I'm up among the stars. I'm in a super time machine...

I'm up among the stars. I'm in a super time machine...

[

And

]

I have no more home internet.	[Nov. 18th, 2009\|10:07 pm]
It's a bit lonely.
link	16 shots in the dark.\|Shoot.

I believe in Dinotopia's helix model of time.	[Nov. 11th, 2009\|04:32 pm]
I feel increasingly like I did in my late teens or early twenties. I walk down corridors, head cocked, trying to place the sounds of green chirping and the inescapable feeling of perpetually indigo, star-speckled sky. Every ostensibly mundane conversation trembles, alive, in my ears — as if my future still lay ahead of me and as if there were a hopeful urgency to the resolution of these work-related minutiae. Sometimes, as I'm lying in bed at the hotel, pretending to myself that I want to fall asleep, a song will come onto my iPod that plays with the stereo in such a way that I feel as if I'm spinning. Not like the German "du spinnst" but an actual inner ear response to off-kilter pinging — like my brain is trying to reconcile the blips into a pattern that make spatial sense and decides, based on what it hears, that I am actually in motion. On the drive home today, the A395 curved into the Georgia 316, and suddenly I wasn't driving into gray mass of cloud after gray mass of cloud: I was on my way to or from a clandestine basement meeting in breaking dawn; I was trying to decide between the comfortable and the electric; I was pushing the buttons, 1 to 6, on my car radio — even though they correspond to radio stations and the car I used to drive (with a 6 CD changer) has probably long forgotten its ex-mother. The hedges grew into Georgia pitch pines, and I kept my eyes peeled for cops who drive different cop cars from the ones my mind still fears, preserved forever in late '90s episodes of COPS that I never watched but absorbed regardless, the way I STILL haven't ever seen a full episode of Seinfeld but know its nooks anyway. I couldn't speed all that much, because I was stuck behind farming implements and other desperately mind-wandering commuters; at least this much isn't a hallucination. The layers are blending frighteningly into one another. Past loves and regrets smoosh together in my mind in a muddy but strident mess, distracting me from work and, in mind-sampled clips of music and voices of friends, asking me what the hell I'm doing. It feels great. My colleagues all ask me why I'm in such a good mood all the time. This morning, I answered the phone, and the man on the other line paused before saying, "You sound very cheerful!" I am, dude. I AM cheerful. The rain is abysmal, I'm floundering in very specific ways, and it feels, well, great. There's a reason kids love going down slides more than climbing up them. Sliding is fun. My life is fun. An overactive imagination is fun. Losing my grip is fun. There's a hole in the wall of the house we're about to leave. It's not a restaurant or a cash machine or anything that gives you food or money in any form; it's an actual hole in the wall. It looks intentional; it probably drains something (don't know what). Sometimes (a lie: today. only today) I get suspicious that this hole is leaking my brain to the cold gravel — that my thoughts are decompressed, spiralling free into space, and that if that hole were not in the wall, maybe my thoughts would realign, like the "block" button on Microsoft Word — those perfectly unbroken, parallel lines.
link	2 shots in the dark.\|Shoot.

I'm not ready for November.

[Nov. 10th, 2009|12:00 am]

[

music

we get ever so hot / whether we like it or not

]

I know it's a bit late to realize this (or to make my feelings known on the matter), but I really sometimes despise November. November always feels later and deeper in the winter than December, in the way 11pm always feels later than ten to midnight. This year November's coldness is even more pronounced, as we're moving at the end of the month to a house that we can actually heat. I may be experiencing the last, coldest month of my existence — but I've probably just now jinxed myself, and I will at some point at my life now have to live without heating in a place even colder than the UK.

December, when you work in a hotel, is absolutely unmatched for mania and stress. But November has a subtle, throbbing undercurrent of stress as well: it's the stress of foreboding — of uncertainty and high expectations for maximum productivity in a somewhat quiet period. Every mistake will be noticed. Every end unresolved will either unravel now or in a horrific spiral in the throes of merriment, so the pressure's on to iron any metaphorical wrinkles out Before There's No More Time.

Something hard to define (no, I lie) about the British weather means that every winter has me craving the American Southeast. Okay, fine, we once had an ice storm in Atlanta, which has so severe that the schools closed and my sister drove me shopping instead. It did also snow a few times, and other times it was supposed to snow, so we had no school on a day that proved perfectly crisp, dry, and snowless.

I know part of it is our current house and financial situation. If you're living in a place so poorly insulated that the inside feels exactly like the outside within 4 hours of turning off the heating, there's just no point. This means a day off feels physically more taxing than a day spent running around at work.

A strange paradox: the more I like my coworkers, the more I also miss my American friends. I suppose when I'm feeling completely isolated, it's easy to extend that isolation into other realms of my mind; when the floodgates of social interaction open, it's hard to continue to convince myself that I'm an introvert.

And I didn't win that £45 million, either.

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