In true triangular spirit, I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday this past weekend — that’s three times three times three years completed in this world.  I took a day off from work on Friday but ended up quarantined at home, writing a paper for my literary theory class.  Ah, well.  The rest of the weekend more than made up for it!

I also got around to watching the 1970s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which I’ve had from Netflix for close to two months now.  An excellent cast all around.  Mia Farrow, Robert Redford, Sam Waterston.  I’m both curious and skeptical about the upcoming Baz Luhrmann flick…

Recently I’ve been reading The Love of a Good Woman, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro.  Her characters and themes are usually so staid, serious, but on occasion she’ll come completely out of left field with a passage either hilarious or disturbing.  I yelped aloud at a bus stop today when I reached this point in a story, about nightmares plaguing the protagonist:

In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts of circumstances) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners.  With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother.  She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism.  “Yes, this will have to do,” she would say to herself. “This will do if nothing better comes along.”  And this coldness of heart, this matter-of-fact depravity, simply drove her lust along.  She woke up unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief, came pouring back into her.

Yikes!

Today I went to a fellow Libra friend’s birthday brunch in Forest Hills.  We took the bus straight down Metropolitan Avenue all the way from Williamsburg, passing the inscrutable charms of Middle Village and enormous swaths of graves on either side.  We hitched a ride back with someone afterward, flying down the BQE and getting home in a third of the time it took us on public transportation.  There in the mid-afternoon sun was the entire island of Manhattan in sparkling glory; and there, foregrounded, were the cemeteries we had passed earlier.  The gritty, indelible urban sprawl in strange harmony with the fields of gray stone, markers of mortality.