I burn with no trace up in the cool sky

I am not at Boskone. I had really wanted to attend this year, but between health and time constraints and academic necessities, I'm still in New Haven. Hello to everyone who's there . . .

I did attend Yale's annual Winter Ball for the first time, where I actually danced, had great conversations (although I forgot to bring earplugs against the very loud, very terrible music, so I had to make them out of cocktail napkins and my ears are still ringing something over twelve hours later), and hans_the_bold was seen in a suit for the first time in twenty years. It was really fun. I'm not a dance person; the last one I went to was the junior-senior formal at Brandeis in 2003, and before that my high school senior prom in 1999. But every three or four years, they're worth it.

My story "On the Blindside" has been included in Rich Horton's Virtual Best of the Year: 2005, which is rather cool. In the rest of my life, I've picked up the tickets to the Yale Repertory Theatre's production of Brundibar, where we are taking my mother for her birthday in a few weeks (and because everyone in my family has agreed that if we missed a production in which both Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner had been personally involved, we'd all regret it for years), and I got her a copy of the picture book as well. The historical context is not a cheery one. But that the opera is still being performed sixty-odd years later—that is something that matters.

I should clean my apartment before the precarious book stacks engulf something important, like me.