Reading: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Moving: I went yesterday.

Viewing: One completely done and beautiful 419-page publication, full of pull-outs and tables and footnotes and endnotes, that was a complete unformatted mess when I got it Friday. Ha.

Listening: Santana, Supernatural

Learning: or trying to learn, how to use which program to print digital images.

29 February 2000: I'm mean, vain, and jealous; then confused and indignant; plus pictures

Yesterday at the gym, someone was on the elliptical so I started my weights. I'd done bench press, fly, and one set of pulldowns before the man abdicated. I watched in the mirror as dramas unfolded in the room behind me:

  • A trainer came in leading a bunch of recruits. They followed her around like imprinted ducklings, timidly sitting at the different leg machines and nervously learning how to adjust the seat and the pad for their different heights and how to adjust the weights for their varying abilities, tittering and patting their hair. Girls, I thought with disgust, and reprimanded myself: they're here at all, and it's snide snotty attitudes like mine that make for a hostile gym environment. Matrons, I corrected myself. I'm more comfortable being ageist than sexist.
  • As if I was innocent of adjusting my hair my own self. I had been wearing it in a clipped ponytail but realized as soon as I began to sweat that, loose, it would drive me batty. Rapidly I whipped it into a braid and folded and clipped it precariously at my crown. During this procedure I noticed at least three surreptitious glances in my direction. Lots of people find long hair really sexy, and I admit that one primary reason I grew it was as a secondary sexual characteristic (for my own pleasure).
  • I'm one of the people who find good long hair sexy. An incredibly toned woman came in, wearing one of her (several) clingy exercise outfits. She's gorgeous. Tan. Buff. Her thighs do not jiggle and you can see the separate muscles in them, but she's not bulky (which I dislike in both sexes). She's Asian-American, so her waist-length hair is strong and thick and shiny black. Fabulous. A pleasure to watch (surreptitiously myself)--once she's seated at a machine. Getting ready to use a machine is not a pleasure: I get impatient just watching her because it takes her about thrice as long as it ought to (for someone completely fluent in their use and familiar with what settings work for her size, which she is) because her waist-length, strong, thick, shiny black, and completely unrestrained loose hair needs frequent flipping out of the way or gets caught in moving parts. Does a ponytail cramp her style that much?

When I finished on the elliptical I donned my t-shirt and recommenced weights. Doing leg curls, I glanced to the left at the man doing leg extensions. I'm a compulsive t-shirt reader. The back of his said "Your hair is too long and so is your set."

Huh.

What does this mean? I struggled to figure out some non-sexist interpretation. Men have long hair and do long sets too, but not as often as women. Women in general do longer sets with less weight than men because women in general want tone, not bulk, whereas men in general emphasize strength over aerobic tone. In general. And I just called a bunch of newbies tittering matrons--in my head (and in my journal). But I wouldn't wear a t-shirt condemning anyone for going to the gym or criticizing their technique. Or their hair.

--

Today I didn't go to the gym. I scampered out at 3:00 to mail DEDBG's package. I bought surface. Someday I'll ship her lighter things than chocolate chips and popcorn and pay more for the contents than the shipping. Also I bought a delectable sandwich from the Corner Bakery, my favorite, a tomato/cheese panini. I ate this sitting in Texas's office as we laid a nickel bet who's pregnant now, because CoolBoss brought in her What to Expect When You're Expecting.

Actually this is a longer story (shocking!). RDC bought two disposable cameras in December to put me off the digital track. I took about four pictures on the first one before Christmas morning, and after that I've just been wasting film. That's what we call it whenever we take photographs of whatever now, wasting film, but I've never been taken so many stupid "Skip to the end!" photographs than I did with the disposables. The first day back after Christmas, I brought all three into work. One I gave to coworker A. for her Chinese New Year's Party, and the other she and I just shot around the office. Her cube is across from Texas's office, and one disposable picture shows Texas forlornly intrigued with the digital. (I say forlornly because I, ever tactful and considerate, pointed out to him that the only two people in the department with digital cameras are the ones without kids.)

Last week after about nine years (or however long it's been since Christmas), I finally got the disposable developed. I brought the pictures in to work and left them on people's desks: when I snapped Landscape, he said that was the first photograph anyone had ever got of him in his glasses (he's badly farsighted), so I took another picture of his naked face. I gave both to him. Coworker A. and I took pictures of our legs, wedding-style, especially because she wore nifty black-and-white checkered tights that day. She put that on her filing cabinet. I left Texas's picture on his keyboard, where CoolBoss happened to see it and laugh before Texas came in that day. She left a post-it on the photo: "Hard at work?"

So anyway, now Texas was looking for a return jibe. When he saw What to Expect on her desk, he knew she wasn't, because she's pretty determined two kids are enough and even if she were pregnant, she wouldn't be so careless to leave such a hint in the open until she wanted everyone to know. So he left her a note, "Personal reading at work?" and what I heard as I came back was her saying she was lending it to someone but wouldn't tell him who, so there. So he and I have a nickel bet who it is, but both of us guess the same person, so there's a waste of time.

---

hookbill BlakeTonight I emptied the digital camera. I added two pictures to the weekend in Steamboat Springs. RDC didn't want me to post the one of him in his long underwear curled up on the couch after his Sundayful of skiing black diamonds, so I won't. I will say that he looks like Sprout, all in green with big socks.

This is Blake with his mouth full of corn, demonstrating why he and his ilk are called hookbills and why he in particular is called a bananahead: look at that tail! It's a third of what a tail ought to be! He's pathetic. Except he's being good and actually eating in his tray instead of taking whatever morsel it is to the edge of the bar and dropping it off. Incorrigible little so-and-so.

DEDBG called on the 19th and RDC decided to commemorate the occasion. This is your basic "Blake! What have you done?" ploy to get me to turn around with a worried look on my face. Or maybe he just wanted a picture of me wearing socks. The God of Small Things and Anastasia Krupnik are on the ottoman behind me. The usual mess of computer peripherals is next to the couch, and a bundle of pine logs on the other side of the fireplace, with the ski racks next to it, except only most of the racks . Someone lost the pieces when we unsentimentally ditched the Tercel, and that someone wasn't me.

talking to NisouLater that day, I graduated from the floor in front of the ottoman to on the chair. Blake, Cynthia Voigt, Jane Louise Curry, a little L.L. Bean, my paper journal and green-barreled purple-inked pen, and "The Lion in Winter" on television. Really. What more could anyone want? Blake is helping me to write by gnawing on the edges of my notebook. What a sweetheart; what would I do without him? I've been meaning to do a photo tour of the house; what do we see here? Top right, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest on the top left of that bookcase. The desk on the back wall has a case of Thomas Hardy Ale, which no beer connoisseur I know can stomach. I wonder if RDC would give it to Shelley. "Here, this sucks. Hope you don't puke." It'd would be an experiment. Under the desk, boxes of recycling. The WIngs of a Falcon on the arm of the chair. High Country Gardens (Spring 2000), DayRunner, and L.L. Bean (Spring 2000) next to my leg, then a catalog from Colorado Free University (I might take Traveler's French), a paystub, The God of Small Things (which is what I should have been reading instead of children's books), my sportbra, Anastasia Krupnik and A Stolen Life face down on my backpack, unidentifiable stuff on the floor. RDC built two cheap pine cubes to house the stereo five years ago. Now we're grown-ups with an "entertainment center" and the cubes hold ugly cheap photograph albums and scrapbooks rendered lovely by my expert application of William Morris gift wrap and cheap clear contact paper with lots of air bubbles between the layers. On the cubes, Blake's Quaker Instant Oatmeal cardboard cave and his tray on top of it.

Saturday nightThere. That's me on a rockin' Saturday night.

So. Monday night, after my ponytail-clip day at the gym, I came home and bundled it into a big clip until I cuddled happily on the couch with Eleanor of Aquitaine. Where is Blake? It's after 10 and he's in bed, closed in his cage to have a snack before he gets covered. We're supposed to put him to bed much earlier, but I figure it's healthier for him to have as much time with us as possible and he can nap during the day while we're at the millet factory. I might have stayed in the study longer but RDC was playing Quake, solely to see what the graphics were like, of course. I turned once or twice from my desk to see just how good they are (pretty impressive) and both times was treated to the first-person shooter's victim's blood exploding on the screen. Charming. My distaste for such things stems from the same pretentious fastidiousness that prevents my watching football, "pro" wrestling, QVC (except channel-hopping, and must I spell out the sarcasm?), "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," and Jerry Springer. As short-termed UConn professor Billy N. would say, "So you're deliberately remaining ignorant of whole segments of your culture?"

So anyway I lay reading (with the front flap marking the map of France and the back flap marking the genealogical tables), pen in hand ready to attack Weir's failings (though not my own: have I written a book?), when RDC emerged. Plentio gore had not ruined his appreciation for the finer things, and he admired me extravagantly as I pay him to do, but I didn't know he was going to take this picture until I saw the flash. This is how anal I am about my hair: the strands rebelling on the right, stuck on the upholestery in curves, makes the hair look unreasonably messy to me.

I'm getting it cut Saturday. Famous last words.

hair

 

 

 

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