rare loquacity - linkless, picless

i know, i know, it's been eons. not quite eons, but a dang long while. how long? fifteen days, i think. roughly. i just haven't been feeling chatty of late. i wonder if i've lost my entire fan base.

give a shout if you're still with me!

it's not as if i've been busy. just kinda poopy. i've been going to work, doing my typing. i've been reading a fair amout, which is a good thing. i watched a good number of movies with the wife, but that's nothing new.

i haven't been working on the novel. i haven't been working out. i haven't felt like blogging. i've been a bit of a dud. i'm the first to admit it. i had nightmares every night for two weeks. scary ones too.

yesterday though, for some reason, ideas poured into me as regards the novel and i feel energized about it again. i don't know how that happens, but it happened. i have a new start date for writing. actually, a restart date: may 12.

i work well with start dates. a start date a week or so off gives my thoughts and imagination a chance to gel. it might sound like a rationalization. one might say, why not start writing right this minute? and it may well be a rationalization. i'm not claiming to be above rationalizations. but it's a system, of sorts, and a system that works for me. so there it is. may 12 is next friday.

today is my aunt mollie's birthday. happy birthday mollie! yesterday was my sister's birthday. happy birthday jennifer! i hope the package i sent arrived safely; i was told it would arrive yesterday. my mom's birthday is saturday. my own birthday is a week from saturday, the day after my start date, as it happens.

i'm not going to talk about how old i'm going to be except to say that i know of people my age who are grandparents! ... and others who are published authors. i guess i'm somewhere in between.

so, yeah, working. i think the most interesting report i typed yesterday was about someone mowing her lawn. there was something in the path of the mower and she reached down to get it out of the way and felt a sharp pain in her hand. she looked at her hand and there was a nail clean through it, having been thrust up by the blades of the mower. ew.

today i typed one about a 2-year-old who took a tumble down some stairs and smacked his head pretty good. there was some ambiguity as to whether his mother's boyfriend had given him a bit of a shove.

sometimes i do want to follow up on these reports, but that just wouldn't be ethical.

i'm about 4 pages shy of finishing "ratner's star" by don delillo. i ought to finish it today. it's good but not his best. it's comic, about supposedly wildly intelligent mathmaticians and physicists and engineers in an isolated think tank trying to determine the content and precise origin of a message from outer space. they're really quite neurotic and silly and not very logical. hence the humor.

recently i also read "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon. that was a gift from jennifer and it was very good. that book is what inspired me to give "ratner's star" another shot, the talk about mathematics and such. and before that? "the valley of bones" by michael gruber, his second novel, a bit of a thriller. somewhere in there i also read several poems by elizabeth bishop, and came away slightly disappointed in myself for not yearning to read her entire "complete poems: 1927-1979" cover to cover. she's got some good ones, though.

and what's next in my reading world? "ghostwritten" by david mitchell? "woman on the edge of time" by marge piercy? i'll be scanning my shelves this evening and tomorrow, no doubt.

this struck me about some of my coworkers recently. one woman (they're all women, my coworkers, except for carl ... a topic for another occasion) came across the name lolita (a patient i presume) and commented that the name lolita carried with it a connotation of preadolescent promiscuity. though the words "connotation," "preadolescent," and "promiscuity" were not used per se.

in listening to these people talk about this, i realized they had no conception of the nabokov novel. (one may even have used the word "nymphet"!) the name is thick in popular culture and they've gleaned that, but they have no source knowledge.

my point? i don't know. maybe that they're not the most intellectual bunch in the world? do i fault them for this? i comprehend that it would be snobby to do so, yet i do so. do they listen to npr and vote against bush? i am afraid not.

perhaps the flaw is with me more than with them. i don't know. it's been an issue i've had with the majority of the people i've met here. i seem to be interested in vastly different things. my head is in another place. different sorts of thought processes. i have difficulty relating to most people i've met here.

ah well. i do have kara. kara and i are on the same page the vast majority of the time. this makes everything worthwhile.

we're going back to seattle this weekend, to see ira glass and julia sweeney and to eat ethiopian food. (another beef i have with tacoma - no ethiopian restaurants!) i'm looking forward to that. ira and julia will be at the same venue as david sedaris was the week before last, but our seats are going to be much better this time around.

david, by the way, was hilarious. a funny, funny man. a good kind of mean.