is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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In my mind (where you�ll often find me).
I woke up this morning in some pain, but much less than yesterday. Best Ever got up to attend a morning appointment and I stayed in bed, cranked up the electric blanket to 11, and slept for two more hours with Hans Blix at my back and Buffy the Bison II at my front.
That�s right, Buffy the Bison has returned. (Perhaps you remember when Evany bought me Buffy the Bison I, and then when Pip killed Buffy.)
Buffy lives.
I finally woke up and did some yoga. Yoga is good at telling you what�s wrong with your body. And it�s also good at keeping things from being wrong with your body. But also: yoga is hard. Last night I was talking about how great yoga is and also how strange it is that so many people don�t believe a) how good it is and b) how difficult it is. I think lots of people think it isn�t really exercise. And yet the only real exercise I�ve done for the past two years, besides my normal walking and occasional hiking is yoga or pilates almost every day, and I look much better than I did two years ago, and also feel much better and weigh 15 pounds less than I did two years ago. Do not underestimate the yoga. (I should add that for reasons unclear to me pilates has made me more flexible than yoga ever did, so the combination of the two together is good, and helps keep away the boredom that attends always doing the same thing.)
Today I had a hard time doing any balancing poses on my right side, which was really strange. And I also felt like I was really out of shape, even though I�m not. It�s good to note these things. And it is especially good for someone like me, who spends too much time in her head, and who constantly finds bruises she doesn�t remember getting (from walking into tables because I�m thinking, or something) to do something that always brings me back to the body that isn�t really so separate from the mind. (You can make a career out of making the argument that the mind and body aren�t separate, and still be someone who is a bit too stuck in her mind.)
Oh, here�s a good one. Last week when I went to see Judith Butler give a talk at Temple University, she said to the whole auditorium, while she was answering an audience question about Levinas, that her old graduate student Jill S� was in the audience and that made her nervous about answering questions about Levinas because apparently Jill S� knows the answers much better than she does. I couldn�t tell if I was flattered or horrified. But I suppose the two often go together. I got some teasing later.
Also, when I was in Edmonton for the job interview and I had to teach the class on Foucault, I did actually end up making the point about how funny it was to be talking about discipline in a situation where I was both disciplining (teaching) and being disciplined (job candidate). The students liked that. The observers laughed, too. Sometimes I can�t stop myself from talking.
I just got some new stones (iykwim) and have some new necklaces planned, and then I�m going to open a shop on etsy, so I�ll let you know. New necklaces will be made mostly of amethyst, smoky quartz, black onyx, and some really great multi-hued jasper. Old necklaces are here. If you see one you like, you can buy it. Or order one custom-made. It is too late for you to be the first, however. That honor goes to awesome Becky.
In other news, I got an email from a reader informing me that there really is a �share the lotion� campaign. An albino African musician has a charity that hands out sunscreen to people who really need it against the powerful African sun. It�s interesting. And it�s also funny, in the way that it makes Caroleen and I look like jerks. Mittens is Insensitive! You think it�s all fun and games when you are funning about dirty hippy hikers, and then all of a sudden everything is DEADLY SERIOUS.
(However I should make clear that that was not the tenor of the email I received. Mittens spun that out into a joke all on our own. Because we are insensitive. Though some of Mittens may have sensitive skin.)
I went to Bill�s birthday party on Saturday night in NYC. Bill�s the one who, like me, often has theme parties. Perhaps you remember his Sixteen Candles party, the one where I dressed up as the cake. Well, this year he and his GF are newly moved into a swank loft in Soho, and they have a no-shoes-in-the-house policy (to which I object on some level, because the shoes make the outfit), so the theme this year was dope socks. You just had to wear some dope socks, my friend, and don�t go biting anyone else�s style. I wore the silly socks I bought at Target that say Bling!!! all over them and have diamond patterns. Wendy, of course, stole everyone�s fire by wearing Jaws socks from the 70s, with huge shark jaws lunging out of her calves. A Beastie Boy was there, as well as a number of famous toy-making hipsters, and tattoo artists and other artists, as were Linda and Marian and Patrick, and Jerry and Julie (both of whom I recently saw at the hip hop party in San Francisco, and we laughed at our bi-coastiality). I met a saucy girl who was talking about how odd it is that short short rompers are back in, and who could wear them, and maybe she wishes she could, and I said, �I was not at all thinking that you couldn�t,� so she admitted that she sometimes DID, but then half way through the day she felt exhausted by herself, so I shared with her the theory of ROCKING the outfit. She asked if I ever wore rompers back in the day. I said no, but then admitted that I used to wear those So So Very Short Micro Mini skirts made by Betsey Johnson. Man, how those were my most favoritist items for so long. And man, are they short! I still have three or four of them (my closet is a bit of a Betsey Johnson museum). I wore one to my superhero party, but otherwise I think I may now be too old to carry that off. Not to mention that it really isn�t how things are anymore. Who wears those? And I don�t mean that in a bad way like I miss my youth.
Bill and Yuki also have the wii, so I spent some time watching people make ridiculous gesticulations while reportedly playing a video game of some sort. In my mind (where you�ll often find me) it amused me to imagine that the two players weren�t playing, but rather were having a wildly expressive conversation, and then I would imagine what they were saying to each other, and try to think of the most or least appropriate thing they might be discussing, and then I would laugh. And then I would look crazy, sitting on the couch, laughing. I kind of wished for a compatriot who would be willing to fill in the other half of the imagined conversation with me, but there was too much going on in the room.
Also, there was some Japanese kid�s show on the television for a long time for the benefit of Jerry and Julie�s kids, Maceo, Lula, and Cassius. It was a very strange show. At one point the guy on the couch next to me admitted that he owned all the DVDs for the show. I questioned him about this for awhile to ascertain the level of his sanity, and then learned that he was one of those artist-toymakers, and had made some money making toys of the characters in the show. Fully sane, and a nice guy.
Also that night I went to the Deitch project to see the opening of a husband of a friend of a friend�s new book of photos of living/working artists. It was great. I also ran into Mike Viola and Audrey Landreth there. I hadn�t seen Mike for quite awhile� perhaps since the night that, because of him, Evany and I ended up having a late night dinner with Boz Scaggs at Zuni, and then I ended up getting into an argument about grammar with Robyn Hitchcock. (Ha! What a night!) (Mike was on tour opening for RH.) And who knows how long it had been since I had seen Audrey. They look great! They don�t seem to be aging at all, much like Prince. That they have a two-year-old kid and still seem not to be aging strikes me as magical.
It may be the case that I had not seen Audrey since back in the day when I was wearing the super super short micro minis in a fairly constant way. There was a whole summer spent (or lost) in a bar in Greenwich Village with me and Wendy and Mike and Chris and Adam and a cast of rotating characters, drinking and occasionally singing songs (some of which would end up on the first FoW album!).
I haven�t heard Mike sing for awhile. It is a wonderful thing to hear Mike sing.
Apparently Mike sings on some tracks on the the new Fountains of Wayne album which approacheth. April 3, my friends. Get ready for traffic and weather.
Anyway, Saturday evening started when I couldn�t find the Deitch place and Wendy was not on IM or texting or email or phone (she was underground in the subway) and it was bitterly bitterly cold, so cold I felt like I might cry (plus did I mention I was also in pain on Saturday night?) so I turned a corner and saw Lucky Strike, a bar I used to go to fairly often in the early 90s, because steamy hot Ian worked there. I walked the hell into that bar and ordered a glass of Basil Hayden on the rocks and everything seemed right with the world. Wendy found me there and we hung out talking about mutual friends, and then set off for the gallery.
The timeline of this diary entry is challenging. Don�t worry yourself over it.
Talking to some people about pain recently, I�ve realized that lots of people go through life with much less exposure to physical pain than I. Of course I�m happy for these people. But it�s interesting to note, because it�s not like I feel that my life has been defined by pain or that it plays a huge role in my life. Mostly it�s a problem solved, at this point. Still, lately I have pains that seem to be much, much, so very much worse when it is really cold outside. The pains are probably a little bit about aging but also mostly, I suspect, about hormone fluctuating that is hard to track because of all the various abnormalities that define my bodily existence. So perhaps I�ll keep a diary to track occurrences so I can figure out what�s what, because the way things are right now is NOT OK. But nor is it unlivable. My life is pretty damned good, so just don�t worry about it, OK? I don�t!
In short: Don�t worry about all the pain-writing. In part that is a practice of pain-abatement, to focus on something other than feeling pain, or to envision the pain as being useful for something. Writing about things is often how I figure out how or what I feel about said things.
2:36 p.m. - February 05, 2007
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