Sunday, August 21, 2011

Gray Sunday

As every Sunday is on the seaward side of San Francisco at this time of year.

I'm scanning passages from this book and listening to Two Bicycles and Grouper.

My job right now consists of talking to strangers and convincing them to donate money. I didn't do well yesterday because I was in a misanthropic mood and the sun downtown was too hot and bright for my British-Isles-pale fogdwelling self (sunburned my eyeballs, guh), but the day did bring two of the coolest people I've met since starting.

They were sisters from Canada, I guess in their sixties or early seventies, and the talkative one was telling me all kinds of stories from the Women's Liberation Movement...about seeing Andrea Dworkin in this particular cafe in New York every morning and how she was really a very sweet person, etc. She was giving me names of second-wave feminist poets to write down and look up. It was a jewel of a conversation.

I'm going away for a few weeks to visit people. Primarily my freshman-year roommate, whom I haven't seen in THREE YEARS, and our former suitemate. Both New Englanders. It's been ages since I've gotten on an airplane by myself, with just a bag and the prospect of being away and somewhere unfamiliar for a while. I miss the feeling of that. I have grown roots in the last couples of years, and that's good too, but. There's always something or someplace to want.

(I banned myself from international traveling in early 2010, to think about contentment and luxury and consumption. Even though I've mostly been broke since then anyway, far-sickness still knocks.)

(I dreamed again last night about being back in Iceland. I have some variation of that dream about once a month or so. Like petrifying wood, the reality in memory is gradually replaced by dreamness and the imaginings of longing.)

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