— from arahsae - Followed

We are driving to Montreal tomorrow morning, and I didn’t have any pretty car window pictures so I am sending you to this beautiful one Sarah took last winter in Nebraska. I love it, and am a teeny tiny bit regretful that it is not winter and we aren’t going to drive by fields covered in snow. But it’s really so small an amount of regret that it’s not worth mentioning. Pretend I didn’t.

Anyway, I’ll see you in July! We have to pack and get to bed so we can leave at the scent of dawn tomorrow.

P.S. I have recently neglected to commemorate both Father’s Day and Rachel’s birthday, for which I apologize. It is hard to keep up with making a post on all the occasions worth celebrating, but just so you know, I do usually think about them a lot on the day in question. My own sister’s 30th birthday (woohoo!) is happening in a few days — so we’ll be sure to acquire sister-appropriate gifts in Canada with our mighty U.S. dollar.

Ok, I’m really going now. Good night!

I finally decided that I needed a wide-angle lens for my camera, because I just can’t take any landscape or even cityscape photographs with my lovely 50mm — the pictures I have been taking since February have all been intimate, because that lens pulls you closer to your subject, forces you to look at it from a friendly speaking distance. You can’t distance yourself, can’t see it with a sweeping eye. And I wanted to get my new lens in time for our Montreal trip this weekend, because if there’s one thing a tourist needs it’s a wide-angle lens. I mean, mountains, and islands, and Olympic Parks! Those things deserve to fit in the frame.

And since I don’t intend to buy too many more bits and bobs for my camera in the near future, I figured I’d go a little crazy and get reaaaally wide.

Fisheye wide.

So now I am the proud owner of a cheap (for a fisheye), kind of crappy, kind of wonderful Belarussian 8mm fisheye called a “Peleng” (anyone know what that means in Russian?), and it came today. It’s quite delightful. My camera’s aperture controls don’t work with it, so I have to set the f-stop on the lens itself — not a problem, since I did that for years with my Minolta. But the camera also has no idea what f-stop I’m using, so it can’t help me meter correctly and I have to make a (somewhat educated) guess as to the appropriate shutter speed I need to expose the shot. It’s also a horror to focus if you’re trying to get something in the foreground sharp, because it has a very large field of view, and it’s really hard for me to tell when I’m all clear. So for right now I suck.

But look! I can take a picture of my desk that shows objects that are Right In Front of Me. Dude. That is pretty cool.

And then I can swivel around in my chair and take a picture of my entire room, including three different walls, while I am sitting at my desk. It’s totally ridiculous. I kind of wish my eyes worked the same way, you know? :-)

*******

I have too much to do and too little discipline. Why don’t they sell discipline in bottles? I know I would work hard to save up for a case.

Yesterday on the way home from dropping off the framed pictures at the store, we heard two pieces on the radio about wind: one an annoyingly lyrical meditation on the subtle orchestra that a breeze plays in the leaves of the writer’s willow tree, ending with the question: If a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tornado all the way across the world, what exponentially expanding effects am I causing as I sit here in my backyard blowing at my willow? A good question, and prettily philosophical as well as scientific — but for some reason I wasn’t in the mood for that particular essay; it reminded me of the lovely, vapid things I tend to write when I have an image in my head but no real passionate ideas about what I want to say.

But after that there was an interview with Marq De Villiers, who wrote a book about Hurricane Ivan’s journey from Darfur to Nova Scotia, and I was significantly more entertained and enlightened. It’s tremendous to think about how strange it is that a tiny bit of difference in pressure somewhere can roil itself up into something that can break a city.

All this to say that today, when I stepped out of the office building, there was a warm wind rising over the asphalt: strong but not rude, and the perfect temperature — a distant cousin of the chill knives of winter and the sun-baked breath of late summer. I stood still, letting it sing through my shorn hair and dance itself around my body like an elusive embrace; so beguiling, so disinclined to tarry; a kiss and then goodbye, the one that got away.

Still much that cannot be discussed yet, although Ross and I dissect and debate over furrowed brows late into the night.

(Click to see me open my eyes — aren’t I tricky?)

Pictures and commentary from the day to come soon (we went to another Natural History museum — I kept thinking this is so cooool… I wish we had giant balloon sea creatures hanging from the ceiling!– and I felt a bit traitorous.) For now, old hair and new hair.

Apparently I am mysterious and moody with long hair, and rather cheery with short hair. I feel I can never quite get this reinvention thing right. ;-)

My big errand today was getting my hair cut. Really cut; it’s short now, and I’ll try to get before/after pictures up here tomorrow. I was brushing my teeth in the morning, and my hair was all around my neck and annoying, and I just decided to do it, since I had the day off. I went to a really gorgeous little salon near Porter Square, run by a statuesque Israeli woman named Maggie who has spiky white-blond hair and two enormous Alsatians lolling about on giant cushions next to the chairs inside — one of them was incongruously afraid of the thunder. The walls are bright yellow and covered with strange objets d’art and huge murals painted by Maggie’s daughter Tali; she’s apparently also responsible for one of the cows currently parading through the city, which I think is wonderfully neat.

My stylist Matt (who was frankly quite adorable, and I get to say that because Ross is a hottie and he knows it) wanted to know I was certain about cutting off all my locks (”Are you sure? It’s beautiful hair”), and I was indeed. He got to about chin-length and said, “I like it!” I said, “I like it too! But I think we can go a little shorter.” And so we did, and it’s very cute and light and, as always when I do this, it makes me feel like my head has been freed from all sorts of things: weight, memories, a too-heavy sense of self.

That’s that for now. Oh, except that my snake-handling days at the museum have been put on hold until all the volunteers go to a Harvard-wide animal training, due to new regulations.

Off to New Haven tomorrow — only one cool cat there now, but she’s worth the trip.

My company does this thing for 10 weeks in the summer where if you make up the extra time, you can have every other Friday off. This is my first such reprieve of the year, and I think I’m mostly going to spend it running errands in Cambridge (indoor duties already done: folding the laundry and washing the dishes!). It’s hot out there, but I can’t complain. I asked for summer, and by George summer is here.

Meantime entertain yourselves with this video, which is maybe only funny if you’ve ever tried to study Hebrew, like Ross is currently doing, and you find pronouncing the 20th letter of the alphabet an impossible feat. Yesterday on the way to Harvard Square to watch Blue Velvet with Sean (…..yeah. That movie is… mmhmm.) he was practicing saying his name over and over, and I was saying things like, “Um, I think when I say it my throat is closing, and my tongue is going down a little.” or “Try saying uhhhhhh low in your throat and then just moving right into the next syllable without thinking about making an “r” sound at all.”

He’ll get it. Hopefully those people did too.

P.S. For reference, here is the word “ra” (which means “bad) pronounced with the correct accent.

…at keeping secrets, so I’ve completely neglected to tell you that my beautiful sister is having another baby! In the beginning of November! She’s already four and a half months along, and two days ago they found out that it’s probably going to be a girl! Which is wonderful, because she really wants a daughter, and we were both secretly worried that she would keep popping out boys for years and years, and then there would be a football team’s worth of them, and when the last little girl finally arrived my sister would heave a sigh of exhausted satisfaction and hand her over to me to raise because she would just be too. damn. tired.

Maybe it was just me that was worried about that.

Anyway, Asher’s going to be a big brother soon, and I’m terrifically proud and excited for my big sister, so look! I’ve brought you a charmingly heartwarming picture of two little girls that we can all imagine are blood-relations instead of total strangers who just happened to both jump into the spray at the same time after last year’s Pride. I’m expecting it to jumpstart all kinds of fuzzy sibling love.

I’ll start: Rani, hon, I love and appreciate you more and more every day. Which is good, because when I started out it was all pulling your hair and poking your sides and pretending you made me cry, so I think we’ve made a lot of progress, don’t you? I’ll never forget the day you wandered sheepishly into my brand-new-very-own-Room-of-My-Own after we moved into the big house, both of us having been shuddering with a deep thrill for months about not having to share a space anymore, and told me you missed me.

I probably said, “Get out of my room!” but inside my heart was melting, I hope you know that.

I also remember the time I slouched into your room, miserable and wet, after my very first breakup, and you soothed me for days and told me that he was indeed a jerk, and that my heart would heal, really it would, and took me out with you to keep me occupied. That was really cool of you.

P.S. Whoever the little one turns out to be, she’ll be very lucky. Being the youngest rocks. You were right all along.