I had a better day today than I’ve had all week, and it was entirely because I took a break in the middle of the afternoon to walk out on an errand. It was cold, but the sun was shining and we’ve been having these whispery snowfalls in Chicago lately that just cover the pavement with powdered sugar, and I saw some awesome ravens and left Peter a funny message, and it was very good for me. Then all day I was planning on writing a long boring blog entry telling you all that, the little things matter, blah blah blah—but eh—short is better. So I made these for you instead.

Eric G. Wilson is a man after my own heart. Or at least, my heart as it is at its heart, underneath all the detritus of joyfulness it has managed to accumulate over the years. Happiness is hard to scrape off, though.

Like barnacles.

I can’t make myself feel it, but I have gotten extremely good at roundabout attempts to bring it into my life. To that end, I have just signed up for

1) a volunteer orientation that will be the first step in possibly becoming a foster parent for a cat (and thereby finally, once and for all, figuring out if I am or am not too allergic to live with one).

2) a 10-week Kafka seminar at the Newberry Library , where Jenn and I accidentally-on-purpose became members on Thursday.

None of this is happening until February, but I am nothing if not a planner.

I know I haven’t been posting much lately, either here or on my Flickr stream. For a while now I’ve been wondering how to explain this retreat to you, what pretty words I could use to turn my turning away into something sweetly melancholy that would sit on this page like a portrait of me in soft seashore light, eyes on the horizon, enveloped in fog. I hoped that, like a true diarist, I could turn the glove of my emptiness inside out and find inside it an entire world writ small, quotidian poems in every finger.

I’ve searched hard, though, and all I can find is emptiness. I can’t promise I know when I’ll find much more than that. I don’t quite know how to return to your gaze. I don’t quite know how to remain sanguine under my own cruel eye.

Until then here is Jenn’s eye on me instead, and mine on my new city.

We went to retrieve the plants from Ross’s office today—here’s how they fared:

Aloevera: Got knocked off the windowsill and has broken limbs. May not survive.
Succulent #1 (the one with the stem that we splinted with a chopstick last year): Seems to have been a little over-watered and got very brown and sad. Will probably survive, but be extremely ugly for the rest of its natural life. Poor thing.
Succulent #2 (the one with the long hairy arms): Was perhaps a little under-watered; also brown and sad. Will certainly survive and live to tickle another arm.
Cactus: A-Ok. You go, cactus.
Orchid: Happy green leaves and three new aerial roots poking out! YAY!

We’ll need to go on a plant-purchasing trip in the spring, but we were planning on doing that anyway, and at least the orchid survived, so I couldn’t be happier. Sarah, what do you think about growing rosemary in the house as a decorative plant (as well as for the herbs, natch)? Let me know.

And now I must leave you to read this, which I promised to review for a magazine. Heh. Also, the review copy they sent me is AWOL (the Chicago postal service is horrifically inept), so I actually had to purchase the damn thing yesterday, and ask a bookstore employee to look it up for me first; he took great pleasure in telling me “We should have it downstairs, in the Self-Improvement section… in the sub-section Relationships.” Double heh. I’m planning on returning it to the store after I’m done writing the review (shhh), but if any of you, my loyal readers, feel it would be of use to you in your personal lives, please let me know. I will put it in the mail and not tell anyone.

Probably.

…I just had another one of those 11-hour work days I seem to enjoy so much.

The good news is that I had the common sense to turn down a new assignment, even though it is always hard to do so.

I scratched my brain for other good news, but I don’t think I’ll have any till Tuesday, when Jenn arrives at my doorstep. Huzzah!

Ross and I arrived in snowy Chicago yesterday afternoon after an uneventful, if exhausting flight—thanks for all the well-wishes! I know you won’t believe me when I tell you that immediately after reaching our apartment yesterday evening we unpacked our bags and put everything away, walked out to the grocery store to get a few things, and returned to cook ourselves a hot meal (choleh with spinach and brown rice). But heck, at least we didn’t make it to the gym this morning like we’d hoped to, so we must not be quite that superhuman after all.

We did wake up, pretty much simultaneously, at 4:30am last night, and had a funny little nocturnal interlude in which we drank hot chocolate, danced to Feist’s latest album, and watched an episode of Hunter Hunter before falling back asleep till 10:20. The rest of the day was lovely and lazy; we ran a couple of errands, cooked another meal, and I carefully read and reread two wonderful long letters from Hal and Peter, both of whom wrote to me while we were in Singapore. There’s little that’s more delightful than coming home to a month’s worth of accumulated mail.

This evening, though, I am back at work and feverishly planning a way to squirm off that horrible hook for my next escape.