This is my Nathan Hale look.

Reading: WIlliam Faulkner, Light in August

Moving: staying up to 11 watching "The Sopranos" Sunday nights doesn't get me walking to work on Monday.

Watching: "Sopranos." Also "X-Files," with yea! David Ducovny.

Listening: Cowboy Junkies, Waltz across America

23 April 2001: Turgenev

Okay, I try to avoid politics and public commentary, but a) I'm still mad the Rocky Mountain News reporter blew me off after setting up an interview time for an article about childlessness (in view of this week's Take Your Equally-Opportunied-Child to Work Day) that ran today and b) I think most people make sucky parents and c) I'm watching this on the news at this instant. One of four children in a Texas family had cystic fibrosis, leading to genetic testing of the already-divorced parents, which led to the father's discovering he was the biological progenitor of only the eldest of his four children. Of whom, he says, he has ever been the sole daddy. Yet he asserts he now should not have to pay child support. I don't say that the biological father(s) should be spared financial responsibility for the others; but this man has been their de facto father and allegedly love(d/s) the children and why should they be deprived?

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I had an eye exam today. This optometrist wanted me to consider daily contacts, which would be easier on my eyes, healthier for them, perhaps not much more expensive than my current fortnight lenses because of not using solutions and enzymes and whatnot....Disposable sight correction. How American. I talked myself into two-months lenses when I first arrived in dry, high Denver and my contacts rebelled. After the GPC diagnosis, I went to the fortnight ones.

My first day in Denver I left RDC unpacking the kitchen and explored cautiously southward to an Albertson's perhaps a mile down the road (it took us a little while longer to find the Safeway less than a quarter of a mile away). I bought toilet paper and tomatoes and bread and two gallons of water and a shower curtain (the last at a K-Mart, actually). I remember its having been that night, perhaps remembering "yep I'm in a city now," that I saw a man in that supermarket wearing women's eyeglasses, with the swoop at the sides.

Remembering that, a man wearing obviously donated glasses, those lenses in those frames because that's what he could get, how can I wear daily disposables?

If I were really concerned I could stop with the contact lenses altogether, since they're not strictly necessary and glasses do the same job cheaper. But they don't do the same job; contacts correct my vision better and will continue to do so as long as my astigmatism doesn't worsen.

At the least I want a second pair of glasses, to have two pair in my correct prescription. And then I can donate my 1990 owl spectacles. Which is another thing you can't do with lenses.

The doctor also dilated my eyes. Ow. I don't remember recovering so slowly last time. I navigated back to my office badly, thinking I was on Curtis and headed for the shuttle but actually staying on 18th, and glancing at the pedestrian signals as briefly as possible through my slitted right eye, and all that unnecessarily bright sunlight made me feel like a vampire. Three hours later I still had barely any hazel and my eyes ached from the irises' hours-long contracting. I wore sunglasses all day, cranked up the text size and magnification of my screen, and was mostly useless. Next time, I schedule such a thing for the afternoon.

However, the headache hammering got me out of doing weights. And I had Fathers and Sons to listen to while waiting in the dark for my eyes to dilate and on the bus on the way home. I don't think I should listen to Anna Karenina. I already don't want anyone to listen to Possession, because you learn a lot from what everyone lines out of their correspondence, lined-out text that probably wouldn't be read. In 19th-century Russia, probably in post-Peter the Great Russia, the aristocracy spoke in English and French in front of their servants, who would know only Russian. Even though Turgenev and Tolstoy in English have to use coy little things like "he said in English" where the original Russian would have those passages actually in English without the narrative tags, different editions keep varying amounts of French. My Norton Critical of Anna Karenina translates most of the French in footnotes and, reading, I can figure out a lot that I can't readily translate. But my oral comprehension has always sucked. Today Arcady said something about the freedom of his father's valet, "Il est libré on la fe" or something, and I cannot spell it and have less idea what it means.*

So I told RDC about my difficulties, and after he figured out I wasn't talking about D.H. Lawrence, who wrote Sons and Lovers, he still couldn't help me, and then I decided that maybe the phrase is something like on l'a fait, which might mean "one [or he] has made himself," which would make sense in context, about the freeing of the serfs, and is therefore what I'm going with, however grammatically suspect.

* Found the book: Il est libré, en effet. My oral comprehension sucks.