Sometimes this town
Last night was a perfect night for sleeping. It was mild outside and there was a nice breeze blowing through my open window. My ceiling fan was turning in lazy circles. Also it was quiet, except, at one point, for the sound of a train passing by several miles away. My cat was purring up a storm by my side – and it was dark out, because it was a normal time to be going to bed: 11:00, rather than 9:00, since I didn’t have to be at work this morning at the usual pre-dawn time. Plus, I’d had a margarita a few hours prior followed by a nice walk around Decatur with a good friend.

If Old Man Insomnia has not made you a regular target in his cruel manipulations, maybe you don’t appreciate this, but to those of us for whom sleep is sometimes a battle, a night like last night was a rare gift. So exquisite, so lovely, I found myself wanting to cherish it, remember it -- to in fact, not waste it by sleeping.
And so, for a full hour I just lay there with Buddy Holly Danger Cat, feeling like I was at the beach--not sleeping, but enjoying the slant of the moon through the window. Then I started wondering if I’d fall asleep at all. And then it was morning.

And Half a Year Later...
I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain movie, lately. A movie nearly everyone I know just swooned over about six months ago and still recalls with fondness in their voices at parties. A little movie called Garden State. When I first rented Garden State, I was visiting my grandmother in eastern North Carolina a few months ago. And I liked it. The first thing I liked about it is the fact that the protagonist’s father creeped me out, right away.

"God, that’s some effective acting," I thought. "But why is this man giving me the jim-jams? Why do I not trust the way he skulks around the house and sneaks up on his son, Mr. Main Character – as if he’s been in that house for eleventy-seven years? Like his mind has been poisoned by the desire for something....a ring, perhaps? A One Ring...?" And then I realized: It’s fricking Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins is Andrew Largeman’s dad!

All LOTR-dorkiness aside, though, I came away from Garden State thinking it to be mostly a sweet little movie. My friends and I are all in the midst of all that career-life-trying to get some cognitive-confluence-goin’ struggle, so it feels poignant to see that played out onscreen. Even if certain aspects of the movie that did not sit quite right with me, simply will not leggo, months after I saw it. There’s the obvious Graduate-style plug for The Shins. If you haven’t seen Garden State--Well, if you haven’t seen it, you probably haven’t even read this far, who am I kidding. But anyway, dear Mr. Imaginary Henshaw, I say to my pretend reader, there’s this scene right near the beginning, when Guy meets girl, and her first Cute Bold yet Endearingly Insecure Move, is to slap her headphones over his head and say, "You’ve gotta hear this. It’s the Shins. It’ll change your liiiife!" Boom-! Soundtrack time! And it’s sooo clumsily done. This is Point A that suddenly I want to throw something at the screen. It’s funny: I go from being pretty much with this movie totally, to irritation, with that one simply turn of events: "Cute movie, cute movie....augh! Selling Me Things! Screw you!"

The rest of the movie, as I said, is fine. You have cutesy Girl Who is Flawed (capitol letters there on purpose) and Pensive yet Cute Guy Who is Flawed. And they’re hanging out, doing random things together in his hometown (where bafflingly, they’ve never met before), when all of a sudden, they meet a couple who lives a quirky life together in a trailer, it rains, and Guy has his cathartic moment for no reason I can fathom. But the cinematography is kind of pretty and there’s music too, I think, so this works all right for a movie. But it would never, ever hold together well as anything else. If Garden State were written as a short story, say, for this class I happen to be taking now, say, it might get some serious criticism on the no-build-up and then sudden, unexpected and unplanned-feeling climax. Just say. And yeah, I know you all probably read criticism of this movie months ago, when it was actually in theaters, so sorry for standing here holding up my index finger in this six-month-later "Eureka!" But I had to say it.

Helllooo, Friday.
Yesterday is over.

I went to bed at 7:30 after talking with my good friend from high school who called me out of the blue from London. Then I read and went to sleep while it was still light out.

I think that generally, I made sense on the phone to my friend, but prior to that, the entire day managed to play itself out in a punch-drunk haze, topped off with the realization that I’d locked myself out of my car at work.

Moreover, and over and over, this week is d-u-n. I’d like to take this opportunity to lock it away in the archives o’ life, because other than a few lurvely hours Wednesday night, it’s been a miasma of stress and exhaustion. My roommates are on spring break from their teaching jobs and are frolicking nonstop friends visiting from out of town, which only underscores the pathetic feel of my existence in sharp relief. I trudge to bed at 9:00 each night, and when I finally get up at midnight from Shift #1 of tossing and turning, they’re on Round Two of mojitos and ice cream
and mariachi bands and fireworks and Kennywood. I grab their rum bottle and take a swig before returning to my sad, quiet bedroom.

Moreover, they’ve decided to stop stressing about their jobs they hate. They’re quitting them to pick up and move to the southwest in July. And good for them, right? But still, some petulant part of me feels whinier than ever, now that
I’m the lone torch-bearer of career/future-related angst in our house since everyone else has gone on vacation. And it’s fricking heavy.

Update from Sleepless Land
Woo! It’s now nine in the a.m. and everything’s taken on this sort of off-keel, loopy bent. I have this feeling I may embarrass myself today. I have this feeling I already have but just don’t realize it. I have tripped and fallen while walking up yet another set of stairs, now, and the stain from the coffee I spilled the first time I did this today is much larger than it seemed when I first missed my footing. (See below.) I just walked up that stairwell again and the whole thing smells of moldy French roast and the stain seems to have grown. It’s totally the kind of thing that I should not just leave there. For some reason when first I did it, it seemed like the kind of thing that would magically go away, because this is how Sleepless Logic works. But it’s about to reach the point when so many hours will have passed between spill and clean-up that it’ll be embarrassing to admit to. Okay, pinky swear: I’ll take care of it in a few minutes.


In other news
We get the world’s best faxes here at Small Publication. Best, I tell you. For example, today: “Super Handyman Al Carrell Has Springtime Painting Tips.” Chief among these bullet-pointed Expert Advice Items: “Choose the colors you’ll use. Remember that light colors make the surface look bigger while dark colors make it look smaller.” Ah. Number Two: “The easiest way to figure out how much paint you need is to multiply height times width for the total surface area. This does not account for doors and windows.” (emph. added.) Okay, so if anyone takes on painting a room who does not understand that height x width equals surface area should just put the brush down. Or the roller, I should say—excuse me, Super Handyman Al; that’d be your next big pointer: “Paint can be applied by brush, roller or sprayer. Brushing takes more work...rollers cover smoothly...” (The first ellipses is not mine, but Super Handyman Al’s. No, I don’t know why it’s there.) Oh! So Rollers paint Big. Brushes paint Small.

Best of all, the fax has a number to call to book interviews with the Handyman, himself, so that he can explain fully his Paint Wisdom, abbreviated in this easy-to-remember patented three-point plan that you can whisper under your breath when the paint aisle of Ace just becomes too much for you:

“I pick the paint.”

“Height time width. But not the empty space in the door.”

“Rollers paint big. Brushes paint small.”

To all the people underground
All my life, I’ve been pretty neurotic about getting decent sleep, resulting from, or possibly helping to spur on, a history of insomnia.

This week, I’ve thrown all that to the wind. The past three nights, I’ve gotten about 10 hours of sleep, combined. Not all this is due to carousing. The night before last and the one before that, it was good old fashioned cursing and turning.

By last night though, I figured I was on such a roll of delirium, that I might as well have a good time – so I broke my ban of going out on weeknights and went to see one of my absolutely favorite people play music: M.Ward.

The crowd at the Earl last night was huge, which initially gave me kind of a protective older sister kinda feeling since why, I knew M. Ward back when he had one quiet, lovely c.d. out. Now it’s four cds later and he’s the New York Times and Salon darling and good for him, too, because I continue to adore what he does and it’s nice to see your friends (even your imagined-friends) succeed.

Lots of major differences between the last show I saw of his and this one. The last one, he opened up for somebody or other at the now sadly-defunct Echolounge. It was a couple albums ago, and it was just him and his acoustic guitar, all sitting down and quiet and reserved. He hung out in the club the whole night and I chatted some with him when I bought a short live album from him at his table in back. He struck me as kind of all-to-himself and lonely, at the time. When he took to the stage, his ridiculous technical mastery floored the front half of the large club and produced the appropriate awed silence, but in the back near the bar, people continued to have their all-important social hour, as this is the Atlanta Way, despite the existence of an Entire Separate Room/Bar that they could have hung out in. Anyway, about halfway through that set, he looked up at us and spoke into his microphone softly, "Thanks. The err, front-half of Atlanta audiences are great." He and Hunter even chatted a little during his set, and he played a request for him.

Not this time, man. This time, there were other people setting up the stage for M. Ward and selling his cds in back. Assistants. I wondered aloud if he had turned into some kind of Howard Hughes-esque figure, and my friend and I agreed it would be interesting if he insisted on playing the entire show from the backstage bathroom. When he finally took to the stage, the lights dimmed. When he took up his guitar for his first song, he stalked the stage, staring out into the huge crowd until there was utter silence in the club. Then he proceeded to play the first acoustic tune on his new album. It was beautiful and full of ornate braggadocio. Then he switched to an electric guitar and brought out a full band and suddenly it was a rock show. Very enjoyable, but of course part of me wanted to shake my head at my dear, sweet, quiet guitar player, all grown up now.

I got home a little after one, finally fell asleep a little after two, and came to work this morning at the usual 5:30. Woo-hoo! So far, I’ve rambled along in conversation a little too long with the woman who sold me coffee at the Gas ‘n Sip (Not Actual Name, most unfortunately), tripped coming up the stairs to the office and spilled said coffee everywhere and—oh, spent fifteen minutes writing this instead of working, which rather needs to be taking place right now, in kind of a dire way. (NOT that I write this from work.) All right, then. Rock on.

(Wanna-be-)Writer’s Block
It’s time to start on my second short story of the semester for this writing class I’m taking, and after a couple hours of sitting in front of my computer typing kee-rap yesterday, it occurs to me that everything I think to write about this early in my renewed Attempt at Writing stage in life, will necessarily be a cliché.

I don’t really have an interesting childhood to go back and dig around in. Flannery O’Conner said something like "If you survived childhood, you have at least 5 novels in you." I cannot fathom five novels about growing up middle class and white and average in suburban Pittsburgh, though; at least, not right now, as I stare down the ceaseless blinking of the cursor.

In college, I had a roommate who was from the rural swamps of North Carolina. She had a whole passel of relatives and ancestors who set one another on fire and hanged themselves and escaped floods -- and she was a damn fine writer, besides.

Back in grade school, I would write about girls who flew to new planets in cardboard rocket-ships powered by grape juice. I had a whole literary series about the zany adventures of a cat named Frisky. I was also a better liar back then. I could lie with a straight face. I could fool anyone. Of course, maybe I just believed this to be the case. I was, after all, eight years old.

For some reason, by college, I had stopped writing. I took a gander at my new Swamp-Genius writer-friend, considered my own bland background, and said, "Okay, so she writes. What will be my thing?" And I made my thing activism and anthropology and philosophy and women’s studies and insert-Alice’s-major-of-the-month here. I lived as if I was the original and only earnest shaggeddy armpit-haired/fist-in-the-air’ed university student.
And I had a great time, but the funny thing is that while I was all this countercultural blah-de-blah, I still was so afraid of conflict that I stopped doing
one thing I loved to do, just because I didn’t want to compete with my friend. Identity is a strange thing. It’s malleable. And often by forces you’d
least expect. Usually inside your own damn self, right?