A Minor Fall and a Major List

The "Minor Obsessions" list is getting a full-page spread this week. My attention is divided into 16 slender slices of a fat, overloaded pie and I keep alternating between thoughts of long, delicate golden necklaces and former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri.

My semester ends in two weeks. I'm a third of the way through a phone book-sized study of the investigation of the aforementioned Prime Minister's assasination in 2005. It's horrifying, fascinating and frustrating. I've never written fifteen pages of anything more than a hate letter to my best friend in high school. And that was in pink pen, on wide-ruled notebook paper. I think it's safe to say that academic writing is not my, comment dites-vous ?, forte. To me it feels like writing from inside an ice cave behind a door with no knob. Walls, walls, walls. 'Let's see...I want to say that a massive revolution was the result of the assasination, whoops, lemme add a little teeny number up there after that date, whoops, gotta go down to the bottom of the page and cite that source, whoops, let's go back up there and, shit, where was I? Okay, yeah, so...a massive...whoops, that's a bit flowery...let's say large scale...yep, that'll work.' There are a thousand silky, delectable words slipping and sliding around inside my brain trying to ooze their way out on to the page: sybaritic..adulate...ambrosial...MELLIFLUOUS! When this semester ends I'm going to stab a valve into my scalp and let them all drain out, one by one, the sap of stunted prose.

Besides being able to speak again in my usual embellished patois, I intend to read. For the last four months I've felt like I was sleeping with my secretary every time I read a magazine article or a few pages of a novel. I found myself sneaking peeks at US Weekly in the magazine aisle at CVS, craving like carbs even a few meager lines of non-academic text. I bought myself a copy of Celebrity Hairstyles on Saturday and saved it all day, dangling it in front of myself like a chocolate carrot to be nibbled upon completion of five pages of my paper. When I met my self-imposed deadline at 9:00 p.m., I tucked myself into the couch cushions and skimmed through the photos of Blake Lively and Michelle Williams and drifted into and out of consciousness, just as the glossy pages of hair mags are designed to make one do.

When I do allow myself a freebie, I devour the "literary porn" on this website. Now, I'm not in any way hip to the shit. It's a nine year old site. But the editor came to speak to my class last week and rendered a room full of competent, edgy women completely senseless. Ever since then I've been fascinated by the notion of making a living writing about sex. Scratch that. By the notion of people who (read: men) make a living writing about sex. Go there. I guarantee you'll lose an hour immersed in descriptions like "milkweed excretions". Exquisite, elegant writing about things between legs and under arms and behind doors. Bonus: music and literature and fetishes. What else can I say?

I'm reinventing myself for summer. I think I've got it basically down. It'll be a cross between Rosie the Riveter and Nicole Richie. Sound doable? I'm thinking hippie headbands and red lipstick. Dangly, bangly, spangly necklaces and 1940s "can do" spirit. Stockings and flip flops. Bangs? Perhaps. In any case, I've been making a list of "must get" items and it includes roman sandals, self-tanner, plastic sunglasses, purple shampoo, and a gigantic hat. Don't worry, it'll totally come together.

Just in time to show off the above new look I've earned two delightful ruby red rings around my eyes. Courtesy of some bizarre reaction to the season's first application of gazillion SPF sunscreen I'm wearing alien spheres on my face that look like skin glasses. Bring on the warm weather styles!

This week, one of my professors actually said: "There are no dull stories, only dull writers."

Just let that one sink in a little.

Fluff

Because not every day is a Chrysalis kinda day (despite efforts to the contrary), this blog has temporarily been renamed My Cotton Thoughts Day. I will now pull thin, wavy strands of airy brain candy from my skull and deposit them on this blank e-page where they will live to grow furry with inconsequential blog mold in the internet concsiousness for eternity.

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Okay, so first things fuckin' last. What's the deal with my Facebook page being slammed by friend requests from platinum-haired LA starlets looking to add my name to their growing roll of F-lister friends like Criss Angel? They lure me in, see, and take advantage of the fact that in my old age names and faces are beginning to gel into one giant personality conglomerate making it now nearly impossible to catalog the gory details of everyone I've gotten drunk with in the last twenty years. So these Facebook marketing co-opters know I'll likely see the request, think I might know the person and perhaps peruse their profile to jog the old memory for an image of the two of us wearing sombreros at someone's birthday party in 1995. They hope, of course, that I'll be so impressed by the fact that this person's friend list includes the likes of Justine Bateman that I'll sign my fucking firstborn away to the Facebook promo devil so I can be overwhelmed for life with notices about this girl's every appearance on NCIS. Nice try, Facebook, if that's your real name.

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I spent Good Friday wandering through the Union Square farmer's market. I bought a hand drawn rendering of the Chelsea Hotel silkscreened onto a canvas of hot pink satin. It is now my favorite thing ever. The side of the building sort of fades off the canvas into a fog of black ink. It looks like it was left out overnight on 23rd Street and corrupted by smog--the hotel straining to come through the haze into being. I met a man, "Joe", who had a little table set up near the subway entrance featuring a potted flower, a jar for donations and a professionally-lettered sign that read: "CREATIVE APPROACHES TO WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT". Feeling "in the flow", as my mother would put it, I asked him for a creative approach to the NY/LA conundrum. When I laid out the conflict that's pulling me apart like a Rolfing machine, he told me that I may love New York but I haven't been able to enjoy it. I'm still trying to figure out why that made sense to me at the time. He also suggested I begin thinking about what it means to let go of what I think I know about staying here. He illustrated the suggestion by having me hold a stack of paper in my hand until it became uncomfortable, asking me to note how I had made physical adjustments to accomodate and accept the pain (touche!). Then he asked me to drop it. When I let go, the papers scattered into an abstract arrangement on the ground. As he was picking them up, he said "See what happens? When you let go, it turns into something else." I got it. The conflict had taken a new shape. There was possibility in the burden when I let it go and it spread artfully across the pavement. But I couldn't see that as long as I kept holding on to it, accomodating its weight. As I was leaving I told him about the Chelsea satin. He said I was collecting memorabilia. I cried all the way through a cinnamon toast frozen yogurt.

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I've registered for fall classes. I'm having trouble digesting the passing of time. Only a moment ago I was eating grilled cheese in January, awaiting a student loan refund. I've decided that each semester I'll take something terrifying. In the fall it'll be fiction. The last time I told a story on paper the lines on the page were an inch wide and we were writing about Halloween witches in crayon. Scary, indeed.

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While I still have papers and finals to feast on, all thoughts lead to that, up there. That's Pula, Istria, Croatia, site of my first bona fide summer vacation since going to Indianapolis to visit my grandma in 1992. Now, given that the photo comes from Wikimedia, it could be a beach on the coast of Libya for all we know. But I'd go there too.

The West is the Best? The West is the Best?

Alright, there's simply no point in putting this off any longer. I have to talk about it. There's, gulp, um, gasp (grips chest), see, kind of, maybe, well (falls to knees), there's this chance...that we may have to move to L.A. It's crazy even writing a thing like that. Now it's just out there: L.A. Two little letters to encompass incomprehensibly endless black ribbons of highway, sprawling white houses with red tile rooftops and people I don't know. Two little letters to explain what I'm not sure I can.

My husband is much clearer on all of this. A month ago he flew out to Angel-Town on something of a lark. An opportunity to scale the western face of the acting business popped up unexpectedly (in the way these things seem to do) and he decided to leap on it. We knew the minute he booked his ticket that he'd begun to shift the tectonic plates of our east coast life. The thing is, we've suspected for some time that he needs to be there. Blah, blah, the market here is so limited, there's so much more work out there, he fits in a few little type-y niches that might actually work in his favor on the sunnier side (multi-ethnic!, yay!). But more than all of that, in a way we couldn't quite articulate to each other before he left, we were somehow ignited by the idea of our lives being turned upside down. I didn't tell him at the time but I felt strangely amenable to the notion of an undeniable shift. Translation, if something happened, I might be up for it.

He was gone for two weeks. We didn't talk much about anything concrete while he was away. But I knew the day he drove the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu for the first time that he might be seeing L.A. as a real possibility. In honor of all the difficult conversations beating down our door I went right out, drank a night's worth of jumbo margaritas and went home sobbing in a cab at 3:00 a.m. The next morning I woke up resolved that he should go there and I should take some time to figure out what the hell I want to do.

I've never felt more sure that now is the time for him. It's partially cosmic, partially timing. Either way, he needs to be able to say he really went for it and I appreciate the value of that. It's more complicated for me. I haven't yet been able to romanticize L.A. to myself. Now, don't get me wrong. I can more than imagine Friday nights at Santa Monica pier and weekends hiking the hills. But my husband's got a hook, an angle, a reason to be there. I don't. Except for him. And while he's a big, important reason, he can't be my only reason or we'll be fucked. We just will.

So for the moment, we've decided he's gonna go. He'll spend the bulk of the summer there trying to rustle something up. We've also made a few other decisions. 1.) Nothing, nothing, NOTHING will ever be New York. We're accepting that and moving forward with the idea that everything we do will be in an effort to get back to our grubby, glittering gray goddess. 2.) The idea of never seeing what else is out there for us is way scarier than facing a world we don't understand.

I'm trying to be open to all the ways this could happen. If nothing else, my view of our current reality has begun to shift. I can't believe how immovable I've become. Thinking for a moment about living in a world where people wear shorts in March and meet each other through panes of car window glass, shop in shiny suburban grocery stores and eat avocados year round has gotten me pondering what is trash and treasure to me here. And that has to be a good thing.

So, onward and...westward? Well, at least I've started going blonde.