I just got back from the Lillstreet reading, which was an excellent time. It was ginormous crowd, including the opening crowd and fiction fans, lured by Niffenegger, who was hilarious with her non-fiction piece about digging up dead cats and this little essay. Very different from the small audience most of us poets are used to and scary enough to set this one shaking in her boots (or flip-flops in this case--it's damned hell hot here for early October). So I was nervous, which doesn't usually happen, but I lived. Also got to hear poems by a couple of poets hiding out in CC's Book & Paper program, one of whom I'd oddly had a nice chat with in the library a couple years ago.
I was also almost late, tricked into thinking getting a cab along Sheridan would be as easy as any other time on an unusually warm Saturday night I have this weird anxiety about being late I also have anxiety about being too early, which I usually am, because of navigating tricky CTA schedules. I HATE being the first to arrive anywhere, especially when I'm going somewhere alone. I DO howver, like a little time to settle into my surroundings. Someone always asks me if I get nervous about reading and the answer usually is no. But I DO get anxious about going to new places, possibly getting lost, being late, etc. Once I'm there, I'm fine.
Besides the reading, most of my afternoon was spent wresting with my wireless connection, which has been all fritzy the last three days. I would work for a few seconds then lose the connection. This happened once before, and in that case, it was AT&t apparently because it stopped of it's own accord. But this was far, far worse. After messing around all last night with the settings, power cycling the modem, trying a restore point, I finally plugged it in and it worked like a charm, which meant it was either the router or something wrong with my laptop. I tried re-installing the router to no avail. I finally managed to google the right question, which led me to the linksys site, which led me to the solution (I had to change the signal channel.) I always get a little thrill when I figure out how to fix tech stuff know nothing about on my own--without frantically calling my more computer literate friends. So we're humming along nicely now...
