On a Streetcar Named Getting-My-Ass-In-Gear

For the first time, I feel really good looking back at the progress I've made in the last week. It might be because I got paid and so everything just looks a little cheerier, but it just seems like I've gotten over some kind of hump (or maybe just my plague) and am better equipped to listen when I tell myself to turn off the TV and do something else. In fact, on Thursday night I was too good at that and missed half of the Bill Clinton interview on The Daily Show - even though I had set up a reminder and the cable box had switched itself over to the channel. But the reason I missed it was that I was so engrossed in my Adaptation project, and the interview is online, so I don't feel horrible about it. I think this week I am actually going to write a scene, instead of just taking endless notes. Three or four possible ideas for an opening scene have been fighting to claw their way out onto the pixel-page, so I might just do all of them and see where it goes.

I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.

Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.

Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.

Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.

So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)



First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.

I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?

Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.

Next, the Monets.

This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.

The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.

And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.