2007-05-14
The air outside is so fine and fluffy I could whip up frosting with it. It has all the brightness of powdered sugar. It has all the green and light of the hearts of trees. Given the opportunity, I would sit outside under a tree and work on my Vitamin D absorption. In truth, I recently consumed a tuna melt that I can only classify as among the top 20 worst sandwiches of my life. That I spent $5.25 on it, and it was accompanied only by a root beer, is only adding proof of its terribleness. That I am still alive is a wonder to me.
There is a thing about being a dog owner which is that when I have a spare moment I tend to think about what she is doing: chewing on a nylabone? Napping in a chair? Barking at the flypaper in the living room?
I walked over to the community college on my lunch and pondered the art at the student show: was there an assignment to paint nudes in unexpected locations? Are these students merely fascinated with rendering the human form blockily? I do not know. This, I might add, was before the bad sandwich. Exiting near the water fountain, I am shouted to. Here is Swebelius, little hobgoblin of 06460, who attends this institution and informs me that my lover would like to marry me for my health benefits. Oh the romance of this statement! Oh the unbearable loneliness I feel in my heart that we have grown so crooked and American as to eyeball each other across the table for what one might do for our deductible. Oh that this methadone mitigated, chess player extrodinaraire knows about my fine benefits. I am hereby exhausted.
Better still the night before his former beau, a lass known as Pebbles viewed me as though across a crowded room and crooned “where is Conini?” and then “Oh, he loves you sooooooo…he would never cheat.” How blessed and perturbed am I that these lasses and weasels, these squirrels and chipmunks, know all about the financial picture, all about the new mattress, all about the relative freedom that my daily non-freedom hereby imparts?
At lunch, over the bad sandwich, I read a note from the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where I once worked as an intern, praising the wonders of a new re-design. I felt at once old (when I was bicycling there during college, it went through a re-design) and also amused at the endless wave of innovation that this kind of life (magazine life) entails. Most business for that matter. Innovation with new tools is often the same plumber in a new pair of overalls. I noted with interest that Sandra Tsing Loh is an advisory editor, and that the Atlantic is aware, at least in its tall and (I like to think) New England way, (this despite the fact that HQ is now in DC, not Boston) of the implications that social tagging can have for internet use. Stunning! GIS (or a permutation thereof) is also covered in the January/February 2007 issue. So the world of magazines lines up alongside the world of librarianship, at least in terms of what was covered this semester.
I went outside and read a fine short story from 1998 that featured a gentleman drawing guns and bullets on a check, but I kept reading this detail as “cheek” and thinking it was a lovely image, and a sad one, a boy drawing on a lady’s face. And also I felt, as I have felt so often since growing old and insured, that what I would like most is to abandon these business pants and return to a lifestyle of late breakfasts and lazy afternoons, where a lady is free to make all the art projects she might dream up were she free of the 9 to 5.