Reading: John Fowles, A Maggot

Christmas: a batch of cookie cutter cookies

Learning: where my wallet is

Moving: not today either

Listening: Peter Gabriel, 1977, 1980, 1982, Birdy.

Viewing: ER

16 December 1999: the Bald Soprano

Tomorrow I should set the clock earlier than its usual 6:00 am. I should try to spend more time with the bananahead before I go, except that he doesn't enjoy waking up before sunrise any more than I do. Anyway, afer I showered and got my lenses in I woke Blake up, and he stood there on one foot and gave me that look, the same look you get from anyone, human or dog, whom you wake unceremoniously and unwelcomed.

The only reason I don't get him up usually is that if RDC stays in bed well after I leave, Blake might yell, and he usually yells throughout RDC's shower (I think because he, Blake, doesn't like the shower curtain). He has learned to be quiet at least while RDC is in bed, but that curtain remains a bane of his existence.

So we had breakfast together, he and I, with me spoiling him with more seeds. He doesn't like to eat immediately after waking but usually breaks his fast with RDC, and we suspect he doesn't eat much at all when we're not home. If he'll eat seeds on his own but not his chow, then I need to provide them. And before I left I showed him every room in the house in hopes he'd realize his daddy wasn't home and not wait for him to emerge from the bedroom.

One of the "rooms" is the walk-in closet off the study, and Blake finds this place fascinating, especially the left-hand rack (with RDC's clothes). The right-hand rack has coats, which he dislikes, but he loves all of RDC's clothes, even the obvious going-to-work ones like starched shirts and ties (which like the coats indicate intent to leave the house and therefore should be equally offenseive). I hated to disappoint him by showing him the closet without allowing an expotition, and I was about to disappoint him even worse.

I put him in his cage, added the security bar (which we only use when we're really leaving), turned on the radio, and left. He yelled once and not again; he's a good boy.

Sigh.

---

Later at work, two people walked by on their way out for coffee. "Wait! I'm coming with you!" I fumbled in my backpack for my wallet, which wasn't there. I looked more carefully and in the main compartment as well, then the pockets of my overcoat. A. and I usually treat each other back and forth, though, and she offered to do this today, so off we went. I haven't gotten a frap and a scone for ages and they don't do me any good, but I do so enjoy them.

Was my wallet in yesterday's blazer's pocket, or in the car, or somewhere in the house less specific than the blazer pocket, or indeed dropped but certainly no longer in the Safeway parking lot? I fretted for a while then took a bus home. I checked the car first, reaching it before the apartment, and there I found my wallet, between the passenger seat and the door where it usually hides.

And I was wearing both my necklaces, which has become unusual. I believe, I want to believe, that the power with which I've imbued my talismans had some effect on the outcome of the lost wallet.

I tried to pet Blake's head for a bit in the time before the next bus, but he wanted none of it. He wanted to strut up and down the windowsill, and I let him. I packed up some cookies to bring to work, since left to my own devices I'll just blindly feed myself by the dozen, and scampered out.

One of the treats I found for my sister's stocking was a keychain edition of Operation. When I showed the loot to RDC that night, he wondered if I had got him one. Taking the hint, I checked the Walgreen's near the bus stop for another such, in vain. I'll have to go back to the one downtown.

But you are aware that there's an invention called television, and on this invention they show shows?

Ages ago a friend of mine at her different job compiled biographies of speakers for a seminar. She called one person to confirm what title the person wanted to use; the bio called the person Mrs. X, not Ms. X, so she figured either it was an old bio or some hag of a secretary at the person's former job had written it. Asking, my friend must have sounded a tad incredulous, because the person replied crisply, "Well, since I wrote it, that must be what I want to be called."

"Oh, of course," my friend stammered, "It's just that it's unusual [read: fucked in the head], and I wasn't sure you'd written it, so I wanted to confirm."

Also at my friend's office, people may use their internal mail for personal matters and sometimes people email everyone in the whole office offering baseball tickets, Girl Scout cookies, and the like. Mrs. X does not distinguish between the functions "reply" and "reply to all," so if she responds to a single person who has sent a global message, she does in fact send her reply to everyone. My friend considers this backwardness amusing and snickers about it condescendingly, but never at work, only to me, who is an entirely different person.

Today my friend heard Mrs. X and another coworker walking by her cube. The coworker mentioned she was buying a color Game Boy for her son for Christmas. Mrs. X asked, "A colorgay boy?" in tones of perfect ignorance, ignorance possibly also of the connotations the word "gay" has been assigned in the past 70 years. The cowork repeated, clarifying how the syllables flowed, "Color Game Boy," and explained, as Mrs. X obviously required, "It's a hand-held computer game."

Mrs. X is not only a Mrs. but has never heard of Nintendo. My friend, who is very careful never to complain about or insult her coworkers in any public forum, nearly burst until she could tell me her tale.

---

Home again, Blake helped me at the computer.king of all he surveys Computers: now I set up the PC laptop by my desk with the quickcam on its keyboard. My shoulders are square to the Mac, at which Blake, being a cockatiel of exquisite taste, is looking; my face is turned to the laptop because hey, that's where the camera is.

And what a Dad face it is: RSH jr.Mostly I look like my mother and maternal grandmother (I think). And then the fact that I always wanted to be my father's son shows on my visage. My irises might be my grandmother's, but overall my eyes are shaped like my Dad's. I think I'll blame him for the nose as well. Or maybe this picture reminds me of my dad because of all the hair escaping its bonds--my dad on a windy day gets all these wisps from his comb-over. If either of my parents ever changed their hair style, I think I'd collapse.

Speaking of hairstyles, here we see the chignon that would not stop. There's nothing holding all that mess up there, just my hair's own sheer determinedness. I don't usually put an elastic at the base of the braid but I do usually at the tip; today I didn't. When I got home and put my buddy on my shoulder, I took out two tortoise-shell chopsticks so as not to stab him in his beady little buddy eye, but my hair stayed up anyway. [And when I woke up Friday, the braid was down but still raveled.] This is why I like my hair long, and why I like it up. I still think a short cut is more flattering on me than long hair pulled back, but I really like the nape of my neck and the mystery of bound hair. I still agree with Katie Nolan that hair is so much more enticing and alluring when it's for a woman to share with her man alone.

no assembly requiredWell. As far as me alone with my man, that's us. I like good long hair on men, and two women or three men or whatever can enjoy whoever's long hair however they choose. YMMV.

I told JPD about his influence on my growing my hair. One of the reasons HEB started to grow her hair after she and JPD had been going out for a while is that he thought there is nothing sexier than hair drawn up off a woman's neck. I liked the sound of that. So I grew mine. Of course, I've hardly seen HEB(D), let alone JPD, since before I started growing my hair out in late summer 1990, so for JPD to see it long last month in Milford came as a shock to him. And may I just say that despite those years of separation, deliberate as well as geographic, I love that we all just resumed as if everything had just happened yesterday, and not nearly ten years ago--or, rather, that nothing calamitous had happened a decade ago--such that JPD could be surprised my hair had grown so long, as if it hadn't sufficient opportunity since he last saw me.

HEBD and I were combing our respective manes Monday morning, sitting on the futon bed in TJZ's spare room. HEBD's hair is about thrice as thick as mine and to her waist; her mane is much more respectable than mine. Anyway, JPD expressed his surprise at my hair (which is ironic, considering how paltry and feeble it is compared with his wife's). I thought back. "My hair was long at DEDBG's wedding [August 1996], and it was long when I visited you last year [June 1998]." How could he have only just noticed? Then I remembered. Of course. "But you've never seen it down before."

Later over breakfast, remembering that exchange, I told him how his appreciation for hair drawn up had affected my decision (and bolstered my resolution through slow months of in-between ugliness). Now he considered. "Maybe not the sexiest. But definitely sexy."

I wonder how HEBD copes. She's like the wife in O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi," really, she's got such great hair. It's luxurious and opulent and fantastically bright and beautiful, but it's waist-length and thick and dense and there's just piles of it, such that when she does get it all braided and piled up and pinned in place, TJZ calls her Challah Head.

plaiting her hair by the fireIt's the 17th now and I'm putting in photographs. My hair's not thin and wispy, for which I'm grateful, but honestly, triple that rope of hair on my shoulder and you'll have an idea of how much hair HEBD has.

Okay, this is why I don't need a camera, not often, certainly not every day. I don't need to know how big my nose is or how crooked my eyes are and why is my left eye so droopy? Am I having a stroke? But I like the smile. I do love HEBD, and I hope that love is evident in the Mona Lisa grin--the picture was taken while I wrote the above paragraphs.

There are three books stacked on top of other books in this picture, aside from the Signet Hemingway stack at the top left that I made deliberately. I just got all the books in place, I thought. I guess not. The top one is The Odyssey, horizontal over Zora Neal Hurston and Henrik Ibsen. Excuse me. Oof. I could just barely cram that in after Høeg and Hoff. What letter is ø, anyway, and does it come before or after o? I always thought it was like ç, but it's not, it's like ñ, a completely different letter. Silly Danes, I'll have to ask Ulla. On the third shelf (second in the picture), Eiger Dreams, which RDC just finished, over Kerouac and Kesey instead of over Kingston and Kundera, in alphabetical proximity if not order. On the next shelf down is The Fate of Man, over Malory and next to Katherine Mansfield. A history professor whom I ran into at the Co-op's Books by the Pound sale insisted I buy that. That was sophomore year, twelve years ago. I haven't read it yet. Don't tell. On the bottom shelf, not in the picture, I see that J.K. Rowlings (Harry Potter, keep up here) is next to Salman Rushdie. I really must write that book about authors neighboring on a shelf and what they'd talk about. Thomas Pynchon is still cheek-by-jowl with Ayn Rand. What do they talk about?

That was something I really liked in Kundera's Immortality. He put Goethe and Hemingway together, conducted a conversation between them. I love that. Naturally I hadn't read enough of either author (i.e., maybe the Cliffs Notes of Faust, and only a few short stories and The Old Man and the Sea to understand Kundera's point. I still haven't: I don't think A Farewell to Arms (eh) and The Sun Also Rises (mm!) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (ah!) would help much. Particularly after reading Forbidden Knowledge, I feel even stupider for not reading Faust (but that's never going to happen). I don't want to have to read Faust to understand Kundera. I read Anna Karenina, finally, years after wondering what meaning there was in the dog's being named Karenin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. To understand Kundera, I will read Tolstoy. But Goethe is too much.

And damn, that dog died. Another movie receives my CM (Canine Mortality) stamp of disapproval (I don't rate books thus). I loved that movie. I named my platypus after Sabrina--wasn't that Juliette Binoche? I fell in lust with Daniel Day Lewis. Damn.

Go to previous or next, the Journal Index, Words, or the Lisa Index

Last modified 16 December 1999

Speak your mind: lisa[at]penguindust[dot]com

Copyright © 1999 LJH