Honey, I'm home

I have an L.A. recap and a tiresome flight delay tale to tell, but today I'm just too sleepy to manage it. I'll tell you this though. When I spun the tale of airline woe for my mother on the phone earlier today, she said, "You should have called us!"

Obviously, when you are a grown woman with a viable salary, the solution to being stranded at the airport at midnight is not to call your parents who live in another county, and ask them to please come get you, but rather, to call a taxi. Still. I feel overwhelmed with gratitude to have a family that would have taken that midnight call and made the hour-long journey to save me fifty bucks. We should all be so lucky.

Speaking of lucky, this is the time of year that the angle of the sun collaborates with my bay windows such that actual rays of light come into my north-facing apartment in the evening. Admittedly, it instantly reveals a certain cavalier attitude towards dusting, but also, for about an hour, creates a glow in the house that makes my life seem beautiful in a cinematic sort of way. And if it seems so, who's to say it's not?

It's nice to be glad to be home.

Celebrity sighting

At 4am, something woke me and I scrawled a note on a scrap of paper, otherwise I would not have remembered to tell you about my dream. Imagine how very sad that would have made you. People love nothing more than hearing the dreams of others. Particularly strangers. Do you know me? I hope not. This'll be great!

I dreamed that I became acquainted with Tilda Swinton, possibly through a mutual friend, I can't remember, but we were definitely staying at the same hotel. We had a few chats and then I saw her in a play in a surprisingly intimate theatre, which was also at the hotel. After the show, we were meant to have dinner, but first I needed to take a shower, so I went to the massive hotel locker room (?) where I somehow managed to wash my hair, but not to dry it. It was crazy crowded in there. It reminded me of an airport. So there I was, frantic, with wet hair, late to meet Tilda Swinton. I decided it would be better to go tell her I was running late than to just leave her waiting, so I struggled into my clothes--I seemed to be damp all over--and ran out into the lobby.

She was standing there, majestic, with a small entourage at the top of a short flight of stairs. I looked a bit deranged, but explained the whole hair-drying situation. She looked at me levelly and said, "I liked the distance we had in the theatre." I wasn't really taking this in because I was so excited that she'd been able to pick me out of the audience during her performance. "This..." she waved her hand to indicate the smallish space between us, and therefore our comparatively close proximity, "seems dangerous for us. And for the relationship."

The Tilda Swinton of my subconscious has intimacy issues.

We were still on for dinner though. Apparently, she always eats at the hotel restaurant whenever she's in Denmark. Also, we were in Denmark. Try to keep up.

She turned away, but I had something else to say to her, so I touched her leg to get her attention. Because she was standing at the top of the stairs, and I at the bottom, it was the part of her I could most easily reach. She turned and gave me a withering look. So here's a lesson:
Do not touch Tilda Swinton's leg.

The end.

I'm going to L.A. in the morning, so it's possible you may not hear from me for a few days. Probably, I will be busy meeting all sorts of celebrities in real life and experimentally touching their legs. But I'll be home soon enough. Have faith.

Les voisins

The Upstairs Baby has been absent for a delightfully long while. I couldn't say for sure how long. Ten days? Two weeks? Long enough for me to relax into the perfection that is my apartment without him. The mornings when he doesn't wake me. The evenings when my meals aren't uninterrupted by his. The totally lack of screaming. The total lack of crashing. Nothing but the occasional footsteps of his father who was still up there and who, frankly, didn't seem too broken up about his absence either. It has been idyllic. It went on for such a long time that I began to fantasize that the Upstairs Baby's parents had gone through a tragic divorce. Generally speaking, I'm not hopeful that parents of babies are getting divorced because, let's face it, that's terrible. I am only hopeful that babies that live over my head might be relocated. I can't really be bothered about the circumstances. It's not my baby, after all. Indeed, I think maybe there should be a rule that if a baby is going to wake you up, it has to be your own baby. Preferably a baby that you totally signed up to have, fully aware that it would be waking you up for years to come.

And if you are thinking that I am a terrible person, I am thinking that you haven't lived in an apartment in a long time.

Yesterday, even before I even got all the way up the front stairs, I knew the jig was up. (An expression that, now that I've written it, I am dubious even exists.) There was a crumpled Air France luggage tag on the landing that told me all I needed to know. The Upstairs Baby is back. And lo. This morning did suck. As, verily, all mornings must henceforth suck until the Upstairs Baby is 15 years old and does not wake up until noon.

Do you have a lovely, well-insulated upstairs flat? Are you also secretly in love with me and uninterested in procreating? We should talk.

Not television, the other thing

The book I got from the library with the suspicion that it would change my life is not changing my life. It is stylistically confusing and slightly anxiety-producing. Which is just how I feel about the work of Miranda July. Unsurprisingly, the book in question changed Miranda July's life. Or maybe not that exactly, but she did one of those "you should read this book" author quotes on the back. A fact I probably should have taken under consideration. Still, I do love the prologue. The prologue may, in fact, have changed my life, so maybe I should be grateful for that and just stop reading it now. Here. She says this, for instance:

At a certain point, I know, you have to forget about your soul and just do the work you're required to do. To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.

-Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be?

I love that.

Now. Here's another library curiosity. You may recall that I was lumbering along with a book that I believe is quite a good book, but one that requires that the reader not be constantly distracted by Game of Thrones or similar. [Did I mention that my friend referred to Game of Thrones as Tits and Dragons? And that I told him that I would be stealing it immediately? I think we should all steal it immediately.] Anyway, when you're all hopped up on Tits and Dragons, it is difficult to apply yourself to literature. What with one thing and another, the three weeks were nearly up and I was only on page 83.

Approaching the librarian, I asked, "Is it possible to renew a book before its due date?"
"Oh, yes," she assured me and took the book from my hand. "Oh. There are ten holds on this book, so I can't renew it. Do you want to hang on to it? You might make progress by Wednesday or, it's up to you, I can't renew it, but after Wednesday it's 10 cents a day."
I found it quite shocking that a librarian was suggesting I intentionally keep a book overdue for my own selfish gain, despite the fact that ten people, ten studious, intelligent people who probably don't even watch television, were waiting to read it. "No, no," I said. "That doesn't seem very fair. I'll just turn it in. I'll try it another time."
I removed a bunch of papers I had stuck in the book and handed it back to her. She suggested, "Why don't I place a hold on it for you, so that once it cycles through these ten people, you can get it back?" That seemed like a very satisfying solution, I agreed.

Imagine my confusion then when THE NEXT DAY I got an email from the library informing me that the book I had placed on hold was ready to be picked up. No doubt the self same copy that I had just given them.

What madness is this? Wither the ten people, dear reader?

I feel that there is a moral here somewhere, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is.

Remedy

I don't like to get you all excited by posting on a Saturday. It sets the wrong precedent. But I am aware I missed Friday, so...

Some disorienting things happened yesterday and I woke this morning feeling raw and fragile. Fortunately, the sun was already on the scene, amazingly without it's sneaky San Francisco sidekick, freezing wind. A good start, certainly, but I felt further action needed to be taken. I suspect that the antidote for raw and fragile varies from person to person, but this is what I applied to the situation.

1. I took myself out to tea. I'm not going to lie: I did have a scone, but I also had some protein like a sensible person. My waitress had very graceful posture. It was her first day, but it didn't seem like it.

2. I went to the library and along the route I did, quite literally, stop to smell the roses. I sat in the library for about an hour during which I was grateful for libraries. I read an article about the Obamas and one about Audrey Hepburn in Rome. I returned a book I had not yet finished because I was informed there were ten people waiting to read it. I am sure they will make brisker progress than I seemed to be making. I chose two new books instead, one of which I think might change my life. I was grateful for libraries some more.

3. I cleaned the house. Or made a start, at least. Then I sat in the afternoon sunshine in my orderly kitchen and had a banana.

4. At the last minute, I did the smartest thing of all, and drove across the bridge to see a baseball game. My niece turned over an inning by striking three kids out: one, two, three. The adults in the stands talked about her with awe, murmuring her name like that of a celebrity spotted on the other side of a restaurant. She's ten. She rules.

5. Then we all had pizza.

It's hard to go wrong with pizza.