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Though I gave up Massachusetts’ autumn orange-trees-against-a-blue-sky for San Francisco’s dead-grass hills many years ago, New England still holds a special place in my heart. Which is why I especially like the newest collaboration between Franz Nicolay and the Dresden Dolls. Dunkin Donuts! 495! Live Free or Die! Pissah, Dude!

You’ve had a cold for the past two days. All of a sudden, as after noon edges toward evening, you feel better: You can leave the room without toting a tissue box with you, you no longer crave orange juice like a whirling dervish craves whirling. Your mind isn’t quite able to conjure up workable metaphors yet, but there it is, working, no longer gummed up and sickly-feeling.

So what do you do? Take the dogs for a sunset ramble on the hill, or buckle down on your neglected schoolwork? Or do you sit there, as hours tick by, sloooowly deliberating?

C. Obviously c.

I’ve signed up for 31-for-21, my friend and former roomie Tricia’s blog-every-day challenge for October, but I’m afraid this might be all you get for day one. Nose runny. Right eye suddenly a spigot. Fly buzzing around the dining room. Is it too early to go back to bed?

Now that I’m a student again, I decided to take advantage of the Mechanic’s Institute’s student membership rate. It’s a nice place to work during the day, and besides, I’m the opposite of Groucho Marx: I’ll gladly join any club that’ll have me as a member.

So, I was browsing the shelves today, putting off working on an imminently due school project by looking for a copy of Ulysses to draft into service for my cousin and my oft-delayed reading group, when I ran accross an intriguing title: The Ghost Epigrams.

Now, I’ll read almost anything with the word ‘ghost’ in the title. I think it’s the same thing that makes me so compulsively drawn to anything with a layer of dust on it: I love forgotten things, fantasize about opening doors that have been shut for centuries and finding someone’s forgotten hairpins or the foundations of a long-ago dismantled wall.

So I pulled the book off the shelf. I was expecting something only tangentally related to ghosts. Maybe a series of poems devoted to memory, or maybe something Caspery about a house or, I dunno, death. But it was better than anything I could have hoped: a book of epigrams by Oscar Wilde “taken down through automatic writing by Lazar.”

That’s right: they’re Oscar Wilde’s thoughts from BEYOND THE GRAVE. Which I seriously doubt Wilde would have approved of, considering he had such a great exit line.

But he apparently had a lot more to say. Such as:

“To become an optimist close one eye and believe with the other.”

“Paradoxes: Thoughts that do not go to church on Sunday.”

“Vulgarity is the rich man’s modest contribution to democracy.”

“Mathematics are the bell boys of all sciences.”

A note at the front of the book helpfully (if a bit agramatically) points out that these epigrams “have never appeared in any book of epigrams or aphorisms from the work of Oscar Wilde these are set down as they came from the master.”

Just in case you confused it for An Ideal Husband.

• One block from my house, someone has used a bike lock to secure their dismantled canopy bedframe to a lightpost. Paging Miss Price. #

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• just got in from some backyard astronomy. #

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I’ve never been good with change. When it comes to life’s stages, I suffer from a sort of debilitating nostalgia, preoccupied with missing my yesterdays even as my right nows pass by around me. No year is as wonderful as the one that’s just past, no time as good as five minutes ago. When I hit junior high school and adolescence reared its pimpled head, my condition became almost terminal: Toys I’d outgrown years before gathered dust in my cluttered bedroom, where I sat like a pint-sized Miss Havisham, refusing the passage of time.

I did, of course, get over it. I grew up, went to college, and slowly, oh so slowly, learned to think of the future with something sunnier than the melancholy farewells that used to reverberate through every change. At my parent’s house this past week, I’ve even found myself mentally redecorating my old bedroom, stripping the peeling and water-stained paper off the walls and clearing the shelves of dusty plastic ponies. Selecting things that could be saved: Maybe this happy memory can stand on its own now. Maybe the sad one could be brushed away.

And at my cousin Molly’s wedding this past weekend, I found myself cheering for the future, able to see the years of joy anticipated in every moment. I wouldn’t give up today’s happy Molly, off on her Tahitian honeymoon, for anything, not even the chance to see the sturdy baby cousin she used to be. Some futures are worth the past that’s lost.

• @sweetney I asked my astronomy-nerd father, and he suggested this one: http://tinyurl.com/nfms96. “Good for beginners, good optical quality” in reply to sweetney #

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• is befriending chickadees in the MFA courtyard. #

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• Whoever tracked sequins through the airport bathroom at 8 AM on a Tuesday: I want to know you. #

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