mallorys_camera | Federal Italianate Houses With Cupolas

If I had to be stuck in the brutal Northeastern winter belt, I suppose, this would be the year to do it: Temperatures this morning in the low forties though a dreary, gray day. Yesterday, though, was brilliant sunshine and people were running around downtown Ithaca in t-shirts. Like California, only with federal Italianate architecture. Houses with cupolas! I will miss the terroir here bigtime when I leave.

Two days before, though, temperatures in the subteens and unending snowfall. I’m here to tell you snowflakes that stay on your nose and eyelashes are waaaaay over-rated.

I’ve turned this journal into a Poverty Diary – what it’s like to be living so far on the edge that you’re either like one of those Roadrunner cartoon characters hanging off the cliff or that Buddhist monk, similarly hanging, but yearning towards that single blooming flower. That means most of the entries are locked. I do have some dignity.

In other news, I 86’d the cop. I did like him and felt oddly comfortable around him – a fact that was instantly explained when he told me he was half Jewish. Ah, the great lingua franca of sarcasm! It’s increasingly odd to me, now that I am firmly in retrospective mode, that none of the Great Loves of my life were Jewish. There’s an instant rapport I feel with other members of the Lost Tribe that I never feel with anyone else. I suppose my romantic life was the female equivalent of lusting after shiksas.

But there was something weird going on with the cop in terms of meetings that were too often rearranged, and I finally decided he was probably married or something. I totally disapprove of going out with married men unless their wives are in an ICU dying of cancer and have given their approval because, even as the life drains out of them, they understand: Men have needs.

I didn’t sleep with him or anything, so no harm done. I should have taken that fancy garlic press when it was offered.