is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Steps, Stairs, Home and Not Home.
Steps, Stairs, Home and Not Home.
Yesterday I woke up at nine and spent the whole day reading and thinking about my dissertation. I didn�t take a shower or get dressed or anything, and I ate the food I had bought at the drugstore on the way up the hill on Sunday. Cereal and macaroni and cheese. It was raining and there are many, many stairs and/or steep roads between here and civilization. Today I also didn�t leave the house but Safeway arrived in a van, so I made a very yummy black bean soup with star anise and onions. I did more dissertation reading, finished the thing. Next step is to go back through and coordinate the notes I took in the margins, and think about how it will all be restructured. Today I also did a load of laundry. Either the towel-laundry has not been done for awhile around here, or my two friends who were here for two days before me managed to use eight towels. And so I have helped to insure that my hosts will not return home to a house without towels. Doing laundry meant that I had to walk up and down the back stairs a lot. The back stairs are on the outside of the back of the house, and, whether you are walking up or down, it is quite an adventure. The house, as I�ve mentioned, is on the top of a hill. The backyard is down the hill a bit, and when you walk down the steps you get an open-air vista of all of the neighborhood and out towards the bay. Sometimes the experience approaches vertigo, other times it�s almost like top-of-the-mountain feeling, like when you reach the top of a peak after a long climb and a closed horizon suddenly opens up and reveals the whole world. Like that but not exactly like that. I�m in Noe Valley in the middle of San Francisco, after all, not Yosemite. Still, it rained off and on today, so the beauty of the view kept changing as the light and cloud-cover shifted. I also mentioned that I am house-sitting for a pair of landscape architects, so, as you might imagine, the backyard is very beautiful. The last trip down the stairs happened after dark, and I had to stop and look at the parallelogram of light that the large windows up in my top floor perch were casting down on the yard. It didn�t look like artificial light, or like it was being cast from somewhere else. It was as if one portion of the garden was lit from within. Tomorrow morning I�m walking down all the stairs between here and civilization to meet Leah for breakfast and run some errands. Then I�m off to Benicia for a night to see my mom and pick up the luggage I left there. It�s hard to believe that I�m leaving a week from Thursday. It still feels like I really live here, even when I don�t have my own house.
But I do think that next semester will be good. I�ll be teaching a new course that I had fun putting together, and I�m also looking forward to continuing the faculty seminar I�ve been doing, rejoining my philosophy department reading group, and reuniting with my fluffy boyfriend HANS BLIX (TCNTUNWI).
10:13 p.m. - January 03, 2006
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