Fears realised

Accidentally wiped my iPod yesterday. Arg. Scrolling through the crippled data files, I discovered an old, old anthem of adolescence.

Too hot; godawful dreams. Last night I awoke gasping and coughing after dreaming I'd swallowed someone's ashes.

Breeze is here.

Feeling anxious. That particularly twitchy anxiety that accompanies threadbare positivity. I'm probably just on a downer after the weekend and not eating enough. I don't know. I think I need a vacation.

Dancey-wetness. Mollusks.

I have this rule I try to live by (and when I say "try" I mean "fail"): never do anything you wouldn't be okay with your family reading about in a newspaper when you're famous.

The chances are, the only way I'll achieve fame is if I'm involved in some hideous but vaguely amusing accident. And I'm blessed with a pretty open-minded family. Still, I think it's a good code. This has been a weekend of ignoring it, and getting rained on.




I went to see Solar Fields play in Dyker Beach Park. Turns out I really like trance music after all. I got soaked on the way there, then the sun came out and we danced and dried off, but then it rained as it has never rained before. Soaked to the bone in seconds. It was fantastic - there was nowhere to hide so everyone just went for it. I had the wit to place my phone and iPod in a plastic bag, but not my passport. Luckily, the main page is laminated, but let's just say my US visa now looks a little bit like an Impressionist watercolor. Shite.





Tarun, Sukh and Brandon came back to my apartment and we dried off and talked about music with great enthusiasm. Brandon bought me LCD Soundsystem's Beat Connection. It's pretty good, but I'll never forgive them for being so unspeakably bad at the Wireless Festival last year. Almost exactly a year ago, in fact. Wow, that feels like an age. Daft Punk were headlining. I wasn't that bothered about Daft Punk until that night - someone just gave me a free ticket - but like everyone else there, I thought it was one of the best live shows I've ever seen. Behold the video: the entire crowd just lost it.


I met someone on Friday who recently set up a seafood business. He brought oysters with him in a coolbag and we shucked and ate as we walked to the restaurant. They were perfect. We gave the waitress and the head chef some, too. Great bivalves buy you popularity; it's science. I'm now a really strict vegan apart from shellfish. I can't give the critters up.

Turning

I went to see Nick read from his new book, Midnight Picnic, last night. I'll link to it when it hits Amazon in a few months, but I read the manuscript a while back and it's kind of sickeningly impressive.



Probably the loveliest bit of the Qur'an so far:

"Surely in the creation of the heavens and the earth
and the alternation of night and day
and the ship that runs in the sea with profit
to men, and the water God sends down from heaven
therewith reviving the earth after it is dead
and His scattering abroad in it all manner of
crawling thing, and the turning about of the winds
and the clouds compelled between heaven and earth -
surely there are signs for a people having understanding."

I loved that line, "the turning about of the winds." It reminded me of a line from my favourite film, The Searchers, when Ethan says, "We'll find them. Just as sure as the turning of the earth." Someone very kindly bought me the special edition DVD of The Searchers recently, which includes a couple of documentaries with a variety of formidable people going on about why it's such a special film. I think it's Scorsese who says that no one could have delivered that line the way John Wayne does. Even if you think you don't like Westerns, or you think that Wayne couldn't act, watch that movie.

Dictators and pedantry and stuff

Ooh, a new look for O Absalom. How thrilling. The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of it.

The agency I work for is part of Y&R, which is part of WPP. A proud day. Reports on whether Sharon Mugabe is or isn't related to the president vary, but I struggle to believe that Y&R's devolution of the agency isn't reactionary, after the news started to leak on gossip sites (I saw it on popbitch a few days ago). I had lunch with Sorrell last year after I won an essay prize thing. He was short and very likeable.


More from the Qur'an:

"That is a nation that has passed away;
there awaits them what they have earned,
and there awaits you what you have earned;
you shall not be questioned concerning the things they did."

This passage is repeated between stories of the forefathers of the faith (or faiths - Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac in this case). Like a lot of spiritual writing, it has a cadence and a charm to it.



Mr. Breeze comes to town this week. We're going to hit up Chinatown and compare notes on irritating Americanisms. Many of these - such as overuse of the word 'like' - have, as Breeze put it, "colonized the UK, much like the grey squirrel." One that hasn't, thank God: "I could care less." Really? You *could* care less? This is by far - by far - the most annoying thing either of us has ever heard. Breeze: "Haven't they given it a MOMENT's consideration?" Me: "I hate that phrase more than I hate Mugabe."

Fact:

There are few levels of personal misery that a trip to Sephora, a new dress and a bagful of cherries can't resolve, at least temporarily.


I miss my parents and brothers like mad. I'm not sure when I'll next be home, and it's kind of a toss-up between spending vacation days and spare cash to go home, which I badly want to do, or spending them to go on an actual vacation, which I badly need to do. I feel guilty about living so far from my family. All the time.


I'm reading the Qur'an, as promised. It should be required reading for, well, everyone. The message, within the first few pages, is one of tolerance: "Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabaeans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness - their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow."


Is it just me, or does everything feel a little apocalyptic at the moment? The crazy storms and cyclones and floods and earthquakes? The wars, the terrifying politicians? The environment, the escalating oil crisis? I'm half-geared-up for a plague of locusts.


One Two Three continues well.

Friday night in. Yeah.

Tonight I was supposed to have an evening of the sisterhood. Turns out 'bros before hos' doesn't apply to the sisterhood, which is being shifted to tomorrow night, so I'm scribbling tonight instead and ordering Thai food from a fantastic place I just found. And maybe meeting Nick much later to see a trashy movie. I was given a last-minute option to go to a festival in Pennsylvania with Rahul and Tarun but I'm not sure three days of trance music and acid is what I need right now.

Odd phenomenon - I have seen at least 5 dead baby birds in the streets near my apartment in the last week. Where are they falling from? Horrid. I never have my camera with me, or I'd attach a revolting photo here.

Back to the writing, though. One Two Three is re-energized. I'd written the first chapter in prose months ago. I think, or hope, that the story is good and it's a beguiling opening, at least as I see it. But it felt like it was a dream I was trying to remember and describe and I couldn't get the feeling of it right. Now I've started to re-write it in verse and it's a million times better. This poetry thing is working out. I'm astonished and excited. I was talking to someone tonight whose husband knew Dylan Thomas (can you imagine?) and spent a lot of time with him when he was here in America, and apparently Thomas said to him, "no matter what, no matter how much you drank the night before [and we can assume that was fair bit], you have to get up in the morning and get in front of your typewriter and start writing." That discipline is what I've been lacking, and I need to combat that. I've been considering buying a typewriter; I reckon the meeting of the tactility of the paper with the finality of the mechanical letters could work for me.

What in the name of Christ is regression?

I've been in training for the past few days, learning more about a proprietary research tool my agency uses a lot. I'm a brand planner. Some planners, like me, approach this using instinct and creativity with the odd graph thrown in to protect against accusations of laziness. Others approach it using spreadsheets that make me want to cry. At some stage, someone obviously made the assumption that everyone in the room was a statistician: "You don't want to take one co-efficient from one regression and one from another regression. The whole advantage of regression versus correlation is you can look at the impact of factor 1 given all the other factors, so you can more accurately track the shift in energized differentiation..." Inside, I was screaming, "I DID A LITERATURE DEGREE." I doodled an elderly elf and a creepy rabbit and my shoe.

They did take us for an excellent meal at Le Souk, though. Then there was dancing. Few social experiences are more harrowing than watching people you work with dance.


I found a really good tune on my iPod. It's the Blackstrobe remix of this song by White Rose Movement. I have no idea where I found it originally. I left my old, enormous iTunes on my work computer, and my CD collection at a friend's house, when I moved to NYC. When this iPod carks it (and it's just passed its one year warranty, so that'll be very soon, no doubt) I'm screwed.

Yoga. Dad.

Just got in from a yoga class. Highly enjoyable and very sweaty. I've lost all the flexibility I had when I was a kid and did ballet, but I've retained some sense of balance, so at least I didn't tumble mortifyingly sideways while practising my Ekapada-asana. The teacher likes to come round and grab bits of you and stretch them way beyond what seems necessary, or even possible, so I think every part of my body will be in pain tomorrow.

Father's Day today. (I'm never quite sure what to do with the apostrophe there. It should be a plural possessive but it always seems to crop up as a singular possessive in common usage. As ever, wikipedia is my friend. God, aren't I fascinating?) Anyway, I spoke to my dad. I miss him. I mentioned on here a while back that he was having a load of tests and stuff, but I don't know if I said he's all clear. He is, which is miraculous and comforting. Here we are when I was a wee one:

Happy as a piglet in boots

While Brown squeezed a vote on terror laws through the Commons, allowing police to detain suspects for up to 42 days without charge, the most-viewed story on the BBC News website was about a piglet that's scared of mud.

If you like filthily dirty electro half as much as I do, then Digitalism's remix of The Cure's 'Fire in Cairo' will be your sort of thing.

On that subject, The Cure's new song is out now. I don't know. Really, is some gauzily-veiled sexual innuendo and a series of rhymes along the 'try-cry-sigh-die' vein the best Robert Smith can do? I can't get that Bryan Adams Robin Hood song out of my head now. 'Charlotte Sometimes' and 'A Forest' are among my favourite songs, but The Cure just seem to have become more and more jangly and insipid over time. Also, I used to have a huge crush on Smith, and now I'm pretty sure he's Elizabeth Taylor.

I had to come into work for a conference call at 7.45 this morning, and the guy running it keeps saying "very unique." The qualification of the word 'unique' is one of my pet hates.

That's all.

Too hot to sleep

...or do anything other than prattle on here, and lie in front of the fan I’ve stolen from my mercifully absent housemate’s room. The fan doesn’t make it cooler, though. It just makes my hair tickle my nose. That, and noise.

I wonder if there’s a blogger in NYC who isn’t whining about the weather. Fascinating.



I downloaded Radiohead's In Rainbows when it came out last year, but have only recently listened to it properly. Unusually for them (I normally love/hate their stuff immediately and irredeemably), it's a grower. This is my favourite song right now. The lyrics are uncharacteristically simple and loving. Radiohead changed my life. I saw Thom Yorke once in Oxford, but was too terrified to speak to him. I just followed him down the street and watched him buy a sandwich.



I’m distressed and twitchy in the face of something (other than the weather) I don’t know how to fix.



I’m using the same notebook for diary/random thoughts, notes from work meetings, and writing. It creates some interesting juxtapositions:

I don’t know how you’ve put this peace in me, because I’m not a peaceful or a patient person.
***
They are big into organization, stress management, seeking peace, having a system.
***
“Just tell me what pops into your head.”
“I guess...I guess I like oranges.”
“Darling, oranges don’t rhyme,” she said.



I’ve been writing more poetry, following a tentative foray a few weeks back that I still don't hate. I’ve devised a meter and a structure based on the number three, an example of which is above. Each stanza has three lines, and each line has nine syllables. The first and last line rhyme. The middle is random. The challenge is for it to sound natural when read out loud, as Shakespeare does. Not that this is a play, or a ‘play for voices.’ I like how difficult it is, how disciplined. I have a vague, so-outdated-it’s-precocious and probably utterly daft idea of turning One Two Three into an epic poem.

Beatings from Barack

The problem with the heat is, it gives me loopy dreams. Last night, Barack Obama dragged me out onto my roof deck and started beating me up really badly. I woke up flinching and terrified.

Heat. Horses.

God, it's hot. And 99 degrees tomorrow. This is not my natural habitat. I think it's Puerto Rico day today or something. My part of Williamsburg is largely Puerto Rican, and there's a great deal of horn-honking and flag-waving going on. (Update: it was.)

Yesterday I went to the Belmont Stakes and won in 4 different races, including the big one, although only on very small bets. It was fun, although I don't doubt horse racing is morally objectionable. But it certainly appeals to a certain blood lust, plus I met some pleasing people I'll see again. It was a better experience than when I went to Il Palio in Siena a few years back. I think a jockey died that day. A horse certainly did.

On the train to Belmont, we got talking to an elderly chap from Virginia. The conversation turned to politics and I asked him who he'd be voting for. He seemed the rootin' tootin' Republican type, but he delighted me by replying, "Obama. This country's ready for a change." He also expressed surprise that we were dressed "just like Americans." We wondered whether he expected us to be dressed as Beefeaters, or perhaps Sherlock Holmes. I don't know. That was funny.

Today I saw Andrew for a long-overdue brunch at this very good place near my apartment. I had chilled cucumber soup. Since then I've been hiding in my room under the ceiling fan. Tim left last night. It's good to have friends to stay, but I'm relieved to be alone again. I'm alone in New York a lot more than I was in London (a natural side-effect of moving to a city where you only know one person) and I like that very, very much. I was half-hypnotized recently and told to imagine myself "wherever your mind wanders." Afterwards, we noticed that I always project myself somewhere I'm absolutely alone.

My dad was forcibly retired from the NHS this week, on his 65th birthday. It's a ridiculous policy, and one the fourth-biggest employer in the world should be ashamed of. He's wonderful at his job, and he's sad about leaving, and the patients he worked with will be worse off without him.

I'm looking forward to doing some writing this week, now I have time.

Whales and whiskey

We had no real idea where we were going; we just got in the car and started driving. On Saturday, we ended up in Cape Cod, got a hotel bang on the beach, and had an incredible supper. It was really misty and the walk back was delightfully spooky. "If we hear a car slowing down, run onto the beach and make like a rock," suggested Tim. On Sunday we went whale-watching. I've wanted to do this for years, partly because I love whales, and partly because the only recurring dream I have is about a whale. We weren't disappointed - a finback and dozens of humpbacks feeding right next to the boat. Of course, the danger with such things is you spend so much time trying to get good pictures that it becomes a camera-watching trip, so I tried to avoid this, but here's a good one:





On the way home, we went into a place called 'Cinema Pub,' quickly shortened, with no end of amusement, to 'Cinepub' by us. I really cannot stress this enough: it's a cinema, but it's also... a pub. That's right. Just before that, we went to Walmart and bought silly things to wear in preparation for the next day, when we rented a tandem. Imagine our happiness:



It was sunny and wonderful the whole time, and the food was great, and we drank a lot of whiskey. Here's Tim with a lobster:




Then we drove to Boston. Anyone who's ever done this can tell you what an unpleasant experience that is, so I won't do it here, because it's boring. We got a room in a staggeringly gorgeous B&B in Cambridge, saw Harvard, more whiskey. The next day we walked the Freedom Trail with me as tour guide and Tim as bored teenager. It was pretty interesting. Here's the grave of the woman who may have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Note the 'A' for 'Adulteress' on the skull:



This was all fun but I didn't warm to Boston as much as I thought I would. It's very touristy (writes the tourist) and the faux-Irishness becomes tiresome very, very quickly. Anyway, we got tickets for the Red Sox vs. Tampa Bay Rays, so we were very happy. Now, finally, I get why people like baseball, although it's awfully clean-cut: some people in the row in front were forcibly ejected for shouting too much. Really. Also, there was a streaker, except he wasn't naked, he was just running around. Can't really see the point of that. "Never go to a soccer game," we counselled the complainers. Anyway, it was great:





Then we went to a really good little jazz bar. More whiskey.



Yesterday we awoke to rain and drove to Six Flags, a theme park. This worked out so, so well. The rain + a weekday = no queueing whatsoever. Just lots of screaming our way around a variety of rides. Although I chickened out at what is, apparently, the best roller coaster in the world. A ticket to pure hell if you ask me. We got back to the car and it wouldn't start, then once it was fixed, it took us 5 hours to get home, via a rather lengthy accidental detour around the Bronx, which was... lovely.