even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: monday

imaginary outfit: monday

Actual:

Check email; ask about proofreading gigs, update spreadsheets. Pick up kid from preschool. Stop at the big box store; look for a drying rack to corral muddy snowpants and wet mittens. Lunch; something in the freezer? Rake leaves; call grandparents. Text check-ins: pals, sister, parents. Library? Dinner: ground turkey in the fridge; sweet potatoes are still good, hopefully. Kiddo bath, book, bed. Scrabble until bedtime.

Ideal:

Teleport to unfamiliar walkable city with large, airy library. Request stack of books on a random theme: rock collections, the Holy Roman Empire, women in silent films, etc. Take notes. Stroll; find a strange little house museum celebrating an obscure personage. Wander through, admiring Latin mottos on floral china plates, hand-painted wallpaper, and cracked-leather Chesterfields. Wind up at dim publike bar. Summon Sean and Hugh via teleportation for warming meal of French onion soup and cheeseburgers. Arrive home. Kiddo bath, book, bed. Scrabble until bedtime.

Ladbroke blanket wrap / sweatshirt by The Great / Rollas jeans / Folk Cavi coat / Spalwart sneakers / NYPL tote / Ecoffee cup / Laura Lombardi mini portrait earrings / MHL felted cap.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: monday

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