I am not old yet, I know, but I am definitely changing. I always thought I would look more like my mother as I aged, but right now I look a lot more like my father. In every single photograph of me in the Netherlands, I wonder if my mother was in the room when I was conceived. She was, because I have Granny's eyes, but otherwise I'm Dad. Partly it's that fat makes my face look more round, more like Dad's, than the rectangle that is my mental image of myself and that my mother carries.
I have my grandmother's eyes, and the texture of my skin is changing.
I still like my profile best.
I turn 37 in less than three weeks. I still look best with a dog. Edited: this is not my dog. It is someone else's dog in someone else's house. The big clue to its not being my house is the crocheted afghan in plain sight.
As I knew but hoped against, History of the Siege of Lisbon is not a travel book. If all that travel time were actually a single stretch, I could read a challenging book, but it's not and I can't, not when jet noises distract and the only time I read on vacation is before sleep: that doesn't work for Saramago. On the way home, then, in Memphis, I bought the one trade paperback available that vaguely interested me: Christopher Paolini's Eragon.
Eragon to Aragorn is too small a jump. The true names of things and being unable to lie in that language and dragon is straight out of Earthsea, and if Ursula LeGuin took it from somewhere else, I didn't realize it when I first read her in...1992, and it hasn't seemed derivative since either. His languages--three, for pity's sake--have even more random punctuation than '80s glam-metal bands.
People saying "She don't" or "I seen" or writing "I should of done" doesn't bother me nearly as much as their slavishly following a rule they don't understand. Much worse than "between you and I" is the misuse of "whom"; in Eragon I stopped actively counting at five. Sometimes Paolini used it correctly (e.g., "You saw whom?"), but it seemed to my reflexively and by this point excessively critical eye that he got it wrong more often than right.
In the sentence "You must deliver this sword to whoever can best wield it," the object of the preposition "to" is the entire dependent clause "whoever can best wield it"; the clause, comprising a subject and predicate, takes a subject, not an object, pronoun: who, not whom. Paolini used "whom[ever]" in like constructions.
The author was homeschooled in beautiful but relatively remote Montana, right? His Alagaësia reminds me very much of the homeschooled Yorkish Brontës' Angria and Gondal.
Only a vague interest, it only vaguely paid off. I wish I were better about putting a book down a fifth of the way through.
Kal hosted me for dinner cooked by her newish boyfriend Ziggy, and we played Cranium afterward. The instructions call for teams of at least two, but what the hell. One would read a card, the second would perform the task and would progress based on whether the third got it. For the record, I cannot hum Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," the only words of which I know are the title two. The hum kept sliding into "Sweet Home Alabama," "Smoke on the Water," and "Walk This Way." I can hum "Stayin' Alive," or at least someone can guess what I mean when I flaut the rules and gesture, if pointedly pointing my chin up and right or down and left like John Travolta counts as gesturing.
There was chaos and hilarity, of course, as these things dictate. My spelling words were ridiculous, like "larva," and I dropped my head to the table with a clunk when this question a) was included at all and b) as a multiple choice: "Stars trace a circular path through the sky because of Earth's rotation on its axis/ Earth's revolution around the Sun/ I forget the third choice/ the galaxy's rotation on its axis." Oh, the humanity.
The funniest thing during the evening was not Kal's shut-eye drawing of a stick shift that looked like a priapus, especially after she added action arrows spurting from the knob much more indicative of ejaculate than of a standard transmission. The funniest thing was Marlowe the cat. He had wanted On the table during dinner (Ziggy made stuffed shells) but was not allowed; after dinner he figured he was sure to be allowed On. He launched up, landed front paws on the edge ready to scoot forward when his back legs followed, but before his eyes on the table lay the Cranium box, not heavy or overtall but unexpected. His hind legs now arrived on the table edge, but instead of continuing the propulsion of his noggin into the box, he abruptly dropped to the floor. We cracked up, me braying. Ziggy considered which was funnier, the cat or my laugh. I love people who appreciate my laugh.
(Of the four Yank drunks we were seated with at the Amsterdam Japanese restaurant, one looked like Dick Cheney so it was awhile before I got past that. The final straw that got me past it was his complimenting my laugh.)
Cranium was fun, if not nearly as challenging as I had hoped. I won, even though I couldn't guess Imelda Marcos ("look at my shoes!") and had no idea whether the Chicago Cubs had ever won the World Series.