Besides, it was all on major sale.
I came home and had dinner and then virtuously not only:
- tried all the clothes on to make sure they fit, and
- cut off all the tags and shoulder pads and hung the clothes up, but also
- cleaned out my closet, so that all the clothes I had stuck in the back (so the evil sublettor (of course, I didn't know he was evil then) would have room to hang his clothes) could come back out onto the rod where they belonged.
A moderately productive loon, though. I finished Lawrence Sutin's A Postcard Memoir, which I'd started last night, reading it in the commercials between mediocre tv. Perhaps not the best way to read a memoir, but this book lends itself to episodic reading, since it's basically a vast series of very short little story/essays, each one linked to a postcard. I found the protagonist a little tiresome, which I guess is always a danger with memoir -- it can be beautifully-written, but if you don't like the narrator...well, you (and he/she) are kind of stuck. But the style was very interesting (Jed, you may want to check this one out -- the photos are very cool, and you may really enjoy the separateness of the pieces). It did come together into a pretty coherent whole, though not as connected as it could have been.
I actually got a little mopey reading it last night; there were some lines in there about him breaking up with the woman he had thought he would love forever that felt...I dunno. Too much for me. I put the book down and called David and we chatted a while, but though he made a valiant effort, I honestly just kept getting sadder. My phone had started beeping at me, indicating that it was low on power, so I got off the phone with David, meaning to just go to sleep...and then called Kev. I've been calling him occasionally, trying to start figuring out what it'll be like being just friends with him. Calling him pretty much always makes me feel better -- but I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not. But it worked last night too, and that was really all I was looking for at that point. Within ten minutes or so he had cheered me up, and though my phone was still beeping at me, it hadn't cut out yet, so we stayed on the phone and he told me about the book he was reading by Haruki Murakami (which I recently picked up a copy of but haven't read yet) and we talked about whether it would be okay for him to come out for a short weekend sometime in the next month or two and I asked him to help me think through this Descartes thing that was driving me bonkers in class on Thursday. I think I've got it now (though Karina, if you want to give me a call tomorrow, I wouldn't mind talking it over some more). We talked about Descartes for quite a while, about whether you can really doubt *everything*, and what it would mean if you could (or can't). I went to sleep cheerful and content (though bewildered by my phone -- sometimes when it starts beeping it cuts out in twenty minutes...sometimes it takes an hour and a half. I don't get it).
I really hope we can manage to stay best friends (where "best friend" is defined as one of a set of people who are all my best friends...usually with modifiers attached, i.e. Lisette -- "my best friend that I went to high school with", Roshani -- "my best friend who is also practically a relative", David -- "my best friend that I managed to get past a stressful break-up with, though it took a while" :-). Etc. I guess Kev will be my "best friend whom I dated for nine years". Sheesh. I'm less miserable than I was a month ago...though maybe that's just being so busy with the new semester. Hard to say.
The other thing I did today was start writing a piece for my creative nonfiction class, tentatively entitled "Grace". I really wasn't sure what I wanted to write, but I started thinking about one incident from early in my relationship with Kevin which I've been meaning to write about for a while, and thinking about it, I realized that one aspect of it, a desire for grace under pressure, has been something of a theme in my life (and the subject of an earlier story, most recently titled "The Light at Dawn", part of my master's thesis). So I spent a while this afternoon writing various paragraphs on that theme...scenes connected by ruminations. I'm not sure if I'll be able to publish it anytime soon if it turns into anything coherent -- there are *lots* of other people involved, and while some of them have given permission for me to write about them (sometimes conditional permission, but still), others definitely haven't (my folks, most prominently). I may be able to edit out those people in later drafts, but for now I'm putting it all in. I figure I can show it to my class and my reader's list without too much compunction. Umm...maybe I better check with some of these people first.
I think I'm a little feverish.
I'm listening to the soundtrack from Save the Last Dance, which isn't the sort of thing I normally listen to, but it's actually doing a pretty good job of prompting me to write, so I'm just going with it. I'm going to wrap this up and try going back to "Grace" -- we'll see where I get with it. My body is exhausted, but my brain is bopping, so I might as well take advantage...
"I don't like crying in public, letting others see my distress. But
that's closer to my parents' fear of losing face in front of the relatives
than it is to an actual desire for grace under pressure. It's
embarrassing to let strangers see your upset, but it's not necessarily
wrong. In the face of some griefs, there is nothing more appropriate than
to let pain come to the fore; too much concern for appearances can only
twist into hypocrisy. And hypocrisy is perhaps the antithesis of grace.
Grace is an attempt at outer and inner congruence, perhaps. Another shape
of integrity."
G'night, munchkins.
I'm glad you're out there.