Reading: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (an ironic title)

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Listening: Toni Morrison, Paradise

Watching: "ER" last night and whatever is in front of me tonight.

23 February 2001: The phoenix from the flame

It ain't easy being me:

• In the past month, I have had David Bowie's "Modern Love" in my head. A lot. More recently, it has been overtaken by whatever '70s? band did "Rock and Roll Hootchie-Coo." Just yesterday Joan Jett's "I Love Rock'n'Roll" had supremacy. I know the origin of that last--it was on the radio this weekend and I listened to it and this is my punishment. A couple of hours ago I had Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's classic "Ebony and Ivory" in my head but Joan Jett seems to have beat them up and stolen their lunch and I am actually glad to have her stupid song back.
• Last week a new coworker came to asking if I could help her to word something diplomatically or tactfully or something like that and I just barely restrained myself from laughing in her face. Today I related the incident, in high self-deprecation, to CoolBoss, who did not restrain herself from laughing in my face.
• There was another thing that I started this list for that's gone now. See? That makes another thing.
• I wrote a chatty email about magpies harrying a hawk out of a tree where it was trying--not to eat baby magpies--to nap, and TJZD replied, "from that description, it's no wonder that magpies are your totem animal...it's fitting. chattering away while some poor slob tries to nap after breakfast, probably wishing you'd just shut up so he could get some sleep...." Abuse on all sides, I tell you.

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I read Holes to RDC this week. At the end, when Zero is telling Stanley about the homeless shelter, he tells him how he would try "have to find someone to pretend to be my mom" to avoid social workers' questions and becoming a ward of the state. Since I first read Holes, the 1999 Newbery winner, I've read Bud, Not Buddy, the 2000 winner, in which Bud evades prying and the Home with the same tactic. I don't think Christopher Paul Curtis lifted the idea. What struck me is how rare it was in children's books, much less award-winning children's books, even only 20 years ago, for such a truth to be assumed as a given to child readers.

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Beth recently found herself on a list of links about hair that included The Long Hair Site. The site's author is not a native English speaker. This excuses his calling women "ladies," a term that in general use puts my teeth on edge. He's clearly a fetishist, but it's the "lady" bit that makes him a freak. Anyway, I remembered browsing around this site a while back, before he was collecting photographs. I want to know what the difference is between this hairstyle and a mullet. I dislike long hair with bangs, but I loathe and mock super-long hair with bangs, especially ear-to-ear bangs.

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When I came into work this morning, I just changed in the lav; I had showered at home and showering at work is about as useful as being licked by a cat. My back was damp, though, and I wondered how much of a ruckus I would kick up if I ran, in the state I was in, from the lav through the reception area to the shower. Probably a lot. This reminded me that when I first started working at Dot Org, I had underwear-in-the-hallway anxiety dreams set there. I haven't had any of those in years, so I guess I'm not nervous about work. Which is another reason, besides that CoolBoss likes me despite my not having a tactful bone in my body, that I don't want to change jobs.

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I watched "The African Queen" last night. I saw this long before "Casablanca," before "To Have and Have Not," before the wretched "Pat and Mike" or the wonderful "Woman of the Year" or "Adam's Rib." For me, it came as a shock that Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart ever should be paired with anyone but each other. What did I know. Seeing it from its opening scene, I was reminded of Jane Eyre.

I reread the last third of the book. I think of the book in three parts, the Reeds' house and Lowood, Thornfield Hall, and the Rivers. I continue to fail to see the appeal of Mr. Rochester, but I figure Jane saw it, and my initial and years-long distaste for her as a character has been pretty well washed away by now. She knew whom she loved and she knew what marriage ought to be, which St. John did not. And it's too bad that Jane didn't know about C.S. Forester, or she could have told St. John that missionaries traveling as brother and sister would be just fine.

C.S. Forester wrote The African Queen, which starts with the character played by Katharine Hepburn as a missionary's sister.

I'm glad to like her now. She still doesn't make it to my List of Janes though.

In Goblet of Fire, Rowling shoves in nonEnglishspeakers to give an excuse for British Hermione to explain how to pronounce her name--for the benefit American English readers. In Edge of Reason, someone or other teases Bridget about an attentive boy named St. John, solely, I am sure, to explain to U.S. folks how that name is pronounced.

Which makes me wonder how Brits pronounce St. John's Wort.

Jane Eyre reminded me of a question that's been niggling at the back of my mind for a while: What's the deal with naming dogs Carlo?

In House of Dreams, Anne and Gilbert's dog is named Carlo. In Windy Poplars, one of the details that made it obvious Montgomery wrote it a) later and b) bored is that another dog's name is Carlo. There must be a reason it would occur to LMM twice as a dog name. The coincidence of such a weird name for a dog reminded me that I have come across it before. When Jane Eyre has her village school, she has a dog named Carlo. Reading Jane Eyre last night, I figured that I had not quite remembered Jane's dog when reading Anne and that was all, but then I remembered the contemporary wordless picture books with the wonderful tempera illustrations about the Rottweiler Carl. So now I want to know whether Carlo was a Name for dogs, like Fido and Pilot and Rover and Spot. Pilot, which was Mr. Rochester's dog's name and occurs elsewhere, I am sure, makes sense to me somehow. But Carl?

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Today, soon after I got home, as I defrosted Blake's supper, a Sinéad O'Connor song came on KBCO. I was so happy, not having heard it for years, bouncing around frightening Blake rather excessively, yelling the lyrics that were once so Deeply Meaningful to me:

How could I possibly know what I want
When I was only twenty-one?

And I was thinking shit yeah, the three men who fucked me up the most were major players when I was 21.* Here, from the depths of my 32-year-oldness, I remembered fondly how much I loved "Troy" especially and how well it went with Melissa Etheridge's "Like I Do," that summer of 1989.

* Whether this gut reaction was fair or even true is another issue.

But I couldn't remember exactly the name of the radio song, so I sought out the tape downstairs, just as I sought out Dream Academy. The right tape case begins with the Pogues, a fact I hadn't memorized but recognized immediately from the red spine of the tape case. (I made my own tape covers from appropriate magazine photographs.) Left one, bottom row, third from the end, was Sinéad; the tulips on the spine as much as its alphabeticalness drew me to it. I opened the case and gasped.

SSP had written the tape label.

In Tolkien runes.

He'd written it because the tape originally held Celtic music he'd dubbed for me. I ruthlessly taped over it--I'm all about high quality recording levels--but didn't change the label because the runes looked cool--you know, like wearing your baseball cap and by extrapolation your miner's-hard-hat-with-a-lamp-on-it backward. (I intended to make a "Small Time Crooks" joke but oops, there's an SSP-joke in there too.) I remember that, remember taping Sinéad O'Connor over "Castle Kelly" so I'd have two albums I actually listened to--Lion and the Cobra and Kate Bush's Sensual World--on a single tape, and later when I had Sensual World elsewhere, taping I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got over Kate. I didn't have a CD player until 1992 but probably taped Sensual World off PLT's disc, on both sides of a tape so I could listen to it again and again and again and again, as I did with Roxy Music's Avalon. (This is one of those pointless navel-gazings that makes my sister ill. Line forms to the right.)

Anyway. Being startled by a scrap of SSP's handwriting, being amused by its being (of course) in Tolkien rune, is some indication of how long it had been since I listened to Sinéad O'Connor. A really really really long time, since I still don't have her on disc and seldom listen to tapes.

A really really really really long time, because the song I was listening to and remembering as being Meaningful from the summer of 1989 is in fact on I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, released in 1990 and therefore as useful to me in 1989 as the revelations of Marge Piercy's Small Changes, which I read the month after I broke up with SSP, was to me in that relationship.

As I skipped, giddy with nostalgia, into my study with the tape, I plucked The Return of the King from the shelf to translate the runes. I was spared that little exercise by removing the tape from the case; "Castle Kelly" was written on the songlist and the Ls match up, phonetic and rune.

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Someone or other, perhaps my freshling roommate Rebecca, was horrified that I had Dark Side of the Moon backed with James Taylor's Greatest Hits. I say it worked if only because in one of Taylor's songs--"Carolina"?--he sings "Still I'm on the dark side of the moon..." I would hazard that the horrified party could have been PLT, except he didn't like James Taylor and interrupted a tape he made for HEB of whalesong with KC and the Sunshine Band and likes, or once affected to like, much more jarring conjoinings than that. It might have been TJZ, because she liked James Taylor but not Pink Floyd.

The Lion and the Cobra and The Sensual World work as tape-companions for the same reason:

Somehow I doubt Sinéad was thinking of Ulysses, though. Maybe. But probably not.