Summer in the city

I moved to Willy Street. I moved east to a neighborhood where people make a habit of talking to their neighbors, of growing sunflowers in illogical places, of leaving free bottles of Miller Lite on the sidewalk. I moved to an apartment where the rooms are not just one after another like they've been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. I took a bunch of photos, but only to document what repairs are needed, what flaws my landlords might try to charge me for when I eventually move out. They have a reputation.

But rather than pictures of flaws in my apartment (I mostly can live with them), here is a list of thoroughly domestic perks:
* Two sinks in the kitchen, so I can dry dishes without taking up counter space. It occurs to me now that I had two sinks before, but the need for counter space was less urgent, and my drying rack, I believe, did not actually fit in the sink anyway.
* Laundry in the basement, rather than a place I have to drive to and read a book at. The dryer is broken, but we have a drying line and plenty of warm days left before fixing it becomes a matter of urgency. I can put a load in and resume cooking dinner or whatever other chore I like. Or read a book, but with a cat in my lap.
* I can walk for groceries, hardware, or liquor or several types of dinner and breakfast. I can walk to my friend's house. The bus system loves my neighborhood, so getting to work in the winter will be easy.

Neighborhood is important to me. Where I lived before, though I liked the quiet and the nearby arboretum and the owl hoots in winter and the occasional coyote eyes across the street at 2 a.m., my building felt like a refrigerator, and aside from garage sales, we didn't voluntarily talk to each other. My downstairs neighbor was the exception, and I'm sending her a postcard so she has my new address. We'd chat in the mornings as she gardened and I got my bike ready for the work day.

So far, I am optimistic about the Willy Street neighbors. There are hippies in the back apartment (they have names, but it's easy shorthand) and a slew of cohabitating bike mechanics upstairs. The hippies sell produce on the lawn on weekends--whatever's leftover from the CSA they help grow. They are ambivalent about being paid. The basement is full of home-canned vegetables and large bottles of dark liquids.

It's all so cliched and so iconically Madison. I should point out there are downsides, like the street is heavily trafficked, and someone nearby plays bongos when I'm trying to sleep, and the downside of people who talk to each other is that they also throw parties when you might plan to get up early on weekends, and I have weird feelings about probably being someone who is buying in to the gentrification and rising cost-of-living of a formerly working-class neighborhood (but then again, my income is really not gentry at all). And still, it's a time where my city feels just a bit magical.

Amelia came to visit and she took a picture of me. I think you can see her reflection.

To-do list for the post-Wisconsin-recall political wonk

• Delete and sort lots of e-mail. Organize your photos on Flickr.
• Start writing about science, the environment, and things built on a more concrete and knowable foundation than the vagaries of electoral politics and campaign rhetoric and exit polls.
• Stop writing about politics, except where it intersects with science, the environment, and the aforementioned "things."
• Purpose, repurpose, unpurpose, overpurpose that blog you originally created to document a trip to a foreign country.
• Write poetry. Read poetry.
• Build bat houses. Count bats. Indulge in similar mild obsessions.
• Take care of your people, your tribe, as Vonnegut would call it, your "karass." Write post cards. Knit a scarf.
• Visit your grandmother in the nursing home and show her pictures of the Everglades.
• Learn your alcohol tolerance has gone way down since you last had multiple beers in one evening.
• Take a long camping trip around Wisconsin. Don't ask anyone who they voted for.
• Consider new tattoos and/or piercings. Dye your hair unnatural colors.
• Consider making a more long-distance plan for, that awful phrase, "your career."

Choices and In Bruges (some spoilers)

(Given that I'm writing this post at a sad point in my year, I feel like I should clarify that this is just a thought I've been chewing on independent of anything else. Also, hi Blogspot, how are you?)

There's this song that plays during my favorite scene in In Bruges, when the fat assassin (I honestly forget his name) is about to throw himself out of the tower, and the young "heroes" are kissing and laughing, and death is striding toward them all with one eye covered in a bandage, and this song plays. This sad Irish love song. About how the lady was clearly a bitch and would lead him to angst, but he loved her anyway and gave her everything and so now he's sad because she let him down.

And that scene, that song, kill me every time. If I watch it alone, I bawl. If I watch it with someone, my face twists up so I don't bawl.

And the thing is, I never, ever, hear that song as being about relationships. That's never what pictures it stirs up for me. It's totally about choices and agency. About the job. About chasing after something that you know is going to end badly, but disregarding because there's something beautiful and thrilling right here right now. In the context of that movie, it's about this guy, the fat assassin (I feel really bad that I don't remember his name, but I'm not taking the simple step to Google it, either, because I'm writing about what's in my head right now), who has spent his whole life being really good at this job that is, right now, killing him.

And yet, of course that's how it would end for him. Because he's a killer. We've spent this whole movie loving this character, but he's a killer. And he's dying like a killer. And that's exactly--fucking exactly--what he saw coming down the road, if not when he started the job (we don't know), then certainly later on. And what we, as the audience, should have seen. And it's a reminder, right before the final chase starts, that we would be naive to expect or feel entitled to a happy ending for Colin Farrell's character, who made the choice to chase after the same bitch of a job.

How's it going, abandoned Blogspot?

No promises.

Went to our nation's capital.