Reading: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Moving: Yes! Finally! Back in the gym for a really bad workout that left me like a shred of yesterday's spinach. 20' on the elliptical with a significantly lower average strides per minute and no handweights yet my heart rate still averaged 150. A full weight circuit, but I was nearly incapable throughout. Can blowing off for eleven days really do that? I'm still snuffly and coughing, but oof.

Viewing:Denver at 60 (degrees) already.

Learning: The implications of the divorced-spouse Social Security benefit (which was invented in 1939, before divorce was common). I had surmised about serially-marrying high-earners being a drain on the system; about other aspects I had never thought.

21 February 2000: Friends

I ordered "Miracle on 34th Street" for her friend and "Toy Story" (unasked, but I want her to see it) for DEDBG today. (She confirmed the weirdness about VCRs but said they had some sort of tri-system one.) Also I got email from HEBD:

Yesterday I asked ZBD if she wanted anything special from the grocery store she answered "a potty"
I told her Lisa was sending her one
Later I asked what she was building w/ her playdough: "a potty like Lisa is sending me"

I love ZBD. Furthermore later today came another note from HEBD asking for my proper snail address because she has photos of my darling child for me. This might have been, oh maybe, my motive in sending them six rolls of film for Christmas.

Also I recently told Shelley about having 600 hits. Ahem, that was cumulative for the month; I'm just an idiot new to having logs at all (I have great potential as a hit slut, though). Actually my daily average is somewhat (i.e. way) below that, except on days Shelley links to me. I had quadruple the usual number of hits that day: boing! goes the column in the chart.

Lots of people reading me that day has been very important, though. I got the nicest piece of unsolicited email ever from someone who began to read me because of that link. I don't have permission to quote it, though I'd like to (not that I regularly have permission from frequent quotees HAO, Shelley, or PLT either, but you guys know where I live and can beat me up). And Kim Rollins read me, oh my! and she's enough of a photographer to explain why Glamour Shots sucks and not just ignorantly and pissily blurt, "Glamour Shots sucks," as I did.

Well. I was going to discuss hate mail and not-hate mail but since I await permission of the nicest not-hate mailer to quote her, that will wait for another day.

I went to a funeral last week. The wife of a coworker died after a month's illness; she was 47. Their children are in 12th and ~9th grades. I don't work directly with the widower, but we all like him very much, and CoolBoss couldn't go and I kind of went by proxy (which neither of us discussed; but it's one of my loyalty issues). Coworker Texas drove Coworker Vermont and me thither. Texas and I, at this point, are friends. Perhaps not the sort that will last past the job, but for now, we are. I like him, his wife, and his kids. Vermont I like as a coworker, but we're no more than acquaintances. Texas, I found out later, was helping to set up the food for the reception afterward (one of the things I like about him is the common decency that's so effortless in him) and so ended up sitting apart from Vermont, his wife (who'd driven from home), and me during the service.

The service was moving, at least after the first song which was someone who should have known better singing "Wind beneath My Wings."

(The first time I heard that song was at a skating exhibition in May 1989 with accompanying hideously bad acoustics that set my teeth on edge; further I assumed it was a woman-idolizing-man song. The following fall I saw "Beaches" and loved it because I was already growing apart from HEBD; I ran home to tell her I loved her and she didn't want to talk to me. I still don't like the song but it makes me very sentimental.)

I was okay (never having met the woman, but I am a maudlin pup) until the eulogies. I was okay during the friend's eulogy, even, but when one of the woman's four older brothers approached the altar and said, "I'm Steve. I'm...I was...Bev's oldest brother and I'm a man of few words, and my brother has an exact copy of this in case I fall apart up here..." I lost it. I love my sister. Vermont's wife had begun to cry before, and Vermont, sitting between us, had asked me if I had a clean tissue. I did, and I spared the square right readily. During the eulogies, I noticed Vermont knuckling his eyes and rubbing his nose. He's a pragmatic man--an economist, even--and I never expected to see him weep, not here, not for a woman he didn't know (well), not in public. But there he was. I didn't wait for him to ask (it would have been a long wait); I just took another folded Kleenex from my blazer pocket and laid it on his knee.

When Texas joined the throng to take the Eucharist, I could see he'd been weeping, which didn't surprise me. Almost every woman I work with and not a few men had a tear-streaked face and red-rimmed eyes, after the friend, brother, daughter, and husband spoke. Three hundred people gathered to mourn Bev that day--three hundred! She was a teacher, and her children are active in school, and at least 25 Dot Orgers and spouses esteem and care for her husband, and she did not live on an island, but still 300 is a staggering number for a funeral, I think.

By the numbers who attended, and by the fact that Vermont's ducts leaked, I clumsily attempt to show how moving the service was, how much love was felt and shown. I cried thinking of my sister and me; others probably cried for the woman herself. I stood and sit when directed; during the most stringently Christian bits I gazed fiercely through the glazed apse at the blue sky and strong sunlight, worshiping in my own way. I did not sing the hymns (having the further reason of being congested) or pray, but I contributed to the overall feeling of love and grief and celebration as I could, I do hope, and so eased the family's burden.

I like my job. I really like the people I work with.

This came rather as news to DEDBG. She said, "You know I don't even know where you work, or what you do." This came up because she asked about the arrangments for RDC's nephew, and I talked about grandparents' rights, which is a subject Dot Org studies. So I told her what Dot Org does, and she agreed that it's cool and worthwhile. I think so. She didn't know I've been at Dot Org almost three years--a day and a week less than I've kept Speaking Confidentially. I told her that I love everything about my job except what I do--if I never have to make another copy or send another mailing it'll be too soon--and told her about CoolBoss and Texas and Box and the funeral and about how, when I was sent to Indianapolis this summer, I didn't care who saw that I had Hamlet in my knapsack. I can be me there, mostly, even though I usually restrain my laugh. I skip in the hallways, unless there's a meeting (I tromp rather like a pachyderm). I keep Babe on my monitor. CoolBoss knows that if I cry when we're having a Chat it doesn't mean that I'm being irrational but merely that I'm feeling strong emotion.

But I didn't expect to be a staff assistant at 31.