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Today has had just the kind of weather I hate, the kind that results in two foot wide puddles of soupy slush at every New York corner, the kind that makes all forward motion on the street a series of twists and flinches to avoid the chill wind, the kind that makes you feel ungracious about any and all things between yourself and the next sheltering doorway, including all your fellow pedestrians.

I got into work feeling dazed and generally unhealthy. Something is paining me in my shoulder, my nose and throat have been packed with phlegm, I’ve got low level aches and acid reflux. (Note to my body: OK, I get it: next week you begin your 49th year on the planet. Is there something you want to tell me about my warranty?) Alka-Seltzer, my secret lover banished some of my symptoms, so that I could go and be a curmudgeon in class, mushroom-barley soup helped with some of the others. It also helped that I made contact with some of the organizations I’ve owed contact to and straightened out some financial matters.

My interest in poetry podcasts has led me to sampling a bunch of other podcasts on iTunes. They’ve been giving me some ideas for what to do with the WordPress version of this blog, namely to make it more bloglike: more linking, more informational in general. We’ll see how that plays out.

There is a crazy-making aspect to WordPress though: because so few people comment, it’s a little hard to be a comment-whore in the way one can be on LJ; instead, there is the ultratantalizing “blog stats” page which provides you with a running tally of how many people are looking at your blog, and lays those figures out on a day to day graph that looks like your own little popularity roller coaster. It’s really hard not to just hit the refresh button one more time to check out if any more people have come by. Utterly addictive evil.

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I felt sorry for Elizabeth Alexander, the poet selected to follow the President. Talk about a tough act to follow. And how intense has Dianne Feinstein’s life been? Seeing her make the introductions, looking remarkably similar to when she announced the Moscone/Milk shootings (I mean hairdo and all, not in bearing) made me think that you truly cannot predict the arc of a life or the consequences of an act.

I’m back on the job after three days away (back to everything really – I’ve been without lj, wordpress, email and cellphone), most of them spent being sick, just at the point that I was congratulating myself on not getting sick like everyone around me. The hubris stick, it hurts.

…about not posting enough. The past week has provided two states of being: feeling ill, thus too limp to reflect and type or doing stuff, in which case there is no time to type. The result? A week slips by with nothing. So now finally some time is wrested from the job, which allows for a quick update. here’s some of what’s been happening:
1. I’ve attended three plays Lee Bruer’s new production of “A Doll’s House”, Cabaret, Wonderful Town. All through the great graciousness of my friends who offered me tickets.
2. I’ve spent weekend in bed convulsed by coughing to the extent that I thought I had ripped a muscle.
3. I haven’t played any Pikmin.
4. I purchased two bookshelves at Crate and Barrel.
5. I watched the people’s court.
6. I compiled a list of people I needed to contact, calls I needed to return, projects I needed to nudge forward…and despaired.
7. I had a number of exchanges and attempted to apologize for my boorish behavior.
8. I organized a still life of t-shirts and ribbons in the back room of my gallery so that it could be photographed for an ad in artforum.
9. I’ve eaten BBQ ribs on several occasions.
10. I’ve drawn.
11. I’ve spoken to my therapist about submissiveness.
12. A friend graciously came by and fixed the desktop machine, if by “fix” one means walking me though another clean install.
13. The buzzing, counfounding strains of NPR have woken me every morning, and the self reflexiveness of Adult Swim has droned me to sleep each night.
14. I’ve fretted about my filing system, and the extreme amout of facial hair left around my wash basin.
15. My family hasn’t called, nor have I called them.
16. I have found myself unable to decide between a dead or fake christmas tree.

…. with being too sick to get out of bed all day Sunday, and then being well enough to come back into work on Monday. What kind of sap am I? If I had any kind of chops as a goldbricker I would have just called in sick and taken care of all the household stuff I missed yesterday beacuse of the fever/coughing crappiness, plus the headaches (I couldn’t tell if they were due to illness or caffeine withdrawal).

So house remains a shambles, calls didn’t get returned and worst, I missed out on poker with http://www.livejournal.com/users/thornyc/ .

Latest crush: The garbage man at the Times Square Q stop. Usually around 10 am he’s working emptying the front bins: mid thirties I’d say, around six feet full, and sort of scruffy chesnut beard, glasses, nice and pudgy. He dresses in such funky MTA work gear that I’ve wondered if he wasn’t a scavenger who just latched on to the uniform, but he’s got a broom and dustpan so I guess he’s legit.