11.02 pm

Opera high is quite unlike any other. It puts you in a quieter sort of place. Not the wild bursts of energy that come from the staying up too late high, or the sustaining, could do this for miles that comes with runner's high. The mellow, contented feeling from sushi high comes close, but it doesn't quite get there.

Jodi wears a hat although it hasn't rained for six days. She says a girl needs a gun these days, hey, on account of those rattlesnakes.

I walked home past the Somerset House, which I've glanced at in passing a few times, and realized that what I thought was the entrance was really a giant courtyard that leads down to the Embankment. I saw water splashing around inside and went for a closer look. One of those fountains set into the cobblestones of the courtyard, a square of about 7 jets on either side. Each had its own, different coloured light at the bottom, and the size of the jets changed heights. I briefly considered dropping my bag and playing tag with the fountain, but the water never quite went all the way down entirely. Most likely to keep people from myself from doing silly things.

She looks like Eve Marie Saint in on the waterfront. She reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.

I think the thing about the opera - really, the thing about any kind of performance - is that it allows you to step into that state known in the creative writing universe as the willing suspension of disbelief. That is, for the span of a three hour performance, we all agree to pretend that what is happening on the stage is real. Perhaps you take this as a given. Isn't that the point of going to shows, to escape reality for a bit?

Sure. But this collective ability to ignore the real world takes on a different sort of meaning when you're sitting in Trefalgar Square in a crowd of about 10,000 people, and you've all agreed to share the same collective fantasy.

She's less than sure if her heart has come to stay in San Jose, and her neverborn child haunts her now, as she speeds down the freeway. As she tries her luck with the traffic police, out of boredom more than spite, she never finds no trouble, she tries too hard, she's oblivious despite herself.

The Royal Opera House had run a contest for amateur opera singers, the grand prize being the privilege of singing in Trafalgar Square during the intermission. They looked so young, both of them, and the expressions on their faces as they finished singing and heard the crowd begin to applaud were a combination of shock and amazement and pure joy.

Jodi never sleeps 'cause there are always needles in the hay. She says a girl needs a gun these days on account of those rattlesnakes.
Opera high is restlessness. It is wanting to walk the streets of London until the sun rises. It is wanting to sit down at the piano by St. Paul's and play Beethoven's moonlight sonata under the stars. It is wanting to hold onto that feeling of being completely alive.

4.00 pm

I could be in any park, in any country. The open stretch of lawn is surrounded by trees, their broad leaves providing a welcome canopy of shade. I hear half a dozen languages around me. Italian. French. Indian, I think, and something that might be Russian. I’m not in any park, in some far off and exotic country. I’m in London, in England, sitting in St. James Park with a laptop, a guidebook for London, and a book I bought this morning by an up and coming young novelist.

The reason I am in the park, instead of out in Brighton or Oxford or pub-crawling with my mates from the office is that I’m starting to realize that I am losing myself working at this law firm. One of the others summers told me the other day that I don’t really seem like a Berkeley person. That I don’t really seem like a hippie. I can understand why he would get that idea, of course. I come into the office in a suit most days. Largely because if I don’t wear a jacket, I sit and shiver in the extreme air conditioned refrigerator that is my office. I work mostly with the arbitration and litigation teams, defending corporations facing white collar crime investigations and the big energy and oil companies investing in foreign countries.

There was an incident at the office yesterday involving a very, very unhappy woman who had worked there about five years ago. It was clear that she was rather upset, and while I won’t presume to know what was going on with her, I’m fairly sure that it wasn’t just working at the office that had gotten her so ticked off. Still, it’s things like that which make you question your own choices. Will I end up that miserable in five years? I certainly hope not.

4.10 pm

Rather depressing thoughts for what is, on the whole, a glorious Saturday afternoon. I think I shall go find an ice cream stand and see if I can get through the whole thing without dripping on myself. I fear the chances of that actually happening are rather slim, though.

6.29 pm

Went on for a walk in the park. Saw a girl in a gold-coloured polyester princess dress and a tiara, which made me smile. And a creep who tried to hit on me, which didn’t. Then I ambled over to Hyde park, where I caught the opening bit of what I think was the Neil Young concert before the sky began to make threatening rumbles.

I made it to the Tube station before the rain and found myself in a sweaty mass of over-stimulated tourists. Transferred to another line immediately. Reached St. Paul’s as the sky really began to open. Big, fat drops of rain that left splotches the size of quarters on the pavement. Am now sitting in my living room with the windows wide open, letting the fresh rain scent blow in.

7.46 pm

And, I should add, a hauntingly beautiful tribute to Michael Jackson in black sharpie on a wall of the National Gallery.

8.47 pm

I've been debating whether or not to post this. After all, some of you might go see the movie, and I wouldn't want to ruin it or anything. On the other hand, very rarely do I have a book experience that leaves me feeling so incredibly used.

I went into the bookstore the other night on my way to yoga, and picked up a book. It was a rather innocuous looking paperback, and I flipped through it and read a bit. It seemed interesting, largely because the bits I'd read made it seem as though the substance of the book revolved around some pretty thorny ethical dilemmas. The owning-the-rights-to-your-own-body-kind, and the when-do-parents-stop-having-the-ability-to-make-good-decisions-for-their-children kind. So I downloaded the audio version to take with me on the plane.

It started out great. It was the kind of book you can't put down. In fact, after I got off the plane Saturday, I kept listening. I put my headphones in when I walked around the city Sunday. I probably walked more than I would have otherwise. I raced home to finish listening to it Monday. Then, Tuesday morning I think it was, I read a review in the New York Times about this particular book. Which was being made into a movie. Which was not, as I was beginning to suspect, about thorny ethical issues at all. Instead, it was simply one in a line of books by the same author all dealing with the same exact subject: dying children.

I kept reading the book, mostly wanting to prove the Times article (which took a rather dim view of both the author, the genre, and the novel) wrong. A book this good couldn't be that bad, could it? Oh yes. Those wonderfully tricky questions about morals and ethics and black and white lines got lost in the melodrama and pathos of the novel's end. It's not very often that I finish a book and wish I could take those 13 hours of my life back.

8.05 pm

Right. It's not yet ten o'clock in the evening and already I've had too much to drink. I blame the litigators. If the one hadn't sent out the email saying that we were congregating in the pub downstairs to celebrate a day without rain (which really, given the week we've had, is a remarkable achievement) and then the other buying me drinks in said pub ... well, I would have been home, and sober, and packing for London several hours ago. On the other hand, it was rather nice to hear the one say, in puppy dog sort of tones, "It's fine, go to London, I'll just work on this chart without you, and I won't miss you at all" and the other say "But if you're in London who's going to deflate my ego with sarcastic and cruel remarks?"

I hadn't quite realized how well I was fitting in with the litigators until it struck me that several of them were rather going to miss me. Somewhat strange, because I'd thought of myself as an arbitration sort of girl. And I've gotten along famously with the arbitrators I've had a chance to work with, but it's been mostly litigation assignments.

8.26 pm

Pizza in the oven and clothes in the laundry. Now I need to figure out a) what I'm packing to take to London and b) what suitcase(s) I'm putting it in. Did I mention I'm leaving for London at about 5 am tomorrow? The idea was to leave work early, around 5ish, because my assignments have dried up over the past week and I didn't have anything urgent to take care of, and pack. Then I would go to bed early, and get in a good night of sleep before getting on a plane to fly across several thousand mile of ocean. And because I have really not had enough to drink that the idea of packing suits with hand covered in pizza sauce sounds like a good idea, I'm queuing up Dexter on Netflix to watch while I eat. Because nothing is better with a few beers and pizza than a serial killer who uses his power for good. Mostly.

10.03 pm

Munchkin runs up the stairs from the basement, for all the world like there's an army of ghouls behind him, shouting "Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow there's an ANIMAL in the washer." I'm in the guest room (because both of the bedrooms I occupied in this house have since been taken over by various brothers) changing, so I put my jeans back on because if there is some sort of large animal I'll feel much better prepared to deal with it if I am wearing jeans and not pink tiger striped pajama pants.

The animal turns out to be a mouse. I learn this from my mother, who is having trouble talking because she's laughing so hard. My father, it seems, has gone down to the basement to deal with said mouse, Munchkin being incapable of doing so at the moment. Dad comes up the stairs and starts lecturing Munchkin on why you don't run up the stairs as though there were an army of ghouls behind you yelling "ow ow ow ow ow" if your only problem is a mouse in the washer. As my father talks, he waves his hands around. He doesn't appear to notice that one of the hands is holding a plastic container, like the kind you get at the deli when you order a pasta salad, with a very wet, small mouse in it.

"Is that the mouse?" I ask. "Is it dead?"

My father shakes the container a few times. The mouse moves. "No," he says. "It's rather wet and unhappy though."

And really, this is a fairly typical evening in my parents house.

3.18 pm

I have gone to five yoga classes in the past eleven days. Two in the past two days. I don't yet have that "hurting in muscles I didn't even knew existed" feeling that I did when I first started yoga a few years ago, but it's close. The kind of weird thing is that I actually enjoy that sort of pain. I used to feel like this after really good dance classes or really hard lacrosse workouts. I'm also starting to feel less painfully stiff and sore in the morning, which is a definite bonus. Part of that is the fact that I'm sleeping on a pull-out sofa in which, until I put a foam eggshell thing down a few days ago, I could feel every mattress spring when I lay down. Most of it is that I'm totally losing the flexibility I had when I was younger.

The other night I was at a bar with one of the girls from work, and we got onto the topic of dance and acro and all that, and she mentioned that there's adult gymnastics at the Chelsea pier. It sounds like you pay your $20 and they let you at all the equipment for a few hours on a Friday night. I'm wicked excited to go do it, but I'm also wondering if a) my body will still remember what to do and b) if my body will actually move and bend that way again. I know what it feels like to do a back handspring. You have to bend your knees and jump, straight up, while bending your head back and trusting that your arms will catch you. That's the hard part. After your arms hit the ground your feet will follow, at which point you have to stay on them and not wobble around as you stand up. What I wonder, though, is if my arms will support me, if my back will arch the way it needs to, if I can still jump straight up into the air as though I were never planning on coming back down.

All of which is to say that I find myself upping the personal ante for my yoga classes. I signed up because I knew I'd be eating ridiculous lunches all summer and I wanted something to keep off the "summer fifteen". And because after watching the contortionists at Cirque, I really wanted to be able to bend down and touch my toes again. Now, my goal is to be able to get flexible enough to do a back handspring this summer.