The Man fixed the electricity problem. I do love men, don’t you?

I’ve got three blog posts to write today. (Yes, I really am sticking to a schedule). I’ve spent the morning doing anything but work. I’m organizing old photos and music. I plan on making lists at some point, lots and lots of lists, but I haven’t even begun thinking about the lists. I’m watching the birds dig around in the wasteland that is our back garden in winter. They’re sending dead leaves and wet twigs everywhere.

My books for next term arrived yesterday. I’m quite excited to read W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, but otherwise I’m unimpressed. Beloved I read years and years ago and despised. I hope I was wrong about it, that I was just being a snotty teenager, but as I recall, my general impression was, why does Toni Morrison have to write like this?

I’m digging KCRW this morning. My tea is just the right drinking temperature and I’m bobbing my head around to the Dandy Warhols and Loudon Wainwright, and Michael Franti. Not the most promising way to start a day meant to be rife with accomplishment, but good fun anyway. I’ll check back later.

Last night I caught the household milling around me, wisps of conversation floating into half-attentive ears: “she’s asleep,” “what are we going to do about her?” “do you think she wants a blanket?” No, I thought, I do not want a blanket. If you give me a blanket, I will sleep here all night, and wake up with the buttons of my jeans pressed into my skin and my arm numb from all my weight crushing against it. I think what came out of my mouth, however, and in the form of a feeble mumble, was, “mmmm num num.”

In the morning, we awake drenched in hot sunlight. The two comforters my mother has kindly placed on the guest bed seem excessive and I throw them off dramatically, leaving my skin to soak up bright yellow lines of sunshine. It is rarely any later than 8:30, and we find we cannot find sleep again, so we get up. We have breakfast. We marvel at the morning.

It’s something to do with the light, of course. But also to do with the stillness outside. When nature itself seems to be sleeping, curled in on itself, the hills lying flat, black silhouettes on a navy sky, no artificial light but a small stream from the house spilling onto the silver line of driveway, it takes all my will to convince my body that it, despite all of the world’s cues, should stay bright and awake.

Part of me feels this is the right way to be: attuned to the rhythms of something greater than oneself; lying and rising to moonlight and sunlight. Another part of me craves the proximity of a city. I think of Oxford, where I’ll soon be, and how refreshing it is to be within walking distance of one’s friends, to have the glow of streetlights to guide you home late at night. I find I cannot reconcile these duel desires except to console myself that each belongs to me, in some way (or I belong to each, perhaps more accurately); that each draws me and repels me with equal force, and that no-one except myself would ever demand that I make a permanent choice about lifestyle when I am still so young. And so I free myself.

This afternoon, inspired by bright skies and dramatic clouds, we drove down Santa Rosa road for tea with the Cadwells. Their house from the outside blends into the countryside: a simple, one-story cottage, with a tiled roof and vines climbing up its sides. Inside it looks like something concocted in a Bohemian reverie: dark wood with cracks and character, bright teal walls in the kitchen, peach colored ones in the office, and yellow ones in the lounge, tablecloths with flowers and patterns that only someone high could come up with, but anyone can appreciate. There are papers strewn about and wildly imaginative artwork displayed above a creaky piano that has been out of tune since I first met the Cadwells, about twelve years ago. We sat at the dining table and drank tea from delicate cups with saucers and ate lots of things with sugar (mini macaroons, honey-filled biscuits, English Christmas pudding that Xander carried all the way from Britain), alongside English Stilton cheese with persimmons and walnuts.

Meanwhile, Clara’s baby, nine months old and dressed in a striped jumpsuit, crawled his way around the table and bounced happily from open arms to open arms, deigning to crack a smile only on rare occasions but mostly looking slightly disgusted with the gluttony of the adults. Once he tried to feed Olive a slice of persimmon; she took it willingly in her teeth before he suddenly yanked it back, as if he had decided at the last moment that in fact she would not do, this silly aunt of his: not worthy of persimmon slices, not worthy of his efforts. Olive, collapsed in giggles, ruffled his hair and he snuggled deeper into her lap. Outside, the light was trying to turn to dusk but only half its heart was in it: the brightness lingered, settling over the horizon, shooting down over the fields below.

We decided to make an attempt at wine-tasting further down the road. We arrived just as they were closing up the tasting room at Sanford, but very kindly, we were served anyway, and I learned to properly swish the wine round my glass (something I’d only partially mastered before), and that, according to Xander, you get the strongest taste by making silly sucking noises through your teeth (the air does something to the wine, allegedly). We watched the sun simper down towards the horizon, hesitating, shooting glorious rays our way, coyly hiding behind bare tree branches, teasing, taunting, until a fuzzy grey darkness finally covered us.
On the way back we looked at real estate ads in local papers: this one’s just $24 million, and look! A bargain at $15 million.

Earlier I had been caught up in thoughts of how I wanted a house like the Cadwells’—shabby but warm, with the smell of a wood fire in winter and the french windows opened wide in summer. Now all I thought was: how do people in the modern world afford to make a home of their own? Whilst I ponder that, I shall work out how to cover my $100+ electricity bill—the product of the first month of a Boston winter, and quite a change from my September bill, which was only $12 (I am reminded yet again to be thankful that I no longer live there). The bar graph on the bill looks like an error, but it isn’t—it’s just a map of the jump between seasons.

Now we are home, and it is 7:30, and one suspects that as the clock strikes 9 I will again become hopelessly sleepy.

It is always on days like this that you run out of milk. The day when the only thing you can do, if you’ve got any sense, is stay inside close to the heater and listen to jazz (cheery jazz—of the 1930s big band variety, primarily, though Brett Dennen does me well too, if I feel like having a voice in the house.) with cup after cup of tea.

Thesis presentation next week. I’ve completely neglected my thesis, to be honest. Now I feel the weight of it bearing down on my shoulders—I spent all summer using it as an excuse to do nothing else, but read and write and be merry in the evenings, but my accomplishments to date seem meager compared with what I still have left to do. I MUST get something done today. On that note, (a spark of inspiration??) I shall away to try to remember what it was I meant to explore in the first place, and then, with any luck, get things done.

Have also been informed that googling “creature of perpetual worrying” brings me (well, my blog, anyhow) to the top of the results. Appropriate, isn’t it?

I’m feeling, you see, really, frightfully self-indulgent today. And in fact quite miserable. Not in an unfixable down-in-the-dumps kind of way so much as in an existential-crisis sort of way, which is better, because it stems, I know, from thinking too much, so if I know what’s good for me I’ll do things that keep me from thinking too much, like running and reading and the like. The only problem with reading is that every two pages or so I look up and apply what I’ve just read to my own life, with the result that I think doubly as hard as I would if I wasn’t reading (just imagine trying to apply Gaudy Night to your own ultra-modern life, and your head will boggle, I promise).

Have finished cup #1 now. So must go off to make #2. Sadly it’s a beautiful day outside, so I must go and enjoy it. If it was raining hard, or better yet, snowing (yes, stranger things have happened in Boston than snow in October, I’m sure), I could justify staying inside all day, steeling myself against the world, having, say, four or even five cups of tea, reading my entire book, and taking a long nap. As it is I think I shall have to put on dark glasses and face what looks, from my window, like a perfectly gorgeous fall day. Poor little me, eh?

Have discovered that the best thing to do when I start feeling really, deeply mopey is to get myself up off the floor (quite literally: this has become my favorite curl-up-and-read/feel-sorry-for-myself spot…a patch of rug near the wall where I’ve set up a few blankets), do some dishes, and cook myself some food. It’s a struggle, but it helps. I very nearly crawled straight upstairs to bed at about 8 PM, but something in me said: no, that’s not going to help, and you know, it wouldn’t have. Soup and asparagus, however, and all my spoons and forks drying in the rack, have cheered me greatly.

I love hearing the rain beating down outside. Especially when I can sit and read with a cup of tea. Which I shall be making forthwith.