It was gone for too long … not for me because I only really care as a byproduct of my son caring … but gone for too long for my hockey-mad boy. The hockey strike is over now tho’ and the shortened season is better than no season at all, you can be sure of that.

I don’t know how it works, how to do the math, but it’s like every emotion I’ve ever felt somehow gets wrapped up in trees. Trees become some kind of conduit for thought and feeling, for understanding, for epiphany, for optimism, for love.

Oh. My. Goodness.

In all the annals of object porn, there are no objects that incite greater lust in me than typewriters.

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

I make playlists on my iPod and they’re often very theme-y because I am nothing if not a theme-y woman — I like to group and organise. I like to find patterns, or, in their absence, make them. Maybe that’s the curatorial urge. Or the librarian’s urge. Anyway, I have a playlist on my iPod called “river” and I listen to the songs on that playlist a lot, especially when I am despairing because those songs are very cathartic to hear and especially when I am all joyed-up because those songs are very cathartic to hear.

The carapace is a wonderful thing in its own right and I can celebrate its utility and its beauty — I can, I honestly can. But I never really forget that for all its protective value, it’s also a small, confined place, like a pedestal … or a prison.

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

This is the postcard you might’ve received when you were 11-1/2 years old and your father was in Munich covering the 1972 summer Olympics and there had been a brief period one day the 5th of September actually when you’d thought your father might be

It’s not terribly often I say this but

Oh my god, they are my unmaking, those photographs. I have watched the BBC DVDS and thought and thought and watched the DVDs and my sleep has been interrupted by the storm of it all.

I recently watched a five-part BBC documentary on the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn and his Archives de la planète project, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to document the planet photographically, and I was utterly unglued by the intense beauty and sadness of those hundred-year-old autochromes. Altho’ it has been some months, I am still deeply roiled up inside about those photographs and am still having trouble sleeping properly because of them.

The backbone of the backbone.