feeling lucky

i’ve put myself in a position where i can be hurt now. but she will never hurt me, not on purpose. look at her, she’s an angel. we will, of course, hurt each other. everybody hurts each other. but we will be forgiven, and it won’t happen that same way again next time. i’m optimistic.

my yearly tarot predicted this month would be The Sun.

it is.

i should draw fourteen for next year. 2024, all even numbers. i trust it, trustworthy year. fourteen cards. one for every month and two for the theme. this year's theme was learning to take as easily as i give. death and rebirth in the desert. oscillating like a freshly plucked string.

christmas eve was perfect. christmas day was perfect. boxing day was strange but beautiful. close and beautiful.

christmas eve i spend all day getting ready, writing, tidying up, eating cheese and helping Lucky with the shopping. when evening falls i head to the bus stop. Lucky’s coming from Green Valley. i get there a little early so i slip through the open gate at Bromley-by-Bow and wait on the platform. we walk home, laughing and talking. lots of laughing, lots of talking. lots of plans, always plans.

Lucky has a little panic about the size of her todo list, we jump up and launch into inaction. it really felt like we were about to do something, but we get distracted by each other and delay everything until the morning. just after midnight we make a pledge to each xxxother.

christmas day. we have had our menu planned since the 22nd, finalized over dinner on the 23rd. groceries shopped on the 24th. the morning is 50 open recipe tabs & typing up a timing schedule in Notes.app. under the wire, last minute, zero hour. (zero hour and eleventh hour both mean the same thing?) it might appear to the untrained observer that we don’t have our shit together, but scholars of Taiichi Ohno & W. Edwards Deming will recognize JIT Manufacturing when they see it. jerusalem bagels, gazan salad, cauliflower cheese, carrots and parsnips, roast potatoes, quorn roast, freshly made cranberry sauce, vine leaves, labneh, houmous, za’atar, olives, crackers, cheese and shloer and wine and mango monster. one of the best meals of my life. one of the best days too. so near and tender. so fun, so playful-stressful. we played a few rounds of chameleon with Lucky’s brother. we walk alone together. she puts on a little music, i listen to a podcast. we walk in circles holding hands. my heart could burst right out of my chest.

boxing day starts early. dark and lazy. up at 5 and dressed and out the door quite soon to walk for hours to the station. the district opens up as we get to Tower Hill, so we take a shortcut. breakfast grenade bar and coffee. she to Brighton, me to Blackheath. i make poor food choices, walk for hours more. hop a bus outside the cinema, and clamber up the stairs to home. cozy in bed, i put some tabla samples on the op-1 and have a napcident which messes up my sleep schedule. i finish reading Finkelstein’s Gaza. —gotta get to sleep because i’m going to Brighton in the morning for a work-from-home date.

27th special. she introduces me to her friend who leaves us to work together in the cafe. she takes me out for dinner. we eat plenty and drink a little wine. we get a little room above a gay bar and sleep soundly, waking early. just after midnight we make a pledge to each other. it's cherries season. i lost my aiaiai headphones. we get a little coffee and do a little work and eat some fries and we head home.

in the morning it's working from home + eating Christmas leftovers for the last friyay of the year. we get a little mint tea in soho with her cousin and her cousin's husband. then she takes me to a little irish bar with a customer-facing-dumbwaiter where i drink a diet coke and a sparkling water and we talk about the future. and the past. and we pull up the zapruder film so she can compare her butt to jackie onassis. jackie o's got nothing on Lucky.

i'm in a rush because i'm late for doing nothing for 6 hours (not a joke). here's a list:

• winter wonderland tickets
• regents park (cute, pretty)
• ¿¿¿Levant Kitchen at Selfridges??? ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿delicious???????
• rain, skip winter wonderland
• sleep apart nobody knows why
• <3
• nye i'm not doing cheese in the bath instead i'm just hanging around in london town until midnight so i can kiss somebody and go home
• all these people i'm being introduced to love misgendering me immediately in reply to a sentence where lucky used a correct pronoun
• my life includes a lot more mint tea than it did two months ago.

love u bye

hey!

look at the week, forty-nine. very nearly the end. i got sick this week, punishment for going into the office last week. it wasn't a particular tough sickness but because i've been being healthy it felt so unfair. normally when i get sick i'm like "yeah, that tracks" because my body is a satanic temple but this time it felt like there was no god. i spent the first few days of it accidentally working with the sick emoji status and texting people to ask them to pity me more. i made a tasty spicy spicy paneer tomato cream curry which partially fixed me, but the main pharmaceutical was pity. i can't believe how little pity i received as i lay there DYING of an extremely mild flu that i was mostly able to work through and ignore. heartless bastards, every last all of you.

i've been making a bit of music with various swedish rectangles. been practising chord changes and scales on the keyboard like i did when i was a teenager to try and get more cozy with the keys so i can talk through it more like i can with a guitar. after the great success of「ANTICIPATION」 i am gazing doe-eyed into the imagined future where i lock myself away in some faraway hotel room with just the op-1 and perform the transmutation stella signata, lucifer, boiling milk + chrysopoeia.

on saturday i met a friend for her birthday. remembering christabel's rule that "if you're the birthday girl + someone doesn't bring you a gift, that means they ARE the gift," i brought nothing at all. it was a lovely time, we walked around in the freezing cold from lewisham to the heath and talked and talked and i drank a shot of tequila at the railway pub which was very loud and busy and christmas. on saturday evening i took a train to london bridge and met a couple of colleagues at the market porter where i drank 3 more shots of tequila. one of the colleagues invited us to hang out at their place and so we went back and we watched the movie wall street and i drank 3 or 4 sips of white wine and ate 5 nuts and two cheeses.

i'm experimenting now to see if it is possible to introduce some alcohol sometimes on special occasions without completely losing track of my otherwise strict health regiment. my limit is 4 shots of tequila OR 4 corona hard seltzers. if i find it making me lax i'll have to cut it all the way out again, we'll see.

Sunday i spent a warm and cozy morning resting. in the afternoon i went to greenwich market with a dear friend. we did a little shopping + had a fabulous turkish lunch. when the sun fell we crossed underground through a hole in the thames, and we walked a while along the river and we talked and talked before we parted ways and headed home.

i got a map of the world to stick on my wall. the listing said "huge" but i didn't really consider that over 2 metres means it's much longer than me.

It's basically actual size.

extremely long

i just finished hanging it in the kitchen where it imposes itself upon me

now i can point at countries where war is about to break out while making eggs

and learn that these are all actually different countries???

merry crincemince it's me caroline the christmas crow deer good tidings and happy hannakuh to my deerly behovèd friends and lovers

big week ahead:. dia de la virgen de guadalupe tuesday. acadian rememberance day on weds. die hard on thurs. and then the last day of chanukah.

every day i seem to become more annoying, yet i enjoy myself also more.

text me!