Hey baby, do you swing?

Here's a brief sampling of what it's like to live inside my mind the last couple of days:

What a beautiful day it is!

Sunshine is STUPID.

You're the greatest co-worker ever in the world!

Why is everybody here such an IDIOT all the time?

I am so lucky.

This sucks.

I'm so sleepy, I need to nap for three days.

Let's go play!

Sometimes I think I should quarantine myself for the good of the planet.

Then I think, screw you all! You deserve me!

Maybe I should take that nap.

In the summer, in the city

Hooray! I made it safely back from a stunningly fantastic trip to NYC, which you can read about here. It was a great break from the insanity of the end of summer on Cape Cod and the ramp-up to Labor Day weekend, during which I intend to revert to my old hermit ways and stay locked up in the house, and I had a ton of fun admiring the hipsters with their extremely Never-Seen-On-Cape-Cod clothing, and just reveling in being surrounded once again by people speaking lots of non-English languages, with lots of non-WASPy features and such.

This area is pretty maddenly homogenous, and it is so very necessary to throw oneself periodically into the fray of an international city like New York to remind oneself what the world really looks, sounds, and smells like.

While I was there, my cell phone rang more in 24 hours than it usually does in a week, which made me feel very much like a real New yorker, striding down Lexington with my phone plastered to my ear. One phone call was particularly odd, as it came from one of the folks I edit for -- a pretty huge corporation that is based in NYC -- and it was strange to field the call while I was, like, ten blocks away from HQ.

I felt like I should offer to drop in and meet my contact face-to-face, but then I came to my senses and realized how very grungy and on-vacation and really-not-from-around-here I looked, and kept my mouth shut. For all I know, my contact has a mental image of me as some smart-looking sophisticate who happens to be a big geek about grammar and punctuation. And who am I to disillusion her?

But now I am home again where, it is true, most of us are blond and blue-eyed and don't go around in fantastic, cutting-edge clothes like we got them out of a trash can (oh, this old thing?), but where I can see so many more stars, and smell the ocean through the window, and walk barefoot outside on Sunday mornings to get my newspaper.

Which is, of course, the Sunday New York Times, so that I can read about all the concerts, restaurants, lectures, and shows that I'm missing, and start planning my next trip.

Gotham

We're leaving tomorrow early in the a.m. to take our wee vacation in NYC. Up at 7, catch a train in Connecticut at 11, then two glorious fun-filled nights at a posh hotel on the Upper East Side. All of this is, as usual, courtesy of the greatest Mother-in-law that ever lived, mine. She is the same benefactor that made our epic trip to Amsterdam possible last winter.

She pretty much rules with how free and easy she is with sharing the old Marriot and frequent flier miles.

Last time we were in NYC, very bad things happened. This time around we hope to break the jinx. OK? So everyone cross their fingers and jump on one foot and turn around widdershins or whatever works for you in the hopes that our trip to NYC will be be fun, frolicsome, and full of good food. And maybe, I don't know, terrorist-free.

We're making it our mission to eat at as many tiny little delis, diners, holes-in-the-wall, and street vendors as we possibly can this time around, and this is my first real trip with a digital camera, so many pictures of delicious city food will be taken.

Also, keep an eye out for all the home runs we'll be catching near the right-field foul pole in tomorrow night's Yankees game. yeah. that'll be us.

Will someone keep an eye on my cats for me? At least psychically? thanks.

back soon!

Erin go bra-less

I realize it is probably the height of disingenousness to suddenly notice that people on the internet like to talk about boobies, but honestly!

My weekly post here this week was all about breasts, mostly at the insistence of the charmingly juvenile inmates who also write for that site (which is, officially, the bee's knees). Then my pal over here wrote about her proclivity towards public nudity from the waist up -- a proclivity I definitely share, and have pictures to prove it, and no, I'm not about to post them in a million billion years.

Then this morning -- when my BFJ post still hasn't even appeared on the site, therefore absolving me of primary responsibility for unleashing this torrent of reference to things hooter-ish, I opened my mailbox to read my daily Bloom County strip, and found this!

I'm a little excited about going outside today. The apparent zeitgeist, based on three or four websites out of fifty-seven ka-jillion, is definitely encouraging!

Missing morpheus

I've signed on to another massive project at work, which is why I woke up at 4:30 in the morning today and was unable to fall back asleep until I had churned out the documents that were dancing the mazurka in my head. So now, of course, I am fully awake and entirely insomniacal, and I don't have to be at work for hours and hours, which is probably about the time I'll feel like falling asleep again, so I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

But it meant I got to see a sunrise over the river outside my window, which is a phenomenon I've been missing out on all summer long, slacker that I am. It was a stunner. The weather has finally surrendered to our pleas and given us a nice string of low-humidity, low-temperature days. I'm even wearing a hooded sweatshirt, it's so cool and comfy this morning! (Tony, Ed, never let it be said I never tell you what I'm wearing. You may also be interested to know that this particular sunrise is finding me joyfully bra-free. As most do, in fact.)

So now I've whacked my over-anxious mind into submission by caving in and doing what it wanted me to do -- trudge over to the computer and log in some unpaid hours for the good of the arts community -- and the question remains: go back to bed, or make some extra-strong coffee and delicious over-easy eggs on toast and slug it out for the rest of the day? I am kinda hungry. But I think we only have one egg left in the house, zero bread for toasting, and grinding up the coffee beans would wake up the slumbering giant in the next room.

Le sigh.

Why can't I still be a feckless and irresponsible grad student, finish my stay-up-all-night homework, crack open a beer at sunrise, and hit the hay until my afternoon seminar? God, those were the days.

Growing up is a real pain.

Many words, little information

Wow, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

My computer went batshit-nutso all last week. So batshit-nutso that I couldn't even get onto the internet. So batshit-nutso that nothing but word processing worked, and what good is it to process any words if you can't share them with the whole entire interweb?

So, since I'm wise enough in my advanced years not to visit blogs (never MIND my OWN*! Perish the thought!) on the computer at work, I have been wandering, parched and alone, in the desert of non-blogdom. And, hell, non-anything else on my favorites list! Do you know how annoying it is to even visit the weather channel site and not have it instantly know who you are and where you are and which map you want to look at? God, I love my cookies.

*At my last job, there was a foolish college girl who used to write in her live journal -- on the computer at work -- during her lunch break. She usually wrote stuff like "My boss is the biggest, fattest, meanest whore-bitch in the universe!" never suspecting that there is such a thing as a "history" button in the toolbar that we could -- and did -- use to access her blog and see what she had been writing about us. When the boss fired her, she mailed her last paycheck to the girl's house with a fistful of printouts of her (the boss's) favorite journal entries; the ones that were the most bilious and hateful about herself as boss. What a silly little whore-bitch that girl was.

Also, I've been super busy at work this week, as the summer is rapidly snowballing to its apocalyptic end, so I haven't had the time until today to sit down and try to figure out what the feck is wrong with this fecker. But I finally did. Turns out it had something to do with my Google toolbar, which I ended up having to uninstall. So now my computer works, but I'm one click further away at all times from the glory that is Google. I'm not sure how long I can live with this intolerable situation, but at least it's less intolerable than having NO INTERNET ACCESS AT ALL so I guess I'll deal.

So anyway, I missed you. Hold me.

In other news, the story on me came out in the paper a while ago, and it was quite nice. I won't link to it, because I want to preserve whatever shred of anonymity I still have around here. If I know you, and you want to read it, email me and I'll send you the link. So it was nice, and I didn't even hate the picture too much. Only a little. At least they captured that devil-may-care sparkle in my eyes.

Also, I've been busy effecting a rather drastic lifestyle change which I might write about someday but not right now. Suffice it to say that I've been living inside my head a hell of a lot lately, and the end result is I'm making a change for the better. No major relationship or geographical upheavals or anything, just a realignment of my personal priorities. Very much for the better.

Also also, I finally downloaded some free sheet music for my beautiful, long-lost euphonium and have been practicing diligently. Soon I will dazzle the world with my heartbreaking renditions of Don't Get Around Much Anymore and Stravinsky's Pastorale. Come on over. We'll jam.

Food fight

It was time for the annual barbeque at my mother's church today, and I was free, and so was the food, so I graced the joint with my majestic presence.

Once again it was a beautiful and perfect summer day, adorable children were scampering adorably, a great many old ladies came up and hugged me, the sauce was slathered and the lemonade was fresh.

Yeah, I know, nauseating, ain't it? But hey! Free food!

I was about to sit down with some old friends whom I was very pleased to run into again, especially since they were accompanied by their two-week-old baby, who was perfecting the art of the nap, when my mother directed me to sit with my brother's girlfriend. Mom referred to her as his "fiancee," which was news to me? But who am I? Apparently, I never write, I never call. I hadn't even noticed her sitting way over there in the back of the room with her two small children, but since I was doing the semi-annual family meet-and-greet, I amiably complied.

I very rarely get the chance to observe close-up the foraging and eating habits of small children, unlike most of the folks I know online. Diagnosis: Fascinating!

The older one, the boy, took great delight in throwing his finished, thoroughly gnawed corn cobs as far as he could fling them, preferably in the direction of the choir director who was playing show tunes on the baby grand. The younger, the girl, was in a high chair, so her "eating" was more of an attempt at abstract face painting. her eyes were glued on me, as I was talking quite animatedly, using many wild hand gestures that she enthusiastically copied, waving her brownie-and-whipped-cream spoon in the air.

The kids' mother (my absent brother's girlfriend) was totally laissez-faire about the whole production, pausing in her conversation only to wipe the more egregious smears from her daughter's face, and overall displaying a dignified calm that I found most refreshing.

It was only later that Johnny Law noticed the fracas, and stepped in.

I think Madam Officer thinks my soon-to-be-niece is Good For Licking.

High cool

I realize this is a song we're all singing these days, but it is retardedly hot. And don't give me some sob story about how it's hotter where you live, because your little game of oneupsmanship won't make either of us less hot. Although I'll admit that it probably is hotter where you are, because I live on a breezy ol' sandbar stuck out in the middle of the Atlantic, not in some foul city where the subways are ovens and the narrow streets trap the heat and restaurants stay open past 7:45 pm and serve something besides baked scrod and there is a chance of hearing music at least slightly more fresh and innovative than Don Henley.

Hey. What was I saying?

Anyway, it's still hot here. At least, hotter than it's supposed to be, since all those awesome things that cosmopolitan cities have like people younger than 65 and sidewalks and folks who don't necessarily look like they just stepped out of the country club and might quite possibly answer to "Bobbi" or "Chip" are woefully lacking here, so being relatively cool and happy in the summer is supposed to compensate for all that.

It's also supposed to compensate for the lack of a decent bagel, but let's not push it.

So I cut out of work early today because I'm a slacker and because I can, and went home and turned the AC to its highest setting, took off my pants and waited for the bliss to begin. Half an hour later, it's bearable in here, but only just. In another half hour it'll be perfect, and I'll be an evil, energy-wasting jackass, but I'll be cool.

And just in case you get any ideas, the pants are staying off. I don't care what the neighbors say.