Triumphant return, or something
Jan. 18th, 2011 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicJust returned from a week in New York with my mom, who had surgery on Thursday. (Other than a little drug allergy incident and a head cold, she's doing fine; she went back to work today.) Her bf and my sister were there as well, so it turned out to be a nice family bonding experience. We shoveled the 8" of snow that fell on Tuesday night, ate a lot, fielded phone calls from friends and relatives, played board games and watched too much TV. Come to think of it, it was the longest continuous period of time I've spent with them since I left NY to go back to school.
This weekend was also coincidentally my first high school reunion (11 years—don't ask), so I skipped out one day to see my dad and his gf and to go to that. It was about as awkward and enjoyable as I'd expected; surreal to look up every now and again and re-realize that I was surrounded by faces I'd known when we were 6, and nice to see that people were talking to or at least knew most other people, regardless of what cliques they'd been in at the time. Only two of my good friends at the time were there, though, and one of them was the one I went with, so it wasn't an especially moving night.
In any case, the vacation-of-sorts included a small epiphany about how football works, a documentary about Jeff Bridges, Up, a chat with someone I worked with at Hell Job, my mistaking a photo of Margaret Thatcher for Albert Einstein (it was far away and one inch tall!) and conflating Kate Bush and Kate Moss during a game of Trivial Pursuit, and showing my mom thingswithwings' Mythbusters vid James Bondage (which, uh, I hadn't remembered having such explicit lyrics). Post-surgery it would have been fully relaxing were it not for the TV, which hampered reading and writing.
I did finish Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, though—450 pages of relentless relocation and massacre still so condensed that there was no room for discussing cultures, languages, women's stories, current states of the tribes and reservations, etc.—and most of a 1985 David Bowie biography, which is not well-written on a sentence level but is nonetheless clear and fairly engaging, plus sprinkled with fabulous quotes about his sex life (most of which involve the casual use of the word "fucked"). Also, there are some pictures I hadn't seen before. Good God, that man was (is) beautiful. And so much ahead of his time with his fluid identities—sexual, musical, celebrity. It's been fun to turn the book into a multimedia experience by listening to songs on YouTube with each chapter.
2011 is going to be The Year of the Return to the Book. I love fic—you may have noticed—but I've been reading too much of it and not enough of anything else for the past year or so. Time to ease in some more print literature, absorb more style, more knowledge.
Then arrived back in DC last night in the middle of an ice storm. Some guy next to me at a traffic light this morning in a car coated with rippled ice rolled down the passenger side window and punched out the sheet of ice left behind. I wish the sun had come out today; the trees would have been gorgeous.
This weekend was also coincidentally my first high school reunion (11 years—don't ask), so I skipped out one day to see my dad and his gf and to go to that. It was about as awkward and enjoyable as I'd expected; surreal to look up every now and again and re-realize that I was surrounded by faces I'd known when we were 6, and nice to see that people were talking to or at least knew most other people, regardless of what cliques they'd been in at the time. Only two of my good friends at the time were there, though, and one of them was the one I went with, so it wasn't an especially moving night.
In any case, the vacation-of-sorts included a small epiphany about how football works, a documentary about Jeff Bridges, Up, a chat with someone I worked with at Hell Job, my mistaking a photo of Margaret Thatcher for Albert Einstein (it was far away and one inch tall!) and conflating Kate Bush and Kate Moss during a game of Trivial Pursuit, and showing my mom thingswithwings' Mythbusters vid James Bondage (which, uh, I hadn't remembered having such explicit lyrics). Post-surgery it would have been fully relaxing were it not for the TV, which hampered reading and writing.
I did finish Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, though—450 pages of relentless relocation and massacre still so condensed that there was no room for discussing cultures, languages, women's stories, current states of the tribes and reservations, etc.—and most of a 1985 David Bowie biography, which is not well-written on a sentence level but is nonetheless clear and fairly engaging, plus sprinkled with fabulous quotes about his sex life (most of which involve the casual use of the word "fucked"). Also, there are some pictures I hadn't seen before. Good God, that man was (is) beautiful. And so much ahead of his time with his fluid identities—sexual, musical, celebrity. It's been fun to turn the book into a multimedia experience by listening to songs on YouTube with each chapter.
2011 is going to be The Year of the Return to the Book. I love fic—you may have noticed—but I've been reading too much of it and not enough of anything else for the past year or so. Time to ease in some more print literature, absorb more style, more knowledge.
Then arrived back in DC last night in the middle of an ice storm. Some guy next to me at a traffic light this morning in a car coated with rippled ice rolled down the passenger side window and punched out the sheet of ice left behind. I wish the sun had come out today; the trees would have been gorgeous.
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Date: Jan. 19th, 2011 01:03 am (UTC)I am too fried for sensible comment, but this is a wonderfully meaty post.
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Date: Jan. 19th, 2011 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 19th, 2011 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 20th, 2011 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jan. 19th, 2011 02:43 pm (UTC)Jesus Christ, David Bowie. He's one of my most favorite people to look at. I mean, I'm a sucker for any interesting face with great cheekbones, but he's just adfjkhasd. So gorgeous. Do you still have that book? I'd like a look at the pictures.
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Date: Jan. 20th, 2011 01:17 am (UTC)You are welcome to read and/or drool over the book when I'm done, which will be before this weekend. Mm, he is so pretty, and has fascinated me for ages.