LX.

This week has been… a lot.

A friend wrote to tell me she had a miscarriage. A colleague has been really sick. Another friend left for graduate school. My best friend in the world will likely move to Maine very soon. I never thought she’d be here forever but I still don’t want her to go.

New anxieties replace old ones. I fear that I will write something that will make me look foolish, that the gaps in my knowledge – which are vast – are not filling fast enough. These are easier fears to put to bed than the incessant worries about children that came with teaching. But then there’s this: I wonder if I’m making any difference in the world.

I make resolutions. I will list places to go and things to do and I will not wait for someone else to be with me in order to embark.

I feel restless.

Is this what the end of summer feels like when it is not marked by a return to school?

I feel like something is about to happen – something big – like it must happen for me to keep going. It makes me jumpy.

On the other hand, I am so tired all the time. The gym is gone from my routine. I never cook anymore. I don’t keep up this blog and I’m hardly ever writing except for the all-the-time-writing that is my new job. I can scarcely believe the level of activity I kept up when I was teaching.

So I make more resolutions.

Summer is ending, accelerated, perhaps, by the early arrival of fall air, wind blowing my pen off the picnic table when I work outdoors, nights chilly. It’s already getting dark earlier, my friend said to me on Monday night.

Restless, restless.

LIX.

Everyone was out this weekend, Italian tourists leaning in across my head for a better look at the subway map, boys leaping like young hobbits from rock to rock in the southern part of the park, drummers clustered around a bench beating out a rhythm, lithe dancers hopping and spinning on rollerskates. Couples lay draped across each other on blankets, a family tossed a huge red ball back and forth, setting it like an enormous volleyball. An old man played the accordion for spare change near the model boat pond; four or five musicians sat in a circle by the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, dividing up their earnings of the afternoon. One noodled on the trumpet for a curious little boy.

LVIII.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is a neat idea… a map of NYC that’s also a nonfiction literary magazine where people submit stories linked to places.

LVII.

LVI.

There’s a kitten meowing constantly in the garden in back of our building. It began yesterday but sounds desperate now. I can’t listen to it without wanting to scoop the animal up and somehow help it to live – but I can’t take in a stray cat for about a hundred reasons: Valentine would flip, the kitten might bring in diseases, strays aren’t easy to care for, I’m going out of town tomorrow, and I haven’t forgotten the nightmare that was Pandora, the cat I took in when I lived in Turkey. I seriously doubt the animal people will show up tonight to rescue this cat… one of the neighbors stopped by to see if it belonged to anyone, but it seems like it must be a stray. If I leave food out tonight, what will I do tomorrow? Should I just harden my heart until it stops meowing?

LV.

I asked my landlord the other day if we could re-paint my bedroom, which is, at the moment, brick red. I lived with it for two months and didn’t like it. He said yes, and because he’s painting elsewhere in the building, he’s willing to do it for me, but only if he can do it Friday. This Friday. Two days from now. I think that’s better than me doing it myself, which was appealing as a project but also intimidating for a first-time painter. I was going to agonize for a lot longer before finally working up the guts and free time to do it. The house would have been a huge mess one way or the other, why not this week? But I am too tired to move everything into the living room, which just got put back together after my roommate moved out last weekend.

LIV.

One of my favorite blogs, callalillie, which shut down for a while this spring, is back posting.

LIII.

A found poem from my new office’s IRC channel (old-school chat, basically):

The man/flow

If I had a nickel, going down to the colo
I have to pollute my mode space.
You’ll need to wrap that in tuple:
you get a new immutable
If I had a nickel, going down to the colo
slicing a tuple yields a tuple:
exploits the fact, the append and pop!
(forgot my enumerate)

LII.

I was thinking about this, the reason why I started drinking cream in my coffee instead of milk, or lowfat milk. In college, I went to Berkeley for a day, I don’t remember why, probably for a folk concert, but I got there much earlier than necessary and had an afternoon to kill, pretty much zero money, and no idea of the town. I found myself in a square sitting cross-legged on a wall watching a drum circle.

A man approached me, older, a little grizzled, a bum of some degree. A little sketchy, a little harmless, definitely friendly. We chatted a bit because I am terrible at not getting into situations like these: I mean, I know I probably should avoid the conversations with strange men, but at the same time, why be rude just because of how someone looks or the fact that they’re talking to me when everybody knows you just don’t talk to people in public like that… I’m better now at shutting people out, ignoring them completely or making a joke and walking away. It’s harder when you’re sitting down and obviously engaged with something going on in front of you. Back then, I was very innocent and easily drawn-in.

Anyway, the man offered me tea. Again, one part of my brain said: do not drink something offered by a strange man. But I was right there in a crowded square surrounded by people, with no plans to disappear down any back alleys with the guy. He asked what I wanted in my tea, and I said milk. He told me to take cream, and said something about making life a little richer and stronger. And the tea was better with cream… it always is.

Later, he said flattering things about my feet and asked if we could go somewhere quieter where he could suck my toes. I declined.

LI.

Jury duty tomorrow. I have such mixed feelings. There is never a good time to take a forced one-to-three day break from your life, with no access to communications technology and a lot of time to fill in a dull location surrounded by at least mildly irritated people on similar “holiday.” Yet, our court system depends on ordinary people doing their share. I sort of want to get placed on a trial, to see the process from the inside. Then again, the vast majority of trials are unlikely to be all that interesting – real life is not television. The last time I had jury duty, I was released midway through the afternoon of a winter day in 2001, after someone called in a threat to the building – to a nearby building? – and we all were evacuated and handed dismissal cards. Since I was missing days of teaching, I was relieved to spend only that one day away from my classroom. Then, earlier this year, I got two jury notices, totally spaced out about one of them, and missed my date. I panicked at first but have decided that they will likely just call me again, and I’ll go. They can fine you for skipping out, but it was an honest mistake and not one I will make again. I suspect probably they fine the people who skip repeatedly – but if I’m wrong and the state comes for me, well, then I’ll deal with it.