magneto.

i am a magnet for crazy. okay, so is everyone else who lives in our fair city. but i've been getting more than i usually do of late. there was the guy on the subway, who rocked and muttered incessantly, who insisted on sitting right next to me on a mostly empty train. there was the quiet man who replaced the mutterer once he'd reached his stop, who kept looking at his hands and weeping silently between bouts of clawing his face. there was the man who sat in the gutter making faces of extreme pain, but who beamed happily when refusing my offer of help. and yesterday, there was the woman who sang miscellaneous snippets of opera on the train; these mini-arias had clearly replaced normal speech in her world.

these are just the ones i've seen in the last two days.

i tell you, a magnet for crazy. there is no moral to the story, except to say that i suspect that the universe has just remembered that i'd had a good nine months of no crazy, and felt the need to make up for it all at once. either that, or it just needed a good laugh. either way. i'll take a glut of harmless crazy over one creepy one any day.

in other news, i had a moment of delight yesterday, seeing that someone in the building where i had a meeting had tacked up a card that i'd designed--for a different client. it was exciting; i so rarely see my work once it's been released into the wild!

live through this, and you won't look back.

i get a lot from my mother. her eyes, her temper, her complete lack of patience for stupidity. her stubbornness and her bossiness, and her fanaticism regarding proper grammar. her strong chin. her pack-rat tendencies. and a motto: this too shall pass.

when i was living at home, you would never have caught me giving credence to anything my mother said. more likely, you would have caught me giving it an eye roll and some sort of snort (like a typical teenage snotnose). but, eight years out of the nest will do a lot for one's perspective, and now at the ripe old age of 25, i fully admit that my mother is wise, and that i probably should have started listening more often.

"this too shall pass" has been my mantra of late; i murmur it to myself whenever i feel overwhelmed by consular processing, by the vast mountains of work i have to complete, by the realization of the inadvertant cruelties i commit when the previous two collide. it gives me comfort because it is always, always true. it is a universal constant. no matter what you're going through, eventually something has to change. and it always does. for better or for worse. and despite the fact that it's almost impossible to guess exactly what it is lurking behind door number one, i find solace in just seeing the door. in knowing that if i just wait long enough, no matter what shit i'm embroiled in, no matter how much it sucks, there is always a way out. there is always a solution, of sorts. there is always a future. and even if that future is dreadful, it's a new place to try and claw my way out of; and maybe it'll afford me a better handhold.

and i find that comforting.

this too shall pass. try it. cheaper than therapy.

WHAP.

life moves pretty fast. so fast sometimes that you lose track of it, until you realize that holy shit! you've been out once in the last two weeks, and you've managed to alienate most of the people you know, so deep have you been in your cave!

or maybe that's just me.

*ahem*

but, no, really. i put my head up for two seconds this week to realize that a) february is almost over; b) i'm still way behind on everything; c) i have GOT to get out more. that, and i really need to get some sleep.

i guess this is a fancy way of saying i've been absurdly busy--so busy that i've been behaving like an asshole at times, without even realizing it. so busy that i haven't watched a single second of the olympics (and yet, somehow the knowledge of johnny weir, america's new favorite metrosexual has registered in my mind). so busy that i haven't really had time to prepare for this thing important thing i have to do tomorrow. whoops.

perhaps this is a sign that i ought to go to bed, actually.

i forgot my point.

crisis of understanding.

all i want are answers. why are there none to be found?

happiness is...

...1.5 gigabytes of RAM in the last of the G5s.

yeah.

behold, the power of the jenny lewis hair!

it has been a while since i've been hit on; this probably has more to do with the fact that i've been living in a cave than any sort of reflection of me as a person. or, you know. something about the ring on my finger introduces me as a waste of time for anyone with such intentions (which i am). whatever the case, the fact remains that i have remained firmly under the radar of most persons, which is perfectly fine with me.

it does, however, mean that on those rare occasions when i DO get hit on, the situation tends to stick with me. particularly if the situation is, as happened last night, straight out of the film david lynch would make if he made romantic comedies.

last week, i was hit on by a couple. this has never happened to me before; like i said, i get hit on so rarely by people traveling alone, forget in pairs. i had the feeling something odd was likely to occur from the moment they walked in, when the lady of the couple caressed my back in passing. granted, this is new york, so stranger forms of greeting happen (to people who are not me, that is) on a regular basis, but it set my creeping hackles on edge.

they were seated between our group and the door to the smoking patio, so we walked past them on our way out; on the way back in, the man tapped my arm and asked if they could buy me a drink. after weighing the options and determining that a good-sized group of my closest friends was keeping extremely interested watch from about eight feet away, and i desperately wanted to know what was up with the back stroking, i agreed, and sat down to chat (i may be an opportunist when it comes to free booze, but i am polite).

they turned out to be very drunk but nice enough, and though they both kept looking at me in a way that made me feel more than a little uncomfortable, nothing untoward was said or occurred. mercifully, i suspect their interest in me waned exponentially with every mention of my husband, which made it easier to mosey back to my group as soon as i'd had enough.

i still don't totally know what was up with the backstroking. but, i suppose that certain mysteries are allowed to live in the shadow of the haircut of infinite power.

chop chop chop.

so, i got my hair cut yesterday. on a whim, as these things so frequently are--i cannot PLAN a haircut; i just have to get sick of my mullet and have it HAPPEN.

so yes. in person, it's kind of atomic age barbarella pixie shag; i'm not entirely certain how well it translates to photo. however, i enjoy having bangs to hide behind; it's been a while!

bring me some gin!

it brings me no small quantity of joy that in the future we will be able to refer to this weekend's snowstorm as the Blizzard of Ought-Six.

that aside, i do love snowstorms; i love how quiet and bright they make the world. i love seeing people pulling their kids along the streets on toboggans, snowshoeing on 6th avenue. when it's fresh, i even love bounding through the great drifts (several of which were over my knee yesterday--i've never been so excited about the tucking-one's-pants-into-one's-boots phenomenon). i love watching it turn blue as the sun sets. i love that the news of the storm inspired my father to call me and admonish me to be careful.

it's just such a shame that the spell wears off so quickly; by morning, the sparkle is gone, replaced with slush, ice and potentially injured limbs. quite sad, really. but honest.

schnow! and a shameless plug.

not entirely policy.

and i was doing so well, too. adhering to this personal resolution of mine to write more. in recent days, however, i've found that my level of interest potential has waned considerably; as i lamented earlier, all i seem to be doing is working and plotting. sleeping enters into it somewhere, but i'm not certain where. it doesn't make itself present nearly enough, that's for sure.

it all ultimately feeds into a sort of exhaustion and drudgery induced delirium, and this is where the rub comes in: there are things happening, things being felt, things being written, things that ARE INTERESTING simmering beneath the surface of this complex country girl. there's enough rattling around my brainpan to feed at least ten songs, to create some sort of really short novel, to talk about in polite conversation. i have so much to think about right now; i just really don't want to talk about it.

and i wonder how long i have before that last sentence kills me.

difficult to say.

instead, i leave you with a brief cataloguing of things that i have been enjoying lately, and an open encouragement for anyone to email me (because the comments remain broken) with a rational explanation of why i can't shake this.

part one: listening to the bbc radio feed at work; hugh laurie; taking pictures; avocados; maker's mark, no ice; wonderfalls on dvd; watching the snow fall; realizing i haven't been into manhattan for at least two weeks, possibly longer; reintroducing vanilla soy milk to my diet; having a steady paycheck; hugh laurie.

part two: the address is in the sidebar.

pro and con.

on the plus side, there's a new imac winging its way to the office for me to use, and i've wired my desk for sound.

on the minus side, it's freezing, my neighbors (the ones with screaming, redheaded, screaming triplets who scream a lot) are doing construction on their apartment with what i'm fairly certain is a combination of drills, jackhammers and chisels, and all i seem to do these days is work.

sometimes i get so upset that i start to feel physically sick. just saying.