"I · tried · living · in · the · real · world · instead · of · a · shell

But there have been some nice, sometimes even cheering, moments.

I spent most of this morning listening to Tigermilk. Why didn't this record enter my life sooner? That's the problem with mp3s: I have half of the songs downloaded. But the record is like a rediscovery, and the sound is better. Skanking (yes, that's right) to "Expectations."

A silly catalogue of some other things that have abated my dourness--

Returning to the insularity of my apartment, I spent nearly three hours laboring over the concoction of a black-eyed bean salad containing, among other things, fresh coconut (the cracking of which occupied a significant amount of that three hours); now I have deliciousness for lunch all week.

I've been reading Swann's Way and am finding myself becoming submersed in the language much more so than when I made a false start at it two summers ago. Maybe it's a novel for winter.

I thought when it quit being hatefully cold and the sun started shining a bit earlier in the day I'd quit being so...hateful.  But the sad-sack-bitter-at-life-irritability has seemed to deepen, rather than abate.  I'm afraid it's showing a bit too much, and I'm a chore to be around, actually.

I've been feeling really negative about New York.  A month of two ago, I would have said: New York is fine, not necessarily the amazing place everyone makes it out to be, but there are a lot of things I like about it.  On some level I know this still holds true, but I'm feeling a lot less positive about things.  I feel lonely, but too irritable to be around people.  I've met some lovely folks, but it feels like we're more acquaintances than friends.  I miss the people who get my references and sense of humor.  

I've been having mini existential crises about Who I Am Becoming, and Losing My Sense of Self.  I know....  [See: title of post.]  What has all this introspection and self-awareness ever done for me, really?  I'm like the cliche of a disaffected twenty-something girl!  Maybe I should just become one of those individuals who thrives off of watching TV and buying shit. 

I've been thinking I shouldn't have started library school so soon, but moved back to Pittsburgh for awhile or gone to the Czech Republic and taught ESL.  Or applied to MFA programs.  What am I doing with my life?

Shuffling about my apartment and listening to My Bloody Valentine and Leonard Cohen.  Drinking copious amounts of tea.

 

I've been enjoying a few langorous days post-finals-stress, before I depart for the holidays in PA.

Beautiful things that are making me happy:

1) Calling my mom tonight, serendipitously during the last 30 minutes of the Steelers-Ravens game, having her give me a play-by-play from their television, and cheering together when they won.

2) Making mix-cds for swapping. I was long overdue in fulfilling a few promises.

3) Friday--finally perfecting a chewy and crackly espresso cookie on the third try. Sharing said some of said cookies with the lovely owners of a vegan ice cream shop on the LES, and having them ask me to bake for them (!).

4) Having magically found every type of vegan-by-way-of-parve baking chip imaginable at one of the kosher grocers six blocks from my apartment. Using one such variant--the chocolate coffee chips--in the above-mentioned cookie perfection.

5) Being obsessed with late-80s twee, Sarah Records stuff.

6) Getting Brooklyn pizza perfection--melted soy cheese and all!--at Pizza Plus tonight with a friend.

7) Sending some packages out into the world yesterday (finally).

8) Thinking about petting the cats and Madeline when I'm home.

9) Getting to visit with The Staufface?!

10) Baking green tea biscotti for sharing with the office while listening to This American Life tonight.

11) Starting to rework a short story I wrote my junior year of college.

12) Meeting my sister at the airport in a few days.

I'm looking forward to my eminent return to the rolling hills of central-western Pennsylvania. Movie marathons with Rachel. And board games. Total nerdiness (as if that wasn't my perpetual state of being). Non-required reading. Snowy hikes. Baking.

I'm looking forward to working on a few projects. In the meantime it's been nice wandering the city.

Bright Eyes set a kind of standard for the music I listened to. Five years ago, when I first saw Bright Eyes live in Pittsburgh I would have said without a doubt it was the best show I'd ever been to.

Of course, over time people change and feelings fade. When Cassadaga came out I intuitively knew it wouldn't be for me. And I didn't even bother listening to it until months after its release, when I borrowed my sister's copy. As I wrote at the time, it felt a bit derivative, stripped of a lot of the freshness of earlier albums. Bright Eyes was no longer my can-do-no-wrong band, and although I still felt connected to the earlier albums, the frequency with which I listened to Bright Eyes had diminished as I disovered other artists.

So when Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band were scheduled to play at Terminal 5 in November, I'd only given it a passing thought. After awhile, though, the idea of going grew on me. I hadn't listened to any of the new stuff, but something about the idea was slightly intriguing. Like looking through a high school yearbook and wanting to know what the person you had a crush on looks like and is doing now. And so I found myself ordering a ticket, and then, last night, waiting in line outside the venue. And, in fact, going to the show.

And maybe I've grown up. 

But with all my sentimental heart I'd like to obliterate the memory of Sunday night and hold on to those years spent listening to Letting Off the Happiness and writing in my diary or walking desultory through parks with Fevers and Mirrors.  I want to pretend nothing has changed.

I'm wiped, and have a slight headache from 5+ hours not-distant-enough drum circle pounding--though the 1:1 ratio of real food to sweets may have something to do with that. Sugar seems to be giving me headaches these days. (Hmm, I guess my body is trying to tell me something....) Nevertheless, a lovely, relaxing time. And, though it goes without saying, all the food was awesome (chocolate-espresso chip cookies!).

Tomorrow I have class at the NYPL Humanities and Social Sciences Library.  So far the reading has centered around appraising works of art, and the intricacies of misattribution and forgery.  For some reason I find it all a bit amusing.

Still no luck on the job front as of yet....

In completely unrelated news, I've been enjoying cleaning lately.  I've also recently thrown caution and restraint to the wind to become an avid cereal mixer.  Wheetabix + Trader Joe's Mixed Berry Granola is a lovely thing.

Toasted baguette + lemon-spritzed avocado = awesome.  Also Asda's lovely Extra Special Elderflower & Lemon Balm Cordial that Rachel was awesome enough to smuggle into the country bring me when she came for the week months ago.  [Note: the bottle actually says "Extra Special"--so clearly it is.]

Alas. Alack.  I should be doing work right now.  I landed this special outside-of-work-but-work-related research opportunity that is tied to a grant for programming and collection development to meet the needs of older patrons, and I need to be organizing (a quagmiry file of) materials related to libraries and successful aging.  Sigh.  

I really want to be skipping merrily through the woods, or reclining on the chaise lounge on the back porch reading one of the three YA novels I have check out right now, or swimming, or working on one of the several short story fragments I seem to write just before bed these days, or--or--uh...merely dicking around on the internet...which is clearly what I'm doing now.  Rats.

Is it possible to feel a kind of bored discontent and complacency at the same time?  I'm missing people and also feeling like shunning people.  I drove east to visit with Married Friends a few weekends ago.  Of course it was a weekend of fun times and proliferous conversation; I guess it sort of refreshed the feeling of wanting to be around people who kind of get me and who I care about.  It's still hard to believe I'll be moving to NYC in two months.

Bah.  

Did I mention I need to have this work done for Monday?  So.  Let the skimming, synthesizing, categorizing, and bibliography-drafting recommence....

[...] And this is just the type
of thing you want to happen when nothing
is fun anymore and you know you have
to make a change but you don't know how
and you can't help thinking,
There's got to be more to life than this.

-David Kirby, "The Afterlife" from The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems

However, the whole reason for the physical was because I am going to grad school to get an MLIS this fall.  Big news, which probably deserves its own special post.  But I've been lax about about my li'l corner of LJ.  And applying to MLIS programs and getting accepted and making a decision regarding them has sort of been such an on-going process that the arrival of the end to that process doesn't seem quite real yet?  

Seeming even less real, is the knowledge that I'm moving to New York City in a few short months.  

The requisite response to hearing of this from people thus far has been something along the lines of: "You must be excited."  In truth, I...don't think...I am...?  I don't know.  I'm kind of jazzed about being able to quit working with the public in the near future, and once again delving back into academic life.  But the whole NYC part?  Ehhhh....  I kind of think I would be more excited to move back to Pittsburgh.  Which, I'm sure, few people would understand.  But New York has never appealed to me as much as other cities I've visited.  Oh, and I'm going to broke as hell.  So.  We'll see.

I think I'd forgotten about this journal until just a few days ago.  I have DSL now, so the likelihood of me posting more regularly is significantly improved.

Last weekend was my turn in the month to work, so it was myself and a high school girl with whom I sometimes work--shelf-reading, shelf-reading, and cleaning books. All the while one of our junior high regulars, a boy who lives across the street--that is, when he's not living at the library playing internet games involving burly Viking-types going on Missions--occassionally tears himself away from his pillaging or somesuch to pipe up when he feels the need to add his insight into our conversation. A previous example of such sage advice being that if someone to throw a cheeseburger at you, you should take it "open it up and throw it back in their face." (Don't even ask me how we got on the subject of throwing cheeseburgers--that's an even longer story involving yet another regular who works the graveyard shift at the McDonald's drive-thru).

Our scene opens at the circulation desk--

HIGH SCHOOL GIRL: Sometimes I think it would be fun to just shelve the books by size.
ME: Actually, before the advent of the Dewey decimal system and librarians trained in cataloging, that is how books were shelved.
HIGH SCHOOL GIRL: (noncommitally) hmm
ME: Oh man, I love the classification system. ...Every once in awhile I actually get the urge to catalog my own library according to Library of Congress...
BOY (from the computer): You're a dork, dude!
ME: Well, uh, yeah.

I am a dork. But really, I prefer "nerd." Is it a sign of a true nerd that I quibble over the semantics?

I hadn't really thought of my Myers-Briggs type in quite awhile (is this a sign that I'm becoming less self-absorbed?). However, I've been starting seeds lately--a project that started casually enough with a single packet of basil and some containers lying around the basement and soon evolved into a trip to Home Depot to buy peat pots and seed starting mix, and 150 tiny containers of dirt dutifully labelled with markers made out of toothpicks. And yesterday I found myself smiling secretively--the way you smile when your crush passes by you in the street on his bike and waves, except that I haven't had a crush in probably half a year. I was thinking about the nasturtiums, dill, and purple basil I had yet to plant. And so, I recently remembered this quote I read quite awhile ago about INFPs, as it seemed rather apt:

When it comes to the mundane details of life maintenance, INFPs are typically completely unaware of such things. They might go for long periods without noticing a stain on the carpet, but carefully and meticulously brush a speck of dust off of their project booklet. [INFP]

Books.  I started using my Goodreads account again.  I'd sort of forgotten about it until a week ago.  I'm exploring YA and juvenile lit. of late: currently reading the first Spiderwick Chronicles book, and a YA book called Candyfloss on my to-read pile (mostly because there was a blurb from Philip Pullman on the back), also a book about a gingerbunny by Randell Jarrell (I had no idea he had authored so much--or any--children's book until a few months ago), as well as the Sherman Alexie YA novel that recently won a National Book Award.  On the lookout for good YA reads.

I'm very slowly starting to write again.  Actually I'm rewriting a short story currently.  But...a start?

Today at work I also randomly ran into this guy who's house I went to for a vegan meet-up in...November?  Maybe we'll get something together activism-wise.  I think I miss being involved in "causes."

Last week I hit a deer on my way home from work.  And it was all kinds of horrible.  My airbags didn't go off, I wasn't hurt, and the deer ran off afterwards--though was was too shaky to tell how badly it might have been hurt.  Nevertheless, sickening.  Makes me hate cars, and the necessity of driving even more.