Reading: Maud Hart Lovelace

Moving: 30' Precor elliptical with two 2-lb. handweights, on the older of the two models, which didn't give me the resistance level or incline percentage. Average heart rate ~160, but also the Precor doesn't calculate an average as the Star Trac does. Full weight circuit

22 March 2000: Finding Your Voice as a Writer: Getting It on Paper

Alarm. Up. Pill. Pee. No shower.

'Cause, see, the plan was for me to catch a 6:15 bus and swim before work and therefore shower at the Y. All this meant to me at 6:00 a.m. yesterday was that I had to get fed and functional and out the door in 15', without a shower.

This is what I had to do: Eat breakfast, thaw Blake's breakfast, and dress for work with my bathing suit underneath and my underwear in my backpack. And make the bus, natch.

This is what I didn't do: make the bus.

Leaving the bathroom, I stood in the hallway for a moment, pondering what to do. Dress now? No, I couldn't possibly figure out bathing suit straps before breakfast. I shrugged into my bathrobe, which hangs on the bedroom door, and staggered into the kitchen by feel. Manuevered back into the bedroom for my glasses, returned to kitchen, open dishwasher, removed dishes for breakfast. Glasses on, I reached over the stove for the cereal box, opened it, and poised it over the dish.

Huh. How do I usually do this? I looked into the cereal box. Do I usually rip a smaller hole in the interior cellophane bag? I looked again at the dish in my hand: I would certainly spill if I tried to pour cereal into that...

Eventually I realized the dish I held in my hand was in fact Blake's little blue plastic one, not the heavy stoneware bowl for human portions. Ah.

I shoveled whole-grain cereal, flax seed (high in omega-3 fatty acids!), dried cranberries (no UTIs in ages!), and soy milk (fattier, but better for me than diary milk) into my face and swigged my OJ. After that I could navigate into my swimsuit with its high front and racing back and the rest of my clothes, and dash for the bus. I thought dashing at 6:15 would be enough, but actually that was when the bus arrived. Someone waiting for another route told me I had just missed mine, so I went home, showered but did not wash my hair, inserted my contacts, and felt extremely foolish for a while before catching my regular bus.

Nevertheless I was thrown out of whack. Napping on the bus didn't help. Maybe because I wasn't really asleep. I can be nice to the occasional rambling stranger, but there's a fellow whose voice--volume, pitch, and content--makes me run screaming for the hills. Or it would if I weren't trapped on a bus, hence why it continues to bother me. It was next to him that I found myself sitting. I sat, set my backpack in my lap, drew out my book, and so "hello" was our only exchange, hooray! I was afeared the book would eventually not be obstacle enough, though, so I closed my eyes.

The cup of Morning Thunder tea doused with enough sugar to make my head spin helped. So did the Thin Mints that CoolBoss brought to the staff meeting. She really doesn't like chocolate: who else has Girl Scout cookies left at this late date? We talked about the upcoming meeting and the receptions. The latter will be held at the Denver Art Museum, with the new Matisse exhibit, and at the aquarium, so those should be fun.

Then lunchtime at the gym. The red chick was there. She'd been there Monday, in some flowery stretch thing and platform sneakers, carried a purse, and did not restrain her hair. The hair is thick and slightly curly and just above shoulder length, so she has a pyramid of hair which is, I freely confess, much more attractive than Linda Tripp's experiement in non-Euclidean geometry. Nearly suspending herself from the console, she goosestepped on the treadmill, cantering and throwing her heels neatly into their respective butt cheeks with every stride. I, who judge character by gait, let that bother me. Then she experimented with the elliptical machines, which were beyond her physical and intellectual powers. She wound up hanging under the console so she could watch her fine self in the mirror. Today she was better. Somewhat. She didn't carry anything around with her and she wore normal sneakers and she'd put up her hair. Whew.

At home, RDC and I discussed the possibility of KMJ's stopping with us while she's in Denver. Naturally we've just got rid of the futon. It had to go; we were desperate for work space and shelving and it couldn't fit in the dining room. She can sleep on the couch. I certainly do, though not yet all night. We discussed this over Lake Victoria perch (what are the people who live on Lake Victoria eating, since we have their fish?) and salad and a delicious wild mushroom risotto.

Then I went to class. I didn't go last week: there were five inches on snow on the ground, still coming down, and Denver doesn't plow. RDC had Cassidy at DIA, but I had HAO's Tracker after driving her to DIA that morning: I had a car, but not one I'm comfortable with. So I stayed home. I don't remember what I dreamed after the reality check at CU the day before, but I had anxiety dreams after skipping that class. I considered not going this week as well, of which I'm really ashamed, but I did.

So here I am in class, writing, but still journaling. We haven't had any writing exercises thus far, even last week when I wasn't here. Tonight we're talking about language, about vocabulary and inflection and dialogue. Rachel, the instructor, has Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, which I want to read a lot more than I want to read A Walk in the Woods or Notes from a Small Island. Anglophile that I am, I like the language even more, and--what's the Pygmalion character in "My Fair Lady"?--whoever says of English, "Why, the Americans haven't spoken it in years!" is Wrong. English is mine (to mangle).

Rachel mentions "beautify" as a word Shakespeare invented. "Pandemonium," I think. "That's one thing Milton did for English." Now she's reading "The Jabberwocky" and all the lovely tolerance for everyone, even the voice on the bus and the flailer the gym, for everyone who wants to be a writer, with which I view my dozen classmates, flies from my bones as she pronounces "gimble" as "gumble" and "gyre" with a soft "g," as if she'd never read Carroll's own explanation of how things should be pronounced. She even says "chuckle" instead of "chortle," which is the only one of Carroll's Jabberwocky words now in common use. Grrr.

The soft g. As I warned coworker Texas, as time passes I will become less diplomatic about Box, the coworker who recently left Dot Org. One time she gave me a phone message from a fellow named Giles. She had written "Jiles," since she had never come across that name before. At Hateful Inc. worked a woman who had never seen "Geoffrey" written in any other way than "Jeffrey." That did not surprise me, not from her, who had a cutesy deliberate name-misspelling and grew up in L.A. where I can easily believe no one is old-fashioned enough for Chaucerian spelling. "Jiles" from Box did surprise me. And then there was the time we discovered she thought the term "tow-head" was an insult because she always thought it was "toe-head." That is a great insult; picture it. Nonetheless.