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mallorys_cameraAs my bae Jessica Mitford once wrote, What it boils down to is putting one’s feelings on a special plane; most unwise, if you come to think of it. Because the bitter but true fact is that the only person who cares about one’s own feelings is ONE.
###
I’ve been floating through this week with a strong sense of disconnect. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it just is.
But yesterday was very productive!
The sun was out. Always a good thing.
I gardened.
Behold my strawberry patch, which last autumn was just two straggly orphan runners, donated by Claude:
I don’t actually like strawberries, so I will be donating all the berries to the Hyde Park food bank.
I went tromping.
The day was so clear, you could see all the way to the mountains of the Hudson Highlands:
I ordered a birthday cake for L at the fabulous La Deliziosa Bakery and stumbled across this statue:
You may not think it’s weird to find a statue of the 2nd Earl of Limerick, a former colonial Governor of New York, standing in a shabby little park in the forgotten backwater of Poughkeepsie long after the sun has set on the British Empire. But I certainly do.
I went over to Literacy Connections to meet up with Christine. The Lola handover is happening next week, and Christine has done such a good job teaching Lola English, I wanted continuity.
Good news on the ESL front by the way! Nafisa passed her USMLE exam on the third try!
I was the first person she called, even before her husband (who is still working in Virginia five days a week.)
“I could not do this except for you,” Nafisa repeated again and again.
So that felt reaffirming.
Nafisa is now a real live doctor, and assuming she saves even one person’s life, I am somewhere on that causality chain, which makes my own life worth having lived, at least according to the George Bailey Theory of Interconnectivity.
Came home. Polished off a short cost/benefit report on the effects of giving nurse practitioners the right to practice autonomously in North Carolina. The North Carolina Medical Society, she is a strong labor union.
Then I grabbed The Hustler and headed back to the garden for a couple of hours of reading.
The garden has this fabulous public space with wooden lounge chairs and picnic tables right outside the fenced growing area. It is so peaceful:
I’m rereading The Hustler because I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. It’s been growing on me, particularly the dialogue, and the way Tevis wrote the scene where Fast Eddie gets his thumbs broken, and the little meditative exegeses sprinkled throughout the text on the differences between winning and losing.
These are all a lot finer and more subtle than I had initially given Tevis credit for. In particular, it is very, very difficult to write about violence in any but the most banal descriptive terms.
Maybe I should become a Walter Tevis compleatist.
When I got home, I decided to watch the movie adaptation of another Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
That is certainly one weird fuckin’ movie.
Nicolas Roeg commands adoration among a certain, small, devoted circle of cinephiles, but I’ve never been one of them because hello! Fangirl of straight-forward narrative! C’est moi!
But who doesn’t want to watch David Bowie for two and a half hours?
Then I got an email from Ichabod: What do you want for Mother’s Day?
For Mother's day, I want reverential adoration, I wrote back. But if that costs too much, I'll take flowers.
###
I’ve been floating through this week with a strong sense of disconnect. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it just is.
But yesterday was very productive!
The sun was out. Always a good thing.
I gardened.
Behold my strawberry patch, which last autumn was just two straggly orphan runners, donated by Claude:
I don’t actually like strawberries, so I will be donating all the berries to the Hyde Park food bank.
I went tromping.
The day was so clear, you could see all the way to the mountains of the Hudson Highlands:
I ordered a birthday cake for L at the fabulous La Deliziosa Bakery and stumbled across this statue:
You may not think it’s weird to find a statue of the 2nd Earl of Limerick, a former colonial Governor of New York, standing in a shabby little park in the forgotten backwater of Poughkeepsie long after the sun has set on the British Empire. But I certainly do.
I went over to Literacy Connections to meet up with Christine. The Lola handover is happening next week, and Christine has done such a good job teaching Lola English, I wanted continuity.
Good news on the ESL front by the way! Nafisa passed her USMLE exam on the third try!
I was the first person she called, even before her husband (who is still working in Virginia five days a week.)
“I could not do this except for you,” Nafisa repeated again and again.
So that felt reaffirming.
Nafisa is now a real live doctor, and assuming she saves even one person’s life, I am somewhere on that causality chain, which makes my own life worth having lived, at least according to the George Bailey Theory of Interconnectivity.
Came home. Polished off a short cost/benefit report on the effects of giving nurse practitioners the right to practice autonomously in North Carolina. The North Carolina Medical Society, she is a strong labor union.
Then I grabbed The Hustler and headed back to the garden for a couple of hours of reading.
The garden has this fabulous public space with wooden lounge chairs and picnic tables right outside the fenced growing area. It is so peaceful:
I’m rereading The Hustler because I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. It’s been growing on me, particularly the dialogue, and the way Tevis wrote the scene where Fast Eddie gets his thumbs broken, and the little meditative exegeses sprinkled throughout the text on the differences between winning and losing.
These are all a lot finer and more subtle than I had initially given Tevis credit for. In particular, it is very, very difficult to write about violence in any but the most banal descriptive terms.
Maybe I should become a Walter Tevis compleatist.
When I got home, I decided to watch the movie adaptation of another Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
That is certainly one weird fuckin’ movie.
Nicolas Roeg commands adoration among a certain, small, devoted circle of cinephiles, but I’ve never been one of them because hello! Fangirl of straight-forward narrative! C’est moi!
But who doesn’t want to watch David Bowie for two and a half hours?
Then I got an email from Ichabod: What do you want for Mother’s Day?
For Mother's day, I want reverential adoration, I wrote back. But if that costs too much, I'll take flowers.
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