It's raining, but there ain't a cloud in a sky. Must have been the tears from your eye.

"Attempting to burrow and disappear into admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my intergrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. I wanted to submit and submerge, even die a little. I developed a preference among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers.....By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist, I was asking works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That, they couldn't be. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water."

Damn you, Jonathan Lethem and your New Yorker article, "Beards", that made me cry last night while reading.

Ah, Friday night and I'm on livejournal. I'm a rockstar.

( illness and writing )

Damon's in town and this morning I took him to Cozy Corner for brunch. My first real outing of the week, and it felt good to walk that far, even if I was a little tired after each trip. The food was really good and hit the spot, and when I left the hostess talked to me by name and asked about my meal. She remembered my name from when we came in and asked for a table. And this place was busy. I was a little touched. We spent most of the afternoon napping on the couch or watching My Neighbor Totoro.

This weekend is about plugging away at the paper (five minutes an hour!) and helping out DYA if/when I'm able to that she doesn't spontaneously combust. But I think she'll be pleasantly surprised with how fantastic it will all turn out, assuming she's awake to notice it.