Do I wake or sleep?

Beautiful day out--it's in the 50s! Spring, I can't wait for you!

I was outside because I slipped out of work to go the church and get ashes. So medieval and Lenten!

Mardi Gras was lovely last night--and most of my soccer team stopped by! And hung out for quite awhile, huddled together and looking around my apartment and petting the bebbehs. (I had to drag Tibby in whining the whole time, naturally.) Trying to remember who was there--Tesse, Michael, Griffin, Tim and his friend Jason, Joy (I did Fare for All with her) and her BF, Ryan, Caley, Jenny Fersch and her BF, plus my team (5-6), plus Anya and me. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. Joy's BF is kind of a jerk, sad to say--I remember two years ago when they left there was a thorough consensus that no one liked him. He has that "I'm socially awkward so I'm going to try to mask it by putting people at a disadvantage" thing going on. I can't remember exactly what he did two years ago (the party last year was at Charles's) but I do remember we ALL talked about it when he'd gone. And last night after he left Griffin told me that he'd said to G "you need to rethink that checkerboard thing with the shirt"--he was clowning Griffin's outfit! So, so rude. He did this weird thing--at one point Jenny, her BF and I (and I think Anya and Griffin) were in the kitchen talking and he came into the kitchen and stopped upon seeing us. Naturally we all noticed he'd come in and stopped in this kind of obvious way, and WE stopped talking, thinking he wanted to say something and of course he didn't--he just wanted us to notice him. Ugh.

I was a little concerned with the King Cakes--I'm not sure they came out okay, they seemed a little dry. I think I might have overbaked them, and since our microwave is broken, I had some difficulty making them (couldn't melt the butter easily). Although I'm amazed I didn't have MORE problems with no microwave--it actually went pretty smoothly! I finally remembered to take lots of pictures, lots of BLURRY, impressionist pictures.

At one point I was talking to Caley and someone else about directing The Vagina Monologues--how I'd talked about the poetry to one actor and said think of these words as jewels, but they don't only look beautiful, they also taste wonderful and smell good. They satisfy every sense, because poetry is the densest, most intense, compressed form of the language--you need to hold these words in your hands and offer them to the audience. Caley liked this image and I said when I was on my cruise ship contract in Spain, I visited Sevilla and I saw the orange trees. They're everywhere in that city. And they're so vivid, so gorgeous--these beautiful green bushes filled with golden orbs, overflowing onto the sidewalks and the gutters and the courtywards. And I had this image in my head of a child's hands filled with these colorful candies, trying to offer them but they keep slipping out between the fingers. So I wrote Los Naranjas de Sevilla (one of my poems). I noticed a couple of my teammates were listening to me, and one of them, Zack, said "now I want to audition for you!"

Finally broke down and made an appointment with the bone doctor for my FUCKING KNEE. It seemed to be getting better until Sunday when I was decorating--I landed rather awkwardly on it and it's been hurting ever since. Last night the train ride home was literally torture--the stupid, incompetent MTA didn't send enough trains so when the A came it was super, SUPER crowded. Those are the worst for me--I'm too short to reach the bar easily, so I'm either barely hanging on, or trying to grab a side bar and swinging around. And psychologically I HATE crowds. Not fun!