Tuesday, 1 February 2005

february to-do list

House:

  • Touch up paint in dining room and kitchen
  • Strip table
  • Make sign for the house's name
  • Repaint kitchen doors

    Garden

  • Take out vegetable garden
  • Get lots of vegetable pulp and coffee grounds (ongoing)

    Errands

  • New houseplant to kill
  • Curtain for bedroom doorway
  • Look for kitchen rugs
  • Stepstool for kitchen

    Lisaism

  • Jared Diamond with Kal Friday 3rd
  • "Sideways" with Koroshiya Saturday 4th
  • Cowboys Are My Weakness Monday 7th
  • Emlet's birthday
  • CLH's birthday
  • SEM, Wednesday 23rd
  • Book club: Kite runner 24th

    Reading:

  • Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (by the 4th)
  • Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  • E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
  • Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
  • Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (audio)
  • John Leonard, Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Land
  • Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spiderwoman
  • José Saramago, Journey to Portugal
  • Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (on-screen)

    Exercise

  • Bike as long as it's over 25, and work on 20
  • Gym too
  • Walk three miles on bus days.

  • Wednesday, 2 February 2005

    flight

    I have felt remorse for Blake's flightlessness but never guilt for the safety I am sure it has brought him. The price of freedom, but really the cost of imprisonment. I had seen still but never moving images of a cockatiel in flight.

    Blake will never look like that, and that's my fault. Hatched in captivity, he was never going to be free and wild, but I contributed to the demand for captive, though non-domesticated, birds. If he were genetically domesticated, it might not be so bad. Maybe that's another reason I call him puppy.

    I do wonder how badly his psychology, in parallel with his clipped if not crippled physiology, is warped. Certainly no wild cockatiel is a Widespread Panic or Rolling Stones fan.

    But I can't figure out where that bird keeps its toes while aloft.

    good news day

    In order of arrival, though hardly in order of import:

    Going to the beach, going to the beach, going to the beach. Possibly frolicking with dolphins. Going to the beach, going to the beach, going to the beach.

    Gonna be an aunt again, an aunt again, an aunt again. I dibbsed the honor of making the sproutling's stocking before it was even a glimmer. Now it's a sea monkey!

    I have just learned that someone is a good kisser. And that the dinner he made for the other kisser that contained a pint of heavy cream. I didn't ask about dessert. But kissing is important! And the news was delivered with a grin.

    This came in a couple of days later, but it fits with the happyhappy theme: SEM is crashing at Formigny in a few weeks.

    I know that Blake would have made a fine wild bird, father, and prematurely a snake's breakfast, but I'm pretty sure he likes me. Surely he wouldn't be so interested with the imperfections in my skin--freckles and goosebumps--and tongue them and try to nibble them off if he weren't concerned with my well-being and appearance.

    Thursday, 3 February 2005

    gym

    Precor Elliptical 30' @ 12/20 resistance, 20/20 incline, 20' two 2-lb. handweights, 4025 strides, 425 calories, spm 134.2. Six whole abdominal leg lifts, which exercise might be called "captain's chair."

    redefining

    I don't often talk about my job. Work, yes: Dot Org, the occasional coworker, commuting, rathering to be downtown. Job, no.

    (Except, aha! At Freak Train Monday night one of the performances was the Mouse Man from the 16th Street. He was just as unfunny on-stage as on-street with the disadvantage of not being able to walk away from him. He's someone I don't miss from downtown, along with the anti-choice Abe Lincoln dude.)

    Today as soon as I arrived I got a call that, admittedly, would not have come to me if any of the research staff I support had been in. How many states require a supermajority to pass their budgets? Though I didn't know the answer off the top of my head (I so want to be Bunny Watson and know all sorts of things off the top of my head), I knew exactly where to find the information, in less than a minute, while the person waited on the line. Most of my afternoon I spent compiling 50-state per capita and percent of income rankings of property tax revenues.

    Most of the researchy stuff I do depends on my MS Office proficiency rather than my genius for analysis, but that proficiency shouldn't--and doesn't--limit me to the support track. I wonder.

    Saturday, 5 February 2005

    gym

    Arc trainer 30', incline 100%, resistance 40%

    Monday, 7 February 2005

    gym

    Precor Elliptical, 30' @ 13/20 resistance, 20/20 incline, no weights because increased resistance, 3775 strides, 425 calories. More captain's-chair abdominal leg lifts.

    Also I might have bought a professional massage for the first time ever. All of it was great, but I think next time I will have the masseur just pull my skull away from my shoulders for the full period, because that was the best. It was deep-tissue massage, and I was supposed to be sore afterward, like next day. No sign of that yet, and I don't expect to be. Maybe I need to have another. Yes, I think so.

    social

    Goodness me, I'm being social.

    Friday Kal and I went to TCLD to hear Jared Diamond speak about, more interesting than read from, his book Collapse, which I'm in the middle of.

    Saturday morning my mother pulled her "My daughter is an abused neglected spouse" thing because I am not currently in Barcelona and though I do distinguish between Europe and south Florida I countered with Key Largo. Instead of enthusing about beach and sun and water and dolphins, she asked if I was going to see my father while in Florida, whereupon I went to the gym and worked out my frustration.

    Then Kal came over to watch the 1972 BBC version of "Emma," which we had expected to be indifferently produced, but not indifferently acted, and we lasted about four minutes--disappointed in Mr. Woodhouse and Emma, and then disgusted in Mr. Knightley, whom I don't expect to be Jeremy Northam all the time, but gack. "You might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley," could not be stretched to apply to this actor.

    Instead we went to the zoo as soon as we finished our grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a gorgeous day anyway, heretical to spend in the basement watching television, unforgivable if bad television. At the zoo, we cooed and awwed over the five-month-old lion cubs scampering and frolicking and leaping on their parents and aunts; and finally saw the okapi calf, now nearly as big as its parents and therefore pretty but not cute; and also saw the November-born giraffe named Dash; and marveled over the seven-month-old baby gorilla.

    The docent said the baby was then straying farther from his mother--four or five feet--than he had ever see him go. When I first saw the baby, this summer, he looked like a human newborn, with bigger eyes and stronger fingers--his mother's preferred mode of transport is on her right hind leg. Now he looks more gorilla-y in build.

    In the evening Trish and Jared and I went to the Rocky Mountain Diner and to "Sideways," which was great. Trish bemoaned my musical ignorance but helped by giving me Beth Orton covering "Wild World," and neither of them tried to take my Junior Mints from me, so it was fun.

    Sunday I didn't leave the house but read all day, not Collapse but Pride and Prejudice because I am a sick pup. But Blake and I enjoyed ourselves.

    Then Monday was the first meeting of Scarf's newly formed book group, for women in South City Park. We--she, five other female neighbors, Kal, and I--discussed Cowboys Are My Weakness and ate chili. It was really good. I don't expect to find voracious readers everywhere, like in my very neighborhood, but maybe I should. Not all were voracious, but they were readers, and that's enough for me.

    Social, wheee!

    Saturday, 12 February 2005

    collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

    Almost all of this was as compellingly readable as my first Jared Diamon, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He explained the outline of the book in an elephant inside a snake kind of way (he used sheep instead, which you can't tell me wasn't deliberate), so of course I liked it immediately. The majority was about past societies collapsing or succeeding, which was history and geography and fascinating, but I confess that when he started talking about now I had to push myself, because he was pulling my fingers out of my ears and writing more loudly than I could chant lalalalala, and then the chapter about oil extraction was all money and corporations and my eyes glazed over until the final chapter.

    One of the two usual plots of my anxiety dreams is Forgetting I Have Registered for This Class All Semester so will certainly fail it. The classes I have omitted to remember are either French or anthropology, that is, the two subjects I should have pursued more. I like Diamond's cross section of geography and anthropology; plus, he's a bird-watcher.

    Monday, 14 February 2005

    bike

    Two 3.6-mile city rides. A gorgeous day.

    Tuesday, 15 February 2005

    half

    One 3.6-mile city ride. This morning when I left it had just begun to snow, so I was happy to have a ride home.

    tempest


    As soon as I got in the house I grabbed the phone. "Who're you calling?" RDC asked idly.
    "Kal."
    "Didn't you just get out of her car?"

    We called each other simultaneously to say "Jordan Catelano." We couldn't remember his name for the last half-mile, and that is just wrong. I was trying to make a parallel between Ricky and whatever the new chick's name was in the last episodes of "My So-Called Life" and the high school boy and his best friend in "Queer as Folk."

    Not only as RDC never been a girl, he doesn't remember what it's like to live with one either. The same thing happened years ago when Haitch and I couldn't remember the third daughter's name on "The Cosby Show." Which I still couldn't and had to look up (Vanessa). It's okay that I forgot that, because I barely watched that show; it was very wrong of Kal and me to forget Jordan Catelano, because she was the exact right age to watch the show when it was on and although I wasn't and didn't I have certainly demonstrated my MCSL love.

    Anyway, I had just come home from an Haitch outing and RDC said hi and then something about that Huxtable daughter Vanessa. You would have to know how much RDC doesn't talk about television and how gullible I am, in addition to merely appreciating coincidence, to know how those sentences coming out of his mouth bowled me over. But of course Haitch had called in the minutes between her arriving home and mine.

    I don't know if she remembered it on her own or had looked it up. I looked up all of my references: Ricky of course, but I looked up Vasquez. He was one of the few characters not referred to by both names. Delia Fisher. Not knowing "Queer as Folk" names is okay. Justin and Daphne.

    As parallels go, I prefer the calling despite having just left someone's side to the Ricky:Delia::Justin:Daphne one. But they both work.

    Wednesday, 16 February 2005

    the other half

    One 3.6-mile city ride, without snow, and in contacts. It felt colder than 30, but perfectly manageable.

    kiss of the spider woman

    Lovely. Surprisingly, the movie was as faithful to the book as it could be, as far as I remember from a decade back, and despite my Issues with William Hurt (that I loathe him, aside from "Kiss" and "Children of a Lesser God," neither of which I can watch again).

    I don't know what to make of the extensive footnotes, that is, not so many but those few being extensive, going on for pages. They offer this person's and that's theory for the origin of homosexuality, which makes me wonder why Manuel Puig didn't offer similar rambling pedagogies on films and dreams (and dreams in films and films in dreams) and the prisoner's dilemma and other themes in the book.

    But it was lovely.

    Thursday, 17 February 2005

    nick drake

    A couple of weeks ago, I heard a song on KBCO that I had to look up when I got home: Nick Drake, "One of These Things First."

    I had heard of him sketchily before, confusing him with Nick Cage--of whom I was also fond, for years, without cause other than his appearing in my beloved "Wings of Desire"--learning that my less but still beloved "Life in a Northern Town" was dedicated to him, and, I think, hearing Lucy recommend him.

    Then I looked him up on iTunes. Kind of Cat Stevens-y, kind of Leonard Cohen-y: simple melodies, gentle lyrics, minimal instruments, mournful. I figured that KBCO had played that song not because he was however influential but because it appeared on the soundtrack to "Garden State" (I repegged that movie to the top of my Netflix queue).

    Yesterday I listened to a lot of Cat Stevens, including "If You Want to Sing Out," which had not been available on iTunes previously and which I had had only on my worn-out Footsteps in the Dark cassette or sung by Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude." Today I listened to Nick Cage, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Drake.

    He's been dead for 30 years but since he's new to me he counts as new music, to which I listen all too little of. If my newest successes have been Nick Drake and Beth Orton, who should I listen to next?

    bike

    Two 3.6-mile city rides. This morning was just below my comfort level, in the low 20s; this afternoon was perfect, in the mid 40s.

    bring on the new messiah

    Okay. I know I live in the past in many ways, most recently evidentally, musically, and iTunes has enabled my WayBackitude more than might be good for me. I have an '80s nostalgia playlist that begins with "My Sharona" (1979, but who's counting) and ends with "Justify My Love."

    I happily paid $0.99 for "Boys of Summer" and howled with glee when iTunes produced "I Ran" and, later, glommed onto Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song" in the background at the bar in the very beginning of "Monster" and remembered that as my preferred song from that album. And I will happily pay the same $0.99 if iTunes ever offers Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" or Icicle Works' "Whisper to a Scream." Those are nostalgic songs.

    A lot of '80s music I never stopped listening to at all. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and the Waterboys figure prominently, of course, and I discovered Cat Stevens in 1986 as well. Some stuff I'm getting now, though, I wonder about. Do I buy it only to restore my catalog, my painstakingly recorded, radio to low-end cassette, full of background noises like my dog suddendly snorfling or my mother yelling, catalog of AOR and New Wave songs? Those cassettes I recorded over at college, and if Oliver's Army was ever legible above the generations of illegality, I missed it. Or would I have kept listening to certain of this music if cassette were a more durable medium, or if I had spent money on CDs rather than on student loans? No question I had to have "Voices Carry," especially since Aimee Mann has justified my love, speaking of, more recently. ITunes has recently provided me with Songs to Learn and Sing, and I am pretty sure that I still love each one, and that that is okay.

    But I am a little worried that if I bought English Beat or the Cult, I would actually listen to them regularly and not on a nostalgia loop. Would that be okay, or would that just be pathe?

    Friday, 18 February 2005

    bike

    Two 3.6-mile city rides.

    Saturday, 19 February 2005

    gym

    Precor Elliptical, 30' @ level 12.66 (10' @ 12 and 20' @ 13), 3940 strides, 430 calories, 20' with two 2-lb. handweights.

    Upper-body weights. Chest press, fly, shoulder press, upright row, lat pull-down, triceps, incline press, decline press, something else.

    Then I couldn't do any leg lifts in the captain's chair. One, barely. I have no abdominal strength whatsoever.

    Sunday, 20 February 2005

    clean

    I didn't water the garden--the vinca looks like it wants it, which means the trees really need it--but the entire main floor of the house is clean. I repainted the top of the mantel and retouched several spots of sage, too. Also I repainted a stretch of trim in the kitchen where RDC spilled some red wine. Cheap-ass Behr paint: not just the eggshell blue but also semi-gloss paint stained by red wine that we immediately washed off?

    White trim. I love its look when it's clean, but it's almost never clean. Dust accumulates in imperfections and can't be dusted away but must be scrubbed out with hot water and a soapy brush. A few times I vacummed the trim but of course the cheap paint readily showed abrasions from the attachment.

    The longer days are affecting my mood for the better. Instead of hibernating--there ought to be a verb for diurnal behavior--I am motivated to action in the evenings.

    I finished overhauling my files. I am really never going to reread my bluebooks again but I am absolutely not going to cull my college papers. I regret that I didn't keep things until fifth semester.

    I added a few years of stuff to my scrapbook, which is just a pointless collection of ticket stubs and such rather than that thing with the butchered photographs and special scissors that I don't understand. I don't understand my pointless collection either, but it doesn't require butchery or pinking shears.

    I can't wait for spring. I am going to drub everything and bake it in the sun and scrub the trim. And wake up the garden, except it's waking up on its own.

    Monday, 21 February 2005

    housekeeping

    Gorgeous, just gorgeous writing, involving a big lake and water water everywhere. I am not sure Robinson knew how to wrap up the relationships, so the ending seems forced and false, but sisters are sisters are sisters and that's that.

    After I finished it I read the Suspects' discussion of it. I should get over my dislike of the ending because it cannot be meant to represent reality. I hope.

    Loved it, until the end.

    Tuesday, 22 February 2005

    yam of willendorf

    I was traveling through a trough Cowboy Junkies, Mariner's Song yesterday and once again succumbed to the one little thing phenomenon. Selecting yams, I saw one with a belly button.

    I guess archeologists or art historians agree that Venus of Willendorf's navel occurred naturally in the stone and possibly inspired the artist to carve the surrounding woman.

    The purpose of my quest was sacrificial victims for sweet potato crack. Whole Foods had garnet and jewel yams but not sweet potatoes, and the produce clerk had already told me when I inquired if sweet potatoes were in stock that they're the same thing. When I saw the naveled one and giggled, he was right there, ready to take it away as if spoiled. I reassured him I was giggling because it was Woman of Willendorf, not because the store had poor vegetables.

    Luckily he knew about the sculpture, so I didn't come off quite as insane as I would have otherwise. But the yam and his ready understanding made me smile. Also he suggested I could sell it on eBay. I wish I had had my camera with me, or was handy enough with a knife to make a Yam of Willendorf. Its navel was big enough fit my pinkie-tip too.

    the ear, the eye, the arm

    Not as bad as House of the Scorpion, no hope of touching A Girl Named Disaster. I had no idea of the point for about the first third, at which point it improved, but 33% is way too much of a book to be indifferent.

    Wednesday, 23 February 2005

    weak gym

    What the hell was wrong with me? Precor Elliptical 30' @ 12.85/20 resistance and 20/20 incline, with handweights only for 10 minutes. I've forgotten strides but I probably averaged ~122 spm. Is it because I accustomed my body to 60% resistance that my gradually pushing toward the full 30' at 65% wears me out?

    my god-husband

    Not that marriage is required for procreation or family, but I do like to call the godfather to my goddaughter my god-husband. I call my sister and mother Emlet's godaunt and godgrandmother, so it follows. SEM is in town for a conference this week and spent last night with me. I had lots of shawnster hugs, which are the best ever. (JGW says that my hugs are the best ever, but he's never had a shawnster hug, and certainly a hug is improved with sentiment so maybe even he did he wouldn't appreciate it as much.)

    He noticed the kitchen all by himself but I had to point out that I cut my hair all off. For the first time I was conscious of its shoulder-lengthedness, because his preference is for either extreme. But he likes me anyway. Also the kitchen. Also what I cooked for him. Also Blake. So he was a good houseguest.

    I told him about finding SLH and we giggled over our delight in googling the absent (and irritation about those so discourteous as to be ungoogleable) and shared pet stories and work and relationships and plans and it was a mighty fine chat.

    Just before he arrove, I was listening to Three Junes and got to the bit where a devastating wit dubs a supercilious snob "The Cuntess" which had made me shout with laughter. Unfortunately SEM and I don't have someone we can call that, and I don't want him to have a vicious ex just so we can, except I kind of do. I thought to tell him that title when absence of cookery skills inevitably was mentioned. I didn't continue to him the train of my thought, which was bits in books that make me laugh, namely how Sodapop made green pancakes. Green. I always loved Ponyboy for how that single repeated word made them so much funnier.

    Um, wrapping this up, SEM has green eyes. The end.

    Thursday, 24 February 2005

    names

    My newest time-suck is the baby name voyager. Why are names called "baby names," as if in mainstream culture adults are renamed?

    The previous entry had me searching for Sodapop, which I didn't expect to find and didn't, and Ponyboy, which I had higher but unrequited hopes for. Darryl peaked in the '60s, but Dallas has been on the rise as the Outsiders generation has begun to reproduce. Oh, poo, the television show also must have credit. It has to have been "Princess Bride" that made "Westley" spike in the '80s and '90s, just as Buffy has inspired Willow and Xander but, sadly, not Giles.

    McKinley, Theodore, Howard, Woodrow, Wilson, Calvin, Warren, Harding, Hoover, Franklin, Delano, Dwight, Kennedy, and Lyndon peaked or at least delayed their declines while their namesakes were president, while Herbert and Richard dropped after those terms. James, Ronald, and George aren't doing well but Carter, Reagan, and Walker are surging. William is declining, despite McKinley and an upsurge around Taft, most sharply before 1990, but that defense of #42 is belied by the drop of Clinton from the '80s to now; and although Jefferson is doing better, the third president, not the 42nd, gets that credit.

    My teenaged self's idea for a boy's name came from the same source as must be responsible for the surge in Dane after The Thorn Birds. Also Justine and Meghan. Ayla appears from nowhere after Clan of the Cave Bear, as did Tabitha and Darren, and less so, Samantha, after "Bewitched." Glinda spiked briefly after "Wizard of Oz" and Dorothy somewhat as the book's first readers grew up. Holden didn't appear until the 1990s. Are Asher's sudden appearance and Jonas's simultaneous but proportionally smaller upswing due to The Giver?

    Quentin ranks higher than the unattractive Quinton but Fiver is nowhere to be found. If I were so insane as to have five children, I'd name the fifth Fiver. Or maybe Hrairoo. At least no one's named a girl Quentin: that's asking for trouble.

    The ascendancies of Dustin, Angelina, Jude, Kobe, Clint, Denzel, Salma, Elvis, and Presley I attribute to celebrity namesakes. Maybe Piper and Tatum too. Hm: while Orpha has (rightfully, to my ear) disappeared, Oprah has not yet appeared.

    I have been trying to find the lowest ranked of these top 1000 names. The closest I have found yet is Doloris, ranking 988 in the 1930s; but because it was slightly more popular in the 1920s it doesn't look like such a maverick (which word is, inexplicably to me, now given as a name). The tracking begins at 1900, and maybe in the 19th century this following name was more popular, but its disappearance after an initial ranking of 973 makes me think Mossie never had a chance.

    Saturday, 26 February 2005

    watering and waking

    After I brought Blake to camp, I came home and spruced up the garden without any spruces. I let the hose run low and for hours on the nectarine and pear trees and another on the cherry, and I would have watered the two longer but the plums needed their drink but couldn't have it from the north hose, since that spigot hibernates. I cut down all last year's growth from the front, now that the weather won't be cold. I stacked all the semi-woody stems on the tarps in back where I'm trying to smother weeds and grass; I don't know what I'll do with them. It's time to start afresh with mulch so I think I will churn all the dead spines of sage and agastache and penstemon all down to mulch-sized pieces and return it to the garden.

    Next weekend I will empty and turn the compost and maybe empty the vegetable beds and restock their soil with young loam.

    Monday, 28 February 2005

    the mambo kings play songs of love

    I really wanted to like this. Someone I owe an emotional debt to recommended it to me in August 1992, and he had already proved his literary trustworthiness by having read One Hundred Years of Solitude and bringing with him (on a Live Adventure weekend of camping) a volume of e.e. cummings. Also because it's the only book I can recall about Cuban Americans. Also because it won a Pulitzer. But I didn't.

    It was okay; its prose was fine and even occasionally stirring; its plot existed; but it didn't grab me in any way. Sorry, Oscar Hijuelos.