Month: August 2011

the bookstore of my dreams

Holly

The bookstore I dreamed about last night was small, just a few hundred square feet. The books on the first floor weren’t for sale, because their magic might not last if they were removed from the premises and because the store’s footprint was so tiny that it might run out of books if people bought the books and took them away.

But the first-floor books were pretty awesome. There were sequels you hadn’t known about to all your favorite series, and how-to books that came with the right equipment and exactly the right level of instruction to make you a master. (A couple of my friends were trying out the martial-arts ones in the store.) As I browsed, the owner unpacked a rack of brand-new yet somehow original-series Nancy Drew mysteries. And I found a novel by Stephen McCauley that had an author photo of him beaming! This was the Stephen McCauley book where he was happy and not cynical!

The second floor of the bookstore had the regular books, new books that you could buy and take home. The magic of the second floor was that the exact right book for you would come to hand. If you wanted, you could think about topics or questions as you browsed on the first floor, and when you got upstairs, the book addressing them would be waiting.

To get to the second floor, you had to go up a steep ladder and pull yourself over a carved wooden gargoyle. My head had just cleared the top of the ladder when my alarm went off. I was disappointed, but it was so clearly set up that way I also had to laugh.

the library haul

Holly

I got off the bus a mile from home to pick up my library holds. Even though I’m in the middle of both Maisie Dobbs and James’  Ambassadors, I had to bring the new ones up on Spaceship Couch with me and sample them.

  • David Carkeet’s mystery novel (starring a linguist) Double Negative, because I so loved his piece The Crap In My Head the other day. (His crap has become my crap– I hear “A B? A B?” now too.)
  • Something called My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing, a writing advice book based on William Blake’s life and writings. Partly because, what chutzpah, and partly because I’m hooked on the genre.
  • Vivian Gussin Paley’s The Boy on the Beach: Building Community Through Play. I love her, I love the respect she gives children and their work together in the classroom. As she’s talking about play I of course experiment with substituting “writing,” just as I do when I read about religion, or about business or work. But here I wonder about substituting “television” instead– isn’t this why I prefer good television to movies?

    As in a really good research study, play does not value closure. It seeks new direction and unexpected results. We want to be surprised but also reassured that we know the territory.

But now I have to find clothes to wear tomorrow, and put a frozen burrito in a sandwich bag, and floss, and stretch over the big orange ball so I’m not a curled-up, barely breathing reading thing.

Pudding On The Rice

Holly

The clerk at Pudding On The Rice said she was sorry, she couldn’t make Sanguinity and me the Shrimpy Pig crepe we ordered, because they were out of the cheese spread. “Somebody used it all up and put the container back empty,” she said.

“Co-workers are the same everywhere,” Sang said darkly.

When I paid and stuffed a tip through the slot in the paper glued down over the top of the tip jar, the clerk told me about the tip thief and how he came in, scooped money out of the jar, distributed it to his friends waiting outside the door, and they all ran in different directions. Hence the new lid.

I like being around employees who don’t feel like they’re paid to take on the corporate voice of their employer too much.

The food was just okay, but then again I don’t see a case with 20 flavors of cold rice pudding every day. White chocolate rice pudding, cheesecake rice pudding, lemon poppyseed rice pudding. We shared some rum rice pudding, which was strongly flavored but not actually boozy.

Try Broadway Coffee & Tea for a better crepe. But since I’m working days and Sang works most evenings, it was good to sit outdoors by the Park Blocks and spend an hour together before I went to catch my bus.

I am a mess of aspirations as usual

Holly

It is August, and The Librarian is off on adventures, for maybe two years. She has her tiny adorable netbook and her folding bike and vintage Volvo and will be reporting via blog and/or book. WOW. I’m sure I am not the only one feeling thoughtful at the sight of her actually marching off to pursue some dreams. And maybe even more so after witnessing a parade of other friends who came by to pick up stuff or help with house chores. She had a way of using help wisely and without fussing when it was offered, but still taking full responsibility for how things were going, and having the bandwidth to listen to and pay attention to people throughout. In short, there is more than one axis on which I want to be more like The Librarian. In the meantime, I now have a little experience painting a ceiling with a roller and putting down stick-on vinyl tile. And she saved the masking tape around the painted trim for me to tear down, because she knows I like that!

In order to get to her house, I got my bike out and cleaned it up for riding. About time now that it’s August, right? It’s a beater, with a little rust problem that’s never gone away since Burning Man, but it’s pretty smooth, fine for neighborhood trips. I’m not an enthusiastic cyclist, so I let myself count cycling mileage in my monthly training totals. (But not for the official Million Mile Ultra.) Aspiration: do this earlier next year and try some Pedalpalooza events.

This morning on the way to the bus stop I ate my first Himalayan blackberry of the season. Most of them aren’t ripe. Every year I say I want to make free-blackberry jam for Christmas presents–maybe this year! Any locals want to make a project of it with me? I’d probably be more motivated with someone to share the suffering and triumph.

I’m looking forward to finding a story to work on and finish– lately it’s been scraps and fragments, KFC assignments, stuff like that. Speaking of longer projects, remember the AlphaSmarts that people were typing their NaNos on back when, because they have like a 500 hour battery life and no internet and no big screen to suck you into premature editing? Well, they’re like $20 on eBay now. I’m tempted, for the next time I write something long. But that’s probably aspirational shopping.