Month: October 2006

You guys are the best. I said I was feeling miserable, and you said nice things here and then sent all this great email (with songs and videos). There was a piece in the Times the other day about people who have friends and lots of networks of support living longer, so I just want to say: Thank you for helping me live longer!!

I fantasize about buying some cool building somewhere as a retirement home for me and my friends. (I am poor, so this is a total fantasy.) Ideally, it should be on a river somewhere or here in the city. This abandoned hotel was one of my dream retirement homes. It’s on the West Side Highway and Barrow Street. Okay, highway, not so ideal, but the river is right there, and there’s something very romantic about it. But I read that someone bought it and all the windows have since been replaced. I’m going to try to think positively. I’m sure there’s an even better building left that I can’t afford! Ha!

Anyway, thank you everyone for the incredibly nice email. It genuinely made me feel better.

I have been just so plain miserable lately I hardly recognize myself. I went to the library today, because I love going to the library and I thought it would cheer me up. But I got motion sickness from the microfilm machines. It happens sometimes. I had to go home.

So, I’m back at home on a rainy day, trying to amuse myself. This is the tiny piano I bought to help find the trickier notes in the more difficult pieces my choir performs. It’s too small to play like a piano and there aren’t enough keys, but here is a tiny part of the piece that was always my favorite to play, Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. Normally, it should be played like a bat out of hell, but I haven’t played in many, many, MANY years so my bat-out-of-hell tempo playing abilities are rusty.

Someone posted in an Amazon review of my book, Waiting for My Cats to Die, that by the time they got to the end of the book they wanted me to die. Okay, okay. DON’T RUSH ME. Meanwhile, here is yet another short video of Finney, who is trying to help the process along. (Sorry. I keep meaning to make videos of something other than my cats.)

Someone I know married a military guy and wrote, “I can identify a Blackhawk, Apache or Chinook helicopter by the sound of the blades slicing the air overhead.” (Lily Burana, great writer, that was in an op-ed she wrote.)

I’m so jealous! I want to be able to do that. What a cool skill. No fair. In the circles I travel, it’s very unusual for someone to marry into the military, so everything is very exotic to me. Especially being able to do stuff like that. Except now I’m remembering that New Yorker piece I read, about all the research since WWI into the effects of war upon soldiers. I wish I had saved that. Our soliders are paying a steep price. We need to be taking better care of them when they come home. Damnit. I have to get a hold of that piece so people know what I’m talking about.

We were talking on Echo about empire waists and I told the story of picking a wedding dress, which I didn’t like, but I got married in the days when all wedding dresses were ugly so I had no expectations, really. Except they made an ugly dress ever worse by changing it to an empire waist! At the fitting the waist was at my waist, where I wanted it. It was too late to change it, so I went down the aisle feeling unattractive, and that was that. Actually, it was not the end of the world. I had a good time as you can see from this picture of me and Adrienne, already pretty well toasted.

But now that I look at it, it’s not at the waist OR an empire waist. It’s just completely botched and uneven. I want my money back. Is it too late to sue?

Here’s another view of the worst wedding dress of all time, after Princess Diana’s, of course. This is me and my mother.