Flying Triangle: Readying for New York

I've been hiding in my introvert's cave (aka my home) today, girding my mental loins for the extrovert onslaught that is the fair isle of Manhattan. I've been comforting myself with thoughts of dosa, cold sesame noodles, plans for smuggling back two balls of fresh made mozzarella (would TSA consider it a liquid?) from Russo's involving a concentric system of Ziploc bags, and family time with mother, aunt, and cousins, not necessarily in that order. I'm just about ready to start packing my suitcase, a process that involves the entire bedroom since I have to see every outfit and possible ways to recombine all at once. This process has been narrowed by the fact that I'm just a little too big for my suits now (in case you've been wondering where your 15 pounds have gotten to, Nancy). But hey, it works for me. And I leave M a little corner of the bed so he can continue to peruse the internets.

I'm very glad to be going--to New York, and just getting away from the rut that is my dusky little office. It's been yet another long week of long days filling my computer keyboard with cracker crumbs rather than taking lunch and I need to shake that slump off before the time changes and I start to wonder if I'm becoming some sort of vampire, venturing out only when the sun shines elsewhere. Wait, I'm a vegetarian. Wait, I'm a recluse so what difference does it make. Wait, maybe I'm only feeling that way because I'm slowly making my way through House of the Seven Gables*.

I do have plans to see my friends from Martha Stewart, hang out at Webster Hall one night, a club that looms large in my frozen-in-time memory of New York, purchase quantities of chocolate and two-for-a-sawbuck "pashminas," and ingest several pleasant non-work dinners. Ten years to the month since I've lived there. I won't be able to spend many extracurricular hours wandering the city or take in much culture or entertainment, but the idea of the pilgrimage is satisfying me somehow.

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*Favorite lines from Hawthorne so far (was he drinking the KoolAid on this style of prose, or did lesser practitioners come along and give his amazing gift a bad name?), one about the sun, one about the moon:

"The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there--with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage--the dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden--such as the dawn, is, immortally--gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes."

"The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and unobtrusively melting its disk into the azure--like an ambitious demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue of popular sentiment--now began to shine out, broad and oval, in its middle pathway."

Who is the demagogue Nathaniel is referring to, I wonder?

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During the movie last night, a strong smell of polecat drifted into the TV room--Rex had surprised a skunk drinking from his bowl on the deck, a water source we think has sustained a number of fowl and fauna this very dry season. We think Dogboy took a shot from the creature full in the face at close range--he was drenched in skunk scent and had obviously been rubbing his face in a corner of the vegetal skeleton of a backyard we lay claim to. We washed him with some shampoo and tomato juice (I know, I've heard the latter doesn’t work, but we've got to do something). But the smell has been haunting me all day.

OK, time to buff my nails, stir the roasting potatoes, and carefully place my crap in the suitcase. I'll try to post from NY as soon as I can.