Having no one to talk to all day but my dermatologist made me grumpy last night and grocery shopping made me grumpy this morning.

But.

This afternoon I fried up some mushrooms in olive oil, piled them onto bread with fresh cherry tomatoes (one red, one orange, one yellow) and slices of ridiculously fragrant basil jack cheese from the farmer’s market, and had me the perfect lunch.

That is all.

Thank you, food.

First of all, I thought you should know that my mum—poor thing!—woke up with severe abdominal pains in the middle of the night a couple of days ago and had to be rushed to the ER, where my dad pulled as many strings as he could to get her attended to in short order. They eventually decided that it was an infection, not appendicitis, so she’s recovering nicely on a regimen of antibiotics and will be home soon without the need for surgery. Phew! I talked to her this morning and she was in good spirits and her usual storytelling self, complaining good-naturedly about being embarrassed by all the string-pulling and describing the woman in the bed next to her, and all signs were that she was the same old mum. Send her your love anyway, will you? Also send love to Rani, who is feeling rotten about leaving her babies for ten days of international adventuring with Gabriel, and to Asher, who is bound to be inconsolable about not being able to go with them. Oh, and of course, my dad, because he’s going to have to take care of my mum, amuse Asher, and dandle Sophia on his lap, all at the same time. So basically, please keep my entire family in your thoughts. Thank you.

*******

I talked to Avi yesterday, and in the course of explaining how he is never online anymore he described me as having “invested” much of my life in the internet. This is, of course, perfectly true—but lately I’m feeling the tug of that other kind of life, that of flesh and breath and music and paper and paint and people. I’m less inclined, for instance, to get out my camera and take a photo of myself enjoying a sunny afternoon sitting outside on the deck reading my Neil Gaiman book (so that the internerd can see what a good time I’m having), and more inclined to simply continue sitting outside on the deck reading my Neil Gaiman book, having a good time. As a result I am a little more quiet here, a little less visible, a little more wary of exchanging pleasure for the documentation of pleasure.

And yet. Document I do, at least for the moment.

So, to recap: I got a library card last week. Yesterday I discovered it doesn’t actually let me check out books from the library, which seems to me to make it rather a shabby library card, all things considered. Ross is just going to have to venture into those unfamiliar PT stacks on the fourth floor of the cavernous main library and get me all my Goethe.

However, just when I was getting a little grumpy over this realization yesterday, I got home and opened the mailbox. Now, this is always a somewhat exciting move, but it’s particularly exciting when one is expecting no less than three Bookmooch books, as I am at the moment. Naturally, when I saw a padded envelope in there I tore it open without looking at the return address on it. When a beautiful, black, glossy book fell out onto the table I was a bit confused, because although our upstairs neighbor Emily had recommended the Not For Tourists Guide to Chicago just a few days ago, I knew I hadn’t been so brilliant as to mooch it. Examining the envelope, all became clear. The wonderful Estee had done her usual telepathic gift-giving stunt and sent us the very thing we most needed! What a honey she is, and what a terrific book this is—page after page of annotated maps to all of Chicago’s most interesting places. Heavens to Betsy, could the afternoon get better?

It could. For lo, besides the package from Estee, there was a thick letter from the inimitable Ms. I. , who sent me many musings from her post-haircut coffee and a long article about

THE DARK SIDE OF SOY

as a follow-up to our discussions in July, all of which I read sitting outside over a cup of tea and biscuits, giggling quietly to myself. (The funny thing is, Sarah is not the only friend this month who has taken the time to give me an article backing up their side of an argument we had months ago. I adore my friends.)

And then! In the evening, after a hasty snack on the world’s most delicious asiago-peppercorn-sourdough bread, Ross and I ventured off to the university’s International House, where we listened to the fantastically beautiful stylings of Grammy-award winning Indian slide-guitarist Vishawa Mohan Bhatt and son-of-a-legend Ambi, and it was three hours of amazing, amazingly complicated, deep, rich, symphonic, lilting, romantic, rousing music that made me laugh and tap my feet and clutch my heart. We hummed the last song all the way home. It was, truly, wonderful.

I still miss you all, though.

Hello! I am still here. I’m just a bit winded from working almost 12 hours straight today on a project that’s due tomorrow, with quick breaks for eating strawberries, Dubliner’s Irish cheese and amazing sourdough bread, pita and hummus, and yet more leftover curry and dal. I also paused briefly in my toiling to take a walk around the block (literally; I was back within 10 minutes because I was a bit anxious about this report) and chatted with Anya on the phone (yay!). The reason I had to work so much today was good, though—yesterday we spent most of the afternoon traveling to Rogers Park, which is an awesome neighborhood full of Indian and Pakistani restaurants, grocery stores, and shops selling fabric, gold, rugs, suitcases, and cheap electronics. It made me feel quite at home, really. Ross calculated that in order to get there and back we traveled 38 miles by public transportation, which I think is absolutely insane.

Also absolutely insane: the fact that when we woke up this morning the heat was spitting and clanking itself on all over the house. People! It is mid-September! This is not necessary! It has definitely been chilly ’round here (getting down to the 50s and once the 40s at night), but heating? In what are technically still the dog days of summer? Come on! Fortunately, although we cannot control our radiators entirely we can turn them off if we want to, so we did just that. Yes, my feet are cold.

But I refuse to succumb. Heat=Winter. And Winter=Not Welcome Yet In This House. Not by a loooooong shot.

Feels like summer is almost gone, here. Everyone tells me fall doesn’t last in Chicago, but fiery leaves or no fiery leaves the air is the right sharp flavor and the shivery shoulders you get when you walk from shadow into sun and your whole body drinks in the sheer joy of the day, those are right, too.

May the days before winter stretch out in love and peace.

I didn’t realize that it would feel so sad to be so close to a beautiful, serious, smells-like-a-university campus and not actually be in school. It’s a little hard to be here and be doing the things I’m doing instead of the things I dream of doing. I’m trying to let that feeling sit with me for a while before I work on figuring out how to handle it, if any handling at all needs to be done. I could just look at it and then put it away. I could try to push my way back into a shell that might not fit any more. I could see it for what it is, if only I could.

But you know, don’t you, that there’s no worry for you.

Listen: today I applied for library and gym privileges, deposited checks, built a shelf, made some money, made a bed, ate two kinds of awesome leftovers from dinners we made this week, and walked the good walk out in the sweet, cool fall air in my good sneaks. The neighborhood hasn’t shown me any new friends yet, but old friends have got them beat. I talked to Jenn today and I have to return calls from Erica and Anya, who both rang while I was painting the tiles in the fireplace last night. And now I know that the stairs to the Ryerson hall observatory (which was locked tonight but will soon be open on clear Wednesday evenings) are a spiral. The windows in the stairway are long skinny rectangles. The view through the windows is both familiar and strange.

Jordan and Autumn’s three day wedding was as full, beautiful, and spiritual as they are. Just in case you’ve forgotten what they’re like, here’s a picture of them Peter took just after our own wedding:

As a pair they have more respect for and understanding of ceremony in the tips of their eyelashes than I have in my whole body, so I don’t know of two people more qualified to carry off a weekend’s worth of poetry, song, dancing, fire, incense, invocations, pagan rites, Jewish rites, yoga, meditation, and storytelling, and call it a wedding. It was genuinely astounding, not least because Autumn and Jordan offer, inspire, and receive such an amazing amount of generosity and love that they seem to channel forces of elemental change simply by their presences. I’m sure it was no coincidence that no one in the wedding party was able to get any cell phone reception at all the entire weekend. (A., that is my excuse for missing your latest call, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t blame the two of them every time.)

Yet all the weekend’s affirmation could not entirely overcome the sly demons of inadequacy, with Jenn wondering why she didn’t feel social enough and Peter encountering dusty and forgotten embarrassments and me attempting to figure out why after all these many years of moving and watching other people move it still matters to me how I look when I dance, dance, dance.

And then tonight we did something brave (for us), which was to go upstairs and have drinks with a new neighbor Ross met when we were moving in. She’s an entering PhD student in history who’s sharp and interesting and fun to be with, and we spent a charming couple of hours in her apartment drinking some delicious wine, so why is it that after a while all I could think about was how difficult it was for me to penetrate the conversation about their (nascent) doctoral experience? Why is it that I hate talking about what I do for a living and yet find it so impossible to feel legitimate talking about what I really care about in my life? It’s amazing how little it takes to throw you back, however lightly, to the outside of any group.

So the past four days have been challenging and provocative for me in ways I hadn’t anticipated, and yet when I think about it I realize that it’s the same old imps coming back, as ever, in new shapes: “What kind of an existence do I want to build? Who do I want to be? Will I ever figure out how to share myself with people fully? How much space should I dedicate to answering the question of doing? And what does it take before I can I learn from others without envy?”

So it goes. We turn and return to the same place, even when we move a thousand miles. We yearn to discover The Answer, when it is as plain as an Indiana day that there are only answers. Our thoughts fly up, our words remain below.

…is very exhausting. We keep waking up at 7am, working like mad building and painting and unpacking and organizing for several hours, and then collapsing on the futon at about 2pm suddenly tired as puppies. The good news is that it’s only been five days, and the apartment is already looking lovelier than anyplace we’ve ever lived in before. On the other hand, I still feel like I’m in moving mode, so every now and then I get a terribly anxious feeling in my chest when I look around at all the settling in we’ve done and think to myself, “Oh no! How on earth are we ever going to get ready to leave now?”

…is a bit terrifying. I’ve now got three assignments due on the 14th, the 17th, and the 19th, and more work is still coming in for the month. I think I can handle this, because yesterday we made my desk, painted my office wall, and set up my filing cabinets, and the little area I’ve claimed for my work space is starting to look very inviting. I almost feel as if when I sit down here I become twice as productive simply by virtue of its configuration. Who said interior design wasn’t useful? In addition, we finally have the internet here after days of fevered anticipation, so I couldn’t be more prepared for research and writing. I’m even thinking about taking some materials with me tomorrow when we travel to PA for Jordan’s wedding , not so much so that I can get stuff done but because working while traveling makes me feel so… so… self-employed.

…is mostly very awesome indeed. You want to know why? There’s a different reason every day, but today it’s because at three in the afternoon we walked 10 minutes to get a couple of chocolate croissants, ate them while sitting in a little park, walked home in an extremely good-smelling rainstorm, and then broke open a very expensive bottle of white tequila (a gift from one of Ross’s ex-colleagues), sliced up some lime, sprinkled salt on the backs of our hands, and had two shots each while listening to the rain.

On a Thursday.Yeah.