While I was busy Knowing, Willing, Daring, and Keeping Silent about the project B. and I have underway, I spouted off my mouth (or, well, my hands) about having a job … and it promptly dried up.

HA!
Told ya so!
—The Universe

It’s not a big deal — the job in question was a temporary gig, and dried up because the business in question realized they weren’t going to need more people for that shift just now. They offered me another shift, but it would’ve conflicted with ballet (and everything else, since it started at 3 AM o_O) — and since being able to add Moar Ballet! is half the point, I told them I was absolutely okay with being wait-listed for when they need someone for the shift they’d offered me.

I’m poking around at other job options, now, and still enjoying the privilege of really not having to make a lot of money. I’m not picky, so I’m sure I’ll find something.

In other news, I’m re-reading Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides and trying to figure out how the hell I’ve read it twice before without realizing how gloriously beautiful Conroy’s writing is. It may be a question of not having been ready, really, before: I think I did a lot of skimming, knowing that there were parts of the book that were going to hit me close to the bone and knowing, maybe, that I wasn’t ready for that.

Anyway, this is part of why I re-read books. Whenever I revisit my “old friends,” the experiences I’ve had in the intervening period (one year for some books, like the other I’m re-reading right now, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King; many years for others, like The Prince of Tides) color the author’s words with new insights and meanings.

A good book is a living thing, y’all. Just as you can never step into the same stream twice, you can — if you’re living, and really letting life get to your bones — never read the same good book twice.

As for crappy books? Who knows. I’m willing to admit that I won’t eschew a bad book if it’s all that comes to hand (but I’ll also read phone books and cereal boxes; I am a promiscuous, compulsive reader), but I rarely revisit them. I do know I’ve read the same chapters of If I Stay (which is a potentially-compelling story badly written) about thirty times in the downstairs bathroom, and I have yet to notice any new layers, there … but that might just be the influence of my ivory-tower prejudice against half-baked writing.

Okay, that’s it for the moment.

Oh, wait! One more thing! How could I possibly forget this?!

For Christmas, our wonderful friend Chef Kelly got us a 10-class card to Suspend, the aerial arts studio run by two of our friends and favorite teachers … so we’ll be taking some aerials classes together soon, if I don’t die of anticipation first.

W00t!