Christy is gone back to the East Coast, and taken the sunshine and good health with her. I spent all my money on used clothing and extraordinarily cheap Italian leather shoes (I love you, punk rock flea market; Value Village), and now I am sick with the cold/fever/whatever that everyone has, for the whatevereth time I have been sick this fall, and my room is a den of mess and I can bring myself to make sparkling grins and to churn out my work, but not to hold myself accountable in my social life or self-care life. I said a few weeks ago, during a supervision, everything else can slip, but work never slips. This is true in the sense that work is the one arena into which I continue to pour positive energy and force. I always feel like I am slipping there, but it's hard to say how much of that is my own perfectionism and how much is me being sensitive to where I'm at in a realistic way. Today I was told that I'm doing a good job, so...?

The whole time Chisty was here, we walked. It was iterations of the life we have shared together in other cities. Walking, talking, eating, looking at books and art and clothing. Saturday we shared a quasi-religious experience seeing The Books at a small, grungy theater that is inexplicably attached to a hip, brick-walled, leather-boothed bar. We had a drink at the latter (reasonably priced and cozy feeling, despite the swank decor), before slipping next door and into the front of the crowd for the former. The Books are cool for so many reasons that I can't even begin to explain, and they incorporate a calm humor and grace into their shows that really adds to the string jams and video art putting the audience into trances. Everyone was wearing their coat (it was cold), and it felt like a womb in there. We were supposed to go out dancing afterwards but we were happy zombies, so we found some gourmet thin crust pizza up the street and went home to crawl into our beds and dream of cellos instead.