I believe my eyebrows have mostly returned. Whew. Note the contrast from a month ago:

Reading: Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart

Moving: walked 5.4 miles

Listening: Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Watching: "The Snake Pit" and "ER," and I have to say again Rocket Romano is someone I love to hate.

8 February 2001: In slow indignation swam

A while back I moved the alarm clock from The Other Side of the Room, where it has been since high school, to my side of the bed, because (while I sneer at snooze alarms) I have a bad habit of resetting the alarm and going back to bed, which is annoying to my bedmate. It didn't take me very long to revert to my junior high habit of turning off the alarm without removing any of my body from the bed but one arm. Yesterday I turned off the alarm at 6:00 and woke at 7:00 and still walked to work, so I was a bit late. Today I woke from restive sleep and got fully up to turn off the alarm. What determines how I react to the alarm is how deeply asleep I am at the time, and how much good sleep I have had. If I've had enough good sleep, the alarm only alerts me, and I get up. If I haven't slept well, it alarms me and I flail and try to get out of the left side of the bed (problem: my bedmate is on that side) or do something equally disrupting and get up. If I slept well but not enough, I am perfectly capable of turning off the alarm in my sleep, as I did in junior high and yesterday morning.

But today RDC was going to lovely New Brunswick, NJ, and both of us had to get up at 6:00. I shouldn't rank on the town. ASZ went to Rutgers, and NCS's friend Andy whom I always liked; RDC's adviser, whom we saw in Wild Oats on Saturday, said it's much improved as a town lately. But still. New Jersey.

I've worn contacts three for three weekdays this week and planned on glasses today; I would have worn glasses Tuesday as well except that being naked except for glasses makes me feel extremely vulnerable, and vulnerable is one thing I don't need to feel when I'm consulting a gynecologist. As I dressed to walk to work, I noticed the snow that had fallen overnight was being joined by even more snow, and put contacts in to walk to work.

Meanwhile, RDC's 9:00 a.m. flight had been canceled. He's waiting to hear if a noon flight might work, and juggling SuperShuttle, and wondering if he can drive Cassidy, standard transmission, with the cast. I would say he probably could steer enough with his left fingertips while shifting if the roads weren't savage, but they are, so he can't. Also I have got to call a refuse company to have the garage emptied of the mint green carpet and the particle-board closet unit the previous owner left, and the old toilet, and the crap I found when I cleared out behind the garage. (That crap is now inside the garage, and behindthegaragae is now not going to be a dogrun. Stupid bird.) Once it's emptied of everything but the lawnmower and such like, Cassidy can live in there--probably just in time for summer. In the meantime, the snow on the car would be another obstacle.

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I walked in listening to Swann's Way. Sunday when I drove to Haitch's and then the garden centers I listened to all of the second tape (of 14) and heard the madeleine bit. Earlier this week on tape 3 I heard the first production error I've ever noticed by Recorded Books Inc.--the narrator repeated a section about a stained glass looking like a face card and a parcel of cakes tied up with string. That's about as close attention as I'm paying to Proust, hearing rather than active listening, remembering two descriptive phrases. Some of it stays in my head, anyway. Listening to my book, I couldn't walk in the street on the car tracks as I did last week; and with few people shoveling the east-west stretches of sidewalk all the new snow covers last week's snow-melted-into-ice and yesterday's freezing rain (yes, for the first time I can remember, rain in winter in Denver--blecch), walking was more treacherous. Not exactly breaking trail the way Laura's first students had to going to the Brewster school, but more than walking. My stride didn't lengthen in confidence of footing until I was within just a few blocks of downtown where businesses instead of rental agencies are responsible for the sidewalks.

I sprang up the steps into the building and debated taking the stairs. I didn't. I bounced up more stairs to the elevator, and someone exclaimed, "You must have had a long walk; you're covered in snow!" "I had a great walk!" I responded, wishing I could shake systematically like a dog. Being vertical instead of horizontal and not a belly-dancer, I can't. My hat was completely plastered in snow, my knapsack, shoulders and arms, and legs. And my scarf had frozen under my chin where my skin and breath had melted the snow.

"You look really invigorated," the woman said. I maybe did. I felt great.

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I finally finished Lolita last night. How did I forget about Clare Quilty? I saw both movie versions, James Mason and Jeremy Irons. I started the eponymous story in Jane Smiley's volume of stories, The Age of Grief. Today at the library I'll get the next crop of Modern Library titles. We have a lot of them but they date from our undergraduate classes when we bought the cheapest possible editions. Which made sense at the pauperous time, but not now: RDC's copy of House of Mirth is some nigh-illegible Ballantine Classic edition instead of a quality trade paperback.

Debate: go to the next No Kidding event or not? (This is where yesterday's navel-gazing came from.) We are going to go next week; someone's arranged snowshoeing in RMNP. We probably won't snowshoe with the group, as the arranger told me she's never gone before and they're going to "test drive" different models in the Bear Lake shuttle parking lot, but we'll see them and later meet at a brewpub in Estes Park. But this week, someone else is having "Board Game Night" at their house. I like games, depending on my playmates. Then when RDC arranged his flight and wouldn't get home until 10 tomorrow night, I decided I would go in the evening. I could jam at any time with the great excuse of RDC coming home, I like games, and I can handle strangers. Rereading the email before I responded, I realized the evening was Saturday night. In Mayfair instead of Capitol Hill. And what would "board games" be anyway? Would they be Balderdash and Pictionary and Taboo so I could trounce everyone or Life and Careers and Playland? (The latter would be fun with friends, but kind of pointless if I didn't already enjoy the folks' company.) The hosts live in Mayfair instead of Capitol Hill, a much less hip area of town. RDC probably wouldn't want to go, and that would be two weekend evenings apart.

Eh. If he goes to Rutgers, I won't go to Mayfair; if he doesn't and we have tomorrow night to play, I might go alone Saturday. Or see "Hannibal" with RDC. Whichever.

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At the library this noon I got my next stack. I might have recently called them the shorter or easier titles but what I meant is the ones I'm most looking forward to. I borrowed The Magus, since I worship John Fowles's general direction even when he's kicking my ass (as he did in A Maggot and less, but still some, in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And The Golden Notebook, which I've been meaning to read since maybe grad school. I have no idea if this is likely but I have the impression that it was required reading for a particular class along with In the Castle of My Skin. Since my memory tells me that these books were in the sociology section, I would hazard I'm misremembering. But I found a lot of cool books in my tenure as a textbook stocker. Or I might link them only because of the similarity of the names, Lessing and Lamming. Also, and this is what I meant by shorter and easier, Deliverance. I could be wrong, but I'm not expecting any Fowles-level ass-kicking from Dickey. And then Death of the Heart, which I would have started walking back except a) it was snowing (still! yea!) and my armload of those four plus a fifth plus DayRunner would have made it hard to hold a book open.

The fifth book is one I borrowed for CoolBoss. I am now feeling bad about her handle, because she hates the term "boss," a detail I never knew until Egg happened to mention it one day over three years into my underlingedness. She wouldn't like the term underling either. It's not as if I call her Boss, or even Chief, as Stereotypically Annoying Italian Intern on "ER" does Kerry. (Note: when I disliked that character I spelled her "Carrie." Now that I like her, I grant her the Scottish name instead of the harsh diminutive for "Carolyn.") I refer to her as my supervisor, on the rare occasion context calls for that. But anyway. She needed a book and--sterling woman and excellent manager though she be--not possessed of a library card, she asked if I could find it. (It was a work-related book, let me clarify.) The web catalog listed it on the shelf, and there it was, but the third, 1980, edition.

So I ILL'd the most recent edition, and today picked it up. When I found the earlier one, Egg had come to the 'brary with me for her own research, and I quickly picked up whatever I was reading--The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter or whatever it was--and commented to Egg as we left that if anyone tracks my library reading habits, Big Brother style, then this book might blow their entire theory.

I don't know why I never read any more Elizabeth Bowen than The Last September, which I adored. I started Death of the Heart over my yogurt with granola and banana when I got back, and immediately wanted to kick myself for eleven wasted years: "That morning's ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam."

Down which swans in slow indignation swam.