A fire in my head?

The city looks new, with the trees just going green and pink. Even the oldest houses look older. I've been in this house a year now. I've been here all of the time longer than that. Things are coming back to where they were. Things are coming back different.

Some time ago I had a boy who would send me tea from London. I only just realized, in fact, that I'd probably never had truly good tea until he gave it to me. (I'm certainly not all his fault, but he did ruin me a little.) We've been talking, and I've been enjoying it immensely. He'll be a nurse soon enough, and he wants to move north. He is still thinking about a tattoo he used to think about when we thought about one another differently. He asks me questions I've not been asking. I've been such a secular thing, this year. I do not think it is bad. The metaphors are no less rich. But mayhaps I do miss feeling the thing under the meat, which was what I knew before I knew the meat so well.

I killed something today.

Today is Bill's birthday. I love to watch the rhythms of people, now, the way that they want community, and then want to be alone, all throughout their lives. We are little clocks. And I've had other thoughts. As a child, people told me that I was wise, and that I was old. And I always reminded myself that no, I wasn't. The thing they were seeing behind my eyes was more slow panic, long trauma, than substance. I'd tell them I was more mud than depth. I knew that if I was wise, I still had far to go. But I knew it as a kind of rebellion: it was like a riddle, and I thought myself all the wiser for knowing the trick at the end. And so there is the part of me that wishes that they had told me, too: you may be wise, and you may be old. But you are very stupid, and you are very young. And, perhaps more importantly, you only know what you know, and you are only as old as you are. I enjoy these paths, too, and I wonder what they will look like when I am somewhere else.

You must listen to the Decemberists' cover of Bjork's Human Behavior right now. It will break you.

The Queen of the Savages.

I have goat cheese for purple grapes and a pink apple and for toast with butter and rosemary. I'm making one of my most absurd teas, a white tea that comes in the form of a pellet which one must unwrap from soft paper as if one is preparing an old gun. One lets it steep once for thirty seconds, discards the slag, and brews it again. I can only ever describe the flavour as interesting, and I drink it so rarely.

What is your favourite type of tea, your favourite thing from which to drink it, and what does your teapot look like?

Whilst in France, I think, Liz and I realized, quite ironically, that we are easy to please creatures, or perhaps infants. Give us good food and art, adventures and regular naps in a strange and new country, and, in my case, breasts, and we are the happiest of things. Is it one of my charms or flaws that I have never been able to bring myself to be ashamed of my base nature? I fuel this machine like it was my religion.

If I smoked like my friends did, I would write here the most terrible purple paragraphs on the joys of preparing a pipe, of glasswork, and of the heaviness and the twisting of smoke. I would ascribe to it mystical properties. But I am a drinker of absinthe and a liar like the old poets, and I long for the secrets of a dead Chinatown.

I have a bit of something called Mint Sauce Concentrate. It came in a lovely little jar, and I haven't the slightest idea of what to do with it. Have you any suggestions?

When I've graduated, I've decided, I must reread Nella Larsen's Passing. I think that it might mean something different, now.

Apparently, corporate entities are performing Hamlet at meetings, and discussing it as a business model at the end. The actors are paid extra for giving the meeting in character, and asking questions, such as, "Would Hamlet make a good employee? Why or why not?" and, "What could Hamlet learn from Laertes?" The things that I hate are, at times, so beautiful and odd.

My tea leaves called me a fool. By swaggering could I never thrive, for the rain it raineth every day.

I've said all of this before, except for the bits about Hamlet and the mint.