ten things

This 25 things meme was going around Facebook & I finally decided to give it a go. I stopped at ten though because I got sort of carried away.

1. It’s probably some kind of sin but on sunny mornings, I usually want to be inside. My house, with its lack of other houses directly next to it, gets an incredible amount of sun throughout the day. And since I’m an early riser, the mornings seem absolutely glorious to me. This morning as I was walking to the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of the big sunspots in the TV room and my office. I sort of sighed and thought, Glorious! I’m not exaggerating this love and its vocabulary.

2. While driving to the corner coffee shop this morning, I learned on the radio that Graham Nash wrote “Our House” after a morning with Joni Mitchell. They went out to breakfast, stopped into an antique store where Joni bought a vase she liked, and when they went home he said, “I’ll start a fire while you put flowers in that vase.” The ordinariness of the moment struck him and he wrote the song over the next hour. Because I was having some sort of love affair with the morning myself, learning this made me feel full, kind of bursting with feelings.

3. I’ve decided to abandon any attempts to quit coffee for the time being.

4. My mother is teaching my friend Sara and me how to sew right now. Yesterday I went over to her house to work on our dress project and after a couple hours, I’m happy to report it’s almost ready. We need to hem the bottom, sew in the zipper, and hand stitch some detail on the inside and then I’ll be set. I’m not going to issue a verdict on the dress until it is complete but I think I’ve made myself a real hippie sort of outfit. The skirt is big and generous, and looks like it should hide lots of small children with dirty hands.

5. I feel like I’m becoming much better at this whole homeowner/landlord thing. I think my past weaknesses have centered around interactions: with contractors, with tenants, and in the midst of perceived crises. My new mantra in this area is “stay cool, keep calm, go slow.” I realized a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself to make decisions quickly (and that others were putting on me too) was unnecessary.

6. My little brother turns 18 on Tuesday and I can’t believe it.

7. Downstairs my housemates and some friends are “meeting” about a summer garden project on one of the vacant lots on our street. I feel conflicted: I want to join them but I’ve also dedicated this time to myself and some neglected writing projects. This tension is everywhere lately and it’s the reason why I’ve got half-finished knitting, cross-stitching, painting, and maintenance projects strewn across my apartment.

8. I’m reading Truth and Beauty by Ann Pratchett right now and it’s excellent. I’ve been picking up this gossipy Kennedy White House history here and there; Sean gave it to me for Christmas. So far I’ve learned that JFK used to swim in the nude in the White House pool with male reporters and female WH staffers, sometimes at the same time.

9. I saw Doubt on Friday night–it was excellent. I can’t stop thinking about it, which I think is a sign of the movie’s greatness. It brought back a lot of memories of Catholic elementary school, including the mandatory silence in the hallways, the scheduled trips to the bathroom, and the fear of my principal Sister Aline. She was nowhere near as mean as Meryl Streep’s character but she still had a tremendous amount of power based on fear. Occasionally she would call up a class and let them pick a piece of candy from her bear-shaped candy jar “Benny.” When I went up to Benny, I always felt like there was a possibility I was being tricked, like she was watching to see if I picked the right piece or picked it properly.

10. I have over $200 in library fines that have now gone into collection. I fear that my friend Brynn, a librarian, will read this and scold me.