Lounging, Books, and Denim

This morning, my alarm sounded, I smashed the snooze button, and this cycle repeated, in almost perfect sinoidal syncopation for about one hour; the prospect of leaving the comfortable confines of my bed was nearly too much to bear, despite a pleasantly optimistic shining sun and cool temperatures. Slippage between the realms of consciousness and of dreaming sleep left me feeling oddly tingling and confused and a bit tired, but, also inspired. I wanted very badly, instead of tending to duties in the office, tedious edits and hackneyed reports, to turn to some of my fiction, and perhaps finish reading this collection of Italo Calvino short stories I have been working on. Spend the day lounging, lazy and productive, in a loose and flowing chambray shirt dress, to pretend to be bohemian and free for a single day. Extricate myself from the entanglements and the seductive traps of technology, leave my computer and my various cell phones, breathe the fresh air oozing forth from the page of a good book, the page of a fresh paragraph of writing in my notebook. At a loss for how to clothe my body on such a day, where the desire to languish amidst blankets and texts abounds, I was disappointed that denim is an option, at this company, only appropriate on Fridays.

Last week, the filmmaker volunteered his brain and his impressive brawn to a local book sale, hosted by an association of essentially older women who also have university degrees. This, obviously, is not their formal name. As it turned out, this bout of volunteerism that has become an annual tradition morphed into a paying gig; in addition to the usual, take as much as you can carry, they provided him with a monetary supplement. The real treasure, though, is the opportunity to glean through cases and cases of books, some entire collections of aged intellectuals or aesthetes who have recently passed, and select the gems for a personal, continually growing library. Upon my return from Barcelona, he gifted me with a short and impressive stack of books, art history and some poetry predominantly, to add to my already teetering tower of need-to-read. Alas, my job so frequently encumbers my work.

(image taken from The Lonely Green Shoe)