Reading: House of Stairs

Moving: Swam .75K

23 March 2000: Swimming

Today I made the bus and had my swim. I figured I had time for a full K, but the strap of my goggles snapped after five laps, and neither backstroke nor breaststroke nor using a kickboard is as fast as crawl, so I only did three-quarters of one. It felt great to be in the water, though; I haven't swum since the weekend after Thanksgiving.

I shared a double lane with a man either my age or younger and an older man. I have no idea how old the younger once: I only know that he swam fast and strong and wore a cap. I have no idea how old the older one was, except that he swam slower than I and had silver hair. As long as I can tell water from air, I don't need corrected vision to swim. But without goggles I can't find the two black lines on the floor of the pool between which I was supposed to swim, and I swim crooked since my right side is so much stronger. Or so much less weak, I should say.

When Greg the fitness guru guided me through the weights, I was excited about the pulldown one. I could tell it would be great for swimming (plus I really want that channel down my spine). Today I practiced the dolphiny kick of the butterfly and I can feel the difference in my quadriceps (or "quadrupeds," as my father says). I can also tell that if my abdominals were stronger, I'd be better able to butterfly. If having a stronger belly weren't cause enough in itself, that's an excellent reason to tone up.

Then I read Dana's entry. No, then I opened Dana's entry. Before I read it, I stared at the photograph, transfixed. Dana has always looked just like Dana, and it is right and proper that she do so. In today's photograph, she looked a heck of a lot like a younger me. If I'd had my hair longer when I was younger, that is. And wore nail polish.

This is me before I got all self-righteous about feeding wild animals, but I'm not sure if the squirrels in the Public Gardens count as wild animals. Nonetheless, I am sure peanut M&Ms are not listed in the Squirrel's Best Diet Plan. This is me spring break of sophomore year, in Boston with NCS. And maybe Mike. NCS and I very well might have stopped with my sister, but I have no idea how Mike fit into the picture. He might have only come up for a day, a different day; one other photograph with me in a different outfit (i.e. a different day) has Mike in it.

I remember the different outfit thing because the photograph was taken shortly before I was ticketed. The three of us were in Fanueil Market and I was approached by a man who wanted to ticket me for not wearing the right green. It was St. Patrick's Day. It was at that moment I coined the response I give every year: "I wear my name every day; I don't need a special day to prove I'm Irish."

There is also the fact that I look bilious in kelly green, but the olive khaki I wore that day was just fine.

I have no idea what I've got on under that Levi jacket. I'd like to know, because every item of clothing I can see Meant something to me. Nisou knit the scarf and gave it to me for Christmas three months before. It's the only garment in this picture I still wear. Or own. I bought the Levi jacket in high school, senior year when I decided to get tough. I bought it black. Over time, I bleached it to smithereens. SEB told me that jacket must got to the point it ran whenever it saw me coming. I bought the skirt for my 12th grade class dinner. At $45, it was the most expensive item I had ever purchased (even the jacket the previous fall was less). The boots were a Christmas present from my father sophomore year--picking me up for Thanksgiving, he brought me shopping on the way home.

And my hair. Over Christmas break I had foolishly decided that I couldn't afford Frank. I decided that since I just wanted it short short short, anyone could do it. I went to an old biddy's salon next to the A&P and said I wanted it short short short, but, you know, with a style? He--an old he, an old straight he--gave me a longish crew cut. This is three months later.

Okay, so the resemblance isn't striking here. Maybe I'm inventing it because she's walking through New England woods--fallen damp leaves, leaves still green on the laurel, so different from Colorado woods.

Long stretches of time pass when I forget just how unforgivably horrible that upholstery was. I happily say "was" now, because my mother bought new furniture this winter. I have every faith it's also terrible, but terrible in a new and different way that I don't have to live with. This is Christmas of 1990. Note the crocheted pillow on the back of the couch and the handmade corduroy pillow behind my sister's back. Notice how the skirt is so much darker than the rest of the couch--that would be courtesy my Shadow puppy in the foreground. You can't see much of the rug, but it was one of those fake rag braided things, in about seven rings from dark green on the edge (to left of couch) to white-with-green-speckles, severely Labrador'd, in the center.

Look at my dog. I don't remember what the three of us are looking at--the tree's behind us--but look at my dog. Look at her beard. What a sweet dog she was. This might be the last picture of her; we put her to sleep 12 January 1991. Not by coincidence, this was also the last Christmas Day either of us spent in that house. No dog, no Christmas.

Anyway, this is one of the rare pictures of me taken between 1986 and 1997 in which I'm wearing glasses. These were the first glasses I picked out on my own, without fashion advice from my geriatric optometrist's wife-cum-secretary or my mother. Round tortoiseshell spectacles. I loved them. In 1991 I got owly frames, also tortoiseshell but not wire frames. They were a mistake. In 1995 I got my current oval tortoiseshell spectacles. Now I'm thinking of going pinky-bronze for the next pair.

This must have been the year of black stretch stirrup pants. Also this is when I developed a lust for flat-heeled black leather boots; my sister would give me a pair for Christmas in 1991, which I've been trying to replace for the past five years. Also note that I'm sitting with the soles of my feet together, otherwise I like to think my thigh would not be dripping off the couch as it is. UConn sweatshirt, Fossil watch--watch before contacts? watch before bra? what a strange person--and headband, as I was five months into growing-out my hair.

Here's a detail: Is the resemblance all in my head? If I wore nail polish, would it be obvious?

Anyway.

Because I swam in the morning, I gave myself lunch off. I went to the library at lunch for the maybe the second time since the second week of January. It was glorious. Okay, maybe it wasn't glorious, because none of the books I wanted was available, but it was swell. People on my booklist have mentioned Tam Lin. They don't mean the one by Susan Cooper that I found in the catalog, but that reminded me to put her new book on hold. Also I reserved The Mother Tongue, which I first read about in Common Reader. And Betsy's Wedding. And The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter. The first and last are booklist mentions, and the recommending member warned me, "Well, but they're sf/fantasy." There are sf titles I'd like to read to have read them, like Ender's Game and Cryptonomicron, but after PLT gave me Fire on the Deep, 800 pages of which he said he liked the group intelligence of the dogs and I managed not to read that, I happily consider myself unobliged to read any sf in future.

So I got two Martin Amis books, The Information and another I don't remember that that's in my backpack waaaaaay in the next room--no, I remember, it's Time's Arrow--and William Sleator's House of Stairs that is so different and so much better than anything else of his--including Into the Dream.

The five 16-year-olds in House of Stairs are subjects of a dehumanizing behavior modification program. B.F. Skinner'd've been proud. What I notice is how blatant it all seems to me now. Which is a good thing, as I hope I'm a more analytical reader now than I was at 14. Allegedly for an author to quote in their narrative whatever a character is reading indicates a Lesson the author wants to shove down your throat. A titbit of lit crit there. That's true of Rosamund Pilcher's The Shellseekers, which however delightful I'd never call literary. Pilcher quotes two sentences of von Arnim's Elizabeth and her German Garden (who also wrote Enchanted April, a big clue in itself) which summarize a whole way of life that the best of Pilcher's characters (and, I suspect, Pilcher herself) embrace. Of course Pilgrim's Progress is all through Little Women, more Christian propaganda. The girls read Dickens, but it's Bunyan whom Alcott structures her story after and names her chapters for. Also Villette depends on Pilgrim's Progress. In all fairness, that was about the only non-Biblical allusion an author could make and expect most of her audience to know; if a household had one book it was the Bible, if two, the second was Pilgrim's Progress. Anyway, almost the first thing Blossom says is "Hate is a bottomless cup; I pour and pour," ("from some ancient play") which strikes me as an unlikely thing for a girl of her disposition and culture to know and as Sleator being too obvious. It strikes me as exactly the sort of thing I should know, but Medea isn't in Project Gutenberg yet and where is my copy? I had it with Regina Barreca for Revenge in Literature (Medea, Hamlet, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Beloved, Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and Remember Me), by which time I'd stopped the foolish habit of selling back my books. Oh, there it is, it's Euripides, not Sophocles. Well, I'm still not going to reread Medea now. Is that passage from Medea? For Blossom, any play would be ancient, but the quote doesn't turn up in on-line Bartlett's or in google. I'll ask Überboss tomorrow; he'll know.

I haven't read the book Gina was researching while teaching that class.