17 June 1999: Harry Potter

Wednesday dawned with rain, so I didn't feel guilty about not riding to work (which was just not going to happen anyway). Glasses, velvet scrunchied ponytail, big houndstooth dress. Mocha frappuccino. Stumping along, vertical but not alert. At lunch I scurried to the Tattered Cover to find Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, since I can't read the second of a series first. They were out, and didn't have other titles I was looking for. I read some Helen Hanff for a spell and then leaving, scampering down the stairs, picked up a new-to-me Milan Kundera novel, Identity (discounted at two years old!) and two cards, and read Kundera on the shuttle returning to work, worked, and stopped halfway home to buy my book from the Cherry Creek TC. On the first bus ride I read Kundera; on the second I read Harry Potter.

And it rained, so I didn't ride or blade, and it rained, so I didn't swim, and I'm a lazy schmuck, so I didn't go to aerobics.

I had dragged all day at work but as soon as I got home I blasted Learning to Crawl and unpacked in a frenzy. I have not listened to that since I bought it in January; I only bought it so I could get rid of the tape that it shared with Melissa Etheridge. "Like I Do" I needed; I did not know how much I needed "Back on the Chain Gang."

"Show Me" sounds just like the theme from "The Love Boat" (old show--I am pleased to announce truthfully that I don't know what the new song sounds like).

After my Chrissyfit I crashed. I read. And slept.

Aha, and when I got home from work my sister's package had finally arrived. The woman in the office said, "Another package?" but of course the first one was from RJH. And since I'd called frequently over the past three weeks to see if it'd arrived, I opened it there (so the clerk could share). The dress did have the same fabric but not the putrid halter top and I love it; and A Century of Women (from QPB), and a purple pen from that purple store in Fanueil Market, and a thick disc of Neutrogena or other clear soap with a mini rubber ducky in the middle like the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop. But it'll take me longer than ah-one, ah-two, ah-three showers to free the poor thing. A successful package, as ever. CLH also buys me the best presents.

When I got the email in the morning after five days away, I nearly deleted an email from an unknown address because it had no subject. But I read it anyway: my cousin Mary! Naturally this made me wonder if this is going to blow up in my face, so in addition to expressing how pleased I was that she found me (because I was), I also asked, e'er so casual, how she found me: The LOLHS alumni site. Whew.

One of the two cards I bought was for Father's Day card and I was pleased to have two (2) things to write my father about how the web isn't evil: the fare to Logan and his niece finding me. (The other card was for RKC's graduation.)

Today I cleaned and read. And discovered that the Ten (give or take) Commandments are not only in Exodus 20 but also in Deuteronomy somewhere that I forget, and that the Jewish and Christian versions differ in text and number, and that the various Christian translations vary considerably among themselves. It is this latter, if anything, that will spare the trashing of the First Amendment: apparently the majority in this country don't care about the separation of church and state but if they--Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, whatever--can't agree on how the freedom of speech should establish a religion, perhaps they'll abridge themselves.

(The context of this is someone's harebrained theory that if the Ten Commandments hung prominently in schools, things like the shooting at Columbine wouldn't've happened. Now I thought it was Roe v. Wade--would they make up their minds?)

Evidently our legislators, state and national, need a refresher course not in the Decalogue but in the Bill of Rights. Number One:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I knew I shouldn't've taken it off my pages.