First robin!

This morning I was starting my car to go to work, looked to my left and saw out the garage window a big, red-breasted robin sitting in the little tree. Spring is on its way!

I was thinking, this isn't just my first robin after a long, snowy winter. This is my first first-robin in something like 25 years.

He was there with his gray mate Mrs. Robin. Of course it was 30 degrees and the little lake was still frozen solid, but it is a harbinger of warmer times coming soon...

Freudian language school

Here's another one I heard:

"He's a die-in-the-woods Republican."

Unexpectedly funny

My sister actually heard this, but she hasn't put it on her blog yet so I'm going to.

We were in a parking lot. She was just coming back to the car, where I was waiting. A family was walking the other way, toward the store entrance. The lady suddenly bent down and said, "Look, a dime!"

Then she commented, "I've been finding dimes all the time lately. I found one yesterday too."

Then she said, "If I had a dime for every time I found a dime..."

And didn't realize how funny that was until she'd said it.

Another message from my Aqua Self

Most time-management and self-help books tell you to start by imagining your perfect life, in a fair amount of detail. There's something to this. It helps give you focus if you have clear goals, and also if you know what you want you'll be able to recognize it when it comes along.

But, but. In my current life, imagining isn't appropriate, because I haven't been here long enough to know who I'll be here, or how this place will affect me and my long-term desires.

So, my Aqua Self says to me, "Stop trying to imagine. Just open your eyes."

I can't live in a detailed future yet, so I'll just try to observe the present.

People I want to grow up to be

David Sedaris
Adam Gopnik
Mabel Dodge Luhan
John Cheever
Jack Kerouac (probably grow down to be him, i.e. recapture my lost youth)
Hazel Barnes
Jim Riley
Jackson Pollack
most of the ladies who volunteer at the NSW Art Gallery
James Wright
1/100th of as great as Garrison Keillor
a Wisconsin poet

Project

One of the things I do in this blog is write about relationships, so I'm going to do that now, except that some of the recent ones have this link and might read this. So, apologies in advance if this hurts anyone's feelings. I think everything I've worked out has been said directly to them, anyway, so it shouldn't contain any surprises or libelous things.

Recent experiences - three experiences - have brought me to the vow that I am now done with 40+ year old men. Really, really done with them. Something happens when men turn about 37 that they suddenly crave an exclusive life-partner. The ones who get to be 40+ seem to have a desperation about them that I don't remember from all those boys I pined for when we were all 25. Those boys back then didn't want to be tied down and could do once-off things and then never call you again, or go to one more movie but never make any sort of move to kiss you or stay over and you got the message loud and clear, that was it, I'm not your boyfriend, this is not going anywhere, move on from me. I remember lots and lots of those. What happened to those guys? 40+ guys come at your with powerful force, need all sorts of time and attention, assume that sex means you want to give all your time and attention to them, and get very hard to deal with when you try to put some distance back between you (not so much you R, I'm thinking more of E who was in Sydney). Actually, come to think of it, 25 year old women act very like that - they glom on, they assume boyfriend when really it was one night stand, they put all sorts of emotional pressure on guys who were just wanting to have a little fun. The 40+ guys probably encountered all sorts of women like this when they were 25 and not wanting to settle down, and now that they're 37+ and do want to settle down, they assume the system will all still work like it used to.

So did I, I guess, but somehow I have swapped personalities from a typical clingy 25 year old woman to a wanderlust-filled, afraid-of-commitment, not-wanting-to-be-tied-down callous 25 year old boy. And I assumed the boys were still the same and you could do one-off things but then at the one movie or whatever you do afterward when you meet up again you just put some distance there and not touch them again and they'd get the message, like I used to get the message, that that one night was all there was and thank you very much, it was fun, good luck with the rest of your life. Remember L.M. from grad school? It was all very lovely and uncomplicated. Made me feel very sexy and great and desirable, the one movie afterward made it clear that we had nothing in common and nothing to talk about, and that was that. Lovely memory, end of story.

However - this transformation of myself to one of those 25 year old guys might account for all the powerful crushes I've been getting on guys who are actually 25 years old right now.

And what I've worked out is that, as with every crush anyone ever had in history, what I'm really attracted to in them is some alienated part of myself. I don't want to marry D.C. and traipse around with him to Tokyo or Dubai, I don't want to hitch myself to the cute boy at work and support his projects and hang out with his underaged friends. I want to be them.

For once, finally, in my life, I can finally embrace this idea.

I had a narrow miss into obsessive and time-wasting crush by finding out that one of them is newly re-single.

But in the past few days I have rescued myself from this whole foolishness and I think it will actually end up benefiting the world, not just me. I realize how very, very much time I spend thinking about all these boys, the 40+ problematic ones and the 25ish intoxicating ones. Boys do not spend that much time thinking about relationships. They would be a fucking lot better at managing them if they did, but they don't. That's why men are able to accomplish so much - while the girl is sitting in the room replaying conversations and trying all sorts of phrasing for the things she wants to bring up, while she's waiting for emails and phone calls and composing replies to him that she doesn't send, while she's thinking about his projects and how to support them, he's just getting on with things - playing World of Warcraft, learning about particle physics, rewiring a server, rebuilding an old engine. If I could free up all this bandwidth in my mind, think of the things I could accomplish!

So, for the last few days, when I catch myself wasting bandwidth thinking about boys, I try to stop and turn my attention to my own projects. And in two short days I think I've actually come up with some really cool, rich, innovative things to pursue, that will tie together my English major and my Philosophy background and my interests in opera and film, and will be art but in a blend of genres, and could actually create something that might be of interest to the world.

More on that as it happens, but boys out there, the 40+ ones and the 25ish ones, goodbye, you're not going to occupy all my thoughts any more.

Local Color

There was a day over the past winter when I was stuck in my house by bad weather. My apartment has white walls and beige carpet, outside the windows the world was covered with white snow and the sky that day was the same color. So I started feeling like I was trapped inside a plain white box. I think I might have mentioned it in a previous post.

When my sister started unpacking my stuff and putting it away around the house, my colors came back. My decor has always been lots of rich multi-colors, set off by black. I first noticed this in my Junior year of college, that the look of my room was characterized by my books and my albums. Because of the kind of books I read, I guess, my houses always seem to have lots of stripes of bold, primary colours, and I always have some kind of black furniture surrounding them - bookcase, stereo cabinet, etc.

Now that (some of ) my books are on the shelf above the kitchen pass-through and my kitchen things are set around the counters, it's starting to look like me here. In the bedrooms she put books along the shelf by the window in the guest room, and in a lovely Mission-style small bookcase from Target in the master bedroom, and those books visually anchor the rooms and balance them. It used to be that the rooms dissolved off into the distance with their white walls, the same colour as the white snow outside. Now the dark color of the furniture by the doors is echoed by the dark colours of the books at the edges. The rooms probably look a bit smaller, in the great scheme of things (smaller than infinite dissolving whiteness out to the horizon - yeah, a little bit smaller than that), but they make a definitive statement, and now look like "me".

Meanwhile, out in the Nature, the snow is still there but melting, and the sun is getting strikingly higher in the sky. I can't believe how fast it's changing, but I suppose if it has to go from 4:15pm sunset at one solstice to 10:30pm sunset at the other one, it has to move pretty fast every day. This change also changes the color of the sky, when the weather is sunny, from a washed out light pale whitish blue to a deeper blue. The main colors over the past few weeks have been white on the ground, this slightly deeper blue above, and then a row of brown trees between. I noticed these bands of color one afternoon when I walked out of work in a knitting frame of mind, and was bowled by their beauty and wanted to depict them in some knitting or art project. And then the next day a guy at work who is prone to wearing pastel sweaters was wearing an outfit with exactly the same colors - white Dockers, dark brown belt, light blue shirt. I almost stopped him and remarked on it, but stopped myself because I would have sounded like a lunatic and also because it's inappropriate to remark on the clothing or physical appearance of one's co-workers.

Now, a few weeks later, on my morning commute, just as I pass over the 441 bridge where it would be impossible to slow down and take a photo much less stop, walk out and regard - the color scheme is just crazy beautiful. That same row of brown trees but beneath, a deep blue of the now melted Fox River. Bands of light blue, grey and tiny hints of sunrise-pink in the sky. The grey highway stretching out before me. Everything a bit metallic and reflective because of the open water. Just crazy beautiful, and it makes my heart soar every time I see it.

Visit to the Jazz Age

Much has happened since last time I wrote. My sister has been visiting - her annual post-ice visit, but this time transplanted from sunny Sydney to the upper Midwest. We met up in Chicago for a weekend, then she was in Madison for a few days, and then back here for like a week and a half. She went back yesterday and I miss her desperately, but she got the ball rolling with the packing and refurnishing and now I can carry that momentum forward and start to get really settled in this town.

We stayed right inside the Loop in Chicago, mainly because we wanted to go to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Art Institute. I found a hotel deal online that included tickets to the show, and as it turns out it was in one of the fanciest hotels in the city, the Hilton Palmer House. Dad said he remembers his mother listening to the radio to shows that were being broadcast from there, and Mom said her parents used to stay there when they went down to Chicago for conventions. So, the hotel and us have a long history that we didn't even know about. It's 100-and-some years old, right in the heart of town but just impossibly glamorous. Glamorous and cozy at the same time, which makes me long to hang out in the lobby again even now.

Sister and I did a bit of tourism and fine dining, and also caught up with a cousin who's in his first year at the Institute and is doing some really interesting work. One afternoon we walked up to the John Hancock building and had drinks at the top. It was very cold and windy, and required scarves wrapped around faces for walking around, even more so than Appleton.

The emblamatic experience of the trip for me was sitting in the hotel lobby, on lovely couches that were set off to the side a bit from the main thoroughfare. We could look up at the gilt ceiling and the heroic winged figures on the light fixtures and the glass and elaborate paint and doors to the upstairs ballrooms (plural). We could look across to the flower arrangements, which were these wacky spherical balls of yellow flowers sitting in what looked like an oversized martini glass, with a sweeping green frond of some kind of grass swooping around, looking like a wacky oversized fantastical Dr Seuss cartoon drink. We looked up as the waiter brought our artisanal local beers in tall, slim, cool glasses. We shuffled our feet to make room for all the shopping bags full of souvenirs and books and gifts from the Hopper show. We watched the people gather and head out for dinner - some glamorous young people in long black coats but many, many rich old ladies in fur, with solid be-suited rich husbands on their arms. We looked back up at the gilt ceiling and sighed and looked at each other and smiled and drank expensive, frosty beers and felt graciously welcomed and warm. What a place.

One of those films of a flower growing, speeded up

The rain last Sunday night melted lots of the snow and so now the piles outside are only about half as tall as they were. Tonight when I was walking down to the mailboxes to get my mail, everything looked much smaller. I had the sensation that you have when you go to a place you haven't been to since childhood, and you are amazed at how much smaller it all looks, but actually it's just you who are bigger.

Last week I couldn't see over the top of any of the snow piles, but tonight they only came up to about waist-high. It made the apartment complex seem much smaller, but also more manageable in a way.

I have lived here four months and one week, and I've already had the experience of being a tiny, overwhelmed child and being a grown-up reflecting back on that time.

Wisconsin Language School

Just now, in an official weather warning that scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen, the phrase "To further complicate things," appeared as part of the official forecast.

Tonight they're predicting rain, turning to freezing rain, then sleet, then snow, so road conditions will be at first icy and then snowy (conveniently, just as I'll be heading to work in the morning). And then, "to further complicate things," they're predicting dense fog in some areas as well.

Right now there's lightning, which is something I haven't seen since I've been here. And I must say, a rollicking good midwestern thunderstorm is, as long as you're tucked cosily inside at home, a thing of real beauty.

p.s. 8:30 pm, sure enough, it's raining outside. I went out on the balcony to see it, and the smell was something familiar and reminiscent - I predict that during my first Wisconsin summer I'm going to have lots of visceral flashback experiences to Grandma and Grandpa's cottage.

This is probably the first event of the spring thaw, although I suspect it's a while yet before it'll really be here.

My Smart Mouth

Sometimes my mouth says very smart things that it works out on its own while it's talking, I don't even know that it knows them until they're said.

This morning we were talking about my cousinlet (cousin's kid) who just started a new major and seems to have found her calling, but who is also having boy troubles. I found myself saying, "Well, she's just started a new major and she doesn't know where it's going to take her, so of course it's hard to know what she's looking for in a relationship, but then that's the time you're the most lonely, when you're in transition."