Hat collector

Multiple corners of my life have been strange, strained. But I swear, I've been having fun. And the first major winter has hit us, the bonesaw-cold, the icy roads, the scarves hiding everyone's identities. When I said December is clearheaded, it is definitely not clear-eyed. So much of winter, really, is a problem of vision. Darkness, snow, water stuck to and clouding our various glass. I've got the plastic on the windows, after waiting a little too long so I could slap another coat of polyurethane on my astronomy-plastered kitchen table. I am almost done with Battlestar Galactica and there are good books lying all over my apartment, waiting. I got myself back to yoga class and remembered how lovely it is to surrender to that kind of discomfort. To sweat, but slowly, to watch a drop of it plunge off my fingertips while the rest of me holds still as an easel.

Also I've learned that I really like The Killers. They give me shivers. The way I discover music now as a young adult, after spending my NPR-only teenagerhood having driveway moments with Beethoven and Prairie Home Companion, I tend to be way too excited about something that everyone else I know has already loved to the point of cliche.

But other songs come on and the whole room gets electric because everyone in it feels the exact same way. When Wolf Parade cries out, "I'll believe in anything." And that old difficult word "duende" shivers down from eyebrow to heel.