Reading: Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Moving: walked four? or so miles with Haitch. Yes, with Haitch! Finally

Watching: season finale of "ER"

Listening: Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

18 May 2001: Friday

All morning I was thinking "What a great place to work" but this afternoon I discovered that Minne hasn't read The Phantom Tollbooth, which, more than A Wrinkle in Time, is the One Essential Book for kids, the way Where the Wild Things Are is for pre-schoolers and--well, my feelings the primacy of this are less strong, but--The Outsiders is for teenagers. What Minne said was, "Have an apostrophe," as if she were offering me a cookie--we were bemoaning the state of grammar--and I said she sounded like The Phantom Tollbooth. She will read it, I know, and she will love it, and thus Dot Org will become again A Great Place to Work.

I'm ashamed. At noon I went outside and passed a newspaper box full of the Rocky Mountain News. Here's what I read, without quotation marks: Red Flags' Raised. I had a cow, right there in the street, because I'm so even-tempered and rational. Just last week, I posted the angry flower's guide to the apostrophe in my cube. Back at work, I checked the News online, wondering if they'd corrected at least their site. What I read online was this: 'Red Flags' Raised.

Oh.

The left edge of the paper was hidden behind the frame of the newspaper box, and I guess AP style calls for single quotation marks instead of double. I think that's as wrong as not using a serial comma, but I understand the principle behind it. So anyway, I felt bad for slandering the paper, though I still think no U.S. paper in tabloid format should hope to be taken seriously, so I explained this whole incident to Minne, who of course understood and in the course of the explanation offered me an apostrophe.

So I told her about Dictionopolis and the letters being offered for sale in the street markets and how the C tasted and how the X tasted and that punctuation was kind of dessert-y, though I might not remember that correctly. Somebody offers Milo punctuation as a not-too-wholesome food. Ah yes, the Official Which.

This morning nearly as soon as I came in, I thought "What a great place to work" because one of the editors who loves the socks off me came over with an unsolicited gift: Pride and Prejudice Paper Dolls. I ran into her right after I bought my Secret Garden coloring book last month, which is how she knew about my little peccadillo (for coloring books--we'd established Jane Austen long ago). I told her how I really liked the Henry VIII and His Wives paper dolls but didn't get them because they were already colored in. These P&P ones are also colored in, but they're a) Jane Austen and b) a gift, so they're wonderful.

There was something else that made me love my job though I can't remember it now. It wasn't the data input I did in the morning, that's for certain. I love using the numberpad and am a lot more accurate with it than I am with the rest of the keyboard, but some of the figures were negative so I had to use that key, which annoys me. Also not all of them were, which meant that I couldn't enter the column and afterward multiply it all by -1.

I am newly even fonder of Egg, too. She wanted to describe something that begins a positive, compounding chain reaction of events, and since that's about the opposite of a vicious cycle, she called it a virtuous cycle. That cracked me up. Unfortunately it's too easily mistaken for our not knowing the difference among, say, virtual and vicious and virtuous, and our audience isn't in it for the word play, so the phrase got killed. But I liked it.

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Earlier this week I wore one of my few summer skirts, a rayon, vaguely floral print in mauve, pink, and shades of green on a field of off-white. Trey came in and admired it (I think she has some sort of auto-flattery function that is part of her personal niceness) and asked where I had found it. "Filene's Basement, 1988." She ogled.

I have to explain about Filene's Basement. There used to be only one, downstairs from the flagship Filene's in Downtown Crossing, in Boston. It was affiliated with Filene's, actually had the overstock from the floors above, and was good. Then it became a chain, like any alleged-overstock place, T.J. Maxx or Marshall's or Ross, and all the stuff at the chain outlets rather than the original basement sucked. So I expected Nordstrom Rack to suck for the same reason; I allowed as how the one in Seattle, or wherever the store is based, might be good, but the franchised others would suck. My one visit to the Rack in Park Meadows bore this out, possibly because I was with RDC, who cannot abide discount places. I probably could have found a frock or three if we hadn't been looking for a blazer for him. Just recently another Rack opened at the new, even larger Monster Truck Shopping Resort called Flatirons Crossing between Denver and Boulder, and women I work with have had huge success finding shoes there. So I want to go, even though I know very well that at such places you rely on the luck of the draw and that everyone else on the planet is easier to shoe than I am. I should just have iron half-circles nailed to my feet and be done with it.

So anyway, the 13-year-old skirt. "How do you keep your clothes so long?" she asked. I've been full-grown for twice as long as she has, I pointed out (she's 26, I'm almost 33). "No, really," she pressed, "How do you take care of them?" I ogled at her. "I keep everything on the floor and never wash it," I responded, nearly truthfully. What am I going to do to a rayon skirt? Go hiking? Hang out with Blake? Garden? Paint? I relented and showed her the badly repaired hem--the skirt's long and full and gets caught under chairs--saying that because the skirt's ankle-length, flowy, and patterned, stains aren't so immediately apparent and the unevenness of the hem doesn't show either. Or so I like to think.

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On Tuesday, Open was released, and I yomped into the car as soon as I got home to plunder a garden center. In the car is a cd player, wheeee! Last Saturday, just before a song, Margo said, "Well, everyone says we're the saddest-sounding bad around, so we wrote this happy song. And when we performed, it'd just be my brother here (gesturing to Michael, the guitarist) and me, but people said it still sounding sad, so we brought the whole band back onstage. This is called 'Anniversary Song.'" It doesn't sound sad to me, but I love the Junkies something fierce and this was RDC and my song at the wedding; in contrast when I asked Haitch if she would like to go to Kinetics and hear the Junkies she said "NO." The first song on Open is "I Did It All for You," and by the time I parked at City Florist I was chortling, because, Margo, this is not the kind of song you need to play to rid yourself of that description. Earlier Junkies songs include such C.M.-rated lines as "He...shot his dog out in an open field"; this one has "she took his dentures from his mouth/ and put them in her own/ took a shovel from the shed/ and dragged him from their home." Charming.

Between loving the Junkies and crying when I woke from general anesthetic, I really do question the generally happy and content state of mind that I delude myself I have.

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When I told my mother I was coming home, I told her my sister and I'd drive down from Boston on Sunday, because Saturday night we were seeing a concert. She asked who and I told her; and, surprising me, she said, "That's a familiar name." The only reason that might be possible is that I bring their albums home with me whenever I go, as does my sister. I suggested that, and she said yes, CLH had brought some music home with her the previous weekend, when this trip started happening. Four years ago during such a trip is when my mother mused that she would possibly use Passion at her own wedding, a sacrilege I was able to prevent by suggesting that music written for a movie based on a book in which Jesus has sexual fantasies on the cross might not be smiled upon by Pastor Miami Vice, her cult leader. My sister also fed our mother's cultism by giving her Godspell one Christmas, which bothered me because there's no way it would ever mean as much to her as it does to us and in fact she probably would outright dislike and therefore profane it. If my mother ends up listening to the Junkies, though, would I mind? Is my opposition to her knowing my Important Things that she shouldn't be know what she can never appreciate or ever respect, or that she simply shouldn't know them at all? Her knowing them makes me vulnerable to her in new ways, and absolutely would she use that knowledge to manipulate me.

Perhaps that's why I read. It's a field of knowledge in which she has no interest and which she dismisses; and since I have always been confident as a reader, her dismissal doesn't affect me, and her disinterest means I am safe from her artless ridicule.