webcowgirl

After a blah day at work (blew most of it self-training and waiting for the work to hit), my evening was spent in the company of the inestimable lovelybug, to whom I fed caponata and pasta alla carretiera, receiving in exchange wine and Ben & Jerry's. I told her she was lovely and calming, she praised me for being generous (as well as loyal). We caught up on each other's lives and made plans for the future. She was consoling and supportive; I was enthusiastic and inquisitive. It went late; it was great.

Today work is boring again (same problem as yesterday) but I took advantage of it and went to Pilates at the Tottenham Court Road YMCA. We did a new move today; the intermediate mermaid with side extension. Sitting sideways on a reformer, you put your hand on the bar, then push yourself away and arch over with the top hand, like a normal mermaid; then you move the other hand to the bar and pull your whole body into the bar with your back arched. You push yourself back out until both your arms are straight, then raise up your chest so that you're curving your back in the opposite direction from before. Then I think you pull back in and re-curve your back out, then lift your "top"/far hand off the bar and lift it over your head back into the original seated position. It was really fun to do something new and I got a great back stretch out of it, too.

Tonight is Carlos Acosta, and tomorrow is the day where I may figure out what's happening with the rest of my life. It should make for an interesting day.

All things considered, there were so many things to recommend about this day that I think it was, on the whole, "nearly perfect."

Good things:
half day at work, actually did some useful stuff while I was there
realized I could squeeze in a lecture before my evening show and bought tickets to same :-)
got to Paradiso on time
shadowdaddy was totally up for taking a nap and skipping paying 20 quid to see art
nap was irresistibly delicious and walk home was gorgeous and sunny
got some new food at Chatkhara (an Afghani kind of biryani) and sweets at Royal Sweets
Alain de Botton was fantastic - made funny points about life (i.e. "There are all of these regulations regarding not having sexual relations with your coworkers at many companies - God forbid you should enjoy sex more than you do trying to get rich")
the biryani stuff was yummy
we found the gorgeous back entry to the Barbican (from Moorgate), which makes it look like a futurist fantasy - I thought "Hanging Gardens of Babylon," J thought "Cloud City"
we were on time for Inferno
we made it home at a decent hour
we're nearly packed

Things that could have made it bad:
Inferno and Paradiso were, um ... not nearly as good as de Botton.
I am having to figure out how to use my two free round trip tickets to Nice in a way that's likely to disappoint someone.
It's after midnight and I haven't finished my review of the shows we saw earlier.

Still, really, that's just not much to complain about! And tomorrow it's Sicily until I've had all of the red wine and marzipan a girl can fit in her. I can't wait!

I spent dinner reading an article I've been holding onto for a while with the cover teaser of "Rachel Cusk on the dangers of telling the truth about motherhood." What were these truths? I had to know. And it was a really engaging read, enough to pull me back to it as soon as dinner had been eaten and the plates cleared away. One of the things she noticed was that she was basically being censored by other women, who weren't okay when what she said about her feelings went against the party line on what was an acceptable thing to say about how being a mother made you feel. While I enjoyed a lot of what she had to say, I found this bit especially resonated with me. Why is it that it's so often other women that try to put the brakes on what comes out of women's mouths? Why are they the forces of conformity? Is the price of sisterhood learning how to "put up or shut up?"

Tell me, oh (female) hive mind: has this been your experience?

I've been moody today. I've even come up with a name for the thing that's been causing my moods lately. I'm going to call it The McGuffin. The McGuffin hasn't gone away, although I thought I saw signs of its demise not too long ago ... it's apparently wormed its way into my brain and will now just kind of twitch now and then when something sets it off. I look forward to it dying permanently, but I now realize this may not happen for another three to six months, or longer. Meanwhile I've got yet another pile of poo added to what I've been toting around inside my head to make me act irrationally and obsess on stupid things. Yay!

So the McGuffin was bothering me as I set out today. I was angry about running so late and making shadowdaddy and wechsler sit and wait for me while I tried to find an outfit to wear (a lack of summer weight pants was making this difficult for me). But after we'd made it to West Dulwich station, of all things, Carter's Steam Fair was set up! It was full of beautiful, restored, gilded giant toys that had calliope accompanyment and silly signs on the sides. The swing even blew out a huge puff of steam every time it went backwards. It was great!

Suddenly I was eight years old and the world was full of wonder. I ran around looking at all of the rides, laughing and pointing and realizing that rather a few of them would make me feel quite ill. The carousel was playing "The Lambeth Walk," a song I wouldn't have recognized a year ago, and I felt so proud of myself for being able to grow a little into the local culture. We stopped in the arcade and played some of the silly, old-fashioned machines. I went for the fortune teller, my obsession since reading American Gods. I got the same one I got last time: "Your hand denotes a firm and determined character, one that can be led but not driven .... Very sincere, but too independent to please most people whom you meet." Yep, it's like a badge of pride and yet a knife in my heart - that ever so accurate fortune of mine - I should just change my LJ user description to say what it says on the card.

I can't really explain how much this cheered me up. We didn't actually ride any rides or play any more games, but trotted off to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s exhibit (ends tomorrow). This was a very nice exhibit - good representations of the realist, substantially landscape-type work produced in the 1850s right up through Calder and Rauschenberg. I also really enjoyed the artists' description of their art, and the assertion of the need to develop an American identity for art, one which "embraces the world as it exists today" - a philosophy I feel most art forms should pursue, especially the performing arts. We also got to see an exhibit of photographs from China done at the very beginning of the 20th century which I found fairly interesting (reminded me of Song of the Fishermen as well as the Chinese opera I've been watching). We actually were finished in good time - the exhibition hall is rather petite - and had an opportunity to sit down and have tea and scones. It was lovely.

Afterwards it was off to meet natalya and lovingboth up at St. Pancras, with a short stop at London Bridge to wrangle some dinner fixin's (stuffed duck breast at a 30% discount, go heavy bargaining me!) and an opportunity for the McGuffin to take control again (boo). I finally got home at 7:30, popped the food in the oven, and we ate at 8:30 ... and now I'm so tired. So tired! It seems like I really burn the candle at both ends based on how long it takes me to get my engine restoked over the weekend. And I say this, and yet I read that the some Russian ballet company is coming to London in late July and I'm all going, "Oooh! Ooh! How many of the shows can I see?" (the answer is two, but I only really want to see one). I can tell I'm going to put myself in an early grave, but, God, getting there is really fun, except for the sleep deprivation.

I had a great time out last night and saw lots of friends. A pub full of people I know - how great is that! friend_of_tofu got very excited when I told her that I have House on Haunted Hill and asked me to bring it the E&M do at the end of the month, but .. well, now I don't know if I have it or not!

I tried to leave early but it was already 9:30 by the time I got back to Putney, and then I ruined my extra-long night's sleep by writing up The Good Soul of Szechuan, which wechsler and I saw Monday night at the Young Vic. I enjoyed it, but Brecht is not everyone's cup of tea.

Meanwhile I'm back to Marcel and have started The Fugitive part of The Prisoner and The Fugitive. I'm on page 401, in the middle of a big section all about loss. I read almost two pages from it to wechsler, all about how intuition understands what the intellect doesn't in regard to relationships - how the signs that it's over will register at one level even while you deny them as "not making any sense." I thought it was really great.

I've been treating this as Dress Like a Girl week due to the good weather (see icon), although I'm not sure if the weather is going to cooperate today. Time to get off the couch and get to it, though!

I am turning 40 tomorrow and it just doesn't seem to be any different from other birthdays. I'm happy, a lot happier than I was last year. What's there to complain about?

I had countess_sophia over for dinner tonight, and the summary is: I had three different kinds of liquor, (two) red wine(s), some zabaione liqueur (poured over the chocolate cake I got from Waitrose for 99 p.), and some grappa that I picked up at the airport. I'm kind of having a hard time feeling my face right now.

Dinner was heavily influenced by my trip - the food I ate there and the food we brought back. I made: gorgeous prosciutto on utterly ripe melon; apple/cured sausage/flakes of parmesan salad with great olive oil dressing it; the cutie tortellini with mortadella and some kind of cheese inside I picked up at Tamburini ("antica salsamenteria bolognese," Via Caprarie 1 - 40124 Bologna 051234726) with butter and fresh basil on top; and big slices of motzarella on big stinking slices of tomato (I sniffed them and they smell like ripe tomato, yum) drizzled with the Modena vinegar I brought back; and slices of cake. Dinner was served on the plates I brought back from Orvieto ages ago and the food mostly in the bowls I bought in Ronda.

It was good. I'm full. I feel happy about living here. Happy Birthday to me one day early. :-) And now for one more glass of wine.

Boy, Pilates felt GREAT, all of the muscles in my back and legs got stretched, plus I got a bit of a triceps workout, enough to leave my arms feeling wobbly. Mr. Shadowdaddy made me "orichetti with ricotta and fresh basil" from the River Cafe "Two Easy" cookbook for dinner and I wolfed it down.

Now I'm sitting by the window, drinking a cider and reviewing my US tax return ($700 owed, could be worse), and I just watched the John Harriot pull in at the dock. Damn, that thing's cute. Mr. Shadowdaddy's going to take that thing into work just to make me jealous, and it's going to work.

PS: Work very busy today.

I have a few folks out there in LJ land that are very tut-tut at me about how I did nothing but talk down people in Seattle and my experience there.

Tonight, at home, alone in my apartment (while shadowdaddy is back in Seattle-land), I'm reminded of how I felt living in Seattle most of all of four years ago. I was damaged goods, I was a waste of a human being, I was bad on the inside, I was not worth being friends with, even though I was 35 and had been trying for years to be a good person and trying to find good friends. I was most of the same person that I am now, but because of how a group of people treated me, I felt not only incredibly lonely, but really sadly broken. I believed there was no hope for me, that people just would never like me. (That time is blogged quite well if you want to read back that far, but since I try to avoid LJ drama like the plague it is, I don't talk much about what is upsetting me in those posts. It's just day after day of bleak and lonely and snow, my guts a little Narnia, my heart overwhelmed with the splinter of glass that said, "You will have no friends, ever. You cannot figure out how to do it and nobody wants you. Go hybridize dahlias or raise poodles or something so you're not just a waste of space.") This went on for months and months and months, pretty much from August to August, building up little pieces until I formed my very solid conclusion about my fate in life as a person of little worth. I mean, really, if that many people who had known me for so long saw me like that, how could I not think they were right?

I think that someday I'll just let it all hang out and tell it to the world, so the people that think I hate Seattle "and everything in it" can nod their heads and say, "Ah, now it all makes so much sense," but really, moving forward is generally healthier. (I'm saving it for my graphic novel, anyway.) And in some ways so much of what was making me miserable was what was happening at home and the fact that I felt like I couldn't talk to anyone about it, but the feeling of being so utterly worthless was very toxic to my brain. (Amusingly enough, this psych book I was reading Saturday night was talking about how this feeling of being icky and damaged is a key element of people's sexual fetishes, but somehow the two never got linked up in my head. I still get shut out of plans of people I know, but it doesn't get me all hot and bothered. Go figure.)

I feel much better now, and fairly regularly, even though tonight I'm sitting in my empty apartment drinking flat, warm cider and getting ready for a (bleah) 6:30 AM shift at work. Boo-yah. In 2004, ergotia, ciphergoth, spikeylady, and lilithmagna convinced me I wasn't worthless, and I decided that I would move moth-like toward this light and toward the person they treated me like rather than the person I'd come to believe I was.

Thanks, guys. And thanks to all the rest of you here, and thanks to the people I met after that summer that made Seattle better to live in after all of the crap had happened.

I'm still marching along with the Proust, and I've hit the halfway mark in volume 1. The narrator is happy, but you can feel that things won't last. Proust has just stuck a long passage about how art that advances its art can only become appreciated later, once it's had a chance to influence people, which seems to me like the author saying that he is anticipating his book will not be well-received. I'm alternating it and the third book by Richard Morgan - brutal cyber-punk versus dreamy late-19th century reveries, what a difference!

Anyway. Home. Alone. Drinking. Tired. Going to bed soon. Please take care of shadowdaddy, for me, Seattle folks, and hope that while he's there he can find the happy that hasn't been coming to him since he moved.