Reading: John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

Listening: KBCO

Moving: Ten minutes on the elliptical trainer and beginning weights

Learning: about Adobe Type Manager and my camera

18 January 2000: Busman's Holiday

Besides that I got up at 5:30 and RDC left for Vancouver this morning, it's been a good day so far (it's 8:30). I caught the bus, no problem, despite culling the time from a schedule I know is out of date. I read The French Lieutenant's Woman on the bus and I will finish it, yes finally, on the bus this afternoon. Being not your average bear, I wore a blazer and fleece pants over gym shorts and shirt, not to have to change twice, and even remembered to pack work clothes in my gym bag, and I used an elliptical trainer for a few minutes before I had my next appointment with Greg the Fitness Guru.

He taught me how to use the different weights. Watch me bite my tongue not to deride Education Sports and Leisure Studies as a college major. I know how to sit in the machines and move the pins to adjust the weights, but I'm never sure if I've fitted the machines to my height. He knew which joints should be aligned with which pivot points, so that was helpful. There was one machine particularly, a pull-down exercise that works the back, that will, I hope, put that channel up my back--when the muscles on either side stand out and there's a half-pipe along the lower spine, that makes me weak in the knees, on either sex and particularly on me. It's a good swimming exercise, so maybe by next summer I can butterfly more than a length.

Also for next summer I'll need a new pair of wrist guards, or at least a new right one if they're sold singly, and probably elbow pads. And, RDC said, butt pads.

Me and My Little Brain! The Fitzgeralds adopt Frankie who is at first quite the feral child and beats up John. John's parents command him to play with Frankie, so under protest John does, and by the end of the day John's donned his catcher's mask and his football padding to protect himself from Frankie's assaults. That's how I should dress to blade.

Or I should just learn how. Leaving Bloodbath and Beyond on Saturday, I watched bladers skim along the Cherry Creek Trail, including one man descending the slope to follow the path under University Boulevard. He stood straight with his right foot in front of him, braking as he went downhill. Show-off. There's no room for error there--concrete abutment to the right, polluted creek with lots of rocks to the left.

Walking on Sunday, HAO and I passed the spot I fell in September. I haven't been back since. There's a scene in The French Lieutenant's Woman in which a man, standing facing a fireplace, listens to a woman sobbing at the other end of the room. He stares at a china sheep on the mantelpiece while she cries, and for the rest of his life he is never able to see a china sheep without being overcome by feelings of abhorrence and guilt. That stretch of the trail didn't affect me like that, but I can hardly claim to have forgotten it. I told HAO that if she ever sees a man with a British accent walking a black Lab named Bob, please to thank him for me.

RDC just called me from the plane, before they closed its doors, and suggested I devote my gym time to weights because I can do aerobic Nordic Tracking at home or snowshoeing on the weekends. Maybe. How long does it take to do two sets of 12 reps on ten different weight machines? I guess I'll find out. I want it to take 15 minutes so I can do 30 of aerobic.

Enough.

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Lunchtime. I have one chapter (I assume) left of French Lieutenant's Woman and I have no idea where Fowles is going. At least he admits that authors don't usually introduce major characters (oh, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) in the last pages of a book. It's his admission that I like. Authorial intrusion: bring it on and be open about it! For a while--what, during the '60s and '70s? I'm an English major; how would I know?--authorial intrusion was supposed to be a very bad thing, but I always thought condemnation was unfair: the author wrote the book, and no book fiction or not can be objective, and even books written by automatons must show the personality of the person who programmed the script. You can deconstruct a book by shredding its unreliable narrator [Emily Brontë] and you can call "Reader, I married him" an interruption of the omniscient narrator [Charlotte Brontë]; but to have a novel without any intrusion I don't believe is possible. (So say I.) So Fowles sprawling all over the text, telling the reader about his own struggles with the narrative, progression, and characters and confessing to breaking various literary laws (like not introducing major characters and not intruding on your own story) I quite like.

Vocabulary lesson: Amphora. An ancient Greek jar or vase with a large oval body, narrow cylindrical neck, and two handles that rise almost to the level of the mouth. I must have once known this word.

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I am so not amused. RDC is in the lap of luxury in Vancouver looking at mountains and seaplanes and peregrine falcons and I just drove the damn bus home.

When the bus showed up, nine minutes late, we all piled on then the driver piled out and lit up in the bus lane. We were about to disembark and dismember him when he leaned in to tell us he was waiting to be given a new packet of transfers. The fellow who brought the transfers also had to guide the driver out of the station because of a 90û angle he had to negotiate. After he opened the doors for the station employee to leave, he turned in his seat and told us he had no idea how to navigate this route and one of us would have to help him. I was sitting toward the front, as usual, and when I saw, looking back, that no one else was getting up, I got up and moved right behind him.

I don't think he'd been in the station at all before because he asked which way to turn coming out of it. Well, Broadway is a one-way street just here so it would be good if you took a left and even better if you could figure that out by yourself by looking at the direction of traffic and the large one-way sign at the gate. So whatever. There I sat, not reading The French Lieutenant's Woman, telling him when to change lanes because this is a bus lane, that's a right-turn only lane, merge left because that lane's going to disappear. I think it might have been his first time driving a bus at all and this was a reticulated, or as I prefer to call it, a double, bus. He was extremely hesitant and kept expecting cars from his left to nip in front of him, but as soon as we hit the open road--Leetsdale east of Alameda--he clearly wanted to pick up some speed. "This curve is a little tight so you want to take it slow--well, next time you'll know and won't put two wheels on the curb."

I wonder what happened after my stop.

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Cleaning out my mailbox, I found something I sent to RDC from Newsweek:

And how did the alleged monopolists respond? In what could have stood for a paradigm of Microsoft's tone-deafness throughout this legal and public-relations debacle, it offered a not-very-convincing declaration of business as usual. Bill Gates--who has privately raged about the government's attacks on him--took apparent pains to appear only mildly perturbed. Rushing back from a semiannual "Think Week," where he brainstorms Microsoft's future moves, he offered a boilerplate reaffirmation of his company's virtues. "Microsoft competes vigorously and fairly," he said. It gave the impression of the owner of a burning house insisting that the foundation was sound.

Doesn't anyone at Microsoft know what a homophone is?

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Okay. News, supper, Office Depot, the end of a book that shouldn't've taken me three weeks even with interrupting myself with The Shell Seekers, and bed with Morse.