I'm watching America's Ballroom Challenge on PBS.
I can't turn it off. It's just so creepy, like wax figures set to motion. I had this jewelry box as a child, white with painted-on pink buds. Open it and a tiny ballerina twirled 'round, one leg in an impossible position, her arms stretched infinitely upward. Her face was only half there, and her fingers were mere suggestions--thin painted lines along her clumsy but delicate, praying hands. These people on TV are like living versions of her. After they bow, I imagine them climbing back into their boxes, waiting in a state of good-natured plasticity until their next performance.
It's just not how I think of dance.
A friend of mine was Isadora Duncan a few years ago for Halloween. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck, and at the end of it was a wheel that she'd made out of paper. One of the best costumes I've seen.
Today we celebrated my daughter's first birthday. Her actual birthday is this coming Tuesday. I'd made the invitations. I made cupcakes and frosted them to look like rosebuds. I made ginger molasses cookies. I made mulled hot cider. Apparently, I can make stuff. It's always a bit of a surprise to me. There were also cheese and crackers and radishes and butter and bread and olives and other things. It was nice. I wish we took more pictures. I am constantly wishing that we took more pictures.
Beatrice seemed to like her carrot stick more than the cupcake. I think she melted a little under all the attention. Later, when everyone left, she ate a cookie with gusto, and talked and talked. She sat in her high chair in the kitchen and Brian and I stood around, nibbling at things, doing that thing you do when parties are over, only this time she was there, doing it with us, chiming in, waving and pointing at things. Crazy. It was, we realized, the first time we had more than a few people over since she was born. I think she had a good time.
I'm thinking way too much about clothes and boots lately and am a little obsessed with skin care products and that stuff that you put on your cheekbones and under your brows. Highlighter?
I'm reading Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt straight through for the first time. I'd read individual stories numerous times but never the whole collection. It's good. The kind of book that gives you great ideas, but then you realize that the ideas are mostly hers, and you're just approving of them vehemently. Or you think--why have I never before written a story about a librarian who one day has sex with countless men in the library? Surely it has occurred to me to write about that before? But it never did. But reading some of Bender's stories is for me on one hand a kind of creative deja-vu, and on the other, this crisp, quenching new experience.
It's just not how I think of dance.
A friend of mine was Isadora Duncan a few years ago for Halloween. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck, and at the end of it was a wheel that she'd made out of paper. One of the best costumes I've seen.
Today we celebrated my daughter's first birthday. Her actual birthday is this coming Tuesday. I'd made the invitations. I made cupcakes and frosted them to look like rosebuds. I made ginger molasses cookies. I made mulled hot cider. Apparently, I can make stuff. It's always a bit of a surprise to me. There were also cheese and crackers and radishes and butter and bread and olives and other things. It was nice. I wish we took more pictures. I am constantly wishing that we took more pictures.
Beatrice seemed to like her carrot stick more than the cupcake. I think she melted a little under all the attention. Later, when everyone left, she ate a cookie with gusto, and talked and talked. She sat in her high chair in the kitchen and Brian and I stood around, nibbling at things, doing that thing you do when parties are over, only this time she was there, doing it with us, chiming in, waving and pointing at things. Crazy. It was, we realized, the first time we had more than a few people over since she was born. I think she had a good time.
I'm thinking way too much about clothes and boots lately and am a little obsessed with skin care products and that stuff that you put on your cheekbones and under your brows. Highlighter?
I'm reading Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt straight through for the first time. I'd read individual stories numerous times but never the whole collection. It's good. The kind of book that gives you great ideas, but then you realize that the ideas are mostly hers, and you're just approving of them vehemently. Or you think--why have I never before written a story about a librarian who one day has sex with countless men in the library? Surely it has occurred to me to write about that before? But it never did. But reading some of Bender's stories is for me on one hand a kind of creative deja-vu, and on the other, this crisp, quenching new experience.
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