Simultaneity.

Of course the leaves are falling. Friday night I went to sleep in the middle of a tempest the likes of which I haven't heard since arriving here: the wind so fierce that I could almost hear the birch trees in the courtyard losing what's left of their yellow leaves. In the morning, the trees were noticeably more bare, and the wind had been so harsh that the leaves hadn't even gathered on the ground; they'd been blown somewhere else altogether. Bit by bit, we're approaching winter.

Yet today I found a new set of trees that are flowering--and I think that these might be cherry trees. Crocuses bloom along the Avenue leading to Trinity. A house on the way to my piano teacher's has snapdragons in its yard.

More significant, though, is the fact that willow trees apparently start getting ready for their new leaves even as they're losing their old ones. At least, that's how I interpret what I saw from Trinity Bridge this afternoon, before the porter in his bowler hat started to talk to me.

When in doubt, walk.

And just keep going. And don't look back.

There will your heart be also.

Then there was the night I stopped on Trinity Bridge without anyone. Stopped because there were the geese again, some coming single-file toward others clustered tightly around a floating light raft of willow leaves. And clacking together with their great black beaks, making a sound like balsawood ice cream spoons snapping, like wooden noisemakers making the same noise over and over. It was 4:30 and dark. I flattened myself to the bridge's stone and peered down at the geese, intent on pulling whatever they could out of those floating leaves. Down the river, goose after goose arrived at the bank and falumphed into the water and followed the others to the leaves. The full and finished geese peeled away, paddled upriver.

It is difficult for me to remember how the current flows. I can only grasp it by thinking of places very far away.

An older man who'd fairly trotted out of Trinity came onto the bridge. What is it, he said, trying to see what I was seeing. The geese, I said, I'm listening to the geese. I pointed. What are they doing, he said. I think they're eating out of those willow leaves. How do they see anything in the dark, he said. He watched for a few seconds more, then trotted away down the dark avenue.

I will be having the birds all to myself for quite some time, I think.

Further lessons in readjustment.

Today I discovered that when Skype forwards calls to my mobile phone, I pay not $.02 but £.16 per minute. Whoops. To make this comparison apples and apples, I've been thinking that the charge would be $.02/min., when it's actually more like $.36/min. Thus suggesting, once again, that things that seem too good to be true often are.

On the other hand, on some very special occasions, other things that seem too good to be true might be just that elusive combination of good and true.

The whole day hasn't been this cryptic. Some parts of it were rather silly, others rather lovely. Chief amongst the latter: correctly timing when to do which activities so as to maximize time spent in the sun. Practicing the piano at noon means that I sit in a pool of sunlight. Sitting down to work at my desk at 3 means I sit in a pool of (setting) sunlight once again. Walking between 1 and 2:30 means not only that I can stride through sunlight but also that I increase my chances of catching an orchestra rehearsing (badly out of tune, alas) in Trinity College's chapel, where I almost took pictures of the high gorgeous light despite the fact that often one is meant not to photograph inside chapels. Instead, I just listened.

For those of you keeping score at home, it is entirely true that I have not been writing for a long time--since before Bristol, in fact, and that's nearly a month ago now. I am gearing up for the next prose push, which has me turning back to some texts that I know well and turning through some that I've long wanted to know but have never explored, and lighting upon others of which I'd never heard before I found them in the marketplace or about which I'd forgotten until someone chanced to mention them recently.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this week has brought some seismic shifts in my senses of what I'm doing here, and of what the relationship between here and home is now and will be. These shifts are going to be all-important: they are about knowing and respecting what and where my real life is.

Tonight, I feel mighty--which is good, because tomorrow a couple of serious tasks (not to mention a couple of very trivial ones) have to get done.

Taking one's time.

It would seem that I'll be doing repeated rounds of stock-taking while I'm here, something that should not surprise me--and something that I'm trying to figure out how to keep under close enough control so that I don't let it overwhelm the actual living that I'm here to do.

I love the concept of embracing one's imperfections; I love it enough that when my piano teacher said to me, a couple of weeks ago, that she wanted me to work toward perfection because I'm capable of it, a red flag went up in my head. And yet, toward what else do we strive? I think that what I'm aiming for now is the perfection of the imperfect: the ability to recognize how necessarily partial my aims are always going to be, simply because I can't do every single thing that I want to do. "How is the piano?" my newly-returned Canadian friend asked me when she turned up for formal dinner tonight. "It's wonderful," I replied, "but I think it's cutting into my work time." "Of course it is," she said. "That's what you're here for."

I needed her to come back and say something like that to me, because I've been tipping over into feeling bad about not getting enough done these past few days. My emotions about my work and about my life, and about what constitutes each, and about what I think about when I think about "home"--all of these things have been in vast and varied flux in the three months I've been here. Some days, and today was one of them, when I do my best, it doesn't necessarily seem to yield much: I'm tired from the beginning, there's a conversation I need to have, there's a practice I need to do, there are errands I need to run, and then by the time I'm sitting down to read, I'm even more tired than I was when I launched into it all. And then there's dinner, that institution.

I know that things are slipping out of whack when I feel myself starting to think about skipping dinner--not formal hall, certainly, but the regular weeknight dinners--so that I can try to get some work done. I could hunt back a couple of months and re-read myself extolling the virtues of being on a schedule, getting up early, eating regular meals. But I don't need to re-read myself. I was here; I remember. What I will spend that time doing, instead, is remembering what I tell my students: progress and improvement don't happen in straight lines. Sometimes there's a doubling back. This is even more likely to be the case if one is trying to build a healthier life than if one is trying to learn to write an analytical essay. But sometimes I feel as though I've always been figuring out how to live. And here I bring myself, once again, right to the threshold of this thing about which I want to write but through which I am still feeling my way: the place of waiting in my life, and the function of the not-yet-here. I am still collecting my thoughts. You'll get them soon.

The picture: that's one of the little streets up which I walk to get to and from the grocery store, which was behind me, just over my right shoulder when I took this picture at 4:30.

Ends of days.

Nothing so apocalyptic as the End of Days, just ends, piling up. Tomorrow we're at mid-week already. I feel I've stopped having enough to show for these piles of days, a restlessness that suggests to me that tomorrow may be the day I'll have to write about the tension between waiting and making.

Cavalcade.

Put two grand pianos onstage, perform Bach and Rachmaninov and Bartok until everyone--perfomers and audience alike--turns pink in the cheeks, and at least one person will walk home in the cold dreaming of the day when she too might own a Steinway and sing out through it like that.

No gentle going.

I so want to write about the ten white hairs I just tweezed from around my ears, and about my knowledge that there are even more where those came from, not to mention all the ones on parts of my head I can't see. Honestly, tonight, for the first time, this seemingly immediate proliferation of white hair freaks me out just a little: it is my body's surest sign (and in this I know I am blest) that time isn't ever going to go backward, and that realization brings a lot of other, older ones back up in its train. But this is as it is, even if it does seem to be happening a little earlier than I'd imagined.

I'm doing a lot of meditating on life's funny constitution out of simultaneous presentness and anticipation. But doing these thoughts justice is going to take more brainpower than I have left at the end of this day.

Lunch? Gorgeous and gracious. My hosts got a piece of breakfast pie out of the deal, and I, meanwhile, still have three-quarters of an ovoid pie on my kitchen counter. "Gott in himmel," my friend said as I sliced into this one this evening. "Look at that."

I find myself no longer satisfied with being clumsy because I'm trying to move too quickly. I'm trying to slow down even more, to give myself time to change direction as necessary, to accommodate people who flail in my vicinity. (When I started writing this paragraph, I was thinking of literal, physical movement. See how figures of speech get started?)

Baking for famous women.

Tomorrow afternoon, I will head out across town to have lunch with one of the most famous people I've ever met. At her house. Now, when faced with an unexpected and generous invitation to dine at a luminously eminent person's house, one inevitably asks, "What should I contribute to this event?" When I posed this question to my friend, he replied, without hesitation, "Chocolates." But that idea seemed nothing short of prosaic to me.

And anyhow, I had my instincts to guide me. I just had to pay attention to them.

So, when I head across town, I'll be carrying an apple pie with me.

I still haven't figured out British pastry ingredients, and that's also the edge of an oval pie you see there: though I have finally located ceramic pie dishes, the affordable one (mysteriously! because people like pie!) has sold out at the new cookshop in town, and the extravagant one, while red and gorgeous, raises the uncomfortable prospect of having to say tomorrow, "Um, can I have my dish back?" Whereas if this one gets left behind and never returned, it's no great loss.

One of my favorite nights in graduate school came the last time I baked desserts for a famous woman in my field: my dissertation director, who was retiring. I volunteered to bake pies for a massive conference-weekend-ending supper that was taking place at her house, being led to believe that I would bake a few pies and then my department would be kicking in a cake or something as a central dessert. A couple of days before the weekend's conference got underway, the administrative assistant planning the event called me up and said that they (I never found out who made up this "they") had decided it would be nicer if I made all the desserts, so that they could take center-stage. Because I love my dissertation director, I agreed to this ridiculousness.

But then the fun began.

Thursday evening or Friday morning--I don't remember which, now, though I think I was a grader that semester, so it probably wasn't in the morning, when my discussion session met--I bought the ingredients for a flourless chocolate cake with raspberry coulis, a blueberry pie, an apple pie, a cherry pie. And some other pie I can't remember. Perhaps there were two apple pies, or two blueberry ones. Perhaps I made a mixed berry pie. In any case, there were many pies.

I attended the afternoon's portion of the conference, then headed home with some friends and got to work. Occasionally, they found ways to make me let them help: someone else followed the instructions for the fresh raspberry sauce, for instance. The chocolate cake went first, because it was terra incognita. But The Joy of Cooking has almost never led me astray (though I find it nearly impossible to make their molten lava chocolate cakes come out of the oven with molten centers, alas). Within a couple of hours, there was almost literally unbelievably rich and dense chocolate cake cooling in my kitchen, and a pie was underway.

At 10 p.m., three of us took a break and took another famous Victorianist (i.e., not my dissertation director) bowling at the local lanes. We tried to convince him to come to my house and go for a ride on the Sit 'n Spin, but he (wisely) demurred.

I arrived home around, oh, 1--and promptly got back to work on the baking. While we were bowling, several people had stayed behind in my house, drinking cosmopolitans and, in one very talented person's case, wielding my old utilty knife to create, from a regular old sheet of paper, a fantastically gorgeous stencil with which we could powder sugar the top of the cake to proclaim that the party's honoree rocked (because she did, and does). I know that the blueberry pie came next. I know that I made at least one apple pie after the blueberry pie and before I went to bed, sometime around 5 a.m.

By 9:30 a.m., I was back on campus for the morning start-up of the conference.

After a day of papers and discussions, I decamped for home with the friend who'd come into town for the conference and was staying in my living room. After we executed some fancy stencilling work, we packed the car full of all these desserts I'd somehow produced in the space of 24 hours.

And it was a terrific event, full of strange moments (like watching the son of two famous literary critics playing the harpsichord). The food was delicious. The desserts were acclaimed. The whole evening lasted only a few hours, and yet they were the thickest party hours I'd ever known. They were dense like that flourless chocolate cake.

I remain proud of that baking marathon, and of having had both the chance and the skills to do a thing like that for the small formidable woman who helped me figure out how to go about being myself.

The pie I baked tonight has a different significance, of course. This one is more like a gesture of hope than one of gratitude--or perhaps I should say that it's also a gesture of gratitude, but mostly in a broad and impersonal way, recognizing what this woman has done for my field and for the college where I'm living.

Mostly, I'm hoping she'll like it.

* * *

I went out for pie supplies just before 4:30. Now, the Clare College clock is spotlit.

And now it's possible, even before evensong begins, to walk alongside King's College Chapel and observe its strange windows as they're illuminated from within. I am not schooled enough in stained glass to know whether it's common to build fragments of old windows into new ones. I will go out sometime this week with the monopod and try to get some better images of the disembodied heads and severed architectural details that punctuate the glass along the whole south side of the chapel. Handheld isn't going to get this job done.

Further thanks.

There comes a time in every girl's life when she has to stop playing the piano and start photographing the moon.

For me, that time came at 4:30 this afternoon.

Crossover event.

To get to my piano lesson, I have to walk over an enormous suspension bridge that crosses over the train tracks just beside the Cambridge rail station. It's a bridge just for pedestrians and bicycles (and sometimes dogs). It's my favorite part of the walk. Especially when many of us walk in step and make the bridge bounce (but not fall down).

A day early.

Last week, my excellent parents asked me what I would do for Thanksgiving. "I'll have my piano lesson in the afternoon, and then I'll go to my Thursday evening concert," I told them. "Will you take a turkey sandwich?" they asked. And the answer is no, I won't have turkey; I won't really celebrate Thanskgiving in any formal way. I'll (deo volante) put on a skirt and my boots and walk across town to hear beautiful music in a beautiful venue, and when it's over, I'll walk home and climb into bed with my mug of hot milk and read until I sleep.

Which is not to say that I don't have a lovely invitation to a Thanksgiving feast. I do, and the fact that I do is probably a large part of why I don't feel ugly pangs of loneliness about my plan to follow my usual Thursday plan of spending a lot of time with music and a lot of time alone.

I'm sitting tonight at the end of a simply gorgeous day, a day so picture-perfectly gorgeous that once I was outside, on my way to meet my new friend (provider of the dinner invitation) and her excellent baby daughter, I knew that I would be staying outside for as much of the day as possible. In a sense, I think that today turned out to be my Thanksgiving. I worked while I was waking up, and then I went to town and walked in the sun with a cappuccino in my hand and then (such fortune!) with a baby in my arms. We talked to the guy who pulled our coffees; we visited an organic foodstore; we stopped for a few dance steps in front of an accordion player; we soaked in the sun at the foot of the fountain at Trinity. After we parted, I bought groceries and then a new piece of music. I stopped on Trinity Bridge, facing the low-slung midday sun, and sent a text message to my friend to see whether he wanted to join in the long walk that that sun had just made me decide I would be taking for the rest of the day.

Literally moments later, the phone buzzed, and he said, "I was just checking my e-mail to see if you'd written back to my proposal that we go for a ramble." We made a plan. I went back to what I had been getting ready to do on the bridge: playing a short Schumann piece on the lichen-speckled stone, singing along to myself, imagining how my fingers would work once I was back at a piano. I faced into the sun some more. I headed for home and squeezed in a tiny practice, just enough time to try the Schumann out, and then I had just enough time to get a invitation to lunch at an eminent scholar's house on the weekend.

And then off we went, off again into the sun. By this point in the afternoon, it felt like the first day of spring on a college campus: everyone, it seemed, was out and about in Cambridge; everyone, it seemed, was getting a little giddy with all the light; we ran into my new friend's parents-in-law (new friends in their own right) before we'd even left our part of town. We were all wearing our college scarves. We stood and talked in the sun, and then we went our separate ways, still in the sun. Today there was enough sun to go around, and then some.

We rambled to parts of Cambridge I hadn't yet seen--colleges I hadn't visited, with Victorian stained glass windows and strange architectural details and unexpected sculpture. We walked blithely past signs warning away visitors; we prowled into balconies from which we could spy on other colleges' halls; we stood in chapels while organists practiced. We searched for Milton's mulberry tree; we found the deep pond into which young children might fall in one Fellows' Garden; we did not find the other danger referred to at the end of the sign warning about the deep pond: "Also there are hives and flying bees." "They should be glad they still have bees," I said.

We saw the oldest plane tree I've ever seen. We passed through courtyards and buildings that far pre-date the Mayflower's sailing. We heard birds I can't yet identify from their rippling chittery sounds. We saw waterfowl I've never seen before (I guessed grebe, again, but as with the moorhens back in September, I was wrong--these were tufted ducks; I should probably stop guessing grebe).

Though, of course, it was fully dark by the time we turned homeward around 4:30 (by way of the Mathematical Bridge at Queens'), nightfall felt less dire than it has for the past few days. Returning to the flat, I realized that what I wanted to do more than anything was to keep doing whatever I wanted to do more than anything--which at that moment was to indulge in a longer piano practice than the tiny one I'd shoehorned in earlier. And so I headed off to play for a good 90 minutes, by which point it was time to get ready for formal dinner.

Now the day is all but over, and I find myself exorbitantly grateful on this eve of a day for giving thanks--grateful for the fact that I've gotten to perch within these foreign shores for another year; for the fact that, as today reminded me (as if I were in danger of forgetting), taking up this perch has meant meeting a whole new world of people, some of whom lead me right back to some of my most beloved people in the world; for the fact that I finally learned, somewhere along the line, that it's more than acceptable to knock off working for awhile when a day like this gets gifted to me--that the world does not end when I leave my desk for an afternoon, that the work gets better and fuller when I am better and fuller.

And somehow, the intensity of today's quiet, content pleasures--of walking and talking, of meetings up both planned and spontaneous, of falling into step with someone for the first time in many weeks, of dining with people who are no longer complete strangers--has me appreciating more fully than I did at the beginning of the day the pleasures that I won't be having tomorrow: the funny combination of labor and laziness that Thanksgiving brings (the alternation (for instance) of pie-baking and television-watching), the chance to eat deliciously with the three most important people in my world (plus the deaf but ravenous dog). The chance to be in that other familiar rhythm.

Perhaps most importantly, it occurs to me as I type, the chance to celebrate just by being with people I love, being with the people in my life with whom, for instance, I actually get to be physically affectionate. This week, telling my friend about watching video of the littlest Lexingtonian eating her first bites of food, I found myself saying aloud, for the first time, that while I'm still not homesick, I miss my people. I miss the babies, who are growing so swiftly and (thank God) healthily. I miss the people who really know me. You're the ones I'm most thankful for, even when I have a stupid (read: often all too silent) way of showing it. I won't be missing Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I'll be missing you.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Oh, rain.

On a day like this, when it feels as though the sun just forgot to come up, the best thing to do is just to keep reading. Take a break and play the piano. Then read some more. Before you know it, it will be time to go have dinner, and you'll realize that the day passed fairly pleasantly after all, weather (and skipped walk) notwithstanding.

Practicing.

When I was six (or so), my piano teacher was Sue Vasquez, then living in Amherst, New York, in a little house on a corner a little ways from where my family lived. Sue had cats, or at least one cat, and one day as I played during my lesson, one of her cats, or her one cat, jumped onto the piano bench and walked back and forth behind me, rubbing against my back. I kept playing as though nothing were happening. She praised me for my concentration when I'd finished the piece. (I wonder whether it was at about this time that I filled in my first grade teacher's little "About Me" questionnaire, filling in the blank after "What I'd most like is" with "more concentration.") (I know that it was about this time that I read my Scholastic Books biography of Marie Curie and fell in love with the story of her siblings' stacking chairs behind her, one by one by one, while she read in complete unawareness of their presence--only to knock down a mad pile of every dining room chair when she pushed back from the table later on. If only I could be so focused, I thought. If only I could shut the world out that way.) (I suppose that one could consider that a time when I should have been careful about what I was wishing for.)

I keep thinking about concentration while I'm practicing, because it's been surprisingly difficult to adjust my mind so that non-musical matters quiet down for awhile. Today, after a string of good practices, I suddenly went all fumble-fingered, hitting notes that have no place in my sonata at all. There's never, ever been a B-flat in this sonata. Not ever. So why did my ring finger persist in hitting it during that scale? The fingering in that one passage? It's been fine all along. Why is it falling apart now?

I realized that I was eating myself alive, magnifying each mistake by being frustrated, and I was about to play one last time and then call it a night when two members of my college walked into the room where I was playing because they needed to set up an event I was planning to skip. An audience wasn't really what I needed at the tail end of this particular practice, but I made it through, took some ribbing about my plans not to stay for the whiskey tasting (I know, I know, I said: all the cool kids will be here), and headed for home.

My impatience knows no bounds, but I have a plan: tomorrow, in addition to doing my four-octave scales, I will warm up by putting everything else in my brain to sleep for a little while--everything that doesn't have anything specifically and directly to do with my fingers and those keys and that music passing through me: it all goes to rest for awhile. I know that part of today's problem was that I rushed into it as a refuge from a silly meeting through which I'd just sat for fully 90 minutes--when in fact I wasn't needed there for more than about two. It was a good reminder of what an unspeakable blessing this year's time, normally unpocked by such things, is.

When I reached the gates into King's early this afternoon, I met up with fully 100 schoolchildren and walked over the bridge and into the college right along with them, listening to their conversation. One ten-year-old explained to another how and why it is that one attends university. Two others exclaimed, "Duckies!"

A woman stood under the massive arch of the Porter's Lodge, waiting for this small horde of small people, holding a sign that read, "Meet the Orchestra This Way!" Tempting though it was, I headed to the music store instead, while they filed up an alleyway toward the theatre.


Have you read Mrs. Dalloway? You should. Swim in it like a silver fish. Don't be intimidated. Follow along from one mind to the next. It is a thing of enormous, flashing beauty.

This secret deposit of exquisite moments.

I walked to town in the wind and the bells, over the small river, through the leaves gusted and gone. I looked for fish sleeping in the cold streams but could not see them for the leaves. When I reached closed doors, I pushed them open and walked through as though I belonged there. Even tucked into my hat I could hear the bells clamor me all the way home.

In the market.

Now, in the market, we shop by lamplight. I wandered through the bookstall, still figuring out whether all the booksellers are connected or whether the Tuesday-paperback/Thursday-hardback man's stock is separate from the Saturday man's. I smelled the fishmonger's wares, watched the man point at the Union Jack boxer shorts, the Union Jack thongs. I saw the halved citrus under incandescence.

Begrudgingly, I bought a black beret in the department store: the sheepskin fur cap was too dear, though perfect. (I lingered near the smart hats, grinning at the other women enticed by enormous feathers and wide brims, pulling faces, wanting whatever adventure the store could help conjure.) By the time I reached home, I had come to love the beret already. May all my necessities be so sweet.

Three weeks from tomorrow, I perform in my first recital in nineteen years. Today I tried the correct tempo--set the metronome and let it go, and oh could I fly, and oh was I tired when it was over.

Sometimes, when I watch West Side Story, I want to be Rita Moreno when I grow up.

Enlarge. Check the clock. I haven't been exaggerating. I don't kid about the dark.

Love goes right; love goes wrong.

After lunch with new friends who know some of my most beloved friends--proving once again, as if we didn't already know this, that the world can be very small indeed--I decided that the day was too gorgeous to waste on the electric piano. I checked out the key to the room that houses the baby grand. I played it with the top down until I felt good and ready--all the way through my C major scales (parallel and contrary motion), my A minor harmonic and melodic scales (ditto), my C major and A minor arpeggios, and my own special super-speed full-keyboard C scales (through which I'm just trying to get back my deftness); then, several times through the sonata. And then I propped the top up and really let myself go, filling the empty room with what I can do. By the time I was finished, the sun had gone down.

Of course, that meant that it was nearly 4, so I turned in the key and headed off to town to find a winter hat, a fruitless search. (Tomorrow I will succeed, if only because it's getting too cold here for me not to.) On the way there, though, I found the King's College cows grouped on a hillock in their pasture, all four together. One of the adults was tending the other one, licking her shoulder. As I rounded the corner and walked through the gates into King's, I could see all four shifting slightly, reconfiguring; one of the young ones followed one of the older; the other adult went backwards down the hillock.

Just after I crossed King's Bridge, I watched a woman pick up her three-year-old son, who laughed and laughed to be so held, so carried.

But as we all know, when it goes wrong, love can get ugly.

Sun alone.

When you have successfully delivered an illustrated lecture about research you did a week ago, and when someone tremendously famous in your field has attended it and responded enthusiastically, you will take the rest of the afternoon off, wander around, buy unexciting needful things, enjoy the fact that the town has hushed itself softly in the first real cold. You will carry your calm all around you. You will watch the geese dropping one by one into the river, swimming one by one in a line, heading upstream.

When you walk out again, it will be dark and colder, frost on the cars, frost on the lawns, stars high and clear like the first thread of violin that will sound over the top of the crowd before the concert begins, strong and thrilling like the sounds that move you even more now that you're making them again yourself.

Coming home, you will see the river steaming. You will see Orion rising huge above the spires you love.

Sun and rain.

On Wednesday nights, we have formal dinners, which means we eat an hour later, and we all dress up. So: 7:15 found me closing the powerpoint presentation I'm building for a talk I give at lunchtime tomorrow, slipping on my new satin minidress, putting on heels and mascara, and heading out the door to grab my friend and stride off to our main hall, where we were served various smoked fishes and tiny shrimps before a gorgeous and strange tower of black pudding, pork, and creme fraiche topped with apple arrived before us. Somehow no one noticed that I'd not gotten my wine topped up; I watched two rounds of others' getting topped up, of carafes emptying, and knew that in at least a couple of crucial ways, I have once again become such a presence as to go completely unnoticed.

And yet somehow, by the end of the night, I'd still eaten and drunk more than I'd meant to. Wednesdays are like this. They're also like this: at every formal hall, there's at least one moment when I can't hear a word of a conversation to which I seem to be listening intently. Tonight, I held myself carefully in a posture of amusement and interest while someone two people away, someone whose voice's cadence I could hear even though there were no meanings attached to the sounds he made, told a story about someone he once knew. It's not my favorite way to be near a conversation. But the concomitant lesson I've learned is how to listen carefully to the conversation I can hear, even if it's not one in which I can participate.

This afternoon, though it was bright and sunny, it was also raining. I should be used to this kind of contrast by now; it is so much like so much of life itself.

Bettered.

It was a drear night, followed by a drear morning and an early afternoon that threatened to become dire indeed. But then, lo and behold, some figures who didn't care about King's College's requests that they stay off the grass. And things looked up from there.

Some days I don't know how to name my own loneliness, and that's when things get tough, because I don't know how to ask to have it lifted. What I do know: neither jealousy nor envy is a particularly generous response to anything. Gratitude and hope, on the other hand, are. Consider me reoriented. Sometimes I picture myself as a five-and-a-half-foot-tall Weeble: I wobble, but I don't fall down.

By the end of the day, I'd bought my first above-the-knee dress in more years than I can recall. I'm not sure whether it qualifies as a mini-dress. I do know that it qualifies as awesome.

(Can I get a hell yeah about Weebles, by the way? Did anyone else have the Tub Sub? or the Romper Room playground set? I have a very clear memory of receiving the playground set and having to put it away for awhile for some reason--I'm guessing that it was probably a gift to my brother when he was a baby, too young to be putting Weebles down slides or in merry-go-rounds. But I remember when we got it out and played with it in the blue living room in the old house in Buffalo. Damn, those Weebles were something else. They never did fall over.)