In the past couple of weeks I’ve been tagged six* times to do this meme that’s floating around the Internet where you make a list of twenty five things you want people to know about you. I thought I might as well say, for future reference, that I’m not going to do it no matter how many times I get tagged—because frankly, I feel that I have done plenty of that kind of sharing here, among other places. If you read me here, you know as much about me as I want you to.

But I am very much enjoying reading what my friends have been choosing to share, and one of them (a dearer heart the universe could not have made) ended her list with the following words: “If I have ever loved you,” she declared, “I still do.”

If I have ever loved you, I still do.

I felt lucky to know that. The love of a girl like that is well cherished. I’m afraid I can’t say that the same is true of me. I have adored many people in my life, quite sincerely and deeply and for long periods of time, whom I no longer love.

But I thought about what I could say, and searching through the swirl of memory and change I found that this, instead, was true: If I have ever loved you, you are with me still. I remember your face. I remember your voice. And I remember what you taught me.

*As of two minutes after I made this post, seven times.

Listen, I know it has been quiet here lately, but I have started building something that I have been planning to build for two years now. It isn’t ready to share with you yet, but I’m very excited to say that I think it will be soon, hopefully some time in my (now rapidly approaching) birthday month. I will need a lot of inspiration and perspiration to continue its construction, though, so wish me luck. And thank you, so much, for the sweet support I know you will give me when the time comes (because you guys rock).

I am also terribly pleased because I visited the Field Museum today and received the most marvelous possible tour of the Bird Division’s specimen preparation room. I do not think I need to tell you how incredibly cool it was to be invited into the room where tiny black beetles eat the flesh off various small-to-medium sized carcasses.

Wait, do I?

P.S. Ross and I are going to get our drivers’ licenses converted tomorrow and—since we have to take a written test—we have just spent two eyeball-drying hours studying the astonishingly badly written Illinois state drivers’ manual. I leave this process with so many questions. To wit: Why, DMV writers, do you include six impressively redundant diagrams and two pages of bulleted lists to illustrate the many ways in which it is right and proper to turn from one lane into another, and then go and toss around the snazzy term “hydroplaning” without explanation? Why is it that after three pages of photographs and text, I am still not clear on whether you are or aren’t required to stop when coming upon a school bus unloading children (like screaming offerings unto the world) in a roadway with four or more lanes? And finally, do you think it would be possible for me to meet and shake the hand of the singularly brilliant individual who came up with the term “aggravated fleeing”?

That is all. Luck, my friends.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

When I was seventeen, I wrote an essay about The Tempest in which I said, of this slight, wonderful bit of verse that happens to be a bejeweled lie, that it was a form of magic because it created a “self-sufficient actuality.” I know this because 1) I have had the phrase “sea change” sloshing gently against the shores of my mind for the past thirteen years; 2) as a result of this long-lived ear-worm, I stole those words two months ago and used them in the title of a Utata project I manage; and 3) when I finally took a photo to submit to the Utata project page, I was reminded of my essay—and during the time it took to scan my Polaroid, I dug it out of a box containing bits of academic ephemera so that I could unearth the precise tone of my early pretension.

I share this with you because 1) I still love the phrase “sea change;” 2) I cherish the tremendous sense of assurance with which I always used to write, and I hope it has not faded too much; and 3) there are things gently bubbling beneath the surface of this year that make me feel I too am becoming—slowly— something rich and strange.

In an inspired effort to be as personally productive as our brand new president, I sent out two emails this evening: one inquiring about jazz vocals lessons with a local singer who also teaches, and one inquiring about the possibility of becoming a volunteer bird specimen preparer (a.k.a. amateur taxidermist) at the Field Museum. I may not be able to afford the former, and I am somewhat unqualified for the latter, so I am not holding out high hopes for follow-through—but gosh darn it, if there is one thing I can do extremely well, it is send out emails.

There you go. Congratulations, Mr. President. Congratulations, me. We both deserve cheesecake.

Ross and I, looking forward to the leftovers of last night’s dinner but not being quite ready to eat it yet, decided to try making microwaved potato chips with the potato we had lying around from yesterday. They turned out beautifully, and we ate them with relish and pride—but five minutes later we both started feeling completely sick to our stomachs, probably (we now realize) because a few of the potato pieces were still a little raw, even though they mostly seemed nice and crisp.

Now we don’t even feel like having our soup: ergo, saddest.

I’m a bit mired in the necessity for money-making at the moment, so all my good intentions for luxurious hedonism are sort of on hold. Still, as Ross reminds me, someone’s got to pay for luxurious hedonism. And I should have a small break in the clouds come Tuesday, when a couple of short-term deadlines will be over and I can wrestle out the crick that’s forming in my neck from all this computer-work and no play.

You will, moreover, be glad to know that Ross and I are not letting the fact that every news station in Chicago insists on describing the temperatures that will arrive tomorrow as “brutally cold”* stop us from going to the opera again. This time we’re going to get our Pinkerton syndrome on. (Some people might say I’ve already done that.)

*The news folks are also keen on the phrase “dangerously cold wind-chills.” January in Chicago is fun!

Ross and I ventured out in the quiet snow yesterday at 9pm to see Vicky Christina Barcelona at DocFilms—the cruel season and the fall of night conspiring to make the movie’s verdant setting, steeped in sunlight, seem even more startlingly unreal than Woody must have wanted it to. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the deal: Two absurdly gorgeous twenty-something Americans spend a summer in Barcelona, where they meet a passionate Spanish painter who succeeds in seducing both of them (separately, though he’d rather it were together) and become embroiled in the messy tangle of his relationship with his crazy-beautiful ex-wife, who has a murderous streak when in the heat of romantic jealousy.

Anya wrote a review of Vicky Christina in which she calls it a “coy, shy longing for a fairy-tale vision of love,” and I’ll start by saying that I agree it’s supposed to evoke a fairy tale, which is one reason for the intrusive narrative voice that runs all along the film’s edges like a gilt frame. I don’t, however, think the movie is either coy or shy, and I definitely don’t think it longs for a fairy-tale vision of love.

Everyone in the film has an incomplete and somewhat warped idea of what love is; no one is capable of learning or growing. Where affairs of the heart are concerned, Christina—impulsive, blonde, artistic but not very good at it—says things like, “I’ll go to your room, but… you have to seduce me.” Vicky—pragmatic, brunette, scholarly but not very good at it—says things like, “If you would care to join us for some recognized form of social interaction, like a drink, then we’d be fine, but otherwise, I think you should try offering [your seductive Spanish charms] to some other table.” Juan Antonio—the painter—says things like, “Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain. And [having a threesome with a complete stranger] is a chance for something special.” Maria Elena—the murderous ex-wife—says things like, “Our love is forever, but it just doesn’t work. That’s why it will always be romantic. Because it cannot be complete.”

And just in case you aren’t capable of realizing on your own how the simple act of pursuing their earnest beliefs to their logical ends makes a fool out of each of these characters, the narrator (invisible, but horribly smug) is continually engaged in a kind of gentle mockery of them: “She saw herself more a European soul, in tune with the thinkers and artists she felt expressed her tragic, romantic, freethinking view of life.”

No one is capable of learning, growing, or changing: everyone’s fate is inevitable from the first, and no one receives a happy ending, because no one deserves one. Where Anya thinks of the film as a failed fairy tale in which true love is idealized, but ultimately shown to be unattainable, I think of it as an anti-romance, in which the idea of true love has sticks poked into it—but very tenderly—from every possible angle.

Yet by the end of the movie you feel that very little harm has been done, and that’s largely because the characters are so utterly ridiculous that it’s hard to take them seriously. It is, however, very easy to enjoy watching them, since they are all very, very pretty. And for that reason, quite despite myself, I liked Vicky Christina Barcelona from beginning to end.