What my apartment has in common with the International Space Station

Yes, they are both suffering from a broken toilet. Mine isn't quite as catastrophic (by the way, who builds a space station with just one bathroom?), but it does involve having to turn off the water supply so the tank doesn't just keep running and running.

And with that, I announce my return from Wisconsin and mark the beginning of the summer. Which will no doubt be a classy one, if this first post is any indication.



(The image is from Sue Rowe's website. My parents have both her books in the bathroom at the lake, and reading them through is a ritual for me every time I go up there. Sorry that this post is all about toilets, basically.)

Wisconsin itself was actually quite wonderful, for the simple reason that I didn't think about anything, not about my life, not about my work--hence, no enormous heartpourings to my parents, no inappropriate allusions to my sex life, no political baiting. It was lovely. I should try this more often. Seriously, though--it could have been hard. The cabin was where, over Columbus weekend last year, I started to first realize that I was pregnant, and in my whole story with K, it has the virtue of being that eerie calm before the storm, when I at least I was still doing my German homework having not begun to sleep with a married guy...and so on. But I managed to keep the vast majority of those feelings at bay. I played roughly 7,000 games of Scrabble with my mother, and won about 3,450 of them. My dad started to give my boat driving lessons, and he took the blame for my hitting a sandbar and taking a chunk out of the propeller. I read most of Trollope's The Prime Minister--a somewhat perverse choice, but really--the Palliser novels are like Victorian candy to me right now. I didn't even bring any de Man.

One of the highlights of the trip was hiking with my mother on the Three Eagle Trail that runs between Three Lakes and Eagle River. We had just intended to kill time while my dad worked in the library (the library in Three Lakes has free wi-fi--a big draw), so we set out to see where it would take us and assumed my dad would pick us up easily when he was done. Except around mile 4, the trail veers off from the highway, and there's no easy way out except to walk for another 4.4 miles. Which we did, and it was totally worth the sore legs and not eating lunch until 3:00. And we agreed that we wouldn't have done it if we knew how long it would have been.

I also saw a loon (several, actually) in the water for the first time. Nearly 20 years of hanging out in the Northwoods and--finally. Also, there were multiple eagles and an impressive blue heron on the dock. So a good time, even if it did get down to below freezing one night. I should do a post on the airports when I get the chance--both the Foucauldian efficiency of the TSA at the Rhinelander airport and the white-people fest that is Terminal A at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport. The latter makes me think that I should maybe pass on applying to jobs in, say, South Dakota.

And now I'm back, easing into the summer where I should be hitting the ground running. Coming back was hard, for reasons I don't totally feel like going into at midnight when I still have dishes to do. Suffice it to say that I went a little soft towards the end of my orals reading (okay, a lot soft and it was almost a month). It's time to pull myself back together and be more protective of my time. I was mad at the Poet for a little while, but I'm not any more, as long as he keeps his whole political thing under control and in New Jersey, where it won't be trying to figure out who I am and if I have a MySpace page. I'm having some issues with my shoulder...got a massage from a grad school colleague who's also trained in that kind of thing, and it helped quite a bit in general, but I'm still sore. Made it hard to do much yesterday, but since it woke me up at the crack of dawn, I was able to go to the Greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza (awesome!! Except that people should really leave their bikes at the edges. And I have a feeling that maybe it isn't so much the place to meet straight guys who are single.) and be back home (with strawberries and spinach and grass fed beef, etc.) before 10. So I went and wandered around the Brooklyn Museum--of which I am a new member--for a few hours. I thought "The Dinner Party" was oddly moving. I'll also be going back to hang with the Ghada Amer exhibit some more. It was pouring rain when I planned to leave, so I joined a tour on "The History of the Modern Chair" instead.

And now...summer. Tomorrow I hit the ground running for real. I've thought about how I'd like my days to be, and I will be doing a test run this week. First order of business is to be smart about Tennyson, in abbreviated form, just enough to convince the Important Journal Editor that I can do the project as soon as the other one is done. I'm also trying to address a few admin-y things this week--the address change that refuses to take, rectifying my inadvertent disenfranchisement. I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat.