this actually happens.

corn muffins are, scientifically, the greatest of all muffins.

i ordered a copy of leonard cohen's stranger music on amazon late in the semester last spring so that i could match up feelings i was having at the time with some of his poetry. the song "closing time" came closest to my emotional range at the time, but certain lines from early poems jumped out at me as i perused the book's pages. one of these was the title of cohen's first collection, let us compare mythologies. the title poem is not included in the collection, so i took those enticing words and began to construct my own meaning based on my own experiences and the four words i had been provided with.

i came up with this: that we each have a sort of personal mythology, our own little world that we carry around daily, composed of our past, our habits, or likes and dislikes-- everything we care about caring about. "let us compare mythologies" refers to the moment in which the floodgates open and these things are shared, sliding between two people in slick conversation over hours that feel like minutes. it becomes, when looked at from a distance, more like a mass cultural exchange than personal bonding. belief systems passing between and meeting up in the middle; syncretism, something rubbing off in the process.

every time i stay out late, something good happens.

broken social scene - "anthems for a seventeen year-old girl" (live)

there's a blog in it somewhere, the last few days. starting school again, seeing people, seeing people in a new light, on the road, the anticipation of more work ahead this semester than i've ever had in any stretch of any school year to date and a determination to face it down, renewed inner life and perhaps a desire to write, things to say and no way to say them. at this moment i'm tired but fully awake, simultaneously caring less about the world than ever in recent memory and caring so much more than usual in a lot of ways.

in a class today we talked about nostalgia and what the word actually means, broken down to its roots, the greek words for "looking back" and "pain." i'm hopelessly prone to nostalgia: in many ways, it's all i ever feel. i'm a step behind most moments and always lamenting one thing or another, the way i imagine most people must be at their loneliest moments. as that brief class discussion went on, we hit on the word "bittersweet" as a way to describe this sort of mental, emotional pain, because there are good times involved as well, which is the worst part. you can wipe out or repress, at least for a while, the worst things in life if they have no redeeming qualities. sometimes, a lot of the time, there's other elements involved: some of your favourite music at a moment that later turned out to be not what you thought it was at the time. you feel as if the past has stolen from you something that you mean to enjoy in the present thank you very much, and you have to go back there and reclaim it. but you can't go back. you can re-live it, surely, in your mind, but the past is, well, you know.

time proves that we are all so wrong in so many ways about so many things. it could just be a matter of perspective or the precision visual manifestations of past events, or maybe there are a few points in life that are like checkpoints for your own perceptions, when you grow up a little or perhaps a little more, see your mistakes, and divorce yourself from the previous incarnation, that unenlightened you.

it snowed on my last day at home: slow static falling from the sky.

moments ago on aim:

ashley: jeremy irons just won a golden globe
me: woooooo

context is fun.

"... there is a town I sometimes dream about, whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next.

For close families, and most of the people in the city are close families, this presents no problem, and it is more usual than not for the escapees to find their pursuers waiting for them on the new site of their choice.

As a subterfuge, then, it has little to recommend it, but as a game it is a most fulfilling pastime and accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the men and women who live there. We were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent.

In the city the inhabitants have reconciled two discordant desires: to remain in one place and to leave it behind for ever."

-- Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

all the little things i do
they're all lost on you
i'm all alone, it's true
it's really nothing new

-- april march

i left the house in the evening in a haze of mismatched thoughts and desires, loose ends and sought-after closure. i'm not going to say anything was resolved, but a head-clearing drive (featuring the magic city) and impromptu visit to the mall made me forget my own problems amid drive-by sunset scenery, mary timony, and the walking dead-- hordes of parents trying to control their screaming children at target.

you know, i first heard the enon song "window display" quite a while ago, and, while i always had a mental image of what a music video for it would look like, i didn't know until today that there is one and it's exactly how i had imagined it. love it when that happens.

watch that, and check this out as well: it is, amazingly, the same band.

so yesterday was nice, warm: unseasonably so, temperature records having been broken for the last few days. it made me nervous about climate change, the same way all the trees dying in the summer did. but my taste for that taste of spring sensation wouldn't allow me to not enjoy it, so i took a ride with my sister, bought some books, saw some of those roadside temperature readouts along the way. 72 degrees at one point. 72.

the same impulse that wouldn't let me not enjoy the day also led me outside as it started to get dark. patty was calling out that the sky looked "scary," like a thunderstorm was coming. it was darkening considerably, the same way it would under those circumstances, the brightness still visible from the other side of the house. i thought about those days long gone, sitting at the front door with julie when we were young and watching bursts of rain and thunder on the street outside while scott sat on the porch across the street doing the same. so many times it seemed we had been down by the playground and patty got the notion that it was going to rain soon, and she'd drive us back to the house just in time and we'd take up spots by the glass of the front door and watch the storm. so many summer days passed that way.

as it happened yesterday i watched the cloud formations and tried to remember bits of what i'd actually learned in weather and climate, but my aesthetic sense took over and i could only pay attention to the dark grey puffs and the way they contrasted with the bright house next door. i felt the first drops and slowly retreated inside as the wind picked up and it began to grow colder.

i was listening to norfolk & western today; i was in a reverie of manufactured memory, a shade of a youth i never had. i come home after a long day of doing whatever kids do to a house of antique radio cabinets and old, beautiful music sounding softly from a room upstairs.

last june i had my day of mauriat, millennium and madonna in which my memory took on a sudden lockstep fascination in regard to a second-season episode of the television series and its repeated use of the song that i discovered was "love is blue." i only remembered a few things about it, little moments really, but there was definitely a lasting effect even though i'd only seen that one episode that one time. well, this christmas, inspired by that day's pondering and my subsequent creation of a cd that features the song twenty times back-to-back, i was after the complete series on dvd. i got it, and over the last week i've watched straight through season one and up to the point in season two where i needed to be: 'a room with no view.'

having just watched it, the moments that stood out to me back in april of '98 were again just as striking: what i now recognise as an enchanting mix of symbolism, cultural commentary, and sexually-charged despair. it all ends up happening so quickly; i realised that i hadn't seen the entire episode and moments that had seemed much more drawn-out actually took place within the space of the first two or three commercial breaks. having the music on a loop, nearly always audible from the very beginning, had the original effect of sustaining an immersive viewing experience through those breaks, absent from the dvd version. seeing what i have of the series, and i'm watching it all for the first time, it's one of the lesser episodes, but i'm not disappointed with the culmination of the experience -- from remembering to re-living -- even if it took this long.