Thumbing

I saw someone in the subway station tonight. Had he seen me?

At home now, finalizing the proposal for the project with Marla. Then we may go out and drink to it.

Still have a job, unlike the huge number of people who were given bad news in the agency today. It's been a brutal week work-wise, then the layoffs made everyone unhappy. We drank a bottle of champagne before we left.

Last night I stayed late in my office and wrote an essay about values and smoking. Years of twice-weekly university essay crises, sliding the finished piece under my tutor's door at 4am, begot an inability to work in advance. I can only write quickly and under pressure; this one took me two hours.

My brother sent me an email with the title, "A bloke that looks like a thumb," with a picture of a bloke who looks like a thumb.

Tim and I are planning a New York-Hollywood roadtrip for March.

Cleaning out desks

The recession hit my agency today. It seems like half the TV producers were laid off and the people with the blue files and packing boxes are coming for my department next. Will I lose my job tomorrow? I don't think so, but if I did I could probably afford to live in NYC for 2 or 3 months maximum before I was totally penniless, then I'd have to move somewhere else because the job market here is dead. I don't really care about money or financial security; if I'm going to find myself jobless and virtually savings-less at some stage in my life, it may as well be now when I don't have any responsibility whatsoever. I'm not ready to leave NYC, but I guess I'd have to see it as an opportunity to start again and follow my nose elsewhere. Maybe start a commune. Then finish the book and sell it for millions and millions of dollars.

"Perhaps people like us cannot love"

So Marla's got me reading Hesse as part of the project we're doing together. I'm currently reading Lulu. I forgot my notebook today because I went to bed with it last night and it's likely hidden somewhere between my multiple layers of bedclothes, so I can't quote directly, but there's a part when one of the characters, a poet, announces that he's going to go away for a while. He's saying he needs to forget everything he's learned, because it's impossible to be well-educated and a good poet: you become so preoccupied with analysis and criticism that you pervert and deconstruct everything you're trying to represent. It's part of a wider theme in Hesse's writing about the dangers of a too-active mind. While there's a certain arrogance in saying you're almost too smart ("people like us" is a phrase that makes me bristle because some of the worst people I've ever met - the awful people I went to university with - used the phrase 'PLUs'), and an irony in warning that "seeking too much" will make you miserable while doing exactly that, there's truth in the idea that allowing yourself to be a little more ignorant, a little less cautious, and little less diagnostic regarding each thought and interaction, will probably lead you to be happier. Smart people - really smart people - don't tend to be very happy.

Brazil

I got back from Brazil this morning. I was in Sao Paulo for work, then stayed the weekend to mooch around. What to say about Sao Paulo? At first it seems very ugly (view from my hotel window):

And it is ugly, but I love ugly cities (I live in Brooklyn), especially ones with a lot of graffiti. In Sao Paulo they have 'graffiti artists' - cool - and 'graffiti terrorists' - naughty:

There are old, Portuguese buildings dotted about:

As well as quite a few parrots:

One of my Brazilian colleagues, Lucas, looked after me. He took me to meet his parents in a small town outside the city. To my unending delight/amusement, there was a FigFest going on. I love figs, especially giant anthropomorphous figs:

We saw some amazing live jazz, played by kids who looked barely adolescent. Everyone still smokes in the bars. God, I've missed that.

Yesterday, the city was, I felt rather arbitrarily, celebrating its 455th anniversary. Classic cars paraded through the streets en masse:

There is alarming poverty everywhere, including a huge shantytown you pass on the way in from the airport, where the tiny houses open directly onto the highway and people sit dangling their legs perilously close to the passing vehicles. There's also a horrid building known as the 'vertical slum':

Everywhere, there is music and dancing, and people touch you all the time. This challenged my delicate English sense of personal space and social reserve.

The food is delicious. When we ordered coconut juice (not milk - this is from young, non-hairy coconuts), two giant fruits with straws were delivered to the table. I was more excited by this than was cool.

And on the surprisingly clean and efficient subway, they had *book vending machines*. What do you want? A how-to guide to Excel or some Nietzsche?

Of course, being a tourist, I bought Havaianas in several colors. Now I'm calculating how long it'll be until I can wear them.

I don't feel about Sao Paulo the way I feel for Paris or Tokyo or pretty much all of Italy; it's not somewhere I'm aching to revisit. But I'm very glad I've been.

.

Pleasing.

Button

Luca and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight. I've been dying to see this film since I first saw a trailer for it late last Spring. I was pretty disappointed. It reminded me, strongly and frequently, of The Time Traveller's Wife, another story of a time-bending protagonist and his at-times-slightly-creepy relationship with a child who becomes a woman. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie version when it comes out, partly because my love for Eric Bana knows no bounds, and partly because I'm eager to see how they make him disappear.

Anyway, Luca loved the film tonight and said it reminded him of Forrest Gump and Amelie, but the issue for me was that those two films, while both are based on improbable, elaborate premises, feature main characters who are unique and lovable and intriguing separate to their semi-magical lives. Whereas Benjamin Button and The Times Traveller's Wife are so in thrall to, so delighted with, their conceptual cleverness that you realize afterward you can't think of a single scene or conversation or moving moment that isn't directly connected to the central conceit.

The really good part was we were in the main auditorium of the Village East Cinema. I've seen at least 10 movies there, but never on 'Screen 1' - there were, maximum, ten people there this evening.

Thawing

Everything went my way today. It was a little warmer; warm enough to go outside without whimpering, so I got to walk. I went into Manhattan and when I got there I realized I'd left my bank card at home, but I was so relieved to be outside, to be in transit anywhere, that it didn't matter, so I came home for it then went back into town again, and bought things.

I went to Italian delis near my house for homemade pasta and bread and olives and roasted aubergine. I went to Marla's place and we ate and talked and came up with an idea that is making my stomach churn with happiness. When I'd been inside it had started snowing again, so I walked home through the virgin snow, dancing alone around lampposts and onto the road, anywhere I could lay new footprints.

Bounce rate

My favorite part of life, and especially the weekends, is walking around, alone. Right now, walking is a pleasure-free activity. I scuttle from warm place to warm place in horror. So it's cold, right? Everyone knows that. I don't want to write a post about the weather.

Marla wrote to me over the holidays about a project we could do together, and we met last night to discuss it. We drank and reflected on how awful 2008 was (I'm aware I've been belaboring this point in recent posts and will move on soon) and the topic for our project rose like a glowing orb between us, so I wrote some stuff down, Marla emailed me a photo, and the ball is rolling, and I woke up this morning excited about it.

Like I said, it's cold: too cold to go out tonight. I can't stop drinking orange juice. Tropicana's new branding is awful. I may go to Brazil next week. I may move house quite soon.

I don't look at Google Analytics very often now, but I do like the map overlay. In the last month, people from 26 countries and 19 American states found their way to me. I see people who came here by accident then start coming back. It's nice to know it's not just family, friends and those who hope I'm miserable who check in here. It's odd when people google my name (and mine is pretty unusual) in cities and countries I've never visited. It's disturbing when the search term is so sick even I won't repeat it (partly because it'll only encourage more of the wrong kind of traffic), but some no-doubt-disappointed people are ending up here.

"If you happen to have a realistic-looking rubber arm in the closet..."

...then this hallucination is for you."

Rich took a week to reply to my email, but he made it count. If these are all hoaxes then so much the better: I hope there are people all over America taping halved ping-pong balls to their eyes and listening to radio static in pursuit of a drug-free trip.

Scribbling

Or, rather, clattering on a keyboard, since I've long since relinquished my romantic quill-and-ink notions. I have a pile of notebooks full of ideas and clusters of lines, but the practical reality of writing poetry, with all the syllable-counting and reshuffling and editing and thesaurus-consulting it entails, is that ones laptop is ones best friend. It is also, of course, a portal to a thousand distractions, including this one. But I'm not really a long-distance poet, more of a sprinter. I can't write for hours on end. I muse and potter and half-think about it for most of a day, then write maybe fifteen or twenty stanzas in an hour. Everything I'm remotely happy with for One Two Three was written that way. If I could only increase my stamina, the thing would be almost finished.

I was out this morning and by the time I returned, at about 1pm, the snow was dusting my hair and tickling my nose and was so lovely that I turned back at my door and walked around for a little longer. When it starts snowing, it always seems less cold, like all of the chill is concentrated in the flakes and the air between them becomes more bearable. Now it's settled into a few inches and the cars are crawling nervously by on the road below my apartment. No more high heels for the time being.

"A piece of gum can start a fire in Las Vegas"

The only remotely good thing to come out of my miserable, far-too-close-to-reality, day-wrecking dreams last night was that delightful line, conscientiously typed into my phone when I woke in the middle of the night. Quite.

No intention of turning this into a sartorial blog, but yesterday I was wearing very high heels, a pencil skirt and a waist-cinching belt, and while I wear some combination of these items regularly, the trinity was astoundingly uncomfortable and restricting: tiny steps, enforced ramrod posture, little breaths. It got me thinking about how greatly a woman's psychology can be strained by what she's wearing. In days of yore, when we were expected to go round in about 6 layers, some of which involved whale bones and corsetry, it must have felt like the whole weight of the world was mummifying you.

Oh and this blog is one year old today. Happy birthday, dear O Absalom, happy birthday to you.

Freedoms they were going to turn their backs on

How strange it feels to be back. I've been away for three weeks but it feels like three months. Last year ended brutally and when I linger on any of it for even a moment, a wave of sickness goes down through me from my neck to my toes. I find I've been able to more or less shut my mind down the whole time I've been away, which makes the return to NYC, and the opportunities for reflection it brings, a little unnerving. Missing my family painfully already, especially my littlest nephew who will no doubt be even fatter when next we meet. All he wants to do is drink milk, cuddle and smile. Happy boy.

Out walking one day, this street sign proved an irresistible photo op for my dad and Dan.

My other nephews, Ben and Brad watching the Swing Bridge swinging from the High Level bridge.

Craig did the dishes voluntarily on Christmas day.

My mam and dad's birdwhore of a garden. This warms my cynical heart. All this, plus two bird houses and a bird bath, and still the little buggers will not be tempted.

By chance, I met Marcus and Christie on the flight back today, which made an otherwise terrible journey a little more pleasing. I asked the stewardess if there was any vegetarian food and she suggested I pick the chicken out of the hot chicken and cheese sandwich she had just handed me.

New Year's resolutions? WRITE MORE. Wikipedia claims that "watch less violence" is one of the most popular resolutions. There are that many people who are not only watching a lot of violence, but so aware of it and concerned by it that they're consciously resolving to do it less? Why, that's crazier than the sandwich lady.