Postalphobia

Everyone seems to have left town for the weekend! There are parking spaces everywhere, the sidewalks are quiet, and I expect at any moment to have a tumbleweed blow across my path.
I had to buy stamps today. I've been putting it off all week. Somehow it is really difficult for me to get my ass to the post office; the constrictive hours, the bad locations. Since I put this task off til Saturday around 1pm, I soon found most branches closed and my only hope was the central post office for the city of Philadelphia on Market st. It is an enormous building and you kind of get to know by living here that that's what it is, but I don't think it says anywhere on the outside of the building that it's the post office! Nor is the entrance indicated clearly. Finally, I circled the monster enough times to find the entrance and the handy fifteen minute parking right in front, which are hidden from street traffic by food carts of marvelous variety. My anxiety began to calm. As I entered I was warned in writing not to bring in pets, bikes or explosives, as though these three things belong to the same category: things you might have with you when you stop by the post office. Inside it was like a museum or a church, hushed and dark. Most of the action was at the passport window. At the far end of the long, tall hallway were the windows for mailing packages etc. Starkly juxtaposed to the grimey antiquity of the rest of the building was the cheery and well-lit Postal Store. All manner of philatellic memorabilia hangs from the walls along with plain old, everyday, stick-and-send stamps. That's all I wanted. I picked some that commemorate childrens book characters, paid, and was on my way. I don't think I'm afraid of buying stamps anymore!

Recognition

I may have caught a glimpse of my husband at the library yesterday. I am not married. I was going through the turnstyle when I noticed him coming up the stairs, and thought "Is that someone I know?" When he came through the outer door I could see well enough that I had never seen him before, but then he looked at me as if he were thinking "Is that someone I know?" Now neither of us was thinking "Damn, he/she's hot!" I know this because I know my own mind and because I was wearing an enormous down coat and a wool hat, so he couldn't have been thinking it. It was just a very strange, strong impression.
I have spoken before of my not being from around here, planetarily speaking, and I realize that on this planet I might be taken for a desperate, sad, lonely woman-of-a-certain-age for conjecturing about strangers being husbands. On my planet, however, it's ok to say a heart's desire out loud, even if nobody thinks you can have it but you (although I am becoming conditioned by popular belief and am looking at myself through glasses that distort my image with shame and fear, even as I write this). We, on my planet, are pretty sure that we know things with no proof other than the certainty of our hearts. I am open to the possibility that the love of my life may not look the way I imagine him, may be somebody I never considered in that light, or even that I may have more than one (in a row, not at a time). The thing that I know for certain is that he (or they) exists. And he may or may not have been at the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, February 21st.

Love, love, love!

Although I have only ever had a boyfriend for a part of one Valentine's day in college, I rarely get down about being single on February 14th. I like a day with a theme! I like when everybody wears pink! The taste in my mouth for this day is the Valentine breakfast table my mom would set for us. She used special dishes and there were little presents on our plates; a pink scarf or a ruby-esque, heart-shaped ring. Valentine's day love for me is the kind of love that is and always has been all around me.
I began my celebration today by opening the Valentine I got in the mail. It was from a 3- year-old and I think that may be the nicest kind to get! Then when I got to school and walked into the faculty room, I felt like Sara in A Little Princess when she imagines a feast as she's going to bed hungry and wakes to find the feast has materialized! Someone (I think it was the secretary, but in my rapture I forgot to thank her - oops!) had spread the table with a pink cloth and on it were cookies of many sorts and a festive heart-shaped cake with pink icing! Perfection! Later, as I left home in the evening to go to a lecture by a handsome and intriguing aquaintance of mine, the sky was a perfect Valentine pink and soaked everything in it's loving glow. The everyday neutrals of the cityscape were dressed up for a special evening!
The only celebratory let-down was the special programming on WXPN. They promised 88.5 great love songs and came up with the 88.5 crappiest songs that include love in their lyrics. That's not really fair; I only listened for the first half hour, but it made me want to hurl! So I thought about what my favorite love song picks would be. Here are my top 10 in no particular order:

Comfortable - John Mayer
For Baby - John Denver
In My Life - The Beatles ( I also love Judy Collins' cover)
I'm Yours - Jason Mraz
You Are So Beautiful - Joe Cocker
Case of You - Joni Mitchell
I'll Back You Up - Dave Matthews Band
Kissing You - Des'ree
They Were You - from "The Fantasticks"
Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon and Garfunkle

Snow Day

I am of the staunch opinion that if snow must fall, it should do it on a weekday to at least give us the chance to miss work/school, so I was pretty bitter at this weekend's forecast. Despite the curses muttered under my breath, there's something about a blanket of pure white that makes the world new again and I feel a childish excitement!
I am snowed in at my sister and brother-in-law's, which is so much better than being snowed in alone. Our "adopted" sister is here too, so it's a party.
The other party-like element that also fills me with childish excitement is that I have just added to my family of prized posessions Irving the i-pod! I just fiiled him up with tasty tunes and he is crooning into my ears as I type. He's a shuffle, which some might find limiting(120 plus songs) but feel like a queen! And sometime this week my adopted ibook will arrive from Oregon and I'll be a real boy at last! (That sounds like I'm having an operation. I'm not. I hope to be a girl for the rest of my life. It was a Pinocchio reference.) Thank you to the McClellan family connection!

Home Sweet Hole

My new apartment now has the air of the garret domicile of a Parisian artist. It is well appointed with small but tasteful furnishings and a plethora of hooks and shelves for tidy storage. It is hard to take myself back three weeks to my first night there, when I arrived with only what I could lug by myself and wondered if I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.
After chasing the realtor up and down the city to acquire my keys, I pulled into the handy leftover end of a bus zone in front of my building (the rest of the zone is taken up by a sprawling construction project). I unloaded the essentials from my car; foam mattress (I'm still sleeping on it!) and bed linens, clothes, a few dishes, folding chairs. While moving my car to more secure lodgings, I breezed into Whole Foods for water, macaroni and cheese, apples, and brussels sprouts. I easily found handy parking and went back to see what I could do at the ranch.
Now one of the major selling points of this small studio was the sleeping loft, the presence of which would keep me from feeling that I was sleeping in a kitchen. When I last walked through the apartment, the loft was covered with a rank grey carpet that one could imagine had once been covering the cold cement of someone's garage, so that he could enjoy a little comfort when sliding under his vehicle for an oil change (which either didn't go well or the car had some other unpleasant leak). The hapless home mechanic soon traded in the carpet for one of those scooter things and offered the practically new carpet to a cousin who was renovating some apartments. I had suggested to the realtor that something be done about this carpet and when she suggested new carpet (possibly from someone else's cousin with a sun room where they kept an incontinent feline) I said I thought it made more sense to just rip up the carpet and paint the floor since vacuuming a three foot high space would be no small task. Great idea, she said, apparently while mentally balancing her checkbook, because when I arrived to take temporary possession of this little piece of heaven, the carpet remained.
After making up the "bed" in the middle of what would someday be my parlor, I climbed up to check out the rug. It really must have been just the one oil change because the rest of the carpet, while heinously un-aesthetic, was like new. As I surveyed the scene, I noticed that when they installed the carpet, it was clear that no one had told them they would need to cut a hole in it for the space where the ladder leads up to the loft, and they had accordingly not brought any cutting tools and had had to use their teeth, leaving a frayed edge reminiscent of the fur on a homeless poodle. Lucky for me the carpet glue they used had been recovered from the basement of a deceased relative, clearly of advanced years, and gave only a vague impression of stickiness. It would be easy to pull up the now infamous carpet, but I was succumbing, by that hour, to the polyurethane fumes that hung thick in the air and decided to call it a night. Actually, I went to bed, found that the fumes made one drowsy, yet not capable of sleep, got up and ate an apple, for utter lack of entertainment options, and eventually managed to put the day behind me.

(PS - Spell check would have had me replace "polyurethane" with "blurting". Hmm...no I really meant polyurethane!