Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Dear everyone,

Hello! Winter is officially here, bringing along with it cold that wants to break off my ears like the poorly attached handles of old coffee cups. I'm feeling the cold less this year--or maybe it's feeling me less. Regardless, I've only recently noticed that it's now December and I'm always shivering. It seems sudden.
I guess you should know that today is this website's first birthday. It marks a whole year of relentless navel gazing, a year of facing two mirrors at each other and trying to make sense of the space in between. A whole year of looking for the bottom and finding only shallows.
I'd like to tell you that, after a year, I've reached conclusions that would let me shut down this vanity project. But that hasn't happened. What has happened is that, in the month that I've been tracking statistics, traffic to this website has double. What is that all about? Who are you people? I find it difficult to believe that a whole bunch of people spend any time at all watching me wiggle my own toes.
That said, I have come to a lot of conclusions lately. I've been trying to reinhabit my own head, to remove television and other distractions, to devolve. I've been spending nights and days back in my books, where I belong--chewing on mouthfuls of words, reading Raymond Carver poetry out loud to myself, squeezing myself inbetween lines and lines of hundred-year-old sentences and sleeping there curled up like a child. I find myself peaceful, and able to blush again.
I find myself.
I have decided to buy myself Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy for Christmas, her photo collection that I've been trying to convince myself to buy since I came across her work in 1999. It's all that I want for Christmas. I am contented these days in a way that surely won't last, but which I intend to enjoy fully while it's here. I am--for once--satisfied.
Things, you know, they're going to get pretty crazy for a few weeks. We'll all be running around and being festive, but part of this recent quiet is such an understanding of how important you all are to the good running of my life. Your evenings out and evenings in, your jokes, and your willingness to listen to me are the sparks that light up the darkness. So during this time for parties, you ought to know that I'm thinking about you.

Love,
samantha

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