Randomness. It was gorgeous this evening. I might not have noticed - I usually traverse the City underground, and see only my own little neighborhood once I emerge, mole-like, from beneath the streets - but I was the third warm body that enabled a colleague to use the carpool lane on the way home, and so the dazzling clarity of the air, and the sparkling lights of the City pulled me on a long walk downtown from the business district where I was dropped off.
What a gorgeous place to live.
*
I have been away from my screen in the evenings because my eyes need a rest. However, to rest them, I elected... to read. I read
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which is a cyberpunk-like, dark future novel about a thoroughly franchised future... It is the novel that my friend Peter always wants to borrow names from. Well, one name, actually.
Peter: And my main character will be called... Hiro Protagonist.
Me: No.
Peter: It's a great name!
Me: NO!
Peter: B--
Me: NOOOOOOO!
Or something along those lines. (Yes, the main character is Hiro Protagonist. Hiro is prounounced like /hero/.)
*
Best line from a colleague about a coffee cup's perception of being in a dishwashing machine:
I think your cup should think of it less as housekeeper-sanctioned waterboarding and more like a spa massage.
It's fun to speak with other people who write frequently, like this particular colleague. While I write in legalese and wound up sounding very dry and formal, she can make reference to 'clouds weeping' to describe rain and it sounds completely natural.
*
Silliest conversation of all of last week:
Me: ...and then I had to tell her what Muzak was.
L: Who here doesn't know what Muzak is?
Me: [name of uninformed freak].
L: Can you imagine being a Muzak musician? Wouldn't that be wild? You go into work and you say, "Let's do some Air Supply! Or let's do [sings] 'Sailing, takes me away to where I've wanted to be....'
Both of us: [do fake air solos on horns and piano while humming to replace Christopher Cross' lyrics in Muzak version]
Me: [laugh so hard I cry]
*
Siouxsie has a recent album out called
Mantaray, which includes a song called "Heaven and Alchemy." The song has lyrics like:
I'm in love
With the idea of you
and at first I thought that was
the most obvious thing in the world, before realizing that most people aren't very good at separating fantasy from reality. It's actually a reasonably observant thing to say.
When you feel affection for someone you don't know well, it's because you have a mental fantasy about how you think they should be, and you adore THAT more than the actual person. There are people whom I have adored from afar who could never, ever, ever live up to my internal fantasy of them: being near them in person was periodically repellent in that it was a reminder that they were real, and had all of the failings of ordinary mortals. (Ick.) But the affection for idea(l)s applies to places, activities, and other sorts of dreams.
There is a bookstore I love, though I am often disappointed when I go there, because it can't live up to the concept I have of the shop as a container for pure genius representing the culture of ideas in which I want to live. There are nightclubs that always get me excited to go to, but when I'm there, I realize the idea of what it would be like was better. Japan was my first international trip, which I visited alone for about three weeks, and there were countless times when the country failed to live up to my historical and aesthetic fantasies. Just about anyone I know had a first sexual experience that falls into this category. Certain sorts of religious rituals. Weddings of friends that involve long, long, painfully long, oh come rescue us now please from this lengthy sermon rife with dogma. Certain kinds of cake...
It is a punishment for creative optimism that the world can be less than we dream of it.
The dreaming is still awfully fun, however.
Labels: easily distracted
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:11 PM