Things are different for us now than when I wrote my first story

My prose poem "On Two Streets, with Three Languages" is now online at Interfictions. It is an absolutely amazing issue. If you want to know more about S. An-sky, I can recommend Gabrielle Safran's Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky (2010) and Nathaniel Deutsch's The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011).The title is taken from a statement he made about himself at a banquet in his honor in 1910: "A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets, with three languages." The third language, as always, is the one that interested me.

I had a doctor's appointment this morning. In the afternoon, I had a good voice lesson. I met Dean afterward in Harvard Square. I got rained on twice and overheated in between, because this is spring in New England, or something sufficiently resembling it.

I am extraordinarily tired.

I dreamt a sailor's dream of me

At eight in the morning, construction with bandsaws and jackhammers commerced on not one, but two houses immediately adjacent to our own. The noise came right in through the windows, even the closed ones. derspatchel and I immediately stopped sleeping. The cats may or may not have been asleep, but they certainly weren't thrilled about the situation. The entire house rattled. It went on constantly. Naturally, this afternoon we had to take them both to the vet.

This was already going to be a slightly complicated process, because they are now full-grown cats and no longer fit simultaneously into the carrier in which we brought them home when they were two months old; rushthatspeaks had agreed to loan us a carrier into which we would encourage one cat, which turned out to be Autolycus because he sniffed at it and then went inside to investigate of his own accord. Hestia, who had never before displayed any fear of doctor's visits, was so on edge from the construction noise that she fled to my room and took refuge behind the curtain of the window beyond my desk, knowing she could not be easily extricated without knocking over everything. Rob did so with infinite caution and gentleness, but then she clawed him and wedged herself underneath the futon. We had to lure her out with treats. And then we had to carry two unnerved cats out into a hot, noisy street, right past the jackhammers because it was the only spot on the street where Rush could stash the car, thank you, Somerville parking. Hestia was already emitting a series of small, distressed mews. Autolycus began to yell. I had never heard anything like it. I have heard him call from one end of the house to another when he can't find his sister or thinks he needs more attention now, but this was the sustained, heartfelt, gonging unhappiness of a cat with Siamese ancestry and it was heartbreaking. The good news is that the vet appointment itself was efficient and possibly even soothing: the rooms were cool and quiet and someone much defter at the process than myself clipped all of their claws, so that Autolycus no longer clicks when he walks and Hestia doesn't accidentally fasten herself to screens. (Usually we trim their claws ourselves, but Hestia has never liked it and this last time Autolycus hissed halfway through the first paw, so we thought maybe professionals for a change.) They were visibly calmer when returned to us. It lasted exactly as long as it took us to step outside into the heat again. And then we pulled up on the other side of the street from our house, and I ran inside to unlock all the doors so that we could move the cats as quickly through the jackhammer zone as possible, and a UPS truck pulled up and double-parked itself directly between the house and the car. So instead we carried the cats around the UPS truck, which was also hot and noisy, and released them from their carriers as soon as we had them inside, and the jackhammering and bandsawing did not in any way cease until five o'clock in the afternoon, but the cats took it a lot more calmly after that. Rush got their carrier back. They were a hero of the revolution. The UPS truck drove away as soon as we had detoured the cats around it, because I don't believe it was on the street for any other reason. Rob promptly collapsed upstairs with the air conditioner and I worked for three hours and then passed out on the couch. As I type, Hestia is sleeping in one of her nests in my office and Autolycus is playing on the floor with an industrial-strength rubber band, occasionally making noises to indicate that I should participate a little more in the cat-entertainment and a little less in the delectable clickety noise that he is not allowed to hunt. I think everyone is going to be all right. It was not the best afternoon, though.

Unexpected nice thing of the day: I had my prose style in Ghost Signs likened to Joseph Conrad, specifically An Outcast of the Islands (1898). I'll take it!

[edit] Second unexpected nice thing of the day: I got back from running a late errand to find that ladymondegreen had sent me the DVD of the Alloy Orchestra's Wild and Weird. I saw this program of shorts at the Somerville Theatre with ratatosk in 2012. I wrote about the four films that most impressed me at the time. I guess I should get around to the rest.