Reading: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Moving: Animal aerobics.

Viewing: Snow! Just a very little that didn't last, but the last flurry of the season, probably

Listening: "Instant Replay" (see "Moving," supra)

Learning: the proper spellings of a few authors' names.

2 March 2000: Pure stream-of-consciousness

By the time I shower and make my breakfast, it's about 6:20. Today, for the first time this season, it's light enough for me to write by natural light at the living room window.

One thing I miss from the old apartment is the early morning sun. It didn't last long and then it was gone from the whole place for the whole day, but in the morning, it was there. Propping myself in the small sharp corner of the sliding door frame against a big floor pillow with a pen or a book was a luxury I've missed.

Right now I'm lying on the floor perpendicular to the window, listening to a crow caw, toasty in my bathrobe, with my wet hair turbaned, my journal open before me, and a bowl of cereal between the notebook and my bent left arm, on which I'm propping myself. Between sentences I take bites (soggy cereal isn't a big issue for me, which is good considering the length of my sentences).

Even when my living room had morning sunlight (in the previous apartment), I always had to wait till sunrise, well after sunrise, to enjoy it. But I get up at six, and I like a minimum of artificial light in the morning. The full glare of the bathroom's fluorescent light, but then the stove hood's single bulb instead of the blazing overhead, and then nothing in the living room. Except the television.

I grew up never watching television in the morning. In music "appreciation" once, we listed all the noises we heard first thing in the morning, which I thought was an interesting exercise. It wasn't homework, we had no preparation, just off the tops of our heads. I was surprised that Paige and others said they heard television.

In my mother's house, we never watched television in the morning (until Captain Kangaroo, and only when I was the Captain Kangaroo age). Neither of my roommates nor I had a television set in college, and NBM wasn't a morning television watcher and neither were the Beasts. It wasn't until I became a CNN addict in my (our) own place that television in the morning became my usual thing. I want news sometime. Plus, low volume television and flickering bluish light is less disturbing to Blake than the one bright lamp in the living room.

(When RDC travels, Blake gets up with me; when RDC stops at home, Blake stays in bed until RDC gets up. He likes getting up with me, though. I always open the shades right before I uncover him, after my shower and before breakfast. Now, I hear him murmur "wub?" as I open the shades, a good morning greeting, even though I'm leaving him in bed. So I say, "You're a good boy, budding, be good; it's time for sleep now" and he doesn't stir or talk anymore. Such a good boy.)

[Now I'm on the bus.]

All of those--lights, television, Blake--are excuses. I could write in the morning if I made the effort.

But today in the shower, moments after I woke, my thoughts were still churning as they do when I sleep and I decided that since that is where I remember most of what I remember at all, I should write it down--right then.

My first thought was soap crayons. They always seemed like an invitation to soap scum to me--because I didn't know about them until I had my own bathroom to clean, years after showers not baths became my daily habit.

Anyway, can I find soap crayons anywhere but in the Lillian Vernon catalog? An alternative is a dry-erase board on suction cups, much less fun.

Yesterday morning at 6:50 I switched from CNN to the local NBC affiliate in hopes of weather. It's usually less stupid than the CBS affiliate that RDC prefers, except at :50 after the hour when both CNN and Headline News have sports, KUSA asks a trivia question. Before it tells the answer, it lists the day's birthdays--but nothing interesting like "This Day in History." Anyway, the question was how far the Queen Elizabeth II moves for every gallon of diesel it burns. [It, not she; no boat whose sole form of propulsion is a motor can be called she in my book.] I stuck around, not listening to the celebrity birthdays but wanting to know about the QE2, until the newscaster said there might be so many birthdays on March 1 because of Leap Day arrivals using it as their usual birthday. I looked up not in time to see whether the years given bore that theory out, wondering if on 2/29, therefore, very few birthdays were listed. It sounds plausible but not likely, since he said there twice as many, but 3/1 + 2/29 would be only 1.25 as many.

So anyway. The QE2 moves six inches for every gallon of fuel it burns. And I travel on planes, which get who knows how much more abysmal mileage. But it reminded me of a conversation I overheard with someone who was changing jobs, no longer could take the bus to work, and whose job would now require driving. "Get one of those new hybrids," her companion suggested. The job-changer hadn't heard of them, so the other explained about them and talked about the oil supply and when it's projected to run out. The job changer asked, "Doesn't the oil replenish itself?" and I nearly ruptured trying to stop myself screaming with disgusted, derisive laughter.

The job-changer was someone I disliked anyway, someone I didn't know from the bus but in other context enough that I knew she had hardly left, let alone questioned, the privileged white-bread world she grew up in. She had never heard of female circumcision, and didn't understand why anyone would want that done. "It's not elective," I pointed out; "that's the point."

She has stopped taking the bus and changed jobs and I am free of her and of what shall I complain now?

Because of Box leaving Dot Org, there's been cubicle-swapping such that an administrative assistant who rubbed me the wrong way from the first I met her is back kitty-corner to me. I'm in the SW cube and she the NE one, but we share walls not doorways; I don't have to see her much but do have to hear her. Her voice, and there's a lot of it, grates. However, the cubicle-swap has also brought a bright and funny young woman to the box adjoining mine. She's only part-time, but I hope to get to know her better.

[at work]

Back to the QE2. Learning that also reminded me more than ever that sail's the thing, as the reader is told on the very first page of Swallows and Amazons.

[Roger] could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel, a tea-clipper, the Cutty Sark. His elder brother John had said only that morning that steamships were just engines in tin boxes. Sail was the thing....

Also, before Eustace got undragonned--before he got dragonned, but he was dragonny before he was dragonned--he told the Narnians aboard the Dawn Treader,

"In a civilised country like where I come from," said Eustace, "the ships are so big that when you're inside you wouldn't know you were at sea at all."
"In that case you might as well stay ashore," said Caspian.

I'm reading RDC Swallows and Amazons. It's going slowly because their goody-goodiness can get ponderously dull. The four of 'em camp alone on an island and RDC wants to know where they hide their beer. I myself would be satisfied if they went barefoot anywhere, ever. But that never happens.

RDC asked if I was really so glad he bought himself a Mac instead of a PC, and I said yes. He's had PC laptops for work, but a desktop--that he bought on his own--seems more of a commitment.

My either-or criteria for a boyfriend in 1992:

  • pro-choice not anti-
  • dogs not cats
  • Macs not PCs

He was liberal, had German Shepherds growing up, and had just bought a Powerbook 170. All the investments in computers he's made have paid off professionally, personally too, and he was going to buy a PC for simplicity. But the G4 runs Virtual PC and Linux, and it loads Windows 95 fast. I didn't realize until he bought a Mac how reassuring I would find it not to have slip any down any slippery slope toward a Mac-less house.

Now it's 4:15 and I've lost the train of stolen thought I indulged in at work seven hours ago. But I made a cheat sheet as soon as I got out of the shower so I'll go back and consult that.

The one thing I should have written about this morning but did not was my dream. SEBB was in it, and it was an anxiety dream. I often have anxiety dreams, but when I dream about ex-friends, it's usually ex-boyfriends. This was the second time in three days I can remember dreaming of her, which is so unusual. On the morning of the 29th, I jotted only "SEBB. KMQ's house. Blake abandoned. SLH=DEDBG." And now I can recall only the general layout of the house, which wasn't at all like KMQ's. This morning I wrote "SEBB. Mine shafts. Weird house."

Today's was another house, unknown but familiar, and weird--see, I should've been an architect. I refuse a Freudian analysis of the mine shafts. I am slightly claustrophobic unless I'm below ground, in which case I am clammily, panickedly claustrophobic.

Yesterday for the first time I mentioned to RDC what the usual plot of my anxiety dreams has been. I usually miss a deadline. My lifestyle isn't deadline-driven, but my life is--if I don't get stuff done, I'm going to die with it undone. Yet I, in my regular life, continue not to do stuff like travel and relearn French and Latin.

When we first moved to Denver and I was looking desperately for a job, and after I started at Hateful, the Terrible Trivium would generally distract me from a job interview. Now that I've been reliably if under- employed for three years, I dream about classes. About registering for a class and forgetting to attend, about forgetting examinations, not bothering to take them, and all manner of similar stuff. Also that it's August and I've forgotten to swim all summer long. That's unlikely.

Though not doing anything for my transcript or collection of pretty initials, the class I signed up for at Colorado Free University might be the sort of jolt I need. I attended the first class last night.

"Only connect."
--the epigram RDC wants for his shoulders.

"Only conect."
The epigram of Howards End if the CFU instructor had written it. (She wasn't actually talking about E.M. Forster.) She can't spell: "That's what copyeditors is [sic] for"--she also had problems agreeing her predicates to her subjects--more with "there is" than with regular noun-verb structure. Besides being unfamiliar with basic (often violated) rules of English spelling that dictate two n's in connect, she also wrote pursuade.

She mentioned Voyage into Darkness, a memoir by Jean Rhys. She said, "I can never remember how to spell her name."
"R h y s," I piped up.
R h y s e, she wrote on the board.

It's CFU, and I didn't expect much; now RDC wonders if I should expect anything.

"Criterium," I reminded him.

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