Peripatetic

So the second phase of the big move is now underway: I’m back in Missouri (where it is a brutal 95 degrees, obviously in my honor—though it’s not much cooler in the NYC area), having returned yesterday to collect the cats and oversee the move. Right at this moment I’m taking a break from packing CDs and other things that I didn’t manage to pack before I started the new job. The packers arrive tomorrow, ostensibly to pack the kitchen, bathroom, our few bits of framed artwork, and our electronics, but I have a feeling they’re going to end up packing more than that. (It turns out that packing services don’t add as much to the cost of a move as I thought they did, which isn’t to say that they don’t add quite a bit–but it’s so worth it, as I discovered the one time I had an employer who paid full relocation expenses.)

And I am a big giant ball of stress. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think; between the heat (we have central air conditioning, of course, an essential in this climate, but it can only do so much) and all the worries and concerns racing through my mind, I just couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour or so at a time. I think that must be the biggest reason that I keep having bouts of uncontrollable crying. This house is just so crowded with…stuff, stuff of all kinds, some of it toss-able, much of it not. I’m afraid that we won’t get all of it packed in time, though rationally, I know that worrying about that is silly. If we don’t get it packed and the movers end up being delayed a day, or we end up having to get them to pack more than we plan to, the world will not end. Worst case, Bill can rent a truck and move the rest of it when he’s ready to join me in NJ. Rationally, I know these things; rationally, I know that worrying about things I can’t control is silly and even unhealthy; rationally, I know that there’s nothing I can do but to keep packing and see how it goes. But “rationally” and I aren’t getting along very well at the moment.

My cell phone has this cute little feature that lets me add a message that displays when I turn the phone on. During the two weeks when I was between jobs and should have been spending every waking moment putting stuff in boxes, the message read, “Shouldn’t you be packing?” For the past month, though, the message has been “Don’t forget to breathe.” It’s good advice; I think I need to tattoo that message to my eyeballs for the next few days.

But it’s not the advice I’m referring to in the subject line. That advice is far better, and it is my heartfelt gift to anyone reading this. The advice is: Never move house. Ever. Find a city and a house you like or even love, and stay there. Or if you really want to move, because you hate your house or your kids are grown or the neighborhood is going downhill or whatever, for heaven’s sake don’t move any farther than a few miles. And for the love of God, don’t do it in July.

This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give anyone.

For months and more, I’ve been wavering about whether or not to just delete the whole blog, to leave it here for posterity (an addition to the world’s growing collection of ghost blogs), or to revive it. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but since I am wandering again and living up to the name of the blog—and since I have a rare ambient wireless connection here at my dad’s apartment (he still has dial-up, so I have to count on grabbing an open signal from the air)—it seems like a good time to post.

Yep, I’ve uprooted myself and my life yet again. In a little more than two weeks, I’ll be a resident of West Orange, NJ, a place I had never even visited before renting a house there. (I was in East Orange back when Upsala College still existed, many years ago, at a record fair or something at WFMU radio, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the Oranges.) The spouse is still back in Missouri, trying to juggle his long workdays with getting work done on the house so that we can sell it. The cats are there too, though mercifully, they’ll join me when I move in to the house; Bill (and the dog) will follow when they can.

And I have to confess that this peripatetic stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be, or seemed to be once. There are so many weird and scary variables that weren’t there the last few times I uprooted: having to sell a house in a tough market (and it wouldn’t be an instant seller even in a good market), having to find a place where we can have cars and pets and space, having to worry about Bill finding a job when he gets here. And not having the cats with me has been truly traumatic; I’ve given serious thought to packing the whole thing in and going back home, resuming my old job and my old life, and I think most of those thoughts have been triggered by my missing the cats. Not all of them, but most. Is it pathetic that I can’t bear to be away from the kitties for more than a few days? I don’t know, but when you consider that their lifespan is only around fifteen years (if they’re lucky, and it makes me nervous even talking about it), three weeks is a long fucking time.

Last time I moved east, with my first husband, we sold our house at a garage sale (really—our next-door neighbors made us an offer while we were chatting during the sale), we had the promise of an apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope, owned by family friends of my ex, and I never had to leave the cats behind. And my ex’s salary in Minneapolis was so negligible that it didn’t matter that he took a job here that paid even less than the one he’d had in Mpls.; we were still able to get by. At my new job, I’m making far more money than I did the last time I moved here, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem like enough.

And then there’s the New Jersey thing. My job is in Newark, and for a variety of reasons, it seems to make the most sense to find a place in suburban Jersey rather than staying in NYC and commuting by train. The office is in a part of Newark that could be called “emerging,” I guess, and it’s not really that bad…but it’s iffy enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk to the train station if I were working late; I’d rather be able to just go to the parking lot and get in my car. (Many of my co-workers commute from Manhattan and Brooklyn, though, so my thinking may be flawed there.) Living in Jersey will also allow us more space and a less frenetic pace, and, if I’m being honest, the easy access to familiar stores like Target that we love to patronize is enticing too. (And there’s a Trader Joe’s within easy driving distance, which I’m excited about. Trader Joe’s has snubbed our part of Missouri, apparently forever.)

So we’ll be Jerseyites, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not the stigma of living in “Joisey,” exactly; just because I grew up making fun of the state doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that it has many lovely towns and places. It’s more that I’m worried that a suburban Jersey life won’t feel like I’m back in New York, back home again; it seems more likely to feel pretty much like our life in Missouri, only a lot more expensive. Is that the life I want? I’m just not sure. Of course, there’s no way I can be sure until I actually start living there, and we’re renting, so we won’t be tied to West Orange for more than a year if we don’t want to be. But it’s yet another thing that’s been keeping me up at night.

Geez, this is the whiniest post ever, isn’t it? On the plus side, I’ve already gotten to see one of my two wonderful nephews,* and the opportunity to see them a lot more often is very welcome. And being able to hop on a train or bus (not as easy from West Orange as from some of the neighboring, pricier towns, but still very doable) to check in on my dad and my brother will be great—I’m really looking forward to not having to get on a plane to see my family. I like my new job, and I get the sense that I’ll continue to like it—and if ever I don’t, I’ll have a lot more job possibilities here than I would have in Missouri. So there’s lots to be optimistic about, and I’m trying to focus on that. Not altogether successfully during these first two weeks, but I’ll keep trying.

But I really think I’m too old for this. I’m not making any more cross-country moves for a while, that’s for damn sure. Or at least I hope I won’t have to.

*My nephews, who are now 21 and 17, respectively, are a genuine source of joy in my life. They’ve both turned out to be such amazingly good kids, smart and kind and fun to be with. Not that I would have expected them to turn out any other way, but y’know, they’re kids, and they grew up in a well-heeled New York suburb, and they could just as easily have been brats or snobs or otherwise unpleasant, despite having good parents who raised them well. I know this because a lot of my college friends grew up in the same suburb, and some of them were kind of wrecks. But my nephews, bless them, turned out to be good people, and they make me proud.

Yeah, I haven’t been around. And yeah, it’s because I’ve been depressed. A combination of the previously discussed crisis of confidence at work, unseasonably hot weather, my supply of antidepressants running low, and some other crap all contributed to the onset of what had all the early signs of a severe depression: loss of interest in things that I usually enjoy (all four of them*), complete lack of energy, inability to concentrate, desire to sleep all the time, etc. Fortunately, it seems to be just maybe starting to subside—and I stress “seems” because a) I don’t want to push my luck and b) the symptoms haven’t fully receded yet, the creeping tendrils are still grabbing at my brain. Plus the temperatures, after dipping below average for the last few weeks, have started to climb again. But I’ve been less totally inert lately, at least, and that’s just maybe a promising sign.

I’ve always resisted describing myself as a “victim” of depression, because I’ve been conditioned by various cancer patients I’ve known to avoid that sort of language, but I have fewer qualms about saying that I suffer from depression. Because, well, I do; it is suffering, when I’m in that state, suffering of a kind I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It’s always easy, when I’ve had a long stretch of feeling pretty good, as I have recently, for me to forget that depression is a disease, and one that can’t always be cured. For people with major, chronic depression, like me, these cycles just have to be accepted and gotten through, basically. That’s wearying, and I wish it weren’t the case, but it always has been for me, medication or not, therapy or not, positive or negative situational factors or not. And though I’ve broken the streak a few times in recent years, the fact is that I nearly always get depressed in April; in my world, it really is the cruelest month, which is fitting for an Eliot fan like me. (I have a New Yorker cartoon on my fridge, one that will always be on any fridge where I happen to live, that’s captioned “T.S. Eliot Meets Beavis and Butthead” and features a guy sitting at a table looking depressed and saying/thinking, “April sucks.” I Love That.) All of my worst depressions (and I mean the real ones, not things like grieving) have occurred or started in April, including my very first brush with the disease. Sometimes they linger into May and June; with luck, this won’t turn out to be one of those.

Anyway. One of the things that’s been keeping me relatively chipper lately is the NBA playoffs, which have been way more exciting than I can remember the early rounds being in several seasons. With the sad exception of the Grizzlies getting blown out (sad because it means no more Bobby Jackson to root for this season), the first round was more dramatic than I would have expected it to be, and how cool was it that the Wizards—who were laughingstocks not all that long ago, though it’s easy to forget that now that they’ve got Butler and especially the marvelous Gilbert Arenas—played Cleveland so tough? How beautiful was it to see the Bulls get to blow the Heat out by 19 points in one game and kept them close in most of the others? Not that I hate the Heat, really—like most other people on the planet, I’m sick of Shaq, though mostly I’m indifferent to him, but how could anyone hate a team that includes Dwyane Wade, who you could pretty convincingly argue is the best all-around player in the game today? (I wouldn’t make that argument myself, but it can be plausibly made). It’s just that the Bulls are my favorite team to watch in the Eastern Conference these days, and they’re only going to get better, at least for the immediate future.

(It’s weird to root for the Bulls, in a way, because for years, from my perspective, rooting for the Bulls was like rooting for air or sunlight or something; they were there, they were going to win, and rooting for them didn’t really seem to have much purpose unless you were a Chicagoan. And I got sick of MJ, not quite in the same way that I’m now sick of Shaq: no, I’m not for a second denying his brilliance on the court, and I can’t seriously argue that he wasn’t the best ever, but players who so totally dominate a game just become boring after a while. It’s a fact of life. So I always rooted against the Bulls, unless they were playing a team I hated (usually the Jazz). But that was a whole nother era ago, and today’s Bulls are just too exciting not to love.)

If the first round was more exciting than any in recent memory, the second round is starting to look like it will go down as the best second round in the modern playoff era. Nail-biting finishes! The Cavs making Detroit look not just mortal, but even occasionally feeble! Duncan and Ginobili playing incredibly well given that they’ve been hurt, and the Spurs still in danger of losing in six! (I’d say “at likely risk of losing in 6,” but I don’t want to jinx the Mavs.) And most amazing of all, the unbelievable spectacle of the Clippers—the Los Angeles Clippers—looking like a team that could maybe even win it all, especially if by some miracle Cleveland actually does send the Pistons home.

Though the Clippers better not win it all, because that would mean the Suns losing, and I’m not ready for that. (It would be bad for my mental health, which is, as noted, currently rather frail. I hope Sam Cassell will keep that in mind when he suddenly starts hitting late-fourth-quarter threes tonight.) Since I don’t even want to utter the name of that team from my hometown that I’ve rooted for my whole life, and my other team, the Wolves, were barely more worthy of mention this season (bring me the head of Kevin McHale, please—seriously, how much longer can he ride his status as Beloved Minnesota Icon before Glenn Taylor notices that his GM hasn’t made a good move since KG was drafted), the Suns were my team this year more than any other, even without Amaré Stoudemire, one of my favorite players in the league. I tend to like guard-led play and smaller teams, so the Suns play my preferred style, and it’s also been so cool to see these unexpected stars emerge: Boris Diaw most notably, but also Leandro Barbosa, and Raja Bell (who’s no rookie, but who had dropped off the map for a while there), and geez, even Tim Thomas has been playing like a near-star. Shawn Marion has had a stellar year even by his already stellar standards, and then of course there’s Steve Nash. I’ve recently decided that I have a deep and abiding love for/crush on Steve Nash, embarrassing Jackie Earle Haley hair and all. He’s smart, he’s gentlemanly, he seems eminently normal, he’s Canadian…and he usually has just a hint of a mischievous twinkle in his eyes during interviews, which makes me think that he’s a guy who’s having a pretty great time being him.

Which brings me to two minor and basically irrelevant points that I’m going to mention anyway:

1. I would like to nominate the Suns as having the highest percentage of really handsome players of any NBA team in recent memory, and possibly ever. I mean, have you looked at those guys? Raja Bell could model. Boris Diaw…let’s just say it makes sense that his surname rhymes with “Wow!” And Shawn Marion, needless to say, is a serious looker. Same for Leandro Barbosa. I’ve always thought Stoudemire was a very handsome young man too. I don’t mean to be all People magazine here, but it’s really hard not to notice what an attractive team this is.

2. Is it just me, or is the league more crowded with classy, likeable, poised young players now than it’s ever been? I’m not suggesting that it’s been filled with thugs in the past; I tend to believe that most of the supposed badasses, including Iverson and Ron Artest and Kenyon Martin, etc., are pretty good guys too. (Artest has indisputably done some dumbass shit, on and off the court, but I think he’s both gentler and more complex than people think, and Iverson has certainly shown over the years that just because he doesn’t scrub up pretty, it doesn’t mean that he’s any kind of gangsta; as he’s said recently, he’s a dad guy in his 30s these days, he’s not hanging on the corner. I always hated the bad rap that Iverson got, even before his Georgetown days. But that’s a story for another day.) But the emerging stars now just seem so…so nice, and so adult, and (mostly) so well-spoken and thoughtful. LeBron? Class all the way. Same for DWade. I’ve seen interviews in recent days with Cuttino Mobley and Richard Jefferson and a couple of others and just been struck by how likeable they all are. Which makes it even more of a pleasure to be an NBA fan right now.

*I always chuckle at those PSAs and questionnaires that pop up during National Depression Awareness Week or whatever that list the symptoms of a possible depression, which always include something like “Do you find it hard to take pleasure in activities you used to enjoy?” because as a nearly lifelong depressive, my response is usually “No, because there are no activities that I used to enjoy.” But that’s a slight exaggeration, especially lately, and this time around, when I noticed that I couldn’t even work up the energy to knit or read, I knew I was genuinely depressed.

Another week, another business trip, and flying back yesterday (from a trip that, to be fair, had a pretty ideal ratio of business to pleasure: an hour and a half in a business meeting followed by a whole weekend with my beloved Seattle friends), I noticed how much I was looking forward to being home. Looking forward to it, that is, in spite of my (at best) ambivalent relationship with this town and this house. I wondered if this meant that people can adjust to anything, even ugly ranch houses in too-small red state towns, but I think it’s more that the pleasures of home—husband, cats, familiar comforts, and so on—outweigh geographic and architectural concerns. But it occurs to me that it wasn’t quite possible for me to feel that way a year ago, when I was just emerging from the depths of a severe depression and, equally important, when I was still stuck in a job I detested. Which I guess means that the business trips and the long hours are entirely worth it, if they keep me in the kind of upbeat frame of mind that allows me to appreciate the joys of home far more than I notice the petty irritations of the house and the city.

(And it is pretty churlish of me to complain about a business trip that gave me a free weekend in uncharacteristically sunny and warm Seattle, including one night in a really great hotel and one spent at Laura and Jim’s wonderful house. I love spending time with the Seattle people; it would be very hard not to be in a good mood around them. The other times I’ve been out there have been big group events, with lots of us out-of-towners visiting, and it was cool to see them in a more normal setting this time. They’re like a little extended family, and I feel totally at home with them.)

But I’d still like to go at least a few weeks without another business trip. Even if leaving town makes me appreciate home more, I’d still rather appreciate it from close up instead of far away.

So my brush with the Joys of Business Travel got even better when, at about 8:30 the night before my 6:30 a.m. flight, I got a call from the senior management type whom I was traveling with, telling me that our flight had been canceled and he was trying to get us on another flight that would leave around the same time but would involve connecting in Chicago. It turned out that it was some weird code-share thing that required us to get our tickets from US Air but check in at United. US Air’s Website doesn’t mention the ticketing part, though—they just tell you to check in at United, which is what I did. It’s a long story, but due to the kindness of various airport personnel (a rarity, I know, but Missourians are the friendliest people in the world, I swear. Seriously, even the postal workers. Even the motor vehicles workers. It’s downright weird, in a good way), I didn’t miss the plane, though I came very close. Usually, when I travel on my own, I’m ridiculously punctual, but I couldn’t sleep the night before my trip, and I just wasn’t moving very efficiently on Wednesday morning. I was having horrible visions of missing the plane and losing my job, because I had the presentations that we needed for the meeting, and the guy I was traveling with is a managing partner, and…it just wouldn’t have been good. But all was fine in the end, despite having to walk 90 miles across O’Hare carrying my laptop and all the presentations and my suitcase. Fine for me, at least; the stupid airline managed to lose the managing partner’s bag en route to Philadelphia, and of course we weren’t staying in Philadelphia; in the end, we were only there for about three hours. The partner also told me that he had gotten an automated recording about the flight being canceled, with no other information—not even an 800 number for rebooking. And US Air wonders why it’s in bankruptcy…

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that in spite of the unexpectedness of the trip, and in spite of the way it disrupted my whole schedule (meaning this coming week is going to be busier than it would have been if I hadn’t lost two days last week), it was still a very good trip, partly because both clients were good, smart people who know what they want and know what they’re doing, but mainly because I got to spend time in New York, aka home. I’ve gone on about this many times before, of course, but I’m still always a little bit surprised at the effect that just being in the city—even at Penn Station waiting for a cab on a raw, windy night after a long day of meetings and lugging all my junk with me—has on me, instantaneously. It’s home, and as much as I feel settled here in many ways, and as much as I appreciate the low cost of living and easy pace of life here on the Plains, I miss feeling truly at home on a regular basis. I love New York in the winter, too, especially when it’s only mildly wintery, as it was this last week. Just being out and walking in the middle of everyone and everything…it just feels right, just makes sense somehow.

This time around, I met people from our New York office for the first time, and on hearing that I’m a native New Yorker, all of them said the same thing: “We do have a New York office, you know—why don’t you move out here?” And for the first time, I felt that doing so is really what I’m striving for; it didn’t seem quite as far-fetched or improbable as it has in the past. (I’d be the only one doing what I do in the NYC office, which might be kind of isolating, but then again, they have a real need for someone in my role in that office, especially with big, New York-based clients like the one we were meeting with—a lot of the things we discussed with them could be accomplished much more efficiently if there were a user experience person physically present. This new resolve on my part doesn’t change the basic facts of the situation, like having two big dogs who wouldn’t be happy in an apartment, but for the first time, I started to feel like maybe obstacles like that weren’t as insurmountable as I’ve convinced myself they are. (There’s doggie day care, for example, and barker-breakers to make them better neighbors. And so on.)

Plus the doorman in my family’s apartment building, who’s known me for most of my life (literally—we moved to that apartment in 1971, so he’s known me longer than just about anyone that I’m not related to), started talking to me about how he’s seeing my dad show signs of aging, and it’s not like that’s news to me, but it’s a reminder of one of the best reasons to move back home. I know it’s not going to happen tomorrow, might not even happen this year. But I’m going to get there. I feel more certain of that now.

And this time, once I get back there, I’m not leaving again. It’s one of the great ironies of my life—one that I can find amusing if I look at it objectively, even if it also drives me a little bit crazy—that after all the years I spent in Minneapolis trying to persuade my first husband to move to NYC, I left and went back to the Midwest only a little more than a year after finally making it back. (That he’s still there, and loving the city, just adds to the irony.) But maybe you can go home again after all. We’ll find out, I guess.

I’m going to save most of my navel-gazing reflection on 2005 for the end of the year, because there’s still some 2005 left, but I’m feeling pretty reflective on this Thanksgiving eve. Maybe it’s the little cat’s-eye reflectors that I have attached to my edges. (Ouch, sorry, couldn’t resist that particularly atrocious pun.)

Nah, it’s just that Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, partly because it comes at a time of year that I love, partly because it’s a no-gifts holiday (I love getting gifts, but I don’t like the stress of trying to continually top the previous year’s gifts, plus I always feel a little guilty at all the bounty I receive on birthdays and at Christmas/Chanuka—though I absolutely love getting presents, always have and always will—as St. Teresa of Avila said, “Anyone who gave me so much as a sardine could have the world from me”), and partly because it was traditionally my favorite family gathering. My mom and her sister used to trade off Thanksgiving-hosting duties, but by the time I was entering my teens, things had settled into a pattern of my mom making Thanksgiving and my aunt making Passover. (That’s how we refer to it in my family: “making” the holiday, i.e. having people at your house and doing the cooking.) My mom was a wonderful cook, and I don’t mean that in the sense that everyone’s mom is automatically their favorite cook; my mom just had a flair for making relatively uncomplicated food that tasted great and always turned out right. (She had some not-so-successful experimental phases in the ’60s, it’s true, when my parents did a lot of entertaining, but those were aberrations; her tried-and-true recipes were all splendid.) And my aunt and uncle and their family—two boys and a girl, just like my family, except with the age order reversed (I’m the youngest, my cousin Debbie is the oldest), and all matched neatly to us in age—were the relatives I was closest to growing up, for various reasons. So Thanksgiving at our apartment was festive and loud and full of good conversation, excellent wine (my uncle is a collector), and enormous quantities of superb food.

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, even though in the past five or so vacation-deprived years, going home has meant flying in on Thanksgiving day and flying out on Sunday, which is always exhausting. It will be weird not to be there, and I’m sure I’ll miss it, but then again, since my mom died (in 2002), Thanksgiving has been a little bittersweet anyway, because I’ve felt her absence especially keenly at this time of year. I feel my mom’s absence every single day, of course, and I expect I always will, but all of my Thanksgiving memories are wrapped up with thoughts of her, and although the past few Thanksgivings (one at my aunt and uncle’s house, two at my brother and sister-in-law’s) have been wonderful, happy, warm occasions filled with the same good food and good company as the ones I grew up with, they’ve been just a little less meaningful without my mom. But it will still be weird not to be there.

But maybe it will be the start of a new tradition, one of my own making. This year I’m going home around Christmastime instead, and tomorrow I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner (of a sort—no turkey, since I don’t eat meat and I can’t really cook a whole turkey just for Bill) for the two of us, which I’m looking forward to. Bill and I have different eating habits and schedules, so we don’t often sit down to a home-cooked meal together, and I’m looking forward to that, as well as to the actual cooking. I’m a decent cook myself, having learned well from my mom, and though I know how to make all the standard Thanksgiving side dishes, I’ve never actually done it. I’m expecting it to be fun, especially since we just got a nice new stove that is vastly superior to the one it replaced merely by virtue of the fact that it actually works.

And I’m feeling particularly grateful this year, feeling like I have a tremendous amount to be grateful for. It’s been a fairly eventful year, in mostly good ways, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to leave a horrible, soul-sucking job situation for one that I enjoy and am challenged by and am learning from and just generally getting a kick out of. I feel hugely grateful that I have as many wonderful friends as I do, including some new ones (like my St. Louis pal Chris, one of the finest people I’ve met in ages, and my wonderful co-workers, to mention just a few) and some not-so-new, very much loved ones and some with whom I’ve gotten back in touch. I’m grateful that my little foray into my past (which has mostly receded back into the past again now, and maybe that’s as it should be) has been almost entirely positive—one part maybe wasn’t such a good idea, on balance, but even that was far from a disaster, and the rest was a delight. I’m grateful that I got to see my treasured and stalwart friend Tim last weekend, for the first time in five years. I’m grateful for the Twanggang and for the privilege of getting to work with them on Twangfest. I’m grateful that my immediate family is healthy and thriving and that my two beautiful nephews are turning into such terrific young men. I’m grateful not to be in the grip of the profound depression that was just beginning to take me over at this time last year. I’m grateful that there are so many things, from music to knitting and beyond, that give me pleasure every day.

Hell, I’m just all around grateful to be here on the planet, healthy, in good spirits, married to a great guy, surrounded by my precious cats without whom my life would be so much less, warm and safe and with more than enough to eat and a roof over my head. I hope all who are reading this have much to be grateful for too…oh, yeah, and if you’re reading this, odds are you’re one of the people I’m grateful for too. So thanks. And happy Thanksgiving.

…happen to good bands: Exhibit A, the atrociously named but thoroughly delightful band the everybodyfields (lowercase theirs; also ugh). I was put on to this trio from Johnson City, Tennessee, by an online friend whose taste frequently meshes with mine, and he was absolutely on target this time. I bought their first album, the annoyingly titled “halfway there: electricity and the south” (again, stupid lowercase theirs), a couple of months ago, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of this year’s “Plague of Dreams.”

So what do they sound like? Well, I don’t like to use the largely meaningless term “Appalachian music,” though it could perhaps be more fairly applied to them than to other young bands who have been saddled with the term, since they are actually from the region. But it’s still a pointless and overloaded term, so I’d prefer to call them an alt-country band (to apply another completely useless term) with strong old-time and folk influences. Their songwriting is quiet but powerful, not at all frail or delicate, and their musicianship is solid, especially their excellent dobro player’s work. The frontpeople, Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews (who I think are a couple, but I’m not sure; haven’t really gotten into the cult of personality* with them yet), both sing, and I’ve always been a complete sucker for boy-girl harmonies; if I could be in a band, I’d want to share vocals with a male singer. I wouldn’t say either of them is an extraordinarily gifted singer or anything, but they both have clear, lovely voices (and they sing on key, always a plus in my book), and they complement each other extremely well. They’ve got a little bit of that dreamy atmospheric thing I’ve been going on about recently, but it’s more a stillness, a peaceful quality to their music, rather than anything airy or trippy. They sound like a lazy autumn afternoon in the countryside, I guess.

And it wasn’t until today—maybe the sixth or seventh time I’ve listened to the record—that I noticed how much they remind me of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They’re not derivative of Welch and Rawlings at all; I wouldn’t even necessarily assume they’re influenced by them. But they’re mining similar territory, and they’re quietly, distinctively memorable and affecting in much the same way. I’m finding that a number of my favorite records this year (e.g. British Sea Power, Brakes, Stars) are ones that I enjoy and admire tremendously but don’t feel especially passionate about, but if the everybodyfields’ new one is as good as their first, it could wind up quite high on my list precisely because it inspires real passion in me, just as the first one does. (Which is a little odd, since a lack of passion is the thing that keeps me from truly loving, rather than just admiring, much of Gillian Welch’s work—not “Revival,” which is a record I’ll always be passionate about, but most everything else.)

My friend Steve got me listening to a good band with a good name this past week, too: the Morning After Girls, from Australia. (They have an actual girl in the band, which somehow makes me like their name better.) Further investigation is warranted, but so far they strike me as a great moody melodic punkish dark-rock band. Pretty sure I’m going to have to order their new record from Australia, since there’s no projected release date for it here.

[A meta note: I realize the blog has been a little sparse and dull lately, for which I apologize. Work has been occupying most of my waking hours recently, and it looks like it’s going to be that way for a while. Not that I’m complaining, because I continue to love what I’m doing, but it does make it hard to marshal the thoughts that are buzzing around in my head in a coherent way. So those thoughts are popping up in my dreams instead, mostly. I’ve been thinking a lot about a line from a Lori Carson song that I’ve probably quoted before: “Heat hangs in this room/Like pictures on your wall/Of other lives/Do you mourn them all?” It’s not that I’m mourning past versions of me, not at all, but some of them have been visiting me unexpectedly (though maybe predictably, given my recent forays into playing with my past), and I’m wondering if other people carry their old selves with them much of the time, and if so, how they deal with it. But that’s about as far as I can get on the introspection front tonight, with a 7:00 a.m. appointment with my trainer looming and another hour or so of work to do.]

*The cult of personality is something that’s all but disappeared for me since CDs replaced vinyl. It used to be that if I like a band, I knew the names of all of the band members and had memorized the band’s basic biography; if I really liked a band, I’d go beyond that and start gathering whatever trivia about them that I could find. (And if a band completely took over my life, as has happened only a few times, I became a font of information about them; heck, I can still tell you things about Paul Weller, for example, that there’s just no good reason for me to remember.) Nowadays that just hardly ever happens. The Delgados are pretty indisputably my favorite band of the last ten years (as long as I don’t include artists who are largely band-independent, i.e. Jay Farrar, Scott Miller, and Robbie Fulks), and yet I still have trouble remembering all of the core band members’ surnames, much less any part of the names of the various side personnel. I was a Grand Champeen fan for a good two years before I knew all of their last names for sure, and for the first year or so, I had a terrible time even remembering Channing’s first name, for some reason. I can’t even tell you some of the Delgados’ song titles, or in some cases, which record a particular song is on. And those are major favorite bands of mine; I couldn’t even begin to come up with the names of the members of bands I’m less passionate about. I blame this all on CDs, because I just don’t pore over CD inserts the way I used to over LPs. It’s probably a product of aging, too, and to a lesser extent, of not automatically focusing on a cute boy in a given band, since I so rarely do that anymore. (I’m not saying I never do it, I just don’t do it as often. It used to be pretty much a given. I remember that in the stretch during the late ’80s when I listened to almost nothing but American Music Club (Soul Asylum were practically the only exception), I was curiously proud of the fact that I didn’t have any girly interest in any of the members of AMC…which is why it particularly annoyed me that Eitzel, with whom I was reasonably well acquainted through a mutual friend, thought I had a crush on him. Yeesh. As if. But I digress.) I don’t think it’s a bad thing that in most cases, the music interests me more than the personalities; it’s just odd, and I’m still not fully used to it even after more than a decade of CD-buying rather than LP-buying.

(Apparently, I should post pictures of my cats more often—it makes people comment. I like it when people comment. That’s a hint.)

Several days ago, I was going to parse that T.S. Eliot quote, but I’m not sure it would be appropriate to discuss the exact thought process that caused the quote to invade my head, so I’ll just talk about the poem a little as a springboard for a thorough pimping of the magnificent Lori Carson. The poem is called “Portrait of a Lady,” after the Henry James novel (though the poem bears no resemblance to the book). I can’t say it’s my favorite Eliot poem—that would be “Prufrock,” of course—but it’s a poem that meant a great deal to me and made me a little uncomfortable for years and years. It’s about a young man having a relationship of sorts with an older woman, though it’s never made clear how much older she is (I’ve always believed that she isn’t much older than the narrator, and the references to her being “about to reach her journey’s end” are typical of her exaggerated, overdramatic style). The woman is vaguely ridiculous; this comes across when you read the poem in the way she repeats herself and inserts parenthetical phrases and makes dramatic pronouncements, but it was made even more clear to me when I heard a recording of Eliot reading the poem. He doesn’t put on a female voice or anything, but he draws out the syllables of her dialogue, and there’s a distinct note of contempt in his voice. But the narrator is also drawn to her, and the most stunning moment of the poem comes when she kind of puts him in his place:

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

(That last line may be my favorite in the whole history of poetry, I’m not sure.)

It was written around the same time as “Prufrock,” but where that poem showed how prodigiously gifted Eliot was at 29, “Portrait of a Lady” shows that he was also still a young man, and a little bit of a callow youth. I have sometimes worried about bearing a resemblance to the lady in the poem—a little excessive, a little ridiculous—but I also love the poem. I can recite it from memory, having learned it (along with another Eliot poem—not “Prufrock,” alas, though I’ve tried, but one of the “Ash Wednesday” poems) back when I was a college girl who not only read but, worse, wrote poetry. (It was a bit of a cliché, Barnard girls writing poetry, but I couldn’t help it.) Nowadays, I don’t read much poetry, except when something in The New Yorker catches my eye or I pick up my giant volume of the great Paul Muldoon’s complete poems, but I still make sure I haven’t forgotten “Portrait of a Lady” by reciting it in the car from time to time.

I’d never read any criticism of it till a few days ago, so the preceding paragraph is my own interpretation, but I hunted around a little bit for some academic commentary on it the other day, and the consensus seems to be that the poem is about the impossibility of communication between men and women. (I don’t disagree with that analysis; that’s what “Prufrock” is largely about too, after all.) And that’s pretty much Lori Carson’s great theme too. (How’s that for a smooth segue? Heh.) Her songs are preoccupied—you could even say “obsessed”—with the pursuit of love and the failure of love and the transformative power of love, which is part (okay, most) of what I find so compelling about her songwriting. It’s her great theme. I’m sure she’s not as regularly heartbroken as her darkest songs suggest, though judging by the (highly readable and engaging) journal she keeps on her site, she does go through relationships pretty frequently. But whatever her romantic life is like in the real world, the version of it that is revealed in her songs is exceptionally powerful and moving.

She’s also a perfectly wonderful singer, a breathy but very clear and pure and strong soprano (with the minor caveat that she will occasionally slip into a sort of baby-doll voice, not quite Victoria Williams-like, but still potentially off-putting if you’re allergic to that kind of voice. But she doesn’t do it much, and she’s done it less and less as her career has progressed).

Lori holds a place in my heart because her second album, “Where It Goes,” was my soundtrack/security blanket during the year that my first marriage was falling apart. When I think of that year, the first image that comes to mind is me on the train ride from Park Slope into the city, listening to the first four songs on “Where It Goes” over and over and over again. (It was a while before I learned the rest of the record as thoroughly as those four songs.) It’s really an extraordinary run of songs (and very well sequenced, too). The first song, “Down Here,” is addressed to a lover who has died, and it’s wrenchingly beautiful:

“Down here itâ??s as you left it
Iâ??m waiting for the grey to clear
Donâ??t know what Iâ??m running on
But some time ago all hope was gone”

That’s followed by the upbeat-sounding (but heartbreaking) “Waking to the Dream of You,” which is about surviving the aftermath of a breakup and the advice that you get from friends who want to help you get through it. After that is a very passionate and romantic song about new love after old, “You Won’t Fall,” in which she promises,

“You can rest easy
Your beauty is clear to me
You wonâ??t fall
You wonâ??t fall”

I could quote the full lyrics from all four songs, because they’re marvelous, but I won’t; I’ll just quote the fourth song, which so perfectly captured how I felt that year—bruised and battered (emotionally, that is) from one major relationship ending and simultaneously hopeful and terrified and thrilled at the new relationship that was starting up—that I could hardly bear to listen to it, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s called “Petal,” and it’s one of my all-time favorite songs ever ever ever.

“Iâ??ve been looking for it all my life
But never found it
I got used to being alone
I know how and I do it so well
Even if we learn to speak the same language
How long can it last
You know as well as I do
How it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

Iâ??ve been waiting for it my whole life
And so many times I thought
Hey this is it
Iâ??m ready letâ??s go baby
But it all led nowhere
Turned out wrong
And I still believe in it
But not much
I know Iâ??m strong enough to fall again
But isnâ??t it just foolishness
Knowing how it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

So, should we give it
Just another chance
Although I know the odds are against us
We know how to fuck it up
We do it so well
And even if we love each other so much
And plan our lives like we will stay together
Make a home and a family
Can we change the way it goes
How it goes?

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those…”

And then there’s “Little Suicides,” a song that Lori co-wrote with Anton Fier. They recorded it during her tenure with the Golden Palominos, and it’s pretty much a perfect song, one that kills me every time I hear it, no matter how many times I hear it, with its repeated theme of “Can’t I (/we) just be happy for a while?/It happens all the time,” and my favorite line, “If love heals anything at all/We should be flying.” Not to mention the chorus:

“All these little suicides
They hardly make a mark
I can take these funhouse rides
I’m a natural in the dark
I’m a natural in the dark
In the dark…”

Lori’s best records, I think, are “Where It Goes” and “Everything I Touch Runs Wild,” but her more recent work is worth paying attention to also. The most recent record, “The Finest Thing,” is all textures and soundscapes and might be best suited for people who are already converts, but it’s still worth picking up. And “Stars,” which came out in 1999, is seriously underrated. Still, I’d start with “Where It Goes” and/or “EITRW,” and go from there, if I were you. So go buy them, right now. You can find them used all over the place, unfortunately.

(It’s a little odd to be writing about Lori Carson when my head is still completely possessed by Patty Griffin’s most recent album, and especially by the song “Useless Desires,” which I listened to no fewer than four times today. They’ve actually got a few things in common musically, Griffin and Carson. But I came late to the party with Patty Griffin, and I can’t say anything very well-informed about her; I can only talk about how powerfully her songs have affected me lately. I’ve been a Lori Carson fan for a lot longer, so there’s more to say.)

Oh, and while I’m going on and on and on, I have an actual movie recommendation: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” a new noirish movie that is both homage to and parody of the noir genre but is also an insanely clever and entertaining film on its own. It helps that the cast is so great: Robert Downey, Jr., whom I love and always root for (geez, if anyone ever needed evidence that addiction is a real, and incredibly challenging, disease…), is at the top of his game, and Val Kilmer is equally good, just note-perfect. I’d never heard of the female lead, Michelle Monaghan, before, but she’s one to watch—she handles a not particularly easy role with aplomb. The movie stops just short of being too clever for its own good, but it is very, very clever, and hysterically funny in places. I expect we’ll see it again when it comes out on DVD. Go see it after you buy those Lori Carson records.

I have a lot swirling around in my head at the moment, and I’m also posting this to remind myself that I want to write a bit later about what I could do if I could do something that my own skills and natural abilities would make it impossible for me in the real world. But speaking of T.S. Eliot, as I just was in a reply to a comment on my last post, this is running through my head right now, and later on when I’m not on a borrowed dial-up connection, I will elaborate a bit on why. Eliot is my favorite poet, and “Prufrock” is my favorite poem, pretty much, but there’s a less well known early Eliot poem that more or less defined me for many years, for reasons I will try to explain in a later post. Anyway, this snippet of a stanza:

“Not knowing what to feel
or if I understand,
or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon”

is possessing me right now, and maybe writing it down will exorcise it temporarily. A partial explanation that will also serve as a pimping-of-the-week for the very wonderful singer-songwriter Lori Carson will follow later this week, I hope.

(Note: “faith” in the subject line is the lowercase-f kind. There will be no mention of Faith Hill—arguably the most egregious example of All That Is Wrong with Country Music (or at least the most famous one), in this post, or indeed, any other that I will ever write. I promise.)

Someone on one of my e-mail lists posted a link to a quiz recently that focused on religion and spirituality. I’m an Internet quiz buff, I freely admit; I know that most of them are poorly constructed and fuzzily conceived, but they’re fun, and harmless fun at that. So I always take them whenever someone posts a link to them. On this one, my results classified me as “spiritual”—80 percent spiritual, to be exact, but also 60 percent “reason-oriented,” and—perhaps because the quiz seemed (based on the way the questions were phrased) to have a slight bias toward fundamentalist Christianity—they had reason at the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Which I guess makes sense in a way, but then again, I consider myself both a believer in logic and reason and a person of faith, so the results bugged me a little, even though I know it was just a dumb badly constructed and probably biased Internet quiz.

Faith is something I don’t talk about a lot, and it troubles me a little that I don’t even think about it as much as I used to, but it’s definitely something I possess. I believe in God, unlike many (most?) of my friends. I am purely a secular humanist type in orientation; I believe in science, I believe in evolution, I do not believe that God created man in His image. (Furthermore, and especially because I live next door to Kansas, I am a devout Pastafarian.) And I believe, ever more passionately, in the necessity of the separation of church and state. But I believe in God. There have been times in my life when I’ve wished I didn’t, because the belief doesn’t really make sense when paired with the rest of my worldview. But I think that’s what faith is, what the Kierkegaardian (I was a big Kierkegaard fan back when I still read things like philosophy) leap of faith is all about: I believe because I am incapable of not believing. For me, believing is very much like knowing; it’s something that I feel—not in the frequently misused sense of that word, when people say “I feel” when what they really mean is “I think,” but in a literal, physical way. I’ve even tried not to believe, to abandon anything like faith, but I can’t. It’s not something I can choose to do.

Nonetheless, I’m okay with the fuzzy term “spiritual,” because in the sense in which the quiz used it, it implies that belief is important to me and is an essential part of who I am, but organized religion is not. And that’s completely accurate. I sometimes wish I were part of some sort of religious community, but I don’t know which one I’d join, exactly; if I had kids, I’d raise them in my family’s religion, which is Judaism, but it’s just me (since my husband, raised Methodist, doesn’t believe in God), and I find myself drawn to aspects of several religions: Catholicism, which I investigated pretty extensively when I was in college, and some of the more liberal/socially conscious Protestant denominations (Quakers, Episcopalians, Congregationalists) appeal to me, as do the basic tenets of Judaism. But I figure I’m probably never going to be a religious person exactly, except in my own very personal way. I used to think of myself as a seeker (in the Pete Townshend sense), when I was younger and did a lot of religion-shopping, but now I’d just call myself a believer. I wish I paid more attention to that aspect of my life, as I used to; I used to pray nightly, and now I mostly do it on planes. (That’s an oversimplification, though semi-serious.) It’s been on my mind lately, though, and maybe I will start focusing on it more again, both because just exploring it, and attempting to reconcile it with my decidedly godless-commie-secular-humanist views, interests me, and because it brings comfort and hope to my life, which I occasionally can’t generate on my own.

Sam Phillips—the female singer, not the Elvis guy—is also a believer, and someone who examines her own spirituality and faith regularly, which is one of several reasons that I adore her and wish more people loved her music the way I do. She was raised in a moderately observant Episcopalian family, but somewhere in her teens, I guess, she became more serious about religion; I don’t know if she would have described herself as born again, but she was definitely a Christian. She recorded a few contemporary Christian records under her given name, Leslie Phillips (Sam is a childhood nickname, I guess), at least one of which, “The Turning,” is very good and still widely available. Somewhere along the line, she broke with organized fundamentalist Christianity, but she is still a believer, a seeker, someone who seeks to find truth and meaning through God, I guess. (I’m saying “I guess” a lot because I’m obviously not fully comfortable writing about something as intimate and personal as religious belief on behalf of someone I don’t know, based only on what I’ve read in interviews and, especially, what I’ve gleaned from her songs.) Listening to Sam often helps crystallize my own thoughts about faith and belief, because she writes so eloquently about it. Her most recent record, written in the wake of her divorce from her husband of quite a few years, the fine musician, songwriter, and producer T-Bone Burnett (who has also been part of, and then separated himself from, fundamentalist Christianity), begins with the line, “I was broken when you got me,” which I suspect she is singing to both her ex-husband and to God. That line has been resonating with me (to use a phrase I detest but seem unable to avoid) recently; it makes sense to me on some gut level that I can’t quite explain.

Musically, Sam is a true original. The two great records that she released while she was married to T-Bone (there are several, but there are two in particular, “Cruel Inventions” and “Martinis and Bikinis,” that are nearly perfect) were produced by him, and they’re full of elaborate, Beatles-y arrangements, so they’re a delight to listen to on a purely musical level even if you pay no attention to the lyrics. Her two equally great recent records, “Fan Dance” and “A Boot and a Shoe,” which were not produced by T-Bone, are almost the polar opposite, striking in their spareness and understatement.

And then there’s Sam’s voice, which is also totally unlike anyone else’s sound. She herself has compared it to the braying of a mule, which is unnecessarily harsh, but it’s true that it’s not a conventional voice by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a wonderful, listenable, affecting voice; it’s just kind of odd, but in a powerful way. It’s instantly recognizable, and when a Sam song comes up on the iPod, I get chills right away, because I know it will make me happy or just make me feel.

I could quote Sam’s lyrics for days on end, but there are a few songs in particular that get at her concept of faith in a particularly concise and thought-provoking way that I’ll quote briefly here, because I’m in the mood to. The song that made me a Sam fan—I read a review that described it in detail and quoted from it, and I was so intrigued by it that I went out and bought the record (on cassette; this was back when my first husband and I could only afford a few CDs a year, and if there was a record that we weren’t both going to listen to, I’d buy it on prerecorded cassette to save money and listen to it in the car) without ever having heard a note—is “Lying,” which is on “Cruel Inventions.” She wrote it partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got,” and the last verse, which addresses that song directly, goes:

If I said I don’t want what I don’t have
And all the answers are in love
If I said I believe in myself
And that’s enough
I’d be lying…

Then there are two from “Martinis and Bikinis” that have a way of coming up on the iPod whenever it’s the exact moment when I need to hear them. One is maybe her best song, an irresistibly catchy pop song called “I Need Love,” and the first verse is pretty stunning:

I left my conscience like a crying child
Locked the door behind me, put the pain on file
Broken like a window, I see my blindness now
(and then the chorus:)
I need love, not some sentimental prison
I need God, not the political church
I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love

I find myself singing the second verse a lot when I’m commuting in wretched I-70 traffic on my way to and from work:

Driving into town, tired and depressed
Like a flare, a streetlamp sent an SOS
Peace comes to my rescue
And I don’t know what it means
(followed by the chorus again)

Then there’s the song “Strawberry Road,” which people tend to think is a reference to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but which actually came from some Eastern religious reference that Sam read. She envisions it as a sort of physical locus of faith, I guess (there’s that “I guess” again):

The strawberry road where the dream fades
Is down between our longing and desire
The strawberry road where our hearts break
Into love

It also contains one of the most beautiful lines in any song I can think of, and that’s the one that tends to pop into my head most often. I’m not quite sure what it has to do with faith, specifically, but it’s tied into it somehow—I feel that, too. It also sums up the way I’ve lived my life at certain times, so it has a special poignancy for me:

You censor longing
And organize beauty
Because you’re afraid you want it more than
Oxygen or light
You can’t get there
With your morals
Or without love…

I have a feeling this post isn’t making much sense, but it’s been fulminating in my head for a couple of weeks now, and this might be as close as I can get to articulating it. And now I need to go listen to some Sam.

(She’s not a huge star by any means, but she tends to inspire tremendous devotion in those of us who do love her. In that spirit, I think, a list friend whom I’ve never actually met recently sent me a live recording of Sam that someone had sent him. He’s never actually seen her live, and it’s one of the great musical gaps in my world that I never have either. I think that if I did, I’d be almost too overcome to bear it, and I’d probably spend the whole show barely able to breathe; that’s what happened to me the first time I saw Iris DeMent, who—as I said a few posts back—has a post of her own brewing in my head.)

I’ve been kind of boring lately here, I think, so I’ll try to post something less esoteric and more entertaining next time. I think I’m going to try to finish up my Replacements tales pretty soon, because I need to stop having those be my main distinguishing feature; they’re old stories that I’m tired of hearing myself tell, so I’ll finish them up here and then retire them.