Reading: Donald R. Hettinga, Presenting Madeleine L'Engle

Moving: 30' Precor elliptical, 13' on an earlier model and 17' on the later, plus nearly-full weight circuit (no back extensions)

11 April 2000: Brainless

This morning Texas paused in my doorway to say g'morning on his way to the breakroom. In his hand he held his lunch, leftover pasta in a clear Tupperware. It was 8:15 in the morning. "That looks really good," I said. "What is it?"
"I don't know," he replied, with atypical boyness. "Whatever my wife put in it."
"Ah. You don't cook either?"
Continuing with the boy theme, he said, "I grill whatever needs grilling," then asked, "Is RDC away? What did you have for supper last night?"
"Broccoli. Two heads, steamed, lots of lemon juice."
"And that was the vegetable...," he prompted.
No. That was supper.

However, supper last night was a treat anyway because just as I doused the helpless veggies with lemon, SEM called. Skip broke up with him, which came as no surprise to anyone including himself, and his work is less than rewarding and did I mention it's in Missouri somewhere an hour and a half from St. Louis, where he says the closest bookstore is? And that in a town of 1250, there are more than 50 churches? So we talked.

Dog-sledding in deepest Minnesota (his "vacation" in January) was "fantastic," according to Mr. Impervious to Cold: "I'd go back in a minute." Maniac. His other future plans include, in the next month, getting himself into the hot tub of a friend of his (in St. Louis) who is at least predominantly lesbian and reportedly possessed of a nipple ring. So he seems to be bouncing back. I asked if he were ready for the challenge of converting this woman. "All I want to do is run my mouth over her entire body," he said. "Sex would be a plus, of course."
My boy SEM. I told him I was going to go take a bath. He laughed.

Moving on. I bought a Sunset Western Living magazine yesterday. It's not as bad as Yankee, is it? Downeaster is much better than Yankee, and Sunset edges out Downeaster in that only a third, rather than over half, of its editorial content is geared toward attracting tourists. I, a good American consumer, was drawn by the cover, which promised instant gardens, easy herbs and vegetables, and bird-feeder planters. And I, who won't live in my house (my house, yippeee!) until June, am worried about tomatoes and basil. So I bought it.

One article gives instruction on how to refurbish an plain old dresser with wood-grain wallpaper. At the housewarming party we were talking about the cycling of furniture and I felt left out, because we don't have anybody's old bookcase and haven't given away anything either. I felt better at work on Monday because a coworker offered me a dresser she's sick of refinishing. Having a basement means I can tackle projects like that and leave them half-done, so I welcomed the bureau. I haven't ever stripped a whole piece by myself, though, but have done so only under the direct supervision of my mother. So the possibility of wallpaper, woodgrain or not, intrigued me. My friend Jen is always doing something interesting with furniture, but she went to RISD and can be expected to be interesting. Shelley's recent house tour also has me revisiting what a boring home I have. (Linking Jen and Shelley, Shelly, you'll be happy to see I did call her Jen and not by her five initials. I am never sure of her names' order, so just for you I am giving her name. And Jenn! This is hardly a rare coincidence, but you and Kevin are my second Jen(n)-and-Kevin couple.)

Circumambulating toward the last paragraph's original point, this article says, "To show off [the wall-coverings'] verisimilitude..." * and I thought a copy-editor had let slip someone's invention of a highfalutin synonym for "versatility." "Verisimilar" I would have defined only as "having the appearance of truth," my M-W 10th Collegiate's first definition. But the second definition is "depicting realism in art or literature." If the wallpaper is supposed to look like woodgrain, is that a reasonable stretch of the word, showing the versatility of English?

* Bertelsen, Ann, "Do-it-yourself Cinderella story." Sunset: The Magazine of Western Living, April 2000. p. 215

Actually I was about to ask my seatmate to double-check my vocabulary, but she was reading a Buffy the Vampire Slayer noveleeny, so I didn't. I have never watched the show, but at least two quite bright people of my acquaintance watch it avidly. I question not the show but any book based on it. They strike me as fan fiction, and my only experience of that was a bunch of faux Jean Auel swill. So I didn't ask her. Soon enough I was confronting my own stupidity instead. Again.

I just read a children's biography of Madeleine L'Engle that was no more than a rehash of The Crosswicks Journals and A Two-Part Invention. It told me nothing new. Presenting is a Twayne series biography, and I have read no critical analysis of L'Engle since grad school at the latest, if then, and if then only because I would research anything except the subject matter at hand. It, too, has told me nothing I didn't know already about L'Engle's life, but it's presented a couple of analytical angles on her fiction I hadn't considered before. The Christian allegory I'd got from the kairos books, and the quest motif, but the thematic structure of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swifty Tilting Planet I hadn't thought much about.

A Wrinkle in Time has proved over the past 20 years to have had the most profound effect on me overall, but at the time I first discovered its second companion book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet sparked my budding story-writing. The oldest stories I possess I illustrated with crayon and laboriously printed out on that widely ruled paper second-graders write on, and pasted the lines onto the craft paper, and then Mrs. Plimpton, my beloved second grade teacher, bound them into books with cloth covers. The first story I ever typed (on a manual my father'd un-retired from his work) starred all of my stuffed animals. I was older than 8 at the time; I clung (and still cling) to my animals. Typical of my stories, however, there was no plot, because I couldn't bear (<--) for my critters to undergo conflict. And unlike Maud Hart Lovelace, who gives Betsy Ray a conflict-free life, I couldn't write a compelling story without plot. After A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I had a plot. Okay, it was L'Engle's plot, but at 11 I wasn't worried about the finer (or grosser) points of plagiarism.

I loved A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I was 11, and it was 1979, and I was a girl: how could I not love a wingèd unicorn? I memorized the rune, and as I sloughed away conventional Christianity, that rune remained my prayer. I probably reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet as many times as I had Dr. Dolittle in first grade and the Little House books throughout elementary school. By the end of middle school, I would atrophy my brain with V.C. Andrews, but in sixth grade, Gaudior and I were likethis.

Therefore, riding along on the bus and reading along about adolescence and how L'Engle carefully portrayed Meg, though married and pregnant, as reassuringly youthful so we'd all be able still to identify with her, I was shocked to be told this one obvious thing that I had never ever ever realized in my multiple rereadings: at least two of the characters Charles Wallace goes Within have names that are anagrams of his own: Harcels and the Llawcaes. I thwapped myself on the brow with the book. Of all the simple brainless mechanisms a reader ought to glean, here was the most evident one, and the one of which I had never thought. What a doofus.