Saturday, April 9, 2011

Anatomy of a Friday Night Shutdown Watch

4pm - Attend goodbye party for new work colleague (i barely knew ye!)
5:30pm - Send out last (?) emails, collect work i will do at home (just come and arrest me!)
6:30pm - Decline invites to continue goodbye bacchanalia due to lingering flu effects and responsibly head home sober and stone cold, as temps dropped at least 15 degrees from when i left house in tiny skirt - may as well be walking around naked from waist down.  Ooo, and now it's raining too - cold and wet, my favorite!
7:30pm - First Friday night alone in years.  Ask Scout for suggestions; decide self-administered tongue bath is intriguing from a gymnastic perspective but otherwise holds no real appeal for me.
8-9 pm - Replumb toilet and successfully stop tiny leak behind toilet that had potential to destroy entire floor.  Given how many toilets I have fixed, both here, at friends', relatives', restaurants...wonder if i shouldn't take up plumbing.
9:15pm - check news on shutdown.  Nada.  Think maybe i should eat something.
9:30pm - Hmm...leftover Chinese? Leftover Mexican?  Cereal?  Salad?  Oh look, here's that block of feta cheese i got to try as an experimental butternut squash-feta-hazelnut homemade ravioli recipe.  Huh...it's going to expire next week...and there's the squash....
9:35pm - Cut open butternut squash and roast.  Look for something to eat.  Maybe the leftover Chinese.
9:45pm - Leftover Chinese terrible.  Not really hungry anyway.  Still trying to work off the 9 course extravaganza with wine pairing at Per Se, although 3-day influenza and bronchitis did most of the heavy lifting.
9:50 pm - Start making new homemade pasta recipe for ravioli dough.
10:15 pm  - No news on shutdown.  Hang out with friends...on Facebook.  Realize 95% of friends and relatives require advanced planning to visit.  Then realize seeing the friends i have here requires as much or more advanced planning to visit.  Start to feel very, very old, yet not old enough to live in retirement home where are your friends live down the hall like they did in college and you can count on everyone getting together to watch tv every night in the smoking lounge.  So now feel both old and not old enough.
10:45pm - Squash is done and cooled.  Start inventing recipe and try to document for blog.  Musical selection: Feist, The Reminder.  Because I'm feeling feisty.  Perpetual problems with taking photos without casting a shadow.  Discover standing on counter ameliorates this problem.  Realize I need new lens and really, a new camera.  And some indirect flash equipment.  If only I weren't about to be furloughed...
11:45pm - Squash formula perfected!  Time to roll out the pasta dough!!  Need happier music - Sufjan Stevens Illinoise!
12am - Don't like new pasta dough recipe at all.  Plus, should have kept it in fridge so it didn't dry out.  Make best of it.
12:15am - Check the news - have job!  Hooray!!  Oh wait, they gave away the farm.  Or the women's half, anyway.  Spend half hour reading analysis of the deal.  Democrats doing usual circular firing squad; Republicans win again.  Weep for women's rights; write angry FB status update.
12:45am - Back to ravioli.  Angry woman music selection/dedication to the Dems:  Aimee Mann I'm With Stupid.
1:45am Two dozen ravioli made...filling for ten dozen more.
2:15am - Clean kitchen.
3am - Still not tired.  Surf Netflix and find the bad romcom I watched half of on plane to somewhere is available as streaming video.  Woo hoo - can now watch other half!
4am - Happy ending!!  Time for bed!

11am, Next Morning - Wake up, still upset about budget deal.  Disgust with analysis in major newspapers - most of which essentially leave out entirely, minimize, or poo poo the continuing erosion of women's rights.  Et tu, Economist?!
12:30pm - Find what I think is tongue-in-cheek political commentary New York Review of Books' Poem of the Day (Remember everyone, it's National Poetry Month, so be sure to read a poem a day!!)
And so, I close, with Frederick Seidel's Evening Man (2008).  Learn more about Seidel's awesomeness here and here.

Evening Man

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.
This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
Who does the things most people only dream about.
He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
You can't drink that much port and not have gout.
In point of fact, it is arthritis.
His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
To be a candidate for higher office,
You have to practice drastic openness.
You have to practice looking like thin air
When you become the way you do not want to be,
An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.
Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we're always headed.
Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.
Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—
Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
The country is in good hands. It ends like this.

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