Mallory's Camera

Baaaaad time of year. At this point in my life, I'd rather be savoring the moments, sprinkling them with imagination, stretching them out. But instead, all I can do is hunker down, stare out a window at the pitiless winter landscape, reassure myself, This, too, shall pass.

I'll want those moments back when I'm dying, that's for sure.

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Meanwhile, it didn't snow all day yesterday, but it might as well have because the part of the day it didn't snow was spent reading the sky, testing the wind, waiting for it to snow.

I did a bit of Useful Work and a useless tax class on Zoom—hey! they're paying me. Played around some with the Work in Progress and unwittingly solved a transition problem before it could turn into awkward prose. Did not exercise, which is possibly why I could not break the gloomy mood.

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Finished I Have Some Questions for You. Boarding school books must be an actual literary genre! This one is not near the top of the list. The protagonist is a celebrity because she helms a successful podcast. And I'm thinking, Really??? I mean, there are celebrity podcasters, but mostly they were celebrities before they became podcasters; they are leveraging their celebrity to carry the podcast, right?

The protagonist has this gurgley, chick-lit voice, which is wrong, wrong, wrong for a murder mystery. The basic conceit of the book (actually kinda interesting) is that the real murderer, the figure emerging from the shadows, is the teacher who had an affair with the murder victim, the same sympathetic teacher who devoted energy to bringing the protagonist out of her adolescent shell. Except this proves to be a misfire! So, what we're left with at the end of the book is that the titular You behaved... inappropriately. And those kinds of transgressions are less moral absolutes than violations of au courant cultural imperatives.

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Speaking of au courant cultural imperatives...

In the evening, I watched multiple episodes of the real estate bling show, Owning Manhattan.

And fell into despair!

How do people end up spending $250 million on an apartment?

The $300 heating oil bill for me this month is gonna be tough to pay!

What kind of an abysmal, absolute failure am I that I can't spend $250 million on an apartment? That I can't even spend 50¢ on an apartment?

Why does money have so many zeroes in it now?

Plus, the Upper West Side that I grew up in is practically unrecognizable now. What did they have to tear down to build the great glass tower at 200 Amsterdam? I was scouring my memory. What used to be there? And suddenly this visual sense memory just rushed in: Annie's old apartment on W. 68th and the little diner next door to it, I could see the breakfast plates now, practically smell them: the sunny-side up eggs floating in a little pool of grease, the crunchy hashbrowns, the thick white china plates...

What will happen to that $250 million apartment in 100 years? Will it still be the apex of luxury living? It can't possibly be, right? The cycle is the Ozymandias Factor, boom then bust, palaces dissolving into tenaments.

But I can't even wrap my head around what comes next.

Shortly, I must toddle off to wildest, wooliest Walker Valley because twice a year, the Shawangunk Dems volunteer to pick up garbage along Highway 52.

I am not looking forward to it: Evidently, I wore the wrong shoes tromping yesterday because I woke up in the middle of the night with shin splints and am insufficiently rested this morning.

Beyond that, naught much to report.

I Remunerated (though, of course, never enough.)

I started reading The Great Believers, an epic novel about the AIDS pandemic. The novel is excellent and, moreover, written in a style that is so outside my personal stylebook, I won't find myself unconsciously plagiarizing from it. (That is an issue for me. Even in my dotage, I have an excellent memory for words, and quite often, I can't remember whether I wrote a sentence, or somebody else did.)

In the evening, I went vox with Ichabod who is getting a promotion in the PD universe which will allow him to defend people facing life sentences. The promotion comes with a hefty raise!

And for once, the kiskas are getting along and acting adorable.