Reading: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things; Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Moving: No, sorry. I promise I'm not succumbing to the four- (in this case five-) week itch, though.

Viewing: Rain! That's not right! It's February!

Listening: Styx, "You're Fooling Yourself"--I was listening to "classic rock" because KBCO had commercials.

Learning: How a full-up employment rate means job opportunities for the mentally disabled.

Also that Sam's Club and Wal-Mart have an exclusive marketing deal with the U.S. Mint such that they get to distribute the new dollar coins, which are legal tender mind you, before banks can. Get me out of this country.

22 February 2000: Mail

I've gotten neutral unsolicited email in the past, like the two in the past month from a fellow Denver resident who found me through Elphaba and from a fellow who was surprised this domain name was taken (nyah nyah!) (No, really, sorry, Kevin, I'm sure you would have done something very nice with it). I've gotten a couple of very nice ones out of the blue, from a reader I didn't know I had who likes A.S. Byatt, from another reader I've struck up a friendship with over books despite her not liking Jane Austen, from someone who just happened on my site and also happened to have been in Pike Place Market the same day I was last summer.

So far I've received only one really hateful one. I am sure lots of people have skimmed by (especially after Beth or Shelley links to me), not liked what they've read or not liked me, yet gone away again with me none the wiser. One person couldn't leave it at that, though. I got this back in October and I didn't respond to it, because really, what could I have said? Would she have read anything else I had to say, or has she turned out a happier person because she figured I was too cowardly or egocentric to respond? I keep it in my inbox, however, not because I plan ever to respond but for a nice slap in the face when I need one.

To: lisa@penguindust.com
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999
From: Deborah
Subject: Your Website is Painful

What makes you think that people would want to read about YOU YOU YOU? I guess that would only be the people that want to read what you have written about THEM on your website... Very sad. I hope that a search engine never gets me quite that lost again. What a nightmare.

At the other end of the spectrum shines this email from someone who found me through Shelley's recent link:

Subject: I wish you lived in [my state]
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000
From: Naomi
To: lisa@penguindust.com

because if you did I think I would force you to be my friend. I've been reading Shelleyness for nearly a year now, and she recently referred to your site (the Glamour Shots entry). That entry was terrific, and told a new reader a lot about you; then I decided to do a little back reading. And I just wanted to let you know that I enjoyed reading it, all of it -- you are an excellent writer -- and I truly do wish you lived near me, because I just moved here, and I don't know many women, and although I love my husband with all my heart, one needs women friends. At least I do. And good ones are hard to find. ANYway, just letting you know your journal is appreciated.

That's just the peachiest email I've ever gotten from a stranger, and I sat here, mouth agape, staring at it, so very pleased was I.

---

Today talking to an editor about books we have to feed into the great maw of the Library of Congress, I saw the proof for a new book's cover on her desk. It's covered little blurbs. She had marked it up, inserting an apostrophe into a contracted "it is" and applying Dot Org's usual AP-style, non-serial comma. "Doesn't this," pointing, "want to be 'there're a lot of people,' not 'there's a lot of people'?" She rolled her eyes. The quotes are from actual fathers, specifically at-risk fathers, and one reason they're at risk is that they're uneducated, and the author didn't want to change the wording at all, not to AP-ize the commas and not to insert the apostrophe. So the subject-verb disagreement, which is so common in casual speech nowadays that seemingly no one except the editor and me hears it anymore, is going to stand.

I remember a column in Time or Newsweek, I think, about how it used to be standard practice to standardize an oral quotation before printing it, and how that courtesy? anal retentiveness? standard? has fallen out of favor. The person used an actual quote from the Oliver North toady, what was her name? Fawn Hall? to show how clumsily people, particularly untrained people like her, speak when off the cuff, and how directly representing the oral emission in type can actually be misleading, not more accurate, and how judicious tidying up of a quotation can clarify a person's point (as well as allow her to come off as (somewhat) less of a bubblehead).

So. Today's quote of the day, given by yours truly, the big two-hearted river person, is "You mean they're allowing people to breed now who don't know how to punctuate?" and the editor, a presciptivist struggling with her conscience like me, laughed. Hey lisa, what's the antecedent of "they," if you're supposed to be such an exacting sort? Oh no no no, the main reason I think quotations ought to be tidied up is that I speak so clumsily, myself. It's all about me.

---

What else. Oh yes, Texas, for whom I should come up with a better nickname (but I can't call him by his initials because he's one of those freaks without a middle name, and I don't want to use the name or even initials of anyone at work anyway), came into my cube today offering me the change on his palm. At first I thought a new state quarter had come out, but no, it was the new dollar coin with Sacajawea on it. And it even has her baby on it! That's so cool! For P.C. reasons, the Mint absolutely had to choose a woman this time, and a minority, and Sacajawea is a great choice. By all accounts, Lewis and Clark wouldn't've made there and back again without her. She not allowed enabled the expedition, she preserved the record of it, saving a bunch of notebooks from being swept off one of the boats in the midst of capsizing rapids.

The coins look kind of goldy. When we trooped in to Überboss's office, he put it more bluntly. "They look like tokens." Hmm. Yes, in fact they do. Texas said the Mint had to do something with color because in size they're so much like quarters, and the Susan B. Anthony dollar was such a failure. Octogonal, circle. Yep, those two coins were hard to distinguish. And they're not milled, even though every other coin worth 10¢ or more is; I guess the Mint has finally admitted its alloys have no value at all. Why are there 17 stars on the reverse? Thirteen stars represent something. Were there 17 states in 1803? <flips pages, yes pages> Hmm. Y'know, it must piss Maine off that it's in New England but not one of the original 13 states. It probably still resents Massachusetts. Nope, only 16, including Ohio's joining up in 1803 (the others were Kentucky and Tennessee). Well. I'm sure glad symbolism is completely dead.

Wednesday 23 February, 6:41 a.m: The U.S. Mint says the 17 stars are for the 17 states in the Union in 1804. My guess was right, but my counting was off, as was the year I thought the expedition began. I guess I didn't flip to that page. And the coins aren't milled in order that you can distinguish them from quarters by feel.

1. CT, 1788
2. DE, 1787
3. GA, 1788
4. MD, 1788
5. MA, 1788
6. NH, 1788
7. NJ, 1787
8. NY, 1788
9. NC, 1789
10. PA, 1787
11. RI, 1790
12. SC, 1788
13. VA, 1788

then

1. KY, 1792
2. OH, 1803
3. TN, 1796
4. VT, 1791

Okay, so I can't count. And Vermont gets to be ashamed of itself too. As should I, as well.

Looking at New York Public Library Desk Reference the list again today, I noticed something I didn't last night: West Virginia and Wyoming aren't on it. Last night I was looking at the date at which each state entered the Union, not the states' names. West Viriginia seceded from Virginia when Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861 and it became a state in maybe 1865. Wyoming wasn't a state until after Colorado, I bet, after 1876. I'll look in The Book of the States once I get to work.

And why omit West Virginia instead of Wisconsin? Wisconsin is the penultimate state alphabetically, not Wyoming. Unless you go by two-letter abbreviation, in which case Alaska comes before Alabama as well, and Arkansas before Arizona, and of course the Ms and Ns are completely fucked up, none of which happened here.

---

Coming home on the bus today I didn't even try to read The God of Small Things. Its typeface must be Adobe Nauseous. I just thumbed through my latest Common Reader catalog and felt unread. I also had an empty copy box and a crate of seven, count 'em seven, boxes of Tagalongs for HAO (which she, native to the wilds of Oklahoma, calls "peanut butter patties," a quirk I class with her calling soda "pop") in addition to my knapsack. I'm a bag lady in training. I was glad enough to take up half the bench the runs the width of the hind end of the bus, but the bus filled up at the mall and when more people boarded at Colorado Boulevard, I squoze up from two spaces to one, knapsack between the feet and box-within-box on my lap. An older man noticed the shuffle, came along back, and sat next to me. I was glad he was there if for no other reason than that he served as a barrier between me and a reeking smoking ragamuffin.

This new passenger was wearing a cowboy hat. So when he actually spoke to me, I wasn't surprised. "Hi, I'm fine thanks, how're you?" with my New English habit of not listening for an answer. And so we sat for almost a whole mile until I no longer could ignore the fact that not having a pleasant little chat was nearly giving this man hives. I had been smiling at my catalog (a soft-cover newsprint thing, landscape 8.5x11" paper stapled twice on the spine), and so now I turned and smiled at him, my good deed for the day.
"That yer study-book for college?" he asked.
Study-book. That cracked me up. What an archaic idiom, and expressing volumes about his and his usual conversationalists' educational attainment. I just smiled, though; my father might have said "study-book" himself and without him I'd've had to scratch a lot harder to get through school. "No, it's a catalog of books. They're described so that you want to read them all, and look," flipping back to My Grandmothers and I, "this one I bought for my grandmother because it's about a girl remembering her grandmothers..." How can he possibly have thought this was a textbook?
"I was watching a show about President Ford last night on the History Channel. Whatever might have been wrong with a president, he has to be somethin' to get to be president. No one's perfect, you know."
"That's certainly true," I agreed, wondering if I'd missed his seque but knowing damn well I'll never be renowned for the logic of my transitions. "I saw something on Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter on 'CBS Sunday Morning' about their being antagonists during their campaigns, of course, but how Ford now contributes to Carter's humanitarian projects."
"There was just a movie about President Thomas Jefferson, and his...children, 'cause you know, no one's perfect, but I thought it was wrong to make a movie about JonBenét Ramsey."
"I agree with you there. Sensationalism can't help anyone prove that case."
"I'm not usually so late. I had to see my doctor. The appointment wasn't until 3:15, though, so I'm not that late."
"Well, I hope you get home on time."
"My daughter-in-law is coming over this weekend to help me put up my Broncos corner."
"Isn't that nice of her. But I thought football season didn't start for...a while?"
"I got a whole bunch of stuff, one whole corner, all blue and orange."
I nodded, unable to think of anything to respond to that. Then I thought of something that made me very happy: "Here's my stop."

My god, and I thought talking to me was full of non sequiturs and random stray pointless information. He had me beat.

Because this was the less convenient bus, I approached the house car-first instead of window-first, so decided to do my errands quick-like before Blake saw me, without Blake guilt-tripping me for leaving the house later. I scurried to CostCo.

Stop me before I do this again. I bought an Alison Weir book. I know. Alison Weir. I sneered at her lack of footnotes and said "no more" and, to Beth dissed her, and recommended Antonia Fraser instead when Beth said she'd bitch-slap anyone who did so (I missed that part of the forum question, though). But, see, I watched "The Lion in Winter" just two days ago and here was Eleanor of Aquitaine. So I succumbed. I'm weak.

After the Tudors and Mary Stuart, I love the Plantagenets best. Maybe the Lancastrians. No, the Plantagenets. Because of movies! Yes! Because of "The Lion in Winter" and "Becket"! Also because of An Army of Children, in which Plantagenet kings barely figure but which was long one of my favorite novels. Also because I read "Becket" in ninth grade and it's all Mr. Hage's fault I'm a medievalist! Also because Henry II was the daughter of Matilda, whom I count in the line of British monarchs (yeah, well, I don't count the popes of the Avignon Captivity, okay? I have my standards). Also because Henry codified the laws and taxes of his backward little province, his England--that's what I learned from Mr. Hage.

So I'm off to read my trashy history. At least it's got to be better documented than my Mary Queen of Scots novel, which I couldn't accept even as historiographic. Away with me to Chinon!