Petitioning the Empty Sky**

Many thanks to Eric and Dean Dad for responding to my meme while I was gone. (I had to look up who Converge was, and I haven’t had a chance to sample a song or two, but I’m thinking that Eric is right about me in that regard – plus, I have all of the songs in Tapestry memorized . . .)

If you haven’t commented on that post yet, I highly encourage you to do so when you get a chance . . .

I’m always curious as to how I come off in my writing – what is the persona I am presenting to the world? My goal is to be as close to whom I am in “real life” as possible, without blowing the thin veneer of anonymity that I have here. The problem is that I am never sure who I actually am in real life – which, I have realized, has turned out to be the real purpose of this blog: providing a snapshot into the daily (somewhat) musings of a random person trying to make sense of herself and the world around her circa the early 21st century . . .

*My business trip went as well as could be expected. The hotel room I had was HUGE – it was one of those suite hotels, which normally I love to stay in when I’m traveling around with Mr. Random – but when you are sitting all by yourself in a strange town, in a suite larger than your first apartment, you tend to think it’s a bit of overkill. I also hate having to be social in the evenings, especially after running around conference sessions all day. I’m only a people person up to a certain time limit . . . On the first evening there, I went out to dinner with a group of folks, but with such a large party (12) we had to wait an hour for a table, then it took forever for everyone to order, and then get the food, and by the time we were done it was 10 PM – going home just in time to get ready for bed. The next evening I begged off from going out to dinner and went back to my hotel room and accidentally watched the entire HBO/Spike Lee documentary on Hurricane Katrina. (Yes, accidentally – I was only flipping around to find some local news for a moment, and I got sucked into all FOUR HOURS of the show. Uplifting! Needless to say, I didn’t get much reading done that night either . . .)

*I did finish reading The Emperor of Ocean Park on the train ride home on Friday. I had started reading it on the train ride down on Wednesday night and tried to get in a few reading sessions in the evenings at the hotel. It was hard for me to put the book down, with is why I had a marathon reading session of Friday night – I just HAD to finish. The book is kind of a mystery as a man tries to find out exactly what kind of man his father before he died. The main character had a lot of “self-loathing-ness” going on, and I think if I met him in real life I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with him much, but the story itself and all of his discoveries kept me riveted. It also helped that large parts of the story took place in DC and Oak Bluffs, MA – two places I know very, very well. I give the book three stars!

OK, right now, I have on queue to read the following: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Traveled, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman . . . among many, many more. Anyone have any recommendations on which one I should pick up next? . . .

*National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) is coming upon us quickly – November 1 – 30, 2006. As you can see by the icon at the side of this page, I started to do it last year but failed to get enough momentum going to sustain my productivity through the entire month. I’m going to try it again this year. Fifty thousand words in 30 days is still quite a daunting task, so I won’t promise that I will finish it but I will definitely make sure that it is higher on the priority list than last year . . .

*I am avoiding all TV today – I really don’t need to be reminded of what happened 5 years ago – working in Downtown DC, just a few steps from the White House, I was in the thick of everything – no one needs to tell me what the day was like or how I should feel about it. Myself and all of my friends, we each have a harrowing bit of story to tell and we all have processed it however we needed to in order to move on in our lives and not live in fear and sadness and hatred. I hate all of the publicity, the overwrought memorials, the gestures that I feel are empty and just for show, just to make us all feel angry and scared all over again, to justify whatever it is that’s going on these days. That’s all I’m saying for now – I’m much too tired to go into a rant . . .

Hope to be back to semi-deep thoughts tomorrow . . .

** Title of a Converge song