The Lounge: Feelings About the Time Change

November 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm (By Amba)

It's always a big deal when Daylight Saving ends—a kind of artificial, ritual kick in the pants accelerating the season change. Our unheralded modern version of the Day of the Dead.  Naturally, I'm ambivalent about it. :) Part of me wishes they'd never started with this Daylight Saving crap in the first place. Part of me dreads and enjoys the jolt.  I'm surprised to discover that in a way I like "fall back" better than "spring forward."  I like the cushy extra hour, and I like the prod to withdraw indoors and get convivial and contemplative earlier, the warning to bar the door because here comes the dark and cold.  In the spring, you get robbed of an hour, robbed of the early mornings, and you (or I) generally feel rousted out of hibernation too rudely.

Yesterday evening when dusk fell between 4:30 and 5 I was walking into the midtown city from the river with a friend.  The sky behind the buildings turned dove color, stone buildings were a bloodless pale red, and glass buildings catching the western sky were silver or pale silk green.  (For the initiated, kind of like those evenings on Fort Myers Beach when the Gulf of Mexico is pale green and the sky is deep purple.)  Japanese robe colors.  Stray marathon survivors hobbled here and there in bare legs and Thinsulate blankets; only the one with a completion medal, a woman, wasn't limping. I looked up at the glass towers—luxury river view condos, no doubt—and part of my mind went "I wonder if they're fully occupied in this economy" and another part went, "I need to feel awe."

The Lounge: Blogger's Remorse

November 7, 2011 at 1:21 am (By Amba)

I heard from Randy! I will let him tell you whatever he wishes about how things are going, but what's most important, he sounds good in himself.

In my answer to him I found myself expressing regret and remorse at abandoning my "innkeeper" role at this blog:

I haven't been blogging hardly at all, and realize vaguely that this is like being "a bad hostess" — a blog can be a sort of gathering place. I've been posting little odds and ends on Facebook only because they don't seem to make it to the blog post threshold in length or substance; but I think this is . . . inhospitable. I feel like an innkeeper who just walked away one day. I suppose I could post these little dribs and drabs on Ambiance just to form the nucleus of/excuse for a conversation. I don't seem to have it in me to provoke serious discussions, so much. But Facebook is about as cozy a place for a conversation as an airport gate area. Still, I'm becoming very in-turned. I'm getting ready to write something about life with Jacques, I think, and this is preceded by a very long inhale in preparation for sinking down into the depths where such things come from.

I wonder whether, instead of writing those little conversational things on Facebook, I should just write them here in a kind of running post—call it "The Lounge." We need a place to meet and hang out, to come in out of the cold November rain and dark. I would like it to look like the cozy, classy bar I passed last night on the way to nearby friends' place. The lights were low, candles and tiny white Christmas bulbs; the polished oak wood glowed golden. I think it was called "One If By Land, Two If By Sea." It just made you want to turn aside and go in. I don't know if it had a fireplace but it felt as if it did.

By comparison, Facebook is a fluorescent-lit airport concourse. Every time I go over there I smell synthetic carpeting. It seems public, exposed, impersonal, and ugly. It's partly the bad (nonexistent, airport-concourse-like) design, partly the boring, trivial nature of so many of the posts (including my own). Yet, as I told Randy, I don't feel up to starting substantive conversations any more.

Sit down by the fire and make small talk with me.