Field Trip City

Last night I had a dream that I was at my family's place, and they were keeping an injured seagull they had found in a thin glass tank filled with water. It looked like it had drowned, so I emptied the tank, picked up the bird and pushed the water out of its body. For a moment its skin turned translucent, so I knew when it was emptied. The bird was still alive. I nursed it back to health slowly. Gradually it turned into a kitten, so I started feeding it soft cat food. By the end of the dream it was healthy and we were best buds.

I spent awhile last night reading Gertrude Stein, who began to make more and more sense to me as the night wore on. I get the feeling that her writing tries incredibly hard to sustain a moment - a point in our lives at which we experience full awareness and feel it burn a place into our memory. Stein is fun to read out loud.

I also started reading Professor Sullivan's biography on Elizabeth Smart, of whom I'm not familiar. It is interesting to read about high class social life in Ottawa during the early part of the 20th century. It's funny to think that society papers wrote extensively about how people dressed for parties. When I move back to Ottawa I'm going to start a paper that details every party I throw - what my friends are wearing, what jokes they tell. Riveting stuff to a mass audience.