this could be the weekend i finally get around to arranging the heap of silk flowers i've been saving up to create a european-ish sidewalk-boutique arch to hide all the crap we've piled on top of our kitchen cabinets. i still don't really know how i'll anchor them so that they look dimensional and fabulous without making it virtually impossible to access the crap they'll be obscuring, but that's something i can't really know until i haul out the ladder and packing tape and get going. (there's a version of this DIY in which i make, i don't know, a wall-spanning little roll of chicken wire or floral foam or something to serve as that base, but i think at the end of the day i'll be coming back to packing tape.) i swooped by michaels the other day to feast on heavily-discounted seasonal flowers and wired ribbon and found neither; most of the christmas-ish stuff on clearance was stocking-stuffer trinkety business, and who wants that? i dropped off a print i've been meaning to frame for several months and got a dopamine hit that felt a little like finishing an apartment-wide dusting jag. i'm puttering thus now because i was teasing a blogger about how she should feature a tour of our place—who else has so many copies of nineteen eighty-four, a rhinoceros head made of cargo pants, and an unflattering michel gondry portrait?—and she said yes, let's do it, so at some point in the new year a photographer will come over and memorialize all the weird little crafts i've made instead of progress on paying work. my motivation here is something like my friend abbe's when she and her now-husband were moving from brooklyn to philly, though we aren't going anywhere in a literal sense: she wanted to suspend the place she loved in amber, to leave a little fossil record of what she'd assembled around her over the years. she first contacted an interior photographer she found through another online tour, and that person said her rates were high but if she pitched the project to a site, said site would pay for her work, and lo! a tour came together. in our case there is, of course, a little of my look-at-me-don't-look-at-me craving for strangers' no-stakes approval, which is...pretty harmless, i guess? and i get to talk about my mom and sisters and friends? i am strongly tempted to stage our bedroom with the still-unfinished english paper piecing quilt i assembled in the first years of the pandemic, and just admit that even though it's not quite done i want people to see it; it feels like transparency is the best approach to whatever this is, though i will also be jamming a lot of stuff in our closets and have already lugged home a bunch of those vacuum storage bags people use to minimize their linens.
what dad and i had planned as a post-holiday central park walk turned into a manhattan-spanning trek yesterday; we met at columbus circle and wandered up the western side of the paths, then cut into the upper west side in search of bulk holiday cards he could use for gifting at his office. i promised he'd find a bunch at my old nonprofit bookstore (not so!), so we took the subway down to soho and wandered uptown again after failing. he said i'd never brought him to the bookstore before? that feels wrong, but i can't prove otherwise, and since he clearly doesn't remember it in its glory, which is why i'd hope he's mistaken, it doesn't matter. i guided him to a beloved taqueria on st. mark's and a bakery i frequent in cooper square, and he will rememember those. after walking all the way back up to the east 90s and meeting up with our spouses for dinner i abruptly ran out of gas, which hopefully didn't read as intensely as it felt; surely it was an okay night, even if my face lost the ability to do pleasant face-things. i am not expecting to change significantly in the new year, but maybe we'll all have a bit more energy and a rising tide will lift all butts? this is my wish for the people. i really don't want to fall asleep on this train.
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