I saw "Voices of a Distant Star" again this morning. It's an anime piece that always makes me cry. I'm easy for some kinds of romantic manipulation to reach. The story is simple enough. Two Japanese teens meet and fall in love while training to be robot fighting machine pilots during an interstellar war. She makes the grade, he doesn't. She goes off with the spacefleet to war, he stays at home and has an ordinary life. As her ship pursues the alien enemy out of the solar system, her messages to him take longer and longer to reach Earth. And at near-light speeds, her time frame slows relative to his. He's aging relative to her. A birthday message comes to him: Happy 28th birthday, from the still sixteen-year-old me. You see? I can feel my eyes misting.

It's easy enough to make me cry. Always happens when I hear Concrete Blonde do "Tomorrow, Wendy" or Fairport Convention do "Fotheringay". Or when Marianne Faithfull sings "Running For Our Lives" or "Falling From Grace".

Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes that she wishes someone would post her a letter for a meme--- the Alphabet Meme that Marina at prettyuniverse was doing. Well, I'll do that for my Designated L-Girl. For Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo, then: ten things that cross her mind with the letter...L. Or because she's a PhD candidate and trained to research, two letters. The letter...L...and the letter...M. I do want to see her answers...

On the phone 'til 0500 this morning with a lovely Voice On The Aether. She is in fact an L-Girl all on her own. An L-name, and one that, here in the Deepest South, comes with a hyphen. Five hours on the phone there in the dark. We talked 'til my house phone went dead, and then talked on my keitai. She does have the loveliest gentle voice. Just a trace of Southern-ness. A girl who goes to a small university in the hills around Birmingham. The kind of girl Miss Ginny and I always develop major crushes on. A girl for Indian summers, for tiny khaki shorts and cropped indie-band baby-tees, barefoot at a dockside party, a drink in her hand. I am becoming attached to her voice.

Miss Ginny writes that she has a "serious offer" to go to Kenya. Kenya? I really do hope she'll tell me the full story--- Details Matter. A trip to Nairobi, but...just a vacation? Or a teaching-English job? How long would she be there? How would it be funded? Who would she be going with? Miss Ginny wrote that she was terrified of anti-malarial pills, of the horror stories about side effects. All I could remember was the Pacific War, and GIs who took atabrine, the first synthetic anti-malarial, turning a hideous shade of yellow. I don't think that happens with whatever they give (mefloquine?) as an anti-malarial these days, but I understand Miss Ginny's fears.

If Miss Ginny gets to go to Nairobi, I'll be happy for her. She's a beautiful and bright and delightful girl. I want her to travel and have Adventures. Still, I will be desperately envious--- and bitter about my own life. Sudden trips to Kenya, language schools in Morocco or Paris or Croatia--- and I'm trapped here. I'd hoped to visit Miss Ginny in Montreal in early autumn, or to go back to Manhattan and take my Late Night Girl with me. I hate it here. I really hate in here, and I feel inferior compared to people who live almost anywhere else or who can travel at all. I'll be thrilled for Miss Ginny/Liedeczka. I will. She always has my support and affection. But I will be eaten up with envy. Just as I'm angry and bitter that I'm not at All Points West just outside NYC today, that there's no way I can ever have Adventures like a certain Vanished girl can have in and around the Skinny Island. So I'm bitter and despondent about the whole All Points West thing, too. Some auburn-haired girl is watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on one of the three stages right now, and I'm sitting here in the dark, too afraid to go down to the pool lest the bikini girls despise me.

Listening to the Killers, to the new Phoenix album, to early Strokes, to the Kills. I do like the new Phoenix album--- good indie pop. And I have to thank my green-eyed Late Night Girl for sending me Owen's cover of "Femme Fatale" and Messiaens' "Abime des Oiseaux".

I really, really do need Mini Viva's "Left My Heart in Tokyo". Someone out there must have it--- or have access to it ---on mp3. I do like Mini Viva...

Miss Ginny and I do agree about Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There". He's nowhere near the travel writer (or writer in general) that Paul Theroux is. But his description of Capri was a delight. And so is his account of the hauteur of the waiters at older Viennese cafes. Make a note: if Miss Ginny ever comes to Vienna with me, we are going to the American Bar in the Kaertnerdurchgang and sit amidst the Adolf Loos design and pretend to be Russian gangster and his demimondaine--- the current usual customers.

My leggy opera girl in Birmingham tells me that in one of the short stories I sent her--- "Notebooks" ---there's a moment where the Older Lover is taking the teen girl down to the hotel lobby in Baltimore after their first night together. She's still in last night's dress and tells him that she just knows everyone will look at her and think she's his whore. He laughs and kisses her and tells her to hush...or he'll start handing her cash right there in the lobby. My opera girl tells me that she thinks the moment is romantic and wicked and she wants something like that in her own life. I told her that all she ever needs to do is ask. She'd be a perfect partner for the moment--- and I'd be thrilled to be able to pay her.

I left Cynthia Gralla a note yesterday to tell her that, yes, I really had given copies of "The Floating World" to a dozen girls, and that her novel had helped me bed BRDYTW girls all over North America. Cynthia wrote back to ask if she could use that as a cover blurb. Oh, absolutely, I said. More than happy to be of marketing use.

I would worry if Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo went to Africa. My own view is that sub-Saharan Africa has nothing there except communicable disease. I'd go to Timbuktu, of course. And to Ethiopia to see Gondar. But there's just nothing else south of the Sahara that I want to see--- and nowhere that's even close to safe. Now...if Miss Ginny does want to go to Africa, she might want to read Stuart Stevens' "Malaria Dreams" first--- wonderful, darkly hilarious travel lit. Very much something she should read.

I do wish that WaterColorFire at LastFM was still looking over my playlists there. And I wish that Miss Ginny had her own LastFM account. My opera girl in Birmingham needs to look at WaterColorFire's playlists, mind you. She does need to add WaterColorFire as a friend.

Tonight I'll...watch "The Acid House" on DVD and drink a bottle of pinot gris and just maybe spend some time making story notes. My opera girl is intrigued by the Incestuous Siblings scenario, and both she and Miss Ginny have thrown out images that need to be worked into a story. Now--- I did re-read two Hemingway stories, "A Sea-Change" and "Hills Like White Elephants". There's so much to be done with the scenario told in allusive and elliptical dialogue. And, damn it--- I do want to finally read Miss Ginny's poetry and short stories.

Tonight late there'll be a Voice on the Aether--- I am becoming very attached to a green-eyed co-ed there in Birmingham. And I'm certainly attached to her laugh and whispers there before dawn.