I gave up on the stupid brick lightly covered with foam that passes for a dorm room bed, and pulled out the air mattress last night to sleep on the floor. I was somewhat more comfortable but I still didn’t sleep well. But it’s Friday, and I’m heading home to at least two nights on my soft squooshy queen-size bed, so I ignore that.

I go to the caf for breakfast. I’m eating my eggs, and realize I really don’t like the oil they use for the grill. Then I realize I don’t have my watch or my cellphone, which means a day without knowing what time it is. Then walking to my class, the elastic on my underwear gives up completely. Then I get to class (French) and realize I probably shouldn’t be out in public.

I got back to my dorm room just in time.

So I lay down and rest for an hour, mulling over the fact that my third class, that I really want to go to, is across the hall from the office of the teacher of my second class, and that if I’m going to show up for the third one I have to go to the second, so I’d better go to my second class –

In which he discusses totem figures of the native peoples of the Northwest Coast, and shamanic amphibious rattles, and I realize that yes, what I’m looking for in all this art stuff is representations of the spiritual world –

And then I go to the third class, which is art meditation/ ecopsychology, and the teacher starts the class with a guided meditation, and then talks about the consciousness of the world and this time of change, and being aware of our physical world, and then sends us out to pick up little things outside for a sensory experiment –

And we get outside and it’s snowing, and you can hear in everybody’s voice how long we’ve all been waiting for this most normal of things.

Arrgghh! School! I’m taking French 101, and I know I’m a bad person, but I’ve been conditioned by I don’t know how many cultural references to think that the very sound of the French language is a reference to snotty jerk posers – and here I am trying to learn it. And something about the teacher makes me think of “Better Off Dead,” and “frrraunch frrries.” I would really like less cheerleading and more grammar, too, please. I just want to be able to stumble through the odd lines of French that show up in Dorothy Sayers’ books. It is a discipline. I can do it. We discussed “tu” and “vous” this morning, and I was sitting back there thinking “Y’all” and “All y’all,” but I’m unsure of this teacher, and of my ability to restrain myself from derailing the class, so I said nothing. Geez, I’ve changed.

But! I’m also taking Non-Western Art! And that is a big score. Interesting talk about materials used in creating things. Completely different way to think. I feel good.

Of course, I also bumped the 5HTP up to 300 this morning. Seems to be working. Maybe I’ll sleep tonight! Yay!

Oh, yeah. Painting. I spent close to $90 at Michael’s the other day, and I’m realizing I need a completely different blue, and some sort of magenta, and orange would be nice, and those brushes I got are too big, and what about a palette knife? (Thank you on-line coupons! I saved $23 on what I bought. Keep that in mind.)

And I sit next to a friend in philosophy! Somebody who also talks in class! It’s a good thing.

And I decided that I need to eat breakfast every day, and not just an egg-muffin thing, so I put money away to eat in the caf. Makes a huge difference in my day.

So I guess it’s good. Two more classes that haven’t met yet, but I think I’ll be okay. Whew.

Today’s picture, taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alberto Giacometti.

We took niceties over to my dorm room yesterday. I didn’t do it at the beginning of the year because I am unsure of my car, and I thought I was being silly, and that a few curtains were good enough. Now I have an oriental rug (from the alley) and a rocker (from a yard sale – $5 – I felt like a thief) and a coffee table (from my parents’ house). It’s all warm and cozy now.

I took my traveling stand-up comic show to the walk-in clinic on Tuesday for a probable sinus infection. The nurse was asking me silly questions, like “Shortness of breath?” Hello, COPD. “Nasal Discharge?” Hello, Chronic rhinitis. But that’s where it started. She was complaining about the computer not letting her spell rhinitis with two “n’s.” I of course said, “Damn you, Spell Checker!” followed by, “It won’t let me use “dickhead” either.”*

Then, I saw the nurse practitioner, or whatever he was. The nurse told me he talks a lot. She didn’t mention that he talks a lot, and in circles, and then expects you to have followed what he was saying and give him some kind of conclusion. This was complicated by the fact that I’d gotten up feeling incoherent and dizzy, which is why I decided I probably had a sinus infection.

So, he looks in my right ear and says something like, “You must be really sturdy to have an ear like that.” I think he used the word sturdy. It might have been tough. But my head remembered grumpy, or maybe curmudgeonly, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t say that. I’m not really sure why my ear made him think I was “sturdy.” And then he goes off on how everything is puffy (he might have used the word “turgid.” I think I have just inserted words that had “U” in them. Maybe that’s what he saw in my ear – the letter “U”). Anyway. Gave me antibiotics and a prescription for Claritin (for two months, or the rest of my life, depending). Yesterday on the way up the hill to the Mall in Duluth, my ear popped, and I can now hear words that don’t have “U in them.

So I’m happy. I didn’t have to file assault charges, and I got what I needed. (Let’s hope this is a trend that continues.) School starts on Monday. I have money on my ID so I can get breakfast. I’m working on organizing my daily life. I can do this, and do it well.

* (I shouldn’t be like that to strangers. They probably expect me to remember their faces and talk to them the next time I see them. I can’t recognize faces well or much. Changed your hair? Don’t know you. Not in the doctor’s office in a uniform? Never saw you before. But the Perkins hostess who wore a nice sweater two years ago that one time we went to Perkins in Superior? Recognized her on sight – in Perkins. Maybe you have to wear a nice sweater.)

It’s at 7:30 tomorrow morning over in Superior. I have to go over to Superior tomorrow anyway, just not at 7:30 in the morning. I might have to change my plans. Just for you, dickhead.

(Yes. I swear. I worked in factories. I try to not, especially for you people. Sometimes it seems appropriate.) (And it bothers me that dickhead isn’t in the computer’s dictionary. Do I continue using it, just to be a rebel? “Take that, omnipresent spell check!” Or do I add it in, making a statement about the unfortunately still-high levels of dickheads in the world?)

Anyway. I just finished a comic called Digger. It’s really good, and sweet, and sad, and I’m at loose ends now that it’s over. Wombats. Dead gods. Hyenas. Excellent story, excellent art. I might buy the print edition.

I got no pictures. I got pretty much nothing. I put something in an art show over in Superior, and the opening is tomorrow. We were supposed to get this shitload of snow, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I can’t really blame the weather people, because the weather has gone crazy and here we have the crazy-multiplier of an enormous heat sink – the Lake. There is the view out my living room window of the next-door neighbors’ house with snow blowing off the roof and smoke from the chimney, and blowing pines reflected in a window that is curtained with palm trees and hibiscus flowers. But aside from that, nothing.

But when I’m not working, I’m hiding in my basement, doing stuff.

I was in my crabby place. I found the one-eyed bug there. Everything else?

We had lunch at a restaurant, with other people in it. We went to a bookstore. We went to a yarn shop. I was up on my feet walking around, and when that got to be too much, there was always a chair. It was sunny and warm, and the Lake was still wide open up on the peninsula. I didn’t do anything productive all day, except for stimulating the economy.

Honey latte and blueberry scone. True North, by Jim Harrison. Four skeins of Cascade. (I’m not even going to try to correct. The blue and purple are darker. The yellow is cooler and the pink is warmer. And yes, I took maybe twenty photos.)
Don’t get this yarn store wrong based on my selections. They had a huge selection of wonderful stuff, books and needles and yarns and yarns and yarns. I just like crayon-colored worsted-weight stuff.

Today I’ll hit it again. I would even call the dentist’s office, but they’re closed on Friday.

I found these at the co-op. Little bitty Pink Lady apples, organic and everything. Pretty and crisp and sweet, and small enough you don’t have to wonder if you can eat the whole thing. And look at those growth rings! Pretty, and interesting, and incredibly good. I love my co-op. And they have three or four people whose names are variants of mine; Kjerstin, Kristin, I think a Kirstin. It’s spooky to go in there and have somebody call out, “Nearly My Name, can you help this person find whatever?” Makes it feel like Cheers, where everybody has your name.

New Year’s Resolutions? I haz them.

1. Do what I’m supposed to do.
2. Be who I’m supposed to be.

At least I think I know what those are, finally.

I was on my way out the door to go to lunch when I saw this harp in the snow.

I have to schedule a goodly chunk of time in the next three weeks to stay the heck home, because I still feel scattered and fretful, and I’m unconsciously keeping track so that I can throw everything back into the bags and schlep it back to school. I’m back in with the chiropractor, who apparently thinks I don’t come home and lie down after my adjustments, so schedules 15 minutes of “You comfy? I’ll be right back” into my visits.

See? Look at that. Two uses of the word “schedule” in one paragraph. Not vacation.

But I got out of the chiro office yesterday to a text message from my friend. (I have a friend! Here! In this town where I live!) We’ve been texting, and not so much on the phone, and we haven’t seen each other since October, so this was cool, let’s go for food yay! We met at the restaurant at noon and had lunch and talked for a while, maybe an hour, and then she glanced up and saw the clock, which now said ten minutes to 3. Oops.

Anyway. She talked me into helping set up a new craft room/ quiet space at the shelter. Scheduled for 5pm on Wednesday.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was out for most of it, for the first time in a while. The wind was crazy off the Lake, has been since yesterday afternoon. We went out to buy dinner last night, and some confused soul made the world wonderful with his brights shining into a blast of snow blown off the Lake from behind the Honda dealership.

I forget winter, and get dreading the slush and the hardness of it. Then it comes, this year right on New Year’s Eve, and I bring out my red parka and my red boots and my red and black mittens and all the thick woolen scarves and hats, and the weight and the cushion of it all make me feel safe, some sort of sensory dysfunction I suppose, that gentle pressure – maybe like Temple Grandin’s hug machine. That burny-hot feeling your hands get when they warm up from the sting and scrape of snow. The sound of shovels on sidewalks, and the light coming up from under your window.

The squeak of boots on snow.

Dreadful caution and cold and the world sliding out from under your feet, and darkness. Maybe it’s this, the paying attention, that brings with it the feeling of being home, and safe. Maybe it’s the pause, catching your breathe after the holidays. I don’t know. Daughter says it’s because I’m Norwegian. I don’t care. I’m home. January is home.

(Oh. Group of Seven here.)

Sterling and copper. The center ring is made from the same wire as the outer rings, drawn as thin as I could make it and then three strands were twisted together. The center ring spins. And rattles.

And it feels different. When I first finished it, I thought I would only wear it for special occasions, because it feels fragile, like holding a bird, and tensioned, like a bow must feel. Then when I put it on a couple of days ago, just to look at it, my finger remembered how much it needs a ring, and I remembered that I’d made this ring for that finger. So. Done.

And to prove that I’m alive;

I put the ring in the snow, and the snow immediately melted. Metal is cool. Or warm, I guess.