hymn to the banal

Languor
Billy Collins

I have come back to the couch—
hands behind my head,
legs crossed at the ankles—

To resume my lifelong study
of the ceiling and its river-like crack,
its memory of a water stain,

The touch of civilization
in the rounded steps of the molding,
and the lick of time in the flaking plaster.

To move would only ruffle
the calm surface of the morning,
and disturb shadows of leaves in the windows.

And to throw open a door
would startle the fish in the pond,
maybe frighten a few birds from a hedge.

Better to stay here,
to occupy the still room of thought,
to listen to the dog breathing on the floor,

better to count my lucky coins,
or redesign my family coat of arms—
remove the plow and hive, shoo away the bee.

when i think back

i've been spending quite a lot of time looking for shade.

translation

it is not often apparent how translation affects poetry. below, Рождественский романс by joseph brodsky, in two english translations. i know which one i like better.

Moscow Carol

A Christmas Ballad

In such an inexplicable blue, Upon the stonework to embark, The little ship of glowing hue Appears in Alexander Park. The little lamp, a yellow rose, Arising--ready to retreat-- Above the people it adores; Near strangers' feet. In such an inexplicable blue The drunkards' hive, the loonies' team. A tourist takes a snapshot to Have left the town and keep no dream. On the Ordynka street you find A taxicab with fevered gnomes, And dead ancestors stand behind And lean on domes. A poet strolls across the town In such an inexplicable blue. A doorman watches him looking down And down the street and catches the flu. An old and handsome cavalier Moves down a lane not worth a view, And wedding-party guests appear In such an inexplicable blue. Behind the river, in the haar, As a collection of the blues-- The yellow walls reflecting far The hopeless accent of the Jews. You move to Sunday, to despair (From love), to the New Year, and there Appears a girl you cannot woo-- Never explaining why she's blue. Then in the night the town is lost; A train is clad in silver plush. The pallid puff, the draught of frost Will sheathe your face until you blush. The honeycomb of windows fits The smell of halva and of zest, While Christmas Eve is carrying its Mince pies abreast. Watch your New Year come in a blue Seawave across the town terrain In such an inexplicable blue, As if your life can start again, As if there can be bread and light-- A lucky day--and something's left, As if your life can sway aright, Once swayed aleft. trans. Alexey Vernitsky

In anguish unaccountable the steady ship that burns at dark, the small shy streetlamp of the night, floats out of Alexander Park in the exhaustion of dull bricks. Like a pale-yellow, tiny rose, it drifts along, past lovers' heads and walkers' feet. In anguish unaccountable sleep-walkers, drunkards, float like bees. A stranger sadly snaps a shot of the metropolis by night; a cab with squeamish passengers jolts loudly to Ordynka Street, and dead men stand in close embrace with private homes. In anguish unaccountable a melancholy poet swims along the town. Beside a shop for kerosene, a porter stands, round-faced and sad. A ladies' man, now old, lopes down a dingy street. A midnight wedding party sways in anguish unaccountable. On Moscow's murky south-side streets a random swimmer sadly floats. A Jewish accent wanders down a yellowed melancholy stair. A fragile beauty swims alone from New Year's Eve to Saturday, exchanging love for bitterness, unable to explain her grief. The chilly evening floats above our eyes; two trembling snowflakes strike the bus. A pale and numbing wind slaps reddened hands. The honey-gold of evening-lamps flows out; a scent of halvah fills the air. The Eve of Christmas holds the pie of heaven above its head. Your New Year's Day floats on a wave, within the city's purple sea, in anguish unaccountable-- as though life will begin anew, and we will live in fame and light with sure success and bread to spare; as though, from lurching to the left, life will swing right. trans. George Kline

little gidding

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

t.s. eliot

(on which, also see ithaka)

i'm in love

but it's not what you think. see for yourself.

(and for context, see this, this, and this)

dorchester

60F today and sunny. for reasons unclear, we went into dorchester for lunch with dave. after winding slowly through the fenway, guided by a flawed GPS unit--every minute in a car confirms the wisdom of selling the trusty saturn--we showed up at an amazing house (painted somewhere between slate and federal blue). dave's apartment in it is replete with quartersawn oak trim, original stained glass, custom cast iron radiators, enormous old glass casement windows, and the rest. tracey managed to conceal it well but i had a major case of apartment envy that became more pronounced after i noted a vestibular space into which at least 60 linear feet of books could easily be tucked, plus an enormous yard in back and a deck overlooking the street and a large, mature maple. we got lunch at nikisha's roti shop down the street: a trinidadian-style flatbread stuffed with chickpea meal and fried on a griddle, then wrapped around curried chicken, potatoes, and chickpeas laced with hot and jerk sauces. not the same thing at all, but 3am prata at the shop on clementi road came to mind and would not be dismissed. on the way back, we detoured by way of the tropical market and the edges of the ashmont hill neighbourhood. many of the houses on the hill are well-built woodframe, set back from the street on double and triple lots. a large proportion had carriage houses attached or close by, ideal for a woodshop. i had plenty of time to ponder this while nursing a glass of water on the deck and talking about japanese denim weavers.

soup of the motherland

not really, but close enough. i did the biweekly grocery run to harvest and whole foods (today in a cold but not unpleasant rain) and bought some pork soup bones and raw shrimp, both deeply discounted. i had a large pile of shells after shelling and veining the shrimp, so i browned them in some oil with ginger and the scraps of pork from the bones until there was a haze of crustacean-scented smoke throughout the house, then added water to cover and simmered them for an hour. this made some really magnificent shrimp and pork stock that will lie in the freezer awaiting the rainy days that we're expecting next week.

there was a bunch of broccoli rabe in the fridge, the heart of a napa cabbage, and some mushrooms. rearranging the freezer, i also found four pieces of flash-frozen haddock and two tubs of broth from the giant fish head i got from new deal some weeks ago. i took one of the tubs of broth and added a cup of the shrimp and pork stock, then braised the cabbage for 10 minutes. after that, the mushrooms and rabe went in then, a minute later, the thinly-sliced fish and shrimp went in for a few seconds before everything got poured into a large bowl over a mound of chopped garlic, ginger, cilantro, and shaved red onion. you just cannot beat this stuff.

the old days

In the old days it stayed light until midnight
and rain and snow came up from the ground
rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.
Every time you’d see one, two more would appear,
walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.
Money didn’t grow in the leaves of trees but around
the trunks in calf’s leather money belts
though you could only take twenty bucks a day.
Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran
up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women
were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri
faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis
could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.
A few political leaders were executed for betraying
the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon
of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day
a year and lovely choruses funneled out
of hospital chimneys where every room had a field
stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk
on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,
my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love
needed only to wear pig’s ear slippers or garlic
earrings. All dogs and people in free concourse
became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas
everyone won the hundred dollar lottery. God and Jesus
didn’t need to come down to earth because they were
already here riding wild horses every night
and children were allowed to stay up late to hear
them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches
with Episcopalians serving Provencal, the Methodists Tuscan,
and so on. In those days the country was an extra
two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand
miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys
to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed
though some tribes chose to found new nations
in the heretofore unknown areas between the black
boundary cracks between states. I was married
to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.
Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang
lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly
in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast
to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented
not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.
Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple
fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music
in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums
and everyone was able to select seven days a year
that they were free to repeat but this wasn’t a popular program.
In those days the void whirled
with flowers and unknown wild animals attended
country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower
and vegetable gardens. The Hudson River was drinkable
and a humpback whale was seen near the 42nd Street
pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,
its voice lifting the steps of people
in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.
I could go on but won’t. All my evidence
was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed
on by all the dogs that inhabit memory.
One by one they bark at the sun, moon and stars
trying to draw them closer again.

jim harrison

jim harrison

i can't stand his screenplays or the long books (i think these are just a matter of time), but his autobiography and short essays on food are more than satisfying--the best parts of these are the throwaway lines that i hope he spends hours refining. (it would be tremendously unfair if he just pulls those out, perfect and fully-formed like athena when she burst forth from zeus's brow.) he also enjoys, as i do, the parenthetical sentence. some scraps from the table:

Within either the classic Greek or Elizabethan concepts of drama, disasters of either business or marriage do not transcend the comic framework into the arena of tragedy. Tragedy is saved for those of "high degree" who fall from a "high place" because of hubris. (Marriage and business were not thought to be sufficiently high places, more like an ordinary porch with a bad step.)

"repulsion and grace"

I sat there and let the mud settle for an hour or so, finally so still that an iridescent-green hummingbird came within an inch of my blind eye, doubtless sensing the nectar there in the memory of childhood flowers.

the smog had cleared and the night's scent was oceanic, flower-laden.

You have to hold out for the wine, even blood, nights that are actually dark, bears that aren't teddy, gritty women like you really know, children who die contorted into question marks, the sun on people who have never bought lotion, the human voice not reduced to prattle, animals who have never been watched, the man who cuts all the ropes so he won't hang himself.

"heart food in l.a."

Due to lack of ambient light and air pollution, the nights remind you of your youth, the peerless air of the northern forest night. The stars were much closer then and you could see the cinders in their bright smiles and the Milky Way was a dense ermine floss, a cumulus of stars.

It is important not to miss the world that is actually there.

"borderlands"

A phenomenal percentage of discoveries on the theoretical level occur to scientists at the moment of waking, when the most abstruse of concepts gather functional dream images around themselves.

"versions of reality"

google earth rocks

last night, at the cal academy of sciences (awesome old museum with phenomenal new building where andy ng works occasionally dressed as a giant ant, and source of the trinity alps sojourn resulting in the steven b craig endowment fund), google earth launched v5.0, featuring ocean in google earth--see the Official Word from Google about the new bathymetry baselayer addition, and the layer content collected for the launch.

steve miller, who is a truly great person i was lucky to work with a few times at the goog (he, needless to say, was not so lucky), has been the product manager on this for over 2 years so mad props, as they say, to him and to the rest of the ocean team (including, it turns out, nate johnson who is also truly great, and a past cubemate to boot) . i give thanks that the goog's still good for the occasional spasm of pride.

new year, the second

[i started this in transit from singapore to cambridge, but the exigencies of life as a minimally-occupied student got in the way.]

in any case, just take vast quantities of food as a given.

i haven't been home for the chinese new year since 2000 owing to assorted poor excuses; first it was inconvenient class scheduling, then work obligations. this year, classes for the spring term start on the second day of the new year, so i got to be home on the eve of and the first day, which are the only two days that really matter.

when i was younger, i didn't quite grasp how unusual my extended family is. my maternal grandmother had 11 siblings, most of whom have 3 or 4 children, some of whom have had their own children (11 at last count); there are well over 90 people on that side of the family alone. most of the grandchildren are between 0 and 4 years of age and look the same. doesn't make it less embarrassing when you forget their name. i'm part of a middle cluster of about 10 cousins, the oldest 8 years older than the youngest.

other than one cousin who hasn't been seen in almost a decade, i'm the one who's made it back for the fewest of the new year gathers--it was stranger and more wonderful than i recall. when all the cousins were younger, the days when the family would gather together were intolerable. the new year week was a prolonged series of visits to relatives in order of seniority during which the adults would talk for hours about things that weren't very interesting and all the children would end up face-down on the floor, sullen with boredom. scratchy new clothes and social pressure to be on best behaviour made everything worse. don't even want to start in on the bizarre practice of giving red packets stuffed with cash, which are impossible to receive with good grace.

coming back to the family new year after a lapse of some years, i saw how they'd survived 8 years of people growing up, dying, going away. some things never change: the mad rush to clean the house on new year's eve (difficult, though not impossible, if you get back from reunion dinner 45 minutes before midnight), starting the new year with a sweet soup of assorted dried fruit and nuts, my dad scaring the babies with his beard. some things get updated mildly: instead of visiting each one of my 12 aunts and uncles in order of their seniority, we all just cluster at the biggest house (and it is an enormous one; so big it has wings and its own generator).

but the best thing is that the cousins now have actual things in common to talk about. at dinner, among the hordes of people (about 60-70 people showed up), we cleared off one of the many tables scattered about the house and spent a few hours catching up--one of them is in new york (i don't see her often though) and the others are in singapore. we are all so different from our parents that its a little startling. so that was nice.

overconsumption

turf city last night, for the parents' anniversary. what used to be singapore's horse-racing complex is now a mouldering concrete edifice perched on the edge of encroaching jungle. there is plenty of parking once you make it in from swiss club road, and its hard to believe that this gigantic crumbling space is minutes away from some of the most expensive real estate on the island.

there's a cluster of enormous seafood restaurants on the second floor, all of which are stocked with pale pink cotton-polyester tablecloths, formica lazy susans, metal banquet chairs with PVC cushions, and brown carpet tile. the carpet's distinctive smell immediately brought me back to those chinese restaurants that used to exist in the shopping complexes in old HDB estates in central singapore--a combination of wet dog and spilled soy sauce. we got settled on the balcony overlooking the old racetrack (now with a large crevasse in the central field from which several trees protrude), then went out to the mezzanine to inspect the array of saltwater tanks containing a variety of live fish and crustaceans looking doomed and resigned.

tasty treats.

the two men holding court manhandle the seafood you choose, still alive and thrashing violently, into plastic bags that end up in your personal shopping basket. this is especially comic when frogs are being harvested from their little bin. normally quite placid, they become panicky and kinetic the instant they are touched and leap immediately out of the bag as soon as they are tossed inside. the bins are lined up in front of the tanks, jittering and sometimes falling over, to be taken away and weighed in the kitchens before you choose the style in which they are to be cooked. we had barely-cooked white saltwater prawns in chinese wine with goji berries and angelica root, a perfectly-steamed marble goby with salted vegetables and spring onions, sri lankan crab in chili sauce (unbelievably messy), a baked canadian lobster, oysters, geoduck clams with spring onions and ginger, and raw scallops topped with a seething mass of oil, garlic, and chives.

then we got up and rolled home.

ice cream

ice cream is deeply satisfying in the tropics. you cannot delay or otherwise draw out the eating, it melts so quickly after being removed from refrigeration.

here in the motherland, it can be purchased (for a dollar) as a small brick sandwiched between two pieces of baked wafer from an umbrella-shaded pushcart. there must be hundred of these carts, all tended by wizened individuals with old knives sharpened to the point of concavity, and the stuff all comes in paperboard-wrapped blocks from the same creamery (it may still be magnolia)--always sweet corn, red bean, yam, coconut, and raspberry ripple. a decisive cut, then the cardboard skin is peeled off with the tip of the knife. specialty bars and the like can be bought, but where is the charm in those? sometimes, if you're lucky, you encounter a cart that additionally carries a vat of singapore-style neapolitan: strawberry, chocolate, and sweet corn. (yes, really.) this you can only purchase in a stacks of tiny spheres in a wafer cone or in sandwich form, wrapped in a slice of soft bread. i made an ice cream sandwich at the ranch this summer, only to be met by retching and gagging noises all evening long from faithless unbelievers; it may be an acquired taste.

there's a reassuring continuity here: flavours, carts, wafers, knife-wielding old men and women, haven't changed since the 1980s. years ago, one of these pushcarts used to wait on coleman street, outside the old anglo-chinese primary school and ambush us on our way to the MRT station at city hall with a tootling horn and the promise of ice cream.

air in the morning

among the small pleasures of living in the tropics are the early mornings, which happen between the moment when the sky begins imperceptibly to lighten and the moment when the sun begins to cast a long and sharp-edged shadow—the word gloaming indicates this precise period. in this cool and dimness, small children stumble to primary school. most everyone who grew up here remembers waking before the sky was fully light, then sitting blearily at the kitchen table and trying to finish breakfast. which might have been (or maybe still is) milo or horlicks, a perfectly square slice of soft white bread from gardenia* or a misshapen slice from a loaf bought from the bread man with his tin box on the back of his bike, and a gelatinous soft-boiled egg with dark soy sauce and finely-ground white pepper. the longer it took to eat the vile jelly, the more it would congeal, turning after about 20 minutes into a particularly sticky and homogeneous brown gloop shot through with the chalazae. finally done with breakfast, you would inevitably be just late enough that the walk or bus ride (or, if extra lucky, the car ride) to school would be fraught, full of the nagging fear of being late and Getting a Demerit.

but if, like me, you are back home at a particularly loose end and school is at least a week and 11000 air miles away, then early mornings in these tropics are unmitigated pleasures. the air is still cool and damp, and breezes come in the window from the patch of jungle across the street. sometimes there is a paper filled with inconsequential news, to slowly page through. this week, there is a small-ish jar of kaya somewhere in the fridge, to be spread on toast. occasionally, when the filter can be found, there is coffee made from beans butter-roasted in a wok over charcoal.

* the jingle they used in tv ads from 1996 through 2001 is still in my head. the vaunted all-american recipe is probably stolen from interstate bakeries, makers of wonderbread. it makes me wonder why they couldn't have stolen a recipe from, say, the acme bread co. instead.

all through the night
while everyone's in bed
gardenia bakery's hard at work
baking our daily bread
only the best goes in
it's prepared specially
with ingredients from an all-american
[dum dum] recipe!

eats

peach garden at novena (桃苑). mnz stood me dinner here, her gratitude being overwhelming for my contribution to various things including her current state of exalted employment and her calling cards (subsequently criticized for having unrecognizable hummingbird imagery and wonky type; ingrate). over dinner, i ventured the proposition that chinese food (singapore-style anyway) has no detectable grammar or logic; in addition, there have been distinct transitions in the master chefs at the stalwarts. as a result, it might be interesting to undertake a study of the genealogy of signature dishes (those associated inextricably with particular restaurants) and the spread of variation in dishes across the relatively small chinese restaurant landscape in singapore. anyway.

• wasabi fried giant prawn with tobiko; roast duck with crisp, rendered skin and a drop of plum jelly; fried eggplant matchsticks with pork floss (the eggplant was The Best Thing Ever)
• braised tofu with spinach and crab meat
• shark cartilage and fish maw soup with goji berries (milky with dissolved collagen)
• perch with strawberries and oranges (this was a bit weird and the sauce was too sweet and over-reduced, though the fish was well done)
• jellied coconut water. simple, with the ideal soft crunch.

after which, we called sulin and asked her if she would trek out to the island creamery. there was a perplexing pineapple tart flavoured ice cream, but i did the usual and got the horlicks.* so that was nice.

sushi yoshida. yeenteck and love+butter both talked this up a lot so i convinced ego to abandon the life of monastic self-restraint at least briefly. after all, if you're going to be in norway for 12 months, where food of moderate quality will cost a kidney, it's a comparative bargain to spend an arm and a leg here for certifiable tastiness. there was a strange washbasin which required several minutes of intense study before the faucet's location could be deduced (a footswitch disguised as a small rubbery lump on the floor about 2 feet away). it was actually as good as they said it was, but marred by the ichigen-san effect** which was particularly noticeable because we were sitting at the counter surrounded by regulars. a bunch of old soccer buddy types who clearly knew the chef started their dinner by pouring him and the other sushi dude behind the counter a glass of sake. in return for their doubtless extensive patronage, they received an array of delights including what looked like a platter of salt-fried flounder strips so recently in their bath of boiling oil that they were still curling up as they were brought to the table, and spice-dusted chicken gizzard yakitori broiled a overdramatically with a blowtorch.

• salted salmon roe (ikura) with yuzu
• poached monkfish liver (ankimo) in shoyu with spring onions and grated chilied lotus root
  
• tempura of fiddlehead fern, ginger shoot (myoga), lotus root (renkon)
• red miso stewed top shells (sazae)
  
• grilled ling cod
• sushi: gilthead bream (some kind of aji), red snapper (tai) with green ginger, sardine (kohada), whelk (tsubu), sea urchin gonads (uni), with really quite good rice though not quite as good as at kiss.
  
• sashimi: o-toro, abalone (awabi), tsubu, sweet shrimp (amaebi), bonito (katsuo), bass (suzuki), scallop (hotate), octopus (iidako). this was garnished with red clover sprouts and shiso blossoms, which i'm pretty certain aren't actually in season. they tasted of nothing. but this is also the first ever sashimi i've had where the shellfish completely left the fish in the dust.
• dashi and clam stock with giant clam (hamaguri) and japanese trefoil (mitsuba) stems. the clam was incredible.
  
• two perfect strawberries, a section of tangerine, and a honeydew melon so ripe it was on the verge of deliquescence

* the fabled horlicks tablets (available in both chocolate and malted vanilla flavours) are nowhere to be found these days. where have they gone?
** ichigen-san okotowari (一見さんお断り) is technically a prohibition against strangers patronising a particular establishment. in practice, the ichigen-san effect is when you (an ichigen-san or 一見さ, ie, a person seen by the establishment for the first time) consume a creditable meal even as you observe happy patrons well-known to the chef and staff toasting each other with secret reserves of 20-year umeshu and being handed numerous plates of mysterious but certifiable tastiness that never make it to the menu.

laser discs

when i was growing up, there was a regrettable phase during which my extended family invested heavily in karaoke, including expensive equipment designed to play laser discs, a sort of giant CD with video. we made do with VHS. (VHS! but recall that this was the late 1980s, when even CDs were new and exciting. my first CD was Doctor Who: Variations on a Theme, trance and electronica based on the music of the television show. even for me that was a frighteningly nerdy purchase.)

for anywhere between $30 and $100, you could purchase an LD featuring an assortment of music set to lingering scenes of scantily-clad women, assorted decolletage, and long, slow, shots of tourist scenery completely unconnected to the lyrics on screen (the locations would be international for the pricey LDs, local for the cheap ones). this is an exemplar of the form:

karaoke lounges, of which there were no shortage, would have rooms full of filing cabinets stuffed with these giant discs and copious supplies of slinky women of negotiable affection as well as hard liquor of questionable quality and exorbitant price. if you called it XO and put it in a hennessy bottle, someone would throw down a couple hundred dollars for a personal bottle to be stored in a glass-fronted cabinet just inside the doorway with his name (women never, ever did this) prominently displayed, for the benefit of patrons wondering casually who the real premium folk are. in every one of these bars i went to, the case was arranged not alphabetically but in order of bottle price. at the top of the case would be the decanters full of hennessy extra-special VSOP (running well north of $1000, given the lounge mark-up), their cut-glass facets glinting in the spotlight trained upon them for that very purpose.

ah, nostalgia.

leaving and arriving

the last four days have been distinctly surreal. leaving a totalizing job is a wrenching experience, the more so if you have had, last minute, a bit of a change of heart.

i had dinner in mountain view with aaron and jini; the streets were full of people recovering from work, happy, talking to friends, drinking wine, browsing in stores. it was unseasonably warm. the late afternoon had been a blur of leavetaking and salvaging emails and files. i had the distinct sensation time was running out with many things left to do, yet i was compelled and wanted to spend time with as many people as possible. when i got back from dinner, i had about 45 minutes before the last valencia shuttle arrived, and waited outside reading the cunning man. it was a funny feeling, heavy and light at the same time.

on saturday morning, i woke up early and walked out to the farmers' market. it is cherry season now, and piles of them sat gleaming in the sun. i ate a sample strawberry and listened to the counter folks talk about j.i. rodale and began to miss san francisco even before really leaving. someone in noe valley showed up to buy my feather bed, then i went out again to buy chewy sourdough pizza breads from the bennet valley bread lady. it was the first half of a valedictory lap around the city. dave showed up mid-morning and we drove up to north beach to meet zach and the rest of the party. there was some 3 on 3 basketball, shotguns of tecate, then a long drive to stinson beach. along the way, the most expensive dried fruit and nuts ever. another day of no food. tecate and pacifico, cold water and surf, tans. dinner at pakwan, drinks at bourbon and branch (amazing martinis, the austrian) then la trappe (a phenomenal unibroue ephemere), then back to zach and catherine's for liar's dice.

sunday morning, i was up early to sell yet more stuff. i dropped off two boxes of stuff at the goodwill box, then walked down to the safeway at 30/mission in search of a coinstar machine (which i didn't find). this being a true valedictory lap, i stopped in mitchell's in search of ice cream, then walked up cortland for a kefte sandwich at progressive grounds before catching the 23 bayview into the shop. refinished the top of the chair, carved out the rest of the bowl, and made a very awkward leavetaking. john was sweet and dropped me off at the hospital. it was 6.30pm and still light, and i walked home, stopping at ritual along the way. around 8pm, people started trickling in. pelly, zach, mary zhang, may, halsey, peterson all showed up. we made our way through a case of tecate, and then i made curry thai noodles. i went to bed at 1 after tearing the pictures off the walls.

monday morning, up at 5.30. the room felt empty, and i folded up the last of the linens and took out the last of the trash. the bags were huge and reminded me again of why i want to travel light. the line at the united check-in was glacial, then the line for security stretched almost to another terminal. flight to san diego delayed nearly an hour, then flight from san diego to denver delayed 40 minutes. i just caught the denver-aspen flight, but of course the bags didn't make it. susan working picked me up from the airport. i met wyatt and whit, the other two wood interns (stories to come). we moved stuff, we did a grocery run, we had pizza and beer, we came back. i think i will like this.