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the best things, i’ve just realized, are done w/ your hands. typing, turning pages, twirling your hair, touching people — hmm, those all begin w/ “T”. a coincidence, i swear. the best foods are what’re eaten w/ your hands too: dry cereal, muffins, carrots … casual food, stuff you can lick off if necessary.

these are the conclusions an afternoon in front of a computer leads one to. 🙂 august is a slow month.

i’ve also been looking at kat’s quote page. it’s an astoundingly comprehensive list. another that i’ve always liked is melanie’s.

on the subject of quotes, one from last nite: “you only name things that are going to die” — liz. ponder that.

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this is the funniest thing i’ve seen today: discussion w/ a magic eight ball. his comment of yesterday was as controversial as that is amusing. he mentioned how he didn’t like women writers, which i would take offense to except that he declared web-friendly females exempt. okay, maybe i could take offense anyway, but i don’t know even know him and it’s not as if he’s read my poetry specifically and rolled his eyes. i asked what his problem is — is it that he can’t relate? that’s always what i assume it is. i feel like most people who say they don’t like a general thing, like women’s writing or scandinavian film or the internet (hi annie :-)), simply have problems identifying for one reason or another. often all they need is exposure to something that doesn’t fit their stereotype and their minds expand like so much baked dough.

yanni’s piano recital is tomorrow, not today. fine. liz leant me survivor by chuck palahniuk (sp?) and now that i’m done w/ tom jones, i have space in my bag for it.

there’s a meme for you: if you carry a bag around most of the time, what’s in it?

mine: a black cvs notebook and a mechanical pencil; a green 40-year-old’s wallet that once belonged ot my mother and a ballpoint pen; a soft-blue change purse, which was a gift from ari last year; survivor; my cellphone; two hair things; about 40,000 Trident wrappers; 40,000 movie ticket stubs; and 40,000 receipts. characteristic? you be the judge.

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i haven’t internetted from the downstairs computer in ages. it’s strange: very nostalgic. i had a number of early michael conversations here and emails w/ becca. anyway.

my father and i just returned from lunch at green papaya, a new vietnamese restaurant in bethesda. we played the word game on the paper covering the tablecloth and i won w/ 76 points. i can’t remember the last time i got 76. i beamed into my tofu.

tofu! yet another food i didn’t use to like.

after that, we got my mother, whose birthday it is, a cake (it is also miz parker’s — yet could there be two more different people in the world? i ask you.) it’s as beautiful a day as we get in d.c. in august and i’m just so goshdarn cheerful about it all. last nite, jamie tamar lana liz and i gathered at lana’s to drink tea, light candles, and sit in a circle, chatting. oh it was wonderful. why? who knows? sometimes the stars are just aligned.

speaking of celestial bodies, i heard yesterday that when i arrive in sweden, there will be only about eight hours of sunlight per day. the good news is that it will increase as i’m there. but the question remains whether i’ll be strong/stable enuf to deal w/ cold weather, no sunshine, and all that foreign-ness. … yuck.

whatever. i’ll talk to m. piker when i get back to skool. there’s no point worrying about it yet. i’m in too good a mood and i have to get to yanni’s to listen to him play piano.

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banana nut muffins. yet another food i only recently discovered i like. also, butter pecan yogurt which i tried when lana, my dad and i were doing our one day, full blast, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. automobile tour of n. carolina. our ostensible destination was this cute small town where my greatgrandfather once lived and ran a store. he chose well: of all the places we passed thru and stopped, that was the prettiest and seemed the most live-able. one corner boasted that it was the birthplace of pepsi-cola, which i don’t drink but do have stock in. (the stock market’s a funny thing. my mom’s father basically plays for the whole family: he buys us shares as well as himself. every once in a while, he’ll present me two hundred shares of some company i’ve never heard of [“sun microsystems? what do they do?”]. but he chooses well. except for the one time, like thirty years ago, when someone proposed that he buy jointly w/ them the land next to a bourgeoning theme park in orlando. “disneyworld?” he said. “ridiculous. that’ll never get off the ground.”)

uch — family fighting downstairs. in nine days i’ll be back at skool. ben laughed at me today for being nervous. yes, finally, after three (?) days of unsuccessful attempts to get in touch, he called on the cell phone as i was heading home from tamar’s. i missed the initial call but pulled onto a sidestreet, parked, called him back, and sat in the grass by my car for the next hour or so. attracted some strange stares and some run-of-the-mill honkings. it was worth it.

my roomiestonite liz and annie (who’re home, altho i haven’t been able to get in touch w/ them yet) are going w/ lana and me to see annie hall at the NIH film festival. i think tomorrow is willy wonka, which makes me think of (swat)becca. her time is winding down in hong kong — maybe she’s even done. she’s heading to the barn on the 27th; ross is getting back around then. gaaa, the future approaches. i should march to meet it, proudly and in anticipation of adventure! i hate exclamation points but the word “adventure!” seems to demand one.

oh, speaking of adventures, adam dad and i saw apocalypse now redux yesterday. for some reason, i liked it better than any time i’d seen it previously. i’m not sure why: i don’t think the additional footage contributed greatly to the narrative or to the viewer’s understanding of the film. the french plantation sequence was pretty awful. it might be that i’ve become acutely aware of how important sound is since a.i. aronofsky is a master (maestro?) at using sound to maximum effect — his work resonates partially b/c of its score — and a. now is similarly breathtaking.

my brother and my father of course had to fight on the way home about what the movie means. i’m not convinced that it means anything. war is crazy; people when pushed can do crazy things; sanity is subjective; paganism is tempting; wagner makes your heart leap up and applaud in your throat. what else? why am i/ are people so enthralled?

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once it was searching colleges; now cities. here’re what findyourspot.com says are the best places for me to live. the list favors connecticut, oregon, and, oddly enuf, maryland. interesting. some of these cities i’ve never even heard of.

present discussion w/ tamar: what does it mean to be a liberal intellectual? am i more liberal than she is? i used to dislike the word — i think mostly b/c my father did. certainly i aspire to be an intellectual; i don’t know if i qualify yet. to me it’s high praise. just liking books, music, arts stuff does not an intellectual make; nor does being able to mangle quotes.

(me) ishtar42: what is an intellectual anyway?

(tamar) tamari2: i don’t kow

tamari2: know rather

tamari2: someone who enjoys their intelligence, to the point where sporting it is one of their hobbies

ishtar42: but that sounds so pretentious

tamari2: not sporting then — exercising.

ishtar42: i still think that sounds pretentious.

*shrug* the discussion continues … meanwhile, more interesting dialogue over at rabi’s.

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ohhhhh wonderful wonderful computer … i could kiss you, i could, if you weren’t so primly unresponsive.

music: “mr. right now” from the nields. good to listen to stuff i don’t have on cd, just from now-defunct napster (you have to update? what the hell? i assume it’s part of the grand scheme to eventually deprive us of all our music. ah well. you were good while you had the opportunity to be, napster.)

i’m distracted. surely there are things to say, they’re just escaping me at present. ben and i have been playing phone tag since early yesterday, which was six-months-of-what day. that priceless phrase was coined by miss lana and it made me think. what an odd relationship it’s been: the first three months we were together, and then an equal amount of time we were across the country from each other. hands down, the separation was more difficult. do all bunnies find it so? since june, i have:

developed an antipathy to telephones;

visited CA for the first time;

missed someone — really missed them;

loved reciprocally;

and dealt w/ the opposite, an emotional vaccuum that scared me until i remembered the horror of prolonged wednesdays.

it’s been eye-opening. six months of what indeed.

beach was lovely. our good luck w/ the weather lasted, as did miss lana’s and my psychic connection. our emotions/desires continued to coincide: when we wanted to beach, we beached; when we wanted to porch, we porched (i got much excellent reading done: in america by sontag blew me away, and i’m three-quarters done w/ tom jones.) towards the end, family relations got a little strained and everyone’s patience w/ joanna was pretty much smoke and ashes. lana handled it all admirably, never once losing her cool, for which i’m grateful.

i’m so lucky to have this group of friends … i returned home to a letter from becca that made me say “aww” outloud and repeatedly. lana and i parted over sweet words. and i made a full list of other similar type occurrances but blogger just erased it all. luckily i had saved everything up to that last line so not too much disappeared. i don’t feel like going thru it again; suffice it to say, the gods are indulgent and i appreciate it.

i’m scared to return to swat. i’m always scared to leave wherever i am. damn i’m a wuss. it’ll be fine. of course it will.

as to net fellows: dacicle let me know i’m missed, and kat wrote heart-fluttery things about me on her site and in my book. i wonder what will change over the fall. not that there’s any point in wondering. all right: i wish then for this fall to be as interesting and enjoyable in unexpected ways as this summer was. is. it’s not over yet.

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i only have a few minutes — naturally, in a hurry, i’m drawing a blank. ilana and i are in the tiny rectangular room that serves as the library here. as far as i can tell, they have childrens books, a few magazines, and Grey’s anatomy. clearly, the essentials.

but they also have two computers which you can use for thirty minutes and i’m grateful. last nite i fell into a mild funk for the first time. when my mother asked me why, i said maybe i was in withdrawal. aside from that negligible dip and the spots of sunburn in rather uncomfortable places (one rarely thinks of putting lotion where one assumes the sun’s hands would be too respectful to roam) i’m having a wonderful time. if my intuition can be relied upon, ilana is as well. adam has four friends here who i think irk her by talking to me — but then, they know me, if only as the little sibling they’ve tormented in the past. mel and joanna are here as well. they’re family friends: mel is my dad’s age and joanna is adam’s. she and ilana are like polar opposites which at least one of them (guess which!) realizes. the craziness just keeps things interesting. the boys left to go fishing this morning. ilana and i decided to go driving. everyone so far has been doing their own thing and not getting in anyone else’s way.

there isn’t too much else to report. we’ve gotten a lot of sun, ingested a lot of salt water, hottubbed, eaten rugalach, missed our dearly beloveds from whom we’re removed, and watched movies. what else could you ask of a vacation?

last note: i dreamt last nite about my berkeley-bound boy. it was a dream-that-knew-it-was-a-dream: he came to visit at the beginning and hugged me goodbye at the end. but i nearly woke up in tears. (hi, bunny, if you’re reading this. i’ll give a call back at thouse.)

to the rest of you: adios, and i’ll see you soon. make sure you return in one piece.

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music: swinger’s soundtrack. would make me want to get up and dance, if only i knew how. alcohol is a great tutor but that’s more a party-at-skool thing than an at-home-at-midnite-wearing-pajamas-w/-a-little-black-bow thing. i have to be content to just type in sync w/ the beat.

oh man i’m going to miss blogging over the next week. i feel like i’ve spent half my waking hours online since i stopped working for martha. it’s addictive: creating, maintaining, promoting, searching, reading, commenting. *phew* but it’s rewarding. i always wanted a virtual community. a few years ago, i tried to get into the message boards at ew.com. it didn’t work so well b/c all they wanted to talk about over there was how hot leonardo dicaprio was. these were 40-ish housewives and i just couldn’t compete.

becca will remember this: i met a guy on the boards who i got really excited about. well, “met” is an exaggeration: researched and exchanged a few comments w/ would be more accurate. still we seemed so similar. that was a warning. i should have known that after that, it was only a matter of time til i actually got into a significant entanglement w/ an internet boy. remind me to tell that story at some point … (or hey, michael, if you’re reading this, feel free to tell the story from yr p.o.v.) here’s a taste. there’s much more to it than that.

anyway, for the loyal 5 of you for whom the loss of notebook for a week is tragedy just short of bush-presidency proportions, here is a list of links to occupy you in the interim. these are sites i’ve come across recently that i found interesting, engaging, entertaining, or worthy of a glance:

of course there are also all the links to the left.

so if i don’t get to talk to all of y’all while i’m in n. carolina, enjoy yr week. feel free to sign the book, email, comment. let me know i’m missed.

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what fresh hell is this? — dorothy parker. absolutely right, reggie, thanks. i can’t believe i forgot that.

my house is an absolute mess right now. electrical failures (downstairs computer, fax machine) compounded by leaving-tomorrow stress, constant phone calls, blown tires (poor becca), dinner preparations, dog vomit, torrential rain; all soothed of course by chai. well, for me, anyway.

what is it w/ august?me hugging copenhagen

oh, and this is a riot: dacicle linked to me, which is flattering, and declared me a boy, which is less so. to clear up all confusion: ester = female (altho not according to the spark). look, i swear: here i am: