Moving on

I now have a blog here:

http://curiousumbrella.wordpress.com/

Sorry Blogger! Who knows, maybe some day I shall return.

Verizon 'accidentally' cancelled my DSL without my permission, for no apparent reason. My bills are all paid automatically and on time. I have spent, literally and without exaggeration, more than six hours on the phone being shuttled from tech support to billing to customer service to, inexplicably, Apple (twice!) and back again. Literally: hours. I watched the unedited Fellowship of the Ring. I made bread. I organized my digital photos by year. All of this while on the phone with people from Verizon, half of whom had accents so thick I couldn't understand them. One of whom hung up on me.

Yesterday when the problem became apparent, they told me that before my service was restored, it had to finish going through the process of being canceled. They gave me "complimentary dial up" (which I'm now responsible for canceling). Gee, thanks. Not that the dial up worked. More calls to tech support. Finally, while on hold, I hung up trying to put the fellow on speakerphone. I'd been pleading for them to expedite the service restoration, and I suppose it finally went through, though the IT people apparently didn't see that. I reset my network preferences and everything finally started back up again, mysteriously.

I am so, so, so aggravated and frustrated and, well, angry! I missed a day and a half of bookselling (though when I mentioned this, they told me technically I'm not 'allowed' to use my DSL for work purposes). I probably went over my alloted minutes on my cell phone.

When I was thirteen I had a little portable TV on the nightstand next to my bed. The shows I remember watching were Sliders and Frasier and Cheers and maybe that show Coach. I don't remember much about the shows but I remember the feeling of having my *own* TV (I had found it in the trash) was thrilling. Something that was mine (my own) that wholly belonged to me.

I never watched much TV after I left for college, and until Thom moved in and discovered that I had free cable, I still didn't. Now the TV is a pleasant background sound with infrequent bright highlights of funny sound bytes and interesting commercials. When Frasier is on I'm reminded of that first happy thrill of independence. When Thom mutes the sound to scan the channels, the silence bothers me.

home is the place where they catch you when you fall · 6 June 05

Something in my dreams or sleep at night has me waking up in the morning short of breath and with a racing heart. I can’t recall my dreams, really—something about a man who was very tall, something about kissing girls, but nothing I can remember would warrant this panic that lasts halfway through the day.

Brin tells me that he spent the weekend in Boston with Amanda and Brian, filming a dvd. I sent him a shirt and had him deliver a letter, but it’s not the same. Although I don’t miss the city or the subway or the smells (well, most of the smells) I do miss my old friends badly. I miss the costumes and the talks and the inspiration. I want to go gather them up—Franz and Emily, Meredith, Jack Terricloth and Yula and Amanda (Brian too), not to mention the notorious Peter Hess—and set them up here, in my living room in the woods, and just sit for a while.
I love my friends here, the few close ones I’ve made. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. But it would be so nice and sweet to see some old familiar faces among them, drinking and laughing and singing our lives away, screaming, speeding down the BQE at four in the morning after hours and hours of song.

Sometimes I'll read an old entry written on the day's same date, years back. Here's one from exactly a year ago today:

· 29 May 07

I picked up Human Growth this weekend at the Q-Mart. It was published in 1950 and written for Junior High students. Here’s one of my favorite pages (click to see it bigger on Flickr):

There’s another great one of sperm marching in formation into a vagina.

Yesterday I made a million foods: Japanese soup, brown rice, daikon radishes, iced rose tea… Momo came over and she was sleepy so I put her to bed and she slept and slept. While she was sleeping I cooked and Thom and I watched The Others and he gave me a haircut and then she woke up and ate the soup.

Later we went to my friend Dawn’s house for a party and I sat in a hammock by a fire and drank bourbon. Then we went home and I read the most boring book ever: All the Pretty Horses. If anyone wants me to keep reading this instead of hurling it into a river and hurling the river into space, now is the time.

Oh yeah! I also saw the third Pirate Movie. It was wonderful and stupid, the way third movies should be.

Dislike: When someone refers to their male partner as 'the boy'.

The Lovely Bones: Alice Sebold · 27 September 04

I remembered those summer nights my father spoke of. How the darkness would take forever to come and with it I always hoped for it to cool down. Sometimes, standing at the open window in the front hall, I would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house. As I listened to Mr. O’Dwyer run through all the Irish ballads he had ever learned, the breeze would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.

There was a wonderful temporary hush then, as Lindsey sat in her room on the old couch studying, my father sat in his den reading his books, my mother downstairs doing needlepoint or washing up.

I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightning would come and, a few minutes later, the thunder.

My mother would stand at the open porch door, and, after she said her standard warning, “You’re going to catch your death of cold,” she grew quiet. We both listened together to the rain pour down and the thunder clap and smelled the earth rising to greet us.

“You look invincible,” my mother said one night.

I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:

“I am.”