Tangents

#joyfuljan

Something I have been giving thanks for recently: living long enough to enjoy the company of people who share my interests, and to see some of those interests catch hold in larger circles and even get their fifteen minutes (and then some).

The John Laurens biography is a gift from around 15 years ago, from a friend I met back when our journals were on Diaryland. I first heard of Laurens during the 1984 miniseries on George Washington, and developed such a crush on the combination of his idealism + tragic fate (or, to be precise, Barry-Bostwick-as-Washington's reaction to it) + the actor portraying him (Kevin Conroy, since known mainly as the voice of Batman) that I ended up combing through all the Washington bios in the high school and local university library for any mention of Laurens, writing two papers on him and drafting a third ("Alexander Hamilton's Best Friend") in my 30s.

So it was a hoot for me to check in on Jen Talley's timeline yesterday, where she was live-tweeting about Hamilbrarians rapping (#alamw4ham #Lib4Ham #alamw16)...

Nothing quite like a roomful of librarians singing at the top of their lungs "When you knock me down I get the F*#% BACK UP AGAIN!" #lib4ham

— Jessica Storrs (@wanderingjess) January 9, 2016

...which is icing on top of my Hamilton-Laurens stocking stuffer having 1066 hits as of today.

If I'm remembering right, I "met" Jen through a Sayers mailing list and then stayed connected through Diaryland and now Twitter. I met dichroic through the same Sayers list, and this year she answered my yearning for the baby Loch Ness monster ladle in the photo above. A friend I met through Snupin fandom sent the sleeping dragon cake pan.

I mentioned both the ladle and the pan yesterday night at a party, having been greeted by the substantial Nessie sculpture in the host's front yard. During the course of the evening, the conversations also included Cthulhu, Doris Salcedo, earring backs, film processing, Stephen King, parks, bruxism, real estate, the High Museum, imaging tech, karaoke at the American Legion, cold water flats in Africa, and trying to finish art/craft projects begun mumble-mumble years ago.

And also cancer and health: one of the guests was a man younger than me with a newly installed replacement hip -- one of many surgeries resulting from cancer + treatment. He emphasized how glad he was to still be here. Another guest was a librarian who, as she put it, will be living with myeloma for the rest of her life. The day before, a friend from high school e-mailed me about a classmate who has just begun treatment for leukemia.

Which all ties back to feeling so immensely grateful that I am here, and you are here, and we together get to giggle and admire and obsess and shout out these things to each other and (if/when we choose) to those in the wider world longing for the spark and sizzle and solace of shared interests, and the things we make and send in celebration.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/399830.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Two days ago, I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. I had copyediting and lettering targets I'd planned to meet, but I also had a headache, and I haven't gotten past the "eek!" part of the current calligraphy thing, so scrubbing the tub and sanitizing pots and making a new batch of basil toner seemed way, way easier than putting pencil to paper.

Yesterday, I started copyediting after breakfast and worked flat through lunchtime (which almost never happens, because I loooooooove food and get very, very cranky when I'm running on fumes) and didn't stop until 2:45 pm, when I yelped, "Eek!" and rushed out the door to meet my hiking partner. (There are times when I curse pre-scheduled exercise because it disrupts my grooves, but we saw two fawns at the lake, and the ridge that always kicks my ass does seem to be getting slightly easier to climb.)

I worry about losing touch with people. I worry about people dying before I make time to bake the pie and find my crocheting to take over for a long catch-up chat. I worry about not getting around to planting the seeds I bought this year, or the ones I've put in the "plant later" tray because it's already too hot. I worry about the energy evaporating from the sketches of poems I don't have time to amplify or revise right now. I worry that when I finally throw out the bags of tomato seeds my mother tried to preserve -- I tested a few this spring, and nothing came up -- I'll wish I had them on hand a week later when the poem about Rorschach seed patterns on scraps of Bounty finally gels (I could take pictures -- I will take pictures -- but they aren't going to retain the layers or up-closeness of the actual thing. I could keep just one. I could work on the dang poem after all if I'm gonna think aloud about it this much).

I fret about how everything, but everything, expands into a million marigold petals when I touch it. I want to scrape at the scale on my bathroom faucet with a toothpick, and to paint my living room myself, and to redo every inch of my yard. I plan to find the pillow for the cover that's been made out of my wedding dress, and the upholsterer I'd hoped to ask about recovering my dining room chairs has gone out of business. I resent work for taking time away from studying. I am breathless whenever I spend an hour studying, awed at how much more there will always be to learn. I get deep into a manuscript and it reminds me of how much I actually already know, just from the years I've put in and how they've developed that editorial "sixth sense" that tells me when a name is probably misspelled or that something on page 38 isn't in sync with what the author says on page 83, as well as being hyper-conscious of all the little cues and nuances that separate a professionally designed book from a document assembled by an amateur. (Nothing against amateur efforts, mind--as long as the professionals are getting their due.) I miss learning new music, but not enough to rejoin my old ensembles or start the trio I sometimes dream about pulling together.

I am delighted by Cathy Yardley's review of my book. I'm singing along with madrigals in the car to de-rust my voice (I'm leading hymns at the early service this Sunday). I found a Spanish-language copy of Isabel Allende's Zorro at a used bookstore, and gave it to a GA delegate in my congregation to take to Louisville for the library to be established there. I saw that the bookstore had copies of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in both the Reading List and Agriculture sections, and that some of the copies in the Ag section were slightly cheaper, which was intel my hiking partner (and mom of a schoolkid) found useful when she went shopping there a few days later. My E player in fantasy tennis (the delightfully sassy Donna Vekic) has made a surprising run to the semifinals in Birmingham (UK), and I'm still alive in Survival at the Shore (horseracing predictions) -- ranked 1118th, true (my second-best day got negated by a cyberglitch, woe), but I haven't let myself dive deep into researching the ponies, so I'm fine with merely swimming along. Go Chocolate Drops! Go Zealous on the Run! Go Toute Allure! I'm amused by this interview of Charleston chef Robert Stehling, happy to hear reports that Husk Nashville is living up to the hype, and, in the bath, reading a 1996 Baedeker guide to Canada that used to live on the shelves of the Charlotte public library.

(And now it's been more than fifteen minutes since I applied sunscreen, and I've been asked to deliver a shirt and a gallon of water to my favorite motorcycle repair shop. Time to move from inventory to service! :-) )

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/53033.html.