is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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A Few Kinds of Magic.

A Few Kinds of Magic.

Today I made the magical cupcakes of chocolate & cayenne with cinnamon frosting for my students and for my faculty reading group, for tomorrow. I almost dyed the frosting orange for Halloween, but that felt like Too Much (even though yesterday it was revealed that I Am Bree, in a Very Limited Fashion). I also experimented with low cholesterol cupcakes, and so there are two versions of the cupcakes, in two different kinds of cupcake wrappers, so that they can be easily told apart.

Both versions are very tasty. The low cholesterol ones are less fluffy and airy.

Also. I have found the perfect cleaning product for the kind of grease that no amount of scrubbing will bring to an end. You know, the kind that after awhile builds up on the front panel and knobs of a range/oven, for instance. The product is called Oxi-Clean Miracle Foam, and that is exactly what it is. You just spray it on the dastardly area and watch the foam drip down, carrying with it all traces of the offending grease.

Sure, it�s probably really toxic. Just don�t clean your cat with it, OK?

I am also happy to report that order has been wrested from the room of chaos. It has indeed. I wish I had taken before and after photographs, because it is truly remarkable, the extreme makeover episode that transpired within my apartment yesterday, all day. My apartment is so very lovely! Magically happy-making!

All of my CDs are stored in five large blue boxes now, alphabetically. I�ve been making a habit lately of opening a random box and choosing a CD I haven�t listened to for some time. Today I listened to Prefab Sprout. It is very good song-writing paired with too much fluffy orchestration (like Jon Brion on steroids. Jon Brion has produced records by Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, for instance) and some overwrought vocal stylings by singer/songwriter Paddy McAloon. Nonetheless, he (McAloon) is something of a genius. He has this way of writing about heartache while not losing sight of what it is that makes love worth continuing to do (or feel), despite all the ways in which it manifestly wreaks havoc on a life. It makes a striking concoction: sadness describing happiness lost. By now I am used to what used to bother me about his orchestration choices. But because of the fluffiness Prefab Sprout albums count, for me, as albums I�ll probably never play when other people are around.

Just finished frosting the cupcakes. Grey�s Anatomy is on the background. It�s a TV show, for those of you who don�t watch. It�s OK. A bit of a train wreck. And this week, there�s a train wreck. Which means that all the doctors have to go to work, and thus so-skinny-no-carbs-ever intern has to stop waiting to see whether handsome-hair doctor is going to �choose her� or not. And she just drunkenly observed that it is not at all true that �what you don�t know can�t hurt you.� She�s no Paddy McAloon, but she�s right. I hate not knowing.

I once lived with someone who preferred not knowing to finding out for certain that a feeling felt for someone was not reciprocated. This person could wait for months and months without ever asking. Actively desired uncertainty over sad sureness.

Uncertainty is fine with me. In fact it is part of what makes being with other people a kind of magic. (This is true not only of lovers but of friends.) When it�s not just you, the future is open. However, if there�s something I should know, I like to know. I once let my patience for uncertainty take me too far, and ended up being wrecked by a pathological liar. That was extreme sadness. Sad sureness would have been better, much earlier on. He expected me to want revenge, too. On top of everything else, he didn�t even know me, apparently. So I taught him a lesson about Nietzsche that he didn�t understand until two years later. I�m serious. I actually fairly patiently lectured him about Nietzsche, how will to power is its own prison unless it knows its limits, to the tune of the eternal recurrence (you�ll note that I�m not lecturing you about this right now. That would take some time). Two years later he wrote to tell me he finally understood. I didn�t write back to find out why. Apparently he had also demonstrated to me the limits of my own forgiveness.

12:15 a.m. - October 31, 2005

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