Monday, January 2, 2012

acedia, and girls stealing tights


i want this to be a blog about positive things, inspired by the people i know who are, right now, attempting to change their minds, hearts, and practices, but today was very, very difficult. and sometimes many days or months in a row are like that.

please don't let it be the black dog chasing me again.

here's a book about it, since i don't want to really get into it right now, and somebody else already got into it better and more comprehensively than i could anyway.

this article made me think of the book of the same name, which i read for the first time years ago, and made me think of the tenuous walk between solitude and sociality that a writer walks, or an introvert, or a person with monkish leanings who wants to walk across the desert but can't quite make herself.

part of my problem right now, aside from the bitter cold, might be winter break, about to end, with almost no time to write and reflect. that certainly makes a writer crabby. and for now i'm going to hope that when the kids go back to school tomorrow, the black dog will run away, and i can deal with the noonday demon instead.

***

on a lighter note, i bought six new pairs of tights before christmas: three black, one grey, one charcoal with a tiny black leopard print, one silvery grey. guess what? they've all disappeared. three other females, all wearing roughly the same size in tights, currently reside in exoskeleton (aka our house on locust circle), and apparently all needed new tights. sigh. i have trouble keeping in tights. do you?

2 comments:

  1. I had a most wondrous pair of wedgewood-blue tights w/the perfect balance of opacity and sheen, and they looked fantastic with my taupe capezio-esque mary-janes, but I fell, dramatically, in the middle of Market Street in Ballard whilst running to see Thomas play at Egan's and tore out both knees--on the tights and my own actual knees. As painful as the knees have been, losing those tights was even more so somehow. They were a rare TJ Maxx find.

    There are times, and tonight is one of them, when I imagine that I will never again be able to get up and take a shower, put on mascara, do e-mail, talk to people with cajoling intensity, or any of the other things that seem to be required of me--but then I do. I get up, and I think, just one more day. And then the day is done and the next day is not quite so difficult. It is raining dramatically right now. Amelia and I walked around Green Lake in the rain, and then we had pizza from Pagliacci for dinner. I am ready for bed but not for tomorrow.

    Not that I'm obsessed, but in the Tinker, Tailor . . . movie, George Smiley is shown on most mornings swimming slowly but deliberately in the pond at Hampstead Heath with many other middle-aged taciturn Englishmen. He dries off and puts on a shirt and tie to go to work. It looks so perfectly sedate and wild, and makes me long to swim in the lake.

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  2. oh, marni c., you are so right. about everythang. tomorrow will probably be better, and if not, then the day after.

    i mourn for your wedgewood tights, and can't wait to see tinker, tailor. thx for reading and commenting.

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