More registration, gah. Certain comments about certain people I encountered, some not for the first time, deleted because I'm tactful like that.
Loose at last, I ate in Wild Ginger: lamb satay, a Vietnamese green papaya salad, and ginger ice cream. For this meal I was accompanied by Katharine Graham. In Personal History I came across what something I've been wanting for a while: an example showing the encroaching usage of the (subjunctive?) for the pluperfect. One problem with giving such an example is that natural-sounding constructions are elusive, sounding like the aseptic examples they are. Another is that I don't know the names of tenses in grammatically technical terms. I do, however, have an ear for my own languague, and could match subjects and verbs correctly in number long before I understood the concept of plurals. Such vocabulary is not necessary to understanding but is useful in explaining.
Graham quotes someone's impression of her husband: "My feeling always was that he was terribly troubled by a self-doubt [--] whether or not he would have hit the heights that he did professionally if he hadn't been Kay Graham's husband, Eugene Meyer's son-in-law, and hadn't had the Post stock given to him."
In common speech now, someone might say, instead of "if he hadn't been," "if he wouldn't have been," the same tense or time or mood as in the earlier "whether" clause, and therefore renders meaningless the conditional nature of the musing. It is the past-tense equivalent of Paul Simon wishing he not were but was homeward bound, but worse, because the if-then aspect. You can achieve much with context and additional words--I understand that Chinese has no tenses--but I want to English to remain short and snappy.
I am getting into a Mood that might have been diverted with some MEWN, or maybe is caused by three days of buddydustlessness, or by getting to the point in Personal History when Graham talks about her husband's mental illness. Or perhaps I am decompressing after two days of On-ness. Being in a crowd does not necessarily help, though being alone is almost certainly bad. I can maintain my boundaries best among people I know slightly: enough to owe courtesy but not enough reasonably to expect anything from. I was thinking about that in the context of someone who wanted to attend the Big Top today. Him I can talk about because he does not belong to Dot Org. Apparently a Social Security office told him about the meeting, probably more from a wholly understandable desire to be rid of him than from any misguided idea that we could help him with advocacy or information. He wanted as a private citizen to attend, but not to pay any registration fees, and wanted our attendees to help him directly. More irrational than his expectations of us was his inability to hold his boundaries: to know what information was too much, to know when he was repeating himself, to process what he was told and react to it. All of that is, 14 years out, distressingly familiar to me. Nigel Hawthorne as George III still put it best: "I have remembered how to seem."