Will to Blog Apparently Rising

One:

All this brief bus ride I have been writing
two poems in my head: One a screed against
our fame-drunk nation—I feel sorry
that Natasha died, but she is no more
than anyone; she is not some blonde god—
and the other a thing addressed to You,
and the semi-sexual sound you make—
mmff—when I put my hands on your hips
and you sling your slim arms around my neck,
clinging like a baby animal to its mother.

Two:

This morning I was whistling in the mirror and noticed
how, though the sound changed dramatically—slid up and down, filliped
over the notes—my lips, poised in an "O," did not move one bit.
I thought of how much my tongue was flipping and flicking inside
the dark, small cavern of my mouth while I whistled,
how it's like the unseen flopping of thoughts behind placid faces
waiting on the early-morning subway. And on the subway, the read-out
that shows the next stop and the current time was scrambled, a chaos
of red, green, and yellow LED lights as we crossed over the bridge.

And then at work I found out that a man
I emailed with and interviewed two weeks ago
had been killed in a car crash, at 57. He was nice to speak to,
had a good email manner, and seemed like a friendly sort.
If I emailed him again
there would no longer be anyone at the other end.

The Obamas + Where the Wild Things Are

This is a great story in the Times about the Obamas getting out in Washington, going to basketball games, restaurants, parts of the city not often visited by former presidents. Of course, theories are put forth as to why they are doing this—Is it just because that's how they are, or is it for political capital? I, for one, would like to believe it's just how the Obamas are; they've always lived in cities—Why wouldn't they want to get out and enjoy one of America's greatest metropolises?

At any rate, it's a cute article. I just really like that family.


Another thing I really like: The trailer for this fall's live-action Where the Wild Things Are movie, which was just released and is available in a variety of formats here. The trailer uses what sounds like a different version of a great Arcade Fire song, "Wake Up," and, though it (the trailer) gets a little bit "In a world where... ," I am confident the movie will be much weirder than it looks. Why? Because it's directed by Spike Jonze, of Being John Malkovich fame, and the big main monster is "played" by (his movements and facial expressions were recorded, and then digitally transferred onto the monster—or at least I think that's how it went, according to a friend of mine who did some camera work for the film) James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, who is a supremely weird and complex actor. I want to go see him in this new play on Broadway, God of Carnage, which just got a killer review (scroll down to the jump in the middle of the page) this week in The New Yorker.

Too Long

My will to blog seems, slowly, to be dying. Oh well.

Three things:

One: Wednesday is the two-year anniversary of my apartment building burning up. I had a scare last week: I woke up in the middle of the night to a smoke alarm going off, and my room filled with what appeared to be smoke. I opened the door from my bedroom out into my apartment and I couldn't see a thing—The whole room was filled with white. I was confused, didn't know what to do, wondered if the whole building was going up, and if I should try to go down the stairs or out the fire escape, what to grab, what to take ... then my mind starting piecing stuff together—the wet, the loud hissing noise; it wasn't a fire. The cap on the radiator in my living room had blown off, and the radiator was gushing steam into my apartment. So I ran downstairs and got my super and he shut off the boiler and we opened the windows and let the steam escape and eventually the pressure died and the gushing stopped and the next day he fixed it and none of my stuff was ruined. A bit of a scare, though. 1am smoke alarm wake-up calls aren't fun.

Two: Not sure if others of you have discovered this, but Gmail's search function can really ambush you. The problem? Nothing goes away, ever. So today, when I searched for the seemingly innocuous word "GPA," trying to discover if I'd written what my college GPA was anywhere in an email, Gmail dredged up an exchange between myself and an old girlfriend of mine, one who I'm not entirely over. Which of course led to me reading that email, and then more, and dots of water in my eyes. "Jesus Christ," I said, kind of having to laugh at it.

Three: Last week a friend of mine who's recently been experiencing some romantic relationship-based psychic pain related to me what his friend once told him about the pain of break-ups and lost loves. "The pain doesn't ever get any smaller," my friend's friend said. "You just get further away from it."

I like that, and I think it's very true. Only problem is when Gmail, in a flash on an unfairly cold March afternoon, finds some old bit of ocean-lost pain and holds up a funhouse passenger-side mirror to it: "Objects in the mirror appear closer than they actually are." And this will just go on, for the rest of your life—Think about it: If you stick with Gmail, theoretically you could be searching for some word 20 years down the road and instantly be tossed back into that old upheaval.

Hunter Is Interviewed Part 2

A friend of mine recently interviewed me for her and another woman's blog, Whateverishly: The Greatest Blog Ever Hula'd. Here is the link.

And if you REALLY want to know more about me, here's a link to a similar thing another friend of mine did back in July of '07.