I’ve been reading Jim Harrison’s short novella “A Woman Lit by Fireflies” but have not yet finished, so suddenly dismayed am I by my current un-status in society. Edna O’Brien what say you?

Here are some of the headlines of today’s (Saturday, January 31, 2004) New York Times:

British and French Halt 5 Flights to U.S. Over Security Concerns

Dowd: Mirror Imaging in Iraq

Uut and Uup Add Their Atomic Mass to Periodic Table

I went to see Girl With a Pearl Earring last night; my friend Mary bought my ticket. Scarlett Johannsson is gorgeous. But I wish her character would have had more of a personality in the movie. She was so bland.

“The mistress is pregnant again,” the rotund, rosycheeked maid said as she picked her teeth with a piece of straw in Girl With a Pearl Earring. “But she just had a baby!” Scarlett Johannsson’s character replied. “Men,” the rotund maid answered. “What can you do?”

Then I gave Megan a birthday present of two postcards I made for her. She loved them, of course. Novelty.

The first postcard was an elegant adaptation of the stylized bust of a woman and the suggestion of a man kissing her neck — that done in India Ink. The second postcard was an adaptation of a drawing from the 2000 Whitney Biennial Catalogue—a drawing of three woodsmen with mouths agape and three times larger than bodies, shouting “VAVOOM,” the words “Please remember to vote” printed neatly at the bottom. Megan let me borrow her Paul Klee calendar so last night I did a watercolor reproduction of his “Fightscene from the comical-fantastical opera The Seafarer.”

You can look at it here (on a website I found by a girl in Kyoto!)

http://www.pn.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~naruki/art/Klee.html

I am suddenly reminded of Mark who had the great luck of visiting Iceland in August with his father (the hottest part of the Michigan summer), and was reading The Sagas of Icelanders in preparation. He told me that there was an Icelandic king who reigned with an iron fist and if he heard that anyone made fun of him, the king would go to their house and kill them.

S is coming from Saginaw this weekend and I am going to have coffee with her and K tomorrow afternoon. I’m excited. (So much for that: I was in bed with the flu)

I miss Cristina. Cristina, write to me this instant! I don’t care if you are in Taipei!

(a picture of The Grand Hotel in Taipei

http://www.asiatravel.com/taiwan/grand/index.html

Did I mention I would like to visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch for Spring Break?

(a picture of Ghost Ranch

http://www.johnmaclean.com/ghostranch/pages/253.html

Or Bellows Beach in Hawaii:

http://www.hawaiionthebeach.com/

And now the melodious sound of… bagpipes.