This just in... A new apartment has been secured: A cute little one-bedroom with big windows, hardwood floors, and a little porch in the back. And it's only a short walk from both Amanda/Charlie's place and Eliina's place. It's a bit too far from the grocery store, but I love a brisk walk in sub-zero weather whilst carrying many pounds. I do. My building manager is Serbian, has fashionable glasses, and swears he will fix up absolutely everything in the place before I move in on the 12th.

Yesterday was one, big domestic scene. I felt like we were in Little Women. The day started with Amanda making an apple pie to take to our Thanksgiving dinner at Charlie's parents' house, so Kirsten and I helped with the peeling and chopping. The only small glitch was when the pie juices overflowed in the oven and started burning on the oven floor. Causing much smoke. We opened windows and turned on fans. Amanda: "Is this going to make the pie taste like smoke?"

Luckily, no, it was fantastic and not at all smoked-tasting.

If you're following the current situation in Ukraine, a blog called Neeka's Backlog gives some sense of what it's like to be there right now. See also her piece in today's New York Times: "The past four days have taught me something valuable: when I'm watching the situation unfold on television, I grow tense, fearful that it's not going to end well. But when I return to the crowd, I feel elated, thanks to people like Tanya, tens of thousands of them, and to everyone else who's out there, people of all ages, hundreds of thousands of them, fearless."

Side note: Over lunch today, Amanda, Kirsten and I got really wrapped up in a discussion over whether it's "Ukraine" or "The Ukraine." I told them I would look it up. Here's one answer.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and to all a good feast. And then, a good nap. I am staying here in Chicago, having dinner with Charlie's family (and Amanda, Charlie and Kirsten).

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Talking on the phone to my mom this morning...

Mom: That is one ugly bird. Turkeys, when they're raw? They're just.... ugly. You would've laughed at me. When I was making it, I just kept saying, "This turkey is god-awful ugly." I was by myself.

Ten minutes later, talking to my grandmother (my mom's mother) on the phone....

Grandma: Does your mom have the turkey going?
Me: Yeah. She said it was ugly, though.
Grandma: When they're raw? Oh, they are.

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"The best way to celebrate Thanksgiving is to be forgiving. Forgive slights, because they were not wounds. Forgive wounds, because they were not injuries. Forgive injuries, because they were not fatal." -- Gapers Block

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

It's snowing. It's been stopping and starting, just tiny little tentatively snowlike flakes. But it is indeed snow. SNOW. I love Chicago. No beating around the bush here. When it's cold, it snows; none of this half-assed freezing rain that D.C. gets all winter.

Monday, November 22, 2004

Question, posed December 2001: "Will I end up as a temp? After all this?"

Answer: YES. But only for two weeks, until you are hired.

On Sunday morning, Amanda and I sat at the kitchen table in our pajamas, eating warm chocolate chip scones and drinking coffee. It was one of those how-will-we-ever-decide-what-to-do-with-our-lives conversations. We talked in circles over all the usual terrain: whether to go to graduate school; whether graduate school would lead to jobs that we're passionate about, pay enough and contribute to a better world; and wait -- how do we know what we're passionate about when our passions change by the day? How many entry-level jobs in various paths can we take before we just give up and pick whatever?

I came across this today in the New York Times. The writer is ostensibly talking about computers that can generate authorless novels, but he's also talking about the creation of stories, which is essentially what Amanda and I were trying to do, map out our own stories:

The economist Herbert Simon, who reminded us of the futility of trying to consider every possible alternative in a world without end, might have had in mind the budding novelist in Albert Camus's "Plague," determined to create a perfect first sentence and therefore unable to advance beyond it.

It was Simon's ideas - particularly his notion of "satisficing" - that first got me interested in fiction-writing machines. Though in theory a person shopping for new shoes could consider all the pairs on the planet, in fact, the cost is way too high - an entire life spent shoe-shopping. So in the real world we visit one or two stores, try on a few in our size and buy a pair.

Satisficing in this way - settling, or even sensing, what is good enough - is something novelists must do as well. We think of an idea and go with it because pausing to systematically consider every plot twist, character or phrase that might come next would lead nowhere.

-- Daniel Akst, NY Times

Sunday, November 21, 2004

My dad called last weekend. Immediately I was suspicious.

I haven't asked him to mail anything, pay anything or fix anything. Why is he calling?

We just chatted for a few minutes about how I was doing.

He sounds so happy. Something is amiss.

So I asked how things were going with him.

"Your mother and I got a tree," he said, as though announcing that they'd got a puppy.

A Christmas tree? Hmm. Strange! The tree will be dead by Christmas, for sure. Unless they've gotten some new-fangled long-lasting preservative-filled tree.

"And it comes in three pieces."

Ah ha! Artificial! I should have known they would do something so devious when I was far away in Chicago and unable to stop them!

"It was on sale!" he said. "And the lights are already attached!"

I think he was actually calling from the store. I could hear crowd noise.

For years, I have relentlessly blocked all movements towards a Muscato family artificial tree. In fact, I was the original instigator of the live tree movement, back in 1988, when I refused to help put together our scruffy artificial one anymore. But he was right. We'd started just going to Home Depot to pick out a tree, which was actually even more pathetic.

And my dad has been looking forward to this for a long time. So. I am going to be mature and accept this. Hopefully.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet:

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road.

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Anne Lamott, Bird-By-Bird:

My Al-Anon friend told me about the frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of the night. The wife kept dragging him in before dawn so that the neighbors wouldn’t see him, until finally an old black woman from the South came up to her one day after a meeting and said, ‘Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’ And I am slowly, slowly in my work—and even more slowly in real life—learning to do this.

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Flung.net: Flung Comix.

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