House:
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
It's not Evolution of Jane, and nothing could be, but it was quite good. It took me until about halfway through to appreciate was Schine was doing, and if it had been another author whom I have less invested in, I might have given up. The daughter, mother, and grandmother vibrated off the page, and the endings felt right, and I saw traces of Cathleen Schine's own story (through an essay she wrote for The New Yorker) toward the end. I loved that, and the bits about naming.
Someone says, "I need to bare my soul," and I thought of how true the homophone verb would work there. She needs to bare it because she otherwise could not bear it.
A stray dog needs a name. "When you got right down to it, what name wasn't a brand? She thought what a shame it was that language had devolved from being a means of expression to being little more than a flag....When everything in life was judged as an adornment rather than by its utility, when even a dog was seen as an accessory, when even its name was chosen as a mirror for one's own aspirations, then what name was free, what name was personal, what name was just a name?...'We'll name him after the first sign we see.'"
I laughed at us after a couple of weeks in the house for having such unrealistic plans of painting both the study and the bedroom in one weekend, our first. Nevertheless I somehow still had the idea I could put two coats of primer in the landing today. RDC disillusioned me of that because primer needs 24 hours between coats. Nevertheless I didn't expect it to take me over three hours to do a 3'x7'x9' space with one doorway and one window. The stairs made for more reaching, and the banisters made one length difficult to reach.
The trim, of course, will need a zillion more coats. Not even the raw wood of the new floor mouldings need as much primer as the damn gunmetal gray of the window and door mouldings. But this does mark the end of the gray, hooray.
I am not, as we know, a football watcher. Today, however, I am not doing a damn thing more. If only there were still chamberpots. So here I am. Laptop, Douglas Coupland, and Superbowl TiVoing. When I started to watch "CBS Sunday Morning" and saw it would have a story on Superbowl ads, I tuned live tv to CBS and, what the hell, hit record. There's still Douglas Coupland and "Mary of Scotland" and "The Little Minister" until it's time to fast-forward in search of ads.
When CBS came on, someone was singing a tribute to the Columbia, which tribute was fitting though the performance a trifle twee. I don't know how Josh Groban could look familiar to me, but he did. He looks like Adrien Brody.
When did "The Star-Spangled Banner" become an easy-listening melody? Where is the shame in singing it as written? For all that Roseanne Barr's baseball version was foul and mean-spirited and out of tune, at least it followed the notes.
And what you learn from television! From "CBS Sunday Morning" again, Princess Leia is Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher's daughter? And Elizabeth Taylor was her stepmother for however long that marriage lasted? And she was married to Paul Simon for an instant in 1983? If Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor are friends now (and they are), does that mean Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell are buds too?
Well, 2004 wasn't like 1984 either: no Mac ad at all. Oh, and New England won, which should make my father happy. And my sister too, I guess.