This morning I finally figured something out and declared, "I'm brilliant!" but of course being brilliant is of little solace unless I can crow about it to someone so I made Intern come over and look at what I had done. He listened quite kindly, following about two inches of my ell* of explanation, and when I wound up, he did my happy dance with me and then asked, "So do you have any snacks?"
I cracked up. He's seriously been talking to my sister: "I'll listen to your story if you give me a backrub while you tell it." I haven't laughed at myself so hard since--well, probably since I saw my sister in December, but certainly workwise--Egg said that thing.
* When I wrote that I just pulled a measurement word out of the air, but an ell! Because I, ell jay aitch, do tend to overexplain and at length, don't I.
One 3.8-mile city ride. RDC picked me up because it was rainy and cold. Also because CoolBoss and Minne gave me a hanging basket full of potted purple pansies for NotSecretary's Day.
Gossip. I love the gossip. I have my guilty-pleasure trainwreck journals, and I am not above dissecting them with friends. I love dishing about people actually in my life as well. There are, however, lines--perhaps arbitrary to an outsider but logical to me--that I keep to one side of. I hope.
I know two pieces of (offline) information right now and I am determined not to pass them on. When I'm brilliant and solve a problem, I want to crow, but there's nothing helpful here. One is only a tidbit that could be taken as part of Someone's larger drama if I passed it on to the Other Person who made me a confidante. The other is a matter of public record and has been published, and is much worse.
The element that disturbs me most--indicative of my own self-involvement, given the nature of the information--is how I received it. I maintain a web page for a group. Someone whom I barely remember after a proximal acquaintance 20 years gone, who maintains a page for a related group, told me. She has presumed before on the similarity of our pages' intents, asking me to intrude on the privacy of someone in my group for information about that person's relative in her group. The fuck, I wondered. The chiseler could ask my groupmember on her own if she though the information so vital to possess. And on what basis did the chiseler assume intimacy between me and my groupmember, and worse, between herself and me?
I didn't reply to the previous request and I won't reply to this. I could wish for greater involvement with my group, but I'm not going to buy it at the expense of others' public humiliation and private pain and of my own dignity and sense of decency.
I have 10 years of said dignity and decency to stand on, though that base wobbles on the 25 years of indiscretion preceding it. The element disturbs me because the chiseler and I occupied similar roles in our groups during their heyday. I do not want to occupy--and I don't--or to be seen to occupy, that position anymore. Nor that of an obsequious chiseler.
I should really get over high school. As if that weren't obvious (where "that" antecedes both what I need to get over, and, just as obviously, the setting for the above groups' formation, where the role I refer to is not that of class gossip).
Why was I allowed to read this when I was so unworthy, getting over Stephen King just in time to fall for Ayn Rand? Books like this shouldn't be wasted on the unappreciative. I remembered the story well enough from 11-grade English, but apparently I missed the gorgeosity of the prose. Descriptive prose wasn't entirely lost on me--I did like John Steinbeck--but I am now ashamed that I remembered eyeglasses and ash heaps and all these beautiful shirts but not Fitzgerald's turns of phrase.
RDC and I went to My Brother's Bar last night and I was a chatterbox. I told him what Shrink said, that she would like to see me self-confident again, "as you were in college," and I amended, "...yet acting in age-appropriate ways."
Age- and context-appropriate and, as I said above, with a little more discretion.
But not entirely repressed. We went to Brother's so I could try on new Tevas at REI afterward. The only thing wrong with my current, 10-year-old pair is that the Velcro has lost its grip, but can they be restrapped? I don't know. I tried on Merrills and Tevas and Chacos and, in each pair, skipped across the area to the shoe-testing bit of fake rock.
I am feeling better because one, I didn't particularly notice if anyone thought I was too old and fat to skip, and two, fuck 'em if they did. Also I am more sensible than I was in college, because I wouldn't've skipped if skipping would have been in the way of a more crowded store's activity.
I was looking for hiking sandals but most of the shoes I found had river soles. "I can't find my sole," I told RDC, after much looking. Then I realized. "I had to leave it on the dock!" A homophone pun doesn't work if the person hasn't read the right book. That particular scene in that particular book just wrenches my heart of my chest, and I thought, oh shit, so much for that good mood. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
As we left, we passed through a display of canoes and kayaks, one of which we'd like to have eventually (with a lake to use it on). RDC suggested Blake could perch on a strut and come along. Blake probably would hate it, and besides, the least wind would land him in the drink. RDC didn't drop it right then but considered whether Blake might be able to do this or that, and eventually I had to hit him in the head with a shovel but not before my mind was full of terrible imaginings.
Not too long ago, either of these things, remembering the leavetaking at the dock or picturing another way Blake could die, would have crashed me. I do think a means of societal control is to keep people complaisant and distracted, and it's not a struggle for me to remain angry and concerned yet, so right now I appreciate that these two incidents merely ended my giddy mood instead of blackening it.