Archives for November 2004

Yes, New Yorkers, I’m looking at you. Erin McKeown, providing the soundtrack to my life since October 2004, performs this Saturday at Irving Plaza with The Waifs, and tickets are still available. How lucky can you get?

Justine Larbalestier cuts right to the way I am feeling this week in a lovely essayette. An excerpt:

I’m all for different perspectives, different ways of living, of seeing the world. One of the glories of being in other places is seeing how varied the world is. I’m so relieved Buenos Aires isn’t exactly like Sydney. That there are places where people don’t know who Elvis is. Spending time in the US I am thrilled every time I discover pop cultural memories the yankees have that I don’t. Growing up in Australia I always thought I knew all about the USA, I could name all the states, knew a tonne about its music and movies and literature, but I didn’t, not even close. I still don’t really know this country, I probably never will. That makes me happy.

But the gulfs. All those Bob Evans people and Baristas people living in the same towns, same cities, sometimes shopping in the same stores, or going to the same churches, who can’t talk to each other, or if they do, can’t make any sense of what the other says. Whose different worlds are so completely incompatible there’s no room for each other in them. That makes me sad.

Read this musing, too. Oh, just go ahead and bookmark her already!

(Thanks to lovely CAAF for the link. A girl with a 4-letter acronym can’t be wrong.)

1. No, not even slightly.

2. Mostly by grunting.

3. Yes, out of a can, acccompanied today by peanut butter and jelly and a pint of warm tap water.

4. The Godfather, Bad Day at Black Rock, and several episodes of What’s My Line? Next up is Pushing Tin.

5. Not a one–I’m too tired to hold them up in bed.

6. Like I swallowed a small sausage that got stuck halfway down.

7. Trust me, you don’t want to know.

8. Tomorrow, I hope, but don’t count on it.

“The only moral to be drawn is that honourable causes are seldom advanced by the employment of lawyers.”

Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?

My cold seems to have given me a swollen uvula, which is one of life’s more comical complaints. It’s helping me concentrate on my writing, though, since I can’t really talk. On the other hand, I’m still feeling moderately crappy!

Once I get Today’s Piece written, drink several gallons of gently warmed fluids, and rack up a hard-earned nap or two, I might well feel moved to blog some more. But don’t count on it.

I continue to feel…well, crappy. Earlier today I went through with a face-to-face interview with a guy who’d set it up weeks ago and had come from out of town just to see me. I didn’t have the heart to blow him off, so I talked until what was left of my voice gave out. Since then I haven’t uttered a word, and outside of a couple of e-mails I haven’t generated any written ones, either. I’ve blown a deadline (not fatally, but it’s badly bruised). I cancelled my longstanding plans for dinner with four very attractive women–a good idea, too, since it’s not even eight o’clock and I can barely hold my head up. After I quaff some hot soup and NyQuil, I hope to become deeply unconscious and remain so until tomorrow morning.

That was my day. How was yours, OGIC?

“About Last Night” is currently being viewed in thirteen time zones. Obviously, somebody wanted to read about something else tonight.

And now I am soooo going to bed….

“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

H.L. Mencken, Life interview (1946)