A couple of months ago I was standing on the corner with a friend, waiting for a town car to take her back to Harlem. It was sleeting so we stood there a while before anyone stopped. Across the street in the elementary school, a construction crew was working. I thought they were just replacing the windows, but they were clearly doing a lot more than that. For a moment the high, penetrating rasp of a wet masonry saw eclipsed our conversation. I winced at the volume, though ceramic sounds mostly make my mouth water a bit. (I like the sound of unglazed porcelain pieces clinking up against one another, or the faint grinding a blasted glass stopper makes in a flask.) My friend turned excitedly toward the sound and then apologized over her shoulder, saying that in her house noises like that are music. He husband is a musician and makes some beautiful, but frankly difficult music (sound art?). It occurred to me that as conscious as I am of the visual world around me, I’m only intermittently alert to the aural landscape. When I suddenly notice it, I am suddenly overwhelmed by how much I’ve been missing, the way I was in the Zumthor building in Vals. The Therme Vals is a singular building. It is probably the most completely considered physical environment I’ve ever encountered. Everything is intentional. Materials, light, color, lines of sight, temperature, smell, and acoustics. Yet it doesn’t feel at all overwrought or overdesigned. It feels very pure.

I am hung over with exhaustion today. Baby was possessed of an mysterious feral energy between 3 and 5am and wanted to run about the room shouting for shoes and toys and other things I can’t recall. I could use a hangover remedy: (Austin) Tex-Mex migas with nice thick homemade chips and tons of cheese melted over the top for a moment under the broiler. There should be refried beans made with a lot of bacon grease and a very spicy michelada… Instead I’m sitting here trying to think about graphing and proposals and not really succeeding at all.

An interview with the director of Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim, a woman I once worked with and liked very much in the way I can’t help liking people who make beautiful things that appear rigorously organized in some mysterious personal way… I can’t wait to see this movie.

Koyuki, a person with whom I am acquainted three dimensionally, writes about how the structure of her life has changed permanently now that she has a child. (The yoga class was enjoyable mayhem. I don’t think I got through a single asana without my child throwing someone else’s to the floor, screaming for a bola or a pelota, trying to announce to the teacher “thisisa…itisa…it’sa…goodie vela!,” or deciding that it was time to drape himself over me and try to nurse. (Woo! It was something like spring break on South Padre Island.) Afterward we walked around Harlem and I yearned quietly for fancy running shoes. We had a fine time. I instantly decided that, since I don’t work Fridays, I will bring the baby every week. And one of these Fridays I will. Nearly everyone I know who has a child describes a profound change in herself… I don’t know. I think I am more myself, the way I am after a big or particularly intense experience (and jesus, giving birth was certainly the most intense experience of my life), but I don’t feel either any sense of loss or at all like a new person. The structure of my life has changed a bit, but it hasn’t occurred to me to think even that has changed permanently. Some essential things are different now, but they don’t actually affect the structure of my life much. (e.g. I am temporarily afraid of dying because I can’t bear to imagine what my baby would do without me. Of course he’d survive, but even though much less intense than it was a year ago, his need for me is still so sprawling.) I’m still me. I’m still the same person I always was. I am deliriously, unspeakably happy to be A’s mother but when I identify myself, I would almost as soon define myself as someone’s mother as I would have defined myself as not-anyone’s-mother beforehand. I don’t feel diminished or ruined or triumphant or… really anything besides myself. My life and my person had a trajectory before the baby and the baby hastened some things (besides gravity’s claim on my body) and emphasized others, but didn’t change the trajectory much. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Probably neither. Or a little of each… I can’t get enough of reading or talking to women who find it utterly different.

The León Ferrari and Mira Schendel show at the MOMA is pretty wonderful, though as usual I didn’t care for the MOMA chitchat. (Is it that I am getting older, more confident of my own readings, so I have less interest in being told what art means? Maybe. I like to talk and read ideas though. It can’t be only that.) The change in León Ferrari’s work in recent years is really interesting. It is suddenly fierce⁰¹ and unambiguous in a way that’s most interesting because of who is he and his years of beautifully cloudy previous work. And aside from the work (which prompted a sketchbook page full of frantic notes and secured a few flyaway ideas about type and handwriting I’ve had in the last year), the pictures of the two artists set beside one another, each with an edge of work in the frame, are pretty great. Like a black and white gender lesson, he with his pointy structure (haha!… ha!) and she with her knotted textile (which makes me think of Eva Hesse). The two of them are a good combination, their work not particularly related until you see it together. Also Mira Schendel was adorable.

The Whale Hunt. For once I’m not talking about Moby Dick (though it features in the story), which, based on the conversations I’ve recently overheard, has a cheerier ending than I recollect. Baby has seen me reading the Penguin paperback with the woodcut (is it? can’t recall) of the breeching whale on the front, and arrived at his valuation of the book accordingly. I had to fight him for it by the last few chapters. He would snatch it away from me and take it to his father who will discuss the tiny pingüino on the spine and the carro (!?) on the front and tell him nice stories about la ballena Moby and how his nose is higher than his eyes and everyone drank tea and lived happily ever after with the fishes, as I suppose a number is true, if you aren’t too literal about living or happily.

Apparently John Maeda’s riffs on creative leadership keep getting better and more refined. (The Web2.0 Expo talk is supposed to be online as a podcast at some point.) There’s a lot to be said for repeating yourself.

Hey, 30 Rock seems to have funnied up again! Remember those bleak years in the early part of the century when there was really nothing on TV? Since I don’t watch “reality” TV except under Clockwork Orange-ian circumstances, I spent a lot of time staring into space before bed in those years. Actually that’s not true. I bought a million Futurama DVDs and carefully memorized them in case anyone asks me to perform at a wedding. (The other day, the baby was playing with one of the DVDs depicting Bender on the cover. He held it up and shouted Papi! Well, well.)  The truth is I’m not much of TV watcher when I’m by myself; I prefer a book and a tea (or hot milk with honey and brandy), but there’s something nice about sharing an experience with your belove-ed (not loathe-ed) at the end of the day, even if it’s a few minutes of reruns before you both fall over. Sometimes conversation is just too taxing.

Now that I’m thinking about it, warm milk with brandy and honey has been fairly significant for me this far into my life. When I went into labor, I called the midwife to ask her what to do and she told me to relax and have a beer. I asked if warm milk with brandy was okay and she said it sounded like a good idea, so I sat at the kitchen table and sipped my toasty milk and wrote some emails and tried to picture having a baby, but couldn’t. Then, the first time we took said baby (who turned out to be real) to visit my parents, he wept the entire hour and a half drive home on the freeway. My father, who had picked us up at the airport, couldn’t understand why I didn’t take him out and nurse him in the car, but, besides being illegal, it was the freeway and the baby was still really tiny and floppy and I was a very new mother who was still picturing catastrophe around every corner despite almost dying as I listened to his howl. Anyhow, to distract me, my father said he remembered me shrieking that way and that he’d secretly dump a bit of brandy into my bedtime bottle with milk and honey. V was impressed. And that’s still her favorite bedtime drink, he said.