counting from none

in thirty hours, we are on our way. we will be leaving new york for a stretch of time far longer than any cubicle monkey such as myself would ever dare dream. three months. three whole months languishing in the english countryside, having nothing better to do than play petanque, read in the garden and sleep a lot.

i mean, once we're done towing the car, planning the wedding, screaming at BT, grappling with clients who may or may not know that i'm going to be working transatlantically, wondering when the hell the DSL is going to get turned on, threatening my dressmaker for her utter slackness at delivering the product, sorting out the immigration paperwork we'll need to submit to the US government as soon as we're married and attempting not to kill my family when they descend three weeks before the wedding.

you know. peaceful.

i keep trying to remind myself of the peaceful part of our ostensibly bucolic sojourn. it has been my mantra throughout this week, which has been nothing short of a circus, and a frustrating one at that. and to a certain degree, this has been a good thing, because by the time i fall into bed at night, i'm absolutely exhausted, which means my sleep is deep and dreamless. so i wake up feeling rested every now and again, which is helping me to cope with the fact that my wedding dress has been so delayed that it's having to be shipped immediately to england, that several paychecks are unforgivably late, that my right eye appears to have some sort of mysterious scrape on it, we're behind in our recording, i've lost my National Insurance card, my family is being as frustrating as ever, i'm running out of time to see everyone i love (and am going to miss fiercely) before i leave and i haven't even BEGUN to pack.

i love traveling. i really do. and i'm so excited for this journey. because after four years in this city, of increasing stresses and increasingly shitty jobs, i need a fucking vacation. and clearly, the universe at large is going to make me EARN it.

that, and the whole getting married part. that's pretty exciting in its own right.

bells for her.

the street where i live has three churches on it. it is an interesting (and not unironic) place for a girl who was essentially raised without religion to end up; sometimes i wonder if it was a gentle suggestion from the Almighty, to have us end up on a street that would probably be a prominent military outpost if heaven had an army occupying earth--in addition to the three churches on this street itself, there are two more within a one-block radius. plenty of barracks for all who pack flaming swords.

but i digress.

the main attraction of having all these churches so nearby is not the beauty of the buildings themselves, nor the exquisite care with which they tend their gardens, nor even the fact that there's something about having three houses of faith so nearby that makes a girl feel a little safer about ambling down her block when she comes home late at night. it's the bells. you would think that in a city with so much noise, the addition of the regimented chimings would not necessarily be the most welcome addition, particularly on early sunday mornings, but i find something soothing about them. i love that they toll the hours from sunup to sundown, with the hour counts coming in reliably off key by comparison to the more musical chimings which precede them. i love that on sundays, there is a special bell to call the faithful to services, and that it has a significantly more ominous, stern chime, like an austere governess calling the children in to supper. i love that none of the clocks keep the same time, with the hourly chimings coming about three minutes apart. i love that every now and then, with no set schedule, rhyme or reason, one of the churches will play a little tune on the bells--never anything instantly recognizable, but a cheery addition to the morning stillness.

i never thought i'd like living in the aural shadow of church bells; they were the bane of my existence the summer i spent in bathford (nothing shatters the early saturday morning silence quite like a belltower that is ten feet from your window), and reason number one that we opted not to take a larger apartment on the outskirts of carroll gardens--the mere mention of the bells from the church across the street provoked an involuntary tic in the downstairs neighbor that led us to believe that, despite his protestations that after a while you don't even notice it, the belltower was not a particularly pleasant addition to the neighborhood (reason number two was that it was thirty yards from the BQE, a hideous and noisy major thoroughfare, with the lack of proximity to any subway line but the G clocking in at number three). but since taking up residence in this little eyrie of ours, i've grown to love the bells. and i shall miss them terribly when we take up residence in england this summer.

oh, yes. we leave in twenty two days. did i forget to mention that?

flipping and flopping.

i bought flip flops today. two pair, ringing in at just under eight dollars in total. they are silver and green and a startling reminder that i haven't owned a pair of flip flops since i was in the single digits.

how have i managed to avoid them so assiduously for so long?

'tis absurd, really.

i say so often that i am a simple creature, with simple pleasures, and this is only one more example adding to the pile of evidence. simple and nostalgic, it would seem.

flip flops are the uniform of my childhood vacations, before i'd forgiven my father and when i first exhibited the good sense to recognize my sister as one of the coolest women in the world. we would vacation at the jersey shore with some of my mother's closest friends; ice cream at the skipper dipper, 'punk parties' in the back yard (what better use are you going to find for pink hair gel when you're seven?); outdoor showers and silver queen corn; bulldogs and asphalt tiles, the smell of the jersey shore and the peculiar dampness of the sheets in the house.

given that that's what i associate them with, i can't for the life of me pinpoint why it is that i stopped wearing them. because even now, as a woman who really doesn't like the beach all that much (i am a fair-skinned pisces who doesn't like water; i'm a traitor to my kind), i look back on that time with happiness, with a rosy glow.

perhaps this means i've finally learned to appreciate my past without being angry at it. or maybe it's just too fucking hot to wear real shoes. you be the judge. my flip flops and i will be sitting over here, craving peppermint ice cream, whenever you're ready.

laborious.

when i first found myself jobless, i also found myself collecting unemployment for the first time. which was great, a tremendous relief. what they fail to tell you about unemployment, however, is that in order to continue collecting it for more than five weeks, you have to report to the department of labor downtown to experience what is loosely referred to as "orientation."

now, i don't know if you've ever visited the department of labor headquarters in your town; should the mood strike you to do so, however, it's likely to be easy to find. just look for the most depressing building in the downtown area. in brooklyn, ours is located smack in the middle of a very cute, charming neighborhood, the only deeply unattractive building for miles. and we're talking unattractive in the extreme. significantly less attractive than the DMV. millions of pounds of unattractiveness.

the building itself seems to be trapped inside a misguided bauhaus fever dream; it's all dull planes and angles, defined against the skyline by taupe colored cinderblocks and smudged, flat windows. inside is not much better, with brown linoleum floors and sand-colored walls, complete with elevators that make you feel like you've been miraculously transported into a bizarro version of Dark City, where the counterbalancing beauty has gone on strike.

the orientation took place in a prison camp style interpretation of my 10th grade english classroom, with a soupcon of the community center where i took driver's ed. you could almost hear the sounds of red asphalt IV. which, quite frankly, would have been absolutely preferable to the presentation (and i use the term loosely) to which we were subject. to call it dull wouldn't do it justice; fortunately, i was distracted from the terminal boredom by the seething frustration born of the terrible transition between powerpoint slides. the slow paced diamond dissolve should never be used in anything geared towards the terminally bored or the functionally illiterate. either camp is bound to be bored to the point of clawing out their eyeballs, or wishing to. i am proof. i and my short attention span.

suffice it to say, i suddenly count myself terrifically lucky that i've landed myself a temporary dayjob to augment my freelancing (i love filing; no,really); in being no longer dependent upon the department of labor to send me unemployment money, i am also no longer beholden to their rules, their hoops. specifically, i am not going to have to go to that building for a while, one would hope.

and i confess i lost the thread of this narrative about two paragraphs ago; the dangers of not posting for weeks and weeks and weeks. i THINK the moral of the story is buy american. or do unto others. or, actually, most likely, Stay In School, it's the best.

something like that.