First, an important note:

The default in my journal is to screen all anonymous comments, so no one sees them. I can remove that screening at my discretion, though, on an individual basis -- and I have only one criterium for unscreening things. If you are commenting anonymously, and you want your comments to be pubically seen, please sign your name in some way when commenting -- either with your real name, or give yourself a nickname. Otherwise I'll leave them screened. Thanks.

...Periodically, I re-link to an older "who am I" post as occasional new "friendings" turn up, but I've decided to just finally put it right up front here and just edit it as necessary. I am shamelessly stealing the idea of a "welcome mat" post from cadhla, because damn it's a good idea.

( But it's long, so behind a cut: )

So, about a year ago I went to London to see David Tennant in Much Ado About Nothing. I only gave myself 3 days for the whole trip, which was much, much too short -- and I promised myself that this year, if I had more money and time, I'd go back to London for a longer stay. And sure enough, I'm doing just that - I leave tomorrow, and am staying for a week.

However -- as it turns out, the week I am there is the opening week for a production of Antigone at The National Theatre - starring Christopher Eccleston.

...That's twice now that a Doctor has been on stage in London while I've been there. Of course I got tickets. (And I'm tempted to go back yet again next year to see if makes Tom Baker comes out of retirement to do King Lear or something.)

So, this afternoon -- 4 months, 3 days, 13 hours, and 20 minutes after breaking my foot -- my physical therapist pronounced me officially healed.

So today in writing class we were critiquing something I'd submitted; something I was feeling was all weird and forced and clunky.

And the teacher said "I think you can start looking for a place to market this."

....Huh.

(It's my first day of physical therapy. The studio is on the 3rd floor of a nondescript office building, and I need to sign in at the security desk before heading up.)

Kim: (waving cane) So, guess what tenant I need to see!

Doorman: (eyes cane) Well, actually...there are two possibilities in this building.

Kim: Oh, really?

Doorman: The physical therapist on three...or the injury lawyer on six.

Poet Frank Delaney read this work of his on NPR this morning. I nearly applauded.

--

Drowning The Shamrock
- By Frank Delaney

"Hail glorious Saint Patrick dear saint of our isle
On us thy poor children look down with a smile —"
But I'm not singing hymns and I'm not saying prayers
No, I'm gritting my teeth as I walk down the stairs
And into the street with these louts fiercely drinking
And screeching and lurching, and here's what I'm thinking —
They're using a stereotype, a narrow example,
A fraction, not even a marketing sample
To imitate Ireland, from which they don't come!
So unless that's just stupid, unless it's plain dumb,
All these kids from New Jersey and the five boroughs
And hundreds of cities, all drowning their sorrows,
With bottles and glasses and heads getting broken
(Believe me, just ask the mayor of Hoboken)
All that mindlessness, shouting and getting plain stocious —
That isn't Irish, that's simply atrocious.
I've another word too for it, this one's more stinging
I call it "racism." See, just 'cause you're singing
Some drunken old ballad on Saint Patrick's Day
Does that make you Irish? Oh, no — no way.
Nor does a tee-shirt that asks you to kiss them —
If they never come back I surely won't miss them
Or their beer cans and badges and wild maudlin bawling
And hammered and out of it, bodies all sprawling.

They're not of Joyce or of Yeats, Wilde, or Shaw.
How many Nobel Laureates does Dublin have? Four!
Think of this as you wince through Saint Patrick's guano —
Not every Italian is Tony Soprano.

I spent the first afternoon of my 42nd year on earth taking a walk -- a long walk down Smith Street here in Brooklyn, just wandering into and out of shops and restaurants and stuff. Just sort of giving myself over to total impulsiveness and whim -- if I saw something in a store I wanted, I got it, if I didn't see anything I liked I shrugged and left. Enjoying the walk more than anything, for the first time in 2 months without a boot.

However, after four hours my foot reminded me that walking for four solid hours on the day after you've had a boot cast removed may not necessarily be the best of ideas. The last storefront I entered was a car service, where I limped up to the dispatcher and whimpered, "can I get a car to take me home?..."

I was thinking of hitting a restaurant for dinner, but my ankle has swollen up rather a bit, so I'll just kick back here....my birthday buddy George once sang a song about how you can stay at home and still send your mind floating far, after all.

Happy Birthday to us, George, whereever you are. Hare Krishna.

Back in 2009, my birthday fell on Mardi Gras (well, actually it was on Ash Wednesday, but I figured "close enough") and I took myself there. Back then, I wrote a series of open thank-you notes to the trip; I'm rerunning them here. Y'all can read them while I dig out my copy of Dr. John's cover of "Iko Iko."

--

Dear Officer Z:

I know you denied it when I said so first, but you honestly did go above and beyond the call of duty. Seriously. I hope you try going to Katz's if you ever get to New York because it reminded me a lot of the place you sent me.

--

To the woman from Tennessee and the bicyclist on Esplanade Street:

Thanks so much for being my good-luck charms on two different occasions. I started getting tons of throws after the woman from Tennessee gave me all of the ones from around her neck, insisting "you keep these, I've got tons and I"ll get more. Happy birthday." And the bicyclist on Esplanade chatted with me about the unreliable nature of the bus long enough for the bus to actually finally come. You helped my luck turn!

--

Dear Debbie and Phillippe:

Oh, you guys were great. I kept talking up your shop to other New Orleans folk I met, hoping you'd get business. Thanks for the spice mix lagniappe!

And thanks for tipping me off about pinning a dollar to your shirt...

--

Dear Alex:

Thanks for the shot of bourbon and trying to get me to come along with your friends after the Bacchus parade, and I hope I didn't look too alarmed when you asked me. I may email you after all, even though I suspect you may not remember who I am...

--

To the two Japanese girls at the Orpheus parade:

Your enthusiasm was infectious, and it was also sweet of you to spontaneously turn around and give me some of your beads when you saw I didn't have any.

--

To Chris and Christina:

Thanks for walking me to the Quarter after Orpheus -- Damn, now I'm going to have to take a stroll down Camp Street next time I come back. Except it may not be as fun without stopping to take pictures of Chris in his zombie mask every five minutes. (Christina: thanks for the Jack Daniels punch, too!)

--

To Jesse:

I only just now learned your name after looking up your cafe online. Thanks for being a delightfully offbeat place to check email.

--

To Amy, T.J., Gina, and the kids:

Thanks for showing me a great time on the day of Mardi Gras proper. I think that picture Amy took of your two-year-old trying to decorate a tree with parade beads is one of my favorites.

--

Thanks also to the woman sitting outside the bar who heard it was my birthday and toasted me, saying, "any day that you wake up alive is your birthday."

--

Dear S.,

Thanks for checking out the Quarter with me later on. Here's to trivia machines and tool sheds.

--

To the three strangers at Johnny White's bar --

Thanks for jumping up and dancing the Time Warp with me as Mardi Gras ticked out.

--

Dear New Orleans:

That was the best damn birthday party I've had in a long time. Thanks.

In my last post I talked about something atrophying - and speaking of that....

I am nearly done with Das Boot. I had my 6-week checkup with the orthopedist yesterday -- which took all of five minutes, seriously -- and it seems that the bone is pretty much okay.

The muscles,, however, are another matter. I honestly had no idea how many muscles were in my foot until I tried to walk on them again after six weeks. "The bone's fine," the doctor said, "but now we have to work on the muscles and tissues." And so....

For the next week, I can take Das Boot off inside, but when I'm outside, or in transit, I have to wear it. And that includes - when I'm going down stairs. And I'm finding that without it, I'm slowing down to a doddering hobble.

So taking the boot off is meaning even less mobility for a while. Fantastic.

Deep in my heart of hearts, I've always thought (or at least told myself) that one of the things that makes me me is a more-adventuresome-than-usual streak of wanderlust. I once got into a bit of trouble at my daycare center when I was four after the teacher read us a story about a little boy who liked to play "explorer" - he made paper flags to "claim territory" and went to go explore a cave near his house. After story time, the teacher helped us all make little paper flags of our own and set up one of those plastic kiddie-crawl-tube-tunnel things so we could all pretend we were "exploring" a "cave"; however, I got so into the spirit of it that I ended up "exploring" my way out the door to our playroom, down a hall, past the bathrooms, up a flight of stairs and into the administrative offices of the church where my daycare was located. It was only when a secretary happened to see me trying to plant my flag on a landing that anyone told me, "oh, no, you're not supposed to be here," and brought me back to the room with the kiddie tunnel. I didn't put up a fuss, and went back to the pretend-exploring in the tunnel, but I distinctly remember feeling that exploring the same tunnel over and over was pretty damn boring by comparison.

That's dropped off for the past ten years, though - I got hit with a lack of time, lack of opportunity, and lack of money. Meanwhile, my brother was backpacking around the world -- twice -- and my parents were starting to go off on cruises and European jaunts, and I was stuck at home, feeling unlucky and seethingly jealous. The real low point came in 2007: my brother's family went to the Cook Islands for their vacation, and my parents went to Italy. Me? I went to Chicago.

But on top of jealous and deprived and unlucky -- I was starting to feel fearful. The thing I've learned about solo travel is that it's kind of like a muscle; if you don't use it, that impulse atrophies. In my 20's I thought nothing of just up and running off for the weekend to surprise a friend stuck working at a Rennaisance Faire in the middle of nowhere; lately, though, a lot of my travel plans feel hampered in by my fretting about whether I can speak the language, whether I can be safe, whether I should be concerned about theft -- the kinds of things I never used to worry about, and the kinds of things that would have made four-year-old me say "yeah, but exploring the same thing over and over is boring, remember?"

However -- now that my luck's turned (and now that I'm in a job that actually offers a paid vacation), I've been spending the past couple weeks starting to browse travel sites online, looking for ideas about where to go. My parents have been trying to sell me on Europe (Dad has been a huge fan of Italy ever since that first trip, where he got to take a cooking course for a day), and I've also been browsing a few travel sites.

But for the past couple days -- for reasons I'm not able to ascertain -- I've been looking more and more at options for traveling in Morocco. To the point that I think I may indeed be in the early stages of planning for a trip there. Even though what I'm finding is that I don't really know the language (the little high school French I've retained is pitiful, and I know fuck-all about Arabic), I'll be a solo female in an Arabic country, and no one I know has ever been there before, and never have I had any thoughts about visiting Morocco prior to this. But none of that is dissuading me.

I'm back.

I've tried other tricks in the past couple years to get back on the writing horse. I joined the LJ Idol contest, I tried setting up a weekly appointment with myself, I tried roping a friend into being a mentor, I tried a few other things to very little result.

I don't know whether I've just found the right teacher, or whether being back in a class setting is making me take it a bit more seriously or whether I was just finally ready. But I just finished work on my first class assignment - something which I not only was disciplined enough to write, but also disciplined enough to review and edit and rewrite -- and damn, it feels good.



(Remind me of this moment if I come back in after class today recoiling because everyone told me it was crap.)

I got hit with one of those tiny groundbreaking personal epiphanies this morning.

For the past year or so, I've been feeling guilty off and on that I haven't done any real writing "practice" -- no diligent dedicated 2 hours (or whatever) to just jotting stuff. My writing was suffering as a result, I was afraid. And, there is some truth to that.

But somehow I've been punishing myself for not writing at all. I called myself a writer -- where was my writing? Where were my notes? I was frittering my time away doing other things, why wasn't I writing?

And this morning I was in a state of flagellating myself about this a bit again, looking at all the things I did with my time instead; and I was chiding myself for what I think one of my biggest time-sucks is, reading and discussion on the Metafilter.com blog. I needed to cut down on that, I told myself. I need to write for a change rather than wasting time on -

And then it hit me.

Why the hell was I thinking I wasn't writing, when writing is the very way you participate on Metafilter?

I still know I definitely need to cut back on that; I've been thinking a lot lately about having to do the kind of "only I see it" practicing that helps you find stuff. There's something to be said about letting things sit in your own space and your own echo chamber a while first, rather than putting everything out in the world from the initial get-go. Let yourself sit with it first. And I don't do that enough -- instead, I've been spontaneously writing things down on Metafilter's discussion threads.

But that is still writing. I actually have been doing practice writing for the past year, it's just over on a web site for everyone to see.

Defintely still something I need to change. But it's good to know that the habit I need to correct isn't one of sloth, it's instead one of....exhibitionism.

So I was just invited to be on the jury pool for another art organization for the month of March. They got my details, I'm sure, from my running Reverie's contest for the past several years.

Wow. This means that I've got an actual reputation.

I should know by now that I am utterly useless in January when it comes to art and creativity. I'm exhausted, and it's cold and dark, and my brain goes into lizard-brain-hibernation-shutdown mode. I do get up and drag myself to work and home, but that's about it.

And every year, in late January/early February, things start waking up again - the light starts returning, the weather is a tiny bit warmer, and something in my subconscious starts...coming back. Even on a subliminal level - it always starts with this strange restless buzz in my head, like I know I'm on the verge of remembering something, but I don't know what it is yet.

The enforced cabin fever from my foot, too, is also making me seek out "things to do outside the house" this spring, for me to do when I get my cast off. A splurge Amazon purchase of the Food Lover's Guide to Brooklyn inspired me to start making regular pilgrimages to Sunset Park -- Brooklyn has its own Chinatown and Little Italy, and that means there are tiny weird shops that sell esoteric foods I could try.

I'm finding that Brooklyn is becoming this weird foodie haven; a lot of tiny artisinal food vendors that start bakeries or jam shops out of their kitchen and then sell them at the Brooklyn Flea, rubbing elbows with the mom-and-pop shops who haven't been pushed out of their storefronts like the ones in Manhattan, and all of them mixed in with a crap-ton of CSAs and farmer's markets. There are cheesemakers, popsicle makers, picklers, butchers, two breweries and even a winemaker here in Brooklyn.

Although, the food fixation can get a little silly....

So the weather this weekend is: first snow, about three inches. Then rain, which will wash some of the snow away. Then falling temperatures, which will turn the puddles from snow and rain to ice. All three of which are daunting to someone in an open-toed walking boot cast.

And thus I am facing yet another weekend of not being able to leave my god-damned house.

I know that I tend to get a bit anti-social in winter, and tend to cocoon myself, but this is getting a little ridiculous.

Years ago, I was coming off a period of extended sleep loss, and was alarmed that I was suddenly having wild dreams every single night - way more than usual. After some uneasy Googling, I learned something interesting -- that one of the things the body does, if you are having a period of sleep loss, is that it will try to put you into a REM state more often during the night; if you usually go into REM sleep once per hour in a normal eight-hour sleep session, but then start getting only six hours, your brain will try switching over to going into REM every 45 minutes instead or something like that, so as to catch up and get more REM sleep in. So what must be going on with me, I assumed, was that my body was still trying to go into REM more frequently now that I was getting more sleep again; which increased the chances of my waking up out of REM, which meant I was remembering more dreams. The nightly-dreams would probably phase out after a few weeks, I figured; and sure enough, it did.

I've been trying for a couple years now to catch up on a sleep debt that's been accumulating since 2009, and for the past couple nights I've been having nightly dreams again - which is a very good sign that I'm finally starting to get on top of this, which is a fantastic thing.

The fact that my dreams are about things like being kidnapped by guys who occasionally turn into ten-foot guinea pigs is probably something else again.

So apparently I am incapable of recuperating or relaxing at home without finding homemaking tasks.

I've decided to cloister myself this weekend (getting up and down the stairs in the RoboBoot is still a pain in the absolute ass, and was thinking it would be a good time to catch up on email and reading and maybe even writing. But instead, I was up and in the kitchen, poking into cupboards and thinking, "hmm, I've had those chick peas a while, maybe I should make something with them...oh, and say, that okra Richard picked up for me would go great in a gumbo with the chicken Niki got for me -- all I need is andouille, and hey, I can get some red beans as well and do red beans and rice as well..." So I've been cooking and such for two straight days. People, I even made my own bread.

Patrick came over for a bit, bearing socks and stamps -- he and Cara both actually had to order me to sit down because I was hobbling around fetching dishes and making rice for the gumbo and moving coffee tables out of the way. I also came veryvery close to trying to mop the floor earlier in the afternoon.

I am deliberately not getting dressed today to hopefully get into a more "I'm supposed to be lazing around and not doing anything" mindset. Let's hope that works.

The sinks in the ladies' room in MegaCorp have those annoying electric eye sensors that controls when they turn off and on. Except they don't really work unless you're practically pressing them - so washing my hands has always been a one-handed operation, because the other hand has to be hovering a centimeter in front of the base of the faucet.

But today, when I hobbled to the sink and put my cane down on the counter, for a second it waved in front of one of the other sinks -- and the faucet went on.

.....Hey.

I repositioned my cane so it was laying athwart my own sink, just in front of the faucet. And -- the faucet went on and stayed on. And I washed my hands hands-free the way I should have been doing all along.

Heh.

I am seriously considering getting a Sharpie and writing the line "You don't know how beautiful you are" on the inside of my walking boot where only I can see it; it's a line from this song, which I've been singing to myself as I boot up.




(Or maybe I'll paste in a screencap of one of one of those brief glimpses of Shirtless Bono towards the end.)