good noon in the cold cold kitchen. merry proper christmas i guess. funny to be on this sunny side of the country. looks to be a delayed meetup with the fam after a delayed aeroport delayed their aeroplane. so i am awaiting their arrival with computer and coffee and jerry garcia. apparently i am being infiltrated with hippie. though i am much too brow furrowing and sarcastic to make the full transition. i hope. i guess. mister dad was commenting on the unrelenting sarcasm of all his children despite the two different mums involved. perhaps it is genetic? though i suspect most young folk in their prolonged pomo american adolescence with some medium intelligence develop a well honed sarcasm to deal with the fine and fancy ironies absurdities ambiguities. yes? and then given twenty thirty or forty (i wish it were spelled fourty) more years of fruitless turmoil (or maybe a fairly rotten fruit engaged in gradual mushing, inward collapse, etc)...then...well then you remember how fun it has been to do the little dance and feel the hot sun on a cold cold day (remembering mrs. dalloway and all those references to shakespeare, right? fear no more the heat of the sun too much college rigmarole) and after all those years of multileveled self absorption can say (admit?) all your little happinesses connections and bumpy textured times with impunity (which i just looked up on m-w.com to see if i was using it correctly).

tra la la.

so apparently all this worry, waiting, christmas carols coming out the 'cross the street catholic church have combined to make me pensive in my olden days way. perhaps also the coffee. and the birite toffee chip pecan cookie to die for (oh darling!) which i stole from the bag intended for my sister.

so one wonders. me. in fact. i wonder. to what extent does one want to think. this pensiveness. also inspired by winter break. long needed pause no doubt. my job sapped me of my energy, mentally and physically. and i gave the rest of the time to pottery, grocery stores, remembering to buy and eat food. also worrying about my body. playing with the roommates occasionally. i have had so little processed material out of which to form sentences. and so. now. babble babble babble. maybe useful. definitely interesting to note the strange way my bodily energies redistribute depending on my level of activity.

well the words are petering out. i feel like i have been sitting too long with my head tilted toward and computer screen. and stretch or two or a reclining posture before the telephone rings. yes?

so. ok. one more thing. the happy holidays. i have to admit that soft pleasure so apparent amidst the public folk. on the public bus (the word for which in mandarin is my favorite: gong1 gong2 qi3 che1). and all that. though i think it may be the collective relief of vacation. our great combined exhale. we warm each other with our hot condensing breath. or perhaps the nearby full moon. or the unconscious biological recognition that the days finally grow longer again. or the absurd amounts of sugary food. or something.

thus completed blog entry.

ahoy.

sooo...this is christmas. somehow a long long unproductive day just passed. capped with a visit to the dad's pad and fam this evening. though he left me with visions of steroid shots and scary endoscopic hoo ha. neverending foot drop. prolonged disability. all sorts of worry. vague wishes that christianity held some solace or distraction for me. that this fine commercial holiday might have a glorious sacred undertone to help me feel better about the body situation.

i admit, though, i am something of a sucker for christmas. or maybe it is the shopping. the only time of year i can spend money on silly things for the folk without feeling fairly guilty about it. though i am a bastard that somehow ends up with little presents for myself along the way. tsk tsk. so the family flies in tomorrow late morning. our nearly traditional dim sum to follow. i wrapped presents in brown craft paper and tied ribbons of that funny stringy red plasticky discount store stuff. i like wrapping presents. though it is blastedly wasteful. more tsk tsk.

ok ok. i am dozing off. she is tired, yes? rather pensive. so i may be a bit redundant--but i can't fucking believe i did such a good job of breaking my body. and it is absurd how tired i seem to get from this lengthy day of not so much activity. wrapping gifts, drinking coffee, visiting the fair hippie grocery store followed by the teeny yuppie grocery store. silly unnaturally moving body. my slapping gait. now the right side of my back whispering little achies to complain about its overuse. moving slowly carefully fearfully. waaa. i do not like it not at all. i want to dance on my toe tips and walk very very fast. whirl and wahoo and all that. so. ok. the time will some. must stop complaining. right. now.

well, darling, dazzle me. ha ha. it's a sort of artificial pleasure to decide to post on a long ago created long left blank blog as if i had just created it. (pretend) unencumbered by past blethering. the most recent of which had fallen short of what i would like to imagine i can write. write better. betterly. buttery. so. here is the special feeling of filling a previously blank screen. of course. absurdly so. i am procrastinating from things i don't actually have to do. which is fairly ironic. but my room is a mess in large part due to me not wanting to repeatedly bend over to pick things up. apparently i need the little claw grabber dealies that orange vested trash picker uppers use (or that the autistic children are supposed to use. though i am sure that my one eared russian boy's motor skills might not measure up judging from how he grips his kiddie scissors).

too much mental and physical space occupied by the strange numb leg. suspicions state i have a bulging or herniated disc between L5 and S1. proudly, i diagnosed myself via obsessive searches of the internet. and was told the things i already knew when i popped into my primary care physician's office. much dismay from the unpleasant feeling of straddling the space between worker's compensation and insurance, with little opportunity to make choices or voice concerns. arrgh. though despite all of my apparently incorrect reassurances to myself that i would never develop disc trouble at such a young age (why discs don't turn against you until you get to your thirties, i thought), i do stand by my age as indicator of speedy recovery. ho ho ho. i hope.

i am playing the pizza tapes for my soil-less plants that my roommate tells me i fondle too much. feeling fairly weary, more from inactivity than genuine fatigue. never a terribly good feeling. but i am being self-indulgent for the moment, for the sake of healing (in theory).

last week we had a little roommate holiday dinner which was quite charming except when i burst into tears right at the start. i also burst into tears in the airport waiting in the security line prior to planing to newark. and again on the phone with my mother waiting for the njtransit into the city. some fatal combination of pain, worry, fatigue (pain kept me up the previous two nights) and hormonal beeswax (yes, i did get my period the next day). interestingly, roomie told me that she, too, was bursting with tears that weekend directly before her cycle arrived. how uncanny. perhaps additional factors--the holiday season, the paucity of daylight--turned us into weepy ninnies.

but yes indeed, the holiday dinner. i must admit that i do have some semblance of a sense of living in this city after a year and a smidge. i daresay i have a friend or two. and even felt not entirely uncomfortable drinking beers with the coworkers in celebration of winter break. and a little special twinge at having found us a potential apartment situation through running into an acquaintance at el metate--though the last time i spoke to the fellow, it made me fear that our acceptance there may be doomed. though i was in a most rickety tired slow moving state.

nevertheless...the semblance of a sense potentially negated within 48 hours of being alone. the roommates are gone. as is customary, time makes those in closest proximity the closest friends. convenient and lucky. but to be by myself (well, it is fabulous to spread out, yes yes, all empty rooms, i do quite like it) is a searing reminder of how i too much depend on the mates for my dips in the social scene. my other dips being quite pointedly bent on dancing in fast paced circles that shake off the little beginnings of potential (potentially mind numbing hard to escape) social interactions.

though i will note the amusing last night with my ol pal in new york where we were accidentally on purpose drawn into sitting with four guys who were visiting each other a year after graduating from yale--prompting obligatory mockery of me and my harvard education, which i couldn't really muster up the school spirit to defend. likely resulting in gratuitous eye rolling. my favorite thing was how they slapped these shots of tequila in front of us (left over because the freshmen in college with whom they were previously chatting had to leave) as we were practicing our coy looks to the side which were to one day replace the overused eye roll (surely the source of all our feminine boyless woes--or so says the expert schmoozer pal of pal). needless to say, we did not perfect the coy look to the side, but i did have an investment banker relentlessly trying to convince me to go downstairs and hook up with him while he would grab my hand and i would pull it away. and i explained to him that he needs to set his sights on girls who wear more eye makeup and have more open body language, not me, hair in bun (a new hair habit derived from putting up my hair every day for a week and a half to keep this tiny boy from pulling it with his exceedingly string grip), all zipper sweatshirted up. i also had him practice his coy look to the side (very poor skills) and his eye rolling (marginally better) by following my finger. i had a difficult conversation about autism with this architecture school son of psych professors. which would have been fine in a surrounding not so exceedingly loud and with an alternate me of maybe a week and a half earlier when i was less injured and just starting to work with the cute tiny boy who likes to jump, do backward rolls, and stare into your eyes. but in any case, it was most curious to have been roped into the exceeding normalcy of boys trying to pick up girls in a bar and to be the subject of their funny efforts, despite all my skeptical awkwardness at their efforts (which i imagine was far too apparent on my face). along with the sort of mysterious wonder at whether this was what the ivy league pick up scene would have been like had i chosen to take part in it. though i worry over my fate as a pair bonder, as i am much disheartened by all the insincerity and general creepiness of boys and girls. but vaguely envious of those equipped with the self-confidence and specialized capacity for insincerity (and maybe a better tolerance for alcohol) that facilitates boy meeting. ah well. i have many years for these things...in theory.