You know how you’ll be humming along for weeks and months in one mental mode, cheerful or productive or scattered or focused or loving or annoyed or whatever, but feeling that you pretty much, basically anyway, know who you are and what your world is? And then all of a sudden there’s a shift in the curvature of the earth – or in the bones and ligaments of your body – or in the nanoscopic composition of your blood – and everything’s instantly different. You become another and the world becomes other; all of it similar, but strange, like every molecule in the universe suddenly got up and moved one spot over to the left, and the air is a taste and temperature you don’t recognize. You’re not sure you like it, either.

Happened to me today. I had an inkling of it yesterday, or a shadow of the thing, when I was putting away the clothes from last week’s laundry and I folded a long-sleeved shirt. “You won’t be wearing this anymore,” I said to myselfsameself. “Last week you were still afraid of the hairs on your arms lifting and stiffening in a tiny ballet of shivers, but that won’t happen anymore, now. The cold is gone away, and the heat is here now. Last week your shins were dusty with dry skin and now the back of your neck is slick and burnt-butter-brown, and that’s the way it’ll be from now on. Just will. Odd, eh.”

Of course that was just the season turning, just the planet tilting, that’s all. Only the physics and chemistry of the solar system and the matter of which the earth is made, only a smallish sphere groaning around another gentle arc of its elliptical journey. This other thing, this shift in me, now that’s a real sea change.

Yesterday I was optimistic. Today I shut my eyes because I can’t see where I’m going. Yesterday I was proud, my notebook full of shiny little paper stars. Today I am angry because the real ones are too hot and too far away to catch at.

Edgy, I am. Boiling on the edge of a phase transition, flailing towards the edge of a different continent. I am pressed tight so tight but it’s not quite enough to make me sublimate, to make me light as air again. I am a late explorer and the wind I am spinning is not quite high enough to lift my sails. And I am getting pissed off about it.

The night is cool and what of it enters through the window smells good; I ought to be outside, but I am warm and dry in pajamas after having run home through the rain in ridiculous heels that I never wear and a dress that was all but see-through by the time I got through the door.

I ran so I could call Ben back (he’s almost in New York state!) and while we talked I thought about being outside at night, all those nights in college, when it was as natural as breathing to step through the door at 9, 10, 11, midnight, later, to walk or talk or visit or sit and watch the sky, feel the fall chill winter slice spring scent summer breath on my face. I am too cosy in my cosy little house, and there are too few reasons to leave it once the sun goes down.

This summer will be a summer of night walks. I have decided. And maybe on one of them it will be the witching hour and I shall come upon the great looming shadow of the BFG whispering dreams through a window and look down to check: Am I still small enough to fit inside his ear?

Here’s your regular fix of my regular fixer. This picture is all deep and symbolic and shit, you know that, right?

Tired. But I just got to use the phrase “paper electrophoresis” in an article. Too bad I don’t have a CLUE what it means!

Just kidding — I have a clue. But it is a rhyming clue, written in code and hidden inside an envelope that I haven’t found yet.

Yesterday the sky was still light outside at 8:30, and we are heading towards the longest day of the year. Summer arrives in fits and starts.

Ross is in Big-Life-Decision Country, and I might have to join him there if things go a certain way. Is it prettier than Big-Sky Country? Probably not, but it’s sure more interesting. I dream of hills and deserts.

Today I found out that I get to be a science reviewer for my favorite literary website — I can’t wait for my first book to arrive.

Ben called and left me a message this morning; lovely to hear his voice but he actually sounds thinner. Which made me think of:

Declaration of Independence (as sung by Arlo Guthrie and heard by me in a white Ford Taurus in 1998)

He will just do nothing at all
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.
And when they speak to him, he will not answer them,
Because he does not wish to.
When they tell him to eat his dinner he will just laugh at them,
And he will not take his nap, because he does not care to.
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.
He will go away and play with the Panda.
And when they come to look for him
He will stick them with spears and throw them in the garbage,
And put the cover on
He will not go out in the fresh air nor eat his vegetables
And he will grow thin as a marble
He will just do nothing at all
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

Yesterday at the supermarket Ross and I each had a nearly simultaneous moment of fruity glee, when he noticed that blueberries were on sale and I saw bags of gorgeous wine-colored cherries — the first of the season! — artfully arranged a little further down the aisle. While he was picking out a good box of his favorite dusty purple pebbles, I headed towards the cherries and hovered next to a woman who was carefully choosing the bag she wanted. After a moment I decided that we could both pick out fruit at the same time (gimme my cherries! Now now now!), and I shifted over next to her to reach for a nice-looking bag. As I was pulling it towards me, I noticed that my fellow cherry-fiend, who had barely given me a glance, was not just examining the bags for a good collection of fruit, but actually opening bags, taking individual cherries out, and deliberately placing them in other bags, apparently to assemble for herself the shiniest, most delectable, and least bruised assortment of cherries as was humanly possible.

I backed away in shock.

“Ross!”

“Mmm?”

“That woman over there is being really rude!”

“Why?”

“Look — she’s pawing through the cherries so she can get the best ones!”

“Wow.”

We both stared at her for a long second.

Then I popped my cherries into the cart and we wheeled it on, me still muttering about how selfish and obnoxious it was to put one’s fingers all over all of the cherries in the supermarket, leaving other less obsessed shoppers with fruit that was not only part of the reject pile, but also annointed by a stranger’s ungloved hands.

Two minutes later I looked up from the potatoes and did a double-take.

“Dude, that is even weirder!”

“What?”

“Crazy Cherry Lady just walked away from the cherries!”

We stared at her, wandering along a different aisle in the produce section — bag of cherries conspiciously absent from her person. She had a fanny pack around her waist (was she hiding the perfect cherries in there? That would bruise them!), but she was holding absolutely nothing. She looked aimless and slightly spaced out, like she was thinking about what fruit to rearrange next.

And that’s my supermarket kook story of the day.

*******

Other weekend roundup news:

1) Jenn’s birthday celebrations were lovely! Drinks and dear friends, mmm.

2) I had a funny Being Married Moment when we were all on the dance floor, and Sean behind me was almost dancing with me but not quite, because his poor hands were curled up into loose fists at my sides, afraid to plant themselves properly on my hips. For they are now married hips, and not to be touched by the palms of another! ;-)

3) On Sunday we went to Salem to look at the walls in Feed Your Head — it’s such a neat little space, but so tiny! We also met its fantabulous proprietor, Randie, and her incredibly sweet boyfriend Bill. I really do want you to come to the opening on July 8th, if you possibly can — not just for me but because the store is so cool, and they’re really trying hard to attract people right now. Randie — who couldn’t possibly be any older than me — just opened the place in March, and has been working her butt off to organize great events and promote the store. If you’ve ever dreamed of starting your own business, but been terrified of the risks, please come and support a rockin’ young entrepreneur who’s taking those risks right now.

4) Took this picture while in Salem — what is it that is so romantic about old sewing machines? Is it the hours of eye-blinding toil and gender-oppression they represent?

Apparently the 8th and 9th of June are dates upon which the world’s most brilliant and lovely people converge and clamor to be born. Happy birthday, wonderfuls. You know who you are.

Yesterday it poured, and Jordan and I met after I got off work to sit by the window of the Parish Cafe, share a delicious flatbread pizza, and give me the happy opportunity to drink three cups of coffee in a row, after not having had any for five days. I admit that I got a little antsy after that. We talked of cabbages and kings, of course, and Jordan got wild occasionally, and I got quietly passionate occasionally, and remembrances entered only a little into things because both of us are quite focused on our present lives and preoccupations. The nice thing about the photographs I took is that the best of them don’t show Jordan as he normally looks when he talks, hands flying and head shaking, but as he looks when he is still — intent, beautiful, romantic.

I know I promised a story, but apart from possibilities and hard work, the only stories I have are about the insides of my mouth, and my dream-life.

1) As I was telling Sarah today, the last remaining annoyance from my surgery is a tiny piece of something poking out of my gum on the left side, which sticks me every time I chew. The tragic part of this story is that for the past three days I’ve been thinking it was a bit of the end of a stitch, and I was dying for it to dissolve and fall out — and then it did dissolve and fall out, and I am still being poked. I can feel another tiny point, which may be another stitch or may be a small piece of bone fragment: you are warned when you have an impacted tooth extracted that since they have to break apart bone to get it out, there may be tiny pieces of bone left behind that will “work themselves out.” Sarah said this possibility was too gross to be true, but sadly that is not a tenable argument.

2) The other night I dreamed that I was in Singapore, and when I was out with my sister trying to get food this guy behind the register at some kind of cafe was insufferably rude to her because she didn’t have the proper stored-value card with which to make a purchase. So I gruffed at him not to treat her that way, and he blew into a rage at me in which he accused me of being stuck-up because I didn’t speak in a Singaporean accent (you see my subconscious is pretty transparent). Still, I gave as good as I got, in a tirade about how one ought not to judge people by the way they speak, isn’t that where the government’s obnoxious anti-Singlish campaigns come from anyway? (you also see my subconscious is good at working out its own issues).

Not the best stories. Here is a better one, not mine:

3) Asher: I want to sing a NEW song.
My sister & my mum: Okay we’re listening.
Asher: (swaying in time and bobbing his head) Da da da da dah dah da, da dah da dah dada daaaaaaaaaaa……………

Pause.

Asher: Why aren’t you clapping?!
My sister and my mum: (stifling masses of laughter) Clap clap clap clap clap clap clap!

Clearly he knows what he deserves.