June 22

Ever wish you could freeze frame a moment in your day, and look at it and say "this is not my life"?

  I've always liked this quote, and have used it often to express disdain and horror of things happening around and to me, including in a college application essay. But today it has a different meaning, because so many good things have been happening recently that I can't believe it is my life we're talking about here.

  Roomie sitch continues to be excellent and non-awkward. Moved some things in, and getting set up in the spare bedroom as soon as I can find  a substitute for this futon currently housed in the living room. I've been successful thus far at not being messy or annoying or really even noticeable as a roommate, which is pretty much what I'm going for. Leaving work is no longer the terrible experience it was when I was seriously dreading being home. Now leaving work is just sad because I had to leave all the cool stuff behind til the next day!

  Okay, I have a terrible story, and I'm going to put it right here. My boss was getting some original notebooks out of the archives to send out to be photographed, and I started paging through the ones in the box on her desk. Having already come across some Woody-penned items, I was able to not get all fangirly at the site of  poems he wrote or pictures he drew in these books. But still, I really wanted to see. Casually paging through his diary for 1946, I picked a day at random and read the entry, still amazed that I got this sweet gig and get to see this awesome things every week. Then I read the entry again. It was a short, four line poem... and it was straight-up pornographic.

  Oh how I laughed.

  At least there wasn't a picture. WG was apparently quite the correspondent with the ladies, some of whom felt compelled to burn the salacious letters to keep them out of the hands of family or husbands. And, well... there it was.

  Anyway, back to the actual topic of today, my boss is leaving town for the week of the 4th and is entrusting me with her cat and Manhattan apartment for an entire ten days. It's almost too good to be true -- free stay in Manhattan , private lodging, and convenient base for everything in NYC? Yes, please.

  All these wonderful people started to make me think that perhaps I had been to quick to judge the people of NY and the North... but then I realized something: they're all foreigners. Roomie is from Ireland, boss is Canadian -- this is not a representative sample we're drawing from.

  Nevertheless, these occurrences and others of lesser significance have all contributed to my feeling as though this has to be someone else's life I'm living right now... and to my hope that we never trade back!