If my brain and my body are going to continue to do wacky things, I certainly hope they continue to be wacky in the same way that they were yesterday.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay.

(Parenthetically: I'm not the only one who had a good day. Pix got accepted to art school in London, so she gets to be with her lover starting in September. I can imagine how she must feel.)

So. About yesterday. My body did wacky things. It decided not to be particularly cranky about temperature changes, which usually drive me nuts, even though I was dressed all weird (in a tank top with a pea coat over it). It decided not to get hungry at all yesterday. I got up at 9 a.m. I ate my first solid food of the day after midnight, and to tell you the truth, I ate because I was tired, not because I was hungry. Weird. Clearly my body does not intend to continue that behavior today, since I'm hungry right now. It would be nice if it did, though, since I'm afraid to go in the kitchen and see what the ants have gotten into now.

After my freakout with the ants and the messy house yesterday, I did some cleaning. (I also snapped at my housemates some, which I'm not particularly proud of.) In picking clothes up off the floor, I found $24 and change in the pockets of various pairs of pants. Then I got an email from Curtis that made me feel really good. I don't know how to put it without sounding melodramatic.

I
love
him
so
much.

We rock.

And I'll just leave it at that.

Then, feeling freshly serene, I took myself out for coffee, went to my Emerson and Thoreau seminar (which was even more fabulous yesterday than it usually is), and went to work. At the radio station. I can't say I was looking forward to it... first day of the fundraiser and all. But I actually had a great time. I got to see Jessica and Jenny and Ronda and Nickie-Jo and Court. Mike didn't infuriate me for once. And I got to spend three and a half hours in the production studio slicing up the new Ani DiFranco album to make it radio-friendly. I did a bunch of edits that I'm really proud of. Now the station has a one-CD, FCC-friendly, normalized-for-airplay version of the two-CD album, which, as I've said before, is incredible. Now that I've listened to it more, I can say that this album (Revelling/Reckoning, in stores April 10) may just be my favorite Ani DiFranco album ever. I'm not sure. But wow.

So then, after seven hours of work at the station, Mike and I stumbled (figuratively, of course: Mike drives everywhere, even if it's two blocks away) to College Inn for subs and caffeinated beverages. Coffee! Then I was all spacey and tired and jittery, but in a kind of fun way. And I came home and talked to Emily and then Curtis and I fell asleep very, very pleased.

Hmm. This seems like an appropriate moment to include one of the seven 351-word sentences I wrote for my Emerson and Thoreau paper last week. I got it back yesterday. Cushman loved it.

People are good at feigning emotions (as performances for other people, but also as performances for themselves, carefully engineered by their subconscious to make their conscious selves feel more virtuous, or saner, or more like the tragic heroes of novels rather than just like sad, lonely people absorbed in their own personal tragedies), but it is practically impossible to feign serenity: it's not the calculated oblivion that people induce with alcohol or cocaine or knives, or the wave of adrenaline and euphoria that hits after achieving success or averting disaster, or the punchy contentment that creeps in toward the end of a long night of storytelling and laughter; it's the slow consciousness of lying in bed listening to the rain and reveling in the warm envelope of blanket and the soft cradle of mattress and pillow, relaxing muscle groups one by one, settling in for a few hours of perfect sleep and a long life of danger and uncertainty (and feeling that, in the morning, the strength to grapple with life without choking it to death will miraculously appear and feel as natural and as exhilarating as that first cup of coffee); it's realizing that, having stayed up half the night already, it's worth waiting for the sun, then watching with heavy eyelids as the sky lightens from black to navy blue and almost to turquoise; it's new grass and the familiar call of mourning doves just after dawn; it's waking up in a sleeping bag inside a tent coated with frost, pulling on jeans and boots over pajamas, and venturing outside to find someone already stirring oatmeal over the campfire; it's the weave of perfect harmony, the arc of a true song, building in a crescendo of elated tears; it's moonlight and woodsmoke, air so sharp it almost hurts to breathe, the smell of orange blossoms, stanzas from crystal poems flying by on the breeze, a thin patina of yellow and orange leaves covering the asphalt and the roofs of cars, and breaking into that sudden, totally pure smile in the middle of the street, where no one can see.

Those are the best moments of my life.