in the hall of mirrors

Between

Between bad weather and good, winter and spring, overworked and relaxed, busy and casual....

Feeling a bit mixed on the whole. The weather has been sharply cold, then today it is sunny and relatively pleasant. The many stressful, big things to do are either done or in train, since Thursday – all weekend I've been both wanting to relax, and not quite able to do so, thinking of other things that need doing, the aftermaths of all these things (continued classes, revisions to two articles), and feeling sort of useless... or post-accomplishment... or something. All kind of tangled up.

Not a bad mood, but a tangled one; I keep waiting for it to sort itself out. I suppose if I lived in a city center I'd go to a movie perhaps, or wander from store to café, or go see a friend I hadn't seen for a while. Unfortunately I'm out here, and all those things seem a bit far away, or uncertain, or....

Typical of Sunday afternoons, I suppose. The new guy who moved in downstairs must be feeling it too – tall, skinny, rather sad and lost-looking, he's apparently a recently separated husband whose kids visit some weekends. They weren't around today, and he was playing guitar in the front room, below my living room – rather aimlessly, not terribly skillfully, as though the guitar had been put away some years ago and he had an impulse to drag out again. It's always amazing the intensity that musical instruments gain in people's imaginative lives, in their memories – though so few actually become skilled, the instrument itself always becomes a locus of hopes and dreams. You can hear it in his playing, as you probably can in mine.

I'll go out for a walk, to the corner store and around, just to perhaps clear my head a bit. To look at something, to move around, to... well I don't know. Really.

Ryman's Air

Reading Geoff Ryman's Air.

I know: it's a bit silly to talk about a book you've only started – I've read about three chapters. It's also the kind of book that is deeply involving; a somewhat dangerous distraction when I've had so much to do – on the other hand many things are done, perhaps I can take a breath for a few days. A book that pulls you into a world... actually certain shows have the same problem, they are too distracting, and working on those two Sondheim shows to finish writing the article was just as emotionally difficult.

However.

The sheer realism of it – and the sense that Ryman has actually gotten much more inside everyday Chinese culture than I ever did, in four years of living in Hong Kong – there is such a sense of understanding people from the inside, and how they understand each other.

And the fear, and the complexity, of what Mae (the main character) is going through – a middle-aged Chinese woman in a tiny village in the middle of Asia, trying to keep from poverty, suddenly faced with the shock of a universal, mind-based version of the Web. Trying to keep her balance between past and present, and an utterly confusing future....

So many passages in this book that make me think: I didn't pay enough attention when I lived in Hong Kong – the memory of walking up one of those steep hills along a street at night, garish streetlights and quiet as it was where my apartment was (sah wan ging, Yee Sap Sam Ho – that was my address in Cantonese, I needed to know it for taxi drivers, including the right intonations). The barking dogs (dogs that had escaped their owners), the eroded tracks, the huge, isolated apartment buildings. The beaches, the hills, the rocks....

Perhaps I'm writing about it to record the reaction to being in the midst of the book: not being finished, not some book review or post-reading reflection; but the sheer vividness of being drawn into another world, and so very well, so honestly.

Snoo

It snew...

... uh...

snowed.

While I was working, finishing the cover letter, revising the papers for Thursday's undergraduate class, planning the Powerpoint for tomorrow's postgraduate presentation. I didn't notice it at all, not while it was happening, but when I went to bed the street behind my apartment looked strangely bright and – I looked out front, and yes indeed, it was not merely some strange trick of the light.

And yesterday – Monday – the grant was finished – just in time.

Sunday the paper was finished, and will be accepted. Happily, apparently. And – though it could be polished, though it is odd, it is also sort of – beautiful. I'm glad I wrote it.

"It's going well." I feel oddly – capable, positive, renewed. Heading somewhere: heading up.

And:

it snowed....

[Photograph: Markus Puustinen, Last Snowfall]

Hero / Craven

Many many things to do: this is the high-pressure week, probably of the entire year. Grant application, promotion application, leave application, masses of administration, three courses to start teaching (one entirely new), and of course that PAPER to finish (aargh).

(The paper is about 5/6 complete – but the last part is just, well, it's just not. Yet.)

Today I looked at the whole grant application and realized how huge it was, what a mess, how unfinished, how impossible, how on-the-verge-of-being-absolutely-due. My reaction was, however, tough: I had that Don't Mess With Me, I Have Work To Do attitude that got me through so much chaos, poverty, and uncertainty in the mid-1980s and 1990s in San Francisco and Los Angeles; when I was the inexperienced assistant manager for a financially collapsing dance company, when I was assistant to the most famous of Colt models, when I was singing in bars, when I was auditioning and working and fighting to get along, one little underpaying job to the next. There were points in those years when I was frankly heroic – in an admittedly rather pushy way; that was the period when I developed that style which I called, years later when it was no longer entirely appropriate (i.e. when I was a professional with a real job and administrative support), my Get Out Of My Way Unless You Want A Me-Shaped Hole In You approach.

Well, it was sort of cool to feel that way again. Invincible, powerful: I can get grants, I can get jobs, I can get things finished – look, the program notes; look, the music is copied and in order; look, I took three buses across town to get the letter signed and back to the post office by the deadline, and even rush hour and a broken doorbell and the wrong address couldn't stop me.

Unfortunately, an unhelpful afternoon meeting on the grant application, then hours working on it this evening, have left me feeling less heroic – it just all feels so made up, so sketchy: and since British grants are more competitive and bureaucratic, any flaw will be attacked sharply. Feeling a bit more, well, cowardly – or anyway easier to beat.

Ah well, it's all feelings. But it was nice to remember that sense of power, of ability: of a certain sense that if I keep battling on and doing things one after another, some of them would actually succeed....

Perhaps I need to remember that energy these days. Even at my age.