higgledy-piggledy!

It's March already! And it's been so long since I've posted, I'm just gonna jump right in here, and it'll get better from here on out.

1. Apologies to anyone local or faraway who I've been neglecting. It's not you, it's me. It's been a really difficult, chaotic move. I mean, not bad or traumatic or anything, but high on the pain-in-the-assedness index. It's only the last few days I've started to catch my breath and sort of feel like myself again.

2. I've been catching up with some movies I missed while I was away, via Netflix. My favorites so far are also among my most-anticipated: Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (although I was mildly annoyed by the fact that characters kept mentioning Catalan culture and identity but no one seemed to speak Catalan--including the purported Catalans--and the culture seemed wholly Spanish, not Catalan. But otherwise I loved it) and Persepolis, a film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. I have more to say about both of these films, but who am I kidding? I'll probably never get around to saying it here. Or maybe I'll surprise myself.

Also, Let the Right One In, which I was actually able to catch at Athens Cine, is one of the most moving and horrific horror films I've ever seen. Every time I think there can't possibly by any stretch of the imagination be any life left in the vampire trope (life left? vampire? get it? sorry...) someone proves me wrong.

3. My friend Dave Schwartz got nominated for a Nebula for his first novel, Superpowers! This book came out right around the time I got to Ireland and I tried to get the Ballinamore library to order it, but they never did. See, they should have, because now it's a Nebula nominee. Come on, Ballinamore library!

4. Speaking of Ballinamore, I've been having strange dreams in which various residents of Ballinamore appear in the usual unlikely dream situations.

I've been daydreaming, on the other hand, about Spain: just the other day I closed my eyes and I was back in the Plaza Larga on that sunny afternoon we sat on a bench people-watching, Spaniards and Romanys and hippies and junkies all going about their business and I said something like, "This would be a good place to disappear," which is exactly what I went on to have my poor character try and do in the story that will someday appear in the Apparitions anthology over there in my sidebar.

I remember those moments sitting in the plaza as among the most perfect of my life, as a part of those jeweled moments of absolute awareness and contentment that travel gives me every once in a while. They are usually mundane, utterly unremarkable, completely magical.

And one year ago today, we touched down at the airport in sunny Barcelona from rainy London.

5. February wasn't bad but it was....(hm, already used chaotic. Google a synonym for chaotic and get: anarchic, disordered, disorganized, every which way, harum-scarum, helter-skelter [yikes!], higgledy-piggledy (best word of all!), rampageous [I am not familiar with this word but I like it and will use it in a sentence as soon as I am able], riotus, topsy-turvy, tumultous, turbulent, upside-down. Yes, yes, and yes, it was all these things.) I'm planning on having a much better March.