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does anyone else find it... ironic, or somehow, um, fake, to watch a waiflike man with nearly blue pale skin, eyeliner, and shoulder length ink black hair get into a white mercedes hatchback kompressor and drive away from a coffe house?
YES, BOYS AND GIRLS, THE CYNICISM HAS RETURNED, rising in a phoenix-esque manner from the shores of last week's blind paralytic panic.
i'm at the spyhouse, eating a decadent almond croissant, (purchased from a girl with surface piercings on her forearms, walking gingerly as the tops of her feet are freshly tattoo'd) watching the zoo that is my neighborhood and loving it. as i told my mom the day i brought her back from the airport --where i live the punks are real. a few blocks over in gentrified uptown, they're a little affected. but here it's all real. as another thought about the neighborhood, i noticed the other day that with the few exceptions of small dogs, all the dogs i've seen in the neighborhood in a week and a half qualify as dangerous breeds. i'm not afraid, the sweetest, brightest dog i know is a pit named athena (but i have heard about the recent death in the sunset), i'm just surprised since so many ads i looked at specified no agressive breeds... it's interesting. i'm not generally prone to petting dogs i don't know anyway, but maybe it just adds to the edginess of the hood.
so as you can see, in addition to having found my sense of cynicism, i am also much more relaxed about the place i live. much of this could be attributed to the simple act (within half an hour of her arrival) of my mother finding the locking mechanism on my windows, so i don't feel unsafe leaving them open when i'm not there. i think the rest of it is just the comfort of mom... i was worried that moving is stressful and money is worse, but really we handled both of those things and nobody yelled or cried. mama makes all things manageable.
we went to ikea, i know it's stupid cookie cutter, but i don't care, it's also affordable and simple and i like what we found (a tall narrow bathroom cabinet we purchased and brought home, and a bookshelf that we didn't b/c it wouldn't fit in my car, as well as a super cool table that folds down to a 6" wide console when the leaves are down...which was out of stock. so i'll return with lora and her family's suv soon....) i have shopped and looked other places too, but money and time are of the essence ---the office portion of the living room remains a maze of boxes until i get more shelves to unload them into and make it a useful work space.
we went to alexandria for the weekend, stayed with the gracious godfather of theatre l'homme dieu, vern and his lovely wife paula. they have a great place on the lake, and took us out on their pontoon for my mom's birthday. she was enthralled and it was great. we went to the theatre campus, but it's very very strange when empty. first of all, it only takes 10 minutes to show the whole place. when it's full, with rehearsals going and lunch cooking and saws running and sewing machines humming, it's hard to get from one building to another with your train of thought intact. with no one there it seemed a little... little. but it's beautiful, which one sometimes overlooks during hive-time.
we had dinner at the black forest, a forty year old german restaraunt a block from my house (boasting, among others, a bill board that says: "non-germans find it excelllent. germans find it surprisinly adequate." my mom laughed heartily... also one that reads: "bring the kids. we serve brats.") she met courtney and katie there, friends from last summer's season... lora took us to minnehaha falls, which was beautiful, and we had lunch with kenzie and grant the other day...so she's met some folks, which was important to me too.
we did some math, which told us that on a very tight budget i can deal until something comes up that i can live with --i not only have great distaste for almost every job we've found in the star tribune, the citypages, and craigslist, i'm vastly underqualified for almost all of them. i need something, and soon, but at least i can spend a couple bucks at the grocery store and a couple bucks at the coffee house for internet access and be alright.
that's about all i have to say, but i did want to share one last thing.... http://www.taize.fr/
i was in taize for holy week the year i was in berlin. it was one of the most singular and communally beautiful weeks of my life, and this sentiment is no doubt being echoed in grief around the world this week. brother roger was a man of peace so profound it almost can't be described... his brothers and sisters must keenly feel his absence in taize, and millions around the world feel it quietly in their own way. peace be with you