Reading: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Moving: walked somewhat less than two miles

Listening: Kate Bush, Sensual World

Watching: fog over the mountains. Winter gardens, and my neighbors' various approaches to lower-water landscaping.

6 February 2001: Better this year, but not good

Two for two: male gynecologists of my intimate acquaintance, in contrast to their female colleagues, don't think a word or two like maybe "I'm going to introduce the speculum now" is necessary. Nor do they give a syllable of warning when they scrape your cervix for a pap smear. Pigs. This guy, at least, didn't smoke.

He came highly recommended, which is why I thought I could get over his male-ness as long as he didn't smoke, like last year's 90-year-old Mr. Butts.

I got to see the desk in his office where we "visited" after he poked and prodded and otherwise molested me in the examination room. As the interview ended and thus when I wouldn't interrupt his spiel, I commented on what a beautiful piece it was, with doors hinged on the side to double its width and those doors containing multiple also-doored pigeonholes. I asked if it had been used in for the mail in a general store. He didn't say yes and offer further details about perhaps its age or origin but told me it had been used as a post office in the olden days when a general store would also be the general mail delivery. Oh, did that happen? the olden days, eh? I haven't said "olden" unless I was channeling Laura Ingalls Wilder since I was eight. He must have just registered the tone of a question and the direction of my glance without listening to what I said; in short, treating me as if I were eight, in which case he really shouldn't've prescribed me birth control pills.

Which means I mark another physician from my directory.

Then I bought Sung parfum for CLH's birthday and walked home. I choose my physicians based on their accessibility from a known bus line, which means I go to Cherry Creek, downtown, or the large array of medical offices around 20th & Franklin, where the Children's Hospital and another major hospital and Kaiser all are clumped. I could easily go to the U of CO medical center, less than a mile from the house, if I could remember to make an appointment earlier than, desperately, three weeks before my annual prescription expires. Remind me next year: Female, non-smoker, and attentive, both to medical courtesy and to polite, complimentary conversation.

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The place where Humbert Humbert first enjoys his Lolita is a hotel called The Enchanted Hunters. When they lead an allegedly normal life together as father and daughter, she wants to take part in a school play called "The Hunted Enchanters," or so Humbert recalls. (The novel is his statement recalled for the inevitable inquiry.) When I started it, I asked Haitch if he's meant to be an unreliable narrator because dates he recalls of his first sexual encounter (when he was the same age as his partners) don't mesh. I'll accept the math of the years not working as either Nabokov's mistake (unlikely) or my own (much more likely), but I am certain that the hotel's and play's names cannot be a coincidence. It doesn't call into question the entire story, the way the gradually-revealed insanity of the protagonist of A Pale View of the Hills does, but it emphasizes, if the reader had any doubt by this point, the impenetrable narcissism of the not-so-humble narrator.

Narcissism being the common denominator in many forms of psychoses, as far as I'm concerned. Paranoia, fr'instance, requires you think that everyone is focused on you. It's interesting that we all start out entirely self-centered, as infants without awareness of anything beyond our own needs, unaware that our toes are connected to our minds. A vital part of socialization is the child's learning that everyone else is as alive and individual as she is. I have long believed that shame, not knowledge (of sin) was in the apple. As you mature, you become aware of, and then begin to care, what other people think, which is why in public so many fewer adults than children climb trees and make snow angels and act silly. When an adult retains that child-like unconcern for propriety and is unable to see any other perspective or motive than his own, he is mad. Or maybe just rude. Or mad, like a pedophile, unable to see or care how his selfish actions harm other people.

[several pages later] Okay, so he is aware of it. Nabokov's telling the reader this only draws more attention to Humbert's irretrievable egotism: "The coincidence of the title with the name of an unforgettable inn was pleasant in a sad little way: I early thought I had better not bring it to my own enchantress's notice, lest a brazen accusation of mawkishness hurt me even more than her failure to notice it for herself had done." Nothing perceived without several of his own lenses to give it his own focus.

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Moving on.

Yesterday I knew I was not, NOT, going to Nordic Track, so I walked home. I stumped home. Cramps had felled me like a tree. I filed bills, helped RDC make sauce, read Lolita, ran a load of wash, and after dinner settled into the freezing cold family room with RDC to watch "The Thin Red Line." (The basement gets no heat during the day because RDC turns off the furnace and runs only the solar, which heats only the kitchen, dining room, and living room. He uses a fan to pull the heated air into his study.) Lots of blankets and buddy snuggled right under the chin.

Man, I thought that movie was going to be your basic war movie. It just went on and on and on, good, but on and on and on, and when at the end the camera focuses off the stern of the ship on the wake, I thought yea! obvious ending metaphor, stern, wake, leaving, end of movie, hooray! so when the scene switched again to some beautiful jungle I huffed grumpily. Luckily that was only 10 seconds or so and then finally it was over over over yea! and I saw, in the credits, the reason it was so very very very long (actually a good movie, but by this time it was 10:30 and taking a miracle to keep me awake): based on the novel by James Jones. Aha! I hadn't known it was based on a book, and I certainly didn't suspect Mr. From Here to Eternity.

I finally saw that movie a couple of years ago after seeing the One Famous Rolling in the Surf Scene. I suspect I would like both books equally little. The more contemporary movie appealed to me (before it started to be long long long) but "From Here to Eternity" was dull. Jack Klugman--no, checking, it was Frank Sinatra, I am hopeless--gets killed. Donna Reed's in it. Patriotism and '50s mindset. I wonder if the two books--which I would probably like equally little--are so different: probably not. Probably the movies are different because there's almost fifty years cinematic sophistication and cynicism difference between them.

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Because I like lists and have no life, I made some lists: besides this year's reading menu, a list of the NEA's, SLJ's, and ALA's noteworthy 20th-century children's books. These lists are what I consult when I'm at the 'brary and can't think of what next to read. I noted in my DayRunner books to fetch from the 'brary tomorrow, and they are mostly the shorter or easier books from the MLA list. I can get through Deliverance in a day, I bet, and mark it off the list! I love lists.