I´m about a million words behind on things to say. Like:

Suchitoto, El Salvador at dusk. Little town up in the mountains, full of cobblestone streets and whitewashed houses with stencils by the front doors of birds and anti-domestic violence messages. From a park at the far end of town you can look way way down at Lake Suchitlan, invisible birds in the trees calling to each other with long whistles. On the corner there's a garden full of relics from the war: a bombshell, machetes, signs about peace. We ate pupusas at picnic tables in the street: biscuity-corn flatbreads stuffed with refried beans and cheese and loroco flower buds and deliciousness. Dinner was 80 cents, the beer was a dollar. Afterwards we spent half an hour talking in Spanglish to a store owner called Rodolfo about his business, unemployment rates, Chavez, the Honduran coup, Obama. Then got ice cream, walked home through the square to our $11 hotel.


I have a four country backlog to write about! Stay tuned for Nicaragua: So Goddamn Awesome, pictures of volcanoes and food, and other exciting tales. Tomorrow we bus up to Guatemala and Friday (Friday!) fly home (home?!) to Atlanta. I can't believe I've been traveling almost six weeks. I can't believe someday I won't be living out of a backpack. I can't believe it's all almost over.

Hallo, livejournal. I'm sitting on the bed in the middle of a little round cabin in Boquete, in the Panamanian highlands, watching it rain and rain and rain. Horses keep clopping by in the street. I want to stay here for about a million years.

It's about twenty degrees cooler here than in the rest of the country, which is such a relief after Panama City, which was a kind of hot and humid even Florida can't touch. (In less than a week, Central America has done the impossible and made me appreciate a cloudy day.) Panama City reminded me a lot of bits of Florida crossed with bits of New York, though way way louder than even New York -- people really like their horns, all night long.

I'm pleased to report that the Panama Canal is cooler than I even expected, in the way that locks and feats of maritime engineering are when they're right in your face, moving giant cargo ships. Not to mention the country around it.

And Boquete is breathtaking; it's tiny and walkable, surrounded by crazy hills that get wreathed in clouds, and the churchbells sound exactly like something from The Sound of Music. We're staying in the world's most charming cabin run by Germans who make your breakfast to order and serve it in -- where else? -- the breakfast dome. Which is all extra-awesome after the kinds of divey hotels we've been mostly staying in. (The one in Panama City where they had to come to your room with a remote to turn the air conditioning off and on; the one in Aguadulce, right next to the highway, with no blankets on the beds, only sheets.)

AARP apparently named this one of the world's best places to retire about ten years ago (... and I don't know what it says that my favorite place so far is retiree heaven), so there's a little expat community and the odd conglomeration of things that come with it (...French restaurants?), and it's odd to see a street full of Panamanians and then someone's suburban mom walking by. But thrillingly, we're going to stay here a week and take Spanish classes (because it turns out my Spanish suuuucks; everything keeps coming out French) and maybe do some volunteering and generally rock out before moving on to Costa Rica. (My childhood guilt-complex keeps flaring up; I feel like this is too fantastic, there's no way I can deserve it.) I keep going to bed early and waking up early and thrilling when I realize I'm still here.


Anyway, I've been throwing pictures up on Flickr (willy-nilly, Photoshop-free, since we only have a netbook):

Panama so far.

(Not pictured: sweaty chicken buses, dodgy hotels, the Interamericano highway where buses screech to a halt wherever anyone wants to get on, giant $2 plates of fried chicken and rice and beans, adventures in giant hair, adventures in remembering not to drink the water.)

I'm not doing as well at paper-journaling the trip as I'd grandiosely planned. I'm already days behind and boring myself when I try to catch up. Maybe telegraph-style is the way to go.

( P.S. Harry Potter and the Well-Stocked iPod. )

Guys, this is it. I'm at the airport, about to leave Boston, my home and native land, my sin, my soul, my only only only. Major sadfaces, and the fact that I spent this weekend acquiring: very little sleep, a nice sunburn, and 10,000 man-hours of stress-packing isn't helping. I miss annakovsky like a crazy person already.

(Mitigating the emosity: listening to a group of high schoolers going to Peru get lectured about the consequences if they get caught drinking. lulz. FYI: They will be sent home immediately.)

So tonight I'm going to be in Panama City! In all the stress of packing and sadness of leaving I kind of forgot to think about that. So we'll see how this all goes. Like Steve Zissou says, this is an adventure.

01. Hey, pro tip, maybe don't watch the Scrubs finale when you're moving away from somewhere forever. There's something in my eye. (For those playing the home game: I'm moving to Atlanta! With my boyfriend. But first we're going to Central America for 5 weeks or so! I leave Boston in less than two weeks! Kermit arms! The deets.)

02. I made these Chocolate Toffee Rum Cookies last night, as part of the Use Up All Baking Ingredients Initiative, and they might be some of the best I've ever made. And I've made a crapload of cookies. OM NOM NOM.

03. Sweet music for downloading! ( 11 fantastical songs. )

04. So I'm going to take the great leap back into blogging, at least while I'm traveling around (...this isn't blogging, this is LJing), except thinking up an awesome domain name is the HARDEST THING EVER. Ugh, any tips?

05. I just posted this and Google Chrome saw fit to delete the entire text of the entry in favor of "asfda", which I'd typed before I started writing any of it. WTF Chrome, each day I hate you a little more.

Guys, if you haven't seen this, your life is not complete. It's the whole cast of Star Trek: TNG on Family Guy. I don't even like Family Guy, and annakovsky doesn't like Star Trek, and we've still watched this about a million times.


( More lolarity from the same episode. )

This year I feel a hundred times more aware of the trees transitioning from flowers to leaves, that in-between stage. It's astonishing! Who authorized this! It goes so fast, though -- my favorite tree, the magnolia down the street, went all the way from buds to sidewalk schmutz in one week. I want to do nothing but take pictures all day, the leaves that obscene, unreal green.

While we're watching videos, let's watch Jacoby Ellsbury steal home plate a few hundred more times, okay? Okay. I'm going to the Sox game tomorrow with ke_rose_ne! Do you think he'd do that again if we asked nicely?

And cheapmetaphor is coming to visit in two! days! I'm so excited I may explode like that magnolia tree. We will do nothing but eat and drink delicious things in the sunshine and be wonderful.

So. Big things are afoot.

01. I'm moving to Atlanta in July. A-the-boyfriend is going to business school at Emory and as he goes, so goes my nation. The sucky part is how wrenchingly awful it's going to be to leave annakovsky, roommate extraordinaire, and my beloved Boston and ( all the things that come with both. )

On the other hand, I'm also, much to my surprise, really excited. After hating living in Florida for so many years, I never thought I'd be anywhere in the South again, let alone happy about it, but: We're going to be living in the Virginia Highlands, in a really cool, walkable neighborhood full of bars and sushi and cupcakes. There are trees everywhere, and it's going to be warm, almost all the time, and let me tell you what, my relief over not having to go through another New England winter is palpable and tear-inducing. And I really liked it when I was there in December; it definitely doesn't feel Floridian. Plus it's going to be so much cheaper to live there, everything from rent to beer to airfares. And I've been in Boston five years(!!) now; it's been feeling like time for something new, and everything's clicking together just right for this.

My biggest concern is about making friends and a life for myself so I have an identity beyond Girlfriend. But the plan is to devote myself to meeting a crapload of people the second I hit the ground, so hopefully that'll work out. ( In which I ramble on about this forever. )

PLUS, I've just discovered that Atlanta used to be named MARTHASVILLE. It's a sign!

I'm excited, guys. I've got that Jed Bartlett feeling on: What's next?

02. I'm going to Central America! For a month! In June! Partly to travel and partly to do some pro bono work for a company that's expanding in the region. Also to improve my crappy Spanish, and get something on my resume that'll be helpful in the future, since I really want to transition into international poverty and development work (read: microfinance) at some point.

Any travel recommendations or tips? I think we're going to be hitting Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama, but it's not set in stone yet. (I keep going back and forth on whether I should feel guilty for taking this time between jobs but oh man, I've been chained to a desk for five years straight through, and the idea of just being free for a couple of weeks = A+++ where the A is for Amazing.)


So between disassembling my life here (so much to pack! so much to sell!), getting things set up in Atlanta (so much to buy! prescriptions to transfer! library cards to get!), and planning this trip (vaccinations! malaria pills! packing lists!), there is SO MUCH CRAP to do in the next few months six weeks oh god. I'm going to make Remember the Milk explode.


Lame, I know, but I'd appreciate for the time being if you didn't mention this in comments outside this filter, since I'm trying to keep it from getting back to my parents until I'm ready. I can't possibly explain how awful it's going to be when they find out I'll be Living In Sin. Like, devastating, relationship-destroying awful. So, um, wish me luck with that.

But anyway anyway. Away we go.

ABOUT THAT TIME, EH CHAPS? National Poetry Month is two (2!) days away! For the fifth (5th!) year in a row, I'm going to email out an awesome poem every day. And look, there's even a fancy signup widget now oooh aahh:

Subscribe to April Is: National Poetry Month

Email:

Visit this group

ALSO, there is now a Tumblr archive of the past four years of poems. Woooo. In fact, this is the year of social media NaPoMo overkill; you can follow along via:

Twitter
LiveJournal (& if you already do, my deepest apologies for the glut of new entries when they switched the feed URL the other day) or Dreamwidth (thanks to ursamajor
RSS
Tumblr or of course the actual email list at
Google Groups

Can we talk about how switching from Yahoo!Groups to Google Groups is like switching from an MBTA bus to the bridge of the Enterprise? The Enterprise D? Holy god it's the best thing I've ever done.

But sign up! Get your daily dose of poetry straight to your inbox, like a shot of adrenaline to the heart! God, I always spend the entire second half of March vibrating with excitement. IS IT NAPOMO TIME YET?

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! I'm wearing socks with shamrocks on them, so I know you're jealous. To celebrate, please enjoy this picture I took last time I was in Ireland. YEP, STILL FUNNY.

Why does LiveJournal no longer let me view any LJ pages unless I'm signed in? That is nonsense. Hey, you know what I think it's time for?

RANDOM RECOMMENDATIONS OF PRODUCTS I ENJOY:

Ginger Chews: Perhaps, like me, you have found your appreciation of ginger gradually moving from 'mild enjoyment' to 'utter obsession'. Now you are ready for these. They are delightfully intense, and don't have any chemically junk or high fructose corn syrup, and did I mention delicious? I like to put them in my pocket or hold them in my hand for a few minutes to soften them up. Also I find them amazing for settling my stomach. And a world where candy is basically like medicine is the world I've been trying to get to all my life. [In Boston you can get these at Harvest Co-Op in Central, and I'm not sure where else.]

Lipsyl Honey Rose lip balm: I LOVE this stuff about a million times more than any other lip gloss or chapstick. It's not sticky, feels amazing, and smells awesome. This morning I had flat out run two blocks for my bus and this fell out of my pocket and I chose going back for it over the 83.

This Is Not A Pipe shirt: I've been waiting YEARS (I think? It feels like years.) for Threadless to reprint this, and I honestly thought they never would. But they did! And I nearly fell off my chair when I got the notification email, and of course bought one immediately, because crossing the nerdiness streams is the kind of dangerous I like to live with. And now I must immediately cut the neck out because yick, crewnecks.

What else, what else? I don't know. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of narrated consumerism. Oh! READ THIS ARTICLE:

The City that Ended Hunger :: Belo Horizonte, Brazil: "Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you." This article -- this project -- is amazing and wonderful and made me want to cry: "I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it." It's incredible insight into how shifts in policy and regulation can make such huge differences.

Guys, on Friday it will be SPRING. Every day that it's a little warmer or a little lighter I want to cry with relief; every year this seasonal affective whatever gets worse and Putting My Head Down And Powering Through becomes less of an effective coping method, and I feel so horribly unlike myself; ugh, it's just so stupid. (So stupid I must resort to sentence with multiple semicolons, apparently.) But! This morning, even though it was still in the 20s, I saw: THE FIRST ROBIN of the year; two cardinals chasing each other up and down the street, around and around, so red; THE FIRST BUDDING CROCUSES; and puppies and babies and the bell in the Yard actually swinging in the steeple as it rang, so delightful since I'd always thought it was a recording.

Question: Do any of you know the Facebook API for creating apps, or do you know anyone who does? I've got a one-time volunteer opportunity that's unpaid, but has the potential to make you money down the road. Anyone have advice about where to look for someone with these skillz? I'm already trying Idealist.


Stolen from abbacat. ( A Tuesday meme. )

DUDE, I just found out that I won a contest where I had to guess how many car keys were in a fishbowl! I've always been horribly bad at guesstimating and things that require, like, spatial awareness, so this is super exciting. I guessed 85 and there were 84! Clearly this opens up a whole new set of career options in the exciting field of Guessing Stuff.

I cannot possibly describe how glorious a 60 degree day is in the middle of a Boston February. I wore a dress and ate lunch outside and walked around without a coat or a sweater and adopted some von Trapp children and taught them about music and love. It was amazing to remember the existence of the world, rather than a series of rooms, with periods of miserableness when moving between them. After work I went to Target and then walked home through Union Square, which is still the best -- where else can you find Korean, Brazilian, Indian, Spanish and halal grocery stores in the space of two blocks? -- my coat open and my scarf undone and the night all breezy.

Sunday it wasn't this warm, but it was in the 40s, which felt amazing enough, and we had nothing to do, so A and I hopped the blue line to Wonderland, where I'd never been, and walked up to Kelly's and ate a roast beef sandwich and a frappe sitting on the snowy beach. It wasn't remotely warm enough for that, especially with the sea breeze, but it was awesome anyway.

( In January, I went to DC and oversaw the installation of a new president. Also I took some photographs. )

Thanks so much to everyone for the recommendations about nonsucky foods. I'm coping, but this is possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, willpower-wise. (Chocolatecoffeebeeronions!) I'm going to come out of this with so much frigging Character you won't even know me.

Oh, if you were disappointed by Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem (or if you weren't!), you should keep an eye on Starting Today: poems for the first 100 days, which does what it says on the package, with a different poet every day. It's really interesting to see how diverse they are. My favorites so far:

Praise for The Inaugural Poet, January, 2009, Cornelius Eady
Dear Mr. President, I Thought You Should Know, Rachel Zucker

Guys, can't it just be spring now? This could last forever, right??

My doctor is fantastically awesome; she listens and commiserates and doesn't brush me off and also wears super cute clothes.

UNFORTUNATELY, she has also just put me on the world's most horrific diet for the next two months, because I'm a delicate flower who often feels queasy. This means that I can't have: coffee [D:], alcohol [D:], chocolate [D: D: D:], ( the horrors continue )

Help: what are awesome things I can eat? I'm trying to put a brave face on this -- I can't eat a classic bland diet for two months without going insane, but surely there are options. Not having beans, onions or mustard available seriously cramps my style for meals, though, epecially since I don't eat much meat. Ideas? Ideas for food with actual flavor?

I'm most distraught over the chocolate thing (WHAT WILL I DO WHEN I'M SAD? OR IN ANY OTHER EMOTIONAL STATE?), but I guess I can bake things like pie and muffins and pumpkiny stuff and try to soldier on. (Eating nonchocolate desserts feels like getting told I have to marry Leah; she's fine, but I want to marry Rachel! And by Rachel, I mean a brownie!)

Ugh, anyway maybe it'll be an interesting challenge, right?

Here are the top 7 books I read in 2008, because that's how many I feel like listing. It is, of course, incredibly easy to not only remember what I read, but what I liked the most, because of Goodreads. Goodreads! You can keep track of what you want to read in the future, and get recommendations from your friends, and read what other booky people thought of stuff, and take geeky little quizzes, and save awesome quotes; it's social networking for book nerds! Why are you not using it?

In 2008 I gave myself permission not to try for 50bookchallenge, which I've been attempting since 2004 (& only actually accomplished in 2005), and done really badly on in recent years. Somehow I still made it to 40 books, despite hardly reading anything for the first couple of months of the year, and despite the bajillions of issues of Poetry, The New Yorker and the Dig I apparently needed to consume constantly.

01. China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh [novel]
THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. Recommended to me by bee_stung and throughadoor. It's my favorite kind of scifi (though speculative fiction might be a better term): fascinating, detailed explorations of everyday life against a really innovative backdrop. Set 200 years in the future, when China is the leading world power and the US has had a Chinese-led communist revolution, it takes place in New York, the Arctic Circle, China and Mars, with great, compelling characters and really clean writing that pulls you along. Lots of interesting stuff on race and queer issues. I could *not* put it down, and I've missed it ever since I finished.

02. Walking to Martha's Vineyard, Franz Wright [poetry]
This is a book about grace. It focuses on Franz Wright's newfound sobriety and conversion to Catholicism. It's my understanding that he got a lot of flack for the latter, since religion -- or earnestness about religion -- is an unpopular topic in modern American poetry. But he's unapologetic about it without ever being preachy, and the poems are careful and spare and intense. The senses of both hope and struggle are tangible.

I kept being astonished by how *not* overwritten these were. It definitely deserved the Pulitzer it won. I read every poem in here two or three times. I really highly recommend it. Here are some sample poems: Letter; The Only Animal; My Place.

03. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party, M.T. Anderson [novel]
This book is fantastic. Really wonderful writing and fascinating premise. I found it in the weirdest way: the author read a passage at a Marie Howe poetry reading I was at, and I was intrigued enough to go track it down -- and it ended up being a totally different story than I thought.

Set in Revolutionary Boston (and I don't even really like historical fiction), it's narrated primarily by a boy being raised in a household of philosophers and given a classical education as an experiment. There's more to it, but I won't give it away. And it's made up of a variety of documents -- mostly first person writings, but also letters, newspaper clippings, etc. (I just finished the sequel over the holidays. 600 pages! But really excellent, too. If anyone's interested in YA or scifi/fantasy, M.T. Anderson's also written about a future where the internet is implanted in everyone's brain, and slowly turning into a vampire.)

( This got long. The rest. )

[And here are all my 2008 books, from best to worst.]

Do any of you have a French press? I'm thinking of getting a little one for the office, since I'm trying not to spend a million dollars a month at coffee shops, and the work coffee sucks, and I really hate juggling a thermos on my whole commute. Are they worth it? Are they a huge hassle to clean? Will it let me be constantly so caffeinated that my coworker asks me if I'm on speed?

MUSICS: Oh No! Oh My! - Go To Work

And now is the time on Sprockets when we pretend this LJ is a music blog, so: a Tuesday music rec JUST FOR YOU, because perhaps you need something delightful in your day.

Noah Britton is like Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields crossed with the tv show The Library in the Kelly Link short story Magic for Beginners. This sounds ridiculous, but it's true¹. Here he is with his old band, The Best Thing Ever (bestthingever), playing a concert in a barbershop in Cleveland while getting a haircut. So weirdly fantastic and moving:

[Here is the original version of that song: Jackson C. Frank, Blues Run the Game.]

Here are some mp3s:

-- Noah Britton - Katie: if this song is like a bolt of lightning to your brain describing exactly how and what your mind obsesses over, then we are the same.
-- Noah Britton - Love of my Life: When I saw him perform at the old man bar near my house, he had the whole audience, which was sitting on the floor, sing the backup part and instead of being twee it was just awesome.

Playing Still Love You Anyway at a retirement home. This makes me want to cry:

Plus! Since he's not signed to a label or attached to just one project, there's fun stuff to find all over THE 'NET, and sadly, I honestly really enjoy a good internet scavenger hunt. Maybe you do too?



Upcoming shows in Philadelphia, Baltimore and NYC.

¹ On absurdity: (1) The Bathroom Tour, in which The Best Thing Ever played concerts in bathrooms around New England for 12 straight days. (Some videos and show locations.) (2) The Surprise Tour, in which The Best Thing Ever drove around the country playing unbooked shows at Amish picnics and comic book stores and sandwich shops. (3) The FUBU dress in the above picture, which he explained he bought on eBay. (4) Etc etc etc.

Friends, why is LiveJournal -- nay, the internet at large -- so quiet lately? I realize I have no leg to stand on personally, but I want things to read when I am supposd to be focusing on Productivity! Well, here is my contribution to the silence. I have all these epic half-written posts, most of which involve pictures and adventures (... for some very flexible interpretation of 'adventures'), and instead I'm going to give you a meme. So there?

( Francisco! That's fun to say. Francisco. )

I don't think I've ever tagged people for a meme! But I think this should be done by, ummm: _swallow, annakovsky, bee_stung, cheapmetaphor, diable, hetrez, imogenics, sailtonorway, onceuponatown and basically anyone awesome.


Guess how many people I have bought Christmas presents for. Spoiler alert: ZERO. Happy December? Aahhh! I want to make some presents this year, but.... I am super uncrafty. Maybe Amy Sedaris will come over and help.


* So _swallow, being awesome, sent me Matthew Dickman's new book, All-American Poem, and I keep getting little shivery moments of delight from it. He reminds me a lot of Jeffrey McDaniel and a little of Billy Collins and I'm pretty sure I can see some intentional Ginsberg emulation. So good! And if there's anything in the world more delightful than getting poetry in the mail, I haven't discovered it. Anyway, here are two of his for you to enjoy:

Grief: When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky.
Slow Dance: More than putting another man on the moon, / more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,

HAPPY DEMOCRACY DAY. If you're American, please go VOTE!

The 1988 presidential election is the first one I remember. I was six, and I used red and blue crayons to color in the map; I kept running down to the basement where my dad was working at his workbench, under a framed picture of JFK, to let him know which states had gone which way. It was the most exciting night ever, and I have basically not calmed down since.

This is the first election in my adult life, though, where I've ever felt like this about a candidate. I feel like I'm in an episode of The West Wing all the time; who signed Aaron Sorkin up to script everything Obama says, and all my hopes and dreams? I'm too keyed up to be eloquent, but I have wanted people to not be president before. I have never wanted someone to be president, or believed so firmly that they were the right choice. I've never seen people actually caring so much about an election or a candidate.

Last night I phonebanked for Obama, calling voters in Pennsylvania to let them know where their polling place was and help them get rides. You could tell they'd been getting a lot of calls, and were mostly politely fed up. One 20 year old guy answered the phone "Obama". Some people hung up. At the end of my list, after a lot of hangups and answering machines, I got a 78 year-old-woman named Marjorie, who told me how glad she was to hear from me, instead of all the McCain robocalls she had been getting. "Yes, I'm going to vote," she said, "and I'm going to vote for Obama, and if he doesn't win, well, I don't know what we'll do."

For a much, much more eloquen post about much, much more noteworthy volunteering, read imogenics awesome post on working in Nevada.

This morning the line at my polling place in Somerville was so long -- down the street and around the block and halfway up the next street. Normally there's no line at all. It took almost an hour to get through, but everyone was cheerful and patient, and the poll workers joked around with everyone. Two little girls in homemade Obama t-shirts were making up dances, and someone had brought big boxes of Munchkins which got passed up and down the line. The weather was gorgeous. I voted for my president.

Guys, throughadoor emailed this to me the other day and it damn near killed me. Two of the things I'm most passionate about in the universe (The National! Obama!) multiplied by AWESOME.


How about some mindless internet activity this afternoon? Via onceuponatown: Reply to this post, and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon.


My Hero of the Week: The girl who got a letter published in the paper saying this election day voters "must choose between what is right, and what is easy." Where have you heard that before? Oh, it was a little piece of advice from our dear friend Albus Dumbledore.


The subtitle of this post is Will I Ever Write An Entry Of Substance Again Well Apparently Not Today.

Guys, I threw a dinner party! I was worried I'd get myself in over my head, but everything turned out awesome! I own placemats now.

I made these Couscous and Feta-Stuffed Peppers (tho' I subbed out the couscous for quinoa, since one of the guests was gluten intolerant), and they completely transformed my relationship with feta. Also roasted sweet potatoes and roasted asparagus and a super-easy blueberry crisp. And it was so fun! I bought snapdragons for the table and we sat on the balcony and oh man I love summer.

**

So I've gotten wretchedly addicted to street fashion blogs in the past few years, and always been bummed out that there wasn't a Boston one -- but it turns out there is! Beyond Boston Chic. It's exciting all out of proportion to see pictures in places I go all the time.

**

I'm reading the best book: China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen McHugh. throughadoor lent it to me, after I read McHugh's awesome short story collection, Mothers and Other Monsters, which bee_stung turned me onto. It's my favorite kind of scifi, fascinating, detailed explorations of everyday life against a really innovative backdrop. Set 200 years in the future, after the US has had a Chinese-led communist revolution, it takes place in New York, the Arctic Circle, China, Mars, with great, compelling characters and really clean writing that pulls you along. There's a queer character, and lots of interesting stuff about race, too. I can't put it down. (cheapmetaphor, you have to read it, there's lots of Chinese! I was so jazzed I knew what guanxi and zĕnme shuō meant.)

**

I have put 22 miles on my bike in the first week! Um, which is totally unimpressive to someone legit, I know, but I'm having so much fun with it! I hauled everything home for the dinner party in the basket, and I've been to the river to ride around, and up to Davis for sushi and tomorrow I'm going to the library and it turns out wearing a skirt is no problem at all. Which is good since I basically renounce pants for the summer. It's slow though, which I knew, but is still a little embarrassing. And my lights already got stolen off it; in front of my house, in the middle of the day, blah. Oh well oh well.

Here it is getting its portrait taken. Next time I'm going to go with the background with lasers.

GUESS WHO JUST BOUGHT A BIKE!



So I've been talking about wanting a bike for, oh, a year now, with more purpose lately, and yesterday I decided to bite the bullet -- only to discover basically every single used bike shop on my side of the river was sold out. For the forseeable future. High gas prices & summer weather = bike mania, apparently. So I attacked craigslist, took an internet crash course in how not to be quite as bike-stupid, picked the brains of bikey people... and tonight bought a helmet, lights, and this sweet ride. Whirlwind!

It's an Electra Townie 3-speed, which is designed for errand running and general around town stuff, which is exactly what I want it for, and maybe some tooling around on the bike trails. It lets you sit upright, rather than bent forward, which is good for my bad old lady back! My only concern is that maybe it's not quite tall enough for me after all, but I think it'll be okay; it allegedly fits people over 6 feet, and I'm a few inches shorter than that, so. And it already has a basket!!

So, bicycley people -- any advice for noobs? I'm going to get a tune up at one of the bike shops, and I'm going to buy a mirror and a really good lock; what else? [edited to add: Oh, and bike shorts, so I can wear dresses! What? That's a valid bike accessory.] Also when will I look like this? [eta: That picture was on the front page of Flickr for years, and I've just now realized it's of Imogen Heap, from her own photostream. Weird!]

After I bought it, I rode it all the way home from Fenway to Somerville, even though there's about a billion percent humidity. I love getting back across the river to Cambridge, where I know all the back streets to take: big houses, yards full of lilacs, white flowering trees, dusk.

An epic poem about my weekend:

Drank some sangria,
Went to Ikea.

I think it's going to be a bestseller.

It's so hot out! Summer just showed up like a guy who bursts into the party already plastered, trying to hug everyone. I spent today helping the boyfriend assemble every Ikea product in the land and trying not to melt to death, and now I'm on my balcony where it's breezy and delicious and I kind of want to just sleep out here.

Here's that meme where someone gives you a letter and you upload five songs which start with it. fitofpique gave me Y! Shockingly, they all basically start with the same word. Holla if you want your own letter.

[+] You're A Wolf - Sea Wolf
[+] You! Me! Dancing! - Los Campesinos
[+] Your Rocky Spine - Great Lake Swimmers
[+] You're the Only One - Maria Mena
[+] You Or Your Memory - The Mountain Goats

And my current favorite for good measure:

[+] Bullets - Tunng

Because I am apparently incapable of making myself ever post again, goinglike_elsie gave me ( meme questions. )

You guys. It's spring. I'm basically deliriously happy all the time.



Right:

onger
etter
ater