notes & things | 8/29/2020
We seem to have crawled out from under the swampy late-summer air, and this weekend, into something cooler, milder, and less likely to have me tossing and turning in the sheets to find a cool corner of the bed. Summer, corona-style, was barely a summer at all, and I can't say I am sad to see it go. Mostly it was just heat and work, with side helping of anxiety. Fall is at least enjoyable when you don't leave the house much, so I am already queuing up my horror movie and planning to make soups. I did learn that beginning next week, we will be open the usual hours at the library, til 10pm, which gives me back my late mornings entirely instead of sliver of time between waking and heading out the door. Since we've gone back, my writing happens in this flurried space over breakfast watching the clock to make it downtown, then exhaustion by the time I arrive home in the evening. This will feel a bit more like normal, if normal is even a thing at all anymore, which means I can get back to design and layout projects that have been drifting while I try to catch up on orders and tend to other dgp business. Also reading manuscripts for next year (which if you haven't submitted just yet, you have another couple days.) At the library are also getting a new staff member (finally) in our department which means I may eventually be able to take a vacation (not that I can go anywhere, but a week off work, as I learned this summer, is sometimes very much needed.)
Today, I woke up and made myself a big stack of french toast and now, coffee, and am settling in to work on another swallow video, check in on my submissions like little chicks, and maybe do some edits on the tabloid poems. The collapsologies manuscipt/project is coming together fast and furious and I can't wait to show you. I still have some pieces to work on the final section (the plague letters) but I love what I have so far. Whatever it's final incarnation (book? box set? something else? all of these things? ) I would like to unveil it within a year from now, since it feels like there is a pressing immediacy to it. Like, is another year passes, it will be less fraught with the angers and anxieties which spawned it. It's definitely a snapshot of a moment in time, a moment that hopefully will pass and be better. It's all we can hope for.
Before then, I do have some little things planned for the witching season I am excited about (writing about horror 80's movies, strange little oracle cards), and as soon as i have them all assembled, the poets zodiac.I've even had a couple of journal acceptances for bots of a couple different series so those will be coming down the pipeline., breaking my recent rejection streak. Impending autumn always makes me feel more ready to buckle down to more serious writing business, so there's that.
I've been poshmark shopping, as a talisman against another quarantine, for some fall things for my closet, sweater dresses, moody fall florals, and way too many things in that shade of dark olive green I've been obsessing over the past year (including a steal of a green suede jacket I'd certainly never be able to afford new.) My fall wardrobe is only slightly less rambunctiously unruly than the summer one, but hopefully Chicago keeps numbers down and I actually get to leave the house to wear it all.
While I feel pretty safe about the library protocols, I don't know how that will change as more people show up on campus (or will they even show up on campus? and if they don't what does that mean for the library?) People on transportation seem to be all wearing masks, even if distance is only minimally possible as it gets fuller and more people are out and about, including the influx of students city-wide. I have grabbed coffee and a breakfast sandwich a couple of times and ordered pizza in the neighborhood, but you certainly won't find me in a restaurant or going anywhere else I can avoid going in public since pretty much anything I need can probably be ordered online (I do occasionally miss movie theatre date nights and all those thrifting expeditions, but not quite enough to risk getting sick more than I already have to.)
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