tavie.com

I've knitted the ugliest hat.

Knitting can give you a good idea of how distorted your body image is. I never seem to trust that the size that a pattern promises will actually fit my body. So I end up with thiese monstrously huge things. Apparently I see myself as monstrously huge. My knitting tells me that I am slightly off on this perception.

So I didn't trust the pattern would fit my head, and now I have this oversized, balloon-y tam-like creation. My, is it ugly. Perhaps I'll wear it outside today. Is it chilly?

(I'm a little off right now. Pre-coffee, and I'm not at Mint Manor. This is a rare weekend that will be spent on the New York side of the river: Horror Movie Fest at Andrew's.)

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:03 PM | shower me with attention

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Well, that was amazing. I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to run into her again today, so I headed for the door, and there she was by the copy machine. So we had that "Is your name--?" "Is your name--?" moment! And she remembered me, too! She said she'd been wondering for weeks now but she didn't hear my name around so she thought it couldn't be me. I told her that no one knows my name because I'm too shy to talk to people at the office. So we're having lunch when she gets back the week after next. Crazy! Not only do I run into someone from high school at work, but it's someone I actually used to be friends with!

As a capper, I found my Tavie ring. It was stuck in the clay.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 7:29 PM | shower me with attention

Okay, woah. Okay, woah. Mild freak-out moment happening.

I just came across someone in the office who looked exactly like a girl I used to know in high school. Not only know, but we were friendly. Lost touch, but we were friendly. She used to call me Pooh and I used to call her Piglet. And I thought, "Is that her?" and then I went and looked and her name is on the employee roster.

I think she saw me too but didn't recognize me.

I have got to talk to her. This is too weird.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 4:32 PM | shower me with attention

So, if seven people each send me a skein of Cotton-Ease, I'll have enough to make myself this sweater. But not in bubblegum-pink. Ew. I'm thinking Orangeade or Banana Cream. Or Pistachio.

I wish there were yarn wish lists like there are Amazon ones. Please, send me yarn?

(Even though I have two pairs of socks lined up to make, and still 4 inches left on my dad's mithril-vest, and countless mittens promised? But it's getting to be springtime! I need a springtime cardigan!)

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:12 PM | shower me with attention

My F train sat for 20 minutes at 57th street this morning "due to a disturbance at Canal". I was half an hour late for work. Nobody cares, it's my five bucks lost, but I still feel guilty when it happens.

As we sat there, the guy next to me started informing everyone around him that "it's gonna be like this every morning for the next six months. They're afraid of terrorists so they don't wanna run any trains under the World Trade Center." Hello? Doesn't exist anymore. "They don't know what the fuck they're doin'. This is the war. We're in it for the long haul, folks." And on and on and on. People either nodded or looked uncomfortable. Some both.

Then a dusky-skinned (is that relevant?) guy a sitting a few feet away started getting angry. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Why don't you shut your mouth. You don't have a fucking clue. Motherfucker."

Soon they were both muttering under their breaths to the people around them. The first guy said, "He's one of them."

A woman nearby nodded. "Arabs. I don't know what they're doing here."

The first guy, smugly, "That'll be taken care of soon."

The whole thing gave me chills. It was ugly.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:28 AM | shower me with attention

Fuck. I left my Tavie ring on the potter's wheel.

Goodbye, Tavie ring. :(

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:11 AM | shower me with attention

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

This is going to be bad. Terrible things will come of this.

I was thinking the other day about the fact that I live in a place that you can't exit without crossing a bridge or a tunnel. It's a place that's 10 blocks away from the United Nations building.

That's a chickenshit thing to think at a time when, as of this very minute, bombs are dropping onto Baghdad, but it crossed my mind. There will be bad things, not just there, but right here.

I was a bit of a wreck at the end of archaeology class on Tuesday. The prof was reciting a bit of Yeats' "The Second Coming" to one of our elderly auditers as I came into the classroom. She couldn't remember the quote, but I could:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

But the part of that poem that sticks with me most is,

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

At the end of class the prof, who made sure to say that what she was about to discuss was the least of concerns compared to the human lives that would be lost, talked a little about the archaeological sites that will be threatened by this war. Important sites. The rise of civilization came out of Iraq, after all. Writing started there. Complex culture began there. And we were all stone-faced. I felt sick. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:18 PM | shower me with attention

We finally started learning the potter's wheel today.

Here's something about the wheel: for those not accustomed to it, it scrapes the skin right off your hands.

Stings! Stings, precious! Poor handses!

I'm really bad at it, but get a little better each time I try. It's fun. Incredibly messy. Maybe next time I'll actually make something.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 9:59 PM | shower me with attention

Sometimes, when school gets you down and you forget what you're doing there, it's nice to go back and revisit a Balinese cockfight.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 3:37 PM | shower me with attention

A man unmistakably hit on me yesterday. I was walking to the gourmet deli where I habitually take my lunch, walking down the street, and a man sort of fell in step beside me and started talking as if we had been walking together. He was short, balding, heavily accented, at least 15 years my senior, and had an unpleasantly intense gleam in his eye.

"Is beautiful weather for a picnic?" he purred.

I nodded. "Gorgeous weather today."

"You go on a picnic?"

"No, not at the moment."

"You should go on picnic. One day, I walk to school and is so boring, and my friend says, 'Come with me' and we go on drive and it was, I not kidding, the most fantastic day! I tell you the truth, it is like no other experience, no planning, just go on picnic! You go on picnic?"

"Not today."

"You Irish?"

"Pardon me?"

"You are Irish?"

"Nope."

"Where you from?"

"Here, New York."

"You live around here?"

I am growing increasingly uncomfortable.We are in front of the deli. I want my smoked turkey salad. "No, I work around here."

"Ah. I hope we meet again, yes! I hope to see you around!"

"Okay." I disappear in the deli.

Irish?

And yet part of me thinks, Oh, well, damn. Now when Kirsten complains that she can't walk down the street without being whistled at, I can't sigh, "I don't have that problem, no one ever looks at ME that way". At least someone was looking.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:02 PM | shower me with attention

I dreamed that Cary Grant was alive, hangin' at Mint Manor, and that I was teasing him about how old he was.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:30 PM | shower me with attention

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

The Next Stupid Ceramics Project I have to do involves building some sort of form out of a bunch of cookie-cutter images that I have fashioned from clay. These smaller forms, which will act as building blocks, are to be based on a doodle. Yes, a doodle. As in, I look at an old page of doodles I've drawn, pick out one that looks interesting, and make a bunch of 3-dimensional versions of it in clay. Then I take these pieces and build something ouf of them.

This just gets stupider and stupider. We haven't even learned how to glaze or use the wheel yet, and the semester is more than halfway over.

So, anyway. What I usually doodle are profiles. So I ingeniously took an old cookie cutter (this was my own idea, and I am very smart because it made cutting the shapes out way easier than tracing around a piece of cardboard) and bent it into the shape of a human face, side-view. Then I rolled out the clay on the machine that makes me feel like Steamboat Willie (it's a press and it has a big wheel you turn, toot-toot!) and then I cut out about 20 of them, about 1/4" thick. The finished products look pretty much like this. So now I have 20 of these clay things and I have to make something out of them. God knows what.

This is even stupider than the Tattoo Trophy, that, did I tell you, ended up being a foot with a big maple leaf growing out of the top? It's supposed to be comical, but it's really just the most ridiculous thing you ever saw. One day archaeologists will dig this thing up and think that we were all Canadian foot-worshipers.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 9:28 PM | shower me with attention

Whenever you see a hyperlink on Craig's blog it's usually because some nerd named Me has emailed him and given him a tutorial. It's charming that he won't simply memorize the formula, just like it's charming that Gina won't. It makes them both seem somehow pure. Or at least less nerdy than the rest of us.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 9:14 PM | shower me with attention

Because none of you took me up on my extremely tempting Design Andrew A New Blog Template Contest, I took it upon myself to lazily modify his yellow-rocks template to something that at least fit his style a little better. Therefore, I win the prize of my own choosing.

Hmmm... let's see... I choose... to update the stack of price-fix forms on my desk! Yes! Aren't you jealous?

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:34 PM | shower me with attention

This is what worries me: it's easy to believe in peace. It's easy to want to work towards peaceful solutions. It's easy to be for peace.

What you have to be sure of is that you're not going to rallies and marches because you saw a movie once where some hippies went to a march and boy was that an exciting time in American history. You can't protest because you idealize an era. If you're protesting because you're dismayed that people of your generation are too full of apathy to take notice of the world around them, then protest that. Protest the apathy of your peers. (For example, if I'm your peer, protest the apathy of Tavie.)

You have to protest because you believe that your government shouldn't have the right to bully and impose their will on other nations, unsupported by the rest of the world. If you're sure you're there because it's the best way to make your opinions heard, then march. But don't glamorize it. That scares me, too. The message shouldn't be, "I stood out in the cold and rallied and it was so enthralling to be there surrounded by like-minded citizens." It should be, "We shouted. I hope they heard us. We'll shout again and again until they do."

Yes, that was all directed at myself. I haven't rallied, I haven't protested. I've only recently begun to glance at newspapers. I'm afraid of knowing what's happening. The speech last night terriffied me.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:17 PM | shower me with attention

If we don't focus on the minutiae, on daily routine, on our lives, then we'll most of us be exposed for the babbling, uninformed idiots we are. Or we'll be nervous wrecks.

That said, instead of saying anything at all of any global importance, I'm going to say this:

I'm finally wearing my reading glasses at work. I never wear my reading glasses because I don't want to get dependent on them, but it gets harder and harder to read spreadsheets without them. So I'm wearing 10-year-old prescription reading glasses prescribed for a 13-year-old who had logged significantly less computer-screen-staring-at-time than this 23-year-old.

They're ugly but functional. I hope no one sees me.

Day to day, the smaller truth. Day to day, the smaller truth.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:40 AM | shower me with attention

Monday, March 17, 2003

This piece of shit iBook is barely letting me connect anymore. When I do connect, the cable wiggles out of place with the slightest hint of a breeze. This makes it almost impossible to use this laptop on my lap, and with the limited surface space in this crowded slum of an apartment, this makes Kirsten's flawless PC more and more necessary.

I'm sending this goddamn piece of crap back to Apple to get the Ethernet port replaced once again, as soon as my replacement screen arrives and is installed by the good people at Tekserve.

In happy news, I had a meeting with my Research Design in Anthropology professor to discuss The Dreaded Research Proposal Question. I have been tearing my hair out about this research question for the past week or two, on-blog and off. I'm sorry for all my public moaning and whining, because my question was a rousing success. I know this because I arrived ten minutes late and had to wait an additional 15 minutes to see her, as the guy who was going before me kept going on and on. My meeting took all of five minutes. She's cool, my professor, although overly fond of referring to my potential test subjects as "geeks" and "nerds". But that's okay, because part of my argument will refer to the empowering potential of such designations, as we computer addicts have been joyfully been reclaiming these terms for the past decade or more. Winkety-wink.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 6:21 PM | shower me with attention

Kevin Sites' blog, a "first-person account of a solo journalist's life on the front lines of war" is extremely absorbing, even for a news-shy hermit crab like myself. It's gotten so I can't really look away any longer.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 3:17 PM | shower me with attention

It's 60 degrees in New York City. I believe use of the word "balmy" would not be inappropriate. Sunshine is a mood-stabilizer. It's beautiful walking weather. Of course, I'm stuck at a desk, but at least I know it's out there.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:30 AM | shower me with attention

Kitana has sent me an hilarious link to a page of international euphemisms for menstruation.

I am very, very fond of the Canadianism "I'm seducing vampires". I don't even like vampires-- they're the most boring monster, Buffy or no-- but it induced a gigglefit.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:40 AM | shower me with attention

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of the first two chapters of Lyle the Elephant, a children's novel by up-and-comer Goose Frank. (Shut up, all of you, I'm enjoying this.)

I devoured it on the subway ride home. It captured everything I want a children's novel to capture, particularly attention to detail. My favourite books as a kid were the ones that were bursting with detail. This one is:

Some rest. Some rest. The words cycled through Lyle's head. He did not need some rest. He was lying. What he needed was something inscrutable, unknown-- his mother, mustard, a black pentagon-shaped tile-- anything but rest.

We need lists like these. The mustard is crucial-- without it, the emotions behind Lyle's thought processes wouldn't ring as true. Ms. Frank has skillfully portrayed the classic modern children's-novel archetype, that of the Creative Dreamer. This book is consciously and reverently reminiscent of Lousie Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, the favourite novel of our young protagonist. But Lyle is not Harriet: he is, in his way, wiser and more self-aware than Harriet was, yet naive enough to foster self-identification of the reader.

When asked by his parents where he disappears to for hours at a time, our young hero, who has been squirrelled away with a stack of books, replies, "a foreign land." As I, myself, have been spending a great deal of time in Middle Earth and Fantastica lately, I appreciated his inner journeys all the more:

His parents (who were always tellikng him to stand up straight and to look people in the eye, not down at the ground, when he was speaking to them) wanted nothing more than to understand exactly what went on in Lyle's head, how it was that his boy did not seem to mind that he was no good at kickball, where it was that he went when he holed up in the hall closet. "Narnia," his mother guessed. "Never-Neverland?" his father replied. "Middle Earth." "Wonderland." "Oz."

I am Lyle.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:16 AM | shower me with attention

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Tonight, Mother and Gina and I went to see Eddie Izzard in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

Very black comedy. Depressing, but peppered with horrified laughter by the audience. Horrified laughing is always a fascinating experience.
Izzard was masterful. He's an incredible actor. He played the father of a severely spastic ten-year-old, whose tactic for coping was to constantly joke about the situation. And the jokes were funny, and Izzard is so damn funny, so you laughed, but the tragedy was always at the forefront of the experience.

And, as an apparently blossoming musical theatre geek (this was not a musical), I was excited to see Dana Ivey in the role of the mother-in-law, Dana Ivey having been nominated for a Tony for her work in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 11:52 PM | shower me with attention

Goose made her first historic visit to Mint Manor last night. There were fajitas.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:07 PM | shower me with attention