miles of papers to go before i sleep

i am psyched to say that i was hired to teach in the english department at a kicking university! job search = over. finally. while the class times are not great, i'm still thrilled!* teaching is something that affords me time to write on the side & keeps me thinking about language. classes start the first week of september--which is just enough time to pull together a course & read all the materials. yow! no more job search means i'll have mornings for writing, afternoons for prep, and evenings to blog & finally return the dozens of phone calls to people i love that i have missed due to the festival of wild job-hunting/moving/visitations that has been this summer. what a relief!

*update: i took the tues/thurs time slots. because really, i like to stay up late too much to be in bed at 10pm four nights a week. two nights i can handle. here we go!

art imitates life imitates

yes, madmen returns: danish modern. perfect suit lines. fifties confectionary dresses. & poetry.

from Frank O'Hara's "Mayakovsky"

4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

back in black

i'm trying to get a bunch of work done this morning despite the fact that there are nighttime-feeling skies & it's 11am. Z's family is up for the week & in the afternoons we are adventuring around with them on a bit of a staycation. it's wonderful to have guests to kick you out into your own city & see new things (for us, in some ways, for the first time). i might have wished for drier skies--but this city gets more rain than london or seattle. i've learned to have an almost affection for an-evening-kind-of-light at the wrong hours.

(two snapshots from our romantically neon trip to niagara falls)

reloping

tomorrow marks one year of marriage. & what a wild-ride-of-a-year it was. i would be lying if i said it was easy--to get hitched, move out, fly across an ocean, flat hunt & find, settle in, work like crazy, & move out again in under twelve months. in fact, Z & i struggled quite a bit this first year--being off away from our family & friends, in a new country, in a matchbox flat. in the end, the lonelinesses were helped by the adventurings. the fights by the figuring things out. & we met some incredible poets & bloggers (in person) . but we both feel ready for a year with less boxes & airplanes & adjustments. since we're a little traveled out, we decided to keep our anniversary easy. tomorrow we're amtraking up to the canadian side of niagara falls (it's under two hours from here). we plan to head to one of those amazing 24-hour chapels to relope, & then off to bad wax museums, ripleys & ferris wheels before we return tuesday. what better way to ring in a new, more grounded year with my canadian husband than the cheesiest place in canada?! (i may have even got myself a sweet little key dress for the occasion).

p.s. did i mention that Z's been off teaching at a princeton summer program. & we haven't seen in each other in three & a half weeks?! hell yes to anniversary reunions.

music for cooling off

i have been listening to this song on repeat all week.* it's the musical equivalent of pressing your face against the refrigerator door in the middle of the night. or lying on bathroom tiles to cool off. the kind of song that makes you feel a little less 100-degrees-in-july-without-airconditioning. (& speaking of airconditioning, i may have just traded some niece-babysitting for an airconditioned car in which to travel to my job interview today. desperate measures. desperate measures).

*this isn't the actual video, it's just the least scary fan video.

so hot i could

it's not that i don't miss blogging. i really do. it's just that it's too darn hot. for anything. except maybe beachballs & bathingsuits & stripes. and even then. really?!

(there's nothing quite like northeastern heat denial & our almost complete lack of air conditioning. wandering around grocery stores can only happen so many times a day).

{image via prettyprettypaper via here}