House:
Garden
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
Precor Elliptical: 30', "gluteal" program 2, 4000 strides, and according to the machine 400 calories.
Upper body weights: chest press, lateral pull-down, incline press, decline press, shoulder press, some other things, who knows, in sets of 20 or to exhaustion.
Precor Elliptical, 15' gluteal and 15' interval program. The incline varies in these, unlike in the manual one which is my wont but I kept the resistance at 12/20.
On the first Monday of a new year, I expect I should be pleased not to have had to wait for a machine. Two ellipticals in the main area were abandoned but still claimed, as if the gym permitted reservation. I went first to an empty machine and was told "Oh that's Robin's," as if Robin were someone I should know, or owned the machine, or some other sarcastic thing that I didn't say.
The next machine had a towel and headphones on it. Was I being assertive, or was I being rude? I went with assertive for now. I had begun exercising when a man walked up to reclaim the equipment. I had looked around for scuttlebutters and seen none, and this man approached from outside the room. He was polite, also assertive. But you left it, and you can't reserve one, and it's a crowded time of day. He acknowledged that, and it was his acknowledgment that allowed me to yield the machine. I do think he was wrong to think that his headphones rather than his presence and usage gave him claim, but my desire to be accommodating and willing to compromise is more important than my judgment of his behavior. It's important to me that I could yield without resentment--though maybe I could do so because my disregarding his claim, however specious, was wrong.
And anyway, in the less popular because cramped and hot other room I used the last available elliptical. This also helped me not to resent.
Another reason this other room is less popular might be that it still has televisions suspended from the ceiling rather than individually. I was too much to one side to read the closed captions on the set closest to me, which is a fine thing, because it was tuned to Fox News. I recently watched a segment on Fox News because a Dot Orgerista was interviewed in it. I think one reason the Dot Orgger got only seven seconds of a two-minute piece is that what he had to say wasn't adequately skewed to its bias. I watched a blank green wall instead of people shooting hoops--which is yet another reason this other room is the last resort.
Afterward we got massive salads during a big shop at Whole Foods. Blueberries were available. Spinach and shredded carrot and diced zucchini and sliced cucumber and crescents of celery and whole grape tomatoes and a sprinkling of cheese and a little wedge of heart of palm and a wee strip of red pepper and a few chunks pineapple and blueberries blueberries blueberries blueberries.
Today I took a bus from closer to the house and then walked a different 1.5 mile to work. This might not be always as pleasant a walk as the other route's--although today it was snowing and therefore beautiful--but it's a good idea to get the part I cannot control done sooner, and done with a more reliable bus than the previous, slightly more direct one I had used. A mile and a half is a fine walk, but having to split it around a bus that might or might not come vexed me, and not to walk from one stop to the next because the bus would skip me while between them wasted my time.
I walked through newer developments that attempt to mimic the front porch neighborhood and fail: The houses have garages on the alleys instead of bulging out of the facade, belying their true significance, but just as these icky bulging garage houses' residents enter from their garages and hardly use their front doors at all, so too with these houses. They don't have mailboxes at their houses but use one central deposity per block, located at the head of the alley so you can get your mail from your car as you drive home. I saw people walking their dogs in the alleys, not on the sidewalks in front. Even graveled front yards, which no one can enjoy aesthetically, are tightly fenced in. Bah.
Closer to Colfax I passed through a much more modest neighborhood of houses that would not be out of place in eastern Connecticut if their lots were slightly bigger. My neighborhood is older and crumblier and last month a man was sleeping on our porch, but this one I walked through today felt a lot less friendly. Even some of the side-streets (running north and south) didn't have sidewalks.
Being my sister's sister, I wanted to take the shortest route when the legal route seemed unnecessarily long. Almost at work, I could have curved around a bend of road or cut through a school's playgrounds. Naturally I cut through the playground, but I won't again: by the time I was near enough to see that the chainlink fence was locked, I would have had to do the dreaded backtracking to return to the legal route. I scaled the eight-foot fence easily enough, since I could use the mid-way rail as a foothold, but I do not have the upper-arm strenth to push myself away from a fence on the descent and didn't relish dropping along it and snagging my favorite flesh. I could get no purchase in Dansko clogs. So I shook them off, toed down the fence the old-fashioned way, and regained my shoes without having to put my sock feet in the snow. (Yes, socks: it was snowing.) The opposite side of the yard was easier: shorter fence.
It is a private school and therefore trespassing more than going through a public school's field might have been. So I'll be legal from now on. And I imagine I don't look like a tall child anymore but like a freak. Le sigh.
One Sunday in December, opening the curtains in the living room, I saw a man curled up on the porch, against the house, kind of under the swing. If I had been alone I would called the police, but as it was RDC went outside and woke him. Does that make me a wimp? or prudent? While RDC and he spoke, I put some Clif bars and fruit in a bag, and gave it to RDC as he came in and out to give the man bus fare (so the man said). He had been let out of the joint, his phrase again, at midnight the night before and had been walking home until he got too tired. (RDC wondered to me later why our porch, and I suggested that it was the first on the block not to have its light on, let alone additional festive ones.) He wore only a light jacket and asked if we could spare him one, and it struck me later we could have replaced our own even if we didn't have any unused ones around. Sorry, man.
I'm thinking I should keep a spare pair of gloves in my pockets and get a leash for my own. I can't give away my mittens but it is on the days I particularly don't want to give up my own gloves that the gloveless's red fingers seem coldest. CLH did give me a new pair of violet chenille gloves in my stocking, so I could carry the lavender pair.
Or just donate them. This weekend I finally made a trip to Goodwill, with books and a set of mixing bowls and another of glasses and clothing and toys and Dan'l Bloone.
On Friday and again Sunday I overstrained my left tricep. A lot: it hurts more and the hurt has lasted longer than ordinary post-weights soreness. So yesterday I did only lower-body cardio and today I merely swam a kilometer.
Bendrix reminded me of the utterly selfish protagonist in The Sea, the Sea, and I might not have made such an unkind parallel if my library copy hadn't been a movie advertisement announcing Ralph Fiennes, whom I avoid.
I did like the religious questing and the touches of the mystic, except now I might confuse Graham Greene with that priest-author...Andrew Greeley? Maybe not: his titles at Amazon look too wholesome. The one I'm thinking of wrote thrillers.
Anyway, I think the Invisible Library is no longer being updated, so I shall list new contributions here:
Maurice Bendrix, The Ambitious Host, The Crowned Image, and The Grave on the Water-Front; also, in progress, a life of General Gordon.
I've been playing geography games recently, and I have a bone to pick with a few countries of the world. Brunei is clearly an Arab-sounding name and the country therefore does not belong in southeast Asia. Similarly, Suriname belongs in Africa, not South America. Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, and Malawi: did one person name all of you? What's the deal with Mauritius and Mauritania being not, say, the male and female halves of an archipelago, but a large chunk of land and a tiny island on opposite sides of a continent? But the worst offenders are the Guineas. Guyana and French Guiana are not Guineas but sound too much like Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equitorial Guinea, and Papua New Guinea to escape my wrath. Does "Guinea" mean "equatorial"?--should I paint Ecuador with the same brush? Why does the island of New Guinea not hold all of Papua New Guinea?
The Lonely Planet's thumbnail history of Papua New Guinea says, "The first European contact in 1526-27 was by the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses, who named the island Ilhas dos Papuas (Island of the Fuzzy Hairs). The Spaniard Inigo Ortiz de Retes later called it New Guinea because he thought the people similar to those of Guinea in Africa."
Hmm, Lonely Planet has a few useful thumbnail histories. Suriname was named for its major river, and the Dutch got it in trade with England for New Amsterdam. There's a trade it might have learned to regret.
How important is knowing about the three technological improvements in medieval European agriculture that improved the yield of feed from seed from something miserable like 2:1 to something that allowed for not only survival but growth, like 15:1 if I recollect at all,* compared to knowing about how the world currently is? Of course Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana were sugar colonies; of course the England, the Netherlands, and France enslaved East Indians, Africans, and Indonesians on their plantations. Well, it's important to know both. So my next time-sink will be at least these thumbnails and maybe more.
* These were the horse collar (previous harnesses tended to impede an animal's respiration), three-field rotation, and better plows. I'm not sure about that third one: though a heavier plow was necessary for soil in northern Europe (wetter and heavier than that within the Roman Empire's boundary where a light plow was adequate), I think I learned something more specific than "heavier."
A transparently genuine stream-of-consciousness narrative from a little boy's point of view. I don't know if there's a some sort of ruling against dialogue punctuation in bildungsroman of the blue-collar British Isles--this, Frank McCourt, Trainspotting, Vernon God Little if I may include blue-collar Usan writing by Brits, and Usan writing by Usans, too, like Cormac McCarthy--but Roddy Doyle follows it. Is it Joyce's influence? Is it just cool, like Faulkner? (José Saramago gets a pass, by the way. He can do no wrong.)
Is it okay that I confuse Doyle with T.C. Boyle, whom I haven't read, and that I want to call the book Paddy Doyle Ha Ha Ha?
Oh for goodness' sake.
For starters, the errors in the copy of this Bantam print. "Whose in the backseat?" and numerous random letter changes. It was the first pulp paperback I've read in ages--since last December's re-read of my high-school era Return of the King--and it had the same font as Judy Blume's Forever, which I haven't seen in decades but whose words I scoured off the page and which I can remember remember by appearance as well as by context.
The thing that's Rita Mae Brown's fault, not her publisher's, is just how perfect Molly is. Overcoming her dirt-poor childhood spent plucking potato bugs, excelling academically and intellectually despite her family's disdain and discouragement, physically gifted athletically and aesthetically, and queer. One of the criticisms I read of Lonesome Dove--I love the juxtapositions wrought by my eclectic reading plan--is reverse racism by making the black character Deets flawless instead of human. Mollly's a lot more interesting to listen to than someone dumb as a stump--and than Deets, who utters hardly a word--but how handy it is for Brown that a character who has to face the challenges society sets for the queer does so with such exceptional talents and personality, who is also flawless. What about the lesbian who is merely average? Also, Brown? Whether het or not, over adoption lines or not, incest is fucked up.
Anyway, a quick and dirty read, just like Brown's heterosexual fucking, but not as pointless. I hope it is a sign of social progress that it is not as audacious and revolutionary to me now as it needed to be 30 years ago upon publication.
We drove to a new-to-us cranny of Rocky Mountain National Park, Wild Basin, and snowshoed six or seven miles to Calypso Cascades. Afterward, we stopped in the Lyons Café for the first time, where we had most excellent Beefy Chili in sourdough bread bowls. Also near Lyons, we saw more wildlife than we did in the park: a stooping red-tailed hawk, several kestrels patiently waiting on power lines, and something on the way up that looked so big I assumed it was a Swainson's. But on the way home, we saw, quite clearly flying low over the road, a bald eagle, so the so-big thing might have been an eagle hiding its white under a...damn, that started out promising, but orange isn't the only English word without a rhyme.
It was a lovely trek, though pine and aspen forest, around erratic massifs, over bridges crossing mostly but not entirely frozen streams (the same stream, a few times).
Almost to the gym, RDC realized he had forgotten my gym bag. (When I take the bus in the morning, he brings my bag.) He made as if to turn north to home, but there and back would have been 40' at least. Also, my iPod battery was nearly dead.
Instead I went happily to the library, the Virginia Village branch that was my first Denver library. I borrowed Secret of the Andes, a new book by John Leonard, stories by Carson McCullers, and The Castle, because I never finished listening to it.
Back at the gym, I soaked in the whirlpool for 20 minutes reading Ann Nolan Clark.
Pretty much the ideal workout in my opinion.
Simple and hopeful and lacking the clear gussak=good anvil that Waterless Mountain had. Also it made me want a llama or several.
Precor Elliptical 30', gluteal 2 program, resistance 12/20, incline 13/20 (any higher and the program tops out). Supposedly 380 calories.
Then upright row, incline press, decline press, and a couple of other things involving my back. Weights. Thbtpl.
Also, I biked to work and thence to the gym, where I shoved my bike into the car because of that darkness thing. About 7 miles, a little less.
This seemed to me like a book written a few decades before its late '60s printing, and it felt as if written in Russian and translated. So I had its origin entirely wrong. The seeming might not have been due to anything more than its time and place, but the feeling was due to Bernard Malamud’s perfect prose. Then I thought maybe it was a response to Darkness at Noon, but I don’t find that it is. Wrongful imprisonment is hardly unique to the Russian empire or Russian soviet, and the Koestler parallel was only my groping.
It is based somewhat on fact, on the case of a Jewish man arrested at the same time and place for the same crime, but also, said Malamud, was inspired by Dreyfuss and Sacco & Vincetti. It took me reading Woman on the Edge of Time, and when was that, why was that? by 1990, I know, but why did I choose it? to learn about the latter pair.
When I read The Crying of Lot 49, RDC wondered if I would be frustrated by its lack of closure. The Fixer lacks plot closure in the same way, but the theme has been thoroughly explored, and it is complete.
Precor Elliptical, 30' "weight loss" program, which I did for ~5' before deciding that a constant 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance was better (perhaps in fact as well as in opinion) than only intervals. 410 calories according to the machine (which I assume inflates the number but also doesn't know I'm pumping my arms), 3800+ strides. Next time I'll use handweights again.
Also, weights! I'm stoked for weights, for once in my life. Chest press, fly, lat pull-down, row, something or other for lats, biceps, the neck, and what I figure is the human equivalent of the chicken's pope's nose, something or other for lats and biceps only that was less difficult despite using fewer muscles (the angle?), and shoulders. Also crunches on the bench dealie, with no weights whatsoever but absolutely not using my arms to press myself up (which I see a lot of people doing and which I think is a mistake.
I feel sore in a good way.
What the hell is the point of this one? As I expected, Kim is better at being Indian--at being Hindu or Muslim, and so on--than any non-white, just because he is genetically white, and better at being European because he is English rather than French or Russian. Teshoo lama is the only likeable character in the book, but even he is not immune from Kipling's condescension.
This essay is entitled "Kipling's Burden." As Jofe Fiennes says, "Good title." "Shakespeare in Love" Oh, right, Kipling coined the phrase "white man's burden" anyway. I hope Kipling was grateful to die before that hideous occurrence, Indian independence.
"White man's burden" and the phrase I'm thinking of from Dune don't have quite the same cadence but "burden" is mostly "burd'n" and "right" is fairly long for one syllable so I am going to say I am not totally a loon for equating "white man's burden" as a response--what do you call the thing that Catholics say in response to the priest, when he's preaching and they say "Lord, hear our prayer"?--with "leader's right." I can just picture any discussion of Kim disintegrating into one person talking and the others agreeing, noddingly solemnly and intoning "white man's burden" all the time as a justification for taking another person's property--without the reason of owner being dead, as in Dune. Okay, this is officially the silliest train of thought ever.
I have almost twelve months to read something better in 2005, but it'd have to be some damn good to beat this.
Woohoo, how often do I go on my own discipline alone?
Precor elliptical 30', manual, 12/20 resistance, 20/20 incline, with two 2 lb handweights for the middle 20' (I know I have to get some heavier ones), 3900 strides, 410~ calories according to the machine, which didn't know about the weights. Average spm 130.
Then chest press, fly, shoulder, lat pull down, row, and a little bit of bi- and tricepping and some crunches.
Yesterday I brought all the cardboard and junk mail to recycling, making me feel so virtuous I rewarded myself with a shopPING expedition. Since nothing opened until 11, I finished Bel Canto in a Starbucks with a mug of tea. This left me, after the exertion of spending money, with nothing to read over lunch, and lunch I had to have if I was going to go to the gym.
RDC wanted to know why I would drive all the way to Flatirons Crossing when all the same stores are in Cherry Creek. I don't have a good answer to that, especially since the Tattered Cover is in Cherry Creek and all Flatirons offers is a Borders. I was carrying a purse instead of a wallet, and the reason I need to get a wallet-on-a-string is so the wallet-to-purse shuffle doesn't mean I sacrifice my lists of books. I stood in Borders unable to recall a single title.
V.S. Naipaul, Manuel Puig, Virginia Woolf, who are next on my list and whose titles I don't own, all didn't occur to me. I did think of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping; Borders had her new Gilead but not it. I didn't think of Michael Chabon's new title, which John Leonard reviewed in the same article as Gilead. Jared Diamond's new book wasn't available either but while I was in the science section, science fiction occurred to me. So I bought John Scalzi's Old Man's War.
I'm glad to have met and talked with Scalzi and to have had him join us when Weetabix and Chauffi dragged me onstage to sing "Dancing Queen." (Abba should, of course, be sung as a foursome.) I have read and enjoyed the Whatever for many years, and especially since he earned his first JournalCon Karaoke fame singing "I Melt with You" in Pittsburgh.
But I didn't like the novel overall. I liked up to Willie Wheelie, that is, up to when the serious army and alien stuff began. I don't much like much science fiction, and reportedly this book is very Heinleinesque, so perhaps it's a compliment to the book that it is so faithful to its genre. I had plotted several of the plot points because of foreshadowing (is it obligatory?) One character's angst didn't mesh with her earlier personality and its origins. There were nitpicking editing errors, a couple of glitches and one utter word omission that interrupted action. And there were less nitpicky things, such as someone pointing out that your Earth-done tattoo wouldn't follow you into the Colonial Defense Force, then a few pages later that same character showing his own Earth-done tattoo, without specifying, which would have been appropriate under the circumstances, whether he'd had it redone. (But the scene containing that flub is my favorite.) Furthermore, the jacket reads, "They don't want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living" despite, first, that the recruits are trained to ignore the limitations of their humanity, both physical and emotional; and second, that other recruits are even better as soldiers because they didn't start out as 75-year-olds.
Jasper Fforde handled a mcguffin better than anyone else. A deus ex machina saves the day, someone asks what happened, and someone else replies that it, the deus, was [brand name] Plot Save-the-Day doohickey (tm). I forget exactly how he did it, but it was meta and acknowledged both his own resorting to such a device and the fact that I, the reader, would get more pleasure from laughing at his arrogance than a rigorously possible save. (Besides, in the world of Thursday Next, such a conceit is rigorously possible.) Scalzi had to let the exposition fairy slap the dialogue around less gracefully than that. Oh well.
Mostly it was the same stuff that annoys me in almost all the science fiction I have read. It didn't happen with Ender's Game, which I disliked for reasons all its own, because Ender defends Earth, where humans belong. I just don't like humans living elsewhere than on Earth. For all that we fuck it up daily, it's where we're meant to be, this planet that made us and gave us life. So the entire colonization thing had my teeth on edge from the start. That's not Scalzi's fault or the genre's but mine, but it doesn't help me like a book.
Also, right at the start, a bit of unexplainable technology is explained by assuming that Earthlings didn't invent the technology but cribbed it from an alien intelligence. So I expected the cribbing to come up later, and it did. The following wasn't the book Scalzi wanted to write, so I can't reasonably hold it against OMW, but wouldn't it have been great if the technology behind green-skinned, cat-eyed, SmartBlooded bodies, churning with BrainPals and nanobots, had also been cribbed?
My main gripe is how obvious the unfolding action was. How common is it for a newly transferred recruit to want his wedding ring, and why is wearing one allowed, since it's not necessary to survival? If you're allowed to keep some personal effects, why wouldn't the CDF make you keep your ring with them? That, following the unsubtle Ghost Brigades comment, made the course of the action obvious, and all the fiddling around with aliens just that much filler, and too glossy and glossed-over to be amusing filler.
That said, reading a man's books because I have a fleeting online acquaintance with him is a good enough reason for me (given that I enjoy the acquaintance). I look forward to Agent of the Stars, and I'm glad for his successes.
STL and PLT and I were talking about movies, and PLT said that anyone who can name their 25 favorite movies is either supremely organized or a huge nerd. I replied, "Or both."
African Queen
Almost Famous
Becket
Brazil
Breakfast Club
Bringing Up Baby
City of Lost Children
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fisher King
Harold and Maude
Henry V
Holiday
Jaws
Kafka
Lion in Winter
Lord of the Rings
A Man for All Seasons
Paper Moon
Persuasion
The Philadelphia Story
A Room with a View
Pulp Fiction
Sense and Sensibility
Shakespeare in Love
State of the Union
Wings of Desire
I couldn't recall them in alphabetical order. Alphabetizing them makes me nerdier, I should hope. Making this list made me realize my Viewing pages are terribly out of date.
Twenty-five is too specific a number: there are 26. "Breakfast Club" is, of course, because I am Crippled by Nostalgia. I've only seen "Becket" and "Kafka" once each, but having seen the former as a prequel to "Lion in Winter" and having a perverse attraction to Jeremy Irons and a not-so-perverse attraction to surreal movies like "Kafka," "Brazil," and "Cities of Lost Children," they stand. "Lord of the Rings" might not last. "Dead Man" should be in there and maybe "Pirates of the Caribbean," and since I clearly adore Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet both, maybe "Finding Neverland" as well.
It is so unfair that something as sweet-smelling and mostly cuddly as he is should be fronted with a beak, and that the more tired and cuddle-worthy he looks, the more likely he is to want not to be disturbed. That little beak, part way open in a threat, when all you want to do is scoop him to apologize for your imminent departure for the millet factory, even though he's so adorable you'd rather leave him on your lap and write a pointless paragraph in your online journal rather than disturb him by actually getting up and going to the millet factory...
He's fluffed out to about the size of a partridge, and he has no neck.
In other cute news, this morning two squirrels chased each other up and down the nectarine tree and leapt from it to my neighbor's roof and scurried across to jump into his tree and the second paused at the roof's edge, switching its tail with irritation while waiting for the branch to bounce predictably enough that it could gauge its leap. Evil little things.
Christ, that last paragraph, which I typed so I could watch Blake some more, only gave him time to tuck. Now I'll never get up.
Precor Elliptical, 30', 12/20 resistance, 20/20 incline, 15' with two 2-pound handweights, 3936 strides and 422 machine-calories; average spm 131.2. Sunday I used the weights for 20', but today I--well, I don't know if "couldn't" is fair, but--didn't.
Having just been unthrilled by an sf book I was foolish to read another so soon. Generally I don't sort children's books into genre for the same reasons daemons don't settle before a certain age but this was certainly past that age. I picked up Nobody's Fool to wash out my brain. Sylvia Louise Engdahl earned a Newbery Honor for this the year Summer of the Swans won the Medal. Weak year.
But then as I came through the front door, the song on the radio (left on for Blake) was "Solsbury Hill." So things are looking up.
---
I told Shrink a while ago that I will write an incident in my journal but not my feelings about it. She suggested that this is another way I deny my emotions. I thought of that after copying this bit out. I'm listening to Mao II, which is why the title is "what I didn't need to hear" rather than "what I didn't need to read."
I've been considering her suggestion and I think she's wrong (but of course, I'm not sure! because I'm me). Writing for myself, describing an incident, I don't need to say what I felt about it because I will know. I don't keep a journal to remember how I felt but to remember what happened. This might be denial-ish but it's more that I am unlikely to forget how happy I was the morning after TJZD's wedding to lie in the windowseat with DEDBG and watch the sun come up and play with her hair, but I am likely to forget about the lying and the watching and the playing, and therefore the pleasure, if I didn't record them. If I just wrote, "had great weekend with the heavies" I would probably not remember the specific incidents and therefore not be able to recall the emotions. It is also unlikely I will forget how mortified or distressed I was by the Who Died? or Pot Roast incident even if I don't write them down.
The Pot Roast Incident no longer distresses me but it's the first one that I will admit to that occurred to me. The admission bit is important. I know why these passages matter to me, but I don't need publicly to admit the reasons. What's important is that I record the passages. If, years from now, rereading this, I cannot recall those reasons, that will mean the journal has served its purpose.
I feel like the father in The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, and why don't I possess that book so I can check that quote? Something like, "...and I have to talk to them too?" demanded querolously by a father who'd rather believe his disappointing children don't exist. Shrink says I have a hard time naming my emotions, maybe also talking about them. Whatever.
I mentioned here some time ago someone's observation that the smallest thing can send me tumbling or soaring. I think I'm more susceptible to a tiny stimulus having a disproportionate effect when I'm low, and I have been since Wednesday. I've been listening to "Mary Jane" when I usually skip from "Head Over Feet" straight to "Ironic," and putting Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" on repeat. It's not good.
If I hadn't brought Babe home I would have had a Talk to the Pig day. Instead I had a Talk to the Dog day, with Snowy on my...I don't know what to call it, a file drawer and a half on wheels with a cushioned top, combining a visitor chair and storage space in Cube Land...thing rolled into my doorway. I wasn't all that dire: Intern came over to chat and that was fine, and I had projects I could immerse myself in so I didn't have to contemplate the inner contours of my own skull. But it still pissed me off when Tex came over, sat on the hassock, and starting talking about one of these projects, and I noticed he had either, bad enough, not noticed Snowy, or worse, flicked him to the floor. "Don't knock Snowy around!" Except that my doorway was partially blocked, I didn't expect anyone to understand that I was having a Talk to the Dog day, but don't fuck with my animals.
I worked straight through, sometimes with two earbuds instead of one or none, how shocking, and left a little early. Home, I started putting away clothes. The first thing that made me grin was a button on the floor.
Wednesday I got it into my head to wear a suit, but the slate jacket had lost a button. I looked through my closet, wore another suit, and took advantage of having the car to scamper to a fabric store over lunch, where I bought less funky replacement buttons. And now here it is just at the foot of the bed.
The second thing was a slender envelope from Ofoto. My girls recently posted photographs from the family trip to Ireland that launched the eldest around the world (subject line from an email I received 27 December: "I'm fine" from Laos, not Thailand), and one was of the three of them, not just this two or another two, not with their parents (whom I love, of course, but who were not my victims). The last I have is at least five years old and taken in their backyard; now I have one of them that is recent and all done growed up and in front of a waterfall in Ireland.
Now I'm fine.
It makes me nervous that I am so malleable. There. I named an emotion.
Precor Elliptical 546, 30', middle 20' with two 2-lb handweights, 3930 strides, 420 calories; average spm 131.
Upper body weights: chest press, fly, shoulder, row, also row on another style machine that rowed from a different angle, front pulldown, incline press, decline press, shoulder, bicep, tricep.
I think Jasper Fforde ended the Thursday Next series with this, and I'm glad. This one was better than The Well of Lost Plots but there's a limit to how far a stunt can be stretched and Fforde reached it.
A boat keels over, right? It doesn't heel over, or heal over? In the book it was "healed over" and I think one copyediting error led to another. Or I don't know much more about boating than was covered in Arthur Ransome or said of The True Love in "The Philadelphia Story."
Johnny Carson died today, yet we were not only in Denver but firmly at home doing much domestic stuff. Possibly I have conquered my celebrity road trip curse, starting with Elvis Presley, including Diana Spencer, conspicuously omitting John F. Kennedy Jr., and most recently featuring Ronald Reagan.
Biked maybe 7 miles in two legs, to work and later to gym.
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 20/20 incline, 12/20 resistance, the middle 20' with two 2-lb. handweights: 3945 strides, 418 calories, average spm 131.5.
Upper body weights: chest press and fly, lat pull down, row, shoulder, front pulldown, some other thing.
Also, and I haven't recorded these before, but crunches, by golly, on a slanted board (second up of three or four angles), no wonder I look like I've borne children, 75. I stopped somewhat because RDC and I were meeting in three minutes but also because ow. However many degrees I lift my upper torso, it's not many. I see people on that apparatus where they're upright, bearing their weight on their forearms, and lifting their legs, at all, straight not bent, some of them past 90 degrees. That is not me.
I just read an article in a ski magazine reporting that primary businesses in Heavenly Valley, California, are tourism, gaming, and then I shut the thing because I am clearly way too easy to annoy.
Gaming is Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble, chess, Dungeons and Dragons, paintball, or dominoes. Gambling is any of those games played for stakes, money or otherwise. If you play chess as a game, checkmate is the end of it. If you or your opponent has to pay the winner a nickel, it's a wager as well as a game. If you put your money into a slot machine, or anything that similarly operates with no input from you, it's only a gamble and not a game at all.
Anything that relies wholly on luck is not a game. I can barely accept blackjack, and craps I'm generously iffy about only because you do at least hold the dice in your own hands. Participating in a sport could be called "gaming" but it's probably running or swimming or playing football; betting on an event that you're not involved in is gambling; betting anyone other than your single opponent on an event that you participate in is cheating.
"Gaming." Renaming it doesn't remove the stigma. Not being stupid with your money, or greedy about others' stupidity, might do that.
These stories have a few good lines but treat, not women of the West as its hype claims, but women who want men of the West. My neighbor is beginning a book club with this, which is why I read it. Good writing, except it was the same story a dozen times over, from different angles. An exception, "Blizzard under Blue Sky," was my favorite: a woman and her dogs instead of a woman and her man.
Pam Houston is going to be at the Tattered Cover tonight. This might be interesting, plus maybe I can get over my exasperation before the book club.
My fourth Don DeLillo; only The Names to go. He's not a favorite but he merits my reading.
"Mao regarded armed struggle as the final and greatest action of human consciousness." With his apparently usual prescience, DeLillo discusses terrorism and the novel, how terrorism speaks to the masses more than the novel. Someone lives in sight of the World Trade Center.
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 20/20 incline and 12/20 resistance, 25' with two 2-lb. handweights, only 3818 strides, 408 calories, and average spm 127+.
Some weights: chest press, fly, row, lat pulldown.
100 crunches on the ramp.
Then I ate a salad, I was going to say bigger than my head, but bigger than my foot, at Whole Foods, while reading Lonesome Rangers. I love me some John Leonard. Most people who make me feel unread aren't good reads because I'm intimidated or they're off-putting (or b because a, of course). John Leonard is an exception, so far the exception.
Okay, I got over my exasperation with the one woman kicking herself in the head with a cowboy boot theme of most of the stories in Cowboys Are My Weakness because now I have heard and met Pam Houston, heard her read from Sight Hound, which I'm reading despite its plot focus being canine mortality, and met her at a friend of a daughter of a friend of a friend's house. Or something. Kal belongs to a book group that her aunt has been part of since its inception, and the daughter of one of its members knows Pam Houston, having met her at a Tattered Cover workshop almost a decade ago.
After the reading at the bookstore, about which I kept forgetting to email Scarf, who is starting a neighborhood bookclub with Cowboys, a mass of people descended on the book group member's daughter's/friend of Pam Houston's house for a cocktail reception. Which factored into why I omitted to tell Scarf about it: I was going to be in two new situations myself, Kal's book group and the thrice-removed friend's house, and Scarf deserves a lot more credit for keeping her head afloat than my considering only that it was deep enough water on my own. And I even wasn't on my own.
Pam--can I call her Pam, having been introduced to her? Houston sounds so cold--read bits from Sight Hound, which has 12 voices, nine human, two canine, and one feline. It was on the strength of the feline chapter that I decided to read the novel, and I hope I hear it as I read in Pam's voice, because it was damn funny. Yes, the cat, and not the first dog (she read another, more canine-sounding, dog's part after I had the book in my own paw). The dog is a charming character, but he didn't sound very canine, whereas the cat's thorough cattiness cracked me up.
Pam said she spends a lot of time thinking about what her dogs might be thinking about, which pleases me. I said to Kal's aunt that the one voice the book is missing is the parrot's. There is no parrot, which is a common fault in literature. The aunt, who will also need an alias, and her husband, and more the husband, are owned by a greenwing macaw. (This made Kal very easy to break in, as far as the eccentricities of my own household go.) I spend a lot of time thinking about what Blake might be thinking about myself, and I wonder if I could tell a story from his point of view. I read a translation of a dog barking, approximately, "Oh wow, I'm a dog! Look at me, I'm still a dog! Yea, a dog! I'm a dog I'm a dog yippee." It must have been a golden retriever speaking.
Blake is extremely sweet and self-centered and likes things to be Just So, like Junket, and I severely doubt that any attempt I made to get into his head could be amusing to anyone but me, and to me only if I could stop nattering enough to let him be heard.
Speaking of Blake, as of course I was, we were reading and having our heads pet and preening when he dropped an ordinary gray contour feather, probably from his shoulder by the look of it. We watched it fall and he resumed preening. Then when he scratched his head, a crest feather fell out, not one of the tall ones but one of the wide ones that give it body, asymmetrically vaned with discrete barbs. That one he seemed to want, maybe because I pounced on it, maybe because it's funner to run your beak up and down an inch-long rachis with some spine (metaphorically speaking) to it than a round contour feather almost without structure. The rule is that once it's out of his body, it's not his anymore--this counts for poop too, and yes, we elect to interpret his not wanting to have his tail or feet touched or be otherwise disturbed as poop-possessiveness--so now I own it. Just a few minutes later a center tail feather nearly detached, and I gave it the slightest of tugs to disengage it. Blake is nine and I have never given his feathers away and I think I have fewer perfect tail feathers from him than I have from Percy, whose (much prettier) tail feathers I would often give away and who lived only to 2.5. Mine.
Bike 7+ in two legs, to work and then to gym. I need two things, a new Kryptonite lock less vulnerable to Biro pens and about a half hour more sunlight, before I can bike the third leg home.
My usual type of elliptical wasn't available so I used the kind with handles, and my spm was less than half, between 53 and 58, for the 30', during which I reached a distance of 2.4 whatever units and burned an alleged 480+ calories.
Which leaves me with a balance of about 80 for the day after introducing Kal to Starbucks' "drinking chocolate" this afternoon, and that's after turning a blind eye to the fact we had breakfast for Wednesday lunch.
Because I held the handles throughout instead of pumping my arms as I can on the Precor, I know that my heartrate plateaued around 164 bpm, which is just about 90% of my maximum heart rate, but all I felt was good. When I returned to aerobic machines after the swimming season, I occasionally touched 174 bpm, so my heart is either that much stronger or I'm not exercising as hard, I hope the former.
I have one answer to my perpetual question, which is: What foods, if any could be so abominable, go with neither chocolate nor garlic?
Today Kal and I were sipping Starbucks' three hundred and ninety calorie (she has forbidden me to tell her the count) per 6 oz. serving of drinking chocolate and she said it compared well enough to her father's Christmas morning traditional hot chocolate, which this year was followed by grapefruit, which is not a good pairing.
I don't like grapefruit anyway--I think I've had a bite here and there of particularly mild ones that didn't pucker my throat--but she does. And even though she does, she agrees it's not a good pairing, and wouldn't pair with garlic either.
42. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Of course, now I'm thoroughly tuckered. We talked about Don DeLillo and metanarratives over burgers at Good Friends, with me grumpy and petulant until I was fed.
Now we are home and in fleece and one of us has a buddy chewing his beak on one shoulder. We are watching "ER" instead of "Judgment of Nuremberg," which is apropos but only happens to be the current Netflix selection because I expect to fall asleep at any moment.
The dog dies, which is nothing you don't know about from the jacket. The cat's chapter, which Pam Houston read at the Tattered Cover, was not only the funniest but also the best and realest chapter, and the dogs' chapters were also exactly right. I expected to cry, but I didn't. I think that means she avoided tawdry sentiment and that's a good thing.
I do wonder how it would read for someone who doesn't live in Denver. Does the name "Chop House" convey enough about the restaurant so that you know what she doesn't show with more words? Do intersections mean anything to the non-resident, give the book a sense of realism, or they just scream Autobiographical?
Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 12/20 resistance and 20/20 incline; only 3700+ strides and 400 calories, 123+ spm. So I didn't push there but I did 10' on the stairmill, 68 steps per minute. I do like that the stairmill sets a pace that you are obliged to keep up with.
Then 100 crunches on the second angle, and I did some abdominal stuff on the TotalGym at home before. And I tried that abdominal exercise where you support your weight on your back and your forearms and raise your legs and, shockingly, I could do five. I could have done more but not raising my legs as high: my measure was to see, in the mirror across the way, the soles of my sneakers cross the waist of my shorts.
I bought a 5280 whose cover proclaimed 101 things you've got to do in Denver. Six of the first 10 are not in Denver: getting traffic-jammed along I-70, seeing Blues Traveler at Red Rocks (officially part of the Denver Parks System, like Winter Park ski mountain), singing "America the Beautiful" atop Pikes Peak, attending a show at Chautauqua Auditorium (in Boulder), visiting a dude ranch, and riding the Georgetown rail loop. I still haven't been to Pikes Peak.
I've done a lot of the suggestions, but not all. I haven't seen Cleo Parker Robinson Dance or eaten at the Fort. I wouldn't kayak Confluence Park (if I could) unless by personality transplant my cuticles weren't ripped up and I could seal off the seven holes in my head and boil myself in disinfectant immediately afterward and ick. I have intended to find Mork and Mindy's house since before I moved here.
We are having our traditional Sunday night television gape-a-thon and something in "CBS Sunday Morning" reminded me of an omission from this list. RDC mocked my mocking so much of the list being from the Denver metro area instead of strictly obeying its own headline, but if I must accept crossing Trail Ridge Road as something to do in Denver, then the magazine should accept that it omitted something major. This week's penultimate story was narrated by Bill Geist, whom I usually fast-forward through: visiting Nederland's Dead Guy and participating in Dead Guy Days. That's an omission.
Quelle trip down Memory Lane I have started. After I finally sorted and stored my various crafts stuff in lots of little boxes, I hauled out my file crate, like a milk crate but collapsible and twice as long and with rails for hanging folders. I think in the summer of 1991, when I bought these supplies, I was Turning over a New Leaf and Being Disciplined and Organized as part of my Embracing Life as an Ascetic. I was going to be an ascetic because it went well with involuntary celibacy; as it turned out, I was a hedonist. Though a celibate one. Anyway, these files. "Articles," not further categorized. Rock and roll got its own folder, though. Clothing (my taste hasn't changed much in nearly 15 years, but I doubt the black velvet v-neck dress from J. Crew is still available, or that I would look any good in it). Veronica. Artwork. Fugly. Resumes and recommendations. School records. Financial aid.
I threw out maintenance records for Fugly and the warranty on long-gone Veronica (though I did keep, for nostalgia, the checks recording her purchase). I found artwork from MCB and Reese that can easily go in the copy boxes of correspondence (never to be weeded). I found my own artwork, which can go into a copybox of my own stuff, and a bunch of stuff for my scrapbook. I didn't start keeping all of my stuff until fifth semester, and even then, did I keep coursework from Stats 110V? I did not. If I should ever want to reread my notes from History 261 (Great Britain to 1603), I can. And my bluebooks. That's as far as I got Sunday: then we went to the gym.
Tonight we (a different we) are going to Freak Train, and the really fun folders are done: I'm not going to weed much, if anything, from my schoolwork folders. I combined a few things into a history of lisa folder, like the insurance report from when I witnessed a bike v. car collision in 1993 and how I bought Shoreline Pizza a new sign after knocking down their old one in 1992* and my acceptance into the National Honor Society in 1985 and notification of academic probation in 1987. Then comes more recombining into boxes, the new history folder and artwork into the journal box and the feeling tidy. I have three formerly white but aged and dingy copy boxes full of journals and letters in my study closet, and I have a scrapbook that includes not only invitations to parties and weddings and programs from plays but also ticket stubs from movies and flights, and as long as all of this stuff is in its place, just keeping it doesn't make me untidy. The boxes, two at the time, made an excellent stand for two more boxes on their sides that held hair accessories and hosiery and jewelry in our pre-furniture apartment days.
My first computer, a Macintosh SE, I named Veronica. I was collecting friends in threes at the time, and I decided Elvis Costello's "Veronica" from Spike and Veronica Sawyer from "Heathers" and my computer would be a good threesome. When I bought it from a satellite store of the Co-op, they didn't allow check purchases for over what sum I forget. They sold furniture and computers so this was pretty stupid, and of course I didn't have a credit card, plus there was a $400 per day limit from an ATM. I should go to the ATM five days in a row and keep $1600 in cash in my room before a final $200 withdrawl and purchase? I finally talked the clerk into allowing me to pay by check. That was November. When I went home for Thanksgiving, I found a letter from my bank announcing insufficient funds. I was mortified: I had promised the clerk I had the money and the check would be good, and it wasn't. I sped to the bank, got a cashier's check, and sped the 50 miles to Storrs, getting to the store just before closing, slobbering apologies all over the clerk, who appreciated and accepted my groveling. More accurately, I had had the check deposited: my boyfriend was going to the ATM and I asked him to deposit my father's check. He did, but to my savings account like a goon. So there was the bounced check fee and the cashier's check and the scurrying to the store and the groveling and all was well.
Before I borrowed a thousand dollars from my father for Veronica, I asked him if he would let me pay him back. He wasn't good at letting my sister or me pay him back for outright loans, and there was no question that his assistance with my college tuition was a gift. But this time he let me. Also he let me pay him back when I borrowed another $500 only a couple of months later to fix Fugly's wispy brakes.
The day I bought Veronica, I lugged her home, in her big box, about a half a mile. She wasn't a particularly heavy computer for the time, but the box was awkward and its handles broke and blistered my skin. I was nearly home when SLH yelled from his window, "Polly, what are you doing?" and ran out and berated me for not asking for help and toted it the rest of the way (the length of his dorm and the lawn between it and mine). For the first time, last year's Yule card came back from his one-time location, "Addressee unknown." I know he's Crippled by Nostalgia as well: he bought an old--1930sish--UConn yearbook at an antiques sale and loved how its owner had kept track of her classmates over the years and we examined the declining handwriting together and imagined how the book had left her former possession during an estate sale. Dear SLH, I do miss you.
In 1993, living with RDC and inheriting his first PowerBook, I gave Veronica to CLH for Christmas. She, in turn, gave it to friends with whom she crashed for six months. Dear old Veronica, you were great but I don't miss you.
* Fugly never really recovered from this. She did become tri-tone, getting a new fender in a glarish red that clashed as much as anything else would with her otherwise maroon and beige shell. My parents individually blamed CLH for the accident, since it was her fault for inviting me to Boston for her boyfriend's birthday party and not mine for assuming the truck in front of me was turning right onto a street when I saw its brakelights and and passing on the left except hitting it on the way by and skidding into the sign of the restaurant that the driver cleaned at midnight every night and joining the statistic that most accidents happen within 25 miles (or a half a one) of home. But her timing or choke was off for her next, and last, six months. Dear old Fugly, you were a deathtrap--almost no horn, no emergency brake, dicey steering--but you were freedom and I loved you yet I don't miss you either.
See that? I miss one person and not two machines. That's reasonable, isn't it? Maybe I'm not crippled.
And also, that's my father in a nutshell, financially if not emotionally available. Financially because he could be, to a point, instead of emotionally, which for many years he could not be. He ends most phone calls with "I love you" now, and I am glad to exchange that last sentence with him.
I told Shrink some stories my grandmother told me about her daughter and ex-son-in-law, stories I really wish I didn't know. In this conversation, or maybe to open it, she asked me if my father had ever touched my sister and me or given us a pet. I was horrified by her suggestion--her suspicion?--and exclaimed no, of course not. But she wasn't alleging what I, given her language and my generation, assumed. She was asking about simple physical affection, and it occurred to me some time later that she in turn assumed that my forceful denial meant I was angry about the lack of affection and open to hear what more and worse she had to tell me that day. Another time I remember the generational difference in language is when she and Frisky were cuddling on the couch, he kneading her and she combing him, and her telling me that they were making love. I was pubescent at the time and knew but one meaning for that phrase, not knowing the one from hers: from "It's a Wonderful Life," Mrs. Hatch calls down, "What's George Bailey doing here?" and Mary responds, "He's making violent love to me, mother." And Jane Austen uses that very phrase in Emma, within a carriage one snowy Christmas Eve.
Sunday RDC asked me where his scuba license is. I am not so useful a backup brain as that. Then he asked where that tan corduroy toiletry kit was, and I said probably in either of the two boxes of his miscellany in the furnace room. Copy boxes, of course, labeled RDC. He found the box and found the kit but not the license, which was, shockingly because he hasn't dived in almost 10 years, available in an online database. That he found later. Digging through the box was as amusing as going through my files. I suggested tossing an empty box that once held highlighting markers. That he could manage. There was a piece of plastic that might have served to mount a phone on a wall that he could throw out, and a 1993 map of Mt. Snow that he could not, because it's a souvenir. Most amusing to me (still; I've seen it before) is the group photograph of his 400-person senior class. The hair-or, the hair-or. That box contains, in addition to perfectly reasonable mementos, whatever detritus was on his desk in the Storrs tenement the weekend before we left that he just swept in there.
Last night I went through the most amusing folder, pictures and headlines, some dating to high school, back when I, the extrovert, the exhibitionist, tried to give people a precis of my personality and interests by way of my dorm room door. Some I kept, such as the advertisement cut from Time, probably, of Snoopy holding hands with Charlie Brown and Sally, captioned "Happiness is having a Big Brother or Big Sister." Hmm. Even though Sally wasn't a big sister, I'm not surprised Big Brothers and Sisters of America didn't want to use Lucy to promote siblinghood. I had a collage of aesthetically appealing women, images culled from my weakness for Mademoiselle and wherever else. Other clippings betray my crush on Winona Ryder--Veronica really was a fitting name for my computer--and headlines my gullible fondness for peurile double entendre. I kept the odd comic strip and one copy of the time I was famous in the Daily Campus. But most I am going to send to my sister, because this shit is priceless, at least to her and me.
My high school subscription to Rolling Stone served me well, but I am sure I didn't put the full-page ad for the re-release of "The Wall" on my wall at any time other than freshling year (before I had seen it, but it was Cool) or maybe sophomore, since my boyfriend's favorite band was Pink Floyd, so why the hell did I keep it? Did I think I would have some future need for it? Hieronymos Bosch's Hell has not been my Outward Expression of Private Pain since maybe 11th grade. Clearly, I put all this stuff in a folder and forgot about it long before the web made all such things accessible all the time.
I found a Doonesbury Sunday strip where Trudeau tried to get postmodern: Roger Rabbit opening a door in the background and Mike & Zonk, seeing him, deciding to call it a day. But I didn't find my two favorites, both Sundays in a Walden classroom, with the same professor bemoaning the lack of intellectual curiosity in his classes. In one ends up ranting that black is white, up is down, while students frenetically taking notes say "This class is getting really interesting" and "Yeah, I never knew half of this stuff." In the other, he offers the radar detector as a device legally sold despite its stated purpose being to help a driver flout the law; a student suggests that maybe it's civil disobedience; and the professor nearly falls to his knees: "I have a student! A student lives! Where are you from, lad? Don't be frightened"; while the student thinks, "Am I in trouble here?" They're probably somewhere, on-line if nowhere else.
I was going to shove all this in an envelope for my sister immediately, but I think it needs to be part of a bigger, turning-40 memory extravaganza. Except that all the physical mementos I have are of my life, not hers.
