The first time I saw a man with an earring, or noticed it (because it was a big gold hoop), I asked him if he were a pirate. My mother shushed me. I was seven, and we stood in the lobby of an auto mechanic. I read a lot of Dr. Dolittle, and of course there were pirates in The Story of Dr. Dolittle. They had earrings. No other man I had ever seen wore an earring. This man wore a big gold hoop. Therefore, he was a pirate. A pirate! How exciting. Even dangerous!

(That memory just occurred to me.)

I had seen plenty of men and boys with earrings before I first saw BHM with two earrings in one ear. I figured he followed an urban, urbane, gay iconography of which I, the straitlaced inexperienced het girl, knew nothing. He told me there was no reason, he just liked them. I remember suspecting he thought I was too young to know the real truth. I was 16 (or so). Also around then, visiting CLH in Boston, we and BHM saw "Stop Making Sense" somewhere in Harvard Square. One of the previews for Blair Witch was the 15th anniversary rerelease of "Stop Making Sense." Same as it ever was.

On Thursday, just as we were leaving for the cinema, someone called to cancel his interview with RDC Friday morning. His wife had just been offered a position in Lewiston, Idaho. This is the woman whose dissertation celebration we attended in February or whenever that was. This means 100% placement for everyone conferred a Ph.D this year. So anyway, the husband, now looking forward to being a faculty wife, didn't need the job. Saturday we went out to dinner to celebrate her job, and when we arrived at their house I was glad I've always had enough time to pack. Carman said you always take as much time as you have, which I suppose is true: I packed CLH's apartment in nine hours, but I took six months to pack our tenement. This past February I packed lackadaisically, but it didn't really count since nothing had to be done neatly. Packing to move to Denver, everything had to be tight to fit into the truck, and I say I took six months to pack only because when I boxed the winter clothes, I taped up the boxes and labeled them. But the less time you have, the more space you need.

So we drove to Hemingway's, a place meant to look like Sloppy Joe's in Key West, and talked about the job, the school, Lewiston, and Hemingway. I was idly staring out the Dutch door when someone waved at me: HAO. Whom I hadn't recognized, which hints at how idle was my stare. JEM was coming through Denver on the way to his new job in Michigan--another placed Ph.D. So they joined us, and eventually we four left, and then when HAO and JEM left, they ran into two other women from DU.

Maybe it's the name. Carman loves Hemingway, a good thing considering where she's moving, and particularly Roberto. I found the novel refreshing unlike an iceberg--and liked it.

I swam Saturday, 1.75 K. I didn't Sunday because of rain. I swear Denver is not its usual self this summer.

Sunday I did precisely nothing all day. I wore contacts because of an errand to REI. I love contacts at no time more than I do in the rain. I did not Nordic Track. I did not do any yoga. I did read Mansfield Park again, and oh, the groans. Between Pride and Prejudice and Sunday I also reread Sense and Sensibility, as if I need to, as if my soul profiteth. But Mansfield Park is the great Austen cure-all. It is my least favorite, less even than Northanger Abbey; I keenly dislike Fanny Price (and not even A.S. Byatt's analysis in Imagining Characters helped her much); and whenever I'm so slothful as to read it, naturally I reckon myself as useless as Lady Bertram. So in the evening I continued with A Century of Women, which is thick if not consistently researched. Today I read Waiting for the Barbarians (yes, still) on the bus and at lunch found the Constance Garrett translation of Anna Karenina. I don't know anything about Constance Garrett, but the other copy on the shelf didn't even name its translator let alone discuss method so I eschewed it in favor of this, of which I have no reason to think good or ill except that it justifies itself.