Saturday night Nina held a party in Calderwood. She kicked it off by reading from her novel and I followed suit by reading from brand new snippets of something I’m calling Hunger and How it Denies its Cravings. I don’t think I’ve ever shared material that early before but the other colonists were game to act and boy did they. I will have to look them up for the New York production

www.xkcd.com

Relieved and elated that the calendar year is changing. That 2008 is well riddanced. I think more has changed in the last year than since the first year I went away to college. I finished my masters at NYU, I went to Yaddo and to Umbria, to MacDowell and to London, to Seattle and to Burning Man, and I moved to San Diego and started at UCSD as the only playwright in the first year MFA class. I lost my best friend and found a new home. I got drunk and subscribed to Scientific American.  I lived with a sommelier in the East Village, shared a tile-walled room in Bushwick, and many theoretical roommates before finding, or being found by, Samantha. I was David Bowie’s captive Sarah from Labyrinth for Halloween. I sprained my ankle running to Ruddie’s for hotdogs. My dad forgot my name and my grandmother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. I was caught in two sand storms and one ice storm. My fingers froze and my gums filled with sand. I taught two classes and ate so many pears. I turned 25. And am happy to see 24 go.

“…Some say that Happiness is not Good for mortals & they ought to be answerd that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one, a blight never does good to a tree & if a blight kill not a tree but still bear fruit let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.”

William Blake, letter to William Hayley, London, October 7, 1803

via Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Don’t drink and subscribe.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/harold-pinter-in-his-own-words/

Christmas Eve is full of Yule, and pool.

I am obsessed with ulladubulla’s War of the Worlds remix—which is a remix of a remix, I think, of Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical War of the Worlds based on the H.G. Wells. Ethan discovered it in Jordan and it has become my winter soundtrack.

Mondays in December.  Are supposed to be the worst kind. But then every week there are podcasts. New Fresh Airs and On the Medias and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Mes, Slate Gabfests and Slate Explainers, and if you’re lucky, new TALs and Radio Labs.

What does it say that I wait for my weekly podcast line-up with such bated anticipation? My life is empty—probably that is what it says. But also that I know detailed explanations of Ponzi and Albanian pyramid schemes. I’m willing to accept both. Being as it’s a Monday in December.

Last night we drank hot cocoa with peppermint schnapps in the animator’s studio and shared work. I read a scene from Filling. 

A few hours later I was dreaming. I was on a beach and there were all kinds of wooden structures built upon it without adhesives (so stacked) and with two large holes underneath dug down far enough that they would fill with water as holes are want to do on the beach. People would jump in from teetering second stories to swim and then others would jump in after them so by the displacement of water by the added bodies all could climb back out of the swimming hole. People were dressed as any who had not expected to find themselves at the beach but were accepting it full steam ahead (so jean shorts and dress shirts wrapped around heads). Also, inexplicably, sheer white cover-ups with LED lights sewn in.

I was concerned about the structural integrity of the drift-wood buildings so my friend lifted me up into the air suddenly above his head and spun me on my vertical axis before swimming me down across the sand by my ankles like a compass. I felt like when I rode on Mojo’s handle bars in the spring of 2006 and raced through the night of east Providence.

I then traveled with people to a cliff side pool. A little boy had lost his glass bottle of shampoo so I borrowed his goggles and told him I would dive down to get it. Meanwhile the boy’s father drained the pool part way revealing a vast treasure trove of lost articles on the bottom of the pool. I retrieved the sun lotion and found also a neiman marcus make-up bag with about a dollar fifty in quarters (which like an arcade was the currency this world traveled in) and green clip on earrings—both in the set.

Today—the snow is still coming down.

Kirk was talking tonight about numbers—Jungian numbers—and I asked if he knew what I was and he said absolutely a 6. A 6 he said is Fight or Flight. It is based in fear. But it is also a loyalist through and through. And I am. To an almost self destructive fault I will stick by you. And a 6 likes to entertain. They care about their friends very much. But their first instinct is to run. They try to be bold sometimes and do things that they are afraid of but they are making themselves be bold. They crave safety. I am all of those things. I used to think it was a testament to how well this one person knew me that they would call me a gazelle. Always looking around. Ready to bound across the Sahara. But then Kirk saw this right away.

I like 5s. They are thinkers. I like thinkers very much. I like people who if they are interested in something research everything about it. Which is all part of being a 5.

I may be somewhat say—imaginative—but I care very much about accuracy. I don’t care for bullshit or misinformation. I love the way things really work. There are people who would give you bullshit and call it free thinking.