Tangents

[The subject line's from Prince's "Alphabet City," which also has "Put the right letters together and make a bettеr day"...]

Look, even Spanish Duolingo's nudging me to find my pobiz (or at least po-blog) groove again:



My big brother and bro-in-law participated in #LexPoMo last month. You can see their pieces at these links:

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/eric-willis-lexpomo-2022/
(I especially love the start of TWW #2)

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/steve-meadows-2022/
("Summer Job Resume" FTW)


Tabula Rasa's publishing three of my poems soon-ish.

Going to write and read tonight after I get through garden chores and service prep (and probably some jamming with Monteverdi and Josquin). On my table: Joelle Taylor's C+nto & Othered Poems and Andrea Gibson's Take Me With You This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181711.html.

Over the past 2+ years, the wires in some of my masks broke outright, from all the fiddling, washing, etc. I'd held off extracting the ones that had become uncomfortable but were still intact, but two days ago finally reached for the ripper. (Is this perhaps a metaphor for other things I should be getting on with? Yes. Might I have a tendency to view my life through a Free Will Astrology filter? Yes.)



Contending with the ever-swarming legions of private brain weasels and public sphere / pundit weasels has been tiresome, to say the least. But there have also been compliments from colleagues and clients, lively chats with friends, and some sublime dancing:





In the yard, the hyacinths are waning, and the overcup white oak looks dead as the proverbial doornail (but apparently it's a really late bloomer), but there are swathes of violets and patches of star of bethlehem, and I have been harvesting wild chives and snacking on fresh mint. Also in bloom: buttercups, ferns (tiny purple flowerets), tomatoes. The six rosebushes all survived the winter, and I planted two white azalea bushes (a farewell gift from a museum colleague) last week. Indoors, the flower show includes cacti, white roses, shamrocks, and cyclamen.

Last night's cooking experiment wound up as phyllo-almond-walnut "cake." It started out as an attempt at Tunisian almond cigars but the phyllo sheets had been languishing in my fridge too long. So the stale bits went into the compost bowl, and the rest were layered with the filling, and I'm happy with the result.

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/181126.html.

*looks around*
God, what an unholy mess.
*redacts rest of commentary*

The subject line's from "Monday," by The Regrettes. An upside to having a dental appointment this morning was catching mid-morning tunes at WNXP, ranging from ELO's "Showdown" and Prince doing "When You Were Mine" to Rex Orange County's "Keep It Up" and some bangers not on the playlist.

Recent reading included the 2021 Rattle Young Poets Anthology. I particularly liked Natalia Chepel's "Semantics," and her bio.

A friend sent me Alexander McCall Smith's What W.H. Auden Can Do for You a few eons ago, and this passage stood out to me a few weeks ago:

I find Auden's life absorbing because it is very unlike the life of those poets who appear to have done nothing but frequent academia. How can one write convincingly of life if one has seen only so small a slice of it? Hemingway asked that question and went off to preclude its application to him by hunting and deep-sea fishing, all fueled by copious quantities of whisky. Auden spoke in his earlier poems of the truly strong man but well understood that one did not become truly strong by doing the sort of things recommended by Hemingway. Rather, he traveled; first to Berlin, where he spent a great deal of time catching up on sexual opportunities harder to encounter in the more prudish climate of England. Berlin was all about sexual freedom, but it was also about politicization, and by the time he returned to England, his previously proclaimed views on the separation of poetry and politics had changed. Then there was the trip to Iceland he did with Louis MacNeice, the trip to Spain during the Civil War, and the journey to China to investigate the conflict with Japan. These were not the actions of a man who intended to live his life in a literary ivory tower; these were the actions of a man who was struggling with a central moral question that most of us face: to what extent should we seek private peace or follow public duty? The world is a vale of tears and always has been. We may withdraw from it and cultivate a private garden of civility and the arts--a temptation that is often strong; or we may face up to uncomfortable realities and work to bring about justice in society. Auden's life and example illustrates the struggle between these two options; significantly, it offers comfort for us whichever way our choice may lead us.

---

Another thing I liked about this morning's outing was being behind a car with a microscope decal and the plate "GUTGIRL." This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/180481.html.

Tu b'shevat arrives tomorrow, and Middle Tennessee is supposed to get whumped by snow by then. Coincidentally, a crepe myrtle the Beautiful Young Man had ordered at the start of November was delivered this week, so he's planting it as I type.



The miniature rose bush I bought at the supermarket a year ago put out some glorious blooms. They were also havens for dozens of tiny bugs, though, so I chucked them into compost sooner than later. The Christmas cacti also put on a good show throughout December.

I'm going to chop up a fir wreath for mulch after I post this. I usually deal with it the day after Epiphany, but I'm still ill (!@#@!#@ lungs), though I'm managing a walk across the neighborhood most evenings. Many of my neighbors still have Christmas/fairy lights up, and I'm enjoying them as I stride through the gloom. There's also a new-to-me greenhouse in one of the alleys I tend to cut through, that may or may not be a commercial venture.

There's sorrow: relationships foundering, people dying. There's hilarity: recent reading has included K.J. Charles's Band Sinister ("You've been waiting your whole life for someone to write a Gothic novel about you, haven't you?"), Flight of Magpies, and A Gentleman's Position ("If you're obliged to cross a man at all, nail him to one while you're at it"), and I may confine my Instagram posts this winter to #CatsInPictureBooks. There's the annual gorgeous Lunar New Year card from a cousin in Kaohsiung. There are the tomatoes I canned and froze over the past two summers that I've been using now in soups and sauces. There's being terrified for the future of my city (those FUCKERS in the legislature . . .) and country and doing what I can anyway. There's pushing through paperwork and code, and trying to keep the pitcher plants alive, and adding smatterings of sparkle and substance to ongoing conversations when I can, and holding my peace and keeping my own counsel plenty of other times, and all this adds up to life being a lot even though the coughing + Omicron means I've been sidelined from singing since November, and I haven't seen anyone socially since December 18. (I do like plenty of time alone, but I object to my style being cramped. Grrrr.)

But! Neighbors brought by smoked cream cheese and Texas caviar, and friends sent galaxies and other goodies, and I made ginger tea with homegrown ginger root earlier this week and fixed a keyboard lag issue this morning. On to weeding and wreaths and mailings and daube marseillaise. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/180203.html.

First, the Norwegians, via KJ Charles and PinkNews UK:



Second: holiday greetings! If you would like to receive one in the mail from me, please put your address in a comment or email mechaieh[at]gmail[dot]com. Comments are screened., if I've managed to tweak that setting correctly for this post, which is not a given these days. [/pandemic brain]

Note: If we more or less regularly exchange mail, you're already on the list, but I'm sure some of the cards I sent last year are still taking the scenic route around Juneau or Cheboygan, so if you want to ensure that something at least gets put in the mail on my end, please send me your details. If you have preferences re shiny vs.-and-or Christmas vs. Lunar New Year vs. general rambling sometime in 2022, feel free to indicate those as well.

(Regarding KJ Charles: as detailed over in the fandom journal, I became entranced with her England series during August, resulting in 16,000+ words of fic so far, as well as inordinate quantities of Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst being played on the sunroom speakers.)

[Edited 11.28.21 to fix parens and reduce wittering.] This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/179482.html.

I learned a few minutes ago that my friend Frank Stern passed away in early September.

On the one hand, he was 92. So intellectually I knew full well that I might not see him again (which, of course, is true of anyone at any age). But he was a very alert and comparatively spry nonagenarian -- I was waltzing with him at New London Assembly during the summer of 2019, and chatting with him via Zoom the past two years -- so I was very much looking forward to seeing him at New London 2022. In one of our later email exchanges, he was talking about still sorting his father's papers, which included jokes in German. We never got around to talking about his career in physics . . .

So, yeah, feeling bereft. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/178988.html.

But, my lord, it's such a beautiful world: the hollyhocks and roses and azalea and balloon flowers are still blooming, and there's this to listen to as I slice, tug, and grind:

This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/178684.html.

Just ate the last Easter gumdrop on Rosh Hashanah. That's how things are rolling around here at the moment. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/178090.html.

A few days ago, a colleague called me a rock star, which feels especially good right now both because I've been enjoying Anna Zabo's Twisted Wishes romance trilogy (pansexuality, aromaticism, bondage, trans hero, mouthy performers, snarky PR manager, art, music, pie, very good coffee, and more [*]) and because there are miles of learning curve to scale at the job. Very appealing vistas; trying to pace myself accordingly -- hence romance novels instead of Big Data slides on this day of rest, with some champagne from an event I emceed last month, and artichoke-anchovy carciuga left over from an impromptu dinner I hosted a week ago.

[* The author has some free short stories on their site. I just giggled my way through the one about the rival neurobiologists.]

The friends who came over had suggested going out, but I didn't have a good feeling about that, both because of Delta and because Saturday nights in Nashville tend to bring too many hipsters, bachelorettes, and other species of extroverts into not enough square feet for my preferred level of cope. Turned out to be a brilliant call on my part -- traffic around my neighborhood was hosed for hours, what with 70,000 people attempting to see Garth Brooks at Nissan Stadium and the thunderstorms that forced the organizers to eventually call the night off. More important, I had everything I needed at home to improvise a nice pescatarian meal -- marcona almonds and Indonesian spiced cashews, fish ball soup, tomato salad, mushroom-carrot bao, and eggplant stir-fried with tofu. I didn't have time to make the ginger marshmallow fluff I'd hoped to offer with cinnamon graham crackers and chocolate (aka fancy s'mores), but that was for the best, since our lovely guests brought with them two kinds of ice cream mochi, along with seaweed salad, cocktail fixings, a sheaf of homegrown lavender, and three heads of garlic, also from their garden. I seriously like being an adult.

Of course, being an adult also means calculating which platters to keep spinning and which to let crash amid competing demands and recurring waves of disappointment, rage, and frustration. I think I'm getting a mite better at recognizing (lack of) capacity -- it hasn't stopped me from going, Oooh! The dragon dance team is recruiting! Ooooh! Little Debbie sculpture contest! Oooh! Toaster oven in a freebie pile! but sleep is winning out over FOMO more often these days. As some of you know, I signed a contract in January 2020 to perform in a professional immersive theater production that would have taken place in June 2020. Things got as far as a photo shoot, but when the venue published its 2021-22 schedule earlier this summer, the show was no longer listed, and while that isn't in any way a surprise, nor would I want or expect the artistic or logistical teams to have decided otherwise, it had been a thrill to be chosen, and something with a lot of potential, both creatively and socially, so yeah, I've been in a bit of mourning over that.

And, although I do better on my own more than many, I've lost ground over the past sixteen months from not singing regularly with others and not hitting the Y every day and it's going to take time to rebuild my voice and get back into form. My current Ailey class pass is about to run out, and it's just as well, because I do not have the focus right now for Zoom Zumba or any other online sweat session. Paddleboarding's on hold until later this month, because I pulled a back muscle last week and because traffic will be impossible this weekend and next. (Ironically, I received invites from two newer friends to go paddling within the past two weeks.) It's fine, but I'm massively annoyed about having let things fall out of shape, but also cutting myself slack, because look, we're dealing with coups and viruses and literal crowds of white supremacist fascist knucklehead grifters, and even Energizer-bunny rockstar me is going to have patches of "fuck off, I need ten naps and a pint of stracciatella before I can deal with any more of y'all."

I have been cracking half-baked Oz jokes for the past month, in part because that's the name of the venue I would have been performing at, and also because my zip code is in the Emerald City "LifeMode Group" of a recent study. The description isn't wrong. (h/t NashToday)

Anyhow, it's time to figure out where I put the library books that are due in six days, sort through yesterday's tomatoes, and get going on today's Spanish homework + freelance pages. Many of my friends were at English Country Dance Week up in Pinewoods (Massachusetts) the past seven days, and as with so many other things right now, I'm a muddle of envy and nostalgia and thank-god-I'm-not-there when I think about them allemande-ing and waltzing without me. (Pinewoods changed my life, for the better -- I'll write more about that some other time -- but I wouldn't be there even in a normal year, because I am unapologetically a housecat and there are dance/music vacations that don't involve outhouses and ticks and camper chores. Just sayin.') And I'd like to be better at playing tunes from Barnes by the time I fully rejoin the ECD universe. Speaking of more things to work on. After today's nap.) This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/177646.html.

We have reached the stretch of summer where I ask myself daily, "Is this really red enough? Is this the right saturation of golden orangey yellow?" because there are tomatoes ripe enough to harvest every morning and evening, and the urge to leave them on the vine to become even sweeter is checked by the insolence and rapaciousness of the local squirrels. In a month or so I will be asking the same question about the Christmas peppers, although the rodents tend to leave those alone.

I planted two knobs of ginger yesterday, and transplanted some sweet cherry pepper seedlings this evening.

At the start of April, a meme floated into my Twitter feed . . .

FIND YOUR WW2 OPERATION NAME!

1) Take your mental or emotional state
2) Add the last food you enjoyed

I'm in charge of Operation Muted Bacon

— John Bull (@garius) April 2, 2021

. . . and the reaction to my result was pretty much, "You don't say":

Operation Tenacious Prosecco is wholly on brand, I daresay. https://t.co/4pJfy7yxTC

— Peg Duthie (she/her/hers) (@Zirconium) April 2, 2021

A recurring Thing this past week has been working through misbehaving connections. On Saturday, it took me a while to realize my board wasn't inflating quickly enough because a tube was loose. I finally got water to come out of a garden hose by shifting the dial at the tip, after flipping other levers and twisting various joins. (It's still leaking more than I would like, but I'll sort that out some other week.) There's been coaxing various devices to working in tandem, including my ancient inkjet printer with my barely-out-of-the box portátil for work. There are acres of bureaucracy on multiple fronts. Fortunately, there being dozens of irons to tend to, one can heave a sigh and bustle on to the next fire.

... and, Flickr is for some reason timing out on the images from JERUSALEM, SHINING STILL I'd planned to share with you. So that will be something for a later time as well. This entry was originally posted at https://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/176956.html.