Not writing about snot

My cold has decided to return with a vengeance. But I will not go into details, because I promised not to, in one of my first entries ever.

Instead I am going to tell a little story about one of the things that happened to me while I was back at school last month, and how I discovered I didn't have a degree that I thought I had.

I had never received my MFA diploma in the mail, but I thought this must have been due to either an address error or a delay on the University's part. Granted, it had been a year and a half, but things sometimes move slowly in University Bureaucracy Land. Thus, while I was in campus, I went to check on the situation. One office sent me to another office, and so on, until I landed in the little cubicle-filled space where all the forms and grades and dissertations go to be stamped and then filed in a bottomless hole.

They were about to send me to yet another office, but I asked the guy in my nicest voice if he could just check to make sure everything was in order on his end. Lo and behold, it was not. I did not have an MFA, I was a Master of no Fine Art. Evidently I had been a fraud on my resume for the last year and a half without knowing it. (At least I didn't send that resume anywhere. I was only a fraud on my hard drive.)

I found why the next day, after the guy had done some digging. Why? Basically, the degree had fallen through the cracks. Lest you think things like degrees don't fall through cracks, let me reassure you, they do. Through the combined clerical error efforts of two distinguished offices, the Department of English and the Graduate Recorder, one of their upstanding students was an unintentional dropout.

The department never changed one of the thesis credits from an "R" placeholder grade to whatever they change it to, and when the graduate recorder wrote to them, they changed it but never got back to him. Then a new graduate recorder came on the job, and there was no follow-up from either end.

Now I was in a pickle. They gave me the option of having an October 2007 graduation date or my original June 2006 date, but the latter would require extra work, including petitioning the dean. I told them to petition the dean, petition George Bush, whatever it takes. I would much rather the record reflect the actual date that I completed the MFA thesis and coursework (while taking my PhD exams, thankyouverymuch).

Fortunately, the dean was magnanimous (I just wrote that word about fourteen times to get it right--gotta be the cold), and I was allowed a retroactively dated degree. Finally, it seems, I can suffix MFA to the alphabet soup after my name.

OK, so that's what I am thankful for today, that the little mishap was discovered and a solution found. Also, I am thankful for some renewed inspiration on a series of poems I haven't looked at since I finished my MFA (that's what got me thinking about all of this in the first place). They are Vermonty poems, wintery poems, and written in a matter-of-fact farmer's voice. I wonder if I'm drawn back to them now that the days are darkening down, the leaves on the tree behind the house are gone, and the air is decidedly chill.

Say it in words

Although it's Monday (blah) and the Mister is gone again (boo) and my sniffles remain (achoo), I am thankful that the internet is back in working order and that I have some energy. Yesterday was one of those drag-yourself-around days. All along my mind was trying to convince myself that I was fine, I was making it all up, really it doesn't feel like someone punched me all over, but of course the fact that I thought I needed convincing was evidence enough that my body wasn't its usual self.

Now that both my brain and the big brain (hooked up to the web we are) are allowing me to do so, I'd like to write about just that: writing.

I've been thinking recently about my tendency to write my life in my head. You know how sometimes people imagine their lives as movies, with a soundtrack? I imagine my life as a book, written in perfectly descriptive and beautiful phrases. Sometimes they're not even descriptive, sometimes just words that sound nice. But it would be a funny kind of book, not much of a page turner, because those phrases are all snippets of what I see, think, hear, feel, imagine... Readers would get SO bored. They would ask where the story went.

When my little nephew was starting to talk, and would sometimes revert to whines or cries in frustration or need, my sister would say to him: "Say it in words. Tell me in words." And that's the ultimate challenge, isn't it, big and little? To translate the precise look of an object, or the deep whine of a feeling, into words that can capture at least enough of them to communicate to others.

I sometimes wonder if it can be distancing, or a kind of defense mechanism. Am I experiencing this any less, living life less fully, because I'm trying to put it into words? Hard to say. I do know that I can deliberately use it as a distraction, but I also know that I probably couldn't stop if I wanted to. I guess it means I'm a writer. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm a good one, but it means that is who I am, living in words.

Say on the train I'm noticing the people around me. Or I'm walking outside and I try to describe to myself the exact way those leaves are arrayed. In my head I start trying to say with words what they look like, or imagine what they might be feeling (the people! not, generally speaking, the leaves). Sometimes it sounds like a crime scene report or newspaper article, sometimes like a poem, sometimes academic, sometimes like, well, a blog entry.

Here are some of the snippets that I can remember "writing" in my head this weekend. They weren't going to go anywhere, or probably even be written down unless some story happened around one of them to appear as a detail in a larger picture. I make no claims for brilliance. But they are a little portrait of me, this weekend, trying to "say it in words."

evening arrived fast, bringing the cold of winter with it

the spices smelled as bright as the color of the carrots, all simmer and steam in the pot

she thought nobody else on the train could tell she was crying, but the woman reading a magazine across from her was only pretending to read

that girl is a stocky Lindsay Lohan with a British accent

wet fall leaves the size of platters sunk into the mud, like starfish in the sand

they walked silently, and too carefully, as if they might break the air

A poppy

We continue to be without internet. And I have a cold, a sore throat all-over achiness kind of cold. The blogging is bound to get the brunt end of both sticks.

So in lieu of any acumen from me, I hereby offer you a bit of poetry, excerpted from a war poem, in honor of Remembrance Sunday and courtesy of Miguel Hernández. It’s a Spanish Civil War poem, of course, and here as in most of Hernández’s war poetry, blood is a character in its own right, morphing and coloring everything the poet sees (“My blood is a road” or “a liquid cloak twisted around my bones / like uncommon serpents”).

Consider the poem a poppy buttoned on today’s gray coat, in remembrance of the end of World War I, 89 years ago today, a war that was supposed to have put an end to all wars.

Bloody Fate

I come, blood on blood,
like the sea, wave on wave.
I have a soul the color of poppies.
The luckless poppy is my destiny,
from poppy to poppy I come
to fall on the horns of my fate.
…
I fight with blood, I argue
with the pounding of bodies, with all those veins,
and each body I bump and contend with
is one more cauldron of blood, one more chain.
…
Blood has given me birth, and jail.
Blood dissolves me and swells me up.
I am a building constructed of blood and plaster
which demolishes and rebuilds itself on a bone scaffolding.

A bricklayer in blood, dying blood,
washes and hangs out his shirt each day
not far from my eye,
and each night, with my soul,
and even with my eyelids, I gather it all back in…

(tr. Don Share)

Tenuous

Internet this morning was crashed; we called the company and they said it’s not just us, everyone’s internetless!

Meanwhile, we went to Ghent, to the Fine Arts museum there, and lingered hours over the paintings and lunch at the café to avoid the cold wet day outside.

Now back in Brussels, and the internet is still not working. If I get an itty bitty tenuous wireless signal from one of the neighbors, I’ll post this in a flash.

Thankful today for museums, museum cafés, museum bookstores. And for time to linger.

Stellar moments

The Mister bought a book last month by Stephan Zweig called, in Catalan, Moments estel.lars de la humanitat (Stellar Moments of Humanity; I'm not sure what the title is in the original German). I also can't figure out when it was first published. The nineteen-thirties? Forties? We've been reading it in pieces, sometimes aloud to one another, and then each on our own.

The chapters detail, as the title suggests, great moments of history. It pretty much fits into the "great men" tradition of history (and it is strictly all about men), except Zweig takes pains to point out that sometimes the turning points of history revolve on the actions of scoundrels, cowards, or unknowns.

I turned first to the race to the South Pole by Captain Scott, because I always love arctic exploration stories. Other chapters I rather enjoyed include the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable by Cyrus Field and the "discovery" of the Pacific by Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

Right now I'm reading the chapter about Handel's composition of the Messiah. I don't know why I ended up saving this one for last, but the timing seems right. I've been engrossed in the story of a man who, just recovered from a paralyzing stroke, besieged by creditors, without any desire to compose, suddenly is sent a libretto (by a librettist he had been known to belittle--hee hee I always wanted to use those two words in one phrase!) and finds himself gripped by a manic episode of composing that lasts, day and night, for twenty-four days.

When he emerges from his almost visionary state and finally sleeps and eats heartily, he insists that the music has come not from him, but from divine inspiration. He donates the concert revenue to hospitals and prisons, stating that the work is for the sick and the imprisoned, because he himself once was sick, and was cured, once was a prisoner and has been freed.

Then, last night, I went to choir. We're performing the Messiah this semester, and as much as I love this music, as much as singing it is always thrilling to the bone, last night the story of its composition, the text, and the music all fell together and just about overwhelmed me. I started to sing with my eyes closed, so familiar it is, and became utterly absorbed in the exquisite sound.

I've sung the Messiah in Oxford's Sheldonian theater, one of the places Handel himself conducted it, with a professional orchestra. I've sung it with feeble high-school strings trying heroically to keep up with the tempo. I've sung it at parties, in church, in countless rehearsals, school gymnasiums. I've sung solos from it for auditions and in performance. I still remember the first time I heard the whole thing live, and listen to it on the radio every Easter and Christmas. But last night it was new to me all over again.

The story of redemption in song, the incredible word-painting, those breathtaking musical surprises. In that moment it was clear how art can be so much greater than itself, that it is much more than the production of a meager human being. I think this is emphasized even more in choral and symphonic works, because their magic is that the music becomes so much more than a sum of the parts, a true synergy of human and divine.

So Zweig didn't have it quite right; the stellar moment isn't so much the composition of the work as the singing of it, time and time again, with thousands and thousands of voices. The newness of a familiar work in every performance, how the inbreathing of notes on the page and plain old air becomes the outbreathing of, well, music.

And that is what I am thankful for today.

Fairy tale spam

I just got a very nice e-mail from a guy in an undisclosed African country. His father was "a licensed solid mineral (gold, diamond ) Cocoa etc exporter." So far, I'm right with him: the raw material for making chocolate absolutely deserves to be classified with gold and diamonds. And if you've got all three in the family, well, you're set for life, right?

Sadly, no. His father passed away, and the story becomes tragic:

"Few years before my father died he apparently married a woman who became my stepmother because my mother died when i was very young. My stepmother already had two daughters of about my age, and they came with her to live in my Father's house. I discovered that there was some ill-feeling from my stepmother towards me, since then i have been badly treated; being forced to undertake work befitting only a servant, in my father's own house."

Wait, a stepmother (whom your father "apparently married") and two evil stepdaughters? You're being made to work like a servant? Do they have you cleaning out the fireplace? Holy mackerel! Despite the alias, I am positive this is Cinderello writing.

Poor guy, the situation becomes worse.

"When my father died instead of being in the state of mourns as custom demand with our tradition, she went as much as desired and claimed my father's property and in future to come she stand as a possible danger to my live with atitude to me."

First of all, outrageous that she didn't travel to the "state of mourns." Secondly, she went elsewhere, "as much as desired." Heartwrenching. And the clincher is, she is dangerous to his "live with attitude to me."

It was just at this point that I started wondering what I could do to help this poor boy. If only there was a way to lift his spirits and get him out of the evil stepmother situation...

But wait! There is a way! I can help him with some money, some 8 million euros, which he has in a bank! But can't withdraw. All I have to do is get in touch with him, send him my contact information, and then withdraw the money. No problem, right? And in thanks for all my help, he'll give me ten percent of the money.

What a saint, that Cinderello. I'm going to write back right away.

Thirteen roses

Squeaking in under the wire, today. It's nearly midnight! As is usual on Thursdays, I didn't get home from choir until close to 11 and my first priority is to feed my whiny, demanding stomach. Now, filled with a quinoa sweet potato dish that I just made up and turned out to be surprisingly delicious, it has stopped controlling my actions and I am free to blog.

All day I've been thinking about a movie we saw yesterday, Las 13 Rosas. It was the opening film for the Spanish and Latin American film festival this year in Brussels, followed by a reception, and we were invited courtesy of M's boss not having any interest in going to the forty millionth reception this year. I was looking forward to it all week, as I vaguely knew the movie was about the Spanish Civil War, and that the reception was probably bound to have Spanish wines and cheeses.

But when it came time to go to the reception, after the movie, I didn't exactly feel like mingling and being cheery, because this was the saddest movie I've seen all year. My neck was sore from trying to hold in my sobs, my face was a teary mess, and my heart was heavy. Because it is a movie based on true events (and the documents and letters quoted in the movie are the real thing), it was even more powerful. As M pointed out, his grandfather was held in prisons just like those depicted in the movie; in other words, it touches close to (my husband's/my adopted) home.

The movie tells the story of thirteen young women who are picked up by the police just after the end of the civil war, on suspicion of being "Reds." It depicts their experience before this event, the brutal and violent treatment they receive, and the aftermath of their imprisonment and trial (I won't give away more than this). While the film seemed tinged with that miniseries quality at first, the quality of the acting and the manner in which the story is told drew me in.

One of the best things about it was how it focused on the relationships of these women (some who were best of friends, some who hardly knew each other). Instead of trying to present the full back story of all thirteen, the movie moves from connection to connection in vignettes that interlace and give a great sense of relationship. In fact, many of them get brought to prison because the police follow one of the girls as "bait," watching to see who rushes up to her and embraces her as a friend.

This was one of those movies that makes you wonder what you would do in such a situation. How you would react? Would you succomb to the deliberate currying of fear and suspicion among neighbors? Would you avoid sticking your neck out for others? Or would you risk your life in even small acts of defiance?

These were the thoughts running through my head as we headed to the reception afterwards. In the sea of people, I lost the Mister and was buffetted about by all those giant handbags slung over women's shoulders (why is it suddenly the fashion to carry purses the size of suitcases?). Witty conversation, a glass of wine, and a wedge of Manchego didn't seem terribly appealing.

Today, I'm thankful that we don't live under a dictatorship. That we don't have to make tiny decisions that could mean the imprisonment of neighbors and loved ones.

Computer speaks

Good morning to you, said my computer, as I settled in front of it, having breakfasted well with my marit.

Good morning, I said in return.

May we travel calmly today? it said.

What do you mean by that? said I. I hoped there were no implications about overly strenuous computer usage.

And within a few clicks my eyes were opened. The internet was crawling at a snail's pace. The snail in question is arthritic, has a bum hip, and is battling a smoker's cough.

Mr. Computer, I said, let's try to restart you and the internet box, and see if that clears out your lungs a bit.

You are welcome to try any remedy, it said. I was surprised to discover how eloquently formal my computer is. Under the youthful white exterior hides the soul of a professor.

Restarting activities were futile. I think Mr. Computer knew this all along, but was just being polite.

Do not take it too much to heart, it said. You have done your best, and in life inevitably there come the times of testing.

So I am left with a slow day, despite an early start and good intentions. A crawling day.

I am going to go swimming now. I am going to do the crawl.

(Today, I am thankful for the swimming pool across the street. For the swimming pool, with its 19th century iron spans, warm chlorinated air, and the little cubbies lining the water's edge. And for the fact that it is located across the street.)

Slightly out of tune, but mellifluous: a piano story

After posting about the final arrival of the piano this weekend, I thought I would gather up the posts about the piano and put them in one place, this post being that place. Why? Because I have a firstborn's listmaker brain and I like to organize things and as a child I always ate M&Ms in a specific order according to color (if you must know, brown, tan, orange, yellow, green, and yes, they threw a wrench into my nine-year-old brain when they added red).

Consider this the piano fascicle, for you Emily Dickinson and/or anatomy buffs.



Part I: the impulse purchase
Part II: reluctant delivery
Part III: we fire the moving company
Part IV: misplaced signage is costly, piano at the doorstep
Part V: signage incompetence continues
Part VI: cancellations and complaints
Part VII: home at last

It took exactly two months from the moment of purchase to the day a concord of celestial harmony caused everything to fall in place and the piano to land in our dining room.

Here is a fuzzy picture of the beautious beast:


I've been playing every day and I'm sure our neighbors are thrilled. I'm sure they would like me to keep playing, all the time.

As the day wanes

Today I am thankful for a warm house, warm soup, and warm tea. Can you tell that it's cold outside? I got quite rained on as I slogged home from French class this afternoon. No umbrella, because it seemed like it might be a nice day when I left the house--but I should know by now not to trust the morning sky in Brussels.

Speaking of French class, we got an assignment to bring a ghost story to class on Thursday, something from our "home culture." She said it could be anything Halloween-related, witches, goblins, etc. Something along the lines of a story we read in class today (for a fourth-grade reading level, isn't that encouraging) about a little boy who discovers tiny witches giving sorcery lessons in the forest. But I'm drawing a blank. Somehow I missed all those charming childhood Halloween stories, I suppose! If anyone has any ideas...

I learned in class today that Belgian children get presents on December 6, which goes a long way towards explaining why all of the shops have been packed recently. It's like Black Friday frenzy in the US: only one month to Christmas! On the night of the 5th, Saint Nicholas comes to leave presents in everyone's shoes. Then, many families also celebrate Santa Claus as a separate thing on December 25th and thus have two gifty celebrations. It's like in Spain, with Christmas and then the arrival of the Three Kings, who also bring presents.

Since the Mister and I have a Catalan-American-Belgian household (Catamelgian, if you will), we should celebrate all of them: presents in our shoes on December 6, presents under the tree and pooped from a log on December 25, and presents left by the Wise Men on January 6. A whole month of presents! Now there's a holiday season worth caroling about.

iMe

Is anyone else getting a little tired of everything out there being called iSomething or eSomething? I get it, we live in an electronic world, the iPod is everywhere, and the internet is our new playground/town hall/encyclopedia. But surely we can stop with the i-ing and e-ing?

It's especially bizarre when the thing being i-ed or e-ed is totaly unrelated to electronics or the iTunes revolution, and it is clear that the name bestowers simply were attempting to give a little hipness to their project or connect to the iPod somehow.

Yesterday, in Place Royale, we saw an exhibit that is called eDoubts. I think the e in this case refers to Europe, as the artwork is dots marking European cities, each with a big question mark on it, spread all over the plaza, cars and busses rattling over them nonstop. As the Mister pointed out, if they think throwing a bunch of question marks onto the ground is supposed to make us interrogate the concept of European cohesiveness well, they've got another think coming.

So, if we can have eDoubts, I wondered what other nouns have been transformed into iVersions and eVersions. Quick google searches of objects within eyesight and some other nouns that came to mind proved that the i and the e can be attached to just about anything: iLamp eLamp ePlant iChair eCandy iMirror iBlanket iWorld iDog iHero iWish eDreams. Welcome to the internetization of the world.

It was not until I tried "iFloorboards" and "eFloorboards" that I hit a wall. Even then, there were a couple of companies who had already registered the domain name "iFloorboards" in case someone ever wanted to eMarket their...virtual floorboards?

Anyone want to make bets as to what will be the next manifestation of Vowel Prefix Syndrome? a, o, or u? Introducing the exciting new whirligig called aThing! uGadget. oExpensiveFancyStuff.

Today, I am thankful for things that are not i- or e- or virtual or pixellated. I'm thankful for my fuzzy sweatshirt, and my husband's morning kiss, for the roasty taste of coffee, and the straight spines of books lined up on the shelf.

Piano: a happy ending

Guess what I'm thankful for today?

The piano is, at long last, esconced in one corner of our dining room. It is happy, I am happy, the Mister is happy.

This time, the placards reserving our space went up in the right sector of streetfront, but cars were still parked there last night at the appointed hour. I called the police but they were predictably slow to respond. Fortunately, our enterprising lift operater managed to squeeze the truck next to the minivan parked in the spot in front of our window and made it work, lifting the piano up and over the parking interloper.

It was quite difficult on the nerves to watch the piano be hoisted into the middle of nighttime traffic (it being dark already at 6 pm--we've done the daylight savings thing already here in Europe), then up through the air just perched on a little platform, not tied down by any means. And then to watch three men wobblingly balance it it half in the window and half out while they tried to maneuver it in. At that point I was as nervous about their backs and bones as I was about the piano.

But all backs, bones, and piano were all intact after the short interlude of its travels and I am simply happy to have the saga over with. Commence happy music now.

I am also thankful for the Mister's safe arrival from South America yesterday, an hour or two after the piano's arrival. Although it doesn't make as good a story, being in his arms again kind of trumps everything else.

Faith

Last night I had one of those life-changing conversations, one of those interactions with other people that is exciting and encouraging and, ultimately, true.

Interestingly enough, the whole thing developed after a discussion about the internet, and even more precisely, about blogging. Does it truly bring people together? Or is it a symptom of our separation and distance and the atomization of modern life? Are we talking to a void? Despite over a year of blogging on this webpage, I don't know how to answer those questions, and I only can speak to what motivates me to write: to keep family and friends up to date on my life, to practice a different kind of writing than my poetry or my academic work, to speak about the things that otherwise might just be bottled up, to allow myself to laugh, to muse, to ramble.

But that's not quite what I meant to write about, either. At that point, the conversation turned toward matters of faith, and my friend and I were up until four in the morning discussing what it means to believe in God, what it means to know that he exists, and what, then, that means for our lives. How to live a life that is beautiful, how to live beautifully.

While she has come recently to this conviction, and is still searching for answers, for me it sometimes is so familiar that it is an invigorating thing to state afresh what it is that I believe, especially to someone so genuinely curious and open to what I have to say. My beliefs are Christian, and in many senses traditional, and I find that the challenge is to explain them humbly, in a way that doesn't ring of piousness, rightwing political catchphrases, Christianese, closed-minded fundamentalism, or hellfire-and-brimstone preachiness. To find new language to state the things in my heart that matter most.

I hope that I spoke clearly, I pray that I spoke truly, and I know that her enthusiasm and joy were a gift to me. And that is what I am thankful for today.

I promise

So I find that I have joined this thing called National Blog Posting Month, which means posting every day for the month of November. It scares me a little for several reasons.

1. I have never posted every day for a whole month.
2. It means that maybe somebody besides my grandpa and my parents and my three friends might read this blog. (Since I had to join this networky thing to make it official and keep myself honest.)
3. The abbreviation of the challenge is called NaBloPoMo, which, well, scares me a little. Therefore it is the last time I will use said abbreviation.

But one of the good ideas that I got from the networky part was to post every day about something I am thankful for. So, since I'm starting on November 2, I will write two things:

1. I'm thankful that the Mister is coming home tomorrow.
2. I'm thankful for the nice feeling of putting on a clean pair of socks.

See the world, don't move an inch

Yesterday I discovered one of those fascinating yet time-wasting internet thingamabobs. Maybe you've heard of it already and are all, that's totally old news, and I've known about it forever, and get with the program, yawn.

But to me, this is pretty cool. It's flickrvision, and it shows a big map of the world with all the images people are uploading to flickr, the online picture gallery, in real time. It feels like you're watching snapshots taken of the whole world at once.

You get to see Lara in Brisbane's photo, and then a picture by Luciano in Milan, and shots of Stephanie in Seattle's party, and Renata in Rio's travels and Yulianus in Indonesia and Fundera in Germany...and on and on.

While the pictures of groups of smiling people and/or pets are legion, there are some wonderful landscape and travel shots. One fun part is noticing that a given picture, while uploaded in Germany or China, is actually of Barcelona or Monument Valley or whatever. It makes you imagine people moving across the map, seemingly at the speed of a few flickers (flickrs?!) of the computer's pixels. Or, click on "3D view" and the world spins as though you're the one flying.

When familiar things pop out of the map it's especially exciting: someone had taken a picture of a croissant from the best bakery in Barcelona! And that statue in Boston! It happens more than you might think, too, that the photos are truly stunning, worth waiting for while the boring blurry ones drift by.

Yesterday as I watched, some distinct trends started to emerge. The Americans, they were uploading pictures of zombies and witches and bumble bees and dragon (to clarify, people costumed as these things). The Europeans were uploading scenes of either parties (blurry pictures of bands and groups of people around beer-littered tables) or travel (cobblestone streets, mountaintops, monuments). The southeast Asians were uploading pictures of street scenes and school events.

After watching for a while I finally saw a picture from Belgium. And what, you are dying to know, was it of? A plate of food, unrecognizable beneath the pile of cheese melted all over the top. You gotta love the Belgians.

But that was just yesterday, during one little slice of the afternoon. What does the world look like today?

Sleeping like a marmot

Yesterday's evening was a success on both social and culinary levels. I was introduced to the joys of the little round almond cookies called panellets and I introduced my guests to the joys of pumpkin pie. None of them had ever tried it before--imagine the tragedy of a pumpkin pieless life!

I wore my Cleopatra wig and eye makeup and managed to astonish everyone who came through the door. I even managed to frighten myself a few times, especially after I had ditched the wig at around dessert-time but caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror still wearing half-smeared crooked black eyeliner all over my face. But, sadly, I was the only one in costume. I understand that on what to them was just a regular worknight, it was hard to get hyped up enough to se deguiser. So I played the role of the loony American hostess in her wacked-out wig and kooky color schemes (I served an all-orange menu: carrots and orange peppers, bright orange butternut squash soup, pumpkin pie).

Everyone stayed until 2 am, and although I lost some of the thread of the conversation by the end of the night, due to sugar overload, wine, and the fact that it was 2 am, I did pick up on a rather handy Catalan phrase. "Dormir com una marmota," to sleep like a marmot, is the equivalent of sleeping like a rock or log. I like it because I'd much rather sleep like a marmot than a log, the former being a whole lot softer and snugglier.

And sleeping like a marmot what I proceeded to do as soon as I had popped the leftovers in the fridge and crawled into my jammies. (And yes, OK, I'll admit it. I ate pumpkin pie for breakfast today.)

In costume

Happy halloween!

I was going to scour my photo archives for pictures of me and/or me and the Mister in costume from Halloweens past, but I think they're all either in hard copy only or on my backup hard drive, which would require labor--you know, plugging the thing in--to find, so instead I have found a mini gallery of what I think are infinitely better pictures. Sort of a catalogue of all the costumes that I found in my iPhoto library.

Cutest first. Last year I was in Vermont for Halloween, and got to witness our nephew's discovery of what Halloween is all about. At the start he was a little confused by the whole thing, but by the time my dad had taken him around to a few houses, he was all about Halloween. It doesn't take long to get a kid to appreciate the glories of people giving you lots of candy.


To up the cuteness factor even further, here is a photo of our niece and her little pal at carnival season last year. Do I not have the cutest nieces and nephews ever?


I rest my case.

Let's continue our perusal of the photographic archives. Here I am with my mom at my old abode, the House of Love. For the annual department Halloween parties, it was the Haunted House of Love. But the decor stayed up pretty much year round. Witness this photo, taken in May of 2006:


Hijinx at the House of Love were many. The following photo is me and my housemates in "costume," sort of. It's a brilliant card made by my housemate for my farewell party. It features me as Nancy Drew, and the two of them as other characters on the cover of The Secret at the House of Love. This is exceptionally fantastic for many reasons, including our love of Nancy Drew covers and the fact that the House of Love holds many mysterious secrets, one of which was that--I kid not--a wheelchair was one of our permanent furnishings. Nobody knows when it took residence at the house, but it was uncovered by some of our earlier housemates in a closet full of rubbish. It was a favorite seat for parties and in actuality proved terribly practical, because it could be driven from one room to the other. And also used for pop-a-wheelie tricks.


Now, switching gears (do wheelchairs have gears?), imagine my surprise when I discovered that I have more than one photo in my archives of random European men dressed in bunny costumes. Honest.

Cologne:


Brussels:


May your intake of candy be excessive, and may your dreams never be haunted by manic bunnies.

Live, from the bus

This morning I was buoyed by the sight of blue sky and sun--it has been so many days since I have seen either. As I got dressed, full of energy to face this day, one that came with a long list of to-dos clenched in its fist, I looked forward to getting my sunglasses out of the backpack where they had languished since my surprisingly summery trip to the US at the beginning of this month.

But as I pulled on my jacket and gathered up my things, the house darkened precipitously. "Oh no," I muttered, "Can't you just wait?" Hurrying my pace, scrambling for the papers I needed for my visit to the parking reservation office (yet again), I glanced at the windows. Sure enough, the familiar sinister pelting of rain. Sighing, I grabbed my umbrella and put my sunglasses on the table.

I should be glad, at least, that I had warning in time to get the umbrella, because when I stepped outside the rain was coming down SO hard--I think the technical term is "cats and dogs." The kind of rain that had my pants drenched up to the knee in a minute, even with the umbrella.

I made my way through the downpour toward the office of "Administration Communale de Saint-Gilles Urbanisme et Travaux Publics." Fortunately, once there, the man understood my tortured French enough to grasp the problem, and a discussion ensued among him and several other jumpsuited public works men as to where the panneaux should have been placed, requiring specialized knowledge of the locale in front of our house. I even drew a picture, pointing to where--BOTH times--the signs had been placed and a big X where our window is located. Clearly, the two did not align. Someone brought up the friterie across the street as an orienting landmark. Yes, that's it! I say. In the end, I left with yet another "clear off the street-side parking" reservation, one that I hope will, this time, do the trick.

I caught the bus to head downtown--oh, did I forget to mention that that's where I am right now? I'm on the bus! writing longhand--for a visit to the costume store. Yes, that's on today's to-do list, given priority even over that conference proposal I have to write, because that I can do after 5:30 pm, whereas the stores, they close good and early in this wet, dark land called Belgium.

Why a costume store? I am hosting a petite soirée at my house tomorrow night that will be a mixture of Catalan All Saints (making panellets, little almond cookies, with a friend), Thanksgiving (making pumpkin pie), and of course, Halloween. That's where the costume store comes in. Normally, I endorse entirely homemade costumes, but this year I've taken it into my head to be Cleopatra à la Elizabeth Taylor, and I just can't get around the wig--everything else I can make, but the wig sort of has to happen.

And besides, it will be for more than one party. In Barcelona in a few weekends we're holding a similar party for all of our family and friends at our new apartment, sort of a housewarming event and, we hope, a way to institute a holiday celebration at our place. All Saints/Halloween is a good one, because people have the day off but don't usually have family commitments already, it's kid friendly and fun for all ages, and can easily combine American and Catalan traditions. Although, obviously, this year we'll be having it a little after the fact...

M. can go as Antony to match my Cleopatra for a good couples costume. Now that I write this, I can't remember if I've mentioned this to him or not. Hmmm... He'll be a good sport about it. We've been known to put together some successful costumes in th past, Bonnie and Clyde and Vermeer and the Girl with the Pearl Earring among them.

Oops, must go. Bus has arrived.

Hello again. Back on the bus, heading home. Mission(s) accomplished! I got a witch's wig that will do the trick, with long straight black hair and straight bangs. Several other stops produced some accessories. At Brico, Belgium's answer to Home Depot, I bought several meters of shiny gold chain that I can make into necklaces and hair adornment. Cost? 1-2 euros a meter. Cost for the stupid and fake-looking plastic Cleopatra jewelry at the costume store? 10-20 euros.

I also recharged my cell phone and went grocery shopping for the stuff I'll need for tomorrow. I had never shopped at the grocery in the center of town before, but I will do so again, because it was awesome! Large, well-lit, interesting food, great wine selection, and even good music (Jamie Cullum)! Although, as in every Belgian grocery store, there is one whole cooler section devoted to gross-looking mayonnaisey salads in every pastel shade of the rainbow, each one a mixture of some kind of meat and some kind of sauce. Ah, Belgians and their sauces [insert shaking head motion here].

Oh, and another thing about the grocery store: although our French teacher says they celebrate Halloween here--and judging by the costume store, they do--there was a noticeable lack of brown and orange M&Ms, or any orange and brown candy. I'm just saying.

Digression: Isn't that an odd phrase, "I'm just saying"? It really means the opposite of what it says; it means you're implying something that you're not saying. I had never noticed it until writing it down right now. Because usually it's something you're saying out loud, so I guess in that sense you are "saying." You're both saying and not saying. Isn't language wonderful?

Digression #2 [written in margin earlier]: This morning I read in the NYTimes that mice who are placed on vibrating pads for 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, lose a significant amount of fat and gain considerable bone mass. They're going to start testing that on the elderly, but it makes me wonder (as I write this with shaking script and teeth clattering to the vibration of the bus) if regular bus riders (especially in Europe, where the cobblestones make for superduper vibrations) also have relatively less fat and better bone mass? Hey you scientists, you should get on that.

Anyway, we're nearing home and I feel happy to have completed my errands. There's even a little sun peeking out of the low clouds. I'll type this as soon as I arrive [editor's note: NOT].

Yellowlegs and purple figs

The market today was full of beautifully autumnal foods, and even though the Mister is gone all week and I'll mostly be eating alone, I couldn't help but buy piles of mushrooms, figs, and other produce.

I even took some pictures (with the videocam, because our camera is broken!):



I'm a tad confused about which kind of mushrooms these are (they were two different purchases from two different vendors; in the picture they're mixed together). Are girolles the same as chanterelles? From a brief look on the web, I think what I bought may be two varieties of chanterelles, the ones with the brown stems being chanterelles jaunes. Not sure though, because at one stand the sign said girolles and the other had no sign.

I think in catalan they're camagrocs (yellowlegs) and rossinyols (nightingales). Translations of food names are so difficult, but oh so fun!

I know these come straight from the forest because while cleaning them I found all sorts of little surprises, included pine needles and moss and more than one little crawlie. I don't terribly mind (although I tend to drop what I'm holding like a hot potato if I see something move) because it means they are fresh and will taste the way the crunch of fall leaves sounds.



Now the question is what to do with the mushrooms? I think for lunch, in a few minutes, I'll sauté some of them and put them inside the buckwheat crepes I made yesterday, since I have leftover batter. If there are enough left after that, maybe a fall risotto...

Also, the figs, oh the figs! I've been buying them lately to put in salads with goat cheese, but since I have a whole little basket of them, I think I should try to make a tart or something warm.



The cookies I made yesterday are hiding in the background.

And what would Sunday be without the Herald Trib (featuring the Sunday crossword, of course) and a grainy baguette?

Home pianoless home

Talking to my brother--with the miracle of video chat! saw his most adorablest dog for the first time!--I realized I had left the story hanging in the middle of the Mister's traveling travails.

He arrived safely, albeit five hours late, and with enough time to relax, talk, eat dinner (I made crepes for the first time in my life--why didn't anybody tell me they were so easy?) and to re-pack his suitcase, which he is doing as I write.

Also, the piano, it is not here. That which was likely yesterday was confirmed today with full cancellations of all of the people involved. I called the police so they could file some sort of document, and talked to them when they came, explaining the situation, although they refused to file any sort of document. (But I talked to them, in French, and they understood me!)

So the Mister is home, and the piano isn't. I'm just thankful it's not the other way around. Although it would be nice to have them both.

Mister in Roma

He got stuck there this morning--after waking up at an early hour to catch a taxi and a plane from Sardinia to Rome, discovering that a small light or something had malfunctioned on his plane and there was no promise of leaving for another five hours, at least.

This is bad news for a couple of reasons. One, it means less time at home between his arrival and his departure again in the early hours of tomorrow morning, when he leaves for El Salvador and Costa Rica. (Yes, this is a travelling month, indeed.) Two, if the delay continues for too long, he'll miss that departure, and that will put him in a pickle.

So I am praying that he can get on a different flight, or that they manage to get a new light for the plane lickety split. Sometimes it's the smallest things that cause a snag...

The Lord does not want us to have a piano, it seems

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it.

They put the parking signs--to reserve our space for the piano lift--in the wrong place, again. We TOLD them and well that it had to be on the OTHER SIDE. We are in the same boat as yesterday morning.

Can I pick up the signs and move them? When it says police property all over them? And some poor guy finds his car in the no-park zone? What if I keep my eyes out and scuttle down and move them when there's no car? And if the car doesn't move?

I called the office but of course there is no answer and it's now almost seven pm. M is calling the police from Italy because he has the official papers with him (since he organized things on his way to the airport).

If there is no other remedy, we will have to cancel the lift to avoid paying YET AGAIN for their time. And the piano, meanwhile, is sitting in the entryway and annoying the neighbors.

I can't believe it.

Also, I short-circuited our electricity today.

The little earth we live in

While I was staying with my friends in Bloomington, we watched some episodes of a most marvelous BBC series called Planet Earth.

Actually, "we" is only true in part. I watched a couple of episodes with one of them, and then a couple on my own after they were both gone on conferences, feeling a little like an interloper but grateful for their in absentia hospitality. I watched them while eating crema catalana (Catalan crème brûlée--the Catalans invented it first, I do believe), the sugar topping caramelized to a perfect glassy burnt-sugariness with my friend's industrial-sized blowtorch.

I bring this up, full disclosure, because I think it's possible that the sugar high and vanilla euphoria of a perfect little pot of cream may have impaired my judgement on just how totally awesome these documentaries are. But I stand by my review, nevertheless, and am confident that they will prove to be just as awesome even when viewed while not under the influence of a creamy sugary dessert.

Sorry. I got sidetracked. Forward, ho! This series of nature documentaries is definitely the most impressive I have ever seen, in terms of outrageous fiming techniques (you keep yelling "HOW did they get that SHOT??!") and in terms of outrageous animal behaviors and creatures that you never knew existed (you keep yelling "This is CRAZY!" at whatever little baby squid or paradise bird or guano beetle they are focused on at the moment).

And it's not just the animals; as the title indicates, the focus is just as much on habitats and environments. Each episode is named after a habitat such as Jungles, Caves, or Deserts, and the processes of wind and water currents, volcanic eruptions, or plant life are equally as central as the animals.

The filmmakers went out of their way to film behaviors and events that have never before been captured on film: think snow leopards frolicking by their den, strange and rare mating dances, manta rays as big as a room. But the "normal" things become just as fascinating as the exotic, and the intricacies of life on this planet bowl you over in every shot.

Predictably, there's an ecological message in all of this. But you are never preached at. It's enough for the narrator, with his impeccable British accent, to note that the only nesting place of this flock of millions of birds is just one rocky outcropping in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic ocean. And then to show you how the birds feed the sea lions, or whatever, and the birds feed on the fish, or whatever. So you know, without preachiness, that if the waters rise, and this little outcrop is covered up, a whole lot of trouble is going to happen in the world. And that's just one small example.

So, all I'm saying is, stop global warming. And also: this baby is going on my Christmas list.

PS: there's a little preview video on the Amazon site. Go watch it. And also, if you have HD television, this might be the thing that's most worth watching in high definition, ever. There's a different version you can buy online to watch it that way.

Please accept our apologies

I realize, and I feel terribly sorry for, the fact that I haven't written in this blog for nearly a month. I was gone a lot of that time, and I made the mistake of storing up all the things in my head that I was going to write about, until the point came where it all seemed so daunting to make a dent in it and I just sort of put it off.

Which makes a good case for regular blogging, in the first place.

Among the things I want to write about are: the family reunion in Michigan, the week in Bloomington with good friends and the old IU haunts and profs, fall food, especially pumpkin pie, our new (hand-me-down) videocam, and other terribly important things I can't remember right now.

For the moment, I offer up the rambly post below, written about today's rambly day, which should give you a snapshot of what's going on with us at the moment, and bring you up to date on the piano situation. Spoiler: it's still not in our apartment.

Love and kisses and hugs and all of those sorts of things.

From aliens to fish eggs

Oh, dear readers. It has been quite a day, a day whose tale must begin by gathering the threads of the piano saga. It is nearly two months since we purchased the piano, and it is still not in our apartment. As of today, it is forlornly sitting in the building hallway, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Only this week did we receive the money back from the first moving company. Meanwhile, upon my return from the US I discovered there were several calls from the store where we bought the monster. We called them, only to find that they had gotten so fed up with us not appearing to claim our purchase that they put it back up for sale.

This, needless to say, was perturbing news, and we insisted that they remove the for sale sign. They (justifiably) wanted us to pick up the darn thing, already. So we went a new route (the Mister had already found other potential carriers-up-the-stairs but we gave up on that plan) and decided to get parking reservation from the town government to park a lift, and coordinate the delivery from the store with the arrival of the lift and some extra hands, all designed to just get it up here.

That was all supposed to happen at 8 am, today. But what we discovered at about 7:30 am was that a car was parked in the essential space, and that the city had placed the no-parking-special-reservation placards on the wrong side of the building (for which we had paid 55 euros, of course). We called the number they had given us to get the police to come and move the offending car, several times, but we received brusque insinuations that our plight was unimportant to them and they were shorthanded anyway.

Meanwhile, the lift guys, who had arrived on time, are sitting there and eating our money. With their coffee and cigarettes. For breakfast.

The piano arrived at around 8:30, and everybody drank more coffee and argued and looked up at the windows and gesticulated. (This from what I could see by leaning out of the window where the piano was supposed to enter. The Mister was down in the thick of things.)

Eventually they decided to bring the piano into the building, and so they did. It is now sitting in the entryway, blocking everyone's passage and just inviting people to scrawl graffiti on it, I'm sure.

We paid the lift guys their 100 euroroos, which they had totally earned by sitting there and drinking coffee and gesticulating. So now we have paid some 150 euros to get our piano about half a foot further upwards towards our fourth-floor window. I had to leave for French, the Mister had to catch a plane to Italy, and I just wanted to cry. I had to say goodbye to him, arrive late to French, and find out I had done terribly on my last exam.

But: the Mister to the rescuuuuuuuue! After class I talked to him on the phone. It transpires that before going down to the aiport, he had returned to the parking-reservation place and insisted that it was their mistake (I made the reservation in the first place--in French!--and I can say with confidence that I indicated the CORRECT side/street numbers) and they should give us another free reservation. At the same time, he called the lift company and coordinated a time with them and with the parking reservation guy for this Saturday. And the lift guy said something about not charging us as much the second time, or something, so that's good news. Then, because without the original piano delivery guys who came with the truck this morning, we needed more lifters, he called our ex-neighbor, who agreed to come with some buddies. So he had it all set up before I even got back home.

Which was a relief. Because I was more upset this morning about the daunting thought of renegotiating and coordinating all these people, in French, while the Mister was on his trip, than I was about not having the piano. At this point the piano itself is a chimera, an illusion whose physical reality even now is masked by the hallucinatory fact that it is loitering in my building entryway.

So that was the morning. The afternoon didn't get much better. I took a nap, in part because I hadn't slept well last night. I had woken up this morning with specific, novel-length dream memories of watching a city-sized meteor land on Chicago, and the all-too-real aftermath of a major disaster. It included aliens who landed in various shapes and their alien animal species, and taking care of an alien who I wasn't sure but thought was an alien child. I even remember thinking about the theological implications of discovering that aliens were real, and feeling the old 9-11 kind of fear and chaos, even while I felt surprise that I felt resolute and maybe even brave. (PS: Did you see the series of NY Times articles on sleep and dreams? They were fascinating. Go read them.)

I didn't dream during my nap.

But I did wake up unaware of what time or day it was. Which is why, when the Mister called at around 8:30 pm, probably a few hours after I had woken up, and I looked at the clock, I started shouting. Because I was supposed to have been at choir rehearsal at 7:30. My one regular evening commitment, and I had missed it. Tonight was important, too: the orchestra conductor, the one who will be conducting us during the concert, was there to rehearse us. So I rushed out the door, grabbing my Messiah score, and caught the next bus. And of course it took me longer than usual to get there. I caught the last 50 minutes of rehearsal, though, at least that.

After a day like today, an upside-down and topsy-turvy day, one that started with disaster-dreams and ended with frenetic catching up to my regular schedule, I decided I needed a treat. So I stopped at the french-fry stand that's across the street from us. People have told me that this humble little trailer is actually well-known for delicious frites, but we had never tried them, probably because the last thing you're thinking about as you step outside your front door is "Where can I get some good snacks?" And also because, returning home, my mind is usually occupied with what we have in the refrigerator and what I can make with it, instead of the fried food across the street.

So tonight I tried them, and they were indeed tasty. Oily and hot and salty, freshly cooked, sliced from potatoes today.

And then I got another treat, only a couple of moments ago: the Mister called from Sassari, on the island of Sardinia, and he explained his utterly delicious meal to me. I was both glad I wasn't there (a bunch of older Italian professors speaking in heavy dialect) and sad to have missed the trip (I was planning to go, but it was two days of travel for one day of being there), but happy to eat vicariously through my husband's description of his glorious sampling of Italian regional foods. Including a wine that "tasted like flowers," a special myrtle grappa, and bottarga, which I've heard of but never tried--it's fish eggs that are salted, cured for several months, and pressed. It's used sort of like parmesan, grated over pasta, or served on bread or sliced as hors d'oeuvres.

On that culinary note, I need to escape to bed. I hope I will not have novelesque dreams that I remember in the morning. If I dream, I hope it will be of Italian food and the music I will play on my piano....one of these days.

I am about to gush

...about being in Chicago, where it is WARM and full of sun and sidewalks and sweatpants. (Er, I don't mean Chicago is full of them so much as Americans are full of them, or fill them fully, if you know what I mean.) And did I mention the SUN? and the WARM?

I strolled around downtown today, blissfully happy, unconcerned even by the el breaking down and bums on the street. I bought overly expensive makeup that I am convinced is going to be worth it because it's one of those fancy things that is blush! and eyeshadow! and lipgloss! in one. And I bought that highly recommended Philosophy facial cleanser.

Plus: the nice people at Sephora gave me lots of free samples. Plus: behold, my buying power is great, for I come from the land of the euro. Although: sales tax? Whoa! All of the sudden at the register everything seems so much more expensive!

I also should mention how charmed I am by the green street signs that have their own little posts, and green highway signs.

And I ate Mexican food, one of those big burritos with black beans, and lo, I was content. And I drank Starbucks, unguiltily (I am opposed to the American invasion of it in Europe, but here, well, I just have two words for you: pumpkin spice).

Speaking of pumpkin, I bought two big cans of it to bring back to Brussels so I can make pumpkin pie. My longsuffering husband has promised me that he will carry them in his suitcase for me. (I don't know if he realizes how heavy those cans are.)

Speaking of the husband, he will arrive tomorrow, and then all will be right with the world. Then we will drive to Grand Rapids to experience the full impact of the gathered descendents of my great grandparents, who arrived in America 100 years ago. Given the family genes, it will be sort of like a blonde giant convention.

Homesickness

Although the title of this post might suggest otherwise, I'm not exactly homesick (besides, in two days I fly to the US!). But it's a gray, spitting, Brussels Monday, and this poem I just found (in a book of German Expressionist poetry that I picked up for two bucks in Harvard Square) perfectly captures that gray feeling of exile and distance.

Homesickness

I cannot speak the language
of this chilly land,
nor walk in its pace.

The clouds that drift past
I also cannot read.

Night is a stepqueen.

I always have the Pharaoh's forests on my mind
and kiss the constellations of my stars.

Already my lips are glowing
and speak distant things,

and I am a colourful picture book
in your lap.

But your face weaves
a veil of weeping.

My shimmering birds'
corals have been gouged out,

on the hedgerows of the gardens
their soft nests are turning to stone.

Who will anoint my dead palaces--
they bore the crowns of my fathers,
their prayers sank into the sacred river.

~Else Lasker-Schüler (tr. Esther Kinsky)

What weekends are for

Friday night birthday parties. (Try to avoid the part where you get inexplicably dizzy all of the sudden in the middle of talking to that nice American girl--yay! another American! a rare sighting, indeed--and have to run to your hosts' bathroom where you can't find the lights to save your life and meanwhile you have to puke.) (No. I'm not pregnant.)

Sleeping until noon. (Preferably wearing your favorite pajamas.)

Reading aloud in bed. (The best way is taking turns. Helps if the chapters are short.)

Talking about European history, with a focus on Lenin and the Russian revolution, in bed. (Yeah, I know! Whatever floats your boat!)

Doing other things in bed. (No comment.)

Frying eggs and refried beans. (And eating them.)

Talking to far-flung family in Spain and the US. (Or, you know, wherever yours happen to be. Go Skype!)

Meeting friends for a Belgian beer. (Recommended: a bar where old men are playing chess.)

Going to see a movie on a cold and wet Saturday afternoon. (Preferably something kind of Hollywoody, in English, but that has gotten at least some decent reviews, bonus points if from the NYTimes. If that doesn't work out, a Romanian art-house film.)

Meeting other friends for a city-wide music fest, trying out a few venues and listening to French pop, jazz, and blues. (And maybe some reggae.)

Going to church. (Wear thickest possible tights. See aforementioned "cold and wet" weather.)

Buying fresh vegetables at the market. (To make soup. See aforementioned "cold and wet" weather.)

Making soup. (See aforementioned "fresh vegetables.")

Playing cards with your husband. (Try to win at least once.)

Denying that it will ever be Monday again.

Chum Frink

I've been doing some work for my brother, who has a super cool graphic design company. They do everything from branding to product displays to websites to photo shoots. He asked me to write copy for a catalogue of high-end sport sunglasses (think Oakleys, but they're not Oakleys).

My job was to write a spiffy history/mission statement, descriptions of all the different styles of glasses, descriptions of the super duper fancy schmancy "tech features" that make these glasses the thing you absolutely have to get if you're at all serious about your sunglasses, and mini-bios of the four famous people who are wearing the sunglasses in the photo shoots (this last one I ended up editing, not writing from scratch).

What took me by surprise was how much I enjoyed doing this work, mostly because of how creative and--dare I say it?--poetic it was.

I was drawn to the challenge of saying normally boring or cliché phrases in a way that was fresh and invigorating. I loved thinking about how to describe a sunglasses feature with style and panache. Ultimately, I found myself using creative language that approximated the poetic process much more closely than I expected.

Of course, I didn't have any illusions that this was poetry, and knowing that my name wasn't going to be on it was pretty nice--kind of lifts the pressure of greatness. (It is only product copy, after all.)

The question of poetry in advertising made me think of the character in Sinclair Lewis' book Babbitt called Chum Frink (his full name is T. Cholmondeley Frink, and that alone is worth the price of the book). Chum Frink is George Babbitt's next door neighbor, and his is "a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent." He is the author of both "Poemulations" and "Ads that Add."

At a party, Frink gets going about which of his callings is more difficult:

"I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem—reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems—all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness—but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory."

The poems--not advertising--are the "cinches" if you just "play the game." On the other hand, advertising has true style and panache. So in Frink's world, the poems are the manipulative clichés and the language of advertising is where true artistry happens.

(Of course all of this is Lewis' commentary on the way poetry in the 1920s was changing to include language of popular culture and advertising, as well as the rise of mass culture in general.)

But that leads me to the part about writing catalogue copy that I didn't like as much: the creative language and metaphorical imagery was being used to--basically--manipulate someone into thinking that they should buy these sunglasses (or a store into thinking they should sell them). Where Chum Frink sees poetry as manipulative (and perhaps it is, in its own way), the language of advertising is overtly designed to cause consumer behavior (and even more, create a consumer identity).

In other words, even though the exercise of language for this job was sometimes just as fun as writing poetry, I am more comfortable with poetic language being used to provoke thought rather than the urge to buy. A more cynical view might insist, like Frink, that poetry is "selling" something, even if that something is a sentiment or a thought or a political/aesthetic perspective. But I'd like to think that there's still a difference there, even if it's a question of degrees (and I don't mean that PhD that's hanging over my head).

I should add that my brother's company is run with integrity, skill, and artistry. And (psst, bro) I would totally work for them again. But the whole process made me think about what creative writing means, what advertising does, and the aesthetic philosophies of T. Cholmondeley Frink.

Piano saga, part trois

After yet another week with no piano in sight (despite promises to the contrary), we fired the piano moving company. They better give us our money back. M. went to collect this morning.

But now we're stuck with our original problem, which is how to get a big honking piece of wood and metal and ivory and stuff up to our apartment. I realize it's just not that easy to do this sort of job, which is probably why the "professionals" get away with all that craziness they pulled.

Does anyone know exactly how many people it takes to carry a piano? And how brawny those people have to be? We're wondering if it would work to just individually hire people, starting with our former Polish neighbor (I mean not formerly Polish, formerly our neighbor) and going from there.

I'm getting a sinking feeling that I won't even have the piano by the time I leave for the US, next week. And since I'll be there for almost two weeks, it will have been A MONTH AND A HALF between the day we bought the piano and I finally lay eyes on it again.

Discord

Still no piano. After several hours, and several phone calls unanswered to the delivery man who called me in the first place, I spoke with the piano company man, who told me that the delivery men had attempted to pick up the piano "three or four times" over the last week but they hadn't ever let them take it because they didn't have "the ticket" (i.e., the sales receipt). It was absolutely necessary, it transpires, that I go down to the store in person and bring them the receipt.

What I want to know, is why I only found this out after THREE attempts at pick-up, over the course of TWO weeks, and why they never CALLED us to get the receipt instead of banging their heads repeatedly against the same difficulty? Why, during ANY of the several times M. e-mailed or called in an attempt to move things along, did they not mention this detail? (At one point they even told us--patently untrue--that they had already picked the piano up from the secondhand place and was being stored at their piano shop.) It all boggles the mind.

It's tempting to blame such blatant demonstrations of ineffeciency and incompetence (repeated over and over again in our day to day life in Brussels) on the government. Or, I should say, the non-government. Belgium just celebrated (with a big sparkly cake) the 100th day of having no elected government.

Everyone's talking about whether the country will split in two or not; certainly we've been astounded by the palpable sense that there is greater division between the two parts of Belgium than any two neighboring countries. But evidently Belgians are fond of their monarchs, and besides, Brussels would be an unsolvable mess: a mostly francophone city in the midst of Dutch-speaking Flanders.

The complexity of regional, city, and town governments are astounding; nothing gets done because there's just too much governance. Especially because it's just a little sliver of a country not much bigger than my home state, Vermont, it's hard to imagine why it is so difficult to smoothly run a bilingual and multicultural country.

Anyway. I just want my piano.

PS: for a nice recent review of the Belgian-split problem, see this NYTimes article.

In which I promise to have some thoughts

I just realized that the iTunes thingamabob that I tried to put up a while ago actually IS there. I thought, mistakenly, that the Blogger template stuff hadn't accepted the coding and anyway...shrug. But there it is. And I don't like it! I can't figure out why some of my favorite music shows up but others are random albums that I don't really like that much at all. And while the scrolling words are nice for about a minute, they're all grey and boring and repeat over and over. You can click on the artist to see the album, but even that is only interesting maybe the first couple of times you do it. Am I right? So, I will be deleting the iTunes thingamabob.

Also, apologies for not blogging in, like, forever. I promised my grandparents I'd keep it up, and then I slacked off for almost the whole month of September. So here I am, grandpa and grandma! I'll try to blog more so you know what I'm up to!

What I'm up to lately is more of the same, which means: trying to work diligently, studying French, singing in choir, trying to swim more regularly so I don't turn into a couch-shaped blob, and traveling to places like Barcelona (two weekends ago) and Liege (yesterday, to see the opera there--Nabucco--and do a bit of sightseeing). Ooh, and my good friend Amanda is coming to visit tomorrow! Also, I'm doing some work for my brother, which I think I'll have to save for another post because I have some, you know, thoughts on that.

Do, re, mi oh my

So, we bought a piano. It's not, shall we say, something one typically expects to do on a regular old Friday afternoon.

But the Victor Horta House Museum, which we thought would occupy our time until our dinner reservation, actually only took about an hour (being rather more "house" than "museum").

Whiling away the rest of the afternoon meant strolling through the Chatelain neighborhood, and in the Chatelain neighborhood, on the same street as the museum, there is a huge secondhand shop called Les Petits Riens (The Little Nothings).

We had our eyes peeled for a sofa or a coffee table, and didn't see anything. However, we saw a piano. Two, actually.

I should mention here that my mother was with us, and I should mention that my mother is a pianist by trade. We started playing the pianos, and noticing that they were only 200 euros. We also noticed that one was both decidedly more antique than the other AND decidedly of richer sound, tuning, and all around beauty. This is where my mom came in: she knows what to look for (uncracked sounding board? good. a cracked key? replacable. tight tuning pins? good. a couple stuck keys? no problem.) and she helped us realize that yes, we could buy a piano in a random thrift shop on a regular old Friday afternoon.

Then the friendly people at the store started to realize that we might actually take one of these pianos off their hands, and they reduced the price by another 25 euros, while pointing out that they had originally priced it at 500, and had no idea what it was really worth (hinting that maybe it was worth a lot more than that).

Nervously (can one really buy a piano, just like that?), we handed them the credit card and were the proud owners of a beautiful antique piano.

Now, here's the rub: one can't exactly take a piano home in one's back pocket. After a few phone calls the following morning, we discovered that transporting the piano up to our fourth-floor apartment was going to cost us more money than we paid for the piano in the first place. Most companies wanted us to rent a furniture lift, which is very expensive and involves reserving the street in front of our house from the town government etc. etc. We did find some professional piano movers who were willling to CARRY the thing up our stairs (heaven help their backs), and so we paid them to do so.

And then waited. All of this happened, let's see, over THREE weeks ago. And we're still waiting for our piano. After numerous phone calls and e-mails and consternation-ful conversations with the piano people, it appears that at long last, TODAY is the day. The piano was due to arrive twenty minutes ago (the dudes called me earlier this morning), so I am holding my breath and crossing my fingers (you know, to limber them up for the scales I'm going to be practicing shortly).

Our neighbors are probably going to hate us, but I am hopping-up-and-down to have a piano. Last time I was home and played a bit, I could tell I had lost so much of what I had (which wasn't a whole lot to begin with, to be honest), after years of having nowhere to play. I'm looking forward to sharpening up some piano chops, and also to being able to practice my choir music without having to resort to a. awkward solo pitch-guessing, b. singing along with recorded versions of the pieces, or c. attempting to use an "internet piano" by which you click on keys in sequence to get a computery approximation of the melody. (Believe me, it's not worth the trouble.)

So here's to secondhand shops, and piano chops. May the piano be light on their backs, and may it come within the hour.

A mini-tour

I promised a few photos of our place in Barcelona, now that the whole setup can function again, thanks to 1) a card reader, 2) my dad's help in backing up and deleting an unwieldy and hard-disk-gobbling amount of photos, and 3) internet, yay! Credit for most of the pics goes to K., poet and picture-taker extraordinaire.



Our new kitchen! As seen from the dining room (with original corner hutch) and towards the blue living room. The oven still isn't in yet, thus the big hole under the stove, but I love how it all turned out, especially the exposed brick (kudos to M. on that, who is the visionary in this relationship). There will be a marble bar extending from the free-standing shelf over to the counter.





The front, purple room, as seen from the green room, our bedroom. The purple room will be an office/library, thus the piles of books (which we hope to put on built-to-order shelves):





The blue room again, with a chest of drawers built by M's great-grandfather, and, yes, a TV.



A close-up of the bathroom sink. Flowery antique saucer used as soap dish, in contrast to modern slate gray tiles and sleek fixtures.

It will be a long process to complete all of the many details that we left unfinished this summer, with little bits done here and there on weekend visits. Some things will remain provisional for the next two years, until we move some of our favorite things from Brussels to Barcelona, and others will change as we refurbish old furniture and buy new items. Each step will be exciting, I think, even if it takes a long time.

Bruxelles redux

As the Mister and I were falling asleep last night, I whispered, "I'm happy to be home." What I meant was, happy to be in our own, big bed, happy to be alone in our own house, happy to unpack the suitcases (in which we lugged about fifty books purchased during our travels).

I have to admit that it wasn't so thrilling, however, after sunny, breezy Barcelona and the sincere, effortless beauty of Vermont, to return to the gray grime of Brussels. Everything I looked at seemed to be coated in a nauseating layer of ick; cigarette butts and beer at the train station tram-stop, crumpled paper and trampled french fries with neon pili-pili sauce revoltingly spread out over the sidewalk in front of our house. (A not uncommon sight, thanks to the frites wagon across the street.)

The gray skies didn't help, and neither did the knowledge that I would really have to knuckle down to work now that vacation was over. No more days spent being fed abundant mother-cooked meals, no more to-do lists that included such pressing items as "read Harry Potter" and "go to museum" and "play with nephew." I'll miss hearing him say, "Ook, Robin!" and his neverending question, "What's that?" to draw my attention to something, anything: the whole world is AWESOME when hanging out with a two-year-old.

Lest I get completely wistful about vacation being over, there are some things to look forward to: my mom is coming in a couple of days and we have lots of ideas for fun things to do while she's here, French class and choir will start up again soon, we will head back to Barcelona in mid-September, and back to the US in early October for a big family reunion: the two-hundred odd descendants of my great-grandparents are getting together for a big celebration of the centenary of their arrival.

And now, I need to do a little cleaning. Six weeks of neglect has left this house a little dusty.

Inferno, paradiso

To solve the problem with our tickets I spent TEN hours on the phone (this number is NO exaggeration, although the following might possibly be). I heard Pachelbel's canon approximately six thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine times, talked to approximately fifty-seven different Cheaptickets agents and "supervisors" (in quotes due to my suspicion that these were just "agents" who were more skilled in customer evasion), and repeated our "record locator" and our situation the same number of times. Every time I called I was greeted with a cheerful description of our old "confirmed" cancelled flight, which seemed to be deliberately conceived to get my goat.

I lost my cool just a couple of times, M. once shouted threats at the Pachelbel's canon hold music when I couldn't take it any more, and we were told we had new, confirmed tickets three times. I finally thought we had a new ticket at the end of seven hours on the phone on Tuesday, but woke up on Wednesday to find no e-mail confirmation, and BA only had a record of the last leg of our return trip, from London to Brussels. Three more hours on the phone resulted in, at long last, an actual new itinerary, a confirmation number, and what appeared to be a charge of over three thousand euros. Yet another call was required to make sure that we wouldn't be charged for the new flight.

The ten hours I spent on the phone were just about evenly matched to the ten hours we spent in the air yesterday, and British Airways in the heavens at least somewhat made up for the hell of Cheaptickets and the purgatory of Heathrow: we flew first class on our transatlantic flight! (The ticket we were given by cheaptickets was the slightly better "World Traveler Plus," probably because it was the only thing available, and then BA bumped us up to first class.)

Flying first class on a long-haul flight has long been a dream of mine, so I was giddy with excitement when we got on the plane and discovered that our seats were better described as seat/bed/entertainment compartments. Like little kids, we pushed all the buttons, zooming in and out in our fully reclinable seats, and ordered champagne and newspapers (OK, like grown-up little kids). The food was actually delicious, the china was real, the service was impeccable, and the movies were pausable. (We watched Waitress: SO good! Watch it!) It was the best flight I've ever had.

My spirits weren't even dampened by a lost bag in Boston, and after a late-night drive to Vermont with my brother and sister-in-law, all it took was one whiff of the good Vermont air to feel entirely at peace. When we got out of the car, the sky was brilliantly clear, displaying a magnificently populated starscape. I had forgotten how electrifying of a sight it is, this infinity of stars, the way the night sky was meant to be seen. The milky way meandered across the heaven, the big dipper scooped low at the horizon, and as we stood there, both M. and my sister-in-law, who had never seen a shooting star, saw a large one greet us with its light.

Not so cheap

Stop the presses! We are flying to the US on Thursday, or are supposed to be. But when I called this morning to order a vegetarian meal, British Airways told me that our reservation had been cancelled. When? The day after I bought the ticket, two months ago. And who cancelld it? Why, the reserving agent, cheaptickets. This is news to me, because we paid for these tickets (and despite the company’s name, not so cheaply, hoo boy no sir), and because we were never informed of any such change.

Cheaptickets.com, meanwhile, tells me (after answering the phone—in India, I think—“thank you for calling Orbitz”) that our flight is confirmed and there shouldn’t be a problem, and we should call back in four hours when BA offices in the US open. In four hours. Aaack, we just want some answers, and we just want to be able to get to Boston and then back to Brussels, without forking out more money.

This is the second time I’ve had a major problem with cheaptickets.com, so I don’t mind telling the world: DON’T buy your ticket from them! The last time, I was stuck for an extra day in Halifax because Delta told me I hadn’t paid for my flight, when again I most certainly had, and also not cheaply. This is beginning to sound sort of familiar.

Nesting

Where to begin, after so many days and so much work and fun?

Let’s begin with a color. Think of the worst color you can imagine. Specifically, the worst color possible for your new home’s entry, dining room, and kitchen. Then imagine walking into your house, a smile already on your face in anticipation of seeing the completed paint and the trim new kitchen, then wiped off after finding the walls painted exactly that color, that horrid color.

That color for me is a pale electric greeny-yellow, and if you come to visit you can still see it in the little guest bedroom. We could only afford to re-paint a certain number of rooms, so there it will remain until we someday take it upon ourselves to wield brush and paint. Actually, in an enclosed space, and one that I don’t tend to frequent (given that at the moment it serves as a storage warehouse for old furniture and dusty lamps) it’s even tolerable. It was the living spaces, the heart of the apartment, that I just couldn’t stand to see robed in that upsetting, nerves-on-edge tint.

The whole thing was more or less our fault, anyway. We tried to choose paint colors by computer, first carefully narrowing down our Pantone favorites, then through some complicated “translation” programs to get the color equivalent of the “Natural Color System” preferred by the painters. I don’t know how “almond cream” on our computer in Brussels translated to “pale electric greeny-yellow” on our walls in Barcelona, but so it did. (I would point out that the painters didn’t help much; we had described the difficulty we had of getting the color codes, and included a description of the color we wished for, and I’m sure I don’t know how they thought that the two were even remotely related.) To further add to our grievance, M. had actually seen the colors during a quick business trip the previous week, and had very much liked them, although they weren't exact. Turns out it was only the "tinted primer" that the painters had mixed up based on our descriptions, but they never mentioned the possibility that the final color would be different, nor did they remark to us that the color took a drastic turn between "description" and official "code."

The walls were repainted in due course, and are now a nice buttery cream. And in the weeks since that first rather shocking welcome, we have done a lot of hard work. I never expected the house to be as utterly dirty as it was, covered with thick layers of plaster dust, paint splatters (another gripe with the painters; did they not use drop cloths?), and wood particles, all on top of the decades of dust accumulated by the 97-year-old great aunt who lived here before us.

We moved in a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last Thursday, when the carpenter finally came in to put the doors and trim on the kitchen cabinets, that that things felt like they were coming together visually. (Also provoking another round of wood-dust cleaning.) The cabinet wood, a decision made so long ago I couldn’t remember what it looked like, goes fabulously with the exposed-brick wall, the rustic black stove hood, and the creamy countertop.

Meanwhile, we’ve been doing a million things, from buying curtain rods and doorknobs to dealing with the lovely and tangled red tape of electric, phone, and internet companies, from mopping and washing furniture to unpacking boxes, opening wedding gifts (like Christmas!), and trying to figure out where that box of bed linen went.

We’ve also managed to have some fun in the month since I last wrote; we’ve twice been up to the coast for a quick weekend beach trip, once out to the Catalan interior (the beautiful, sunswept Sagarra), and a good friend of ours came for a stay, prompting welcome respites like paella at the port, strolls in the city, visits to favorite restaurants, an afternoon in Sitges, and a ride on the cable car that sways its way over the water from Barceloneta to Montjuich.

What our quick Costa Brava trip this weekend (to celebrate our niece’s two-year birthday) told me, though, is how much I was looking forward to coming back to our breezy and serene apartment. I already love this place, knowing that it will be a home that we continue to build and live in, a place to come back to from wherever we are in the world.