Dear everyone,

I was cooking tonight, bopping around the kitchen in my dorky glasses to Sinatra, making soup, and I realized that although February was a short month it ended up being an uncommonly good one. This is probably just in light of the last couple of weeks, which I might tell you about some other time, but as of this exact moment I've found myself in the best mood.
I am really not much of a gambler--too timid for it, too afraid of everything going wrong. Which is very likely just what the trouble with me is. (That, and my habit of ending sentences in improper ways.)

While we were kitten shopping yesterday I met a very small black-and-white fellow with a sour disposition and only one eye. If there was ever a pirate kitty it was this one, and if there was ever a kitten that I ought to own it would be the pirate sort. The fellow thought that I should get it and train it to sit on my shoulder, and then adopt a whole crew of misfit kitties to man the ship, but I'm not allowed to have such things in my apartment. Today I discovered that the little guy is this one, and that makes me very sad.

My nan has recently been forced into a nursing home, and is now doing her best to make life miserable for the better part of my family. That's really pretty par for the course with her, but because everyone is already feeling guilty she's found what amounts to a whole new playground for psychic dodgeball. I'm worried about her, and not a little bit upset about just how useless I am from this distance.

I've been participating in too many late nights full of whispering and hesitant confessions recently, as well as an unladylike like amount of being lazy and giggling. It's all very fun and I plan to continue doing it for as long as I can. It's still cold and rainy but spring is on the way--the daffodils are coming up and the cherry trees are starting to bloom. And you know what that means--it means it's only a matter of weeks until I'll be skipping up to strangers and offering to read their palms through the reflection in their eyes.

love,
me

The search for a kitten ended today with a tweedy apricot colored bunch of soft that the fellow will be able to take home in a week. She is seriously adorable and sweet, and the two of them were best friends pretty much immediately. I, unsurprisingly, melted into a little puddle of samantha. All of my plans for next weekend now involve trying to steal the kitten's affection away.

(P.S., Dayment: At the Sunset on Saturday night Chris rocked out so hard on his keytar that his glasses fell off. It was possibly the most adorable thing ever.)

I was back at the Crocodile last night, almost full circle from two weeks ago, sitting next to the same person. The three of us were chatting--or, anyway, the two of them were reminiscing and I was giggling--when a drunken fellow swayed over and asked if he could take our picture. Adam, much quicker on the uptake, rabbited up from the booth and away from the man with the camera, saying, "You can take a picture of them."
Caroline and I exchanged glances, unsure what to do. This doesn't happen to either one of us, and so we sat there looking dumbly at each other while he took his picture and left.

Today, after a lovely lunch with the lovely Ryan, I wandered around town trying to shop for clothes. This is always a terrible and frustrating process because I am smaller than the vast majority of the population over the age of twelve, and also because everything currently in style makes me look pregnant. I wish that I was being hyperbolic, but I'm not, and as a result spent most of my day off grumbling. Which was still better than staying in my office and doing the same thing.

When we walked through the door, all the fish were hovering at the top of the tank. One floated upside down--still alive, but upside down all the same. As I watched, it turned over and struggled downward, only to bob back up towards the surface. A second fish floated up toward the first and slowly rolled onto its side.
I couldn't stop watching, able to tear my eyes away from the sickly creatures only when they were closed.

When I got into my cab, the driver was on his cell phone. He asked where we were going and then returned to his conversation, coordinating a trip for tomorrow to go somewhere and buy spy equipment.

In one incarnation of my dad's band there was a guitar player named Mike who could play his guitar with his lips and tongue. It was a trick he'd pull out towards the end of a set when he was getting tired and his already mediocre playing was getting worse. Anyway, it was a trick he'd use up until the night that a string got caught between two of his teeth, slicing his gums right open.

This has been a completely decadent weekend full of not getting out of bed except for things like pizza and shooting pool, which has also resulted in an almost complete media blackout. This was not originally what I had intended for the weekend, but it was certainly worthwhile.
Now it's starting to feel a little bit like I'm coming down with something, which would be really unfortunate because this is going to be a heck of a busy week.

I've been on a major Magnetic Fields kick for the past week. Up until last Thursday's tribute night I hadn't listened to any of 69 Love Songs in ages, but now I can't take it out of my stereo. And it's sort of funny how the same songs that made me keep drinking last week are just provoking smiles this week. It's amazing, the difference a week makes, and I want you to remind me of that when things fall apart and I go back to drinking.

It's been another week-and-a-half of only being home long enough to shower and sleep and check my email, so tonight I intend to be home, whispering gossip to the ceiling and reading Art Forum.

Valentines Day was the sort of raging success that can only be expected when you get five sassy girls into a room and let them get all hopped up on sugar. I'm a laughing sort of girl, but I actually ached from all the laughing by the time we finally left.

Last night involved a yummy dinner and amusing company. The long weekend is largely unplanned, aside from the usual volunteering and Monday French lessons, but it might also have a little bit of playing with kittens. Small things are cute.

And if I knew better, I would run in three different directions back towards what I already know. But I have never been one that knows better, and so it looks like I'll be keeping on down the one way I know nothing about. It is, in the end, the more interesting way to go.

There are only so many options that I will erase from my dance card, so many hedges I will hide behind. After that what I'm going to do is jump out and giggle at your shoes, and there's nothing that can be done about it. I am in possession of more smiles than I tend to give myself credit for.

Today's mail brought me an aerogramme from Kenya, something I've never found in my mailbox before. The stamps have avocados on them.

I have very little to say to you, as the things that are happening aren't the sort that I write about here. Friday involved another cab ride home, Saturday was volunteering and Caroline's birthday party. Yesterday I took a trip to the Henry, and tonight we had a party to celebrate Julie's promotion. I'm a terribly busy lass, and as of right now I just want to go to sleep.

Happy Valentine's Day to you all. I do not think I will be repeating last year's night of Jaeger-fueled debauchery, of red cocktails and gay bars and ill-advised decisions. I think I'll probably spend the evening with nice girls having cookies or something. Just for something different.

Walking into the bathroom at the bar last night, I happened upon a girl doing coke. There was little counter space, so instead she had a bar napkin held up to her nose, sniffing the drugs up off a small mound. When I opened the door she looked at me, unconcerned, and asked if I wanted any. Because people in Seattle are very polite.
I said no. I'm not into coke, and even if I was I was on a date and did not need to be any more jittery.
I returned to the table and told the story to the assembled group. The boys in the band vowed to start hanging out outside women's bathrooms.

A few hours later there's a knock at the door. Neither one of us moves to answer it, and soon enough the knocking stops. I consider asking who might be stopping by in the middle of the night, but decide against it because I probably don't want to know.

My sometimes-walking-home partner--who looks strangely like John Turturro in Barton Fink--and I discovered a hidden cache of almost ripe blackberries today. They're in a spot that's pretty sheltered from the wind and the worst of the cold, I guess, and somehow they have decided that now is the time. We capered in front of them briefly and then left them alone to finish whatever it is they have to do. It would have been mean to eat them.

A little farther down the road a man with a beard halfway down his chest lost his hat to the wind, and I caught it. I handed the hat back and he reached out to shake my hand. While we were shaking, I noticed a tiny braid hidden toward the left side of his beard.

I've been hiding out the last couple of days, laying low and trying to divest myself of my skin like a cranky little snake. I'm tired of being me again, so I've been pretending to be Popeye--which, as it turns out, I'm not very good at. Tobes says I'm going through "emotional detox" as a result of my recent decision to quit it with the pursuance of a particular fellow, but I find that phrase just too emo to be borne.
So instead, I will be Popeye.

I need to go out. A lot. Let's hang out in bars, people, wearing sassy, sassy outfits.

I spent Sunday at a play and then at the Casa French drinking pomegranate mojitos and making valentines and reading fashion magazines and being girly. Yesterday I had my French lesson and today I really ought to do my dishes. Although I tried to convince them that 8:30 was a waking up time and not a having a meeting time I ended up with a very early meeting, and now I could use a nap. And a pizza, too, but maybe in reverse order.

I sometimes wonder if you're not all one big McGuffin, but if you are, I apologize for your insertion into this particular not-so-interesting plot.

Not only did the day's windstorm bring us an interesting array of fallen branches, it also lent the day a quality of light that I remember from thunderstorms that would only last 15 minutes but would, in that time, readjust the landscape. We don't have a lot of extreme weather out here, and I forget how the bottom portions of my brain feel it.

I'm bored of my usual way of projecting how things are, through Pirandello or the extended serpentine curves of Parmagianino, or even through the way the Etruscans used mirrors to spotlight the walls they were painting in the resting places of the entombed. Today I am tired of filtering, and ought to be participating in the tangible--cleaning my apartment, which is full of piles of junk mail and shoes due to my habit of overscheduling, or baking muffins, or mending holes in my clothes.

I am not the builder of bridges that you think I am, but I will take your lack of guidance to mean that you like to be surprised.

When I got back to my desk this afternoon after a "Mad Libs" session, I found a voicemail from my mother instructing me to call my grandmother and, "tell her what the vowels are." Which was the oddest request that I've had recently, but I'm a good daughter and so I called.
Apparently, an argument was raging in my mother's house this afternoon because my grandmother had never heard of, "and sometimes y." My opinion--because my degree was in English and evidently is supposed to mean something--was required. Unfortunately for me, the addition of "y" was not what my grandmother wanted to hear, and I was ordered to cease thinking of it as a possible fill-in vowel posthaste.
My mother, in the background, was shrieking with laughter. I didn't even ask how the subject came up.

(Also, I have spent the last few evenings self-medicating with lots of cocktails and many, many pitchers of beer. I only point this out because one of my New Years resolutions was to hydrate better while drinking--or, at least, afterwards--to have fewer hangovers. I have so far not yet shown up to the office hung over. Yay me.)

I meet people on buses, mostly late at night and mostly much older men. They usually sound a little confused, like they've just missed a train, and they usually want to chat--just small talk and sometimes mild jokes, until it is time for one of us to get off the bus. Their voices are small, hesitant, and I believe that they just want a little plain-faced girl to talk with.

I'm pretty sure I remind them of someone; a girl next door or a high school sweetheart or whatever it is that some men miss. I am a generic lass and it seems like they feel a little happier, chatting with me. And of course it makes me feel a little bit better, too--a little bit less like that girl that you don't notice, a little less like your younger sister. A little less like the girl left behind.

Because in the end, I'm pretty sure that the old men on buses and I are looking for the same thing only exactly the opposite. And comfort is found in the unlikeliest of places, so a bus in the middle of the night sort of--when you think about it--makes a lot of sense.