I think I get the pins and needles expression now, except probably the expression means that you're sitting (or standing or laying) on pins and needles, and for me it's all on the insides and less painful. like a slight whole body vibration that starts from the spine out. and even though it's vaguely uncomfortable, I think it's probably a good thing to get your body revved like this from time to time, because it reminds you what it is to feel this way, which is not nothing, which is actually something and more than one might think.

27 hours just about and I'll be in the city. a boy outside my office is singing 'here comes the sun' and I'm positively giddy about it. omens. amens.

sometimes I think we are like the great and powerful oz, impressive and smoke so long as the machine stays behind curtains and then when pulled aside a little bobbling and embarrassed, but did you see that machine? which produces smoke and mirrors and a booming certain voice but is quite a machine really. there's even a whole city, a beautiful and shiny city, built around the illusion of the ponderous and mystical head.

and when they come, gingham and tail and rust and all, a small crew of searching misfits, we are aphasic with humility and we give them what we can which maybe should have been the whole of it from the beginning and tell them not much more than what they already knew and that is to close your eyes and trust your manolos and anyway, we're never precisely where we think we are, even if we're awake, or almost waking.

from Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

she saw them as a sleeper waking from a heavy sleep sees a brass candlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again, finally starts broad awake and stares at the candlestick with all his powers.

***

I think it's a beautiful description of attention as attention occurs, which seems to be what I'm thinking about these days anyway, and whether we now are sleeping, or all liminal, and if we are sleeping, or even hypnagogic, then who is doing the watching? who are the ones paying attention? and as much as I really truly want to say, it's me! I'm an attentive one! I know that it would be a sad kind of lie, and not one I want to tell.

the snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him.

I think I'd rather be a snail than a sleepwalker, slow though it promises to be.

as for noticing, I was right about denver smelling like laundry, as that very day was the first day the buds came out on the trees, and buds as everyone knows smell like laundry, or at least laundry smells like buds. no matter now though, the ground and limbs are covered with snow, and for a while.

in other news, I'm making burritos tonight. I'm slowly and happily re-watching the last season of sex and the city to prepare myself for my ny visitation. I'm making a new syllabus, and deciding what to teach and why, and this is hard because this is a literature class, and perhaps the last literature class that my students take, and I want them to leave with something, some kind of crushy love or regard. I worry about sister lauren, who is sick in a way my mind can't seem to understand. I went to a moroccan restaurant last night where I ate barefoot and with my hands only and was lectured on the relationship between vegetarianism and orgiastic rites. and in 3 days I go to ny. in 3 days I go to ny. in three days I go to ny.