Dear Charlotte J. Nolan...

So, then:

...last month, did you see Regina Spektor play in a small venue above the big Barnes & Noble in Midtown? Wasn't that the Barnes & Noble where you spent an afternoon once before catching the A train to JFK and a flight to your Adulterous Spring Break in Stockholm...? What was Ms. Spektor like in concert? Does she compare to the Neko Case concert you saw in Times Square last March? Sigh... I do envy you small venues. I do envy you being able to hear music there on the Skinny Island, to just have it as an ordinary weeknight option...

Reyka vodka tonight--- Icelandic vodka with some zero-calorie lemon-lime drink. I suppose in a better world I could be in Reykjavik with a lovely companion, watching the autumn skies off to the north. I changed planes in Iceland once--- at Keflavik on my first flight to Europe, when I was a very small little long-eared desert hedgehog. I've never seen Reykjavik, though. It's a place I'd like to see at summer's end, though. Take Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo or the Lost and much-missed Britt-Nicole and see Iceland. See the landscapes from the Sigur Ros documentary.

One Vanished girl saw Regina Spektor above a Barnes & Noble last month. Another is having a birthday tonight--- her 22nd. In a better world, she and I would be at a Thai restaurant in Birmingham. Or walking along West Village streets on our way to dinner at Sevilla. I wish I could be there to kiss her tonight. I hate it that I'll never get to see her in a charcoal pashmina at an airport bar. I miss her laugh and whispers.

9. September, 25. November--- birthdays for a girl in Birmingham and for Britt-Nicole in the Carolinas. 11. March--- a birthday for a girl now on the Skinny Island, a girl who claims once to have gone from the Baltimore Amtrak station to lie naked with her First Love on a carriage house sofa in Silver Spring. I do remember the dates. Not that they'll do me any good.

I don't know Miss Ginny's birthday. That's one of the things I do want from Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo: the date of her birthday. I'd like to be able to send her a birthday card--- a Tare Panda card, maybe...or postcards of scenes in Tuva. Those I do have--- postcards of scenes in Tuva. I do want to send a few to Miss Ginny at McGill.

I'm here at the Tare Panda Laptop--- little Toshi Tare Panda. My little Toshiba laptop has been good to me this past year and I do like it. But I need a MacBook Pro. That may be solely based on envy. A lovely green-eyed girl in Birmingham has a laptop; a girl there on Morningside Heights seems to have just acquired one. I did find Lissy at emigree's 43 Things list about a 15" MacBook Pro. I am eaten up with envy of Miss WaterColorFire. Miss Ginny tells me that all her friends at McGill tell her to get a MacBook, too. I do want a MacBook. I know that so much of that is just envy, though--- knowing that nothing I have is as good as what girls I know have, knowing that nothing in my life will ever be as good as in theirs... No Stories, no Adventures, no travels, no lives or lovers. Not being able to afford a MacBook Pro--- or even feel like I'm good enough to be allowed to have one.

Reyka vodka, yes. And thinking of Harry's Bar in Venice. My younger brother sent me a Facebook message to remind me that they had great burgers at Harry's Bar. They did, yes. I had to remind him of having too many Bellinis there and becoming...ummm...indisposed in a gondola.

I have Terrence O'Donnell's "Garden of the Brave in War" to re-read. Such lovely travel lit--- his account of his life on a rented farm in Iran in the mid-1960s. Lovely descriptions of the landscape and the people and a lost world. It's a book I do want to recommend to Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo. I'd have recommended it once to Lissy at emigree, but I have no idea what she reads now. I suppose Trish at kissingverlaine or even Alessandra at bel_ebat might like it, too.

A farm in the hills north of Tehran... Of course that calls up the opening of "Out of Africa". But I always liked that book. I even liked the film. I liked Julie Harris' one-woman show as Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen.

I keep hoping that Miss Ginny and Laura-Ashlee are going to my HighDesertSnow LastFM site and making note of the music I listen to. I hope that WaterColorFire is doing the same once in a while. I'd like to think that Miss Lissy still looks at what I listen to at LastFM and read at GoodReads. I just wish I could entice more lovely clever friends-and-correspondents into leaving more comments here...and into discussions of books and films.

I do have "Wittgenstein" and "Adventureland" to watch. Something to do this weekend.

The girl in Birmingham who turns 22 tonight...sigh. I did send her not just a pashmina, but a couple of keffiyehs as well. I wish I could see her wear them. I hate thinking that I'll never see her in the flesh at all.

And I'm completely unlikely ever to hear a clever, seductive, wicked voice over the aether again. Girls are unlikely ever to call again...I'll take that as a given. All the more so for people like drocera who've vanished altogether. I'll never have a MacBook Pro or anything like the life WaterColorFire will have...or the green-eyed girl who turned 22 today.

Reyka vodka...I can keep drinking I can do that. What I can't do is have anything like a life...or a future. Or a MacBook Pro or anything else that might symbolise that I have anything like the value people like WaterColorFire or the girl in Birmingham or one in Montreal have...