velleity

last words

2005-12-20T18:49:00.000-05:00

My new coat is long and black and puffy and has a hood rimmed with fur; in other words, it is supreme. Yet with which words do people choose to describe it?

1. My brother (at the airport): I thought you were an Inuit.
2. Liz (at crazy mocha): Your coat is ridiculous. (she then tried to make it sound like she meant "good-ridiculous".)

I am back in the land of my provenance, and this is good, as it is where my copy of The Beach Boys' Christmas Album is, but also bad, because a.) boxed wine is $2 more expensive here, and b.) due to parking and laundry, quarters are once again worth more than 25 cents.

At any rate. Since I'm back, and the point of this blog was to keep people abreast of what I was up to while I was away, I should stop, esp. since I'm going to be taking a zillion classes this semester and trying to find a job. So thanks for reading, and for commenting, and please keep in touch (cgillott@andrew.cmu.edu)

When the only action is speech action.

2005-12-07T18:50:00.000-05:00

If you decide not to go home with someone, and that person argues with you about it, and you end up fighting, and then the next morning you get a text message that says "Sometimes you have to fight for the good things. XX" does the context warrant your having taken it as an apology rather than the unapologetic explanation you later find out that it was?

The Royal Doyle...

2005-12-02T12:03:00.000-05:00

...has been deposed.

Someone invite me to a party.

2005-11-22T18:00:00.000-05:00

I am now able to explain the entire hemostatic process on a sub-molecular level.

I'm going to go find that Asian hipster and explain it to him.

update.

2005-11-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

I hereby retract any less-than-flattering statements I may have made about certain periodicals and the Irish who read them.

That, as they say, is all.

OK.

2005-11-18T11:42:00.000-05:00

Gay Asian Hipster Undergrad Sitting At Table Next To Me: Are you an editor?

me: No. But that’s not far off. Why?

him: You have that look.

me: Oh.

him: Like you’ve been staring at a piece of paper all day.

office excitement

2005-11-15T09:37:00.000-05:00

There are firefighters and cops and news reporters milling around on the sidewalk in front of our building. Why? Because they've discovered a meth lab in the building across the street. The building is square, 8 stories tall, white, made of brick and concrete, and concrete stairs are shadowily visible through the dirty windows on the corners, so of course it's hard to think we were ever able to imagine it containing anything else. Also, it seems that we all really like saying "meth lab."

Update. The plot thickens. It's grisly. Details here:
http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/BOS9127

Suggestions For New Built-In Text Message Entries

2005-11-13T18:25:00.000-05:00

WHAT???

No. What?? NO.

What the hell is wrong with him?

I want to DIE.

Time of your life?

Oh. My. God.

I'm dead on my feet, and just going to eat some scallops and sleepwalk home.

Never. Again.

(brought to you by a night of drinking cocktails w/Susan)

O

2005-11-13T18:07:00.000-05:00

ne good thing about working as a copywriter is that you can be staring off into space, enjoying a revenge or sexual (or some combination of the two) fantasy and that you're not working is invisible to the naked eye. Same with looking at web sites.

Another good thing is that you get to spend weeks learning all about a subject you never knew existed or did and fled from. Molecular chemistry, in this case. To learn about hemostasis, I've been reading a journal called Trauma, the front cover of which, at a glance, could easily be taken for an Omaha Steaks catalog, and when I'm done with this project I'm using it as part of my Guy Grand-like plan to replace the magazines in all the chichi Boston salons with hearing protection trade journals and trauma etc. Anyway, yes, lots of medical research articles, which are quite metadiscursively interesting and by and large very well-written, unless they're not and I am just exceptionally smart.

5 more weeks, and one more day.

2005-11-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

vorwiegand nicht gut.

What To Wear On A First Date

2005-11-07T19:53:00.000-05:00

Usually it's easy: key is to pay slightly less attention to your appearance than you usually do (which, of course, takes paying attention to your appearance, but we'll let it slide (won't we, G. O.?)

But sometimes you're living far away from most of your clothes, and the only clothes you have with you are either too casual or a little dramatic. One should think carefully about wearing clothes that are a little dramatic for a date that's meeting-for-drinks-after-work, because you don't want to look too peacocky, but one might not want to go too casual, esp. when date wears a suit to work.

Obviously the secret is to have a job that forces you to wear a uniform, such as a policewoman or trapeze artist, so you can just wear that to the after-work drinks and avoid the issue entirely.

Stay tuned for next week, when I counsel you on what food and beverages to consume, based on which colors look nicest next to your mouth.

Not much to report.

2005-11-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

Spent yesterday afternoon at the DeCordova, a museum and sculpture park in Lincoln, MA. It was the perfect thing to do, entailing as it did driving through Lexington and Concord where the colors of the trees are not to be believed. The DeCordova was showing an exhibition of this guy's work, which was spectacular and completely apropos of the surroundings (even though ARM - oh! cool - had clearly been influenced by my series "Thumb In Upper Corner of Frame.") I like art that is conceptually interesting (by which I mean "concepts I understand") and many of his photographs were that, but every time something seemed particularly brilliant* to me, Susan, who has gone to both art and design school, looked at it and said "Oh, how silly." (but not in a bad way.)

Here are some pictures:

So, yes. And then Patti was in town for a conference and last night I dragged her to the Malaysian restaurant I make everyone go to. At first I teased her for saying "here" and meaning Pittsburgh, but then I started doing it too.

*I love Martin Amis's remark "I don't know much about science, but I know what I like."

heat and snow

2005-10-29T15:49:00.000-04:00

My house is steam-heated, and it is an adventure. It clangs and whistles with zero respect for a proper night's rest. Wakes me up at night. Sounds like someone is trying to break in more often than not. And I know I'll miss it when I am gone.

Today is the first snow. I'm sitting on a red velvet couch in a cafe looking out at huge snowflakes falling on Davis Square. Johnny Cash and that espresso machine sound like an elephant singing an aria. Couples everywhere. Sometimes I think people suffer through the slings and arrows of relationships for the payoff of being in love, or lust, or like, for the first snow.

vorwiegend nicht gut

2005-10-26T22:10:00.000-04:00

If you knew me 2 or 3 years ago, esp. around the time that I had the summer Shadyside apartment, you may have been one of the several friends who FORBADE me from seeing a certain person, with whom I had been mutually hanging around, to the detriment of all (modifying "hanging around," not "forbade"). No encounter with this person ended favorably. I may go so far as to say that no encounter with this person ends favorably.

Naturally, I have tentative plans to go with him to a party tomorrow night.

adventures in language

2005-10-26T21:51:00.000-04:00

I have been taking these German classes at night, just for a couple weeks, and I see that one of the vocabulary words for chapter 3 is the word for "predominately." (vorwiegand). Is that necessary? For comparison, here is a partial list of words we haven't learned:

stop
more
love
sleep
sales tax
martini
freezing

Seems awfully Teutonic to me. Draw your own conclusions.

It did get me thinking about how textbooks set about trying to teach you a language. When I took Chinese, the first chapter was all "Are you Mr. Wong?" "No, I am Mr. Liu." "Yes, I am Mr. Wong." Because, you know, we think they all look alike. My Chinese teacher, a Taiwanese woman inclined to gossip (to this day, one of the only things I remember how to say is "who does she think she is?") used to parade me in front of her friends and make me talk to them. An imprecise syllable lead me to tell one of them that Chinese people were very difficult, instead of the Chinese language was very difficult, but I don't think difficult retains that meaning in Chinese. And then there was the time that I got one LETTER wrong in a word changed the meaning, in Italian, of "call me or write me" to "call me or (do something violent and maybe exciting to) me." and the Italian to whom I was addressing this discourse wrote back pointing out this mistake and then wrote: "I will. Call you, I mean."

It was worth it.

harrumph.

2005-10-23T19:13:00.000-04:00

I did NOT have another hypomanic episode. Drat!

But many of the signs were there - inner racing, inability to concentrate, finding what other people were talking about not all that compelling, great excitement. But while I didn't think I'd ever experience a negative emotion again, I could conceive of their existence. Maybe I was just excited at the prospect of dinner at Oleana.

Wow, having wireless access - being at a cafe that has wireless access - after an at-home wifi drought is kind of dizzying. So, things in no order:

1. today at church, someone got up and said "I'm from the Intergenerational Men's Discussion Group, and the topic of our next discussion is "Romance: Men's Hidden Strength." So if you're a man, or self-identify as a man, please join us."
That's what I'm going to tell someone if I'm ever asked about Unitarianism.

2. I haven't written anything in over a year and a half, and I'm finding it increasingly morally unjustifiable to continue that (although yesterday I did tell someone, somewhat ingenuously, that I needed to get back to procrastinating) and so today bought a book called - wait for it - "The Courage to Write." Ouch. And there was another one I kind of wanted called "The Motivation to Write" but I couldn't bring them both up to the counter! I was in Harvard Square! Maybe Davis Square would have been a different story - as I was walking up here I heared some young guy brag to two girls that he knew Portuguese Brazilian. The Motivation to Make a Fool of Yourself.

3. I subscribed to this dictionary.com Word of the Day email service not, I now see, so that I could learn new words, but so I could feel pleased at knowing all the words. But they're cheating! Tocsin? Pelf? C'mon!

4. Last night Susan and I were cutting through Boston Common and there, lined up two or three deep all over the paths, were hundreds and hundreds of glowing jack-o'-lanterns. Piled everywhere. And there was this huge rack easily 40 feet high and 20 feet wide, filled with jack-o'-lanterns - really funny novice ones, and ones that were so intricate or so conceptually interesting that they challenged the notion of j-o'-l's, and it was dark and drizzly but there were all these people milling around under umbrellas drinking cider and checking out all the GOD I'M TIRED OF TYPING THAT. But really, you should have seen it. Nothing puts you in a good mood like having a zillion jack-o'-lanterns sprung on you.

hey

2005-10-21T17:27:00.000-04:00

I think I feel another hypomanic episode coming on.

Salem

2005-10-09T17:35:00.000-04:00

It’s been and will be cold, rainy, and blustery all weekend, so we went to Salem instead. Salem is a nice town, once you get past the pudgy long-haired men striding purposefully around in purple tunics and silver jewelry and tall black boots. I learned about how pagan healers were turned into what we think of when we think of witches (some of the herbs they used turned their hands green, and since windows weren’t so good back then, it was easy to see how you might think someone was all green (plus maybe the food wasn’t super, but I kept that to myself), and they’d be out in their garden with a broom, and there was this old thing about your crops growing as high as you could jump, so they’d spring into the air, holding their broom), and bought some wine in a box, er, boxes, and went to the Peabody-Essex museum, but got there too late so we only saw the gift shops, which are the nicest I’ve ever seen, and then drove to Marblehead for dinner at this restaurant that jutted right out over the ocean.

But the best 2 things to come out of the trip were:
1. Coming up with all-time best Halloween costume: a sexy ghost (costume). This because we were talking about how irritating all the sexy witches and sexy cats are every year. So we’re going to get sheets, cut them really short, cut out 2 holes for eyes, and wear fishnets and heels. I like that we’re going as both a ghost and the ghost costume, if you see what I mean.

2. We did not do this, but as we walked past the courthouse, the following suggested itself:

(C and S enter the Salem District Court)

Court person: Can I help you?
S: (gives court person exasperated look and jerks thumb at C)
Court person: I don’t understand.
S: (pause) I think we’ve got a you-know-what.

In other news, George Saunders was stunning. It’s impossible to get how funny his stories really are until you hear him read them. I bought and read his latest, “The Brief and Terrible Reign of Phil,” and loved it, although other fans with whom I spoke at the reading thought it was a little weak. After the reading, he signed autographs, chatting with each person as he signed their book. When I walked out of the bookstore clutching my autographed book, I was almost shaking.

And question: if you have a crush on someone (and think/because) they remind you so much of you, do you think that more strongly supports narcissism or the belief that we were all coupled long ago and rent asunder and continually look to rejoin our other half?

yay!

2005-10-06T17:39:00.000-04:00

I'm on this great streak of there being things that I want to do that I find out about just in time. Just learned George Saunders is giving a reading tomorrow. I'd sort of like to handcuff myself to him. And I think he'd find it conceptually interesting.

thingz

2005-10-05T12:04:00.000-04:00

Oh Blogger, it's been a while. Free wi-fi at home seems to have dried up. Not very much is new, I don't think. Susan and I will go to Martha's Vineyard or MassMoCA this (3-day) weekend. I'm taking German, and a girl in my class who is married to a German told us that English was invented to get rid of the need for the formal and informal "you" that exists in other languages. Someone from the office went to Montreal and brought back banana Kit-Kats which oh my God. Ran into a girl I knew in middle school at the Park St. station, we went for a drink and were met by her new Basque husband, and I did not tell the joke that ends in "All your Basques in one exit" - admire my restraint! Thinking of going to the Ig Nobel awards at Harvard tomorrow night.

I've been having weird flashes of missing random Pittsburgh things. Specifically:

1. The corner of Ellsworth and College.
2. (unspecified lovesick pangs for the Sharp Edge)
3 The liquor store across the street from the 61C in autumn.
4. Abate - this totally mediocre restaurant in the Waterworks - and the non-Abate Waterworks parking spaces that abut it.

Am sort of dating that guy from MIT, who recently told me that normally he's the one who holds his cards close to his chest while the Other is only too willing to show her hand. The thing is, I don't even know what my cards are. Or whether I should be playing.

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Like An Old Texan

2005-09-22T19:24:00.000-04:00

Susan and I have a new form of exercise, Cardio Disliking. The thing that got me today was the name of the local bagel chain - Finagle a Bagel. I do not think you need to finagle a bagel, I'm sure you need only give them a dollar or whatever. It's not like you go in there like "If I give you this dollar, will you give me a pair of red shoelaces (sotto voce) andabagel?" Down with gratuitous rhyming. Anyway, today at lunch I was discussing this with co-workers, and this new part-time designer, about whom more later, said "Well, I think they mean more like when you get the bagel, it's like when you're putting toppings on it." Silence.

Unbounded gratitude and love for all the support re: my mental health. Saw a psychiatrist yesterday (whose office was in a brownstone on a tree-lined street! I felt that I should discuss the fear of death and take off my glasses and rub my eyes a lot.) and he is not too concerned for my sanity. Apparently people sometimes just have hypomanic episodes, sometimes can be caused by anti-depressants, etc. He's advised me to cut back on caffeine and alcohol and let him know if I experience any distinct changes in mood. So, good.

I was going to complain about this designer, with whom I was brainstorming about a how-to poster today, but the problem was mostly with me, in that I am too conceptual and probably too meta and have to remember that I'm not working for some crazy cutting-edge ad agency but for a branding company rooted in business, but the problem was also with her, in that she had no idea what I was even talking about. At any time. She makes my most literal-minded friend - and you know who you are - look like Rimbaud. She kept saying, "but I don't understand - how is that a concept?"

Harrumph.

Enough complaining. Here are some pictures of produce.

Hmph. Blogger won't let me upload my second picture.

Here, then, is how you would count to 10 in French like an Old Texan.
Ern
Der
Twoir
Quart
Sank
Six
Sept
Huh-weet
Nerf
Dix

Here's to you, conceptual things, heirloom tomatoes and Texans of any age. Thanks, as always, for reading.

again and again, I get up and say I only want to get it right.

2005-09-16T23:37:00.000-04:00

Just got back from seeing the Dandy Warhols play in a big tent in the rain in a field in New Hampshire. Diagram *that*, MAPWs!

The tent was so crowded, and the stage so low, that I spent the first third of the first song thinking that they hadn't come on stage. But I muscled my way up to the front until I could see slivers of the performers, and then to right smack in front of the speakers, where I could clearly see the sly and amorous glances Courtney kept giving me. Also longing. One of the 12-ft men standing in front of me yelled "Courtney, you're the only man who doesn't make my penis shrivel up!" He is the Angelina Jolie of men.

Drove up with benevolently weird silent guy from Craigslist, this girl with whom he'd been emailing for years and hadn't met until tonight, and Tom. I was nervous at first thinking maybe there was some unwritten Craigslist rideshare rule whereby if you acecpt a ride from someone you have to provide/do "420," in the local parlance, but we escaped unscathed. Flirted briefly but well with guy behind me in beer line. Tom, who used to box paraprofessionally, almost got into a fight with a short guy in a funny hat who kept trying to push him to the side, saying "Dude, you're in my way. You're like a foot taller than me." Finally, after brushing him off, Tom faced him and said "You noticed?" and the guy backed away. It was exciting. And then the show was over, and we went home.

Wow.

2005-09-15T18:15:00.000-04:00

I just got back from the psychiatric ward of the emergency room. My psychiatrist, therapist, primary doctor, and the psychiatric nurse think it was/is a hypomanic, which I can type no problem but can totally not pronounce because I always start like "hippopotamus," episode.

Hey, I just realized that what I might have considered to be kind of not-great writing skills on the Internet may be caused by the weird hybrid writing/speaking style/language that people use.

Hmm. Maybe that paragraph is evidence that this purported hypomania is not over. I mean it's not over, but I sure have calmed, pardon my french, the fuck down. I wasn't out of control at any point, I looked totally normal. It was exactly like being on the best part of every drug you could name. I felt totally laid back while my mind was just racing. I couldn't hang onto a thought to finish it, before another rushed in to take its place, and of course they were all incredibly brilliant and insightful.

I wrote down my symptoms on yellow post-its at work so I would remember them. They were/are:

mania (mental glee)
inability to concentrate
unassailable good mood (ed. at the time, I described this to people as not being able to conceive of any negative emotion, as though negative emotions were in an entirely different plane than I am.)
I wrote down "really do have many things to be happy about," because it's true. Or maybe it's not, I can't be trusted right now, and here if I were that kind of person here I'd insert a grin emoticon, but I've decided to only use emoticons in handwriting.
hyper-aware in every sense (vision, hearing, etc)
body tingling all over
amazed at how witty I am
amazed at how lucky I am
wanting to tell everyone I loved them

And, you know, I really do think I was funnier than usual. Meta-hypomanic comments. Unmined comic territory!

But it was scary, at one point I remember having an empty salad container in my hand and looking at it wondering what I should do with it, instead of just throwing it away. And I was outside the front door of our office admiring the way the light fell on a windowjamb(?) and I said, out loud, to my boss (who knew what was up), "Look at how beautiful that is. I want to paint that" which I don't think I"d ever say.

I also described it as you know how when you feel normal you feel here (hand held at a sort of middle level) and when you're sick, you're here (hand held significantly lower)? I feel here (hand held high), it seems to be a distant cousin of sickness, but in the most wonderful positive way. Cara's going home well.

So Darcy took me to the emergency room because my therapist wanted a professional to look at me, and there I was pretty argumentative. It was funny, even at the time, I was pre-emptively apologizing to the poor people I was dealing with even as I condemned them and their antiquated medical practices. I wasn't too bad, not at all. Definitely held most of it back. Darcy's a rock, I tell you. Sto-ic. I on the other hand, freaked out on the nurse because as we were leaving, she said "I hope you get this worked out," which I for some reason interpreted as "but I really, really, really don't think it will," Ridiculous, and I got it seconds later.

So. Now I'm home, and I feel speedy. Still feel pretty happy. Lots of adrenaline, but also a little tired, still feel a little bit like I'm on drugs. On the way back from the hospital Darcy and I had normal conversations about normal things, and it was totally cool.

So feel free to leave comments, as always. This is a little bit of a reaching-out post, and I'd rather it didn't just hang there, lonely. No pressure, just mild encouragement.

And while you're here, and I'm where I am, if you're reading this blog, I probably love you. You kmow who you are. Unless you're one of those people, like me, who reads blogs of people you hate. In which case I feel cosmically sisterly in your direction.

Literature and Spirituality, or, Yet More Navel-Gazing

2005-09-14T20:35:00.000-04:00

This is going to be a difficult and awkward post to write.

1.
I majored in English Literature because I liked to read and was going to graduate in a year and had to major in something. I liked and was pretty good at writing papers, because I looked at them as problems to solve, not opportunities for intellectual inquiry or reflection (this because I was/am lazy), but I never liked discussing books. I thought relationships to books were singular and personal*.

2.
My favorite writers are John Cheever and John Updike because they write about the magical in the everyday and the everyday in the magical, and because they seem to marry the Catholic and the Presbyterian, the two forces to which I've been most exposed, in interesting ways, and because they write sensitively about complicated characters and approached what it is to be human with love and no fear and because damn can they write**.

3.
And it dawned on me today, as I was reading one of my favorite passages from Rabbit, Run:

"Every employee hated Kroll's; yet they left it slow as swimming. Janice and Rabbit would meet in this chamber, with the dim light and green floor like something underwater, and push at the one unchained door, push up into the lightm and walk, never admitting they were going there...hand in hand tired walking gently against the curent of home-going traffic, and make love with the late daylight coming level in the window. She was shy about him seeing her. She made him keep his eyes shut. And then with a shiver come as soon as he was inside her, her inside softly grainy, like a silk slipper. Lying side by side on this other girl's bed, feeling lost, having done the final thing; the wall's silver and the fading day's gold."

that that's my sense of spirituality right there - the fall from grace coupled with not expulsion but grace, redemption. Forgiveness. The belief that the world is a good place, and whoever is watching it is good, too.

And this happens again and again in their writing, especially with Updike, on a stylistic level even - maybe especially - when it's being contraindicated by the plot.

Here's another. Rabbit's about to cheat on his wife with a likeable hooker:

"He asks, 'Should I pull the shade?'
"Please. It's a depressing view."
He goes to the window and bends to see what she means. There is only the church across the way, gray and grave and stony. Lights behind its rose window are left burning, and this circle of red and purple and gold seems in the city night a hole punched in reality to show the abstract brilliance burning underneath. He feels gratitude to the builders of this ornament, and lowers the shade on it guiltily."

I could think about this book forever. So. I want to teach a course called (I just paused for nearly two minutes, trying to think of a course title that wouldn't use a colon) "Narrative and Stylistic Spirtuality in the Works of Post-War, (Probably) Alcoholic Male Writers From New England."

caveats:
I've always identified a little too much with Rabbit for my own comfort. All this about a loving God could just be me subconsciously wanting to get away with stuff in this life and the next.

*Or this is what I told myself; more likely I didn't like discussing books because I didn't think about them and so had nothing to say about them.

**although this morning on the train I read this sentence from Rabbit, Run (at the very beginning, when Rabbit's playing basketball): "His arms lift of their own and the rubber ball floats toward the basket from the top of his head." and I thought "that should be 'the rubber ball floats from the top of his head toward the basket.'" At that moment, I tell you, I became a woman. Or all my heroes were dead. At any rate, it was a moment and a feeling I think he'd appreciate. Also, his grandson goes to school with Mike's daughter! And his son, according to Mike, looks like a homeless person who startles him every time he addresses him at a T stop.

Signs...

2005-09-14T20:00:00.000-04:00

I'm Turning Into Someone I Should Hate:

1. I can no longer walk in heels, and have detected smarm in my voice when I say so.

2. I bought* a book called "Circle of Simplicity: The Return to the Good Life." But I bought it in Brookline. I guess you have to know Brookline to see the humor in that.

3. I am thinking about the Raw Food Diet. I don't know what got me started on this, but I know people who have done it, and I've read up on it and apparently it's insanely good for you - you become overrun with energy, your health vastly improves, and it's said to improve your mood, too. The downside is that no one ever wants to have dinner with you, but every cloud has its silver lining.

Signs There's Still Hope:

1. LOVED Brookline.

2. Am compiling list of foods soon to be recategorized "raw." Like wine. Or perhaps "raw" is surfer term meaning good.

3. Today I used work I did for my Discourse Analysis class on the rhetorical effects of the progressive and perfect tenses and the passive voice to compare our client's website with that of a competitor and literally didn't notice when the fire drill went off.

Signs I Might Be Turning Into Someone Other People Would Hate

1. Today in the kitchen I held forth, over a half-eaten pan of eggplant parmagiana,on the idea that the principle of not eating the last piece drawn to its logical conclusion means that no one can ever eat anything divided into pieces.

*At a used bookstore. You might think that mitigates the fact that it was bought in Brookline, but I bought it at the Brookline Booksmith which is almost painfully yuppie-pretending-to-be-smart-and-cultural-and-hip-and-with-it** so of course I wanted never to leave.

**there ought to be a way, when making a hyphenated phrase, to indicate that one of the elements in the phrase is itself a hyphenated phrase. I like the idea of the second part of the phrase being written in subscript, but that's because I think that in those two-part hyphenated phrases the accent is usually on the first syllable - maybe the unaccented syllable can be written in superscript if it's first, and subscript if it's second? Do I hear a Nobel Prize?