Reading: A Severed Head

Moving: Biked 7.6 miles and walked vigorously for an hour

House and Garden: ask again tomorrow

Watching: since yesterday, "Hollywood Ending," this time awake (I preferred the asleep way), "ER," and four episodes of "My So-Called Life"

7-8 November 2002: Tryptophan Flashback

The following is a tangent from my New York ramblings. Also, I remembered two other trips: an organized bus trip from UConn to the Bronx Zoo and a private jaunt to St. John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral.

When I was in fourth grade, my friend Elizabeth's mother was in nursing school and needed to interview children of different ages for a child development class. She asked me and I said I didn't want to be a subject, and it couldn't be her own daughter, but what the hell, Mrs. Atkins recorded me anyway without telling me until after. I clearly was just as gullible at 10 as I am today, because she must have asked me leading questions that I thought were just friendly chat (Mrs. Atkins was the first parent, maybe the first grown-up, who talked with me instead of to me).

She showed me the report afterward. One of the questions must have been along the lines of "What do you do when you get angry?" and I said I clean my room. Mrs. Atkins theorized in her report that tidying and so forth must have allowed me to clear my thoughts. Even at the time I knew how wrong she was: I cleaned because it was a good way to expend energy that otherwise might come out violently.

I never forgot that, in part because I was so glad that a grown-up was wrong, particularly about me, but mostly because I felt so betrayed, by both my friend's mother and my friend who knew what was going on. It's also when I first heard myself on tape, also memorable. She had me talking about having my teeth capped in third grade after falling out of the jungle gym, and this was the first time I had heard my voice as others hear it, how the teeth-capping material "had the wust taste." Because my teeth might have been capped and my chin stitched, but the trauma to my jaw (from another accident) that sent it out of alignment had not been corrected, and I could not pronounce any vowel-r combination for the next five years. My beloved speech therapist cured my lisp and my w-for-l and various other things, but I wouldn't be able to say a vowel-r until my jaw was straightened out.

The New York stories reminded me of the child-development project because after my first trip to the city, I came home and cleaned my room. My mother smugly concluded that this was because I was so shocked at the state of the streets. But she was wrong.

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It was a great ride home from work. I am so glad to be back on my bike. Besides the sub-20 temperatures, another reason I didn't ride previously this week is that I couldn't find a piece of the bike pump. For some reason we have a This brand of pump but That brand of inner tubes. So there's a little converter bit, an inch-long brass valve, that's meant to be stored snapped into a bracket on the stem of the pump--why it can't live screwed into the tube I don't know--that wasn't there when I needed to inflate my tires.

RDC was sure I had lost it on the deck, which wouldn't be so bad except that it's now smovered in leaves [woohooo! first new coinage in ages. not a good one though. darn]. I looked for it twice in the garage where the pump lives, once on a sunny day when the garage was dimmer than outside and again yesterday afternoon, when the artificially illuminated garage was brighter than the outside. I found the valve almost immediately that time. Maybe it fell out of its bracket on its own, but maybe it was knocked out when someone tossed the charcoal lighter back into the garage, as he has done every time he's grilled since I last pumped my tires in July, the charcoal lighter being in the category of Sharp or Hot Household Objects that Lisa Doesn't Use.

But anyway, I found it, I have a few score of pressure psi in my tires, a cockatiel preening my braid, and tomorrow off.

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Friday.

And what did I do with my day off? We went for a vigorous walk in the late afternoon, but mostly Blake and I read Mother Jones and Time and Smithsonian and The Ground Beneath Her Feet and watched several episodes of "My So-Called Life." That's why I think I'm having a tryptophan flashback.

Almost five years ago, the day after Thanksgiving, MTV had a day-long marathon of "My So-Called Life," as I discovered when I staggered vertical sometime before 8 a.m. and channel-surfed over my turkey and stuffing breakfast. Not much longer afterward, I flipped down the futon from couch to floor mattress, there to ride out my tryptophan hang-over with a lot more of the hair of the dog. RDC even joined me. I had never seen an episode before, I'm pretty sure, but that day changed everything.

So anyway, this was not such a productive day off. I felt under the weather all day and barely moved except for the walk through the park. I started watching MSCL because it just arrived, but I think it triggered a flashback, the all-body sensation of turkey hang-over.

Oh. Jared Leto played Jorden Catalano. I recognized the name, not the face. And the actress who played Rayanne is not the same actress who played Harper Tracy on "ER." All you humans look so much alike.

RDC recently bought a blood-pressure cuff. After dinner (chicken, chard, mushrooms, and scallions with wine and garlic over rice that I actually helped cook, zounds), he measured mine: 105/57. That might be why I felt faint helping with dinner--or maybe it was just the shock of participating in something like cooking.

And hooray, I'm watching "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension" for the first time since 1989. Jessie noticed The Crying of Lot 49. I notice "Back to the Future." The gizmo in the vehicle Buckaroo first drives through the eighth dimension with looks like the flux capacitor. The modified vehicle itself, which should have been named Evelyn. John Lithgow as the mad doctor--although Christopher Lloyd is in "Buckaroo" too--but the Hong Kong Cavaliers have little to do with Huey Lewis and the News, I'm happy to say.

This movie won CLH's heart when the Cavaliers dropped saxophones and spun out pistols when the time came. I don't remember why it amused me so, except that I was in eleventh grade spending the weekend with my cool sister and her cool college friends. Now I see it as your basic goofy movie with a sense of humor about itself, like "Re-animator."