I am fetid

after the day of airline shenanigans and then two-now-going-on-three days in bed with the sweats/chills/coughs/bodyaches/fever dreams of flu, I am one rank typhoid mary. this virus is having its way with me, and I seem able to do little more than let it. occasionally summon my energy reserves to take the dog down the block, and then back to the sickroom. thus far have ingested one bottle nyquil, assorted packets theraflu and advil tablets, approximately one gallon juice, about half a gallon soup, and numerous cups of hot water with lemon and honey. I have hopes of actually making it in to work tomorrow. for the time being standing unclothed and letting water of any temperature fall on my unprotected skin sounds about like the least appealing activity I can imagine. so I stink. cough and stink. at present I totally get why flu is life-threatening for the elderly– being no walk in the park for those of us in the prime of life. I realize how entirely normal and prosaic all this is, but experientially it feels a whole lot more significant– like one day soon I shall look back on this as the week of some great purgative event.

trapped in airport land

part I: I Should Have Called Ahead.
showed up in proper time for my afternoon flight out yesterday, gave heather a big hug and thanks for ever-incomparable hospitality, waved so long and watched her toodle off in the adorable blue mini. dragged the typical crap inside to check in– only to find that all flights into and out of chicago were canceled due to weather until the morning. oops. poor heather, having reached home, received my distress message, turned right around and came back, swooped me up and whisked me away to most delectable goodberry’s frozen custard confection, followed by an evening of further delightful conversation, wild mushroom risotto, and an early night to bed once more in the mmmmmmarshmallow guest bed.

part II: Yaawwwwwwnnn– And For What?
arose basically at Insomnia Hour, 4:30 (3:30 cst) to make my 6:30 a.m. flight– cabbed it to the airport in the pitch black, wound my way through the longlong snaky lines through security and down to the gate, only to discover no evidence of my fabled flight, only the previously scheduled and long-since filled 7:03 one. I should have suspected something was afoot on the basis of the agents’ shifty eyes yesterday and this morning as they scrambled through terminal screens and printouts in search of my “flight” and then were all, oh– oh yes of course– flight 9578– they’re just building that one. um, building it? never a good sign. basically? it never existed, I now realize. I am but a pawn in their game. how exactly it benefited the airline personnel to invent this crack of dawn flight when no one ever had a hope of flying us out before 11 (if then…), I’ll never know. now they have hoards of hopping mad chicagoans mobbing the podiums, their own little circle of transit hell, and everyone’s day is wrecked. oh, air travel, thou harsh hearted mistress. it’s never fun being lied to– even when it’s as impersonal as an airline doing it.

part III: Remaining Zen About It All
so here I sit in Cyber Cafe, sipping not actually terrible coffee and eating greasy airport egg “panini”, counting my blessings– most wonderful visit just enjoyed, respite from chicago’s snow and ice for a weekend of raleigh’s blooms and victorians, a coupla bars of wireless access. the only real loser, ultimately, is my employer, cheated irredeemably out of half a day’s labor, possibly more as time will tell. but what can I do? I sit at the whim of the aviation gods. at least I can get online (don’t get me started on the airports and hotels that charge for access in this day and age), vent my spleen in rather pointless bloggery, and attend somewhat to emails and digital biz. que sera, que sera, que sera. nothing in the end is really all that doggone critical– only annoying, and annoyance is fleeting. just like those beautiful waves of clouds out the window before me, rolling across the horizon in untroubled flightpaths.

calling all camcorders…

back when I was a grad student heavily involved in teaching various forms of “writing” with media (traditional verbal in various genres, yes, but also visual/interactive), I had a great resource at my disposal: the university’s media lab for teachers– we could checkout digital video cameras for various projects, play with them to our hearts’ content, and turn ’em back in, ta da. it was awesome.

so now, unsupported by great mother university and back out in the rillworld, I wonder how to get my mitts on a little handful of digital video cameras for an event thingy I have in mind to put together, say 3 or 4. I’ve taken a peek around at rentals in the area, and could do it for $35/day per camera. alternately, I could put a call out to friends and friends of friends for camera loans and hope that I’m not setting myself up for a format nightmare when it comes to compiling footage and also that nobody’s beloved camcorder gets accidentally dropped. it’s kinda challenging to figure out.

see, this is the problem with being a dilettante and having my hand dabbling in about a zillion different areas– all my knowledge is pretty superficial, sometimes little more than anecdotal or briefly experiential, whereas others geek way out, research the thing top-to-bottom, and create a mental catalog of various highly technical points of note. me, I cannot be bothered– quick n dirty does the job. idle and lazy, from some perspectives. eh, it’s all in the name of play.

so that’s the littlest wee thumbnail peek at my current project, just hatching. more later as it develops. shoot me any advice you might have about corralling cameras when you have a minute– all thoughts welcome (via email if you can’t comment here). thank you kindly. xo, sat.

el-oh-el-ay

so last night I went to a house party/ro-sham-bo championship. the host used to be an event promoter, so he did up his own event in stylee, with a little pa/dj station and prizes from the dollar store and everything– verrrra nice. and a group of people who like to play games– I was in heaven, totally happy and excited– and maybe a little manic into the bargain.

that’s the part that hassles me out in the cool light of morning– the old instant replay of shame. certainly it’s a result of certain indulgences, an oh shit just how big an idiot was I… kind of thing. woo fun.

the instructions at the door were to make up a fictitious name for the championship and write it down on a slip of paper for the competing order hat and also on a sticky nametag to wear– so I became lola for the evening. and, geez, but that lola was a bit of a rager, loud and downright obnoxious at times, occasionally witty, and generally so not the me I am for 99% of my life. it’s a little weird. I’ve written here before about how once in a blue moon I’ll get a wild hair and tear it up. those blue moon nights where the turtle emerges from its shell– and dons showgirl feathers and struts around. there’s the ungainly tarantella right there.

I am, I suppose, a clown at heart, though I seldom give it much free reign and then the superego kicks in once I do. I had a moment of self-assessment alone in the bathroom at one point where I thought, sometimes I feel like lucille ball, and sometimes I feel like my mother, and other times I feel more safely, groundedly like myself. tonight I do not feel like myself. there’s that razor’s edge to giddiness– am I lucille ball or pratfall-prone lucy?– if you let go, sometimes your laugh rings just a little too loudly and echoes in your own ears as shrill. it’s most alarming to a turtle.

too, I don’t really know these people– I liked them, some of them very much. it’s a network of old local friends, a community of sorts, immensely attractive to a transplant who craves a wider local social circle. I get out so seldom. there are these little forays into existing social networks, and it can be a bit nerve-wracking. there’s that part in eat pray love where gilbert’s talking about the significance of social networks in indonesia, how people’s identities are essentially relative– being x’s son and y’s cousin on his mother’s side and so on.  we have a little bit of that here, though less rigorously. and then we have floaters like me, people who have maybe moved around a lot. like the narrator of the book. deracinated. maybe rootlessness is a little maddening– possibly the person without real roots becomes to some extent a social danger, a loose wire. loose wire or wild hair, sometimes it’s a tough call. ah, the overanalysis. :) my forte. lola versus the turtle.

p.s. also I fell in love. her name is biscuit. she’s a four-year-old heinz 57 that her person has neglected to spay, so she was wandering around the party in a diaper. near the end of the party, in my loud and obnoxious way, I was giving her owner a hard time about this, and he started talking about how he wasn’t sure he could keep her, pointing out the window to his camper and talking about a big trip he was planning… I started to argue it and then just whipped out my card and told him to call me if he decided he needed to get rid of her. so maybe someday biscuit will be my biscuit. and she’ll get properly spayed, I can tell you that.

fyi– challenges!

the things I cannot state publicly– we’re also cheap, hypercritical, idiosyncratic, prone to severe attention deficit, overreactive, narcissistic, and… oh, what else? cheap. did I mention cheap? and also occasionally crazily extravagant.

blah

blah blah blah blah blah blah saturday blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah blah blah fiction blah laundry blah movies blah. blah blah blah extremely fucking cold blah. blah blah jets crazy loud blah blah blah blah. bourbon blah blah. blah blah.

hmmm

sounds like my bathroom radiator is in labor.

of course you know what that means: iron baby to be friends with marzipan baby. just be careful which one you bite.

there is no marzipan prince…

so tonight I ate the marzipan frog.

the googley eyes put me off for a bit, but finally I turned it away from me and attacked from the rear, as it were.

as luck would have it, one of the frosting eyes quickly fell off, so I removed the other as well and set to with relish.

deeeeeelicious! inside there was some sort of proper raspberry cream. believe you me, that was one confection done right.

and now I am working on hatching a marzipan baby. woo! just imagine all the cute little marzipan outfits.