Dear Diary: Paradise — the Rental
It’s awful. I’ve re-read yesterday’s diary entry several times, but if I didn’t remember what I thought I was writing about — a memory that’s completely independent of the words that I set down here — I wouldn’t know what I was trying to talk about. My excuse for avoiding specifics was that specifics would be deadly dull to read about. In fact, they’d have been even duller to write about. I was taking it easy. Sorry.
If I weren’t old and calloused, I’d nourish the hope that tomorrow or the next day might be just like today. But days like today happen once a month at best, doubtless because I’m a stupid dolt who doesn’t understand his own rhythm. I was busy all day, and on many different levels. I wrote up two reading items, the New Yorker story (a chunk of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel — exciting to read but a disappointing displacement of genuine short fiction) and Operation Mincemeat. I uploaded seven or eight CDs onto the pop-side laptop (the desktop is cordoned off for the classics), and edited the very eccentric playlist that wakes me up every morning. The paperwork that I did was not very serious but it wasn’t frivolous, either — a new medium. I read a lot; I started, finally, to read Steve Pincus’s 1688, a book that I’ve been dying to take up for months but that I insisted on setting aside until I’d finished Peter Wilson’s Thirty Years War. I did a number of little kitchen things, culminating in a very nice dinner of veal piccata, a dish that I haven’t made in over twenty years. Call it beginner’s luck: it was delicious.
I sorted out our Manhattan Theatre Club tickets. Don’t as me why, but Kathleen arranged for this year’s tickets to be held at the box office or in the patron’s lounge of MTC’s venues, with the result that I’ve had no idea of dates. It’s a good thing that I took care of this today, because Kathleen bought seats for Red that conflict with one of our MTC subscription evenings. All fixed.
I wrote a few letters, and I had a good talk with the Web designer who is helping me with the “tablet edition” of The Daily Blague. He’s also helping me with the tablet edition of Portico, a site to be known as Civil Pleasures. Getting these two sites up and running is the minimum required assignment of this spring break. I can’t wait to see this column of text fill the iPad screen from side to side.
So it wasn’t a day of mindless bustle; nor was it a day of “writing.” Thanks to the heavenly weather, I felt as though I were spending the day in paradise. A paradise where I have to clean up and pay the bills, true. But even more of a paradise for that very reason.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow. After a morning at home (the Book Review review, can we?), I’ll head out on a round of errands that will begin at Perry Process and Staples, carry me to Williams-Sonoma, and perhaps deposit me at the Museum. (And I know that I’ve already forgotten something here!) There may even be a croque monsieur for lunch.