kinda small
DO NOT FORGET TO STRETCH
Let’s warm up with some “who cares, Smartypants” minutiae before trying to describe, diary-fashion, what I have been up to for, you know, months.
- I own my first pair of over-the-ear headphones now; I have mixed feelings because (a) they look kind of silly (I feel like an alien insect DJ), (b) there is no denying this is a lot more to lug around than earbuds, and (c) they have noise canceling by default. I have a lot of feelings about the noise canceling. It’s nice but it is leading to a comfort crisis where I will realize how noisy places are (the GYM, omg) after I take the headphones off and then I’m like: can I live like this? So I think it might be making me soft? TOUGHEN UP MARINE, THE WORLD IS A NOISY PLACE JUST DEAL WITH IT. Also I cannot get over the nagging suspicion that lengthy noise-canceling is physiologically not good for me, somehow? Maybe it is putting pressure on my ears/brain/nervous system? I doubt that has any science basis but the thought; it remains. On the positive side, I am grateful to these particular headphones for including a little diagram inside the case about how they fold up to fit inside, because otherwise my spatially-challenged ass could never make it happen.
- My spatially-challenged ass went to the office recently (boo), actually used the “hoteling” workspace reservation system instead of just awkwardly camping out in conference rooms, and was pleased to discover that I had booked a space with a gorgeous floor-to-ceiling river view that was conveniently close to the bathroom and nowhere near any other human beings. This was dumb luck since I cannot read a floor plan to save my life (see above). Still not a fan of leaving the house but if I can snag this space again for the twelve times a year I need to commute, that will be acceptable.
- I am temporarily credit-card-less because of fraudulent activity. We find ourselves in good company, as a google of the defrauding business led to a large Reddit thread of similarly defrauded folks. It will all be fine until the new cards arrive, but traveling downtown reminded me just how many coffeeshops are cashless now. Luckily stupid Starbucks was just fine with trading my dirty dollar bills for their over-roasted cold brew.
EASY LISTEN
I got deep in the Gino Paoli musical rabbit hole recently. Do you know this guy? He should be as well-known as Frank Sinatra or something but life isn’t fair. Gino Paoli is (he’s 90) a soft-voiced Italian crooner who had some popular songs in the 1960s. Also, this is an amazing bit of his Wikipedia:
According to Paoli, the lyrics came to him while lying on a brothel bed. Gazing at the purple ceiling, he thought, “Love can grow at any moment at any place”.
Okay Gino.
HORROR QUEEN STORYTIME
[a text message discussion of the VHS horror movies of our teens]
Me: I always thought Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street was sort of drag-queen-coded.
Friend: I can see that.
Me: the arch comments, the sarcasm. The NAILS.
Friend: Similarly, the Cryptkeeper, with the drag queen jokes.
Me: oh, disagree! The Cryptkeeper has a masculine energy
Friend: brb, jotting that down for the title of my collected poems. The Cryptkeeper Has A Masculine Energy
FROM AFAR
We were in Istanbul for the first half of November. It was cats cats cats, walking everywhere (oh so many hills and stairs; Istanbul, you are the Los Angeles of Europe or the Lisbon of Asia, depending on how you want to look at it). Rented an apartment and I really loved our neighborhood, and the five “regular” cats I fed from the back garden. The apartment owner had left a little bit of dry food but we ran out, but there was a pet-supplies store in the neighborhood. All the shelves had fancy bags of Royal Canin and special feline diets, and we were trying to brokenly communicate to the shopkeeper that we wanted something different when she cut us off and said, “Street cat?” Yeah, street cat. Then you get the unmarked bag of kibble from the back for like fifty cents. “Our” street cats seemed happy with it.
Other Istanbul things:
- Getting slightly mixed up in the Istanbul marathon
- Getting slightly mixed up in the 86th anniversary of the death of Atatürk (November 10) (this involved crowds and megaphone speeches and people with Atatürk-head posters on sticks)
- Manti for dinner as often as LT would put up with it
- Various palaces full of hideous furniture
- The modern art museum where I became obsessed with this collage artist
- Taking ferries for no reason, because I love being on boats so much. I would be happy spending a day taking a ferry to the other side for tea and baklava, taking a ferry back for tea and baklava. Just keep that going all day.
- A sketchy bar, the kind you only go when traveling just to get off your feet/away from people for a while, that had a special of 50 (or 56? unclear) tequila shots. I was brave enough to use the bathroom there, and before I left the table I told LT, “If I get trafficked I hope it’s to somewhere nice.”
In the middle of the trip we flew to Izmir, rented a car (I shall henceforth use the phrase “like renting a car in Izmir” to describe anything especially Byzantine), and drove to other archeological sites for poking around. There is so much! So much antiquity. At one point Google Maps kind of went crazy and we ended up going up and down mountains instead of on the nice modern tollway, which was kind of exciting, both for us and for various herds of goats we encountered.
BACK HOME
Murphy cat, who is not a street cat at all, yelled at me for probably about 24 straight hours when I returned from Turkey, angry that I could leave him like that, despite twice-daily cat-sitting visits from people who theoretically care about him. He still does not enjoy me leaving the house for every reason, even for things like the grocery store, a required in-person work meeting, or a concert. LT and I attended a performance of the Bach Christmas oratorio, where I tried to stay relaxed and keep my eyes closed because why did it have supertitles? It is a bunch of songs! The songs are still pretty even if they’re in German! Supertitles make sense in opera where there is a plot, because otherwise you would be all like WHO IS THAT. But they are dumb when it is just beautiful music with many repeating translated lines about the Christmas story. Here is the choir (singing as shepherds) saying
SHOULD WE GO AND SEE THE CHRIST
YES, LET US GO TO SEE HIM
SHALL WE INDEED GO, TO THE CHILD JESUS
YES, WE ARE TOTALLY GOING
Don’t put that on a big screen! We can just listen!
—mimi smartypants: we hear for you.
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