I'm baaaack

Hi world! Back from the land of bloglessness, which, you know, okay, I only visited for 10 days, but that seems like a reasonable time period for a vacation. Right?

Things that are new:

Based on the increased productivity, and (probably more important) decreased consumption/appearance/why-don't-I-live-in-New-York anxiety, I am choosing not to register my new computer on the campus wireless server. To call it a decision actually gives me a little too much credit, since, when I went to the library today, I did my darndest for the first half hour to find an alternate server, but then, shockingly, I actually got some work done on my play. And I gotta say, I think those two are related. According to this plan, if I really need to check my email, I can always go to one of the terminals, but not while writing. So says I right now, we'll see how it works in practice, but it feels like a baby step in a good direction.

I think I'm going to sign up to be a lector (sp?, feeling like Hannibal) at church. Father Dan suggested it last year, along with teaching Sunday school and generally jumping into parish life. I was a little freaked out at the time commitment, so backed away from all of it, but this seems like a reasonable way to be a little more involved without being all-consuming. It was weird, though, when I talked to Fr. Dan on Sunday, he responded, somewhat surprised, "And you're comfortable speaking in front of large groups of people?" and I came back pretty quickly with "Yeah." I mean, I never would have thought of putting it on a resume or anything, but enough high school theater and college improv, and reading the Word of the Lord doesn't seem like such a big deal. Again, we'll see if I follow through, but putting these things in the Internet makes them more true, yes?

Finally, in much more trivial news, "Hey There, Delilah" by the Plain White T's is the single worst song ever. Really. In my book, it beats "My Humps." It's awful. I think it's important to note here, that I freaking love pop music. I was rendered incapable of dinner conversation earlier this week because a Justin Timberlake song was playing in the background of the restaurant. I saw "Crossroads." In the theater. So, hatred of this song is not coming from genre disdain, but genre love and genre pride. The fact that this piece of uselessness was the number one song in the country last week depresses me almost as much as the current session of Congress. America, what are you thinking? You invented pop music, America! Don't let this song triumph! And, above what? "Umbrella?" "Suicidal?" "BARTENDER!?!" These are great songs, America, or at least, fun summer anthems to sing in a car with the windows down while drinking milkshakes. "Hey There, Delilah" is a ballad with no purpose, beat, or melody. It's only redeeming quality is that it's not "Hey There, Jessica" but that's only because the guy in the band actually met a woman named Delilah whom he thought was cute. No Biblical overtones. No overtones at all. Frankly, I don't think there are even tones. Whew. All right. That's it for now.

Not a break-up, just a break

Dear Internet, I kind of need to break up with you. Or, maybe not a break-up, just a break. For a couple of weeks, to clear my head so I can figure out what's important to me. It's not your fault, Internet, it's nothing you've done, it's me. You make me kind of insane. Love, Dorothy

So, as you may have noticed, I haven't written very much on this thing recently. For a while, I was blaming the lunacy that is school, but it's almost August, so I feel like that explanation probably can't be leaned on right now. I think, actually, it was a bunch of stuff -- sudden concern about the privacy thing, energy expended on writings elsewhere, and generally getting out of the habit. But, now, I'm going to use this final (-ish, for a while, oh hell, I'll probably be back in a month) post to talk about why I need to break up with the Internet.

It occurred to me today as I was sorting through worm poop -- a hazard of the whole 'compost your own vegetable waste' thing -- that I spend a quite substantial portion of my awake hours consuming media that has no direct bearing on my life. I know this isn't a particularly new revelation -- not everyone who buys Vogue is a skinny billionairess, not everyone who reads Pitchfork has an annoying complete music collection, they're about fantasy, they're (made-up word alert) aspirational -- but the particulars of my own reading habits hit me upside the head this afternoon. Perhaps it was the poignant contrast with the poop. Every day, barring electrical catastrophe or errant delivery person, I read The New York Times, New York Magazine, the New York Observer, and I frequently read Time Out New York. What city do I live in? You guessed it. Not New York. A quite reasonable 2 hour MetroNorth commute away, but still. Why do I know how much an apartment in Boerum Hill costs? Why do I care?

I also read Gawker, which is about publishing -- a field I am not in, and Defamer, which is about Hollywood -- again, not so much. The only Gawker media blog I can legitimately claim as my own, is Jezebel, but then again so can 51% of the population. There was a whole thing today about single women's refrigerators, which I followed (don't ask me why) through several websites, culminating in my realization that: I have a very full refrigerator. And I'm married. And I've never been a single, living-alone adult, so I have no idea what I'd eat under those circumstances. My default guess is Popeye's fried chicken and lemon ginger tea, but, who knows? Also, related to above, who cares?

Also, while I'm double-decker navel-gazing -- see, I'm looking into my own navel as an individual, but I'm also looking into the navels of blogs while I blog, ooooh -- there's the whole consumption thing. Which is I think where Jezebel gets me down. I really don't go shopping very much. I would like to. I like clothes. Every time I go into a New York city clothing store, I touch lots of things and imagine a life in which I could wear them and then leave, in my flipflops, empty-handed. Stuff's expensive, and I feel like even if I could afford one shirt or dress or whatever, it would just sit in my closet, because the life I live takes place quite efficiently in jeans and t-shirts. But I read magazines, because they're wicked fun and I read blogs and all of a sudden, much like New York real estate and nanny trends, I know all about Kiehl's and Phillip Lim and things which, really, am I ever going to purchase? Unlikely. But I know. Daily Candy's in my brain, telling me when the Catherine Malandrino sample sales are, despite the fact that the last clothing purchase I made was at the Salvation Army. This is why I freaked out at the end of Friends with Money, when Jennifer Aniston's in bed with the dude and he says that he wants to buy nice furniture, but he doesn't know where to go, and she says "I know where." Even though she's a school teacher (and then a maid), she's been sitting on the knowledge of where to buy nice furniture for years. Which is why she goes to the makeup counters and steals all the little free samples and -- okay, look, if you haven't seen this movie, go do it, because it's fantastic, and it's also a more eloquent and funnier exploration of what I'm trying to get at here. Whew. Anyway . . . .

As I sifted through the poop, thinking about what was on my agenda for the day -- take down laundry, drive BH to the train station, yoga, make the no-knead bread dough, so there will be bread tomorrow -- and what was in my brain's repository of knowledge, I felt totally weird. I have somehow acquired information and opinions for an alternate life, a life that, if I were slightly different I would be leading. Same age, same demographic, same college degree -- but instead of making the many bizarre decisions I've made, I would have instead moved to New York and gotten a job in publishing. And I'd live in Brooklyn. And I'd eat out a ton. And I'd buy clothes at little boutiques with handmade sparrow appliques on them. And have bangs. And I'd know the people who were snarked about. Maybe I'd even be a professional snarker, who knows? But I chose differently. I didn't want to do that or be that. I chose the not-money, not-glamor path, I chose the cook-a-big-pot-of-chicken-and-rice path, I chose the dog and the garden and the sneakers, so why am I spending several hours online imagining I did otherwise?

Who knows? Maybe simple escapism, the same reason people put on pleather jumpsuits and play Second Life. Maybe just to keep tabs. And maybe, since it's ultimately all funded by advertising, it's all aspirational: I (in some, until recently unconscious part of my brain) want to be the chick in publishing, she wants to be her boss, her boss wants to the people they profile and nobody likes her shoes or her haircut or her handbag, so we all just keep wanting up and the late capitalism schooner stays afloat.

I guess the other answer is that I could read things more accurately geared at myself, but I don't really know what that is. Bust gets on my nerves, for reasons previously discussed, and I feel like any sort of neo-hippie homemaking blog, where they talk about things like composting and making bread is likely to be so self-righteous as to make me vomit. I mean, essentially, all I'm looking for is a magazine/ website that's Catholic, feminist, celebrity-obsessed, anti-capitalism, pro-shopping, completely irreverent, wickedly funny, featuring 10 new recipes, and amazing clothes under $100. And it has to update frequently. And have dog-training tips. And will tell me what my next haircut should be. That's all.

So, if you have any suggestions, please send them my way. Otherwise, I'm going to try and take a break from the web for a while. See if my self-esteem and perspective cells grow back. . . besides, you know who I haven't seen in a while? TV. I bet TV will totally help with all this . . .

Good news/bad news

I've always had an intense moral relationship with dentistry. I grew in the first wave of flouride treatments and orthidonture, but, blessed with a resolutely old-school (and, actually, kind of old) dentist, I never endured anything more than a teeth cleaning. And, every year, I was fussed over: "Oh, such clean teeth, never any cavities, going to put us out of business."

I was/am strongly bent on being good, and took a great deal of condescending pride in my oral hygiene -- tooth decay was for other, lesser children of inferior, slovenly stock. This attitude lasted me all the way up to age 23 when I got my first cavity, the probable result of drinking unflourinated water for the better part of a year. Okay, I figured, everyone's human.

Well, there's no dental insurance on the fabulous health plan here, but it took me a while to figure that out, and then, it looked as if we were going to switch insurers because BH's company would cover us, and, with one thing and another, I hadn't been to the dentist in almost two years. Until Friday.

The good news: I got my teeth cleaned (damn, did it take a while to scrape off all that plaque). I got the fear of God put into me again about flossing and mouthwash. The hygienist was extremely nice and non-sadistic . . . unlike my childhood hygienist who always commented that the only way to know if you were flossing hard enough was blood. . .

However . . .

The bad news: I have a small cavity on my right back molar. Many explanations are possible, the most logical by far being: well, you didn't go to the dentist for two years, dingbat. Or, my current favorite: you're a bad person. Original sin has found its way into my teeth, and I'm a little nonplussed. I also have an appointment to get the cavity filled next week, and, yes, I'm paying for all of this out of pocket. Grrrrrrrr.

Hello again . . .

It's me.

I feel as if I should have some kind of massively exciting reason to have been away for weeks and weeks, but it's more a combination of things:

1) inchoate grumpiness
2) frequent travel
3) lots of little miniprojects requiring the sending of emails or the attending of rehearsals or the scheduling of schedules

leading to

4) marked inefficiancy on the major projects, like, you know, writing plays. Not been so good at doing that recently.

leading to

5) inchoate grumpiness

Nothing major or life-shattering, just the feeling that, for no good reason other than late winter, my batteries are weak, and I kind of just want to stay in bed. To put this in other terms, I have read virtually every magazine on the news stand for the month of March. I have magazine brain. Lots of pictures, few words, and the belief that shopping and/or exfoliation and/or kitchen reorganization will remake me into the person I was meant to be. Except I don't have the energy to shop or exfoliate, let alone attack the kitchen -- just to read magazines.

This isn't totally fair -- I'm caught up on laundry, I've cooked a lot of yummy meals the leftovers of which are pleasantly frozen for a rainy day. I even got a thank-you note in the mail today for a package I received on Monday, and I'm seeing the dentist (of my own volition) on Friday. So, it's not depression with a capital D, just feeling . . . "meh." And "meh" makes a hard blog post.

On a break from the magazine rack, I read Julie/Julia this weekend and it was pretty great, and reminded me that:

1) I am a better cook than I was a year ago and that's cool
2) it's okay to be young and grumpy and take it all out on absurd schemes
3) blogging can be good

It also made me realize that

4) it is highly unlikely that I will have a book deal by 30

But you can't win them all.

I guess what you can do is make cocoa while the weather still demands it, knit, and be glad there are so many magazines to read.

Where are they now? department

So I'm reading along in the NYT article about Drew Gilpin Faust being named president of Harvard, and it all seems pretty normal until the last paragraph.

I quote:

George Thampy, a freshman, said of the selection: “I think it’s a great step forward — a bona fide scholar who’s a woman. In some ways you could say it’s a reaction to the last president and that fiasco.”

George Thampy! From Spellbound right? He's the slightly lisping bespecacled homeschooled kid (no, no, the other one) who features Jesus in his autographs. He's the big competition, the villain (if there is one) of the movie. It's got to be the same George Thampy, doesn't it? Good to see he's adjusting well to college.

Oh

A true story:

In mid December, 2006, our heroine attends a birthday party. Since she attends after a stint as an usher (part of the indentured servitude aspect of PlaySkool), she is wearing her one (count them one) pair of black pants.

Upon returning home, she notices a bizarre stain on the bum of the pants. It is white and kind of crunchy. Our heroine recalls her behind's proximity to a candle where she had been sitting. She decides that wax stain removal is difficult and she decides to take the pants to the dry cleaners.

There is no dry cleaners near where our heroine lives. She avoids cleaning her pants for weeks. And weeks. The pants sit in a bag in a forelorn heap. She instead wears her beloved husband's pants whenever she ushers, which is, like, every day. He gets kind of annoyed.

One day, towards the very end of January, she decides to solve the wax-butt problem herself. Armed with a trusty copy of Home Comforts she lays paper towels atop the pants and irons them so as to dissolve the wax. The wax does not dissolve. At all. Our heroine begins to think that perhaps she does not have a wax stain. In a fit of intuition, she decides to taste the now six-weeks-old stain.

It is sweet. She had sat in frosting.

Our heroine puts the pants in the regular laundry hamper. She will wash them tomorrow. They will be clean in time for her final ushering gig of the year.

The end.

Dog of Pathos

So, Tuesday night, Wonder Dog somehow stepped on something sharp in our backyard and sliced up his paw pretty serious. We spent a good long chunk of time at the Emergency Vet Hospital, after failing to get the bleeding under control at home, and he ended up with several sutures, and a little puppy cast with a splint. We ended up painfully aware of the fact that pets don't come with health insurance. Yesterday was the hardest because he just had no idea what was going on, and my heart would break every time I saw him hop around. Today's been easier, so far, because he's getting better at manuevering and seems less sad. Luckily, he'll still eat anything, so getting the antibiotics and pain meds into him is easy. He's mostly sleeping, though, which is, in itself sad, because he's usually such a whippersnapper. Tomorrow we go to our vet to have the bandage changed and to make an appointment for suture removal. I want to explain to him how it'll all be fine, and, if he just stopped trying to eat his cast, we wouldn't have to put the plastic cone on him, but he doesn't speak quite enough English to grasp it. I have no idea how anyone has children.

))<>((

If you haven't seen, Miranda July's movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, go see it now. It was our inaugural NetFlik, and is super-fantastic. Large, enthusiastic thumbs skywards.

Maybe I've Just Got No Sense of Humor

But I found this utterly ridiculous.

Heftily, dykily, and Jewishly yours.

Advent

There are lots of good things about belonging to a parish two blocks from your apartment:

It is really hard to be that late to church.

You can get a good sense of your neighborhood.

You can stop by the Italian pastry place across the street and bring home pastries very easily.

You will run into the nice woman who runs Wonder Dog's obedience school every week.

There are also some things not so good about belonging to this particular parish, namely that the sermons are decidely hit or miss. So, in my very 21st century way, I've been reading this guy for extra Advent ideas. Between that and these folks I feel plugged into the liberal Catholic world, without having to join the university congregation, which is just weirdly too undergraddy for me somehow.

Re-thinking globally

So, every couple of all the times, I read something about the environment/ global warming and get all angried up. This week, it was this article in the NY Times about how ski lodges are having to manufacture fake snow for all their skiers because there's no real snow anymore. Which, you know, is a polluting act in and of itself. And I read this and had my typical reaction which was: "Oh damn. Global warming. I should turn down the thermostat and drive less today." Which was completely in line with the general message I've been getting about environmentalism since I was a wee tyke in a moderately progressive elementary school: the best way to affect change is small, personal decisions. Use fewer paper towels, turn that soup-can into a pencil holder. And, for the first time, this week, I started to wonder if this advice has been a giant disaster from an environmental standpoint. Yes, if we all made incremental changes in our individual energy use, the environment would benefit, but we're not. Nowhere near it. So, I can sit in my apartment and feel good about my carbon footprint, but so what? I've been exhorted by the leaders of this movement to be a responsible individual when maybe I should have been told to scream or dance or write a letter or just generally freak out about stuff like how much fuel the airline industry burns, or what to do to ensure cleaner factories are built by American companies abroad. I love my worm bin, but my worms are a very tiny drop in the bucket. Anyway, I'm angry and het up and if anyone has more political-action-type-things they want to suggest in addition to the individual-responsibility stuff, I'm all ears. Phooey on acting locally.

Decembrrrrr

The weather seems to have finally changed for the cold, which is both calming (I am in New England, after all) and annoying (the heat in campus buildings is approx. 9000 degrees, so these days I have to begin all my classes by dashing to the bathroom and removing my copious underthings, necessary for the 2-mile bike ride.) But, it's coinciding very well with my newly found free time, and encouraging much burrowing behavior. I filled two big jars with homemade Haitian relish yesterday and am planning to start on the season of soups tomorrow, with a Cook's Illustrated version of Thai chicken and mushroom soup.

Also, in nesting news, I had a completely inactive Thanksgiving. Really. I barely moved. I stayed in town, watched 21 hours of television, and mostly slept. It was great, and, after a fall with 4 tech weeks in a 7-week period, I was ready for oblivion and mind-rot. It was so successful, I actually found myself wondering whatever happened to ol' Anna Karenina (whom I abandoned on pg. 450 back in September). I'm still a good 300 pages from the end, but it was exciting to have the physical time and emotional energy for recreational fiction. To be filed under "duh", it's also a really good book, yo.

All this rest and recuperation will be pretty shortlived, alas. I start a big ushering assignment, which will likely see me all the way up to Winter Break, but I had a good hunker-downy kind of weekend, in which non-work outweighed work for a change and there was precious little travel. In preparation for a class on Tuesday, I also reread my favorite play ever (we have to bring in a selected scene), Escape from Happiness. This is a play I have seen, directed, and read more times than I can count. It still brought hyperventilating, neighbor-alarming laughter and genuine tears . . . I think because a) it's a fantastic play and b) it's pretty much completely and totally about my family.

A bulwark

There are bad days. There are days when everything goes horribly wrong and you can't even muster the energy for tears or rage. But then again --

There are good days - when the party you voted for actually won the House and the Senate (way to go, Virginia!), when it's 62 degrees in New England in November, and your play is opening and you're hopeful and scared and even Britney Spears seems right with the world, and then your professor pushes class back an hour so you can eat lunch at home.

There will be bad days, but I want to put this day out there as a shield to push them back just a little. There will be bad days, but there are good days, too.

Boo humbug

By and large, I'm enjoying fall this year. The weather has been lovely, if blustery, the trees look rad, and the farmers' markets sell awesome apples. I even got to sleep in an extra hour today and still make it to church on time. But I'm totally annoyed by Halloween. Whether it's dodging nearly nude college students on my way home from work Saturday night, or noticing that a third of Target has been taken up with candy displays, I feel only curmudgeonly. "What I stupid holiday," I mumble, biking past the green with its black-cat "Boo Haven" signs. "Why does anyone find this fun?" I ask, stuffing stale candy corn in my mouth at the library. As I'm not usually this misanthropic, I've been wondering why I suddenly hated something that seems to make little children and single people happy, and I think I've finally figured it out. When you're in Play School, every single bloomin' day is Halloween: wear outlandish costumes, put on lots of makeup, pretend to be someone else, blah, blah, blah. It's a busman's holiday, except my bus is the make-believe sparkly kind. The last thing I want is more theatricalism and escape: give me a holiday where you come home at five pm, eat dinner with your family and watch network television. Now that sounds fantastic.

Worm poop, etc.

The busy-ness continues apace, although I have decided to drop (temporarily, I promise) the 9:30am class I was auditing, which has pushed me (temporarily, I promise) back over to the "sane and rested" side of the spectrum. Mmmmm, rest. Mmmmmm, sanity.

Spent the weekend buying terrifying pink bedroom decor for "We're Celebrities" and seeing "Eurydice" at Yale Rep. It was amazing, beautifully theatrical, and my eyes are still puffy from having cried for its hour and 45-minute duration. What more there is to say about it is deeply and freakishly personal, to the point where I think I should be examining my ceiling for MacArthur Genius wiretaps, and lies outside the sphere of my blogging. Suffice it to say, if this show comes to a place where you live, buy a jumbo box of Kleenex and go.

Also went out to a 1st anniversary dinner last night at the swankiest restaurant named for a remote-controlled vacuum cleaner around.

This morning, largely as a means of work-procrastination (I'm applying to contesty-type things that range from unlikely to impossible, but having been brought up on a steady diet of "You can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket" I'm applying anyways) BH and I cleaned out the worm bin. As I may have mentioned here before, we have a giant Tupperware in our back yard where vegetable waste goes and is helpfully turned into compost by about 1000 earthworms. Part of this process, though, is harvesting the compost, and I decided this morning would be a really good time to dump out the contents of the bin and separate it into piles of "worm" and "not worm." When you have 1000 worms, this takes a while. The good news? We have an enormous bucket of compost, which can sit in our garden beds all winter, and the worms can be left to themselves for another 3 months, or so.

Tonight I have first read for one play and first tech for another. This makes me really happy.

Self-promotin' is the best promotin'

Hey world, so, as I may have mentioned to you, if we've spoken briefly or gmail-chatted, or even if you've just noticed me falling asleep on the floor (actually, I think that only applies to BH), I'm extremely busy.

The reasons for all this bustle are multifold, but the most exciting of them is that I'm involved in three productions in the span of six weeks. 24-hour theater, which I am "curating" aka "doing a ton of work for" will be going up in a week, so right now I'm herding the Drama School cats into writing, directing, designing and producing in a period of time (24 hours over 5 days) that is both too short and not short enough. Once it ends, there's:

We're Celebrities . . . We're Just Not Famous Yet written by yours truly and premiering at the Yale Cabaret. It's about teenage girls, Angelina Jolie, Jessica Simpson, and the fact that I spent waaaaaaay too much time last year watching "My Super Sweet Sixteen." Directed by the fabulous Ms. Becca Wolf and going up October 19, 20, 21.

Then, mere weeks later, is:

Bibles and Candy also by me, and going up at PlaySkool. This is my official yearly production, and is about NGO workers, missionaries, journalists and the fact that I spent a certain amount of time in pre-Aristide-coup Haiti. Directed by the talented Mike Donahue and going up November 9, 10, 11.

Let me know if you're interested in tix to either or both, and apologies in advance if I forget your birthday, don't return phone calls, and am generally a social delinquent. My already-picked New Year's resolution is not to put on any plays for a couple of months.

Hello again

Notes from all over:

1) I made jelly! And it gelled! We have a lovely grape arbor in our backyard, which means that, in early fall, we are suddenly innundated with pounds and pounds of Concord grapes. And they're actually harder to use than you'd think -- you can't really make grape muffins or grape pie, so you're pretty much left with jelly. For my first batch, made a couple weeks ago, I followed the directions on the pectin box religiously and ended up with several jars of grape syrup. So, this time, I disregarded their timetable and just boiled the tar out of my grapes and it worked. Six whole jelly jars worth. And there are still enough grapes out back that I could probably get another batch in. Yay. The true victory will come when I eat the homemade jelly on homemade bread this winter. Mmmmmmmmmm.

2) School goes well. Not quite up to first week levels of stylishness and confidence but a hell of a lot better than I was doing a year ago this time. Various scheduling demons are conspiring against my production this fall, but I feel, perhaps due to the 2 beers I had with dinner, that the show will emerge victorious. At the very least, I don't hate my play yet, so that's nice.

3) The cold is better. I actually did the mature thing and stayed home from school, instead of being brave and carting tissues everywhere and dragging the whole thing out for weeks. So, I mostly feel fine . . . except I still have a window-rattling chest cough, that prompted the following exchange this morning.

Me walking down busy street: Cough Cough

Dude on cellphone walking past me: Blah, blah, blah . . . . Wait, hold on a sec.

Me: COUGH COUGH COUGH

Dude (clearly annoyed that he might have to save my life): Are you, like, okay?

Me: Cough. (Nod). Cough. (Nod).

Dude (back on his cellphone): So, anyways, then I said . . .

4) Wonder dog is back in obedience school, in the hopes that he will become even more wonderful. And, God willing, learn to walk on a leash without dislocating the shoulder of whoever happens to be walking him. So far, my favorite thing about it is I'm forced to remember where he was, obedience-wise, in January, when we first signed him up and how far he's come since then . . . for example, we couldn't even leave him in the house alone uncrated at that point. So that feels nice. Even if he's a yanking machine on leash.

5) I like fall. Always have. Comes from being a nerd, I think, and enjoying school-supply shopping a little more than is socially acceptable. Also sweaters and apples and everyone's birthday. And lots of holidays and the good kind of Daylight Savings. It seems appropriate to be bustling around and getting things done, as opposed to February where all tasks except for the most nesty seem onerous, and I really just want to swath myself in flannel, read dense Russian novels, and wait for spring.

Bleh

So the first week of PlaySkool went quite well -- I made it to classes more or less on time, knew what I was supposed to be doing, enjoyed the polite chitchat at the requisite BBQ and managed to pedal myself around town on my newly gearless (early anniversary present) bicycle. The Year 2 version of me was kinder, wiser, better dressed, and more self-possessed. I was thinking of declaring victory and looking into cloning myself.

Then we went away last weekend for a lovely wedding in Chicago, featuring a record four ministers (2 getting married and 2 performing the ceremony). Unfortunately, the weekend also featured: strong unidentifiable allergens, many smokers, 2 airplanes, 2 trains, 2 subways, a bus and a car, and a 30-minute period spent standing outside in the rain after 4 hours sleep. Not surprisingly, I am now staying home from PlaySkool, rubbing the skin under my nose a deep magenta, and frightening the dog with my deep-chest coughs.

Much sleep and tea are the day's agenda and I am, actually, starting to feel a little bit better, which is why I can summon cogent self-pity as opposed to yesterday's mere clogged bewilderment. But still. I was doing so well. It's only week 2. How can I already be miserable, wearing a sweatsuit, and behind on my schoolwork? How?

Ready or not . . .

It starts tomorrow.

August 15, 2006

We had blue sky our first day in Beijing, and blue sky returns to see us depart today. Coming back to Beijing after having traveled for two weeks, the city seems a little more navigable, and the few Chinese phrases we’ve learned do us well. Our plans to visit the Great Wall were stymied by constant drizzle, but staying inside and catching up with friends has been wonderful. For the past three weeks, I haven’t slept more than two nights in the same bed, and I’m looking forward to going back to home and real life, but there’s so much here I’ll miss. The food – from nice restaurants, to street stalls run by members of China’s Hui Muslim minority in Xi’an and Kaifeng – has all been good, sometimes spicy, sometimes comforting, but all good. Knowing that I can’t just wander out and find a bowl of fresh hand-pulled noodles with beef and bok choi for under a dollar, that’s depressing. I’ll miss the people – the language barrier made it difficult to connect with at times, but never impossible. I’ll miss the friendliness and the bluntness I’ve come to appreciate. I’ll also miss the sights: old people doing tai ji on random scraps of grass in the midst of the towering gray city; temples full of ancient statues and modern worshippers; even the frantic growth of buildings and businesses, feeding on the shared belief that China is the future and the future is now.

I’m exhausted from the struggle to do simple things like get on the right bus or buy a cold bottle of water, but my two-word Chinese vocabulary has grown, as has my confidence. Today, Colin woke up early and went on a walk, past the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, to a group of elderly gentlemen sitting with pet birds. “Zaijian” one of the birds squawked at Colin. It means “Goodbye.”