a movable object

I walk to the corner. I turn left. I walk up a block. I turn left. I walk half a block. I glance to my right and I see the place I lived for a month when I first moved to San Francisco eight years ago, when I fell so fast and so hard for this city I could barely stand to sleep through a moment of it. A block away. I didn’t plan that, couldn’t plan it. In fact, if I had, it might be slightly creepy and melodramatic. Instead I call it “poetic” and smile and walk on by. Today was my first morning back at work since the move. I went to the eye doctor before going in, so it wasn’t a real first commute, but it felt pretty astounding nonetheless. This is the first time I’ve lived alone in an actual apartment, and while all...

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Posted on 29 May 2007 | 7 comments

anti-tip

Packing anti-tip the forty-seventh: do not read old journals when packing them. Just put. Them in. The box. And then step. Away. From the box. It’s not that you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find in there. You wrote it, all of it. It’s that you’ll spend more time reading them than you did writing them and you have kept a diary since you were 7 and that’s a freaking lot of journals and the movers come in 11 days and you still have a few more boxes of CDs you don’t listen to anymore to load and why did you never unpack or throw away this box of bubble-wrapped bottles of perfume you have never worn? I pick up the keys to my new place in eight hours. Zen is fast asleep next to me, twitching as she knocks over...

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Posted on 15 May 2007 | 3 comments

and also holy ow

Drinking one part apple cider vinegar to three parts water with five shakes of cayenne pepper doesn’t mean I am hardcore. It means I am, in fact, a gigantic wuss when it comes to having a sore throat and after a week or so I will do anything I read on the Intarweb to stop it. By the way, OW. And then also HOLY OW. I started out with three rounds of gargling with cayenne in water, but it got to be some weird competitive thing, me vs. my throat and all the nerve endings I have ever had in that general vicinity, and so I broke out the vinegar. Before you ask the obvious, yes, I know of the newfangled invention called “cough drops” and I know of tea with honey and I know, I know, hot pepper and vinegar, how could this ever end well? But I will...

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Posted on 14 May 2007 | 2 comments

where to return

where to return

.flickr-photo { } .flickr-frame { float: right; text-align: center; margin-left: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } the geeks and the goth, originally uploaded by cygnoir. I am settling into being mediocre, between genres, unfinished, and not a genius. In a way, I am reassured by this, because it means I no longer have to write the best first novel ever, and poems can just be poems. This reassurance can turn so easily into dissatisfaction. We weren’t supposed to live this long with dissatisfaction; we get bored; we start wars or break hearts. We wander off. We forget where to return. Across the street, someone tosses a tennis ball twenty feet into the air. I watch it rise and fall without...

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Posted on 6 May 2007 | 3 comments