1) sleeplessness (due to the vagaries of san francisco cell phone reception, i received a text at 4 a.m. from my sister that had been sent twelve hours earlier and then couldn't get back to sleep)
2) fatness (i went over to dinner at F.'s house, and she made pasta carbonara, which pretty much hits all the high-calorie peaks I know of: cream, bacon, cheese, eggs... you could maybe throw a donut and a couple of strawberry daiquiris in there while you were at it, but it's hard to beat for sin:volume ratio. F just got back from visiting relatives in Calabria, and I am suffering snits of jealousy that I am not stylish and Italian with a summer villa on the Adriatic and big piles of cousins)
3) happiness (last day of working fulltime clinic for a wee stretch. i'm on call this weekend, and there are a couple of ER shifts upcoming, but i am temporarily done with answering histrionic calls from neurotic middle-aged ladies throwing tantrums (I am not making this up) about how they called in a refill request for their vitamin D supplement over TWO HOURS AGO (**we ask people to give us a turnaround time of 3-5 days**) and they haven't GOTTEN it yet, and they are crying and hysterical because they feel noone is LISTENING TO THEM and how are they supposed to last the weekend WITHOUT THEIR VITAMIN D SUPPLEMENT. which, not to be unsympathetic, here, but this always makes me think, huh? what about global warming? what about the war in Afghanistan? what about all the toxic chemicals leaching into the food supply and how we're all twenty years away from turning the planet into an overheated nuclear waste pesticide dump populated entirely by SUVs? if running out of your entirely nonessential vitamin supplement for two days causes you this much stress, how to you even get out of bed in the morning?
I have had running through my head all day the lovely lovely John Dowland song, Come Again, which is such a sweet combination of sexy and sad all at once:
"Come again, sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain to do me due delight:
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
Come again, that I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain, for now, left and forlorn,
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.
Gentle love, draw forth thy wounding dart!
Thou canst not pierce her heart. For I, that do approve
With sighs and tears more hot than are thy shafts
Did tempt, while she for triumph laughs."
I am extra impressed with myself that I could reproduce all three verses after more than my fair share of a bottle of red wine...
projects for tomorrow: landlady-type fix it things around the house, and I am going to start on my master copy of a Michiel Sittow portrait of a lady who might or might not be Catherine of Aragon. a beautiful beautiful painting. why have i never heard before of michiel sittow? i just randomly found this painting poking around on art.com. i think my art goal is to figure out how to paint portraits of people I know in the early flemish style. as in, actually identify and be able to reproduce the elements of a van eyck/rogier van der weyden/memling/etc etc portrait without simply copying directly. sort of like the gerhardt richter paintings that are so intensely evocative of vermeer.
until then: good night, everyone. goodnight baby. your mama she meeses you.
