hibernating

Sometimes working for a Very Large Multinational Firm does offer some perks. The office is closed this week. Closed, as in, "please do not come in to work; please stay home and relax." What a huge gift. Best I've received all year.

So I'm laying low. I really think that humans function best with a period of true hibernation each winter. This week is the exact kind of solitude I crave in July when the office is clicking and whirring with all its noise and fury. Maybe I can store the silence up and pull it out of the freezer when things get loud in the summer.

So far this week:
(1) Updated the ephemera page. It's a good end-of-year selection; go check it out.
(2) Threw away about four big garbage bags of stuff, including about one big bag full of those free-gifts-with-purchase cosmetics trinkets accumulated in about ten years of Clinique counter visits. I am nothing if not irrationally devoted to the Clinique free-gifts-with-purchase.
(3) Organized two closets into near-military levels of precision and order.
(4) Left the Chia Herb Garden given to me by my mother last year for Christmas in the public space of my apartment building with a "free to good home" note. (Miraculously, someone claimed it.)
(5) Listened carefully three times to the Joanna Newsom album. Though I am being careful to not to make a snap judgment on this recording, I have found it to be a difficult and inaccessible piece of music. (Amazon.com's review of the album calls her voice "a piercing flutter that's pitched somewhere between Björk and a hand brake" -- ha.)

So far, I think this album is a strong front-runner for the Most Overrated Album of 2006. Or possibly Most Irritating but Widely Acclaimed by Groupthinkers Album of 2006? I'm not saying that this album doesn't have admirable qualities. I just wonder if all those music listeners out there who nod along energetically when this album pops up in conversation are secretly thinking, "What the hell is that album about?" Listening to it feels like I'm back in college, sitting through some agonizing, highly conceptual art performance in an effort to earn cultural events credits.

(Coming up next time, a list of songs that did work for me this year....)