Unwinding

Dear Family, I keep this blog for you, though today I need it for me. I'm feeling a bit like water pressing against its dams so I'm going to write it all down. Sorry for the excursion though maybe you will like it if you read it. Maybe stuff we can talk about when I come home, and I'm dying to come home.

I'm feeling a strong anxiety today. I didn't wake up that way, but gradually as the day goes on I am feeling more shaky...I should probably give up coffee, but I like it so much...maybe I can find a healthier "vice." I should also likely start jogging again, but I get so bored. It appears clean and bright outside so a long walk will do me some good.

On these days I make all sorts of lists to inventory my life. I clean my desk but mostly sit still. Here is some of that clutter which feels most pressing:

I want incredibly to learn French. I'm afraid I can't learn the words I am looking for as I was not born to them. I'm afraid my interpretation is always limited to the extent of who I am, who I am is not French.

I cannot begin to concentrate on a book on these sorts of days, but I take account of everything I need and want to read. All I want is to read about space all day long....though actually I just want that feeling of opening and awareness and vulnerability that I have when I read about space. Many of these I wanted to read while in school and should have. I was worried I wouldn't understand them or would become sidetracked, confused, and when I did read them, I did become sidetracked and angry also that no one would read them with me. These books among many I want to read:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch

The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre

Space and Place: The Perspective of Space, Yi-Fu Tuan

The Practice of Everyday Life, vol II, Michel de Certeau

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin

I want to read these again:

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

Species of Spaces, George Perec

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Jacques Derrida

Austerlitz, WG Sebald

Other readings:

History of Love, Nicole Krauss

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Kafka by the Shore, Haruki Murakami
Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton
Lolita, Vladimir Nobakov
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, Bernard-Henri Levy

Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books, In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Zizek

Also, Dostoevsky, whom I've never read, and specifically women writers whose language and philosophies I like, such as Lauren Slater, Joan Didion.

Last night I remembered that I took two different ASL classes as a youth. One was paid for by my school so that I could communicate with a deaf student in my class. I now wish I would have really stuck with it and studied, for my sake and for Shawn's. I don't know why I didn't care enough then...a selfishness of naivete perhaps.

The next craft I am willing to take on is Cut Paper illustration and sculpture. I read that symmetrical cut paper design was a popular Polish folk art called Wycinanki. This makes sense to me. I love using an x-acto blade.

I've been daydreaming of Vienna, or what I imagine could be Vienna, which is a majestic city with the remnant haze of war like soot in its gilded corners. In The World According to Garp he [Garp] moves to Vienna and writes a story about a circus bear on a unicycle, and his is the Austria I love. Last night I dreamt that my little Iowa family moved into a small oddly shaped flat in a huge hotel-like complex. It felt at once like it would be in Austria but also Sweden....the beds were enormous planks of wood with down blankets, tucked under the eaves. The window looked out over the maze of rooftops and windows of the same building and nothing else. I looked through boxes of feathers and buttons left behind by the last tenant. I am always dreaming of expansive, broken down hotels, something between Maria Theresa and Socialist housing, something with lots of doors.

All I listen to these days is Roy Orbison and John Denver. Is my heart getting soft? Annie's Song is one of the most beautiful songs I know. My heart swells when Denver sings "....looks so Lovely," for the last time in Sunshine on my Shoulders.

In my dream wedding, Jens Lekman would be there singing John Denver songs to us.