Remembering your face again when I found you

We are back in the mode where I don't sleep so much. My internal soundtrack has been alternating Arcade Fire's "Black Mirror" (Their names are never spoken, the curse is never broken) and Pretty Balanced's "My Mind Is a Box" (So fill me up with chemicals or other people's words) since sometime even before I tried to fall asleep last night. Around four o'clock, I almost started posting the quotations that were running through my head, but instead I re-read Sean O'Brien's HMS Glasshouse (1991) and Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). I object to the results being an anxiety dream about my computer, mixed with some weird hangover images from The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) about the Yiddish-speaking rag trade. At least I was woken up by thunder.

There were a lot of people this weekend, not even counting the dead. Saturday, I braved the summer storm to meet derspatchel for dinner with cirne and hermitgeecko at Tu y Yo in Somerville. They very kindly gave us a ride to the restaurant, thus avoiding anyone washing away in the monsoon; there was probably a rainbow outside a little later on, but we were distracted by the five different kinds of tamale and the cheese-filled plantains by then. We sat in a booth and looked like a hand of face cards. Two of us were wearing color-matching sundresses. Two of us were wearing black corduroys and button-down shirts. We hadn't planned on looking quite so patterning, but the conversation went everywhere from pilot's licenses to Lovecraft to a spontaneous outbreak of quotation from Red Dwarf ("Today's fish is trout à la créme!"), so maybe we shouldn't have been surprised. I expect to be seeing a lot more of these people. I suspect I will survive.

And Sunday was captainbutler's wedding, which was lovely. I didn't even have to go to D.C. for it. There were people attending I hadn't seen in years, Steve and Lisa looked as I tend to think a couple should on their wedding day, i.e., glowing, and the ridiculous smallness of the world continues, as I learned that Rob and my second oldest friend from Brandeis went to the same high school and had the same Russian teacher, albeit a couple of classes apart. (They can both say at the drop of a hat, "There is for me an absence of hedgehog," which still sounds like the title of something to me.) She gave me a ride from the synagogue in Belmont to the reception at Brandeis; we made the mistake of following the directions on the handout and wound up first in Concord. I have been invited to upstate New York by kraada and seem to have told him to move to Boston. All the dancing at the reception was contra, so now I know how to dance something called the Horse's Bransle. There was one uncomfortable moment when the woman next to me heard me asking whether a turn was clockwise or counterclockwise and decided that it would be reasonable, when it came to that step in the dance, to seize me by the shoulders and abruptly drag me around the way she thought I didn't understand (I yelled at her, because no), but on the other hand one of my partners said that I didn't look like someone who didn't know how to dance, because I was making such good eye contact (I assume instead of staring at my feet), so that was unexpected. The first dance belonged to the new-wedded couple, something appropriately called the Amoroso, fifteenth-century Italian. They met contra-dancing; the rabbi had themed his speech around the lessons that can be drawn from dancing with someone and applied to living with them. I had never seen them dance before. They were beautiful at it, intently gazing. They stayed around each other unless they were drawn off into separate conversations; it was entirely futile to ring glasses until they kissed, because they were full of kisses and small touches, always within one another's orbits. They danced together until the music switched over to Israeli folk dance and horas started happening. Their last was to "Sellenger's Round," which is also called "The Beginning of the World." It was very sweet to see.

And today is the kind of day where I feel simultaneously that I have run out of words and I want to write something as jitterily as I imagine other people want coffee when they wake up, so I am going to clean the things that haven't been cleaned in days and hope my brain either perks up or resigns itself to its current state and leaves me alone, because there was a lot more shoulder philosopher last night than I really thought necessary. I got my schedule for Readercon, which I will post separately. Maybe something with intellectual content will happen before then.