Utrecht, Neruda, and Oe

Yesterday morning I was out early hoping to deposit a check before my rent check cleared. I think I made it. A couple sobering realizations followed: 1) After taxes, rent, metrocard, and phone bill, the income from my full time job leaves me $5.60 per day. No more $10 lunches at lemongrass. 2) The guy at the $2.50 eggs-homefries-toast-tea breakfast place I had ducked into to do my calculations had shortchanged me while distracting me with compliments about my hair.

Emil, you dog!

To celebrate my budget shortage and the extra time I had before work, I hiked up to the Utrecht paint store on 23rd street where Socorro and I had seen the little Moleskine notebooks that I think are the most perfect notebooks. They are small enough to fit in any pocket, they have grid lines, a little pouch inside and an elastic band to keep it secure. Sadly, they seem to have discontinued it. The Moleskine display was off to the side with only two little books left, neither of them grid lined...Sigh. I bought two pens instead.

Walking back towards the Strand I did have one of those really nice moments where New York in all its grittiness seemed beautiful.

I sat drinking free water from a very small cup at the Barnes and Noble Starbucks, weighed the pros and cons of living here and found the scales about as level as my checking account. I wrote in my current notebook:

This is capitalism. Thank God for Starbucks or you'd have to pee at McDonalds.

So, this morning I got up to let the cat out and discovered we had hot water, a rare occurrence these days, so I jumped in the shower. Now, up early and wet, I find myself finally starting a blog. Something Liz suggested long ago.

Asked to pick a name I instinctively ripped off a literary reference...a side effect of shelving literature all day. My first thought was grain of sand after my lost Wislawa Szymborska book. Then I thought of the Pablo Neruda book I saw at work yesterday, the one with the nice drawing of a saltshaker pasted on...and thought, Ode to a Grain of Sand...or simply Common Things...I looked around the room...I have mostly architecture books here not much literature...I settled on out growing madness, a reference to Kenzaburo Oe's short story, teach us to out grow our madness...a story about a fat man and his son Eeyore.

Now I see I mispelled madness...maybe I should have called it...learning to spell.