So. Hey stranger...
I'm in a hotel room in New York. I came up with Bill, thinking I'd chill out in his comped room until his shifts were over and then we'd be able to do our girlfriend-y/boyfriend-y things until his next shifts started. He's been spending three to five days every week up here in Fishkill (funny name for the work site of a marine biologist) and the blues always seem to find me when he comes up here, so he invited me to just come up and chill in NY while he works so that we could be together when he's off. I can't work right now for a combination of reasons, so all I do is sit around, knit, read. It's pretty pathetic stuff, and it gets to be rather depressing when Bill's not there to break the non-flow of that stuff.
Unfortunately, his crew's going to be sailing all the way up to [some place the name of which escapes me] and they'll be spending the night (well, day) there after their shift ends, which means Bill won't be back here at the hotel until Thursday morning. Phooey, eh? Yeah.
It's still better than being in my room for the time being. I'm in a nice hotel with enough money and opportunity for hording that food won't be an issue over the next day or so. Bill feels terrible about it. He keeps checking on me constantly, apologizing for not having previously sharpened his psychic abilities so that he would have known not to leave me without the car. He's a funny little guy sometimes.
Bill absolutely pampers me. Granted, with my recent many and multifaceted paroxysms, I deserve a little TLC, but the guy waits on me hand and foot for as long as I allow it before having to tackle him to the ground and make him stop. He acts as though... I don't know how to describe how he acts. He just treats me like I'm made of diamonds... breakable, depressed diamonds, but diamonds nonetheless.
So, it's been a while, and I guess I've racked up a good amount of stuff to have to report. One good thing about being stuck in this hotel room is that it severely limits my day's activities. I brought the last two volumes of The Maxx, two scarves I've been working on, and my laptop.
I've been reading The Maxx a quite some bit lately. I'm really enjoying it. I haven't read many comics since my single-digit years, but I wouldn't be surprised if The Maxx turns out to be my favourite. I look forward to getting further into the series, and grow saddened by the idea of it coming closer to an end the more I read. It's really fucking thorough, and I believe it would surprise non-comic book readers with the depth of the story. It takes a different kind of reading, yes, but I find it, well... fulfilling. Bill and I ordered another of Sam Keith's comics, Four Women, which looks to be the same kind of depressing The Maxx has been delivering. He writes a lot, and very, very well, on the topic of the lives of women who have been sexually abused.
That's why I can't believe The Maxx was on television. You'd be hard pressed to find something that so honestly and intimately addresses sexual abuse on a level that treats the women like people on television. No. Scratch that. You'd be hard pressed to find something that so honestly and intimately addresses sexual abuse on television.
I'll tackle Y: The Last Man after, maybe. It's about what happens when all the males in the world die due to some mysterious scientific fuckup, the only surviving ones being Yorick and his pet monkey in a world run by the surviving women. I've finished the first book. Bill warned me that the first book wouldn't inspire me to dive into the rest of the series, so I'll go forward with the second and third on his initial word, but I'm a little annoyed by some of the comments the author writes into dialog. Bill strongly recommended the series to me last year, after he started it. Since then, though, he's pulled back a little on his certainty of my enjoying the series. He said since he's become even more aware of the sexism in our culture, looking back on the series after recently completing it, it's not as pleasing as he once thought, or is at least somewhat objectionable.
I dunno. We'll see.
So there's been some really good goods and pretty terrible bads.
August 11th - 15th: An entire week of The Goods.
- A couple of weeks ago, Bill and I went to the City and attended a taping of The Daily Show on a Monday.
- The next day, I met up with Benja in Philadelphia went to the Radiohead show on last Tuesday.
- Um. The following day, I made some pretty wicked hummus.
- Bill came home that Thursday!
- I discovered how superior to wheat spelt is on Friday.
The Bads (Non-Specific Dates, all recent):
- I re-sprained the joint that still wasn't fully healed from my May 2007 ankle-the-size-of-a-GMO-grapefruit extravaganza.
- I have a fully blown knee injury that will never get better ever at all forever.
- Both of those are on the same side, so my entire left leg is just dead, painful weight at the moment.
- My other ankle is swelling, which I can only image is from being overworked.
- ...So if you didn't catch that, I have two sprained ankles.
- Every day, I wake up with confusing, increasing pain in all of my joints. All of them. I've become incredibly weak.
- Something else that's pretty...fucking serious, which I wont be writing here for the time being, not because I feel weird about just anyone reading it, but because right now I don't feel like allowing the asshole who reads my journal too regularly access to my entire life (Not you, USA Today guy. You're cool :) I'll be posting a Friends Only entry soon.
It's fair to say that by the looks of things, we may need to leave the country in order to keep the inevitable medical bills down.
The "something else" came at a bad time (not that this sort of thing could come at a good time) because news of it put a damper on the first two (and hell, even the third) things on my Week of Goods list. When Bill would ask me if I was excited to see Jon Stewart, I'd smile but I know it wasn't how it was supposed to be. I worshiped that Jon Stewart for nearly a decade and respect him to the point at which I've actually grown to be sexually attracted to the man.
The show really was spectacular. We had great seats and had a perfect view of everything going on. It was weird, you know. The studio is much, much smaller than the show would let you assume. Basically, everything you see on an episode is, in reality, duller and less wide. When I'd compare what I was seeing on the screen to what was right in front of me, I felt... I dunno.... fooled. Those vibrant blues all over the set, the darker tones in Jon's hair, all lies, all lies.
I laughed a lot though. We were closer to a mic than anyone else in the studio, so we could probably hear ourselves if we go back and watch the episode.
Bill and I parted ways on the train to Trenton when he got off at Metropark. He asked me if I was excited to see Radiohead. I wasn't, really. I mean, I was happy to see them, yes, for the what, 5th? 6th time? But, in truth, I haven't been excited about anything in a while.
It was a good show, though, and I'm glad I went. I met some of Ben's friends, got to watch Thom do his Euro trash dance between verses, and stared in awe at Jonny working his magic from under that suspiciously shiny hair.
The day after, I picked up some mead and took the train back into Jersey.
You know, I realized during the show that Thom Yorke does, motion-for-motion, exactly what may be commonly known as the "rich white hippie girl dance". If you've ever been to a festival, a college folk show, or a concert at an open-air bar with about four square feet of dance floor in front of the stage, you know what I'm talking about. It's the dance that the privileged blonde girl with the name brand imitation of what's supposed to look like bohemian hippie clothing does, based desperately on a bastardized version of some African dance she felt she could pull off.
Anyway, Thom Yorke does the same thing, except I think he was a DJ in college, and he's got a salamander eye.
More catching up later. This is enough for now. I'm sorry to those of you I haven't been in touch with recently. You will or would or might or mightn't understand later. At this point, I guess that's clearly established itself as not my top concern.