Hi, I made some changes to the site, including adding some aliases (aliaii?), updating the "about" page a bit, and changing the colors so we looked less like winter mourning and more like, you know, summer. Sorry if I broke your feed or anything.

Squire Tuck (the boy formerly known as K) is done with school, finally, today, and is celebrating by having a fever. He’d better get better before it’s time to leave for Greece, as I’d hate to leave him behind.

I’m trying to decide which of my Procrastinated Heavy Books I’ll take to Greece. I started "Love in the Time of Cholera" in the waiting room (which is sort of like the beach except no fun at all) and I feel so much more optimistic about finishing it than I did about 100 Years of People with the Same Name, which I finished because at that age I still thought finishing books was a virtue, like cleaning your plate. But now I am old and wise and must watch which words spend time getting into my head.  But I’m going to finish it before we leave, I think, so I must pick something else. Arthur and George? Kavalier and Clay?

Otherwise we’re doing what we generally do. I got all the paperwork in order so that if the house catches fire Friar Tuck (the man formerly known as P) will know which papers to grab. How much do you love these aliases? See what 5 days without a single drop of alcohol does to me? Busy busy busy brain. Gosh, do I need a dreamless sleep ever so badly.

My sister sent me a bathing suit (two, actually: a black one that I
asked for and a blue one that she picked) and it came yesterday. I am
going to hire her to come here and Geranimalize my wardrobe, so that
all the tops match all the bottoms and I will never again be standing
in front of the closet all, does faded black still go with black? and
weeping. The suit she picked is a very vaa-vaa-voom bathing suit; it is
the color of sweet Westley’s eyes, and it makes me look like I don’t
even know what. A forties film star from the neck down. Like someone
who uses a lot of L words. Lounge. Lush. From the neck up I’m the human
embodiment of practical fun. Short hair is awesome because you can get
stuck in a massive rainstorm and be all, flip! and back to normal.
Altogether this bathing suit feels like a reward for managing to stay
in my body this spring. After about three months of pain in one place
or another and more doctors than I’ve seen in ten years total, I think
I’m finally feeling normal. Spring sucked a fair bit of life from me,
but it’s summer now so I am done with the swooning and I am definitely
done with the waiting rooms, I do declare. I noticed yesterday that I
was sitting up straight and my back didn’t hurt, and my body and I
enthusiastically high-fived over it. Basically I feel better, I look
great and you totally wish I was your girlfriend. Sadly (for you) as
Friar Tuck is the first man I’ve lived with who didn’t tell me I’d be really
pretty if I just lost some weight, he’s the one who gets me. However,
you and I can still be great friends, and if you’re really nice to me
I’ll let you touch the hem of my extremely cute bathing skirt.

In other news, we went to a concert (neocekavany dychanek)
last week that was just awesome. I don’t even have words. It was so
much music, and so loud, and yet each one of them (accordion, electric
guitar, flute, drums, sax, clarinet, mandolin, and I think there were
some more) got a turn and they all seemed to be having fun. The female
singer danced like mad whenever she wasn’t playing flute or swinging
around a megaphone (she’s very pregnant and she did
more moving on that stage than an aerobics teacher, it was like
watching Tina Weymouth in "Stop Making Sense"). The accordion player
pogoed!  AND I’ve never seen anyone type as fast
as that clarinet player could move his fingers. The whole thing was
just…
exhilarating. The audience was great, too, like watching deadheads
dancing to punk music, and since I couldn’t understand the words much
because it was too fast and busy, I got to people-watch like mad and
think anne thoughts without feeling like I was missing anything. I was
thinking, for example, that the female singer is beautiful and yet
because she is talented she seems detached from her appearance, which
enables her to make faces like crazy and still seem gorgeous.

And then this weekend, which was coincidentally St. John’s Eve,
we went to the cottage and worked and played super hard and we walked
home through the forest with certain wise people, we stepped over
fireflies instead of over fires, and everything was sparkling and
wonderful, and it seemed as magical as fern seed and perhaps now we
really are invincible. Or invisible. Either way.

on friday we went to see pirates of the caribbean again. i wasn’t sure
i’d want to see it twice but i made up a drinking game in which i pretended that i was drinking every time keira knightley demonstrated her utter inability to act, but i did not
actually drink, which means i
amused myself but did not distress anyone in my vicinity, which
happened when we took literal drinks for the da vinci code and ran
entirely out of beverage before the movie was over. it was the "tom
hanks’ hair is ridiculous" that pushed us over, i think. anyway:
pirates. the first time we saw it my friend commented that for all the
talk of ms. knightley being anorexic, she’s got nice legs. do you know
why? i suspect a body double, as i haven’t seen face/legs/face editing
that choppy since jennifer beals in that frankenstein movie. lucky, lucky faceless
woman that had orlando bloom kissing her leg.

i went to a party on sunday. i hadn’t been to a party in a
while and i had a bit of a meltdown right at the beginning in which i
lost not merely words but sentences and some other key features of
brain function. it wasn’t pretty. i had to sit in a chair mumbling to
self and pinching the insides of my arms while another friend who
hasn’t slept in a month expressed some concern, which made it worse,
and then i opened my mouth and said some stupid shit and died a little
more inside and it was all poor yorick but then it was okay.

i am thinking about how you learn so much when you’re young
and as you get older you don’t gather information in quite the quantity
and so it is really neat to have learned in the last year to peel a
banana from the other side (take THAT kirk cameron) or in the last
month i circumvented the "how to peel a boiled egg without getting
shell all over the damn place" and last night i learned the magic of
cornstarch is not to be underestimated and it’s really just altogether
wonderful to be alive in these interesting times, isn’t it.

oh and also i have a squire tuck snippet, which is this: i was
talking to him about nature vs. nurture and how this is such an
interesting thing because we don’t know which controls a lot of things
about how we are as people. and i asked him, so does he think that
personality is more likely to be determined by environment or by genes,
and he said it’s determined by what you yourself choose, and added that
saying that something is a product of nature or nurture in both cases
takes it out of your hands, which is unfair. and that is why i keep him
around. and also because he smells nice.

the last time i bought a bathing suit i was… uhm. oh, let’s not play
ladies. i was larger than i am now. so and i’m going to greece next
month and i need a bathing suit that will not be wrested from me by
a big wave. so i went to buy a bathing suit.

how to buy a bathing suit:
step 1: DON’T. look life is
short. what do you want with a bathing suit? seriously, go to the
mountains or something instead. while realizing that greece is a dream
you’ve had since you were 12, and that greece has the longest sandiest
beach of ever, and that greece is a mere plane flight away, and that
greece for 12 days is cheaper than a plane ticket to america… dude,
greece is hot. stay home. you could work on the cottage or something.

and also you, with your glow in the dark whitey whiteness, would
be banned from beaches if such banning were legal. the three of you
together are like some milky way constellation. you belong in the sky,
or possibly in some mushroomy cave somewhere. you have no business
being on the beach.
or maybe you should wear a muumuu or something, skip the bathing suit and that irritating note of rising hysteria in your voice.

step
2: okay shut up. you do some internetly clicking which is always fun
because they’re like: this suit covers up a large bust. this suit
covers up a large belly. this suit covers up a large ass. you want the
suit that makes you invisible: where is that suit? the suit you want is
the suit for frolicking in the water with your son without getting sand in your parts. you want the suit that’s for getting drunk on the
beach and stumbling back to the pension (a mere crawl from the beach!)
to play catan. where is that suit? that suit is not available in
stores, and you can’t get it by mail order either. give up the idea of
a suit that suits. you’re thinking: tankini top, and you’ll buy some
boy’s trunks and anybody that looks askance gets poked in the eye.

step 3: go to TESCO. you hate TESCO with the burning hatred of
a thousand suns, but it is somehow connected to target (the only place
you’ve bought a bathing suit that fit) and therefore you think they may
have some reasonable bathing suits. you will be wrong. they have
hideous yellow things covered in what appears to be glitter.  they have
bathing suits that make their mannequins look fat and or badly
proportioned.  they have a bikini top that you actually try on because
you like pain; this bikini top would go well with your drunk on the
beach scenario, as it gives you a shelf upon which to rest several
beers, but it is otherwise really a nightmare and it costs a ridiculous amount. they have mirrors tilted
in at an approximate thirty degree angle, presumably because restocking
is hard and simply not moving the merch is the way that TESCO is
playing its hand. they also have a peeping tom(as) in the dressing
room, which goes well with the mirrors. you feel angry, you feel
filthy, you feel weepy and punchy. you also feel like you will never
find a bathing suit.

step 4: press hand weakly to forehead.
perhaps you could make a victorian bathing suit, although that will
probably get even more askancing, and victorian ladies do not poke eyes
out.

step
5: write in desperation to sister, who has better fashion sense than
you do, and is not driven to tears by shopping but in fact actually
enjoys it. apparently your sister and your mother are happy to spend
your mother’s birthday shopping for a bathing suit for you. you cannot
conceive of a sentence that has happy and shopping in it. you are
probably a changeling. a changeling who is having a bathing suit sent
to her, though!

the thing is, while i’ve bought enough regular clothes to
have gotten over the idea of Transformation, i can count the number of
bathing suits i’ve owned in my adult life (uhm… four), and so some part of me probably is still stuck back at age 16,
all self-loathing and eternal moments. but the thing is: self-loathing
is boring, and no moment lasts forever, whether it’s a knee-melting
kiss or a creep staring through the cracks in the dressing room door.
i’ve got better stuff to do than this. for example, now that my hair’s
short, i can start dyeing it interesting colors again. and i may
require more earrings for my freshly exposed ganesha ears. also: i’m
going to GREECE next month. woot.

things that hurt more than you expect them to:
paper cuts
unrequited flirting
curiosity

things that hurt less than you expect them to:
conking your head on the doorway
walking away
breaking up

things that are right about on target:

the dentist
the word no
saying goodbye

and what brings you here, my pretty?

Ducklings,

I am sorry, I was busy entertaining Awesome Company this past week and describing how much fun I was having would have been like describing a roller coaster ride while you’re on it. Metaphorically speaking: I was preoccupied with screaming and drooling with joy.

I wrote a little culture thing over at Lost in Transit, though, so you don’t go entirely hungry this week.

Returning to normal next week, I expect.

We went to the cotthut this weekend. Squire Tuck and I chainsawed the rest of
the wood from the massive apple tree pruning. We read a bunch ("My Side
of the Mountain" is an excellent cotthut book). Friar Tuck got the interior
support beams done so now we don’t have to worry about the new roof
falling on our heads. It was altogether a good weekend.

last year Friar Tuck was obsessed with hedges. our conversations were like,
"i’m thinking of making some changes to my will," and he’d be all, "so
an alternating line of beech and maple trees…"

for his
birthday i got him some CDs of birdsong because he’d been driving me a
bit to distraction with the "hear that? wonder what bird that is!" and
i thought that if he knew he would be happy.

hahaha y’all. i
may never have a complete conversation with the man again. and his
obsession plays like a total ADD parody conversation. "so… about the
asbestos?" "look! a bird!" except it’s more like, "listen! a pipit! the rubescens! in english, i believe its song is described as see-me, see-me!"

i was walking Squire Tuck to school today and he’s all, "i think that was a woodpecker!" and "check out that Parus major over
there," and i had to bang my head softly against a lamp post. what hath
anne wrought? except then i realized that parus major in english is
great tit and it’s hard to feel too sorry for yourself when you’re
laughing til your tears leak.

***
ETA: also: A few circus pictures up here. Friar Tuck
takes better pictures than i do because he takes pictures rather than
watches the action, so he comes back with like 100 pictures and i have
maybe 2. but he will insist on taking them all in profile, or from a
hundred miles away, or whatever.  i’m not even going to post the one he
took of me, cracking up, me and my seven chins.

Squire Tuck went to a circus training camp this weekend (what they’re called
in czech literally translates as "concentration camp" but i think
perhaps we’ll just call it a "training camp", hm?) so Friar Tuck and i
scurried off to the cottage to do all the stuff we can’t do when Squire Tuck
is there, because we’re afraid he might be scarred by the experience.

no, actually i meant pulling the asbestos panels off the wall, gutter brain.

so we pulled the remaining panel off the wall. it was behind the stove,
so first we had to take apart the stove and drag the rustingly foul
parts out, and then we pulled the panel off. i say "we" but i mean
mainly Friar Tuck, although i helped with the heavy lifting a little. i
mainly was sorting the existing stuff into piles in the hopes that
perhaps now that the roof is done we can get someone to come and haul
it all away, so i’d like it neatly stacked for efficient removal.

i’m so mad about the asbestos: the roof was asbestos tiles and the wall
panels were impregnated with asbestos, and there’s even these strings
that the guy used to stuff into the cracks that Friar Tuck says are made with
asbestos. also there’s a lot of glass wool, but i’m not even getting
into that. i’m mad because trying to find someone to haul it off is
proving to be very difficult, and trying to find a place that will take
it isn’t easy either, and the quotes we’re getting from the places that do accept it are
really high.

everybody has a different idea for what we should do with it. my
favorite suggestion was "grind it up in a woodchipper and then
distribute it in a field somewhere"; the roofer suggested that we just
bury it out in the forest. obviously not doing either of these things;
nor do i plan to just dump it at some construction site in the middle
of the night (although that is a leetle tempting)– i have enough money
to pay for it to be legally disposed of, and i will, because i am an
upstanding person and because i enjoy criticizing others, which means i
can’t be too much of an asshole without being a hypocrite.

but i do think that other people are poorer, and perhaps less upstanding, and
are taking these suggestions, and are getting rid of their once totally
legal roofs by means less than legal, and it makes me incredibly
pissed, because i can’t even be that mad at them. who wants to spend
more than the price of a new roof on getting rid of an old roof? it’s
messed up.

in addition to frolicking in the asbestos, Friar Tuck also gave me some
better instructions with the chainsaw so i got to be all i am woman
hear me roar and slash through one of the three giant piles of wood.
the firewood is totally stacking up for the winter. i sawed everything
into nice, stove-sized pieces, and then we did a thing where i was
doing the stacking while Friar Tuck was axing the bigger pieces, and i had to
grab the piece and then turn to the stack while Friar Tuck swung the ax down,
then turn back and grab the fresh piece while he got the next log out,
and i remembered when the guys would make mochi in japan in an usu
(like a giant mortar and pestle) in front of the train station, and
while we were not nearly that efficient or dangerous i still liked
falling into the rhythm of work, repetitive work that requires your
attention nonetheless.

so: good weekend. although my everything hurts a bit today. i am a
pampered pale lady and did not realize that not having muscles didn”t
mean they wouldn’t hurt.

we’ll all be very grateful to hear that my ego got its proper dressing down this weekend and that my head has now shrunk back to a sensible size. i can do many, many things of tremendous importance in the world. i can organize socks. i can explain the difference between good and well. i can boil water like a madman. i can make pickled eggs. i can quote at crazy length from just about any movie released between 1984 and 1994. i can untangle knots without resorting to the alexandrian solution. these are all, i am sure you will agree, highly useful skills.

however,  i cannot consistently break a forest of tasks into individual trees. i get lost in the forest every single time. this is usually a metaphorical forest, but this weekend at the cottage i came to understand that a literal forest, or even a literal clump of trees, can reduce me to rocking back and forth and staring at my useless hands. i cannot run a chainsaw for more than about 10 minutes without flipping out. even if the chainsaw weren’t a problem, i cannot prune a tree for any use, because i get too distracted by my desire for symmetry and my fear of falling (one of my many talents is that i can completely wipe out while walking slowly on a perfectly level sidewalk, so i’m not really crazy about situations from which even stable people topple). i cannot seem to stack wood without getting a zillion splinters in my fingers.

i’m really good at taking out splinters, though. i’m good at small things. i’m like, all fingers, no arms.

i continue to be bad at interviews, even when i have time to prepare the answers.