If I bike to work tomorrow, it will be the first time since high school (well, college, but that doesn't count) that I commuted to work or school under my own power for all five days.
College didn't count because walking across East Beach from dorm to classroom was about two feet. But why didn't I ever bike during grad school, at least the first year? (Second year I am absolved, since Spring Hill loomed between me and campus.) I didn't have a bike, I guess, Zeph being rusted into a hulk by that point. I borrowed RJH's hybrid for a spell but barely ever used it. I carried a lot of stuff and didn't have good panniers, I know. Once while I lived with NBM she drove me to campus when Fugly was being worked on and she ribbed me about my baggage: my regular backpack, a gym backpack (I had just done laundry; it usually lived at either of my campus jobs), and a stack of library books (probably I had just given up on yet another paper).
Anyway. I rode my new bike. Naming it Shadowfax might be overkill: I already always mount a bike from the left, as I would a horse (I've been on a horse I think twice), but naming the bike a) at all and b) after a horse and c) after that particular horse is making me think in horse-metaphor a lot more. When I started bike-commuting I started keeping my bike in the basement rather than the garage, which entails fewer locks to unlock and lock. Now every afternoon I think of stabling it (and I pat it on the saddle as I leave it). When I prop it (right side against the prop) and the front wheel falls left, I think of how a horse turns its nose to look at its human.
I am not so far gone that I hesitate to hang it from a hook in the indoor bike closet at work though.
where "fucking" is an adjectival modifier and not a verb.
Uberboss just excused me from reading any book that doesn't thrill me, like The Little Friend. I just can't get over that no one told Tartt to change Harriet's name. I mean, okay, it's only the protagonist, and it's not as if I have ever averred that someone's name affects their character, oh no. But damn. A twelve-year-old girl detective with that personality, named Harriet? This book might be a Louise Fitzhugh alternate universe.
Anyway, so I picked up Jane Eyre when I got home, because that book annoys me and I am insane. Because Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen. Because I'm not that much fonder of Jane Eyre than I am of Fanny Price. It doesn't annoy me as much as Wuthering Heights, which outright pisses me off for its overthetoppiness. I do like Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, so the Brontës aren't a total loss.
The reason I always come back to Jane Eyre, though almost never the whole thing, is that I continue to try to puzzle out Mrs. Fairfax. Have you read it? Why not? Spoilers follow. Mrs. Fairfax knows there is a madwoman in the attic. She loves Jane, or is fond of her, and respects her as a good and proper young woman. But does she know that the madwoman is Mrs. Rochester? Mr. Rochester says, after the botched wedding, "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts." Is her questioning Jane when she learns of their engagement meant as a warning? That is the last time we hear her voice directly; afterward when the wedding party return from the church Mr. Rochester rebuffs the congratulations offered by her, Sophie, and Adèle. Much later, after the fire, Jane tells her reader about Adèle but not about Mrs. Fairfax. She was such a priss to decent old Hannah that I wonder what her attitude to Mrs. Fairfax might be.
Lou Grant narrating Great Books made the David Denby seem even older than his attitude. He said a reason for women and minorities to read the traditional canon is that it is a body of knowledge traditionally denied to these demographics who now shouldn't deny it of themselves. Something occurred to me on my bike ride home that I've now forgotten, about how just because women now live in a man's world doesn't make the man's world such a hot one to begin with that anyone should clamor to be part of. Thought that's truth, I don't like that it might lead to no one's reading Gilgamesh or Othello anymore. The real problem is that with more texts (a word Denby despises) recognized and necessary and worthy and important, curricula are still constricted. Why not two courses of the canon rather than one?