"fireworks in a tin"...

...is how I am feeling currently, in the picturesque phrase of Vita Sackville-West (I have been reading the letters of Virginia Woolf and VSW); the VW story never fails to make me sad, and I keep reading biographies/diaries/letters of hers to see if the ending ever changes, and it never does. Vita wrote in her diary years later that if she had only seen Virginia in the days before her suicide that she feels sure she could have turned her around and made her feel better, and the editors of the volume of letters put in a little comment at the end to the effect that the stupid thing was that she probably could have. Anyway. I think it's kind of funny that I find the whole pretentious/romantic ambience of the Bloomsbury crew (and attendant diaries/letters) so much more interesting that any of their actual published-in-their-lifetime writing (w/ the exception of T.S. Eliot).

The main thing I am fretting about (and the reason I am awake at 6 a.m. on my day off) is the trip to the UK in the month of May; I sent an email yesterday to choir director to let her know about missing several rehearsals and I am dreading, dreading, dreading, the shitstorm of a guilt-trip that is due to arrive in my email inbox after the requisite three days of ominous silence while she discusses it with every choir member behind my back. She self-sabotages a bit, in that her response to people missing rehearsals is completely hypocritical (one of the basses, for example, announced he would missing every Tuesday for the next three months for an evening course he had signed up for, and she was thrilled to pieces that he was "furthering his career" and promptly declared rehearsals to be on Monday nights during those three months; on the other end of the spectrum, one time in residency when I couldn't stay 5 minutes over and had to leave promptly at 9:15 to get back to the hospital to resume call duties, I got a lecture about how "this sort of attitude reflects poor commitment to the group" blah blah blah. So because the response is so out of proportion to the crime (or lack thereof) committed, I have given up completely trying to keep her happy with me, and when I do want to miss a rehearsal for any reason, I just do the minimum to make sure she doesn't actually chuck me out of the group and in fact am willing to do slightly dreadful things to get what I want (i.e. lie about what exactly I will be doing in May to make it sound more respectable) which I would never ever do with anyone else. She may chuck me out over it. On verra.

I am also wound up because of my ER shift yesterday - more than 10 hours in the ER tends to do funny things to me. I don't know how the fulltime people do it. My favourite case was a woman who had run out of tampons (so far, reasonable) and so had stuffed as much toilet paper as she could fit inside the pertinent orifice (slightly mad, but I can see her logic), and then forgotten about it for several days (going through passport control on the border of the Land of Total Nuttiness) until it started to smell bad and hurt to pee (I have doubts about our ability to survive as a species).

A trip to Tar-jay last night with H. to buy socks after work; I surprised myself by buying (in addition to the standard bulk black multipack that will have disappeared into the black hole down the side of the dryer within a week) a pair of footless tights, which sounds racy, sort of like crotchless chaps, except it isn't, just way trendier than my usual, and a pair of old fashioned thigh stockings, just in case I meet anyone born before 1900 that I need to seduce. The thing about thigh stockings (I didn't try them on, I decided optimistic faith was more enjoyable than reality) is that you have to have really really superlative baby-giraffe thighs in order that the bits that are above the stockings don't look ridiculous.

Despite my best intentions NOT to have New Year's resolutions, I have ended up with some anyway. Friend A's fault. Notice, however, that they are not open-ended, but specifically things to be achieved before the end of 2009:
- eight portraits in oil, excluding ongoing van eyck travesty
- two weeks of intensive classes in either cello or tango dancing
- exercise every single day of 2009, at least 30' run or equivalent thereof. (I am allowing myself to just do a bit extra in the rest of January to make up for days skipped prior to making the resolution)
- have at least two dinner parties with 3+ guests each.
- to be completed before the end of the month: attic insulation project (yucko, but must be done), organize and pay my taxes (ditto).

I re-read the beginning of Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree" last night in bed; and was irrationally delighted to find that there had been some crossover in our reading lists since the last time I picked it up. In September 2003, for instance, he read Ian Hamilton's book, "In Search of Salinger," which I read in France, and it prompted the same urge to reread all of Salinger's oeuvre (which he was able to do, and I was not, since the Shopi in A-C was a little low on twentieth century English classics). He also read Tobias Wolff's "Old School," Charles Baxter's "Feast of Love", Zoe Heller's "Notes on a Scandal" and several others that either I read but am not mentioning because they were big bestsellery type books that a lot of people read or that I have had on my list intending to read but don't get to count as books-in-common-with-Nick-Hornby until I actually get around to reading them. But it did make me want to take his lists to the bookstore and buy some of the things that he recommends because at least so far we agree on what was good.

okay, sun coming up now. time to achieve greatness.