it’s not that i’m trying to make a slow exit from the blogging world. it’s just that lately, i feel as tho i have nothing left to give. no creative energy left over after all the “have-tos” have been done. my writing has dried up, i’ve been remiss in my friendships, both near and far, and when i do get an evening off, all i seem capable of doing is vegetating in front of the television or behind a book. believe me, this is not a state of affairs I would like to maintain indefinitely. i’m just trying to get by right now, to breathe into one day at a time, keep believing that my ship will come in, that this will somehow get easier.

so, the brief update:

we’re considering moving to a new apartment a little further north of where we live now. it’s hard to consider leaving our neighborhood, with its abundant take-out thai food, 2 minute-walk to the yoga studio, conveniently located public transit and strangely colorful residents (is that a halloween costume, or are you just always like that?). on the other hand, the place we live now feels, well, like living in a dorm. temporary quarters in an exciting district whose noise pollution frequently intrudes on one’s sleep. and there’s a lot of barf on the sidewalk after the weekend, which i find most unpleasant. the other apartment (belonging to a friend who is moving in with his boyfriend) is on a quiet, tree-line street. it has a garage (so that someday we might own a car), a backyard, an extra bedroom – in short, it feels like the sort of place one could make a life. so, are we going to do what we said we’d do, and settle down and make a life here in chicago? good question.

in rehearsal for a new show. the play is good, and i’m working with a set of designers and actors i enjoy very much, which is making a difficult play/process easier. and i do love the strange things i learn for each production – this time around i’ve learned everything there is to know about interior moulding, confetti cannons, and how to get a gigantic, scary gothic chandelier custom built for under $300.

trying to decide what to be for halloween. it’s another sign that i’m not living my life right when i realize that the past 3 years i’ve been too busy to dress up for or celebrate my favorite holiday. when i was a kid i had my halloween costume planned out in detail by august, at least. i am open to suggestions, one and all…

i have a car! (of sorts). chicago finally has a car-share service (www.i-go-cars.com). after paying a one-time membership fee, i can now walk two blocks from my house to where a shiny new honda is parked, drive wherever i want for $6/hour, and everything – gas, insurance, maintenance, parking – is taken care of. yay, car-shares.

still working for the dentist. since i’ve gotten to a place where i can process insurance claims and schedule patients with my eyes closed and brain half-turned off, i begged my boss to let me take on new tasks for fear i might die of boredom. so now i’m learning how to take x-rays on patients, sterilize equipment, pour models from impressions, and other thing that are at least interesting while i’m still learning them. i have no intention of becoming a dentist (working all day long under those fluorescent lights, looking at people’s yucky moldy mouths, no thank you), but these marketable day-job skills are always useful to tuck into my back pocket for future times of unemployment. actually, i’m just trying to get to a point where i do enough messy lab work that i can wear scrubs instead of uncomfortable/expensive “office” clothes to work in.

thinking of taking the winter off from stage managing (so i’ll just have two part-time jobs, instead of three), and taking a stage combat class and a class in copy-editing (thinking of more flexible day-job possibilites for the future).

see? so now you know i’m not dead, just really really boring.

my favorite moment of the day is twilight – that moment after sunset and before darkness, when the air around you is dark, but the sky is still light and the trees and buildings are sharp, black silhouettes. it is the quietest time of day, the moment when the earth holds its breath. the other night, i was on the train coming home from work, and i looked up from my book and out the window at the twilight, and thought, when i am old, all i want is to spend every evening sitting on a porch somewhere watching this moment, holding my breath as the color drains from the sky and the darkness gathers. it is the closest thing i know to peace on earth.

i like noting the little mile posts of time passing in my life. the phases of the moon. the subtle turning of the season. when our first year’s lease is up. like the previous month’s mile post, this is another one: its the first time i’ve lived in the same dwelling for an entire year since i left my parents house eight years ago. we did it. managed to dig our heels in and stay in one place for a whole year. and while a friend is in fact tempting me with his soon-to-be-vacant, much-posher-and-cheaper-than-ours apartment, we are leaning toward just staying put for a while. having some continuity, or as much as one can have and still be living paycheck to paycheck.

usually the autumn brings a sort of melancholy to me, but this year there is something comforting about the gathering fall. the leaves have just barely begun to turn, but already it is dark when we rise for work, and dark as i take the train home at the end of the day. today was the first really cool day, scarf-weather, and right now the radiators are creaking back into action with a comforting series of clanks and hisses that always precede the warmth, filling the air with the pleasant scent of warm dust.

there are few places i dislike more than a city-hospital ER. andy called me from the train on his way home from work tonight; he’d cut his finger on some glass at the end of his shift and it was still bleeding pretty bad, and did we have any gauze and tape in the first aid kit at home? a trip to walgreens fortified our first aid supplies with gauze and tape (as well as spiderman bandaids and hershey kisses – oen wants to be prepared for any sort of emergency) by the time andy arrived. like head wounds, finger woulds BLEED A LOT, so the bathroom counter looked really dramatic and ER-like by the time we got it re-bandaged and andy installed on the sofa with his arm propped over his head. a quick consultation with the family nurse (andy’s mother) concluded that he probably needed stitches. so we packed up our books, chocolate, and other camping-out essentials and walked a couple of blocks to the nearest hospital.

why i hate hospitals. well, 1) i’m a total germaphobe. upon arriving home several hours later i mandated that we both scrub our hands with hot water and dial soap until i felt sufficently de-germed (last spring andy brought the stomach flu home with him from a doctor’s office and i have no desire to repeat that experience). 2) the place smells like shit. literally. once you’ve been inside for an hour or so you start to forget about it, but if you make the mistake of going out for a cigarette or some fresh air or a phone call, the desensitation process starts all over again. 3) the metal detector and interview with the security guard prior to be admitted into the waiting room. i plied the security guard with the aforementioned chocolate and afterwards had no trouble coming in or out. 4) all the sick people. sick people freak me out, there’s no nice way of putting it. there’s the young hispanic woman in a wheelchair, no visible injuries about her, but she can’t hold her head upright, so she leans it against the built-in IV pole on the back of the chair, hand pressed to forehead. her worried husband crouches on the floor next to the chair, holding a plastic cup of ice water up to her lips and speaking to her in a low voice. there’s the four-hundred pound guy who can’t fit into the over-sized wheelchair. his bare feet are scabby, bright red, and swollen to to such a degree that shoes are not an option. there are several sets of parents with children draped across their laps sporting ear aches, fevers, asthma attacks. there’s the young couple who share their newspaper with us; the wife has cut the palm of her hand badly and is worried about her job as a massage therapist. when andy and the woman both go for their stitches, the husband peeks into the back and gives me regular status reports on both cases. in the treatment room, andy tries to distract the young woman with jokes as she struggles with queasiness brought on by the sight of her own blood soaking through the bandage.

i hate hospitals. i think the people who work in them are heros. i just don’t want to repeat that experience, even for a minor injury, again any time soon.

well, he wouldn’t vote for barak obama, apparently. according to alan keyes, that is, who released a public statement today stating that if christ were here today, he wouldn’t vote for barak obama (he doesn’t specify whether jesus would vote for keyes or if he’d opt for a write-in candidate). well, how can you argue with a political opponent who has a direct line to god?

alright, i confess it. my secret guilty pleasure: WB dramas. i’m particular to gilmore girls, but really, any one of them will do, and i don’t have to watch the episodes in order or on a regular basis to derive great, idiotic pleasure out of them. i drag the circa 1970 black and white television out from under the bed and set it up in which ever room i’m doing housework and revel in the pretty people, picturesque sets and mindless sappy plots. it actually makes me do more ironing/dishwashing/folding than i otherwise would, just so i can indulge in the entire hour (or two). there, i’ve said it. think of me as you will. it’s better for my blood pressure than watching george bush invade my televison.

andy and i were foster parents to our friend piaf’s impossibly cute chihuahua for the weekend. while i do tend to sneer at dogs that are so small my cat could make hamburger out of them, it’s true that lola is pretty irresistible. and smart, too, i suspect because piaf leaves the radio set to NPR when she’s gone to keep lola company. andy found she was a chick magnet of the first order, but as soon as he told the googly-eyed girls in the park that the dog’s name was Lolita, the conversation was over in a big hurry. hey, we didn’t name her. zeke gave me a dirty look whenever i’d come back from walking lolita all weekend. “you stink like dog” his glare seemed to say.

from last tuesday’s Science Times section of the NY Times:

“Dr. Bianchi…stumbled into the field [stem cell research] when she was trying to find a new method of prenatal diagnosis. She knew that a few fetal cells enter a woman’s blood during pregnancy…But then she discovered that the fetal cells do not disappear when a pregnancy ends. Instead, they remain in a woman’s body for decades, perhaps indefinitely. And if a woman’s tissues or organs are injured, fetal cells from her baby migrate there, divide and turn into the needed cell type, be it thyroid or liver, intestine or gallbladder, cervix or spleen.”

okay, i don’t normally get all excited about mothery sorts of things (my ovaries have apparently procrastinated the biological tick-tick-tick until later in life), but how amazing is that? a woman’s offspring physically become a permanent part of her own body, and the act of giving life to a child could in turn prolong or protect her life from illness or injury years later.

science is cool. nature even more amazing.

tonight marks one year since andy and i arrived in chicago in our gasping, rusty moving truck, with frantic cat and frazzled nerves in tow. to be honest, the sight of a uhaul still makes me a bit nauseous. this is the longest i’ve lived in any single place since i left my parents’ house at age 18. i’ve been fighting grass-is-always-greener urges lately, feeling homesick for places i’ve been before, idaho and california, but we’re not giving in this time, not for now. in the past, every time a place starts to bite my ass, i’ve just picked up and moved on – new project, new people, different set of worries/benefits. but that nomadic lifestyle was taking its toll. i haven’t really put in the effort to be a part of a community in a long time, not since college, and i can start to feel what i’ve been missing out on. there’s endless amounts of chicago left for us to explore, but our neighborhood is starting to feel like ours. i’m no longer eyeing my apartment like a game of survivor, deciding which possessions will have to get voted off the island with the next move.

the following ad, for a cheap furniture store popular in chicago called Affordable Portables, appeared on the back page of section 1 of the Chicago Reader in the august 13th issue. so the question is, am i the only person in chicago with enough free time (at work) to have read the fine print on this ad? a close examination reveals the following:

the lower right-hand corner or the ad reads:

oh yeah, and that’s a mushroom cloud on the televsion set.

is there something i’m missing, or is this just cynical hipsterism done in really poor taste?