Reading: Nobody's Fool

Moving: nope

Learning: how to mortar a house

Watching: "Fight Club," "Sweet and Lowdown," "Double Jeopardy"

13 July 2000: Random

Last night I left my DayRunner in the car and this morning I walked around the corner--today being a street-sweeping day--to retrieve it. I checked my watch as I turned busward, but checking my watch doesn't help when I don't know when the bus comes anyway and have no intention of running. (I missed it.) Anyway, this reminded me that I like checking my watch. I love my watch and it's only become more perfect over time (time! ha! it's a watch! I slay me!).

In the summer of 1989 I needed a watch more than I had during the first three years of college. Somehow a job and an evening class required more synchronization than six semesters' worth of changing classes and oddly-houred part-time work. But either I didn't have a watch or I hated the one I had, so by 1989 I needed a new one.

My father gave me a watch I think for my 16th birthday, a drugstore-level Seiko. I liked it okay, but eventually, living on my wrist, it needed a new crystal. In the course of errands one midsummer morning four years later, my mother and I brought it to a jeweler's. This strikes me now as odd, since repairing probably cost more than the original watch plus a replacement, but that's what we did. It wasn't ready by the time school started again and my mother said she would pick it up and mail it to me. And she did. Before she did, she decided the watch needed a new band.

(It probably did. I remember it cracking and peeling, that kind of band that claims to be gen-yoo-ine leather and is really a paper-thin scraping of cowhide over canvas. But it was broken in and I liked it that way.)

I think she meant it as a gift, but--as with most things about my mother--this action only grieved me. The watch was supposed to be gold-plated, but again, it was cheap and I remember white plastic peeking through the peeling gold paint. (I can't believe I replaced the crystal rather than the whole thing.) But it was supposed to look like a metal, not a plastic, watch, and therefore, I thought, deserved a leather band. The watch I removed from its box had no band but, through its hingie-bits, was strung on a brown plastic strap less than two thirds the width of the watch. Because the watch was heavy and could not be anchored to a strap not intended for it, it would slide around my wrist when fastened and fall off the strap when not fastened

So anyway, I couldn't wear it all junior year but junior summer needed a watch. Despite my having broken up with him, I accepted NCS's offer of the loan of his black-on-black Swatch. That was a cool watch, perhaps because--being black on black--it was almost wholly unreadable. I needed a new, NCSless watch.

And so that summer I found my Fossil watch. Round, with art deco numerals on a creamy face with a nut-brown middle. The case is brushed, tooled steel (it was once plated but I've worn all that off). And I even found a brown leather band with a silver buckle, rare as that is. I love my watch. I never want another. People have asked me if this was my grandfather's watch; that's how old it looks. It's beaten and friendly and mine mine mine.

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We rented three movies on Monday. I slept through the last part of "The Sweet and Lowdown" but I liked the idea of the alternative endings, since no one knows what happened to Emmet Ray. I also liked that Woody Allen was barely in it. This weekend we watched a tape of "Mighty Aphrodite" and I wanted to put a skewer through my head. The idea of anyone, especially Helena Bonham Carter, wanting to sleep with that man or even have a conversation with him is deeply disturbing to me.

"Double Jeopardy" I wanted to see mostly because I have a thing for Ashley Judd. It was pretty stupid, as expected.

RDC expected to hate "Fight Club" but he liked it a lot; so did I. I like the way it was narrated; I like how Brad Pitt was spliced in before Edward Norton met him, as Brad Pitt himself would splice frames in and out of movies. The soundtrack was great, as was the art direction.

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I received a postcard from Kim Rollins today. Her handwriting is about as cool as I expected. This reminds me that I have to find everyone else's address for postcards gathering dust on my desk. I didn't write to Feenie disillusioning her yet. (Kim sent her postcard because I'd sent her my change of address. The postcard is in the style of a tawdry '50s publication: "Giant Comics Editions: Diary Secrets!" She inserted "Online" before "diary."

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There should be a rule that people not start talking until after they close the office door. I heard Verm knock on Coolboss's door and what he said as he closed it after him. I sat, thinking about that, and Minne came in. I told her about this rule I'd like to propose, and she looked over my cube wall to see if I had come up with this rule because of Coolboss or Überboss. Of course, she wanted to know why I thought this, and I told her what I'd heard: "It's official. [The wife] and I are moving back to Vermont." We whispered about this for a minute, during which time Tex walked by my cube and saw us deep in conversation. By the next afternoon, Verm had told Überboss (door open this time) and found Ur-boss, and so he was ready to tell our department. Coolboos called another staff meeting--we'd just had one that morning--and Verm announced it. It's a blow to the department because Verm is really valuable; it's a blow particularly because Colorado's unemployment rate is 2.2%; and he had just passed his ten-year anniversary. Which is, coincidentally, also Tex's ten-year date. The announcement was news to him but also a relief, because he has the same thing I have that when he sees people whispering, he knows it must be about him. He was nervous after seeing Minne and me huddled together the day before, but, as I told him, I told her instead of him only because she, not he, happened to be the next department member in my cube.

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Last night a thunderstorm blew through and cooled the day off, just as is supposed to happen in Colorado. It was the first afternoon in a long time it's been cool enough that the prospect of working in the yard pleased me. (One day it'll be a garden; right now it's just a yard.) I murdered all the baby cherry trees with the weed-whacker. I don't know what to do under the cherry tree, how to get all the cherry pits off the yard other than by plucking the fuckers off the ground one by one. A rake doesn't touch them. I weed-whacked the north side of the house until the charge ran down, since the grass there is too long for the reel mower to touch. I mowed our bits of lawn. I weeded the patio (which I'd like to relay and the back walk. I watered.

Meanwhile, RDC installed the blinds and the ceiling fixtures. I don't like overhead lamps in bedrooms, but we could have either left the old ugly ones, or had gaping holes in the ceiling, or bought new ones. Our new lamps are brushed pewter with an pearly marbled glass. I'm glad I didn't have to install the blinds, but RDC managed. They're a woven white material, kind of a double-diamond cellular thing. The long cells will help regulate temperature, and it was cooler today after leaving the blinds down. The moon is too far south right now for its light to reach the bedroom, but it will in the winter, and keeping the heat in might not be as important as sleeping in moonlight then.

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Mary Anne's book is on the front cover of this month's Tattered Cover newsletter. I have to write and tell her that.