this n that

i don't have anything particular to say here today, but i guess i felt like writing a little something anyway, just to check in. outside it's warm and rainy.

it was a bit of a drag of a week but i'm on a three-day weekend now and things are looking up. i suppose everyone feels like looking for a new job every now and again. it might be just a phase that will pass soon. i'm not sure what else i would do for a living. regardless, the second half of the workweek was better than the first.

i'm reading mailman's novel and i'm liking it. it's good. i like picturing her writing it, sitting at a keyboard or a typewriter or with a pad and pencil or however she does it. she has another novel coming out in a few months and i'm looking forward to that. i'm happy that things are going so well for her.

i have thoughts of a new story of my own, and i think i'll start writing tomorrow. i allowed the march story to die, and that was perhaps sad, but there it is. maybe i'll revise my goal and shoot for a story every other month. maybe i need fallow time or something. i'm not being so hard on myself, but i will start something new tomorrow.

yellow and i have the sniffles these days. he's got an upper respiratory infection (i took him to the vet yesterday and have antibiotics in a dropper for him) and my allergies are acting up. i have a referral from my soon-to-be-ex primary care physician for a skin test with an allergist, and i should follow up on that. the allegra i'm on seems to be insufficient.

i'll be taking a drawing class at a community college starting the week after next, to get me out of the house and because sometimes i like drawing. and kara's been spending a lot of time at her studies, and i think she's enjoying it. it's slowing down our voyage through season five of "24" but that's all right. (though i do rather like chloe and wouldn't mind unbuttoning that button.)

max seems to be moaning a bit more than he used to. he's got some tremors in his legs. kara is going to talk to the vet today about getting him some more potent meds.

for the past week and a half i've been working out regularly afternoons, on the treadmill and with the weight machine. i don't see fantastic changes yet but i'm glad i'm doing it. the changes are coming.

monday

somebody's got a case of the mondays. still, i feel like i'm coming to terms with things here. i feel more solid than i did when i last posted in this space. i'm still not ecstatic, but i'm all right. i was just at an especially low point the other day.

and yesterday wasn't such a good day at work. i kept getting dictators who blur the lines between the words. i'm sure they don't even think about dictation from the transcriptionist's point of view. some of them are great, and appear conscientious, but there are, i don't know, about a dozen or two physicians and residents who regularly give me problems. all of them seemed to lurk in my queue yesterday.

i hope they're not back today.

i'm thinking of taking a drawing class at tacoma community college. get me out of the house a bit, thursday evenings. and i'm going to a day-long medical transcriptionist symposium on 4/14/2007, a saturday. i'm hoping it'll be interesting. and kara's well situated now in her schooling; she's shooting for a masters in criminal justice at kaplan university, online. she was buried in books all weekend.

vibe

yesterday for a while i was in a bit of a mood. the idea of getting rid of everything, everything, excluding kara but sometimes including the pets, is sometimes extremely appealing. lose it all, burn it all. all the stuff we have, our whole lives, gone, and start over. new city, new house, an empty house, empty but for the two of us (and maybe the pets). maybe there could be a fire and there would be insurance money for us. (though kara has probably already had enough destruction by fire, and calamity in general, for the rest of her life.)

i suppose i was just feeling generally down about things, mostly about this town of tacoma, feeling weighed down and stuck and lost and alienated. what are we doing here? are we going to live here for the rest of our lives? i was feeling terribly not-young. (though, happily, i was carded twice in the past week when purchasing wine - not bad for two months shy of 36!)

(we moved here solely because we wanted to own a home - we'd been renting half a duplex in a dingy suburb north of seattle - and prices in tacoma were considerably more reasonable. now, of course, we know why!)

it's true i've put almost zero effort into meeting people here. my trouble is i don't expect to like anyone i meet. i expect to be disappointed by people, expect them to be narrow-minded. i think my bitterness about tacoma comes from the fact that my first job here was at borders books & music. what a terrible experience that was, what a rotten store, and what horrid people. i felt stifled and lost there. (i did make a friend there - shannon - and she could have become a good friend - she and her girlfriend and kara and i went out a time or two - but she hated it here too and moved to oregon.) i got away from borders, but the experience tainted my views of this town, and perhaps that's not fair. plus in my job currently i'm alone, with headphones on, not socializing. oh, i'm quite de-socialized these days. i've isolated myself rather radically. that's my own fault, my own choice.

i went to the mandolin this morning because it's one place in this town in which i feel as if i might be with like-minded folks. i don't even know why i feel that way, because i've never met anyone there (once i chatted with a barista for a minute), never made any connections. it's the environment of the place, perhaps, the wooden tables, the paintings on the walls, the fireplace, the music. i sat there, drank coffee, ate a bagel, read iris murdoch. there weren't many other people there, but there were a few. i ought to go there more often than once every few weeks.

i don't feel like i need a lot of friends or activity. i don't want to go out all that often. i'm a homebody and i go to sleep early. i enjoy my fridays to myself and i enjoy evenings and saturdays with kara. i don't need a lot more. a social engagement now and again, a dinner out, something, wouldn't go astray.

it's true i stress a bit about meeting people and talking to people because whatever conversational skills i might ever have had are surely severely atrophied.

mostly it's the vibe of this town. is it too small? is that what it is? i think of afternoons spent in cities like seattle, dc, and cork, and what i liked about those environments. the buildings, the people, the shops, the buzz, the possibilities. a nice pub in which to have a beer of an early afternoon, and then walk around again among everyone.

today i feel a bit better. i'm still a little low, but i know of some places in tacoma that make me feel better. there's the mandolin, the metropolitan market, shakabrah java. something about those places, the people i see in those places, remind me of the larger world. somehow. the vibe.

the idea of starting over is still appealing. getting rid of all our material stuff sounds appealing. being thoroughly cleaned out by a fire, however insane that sounds, appeals, on a level. (theoretical!) i know that we're going to be in tacoma for a while, so i'm going to make the best of it. i'm going to go more often to the places that i like and i'm going to work on being more open and accepting of people i might happen to meet somehow.

cyclops

this morning i dreamed, at a point close to waking, of a new character to write about. he is an otherwise ordinary man who, when first looked at, seems to have but one eye, centered on the interpupillary line, not unlike a cyclops of myth and legend. the person looking at this man is initially confused, blinks, refocuses. when he is looked at again, the man appears to have two eyes, as do most other folks on this fair planet. is it the man who changes? or is he able to cast a temporary sort of visual hallucinatory spell on those who gaze upon him? this one-eye/two-eyes thing occurs whenever anyone looks at this man, even if a person has seen him a hundred times before, even when he's in a crowd, any time.

strange. it would be a different sort of story for me, and maybe that's what i'm looking for. i don't know what i'm looking for, do i?

i finished that cormac mccarthy book; it was very very bloody. it reminded me a bit of the last elmore leonard that i read, but i liked it better. crazy violent, though.

i've decided i don't like my doctor. and it's not only because he put me on niaspan and wants me to undergo an allergy skin test, with needles. i just don't like him. he sort of brushed me off when i wanted to ask him some questions about my questionable ibs. i'm going to seek out a new primary care provider.

ellipses

we have heat, for the moment. the same furnace technician as before came back yesterday and rereplaced the same part, the gas valve. maybe it was a bad part that he installed before. maybe there's something deeper wrong with the furnace that's making the gas valve fail. luckily for him he didn't even try to charge us for the work or the part yesterday. and we have heat again, at least for now. we'll see how long this lasts.

we love our new sink and faucet (pictured in previous post). we don't care if everyone else hates them. we're crazy for them and we're bringing them with us when we move ... though we're not actually moving in the immediate future. and yes, baltimore has been added to the list of possible cities for our future, which already included portland (oregon), seattle, and chicago.

... we saw daniel craig play james bond last night in casino royale with cheese. we found it a fairly typical bond film and were disappointed. and apparently he's doing another one. we weep for daniel craig. ah well - we will always have him in the mother, sylvia, and enduring love.

upset

i was about to get on here and write about how happy i am about our new sink (pictured) that was installed yesterday with much to-do, but then kara came upstairs and told me that our furnace is acting up again. it's the same issue as before, before we spent $385 on a new gas valve. the symptoms are almost exactly the same. so i'm actually fairly livid at the moment and not in much of a mood to discuss happiness over a bathroom sink with a bridge faucet. i finished main street the other day and we saw ira glass and dan savage in seattle last week. i started writing a new story yesterday, a sort of a fanfic piece with characters from versions of the "csi" tv shows (warrick brown and sheldon hawkes; why not?) but now don't feel like working on that or even talking about anything any more. we're thinking of moving to baltimore.

midriff

happily, i slept well last night. and the night prior, and the night prior. i am tired this morning because we were up in seattle last evening seeing art spiegelman smoke and talk about comics. it was a good talk, very informative and entertaining. we just got back later than we usually go to bed, so i'm a bit tired right now. but i'll be fine.

kara recognized one of the ushers last night as a man she worked with for a tax season at the irs about a decade ago. after we got our seats she went and talked to him for a while. it's something to see someone out of the blue whom you haven't seen for years. i was reminded of running into my ex-girlfriend patti in a seattle bookstore some months ago.

this usher, bill, told kara, at the end of their conversation, that he remembered fondly her navel. apparently she wore low rise pants and brief tops somewhat more often back then than she does now. i wasn't sure how to take this comment, related to me by kara after the fact, though it stirred in me many a mental image.

i notice things like that as well, don't i? those aspects of fashion. oh yes i do.

awake

witness the time stamp on this here post. i've been awake almost three hours; i went to sleep six hours ago. i'm getting a little distressed now about not sleeping. nowanights when i wake in the small hours i don't even expect to fall asleep again. i just lie there. it's not as if i'm fraught with worries that are keeping me up. nonetheless, used to be i would wake up in the night for a few moments, from a dream or a noise from a pet or a need to pee, and return to sleep nearly instantaneously. are those nights altogether gone? is it my pillows? the mattress?

well. i'll work on my story for a bit, then. make some use of the time, what what? i'm off today anyway; maybe i'll have a nap this afternoon.