If you want to cease being productive at work on Friday afternoons, listen to Rihanna and lip sync to Pour It Up in anticipation of weekend festivities. Just a suggestion.

Additional notes:
- tatami, umami, chirashi. unagi, nigiri vs sushi vs sashimi
- lure, in a boat-like state, lure, in a lake-like state. champagne flutes
- running in the rain, and scaffolding lessons. i can run now?? no, at that realization, it turned into leaping through the rain.
- dancing in the humidity, everyone celebrating a roof over their heads, "sweet & vicious," we can make it!, dancing on the coffee tables, dancing on the stairs
- so much green
- the leaves changing already
- the first day of autumn, man. when love is born (we swore to each other that spring is overrated)
- angel food cake. "holiday" watching. dreaming
- the full moon. moon cakes.
- clouds. "scenic overlooks"
- hours in the car. hours.
- curiouser
- and curiouser


also, from a project by Miranda July (I love that they described it as "curated intimacy", the author Etgar Keret writes:

Asthma Attack

When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones--those cost you, too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be “stop,” or “inhaler.” It could be “ambulance.”

some notes:

- open mic night,
- a suggestion of desire,
- an approach with almost familiarity, "he has great taste,"
- flight from manhattan on the back of a motorcycle from the 1980s, past the Hudson river
- "i feel the wind in my hair"
- fire escapes and champagne,
- vines,
- exposure,
- sleeping on planes, (more like hallucinating),
- dark, red-lit bars,
- sweet georgia brown asking for a little respect,
- and the bowery electric,
- (“There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love,” she wrote). In her diaries, she expressed her joy of landing in bohemian Greenwich Village, “where all night long typewriters click, people sing in the streets, hurdy gurdies go all day and the laundry boy reads Turgenev. - on The Diaries of Dawn Powell, the New Yorker
- "i hope we fall asleep here."
- we were lit. broken. healed.
- the shape of it all. a peninsula, or perhaps a fjord,
- eyes in the dark. hands in the dark.
- falling asleep on air mattresses and waking up on the ground,
- identity, i guess,
- twenty-eight and counting,
- "broadway is dark tonight" and i am living it, i am here.

"so what if you catch me.... where would we land?"

All our words were bound to fail

new york city scares the fucking shit out of me. and i am absolutely, wretchedly, in love with it. it sounds, aptly, much like the rest of the things i've fallen in love with over the course of my lifetime.

there is something singular about the way new yorkers write about the city.

its unforgiving nature. the heat rising from the cement. the cold seeping into the veins of buildings and people. shitty window unit A/C (what? there is no central A/C? laments the stupid houstonian). how no gentlemen will wait for you to get on the elevator before they push their way in. (wait, how no gentlemen exist?) the pollution. the endless subway stories, the endless assholes. the traffic.

yesterday i spoke with someone who left new york city 20 years ago. her entire face lit up as i talked about the City, and like teenagers talking about their first caramel frappuccinos, we chatted excitedly about it for 15 minutes (even though we were supposed to be talking about boring business things).

time passes differently there. you can touch the time, it's thick  and substantial with urgency and impatience. maybe that's why i like it there.

even the way the sunlight falls on the side of the fire escapes casts different shadows.

and, aren't we breathless the very moment we land? the decision is, the good kind of breathless, or the exhausted kind...

...related to yesterday's note.

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

D.H. Lawrence

Food for thought. After reading Arian Foster's article on "6 things I'll try to teach my daughter,"
I picked off his twitter description and two good tweet quotes.

Mom, I'm happy. So small, but part of it all. A place where time doesn't exist and infinite is familiar.

"And the smiles of that little me leaves little time for any whine. And plenty wine."

And a retweet:
Blood is thicker than water but maple syrup is thicker than blood so technically pancakes are more important than family.

A few months ago, maybe in April, I took my first spin class. 

Lifechanging? Probably not. Impactful? Certainly. There were few physical activities this year that made me feel completely useless. One was snowboarding. The second was hiking uphill for hours carrying 40 pounds on my back. The third was spin class. Okay, fine, the fourth was probably breaking my own heart.

Now, I struggle with recovery. I referenced a quote from Ana Forrest's Fierce Medicine:

"I’d believed that in order to do what I was afraid of, I had to get rid of the fear first, but that turned out to be only an idea, not the truth. You have to do something two hundred times before the fear will disperse. Are you still afraid of something? Just do it again. Do it again. Do it again."

For as long as I can remember, I don't think I have ever just stopped being active for a period of time. Now it's a mental battle. Lacing up my shoes. Picking out smaller weights. Facing the way my muscles shake, even at 1/2 the weight I was using just two months ago. Dealing with how my breath seems like it wants to quit just 15 minutes into something. The flexibility I've lost. The strength I need to gain. The yoga poses I can't hold for as long.

Things that were easy then, now feel like war.

I intend to fight it.

My doctor talks about professional athletes. The slow progress they make. Basketball players jogging slowly across the court. Then around it. Then playing horse. Then pickup games. Practice. More practice. Are you scared? Do it again.

I feel my fear building, about how weak I feel.

I am stalking my fear. 

My fear of failing, my fear of love, my fear of pain, my fear of being injured. My fear of the unknown.

Let's go hunting.


PS- a favorite lyric from Bjork:

if travel is searching
and home what's been found
i'm not stopping

i'm going hunting