most beautiful when unbroken

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I am (nearly) forty years old and I still rarely make eggs without
getting a teeny bit of shell in there somewhere. My friend says cooking,
for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion. And here I am leaving
grocer’s apostrophes of eggshell all over. Hopeless. This morning for
breakfast I had zucchini and eggs and potatoes; the crisp edges of
properly fried zucchini mask the eggshell, though I think miraculously
this morning I made an omelet without breaking any more egg than was
absolutely necessary. I was
singing while I stirred in the potato: "Any weird you can cook, I can
eat weirder, I can
eat any food weirder than you!" and I’m sure Ethyl Merman rolled over in her
grave, but maybe she was dancing along.

Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I made rice. "A
scant cup. A scant cup. A cup that is scant. That cup’s scant. That cup
can’t." WHY. Some people talk all the time to prevent their brains from
starting that pesky business of thinking but it’s like I’m treading
water in my brain sometimes to stop myself from floating.

Since I don’t walk Squire to school anymore, I am no longer
terrorizing the neighborhood with my early morning outbursts, standing
in the middle of the sidewalk laughing because I remember something
outrageously funny or chatting myself up in my phony French accent. I’m
sure everybody’s much happier. Nobody needs to see my particular brand of crazy before eight a.m. On Mondays when I go to the high school,
the old ladies on the tram all love me ’cause I give them my seat when
the pig men don’t, and then they (the ladies) always want to talk to me,
with their gold teeth and purple tints and whack makeup. They know
they’ve spotted one of their own in the making. Last week one of them
was nodding at me the whole way home, in other words giving me much
more positive feedback than your average high school senior, and I
wanted to give her my cheery smile but frankly it was all too awful in
my head and I just couldn’t. When she got off the tram she patted my
hand and I realized I was crying. Oh, my old ladies, the mascara is
roping down my cheeks and I am closer than I think.

Last week was entirely too long. If the weekend hadn’t come when it
had, I think drastic action would have been taken. I have high hopes for
this week, though. Not least because the Teletubbie House of Pain video makes me
confident there must be some real good in the world.

subject line from "White Dwarfs", a perfect poem by Michael Ondaatje.

boom boom boom boom

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The boomerang is one of the coolest toys ever. Part of the reason that
the boomerang is a cool toy is that it wasn’t originally a toy but a tool.  Not a
tool like that guy you dated in college but a real tool, I mean one
that was good for something. A boomerang went out and killed your
dinner, which I have just confirmed is true because I looked it up. The
European ones apparently weren’t meant to come back to you which is
sort of not all that surprising but that’s not what I’m talking about.

So boomerangs are cool, they’re sort of exotic and foreign but not
entirely unfamiliar. They go and out do things for you. They can bring home
the bacon and they also, apparently, play music if you know how to hold
them right. They’re not exactly doing those things FOR YOU because
they’re not servants, you know. They do what they do because it’s their
nature. You send them out and they do what they were made to do and I
guess you could say that basketballs were made to go through hoops but
if you don’t think a boomerang is cooler than a basketball then I don’t
even know why we’re talking. A boomerang is a kerjillion times cooler
than any ball that you bounce, throw, or pass, and it’s even cooler
than a weapon that’s just a weapon because a knife only wants to cut
stuff including your fingers if you aren’t careful but a boomerang can
hang out in the field with you on a lazy windless day going out and
back, like a hawk without jesses.

I want to use words like elegant and sleek but in a way these fall
flat. Of course you can get some cheap plastic thing but we are people
of taste and plastic offends us so let’s talk about real boomerangs,
old school. They are so beautiful to touch, to run your finger along
that edge and know that this curve here, where all you want to do is
touch it, run your finger along how smooth it is and this thing that
you can barely stand to stop touching is the very thing that will make
it come back to you. I mean, if you throw it right.

And of course boomerangs come back if you throw them right, if you’re
not a big disgrace to the Aborigine race. The boomerang wants to come
back to you. It wants to rest in your hand again, to feel that it’s
gone forth and done what it was meant to do and now your lovely long
fingers are running along that curve again and that was so good, that
freedom going forth and that arc of longing and that return home.

But maybe you are too afraid the boomerang won’t come back. Maybe
you’re not ready for boomerangs. Maybe you should start with yo-yos,
you know. Something with strings attached.

Uz jsme doma

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So Squire and I did a whirlwind tour of California/Nevada, did I mention? Started at my parents’, drove down the coast, spent a few days in Disneyland, drove over to Las Vegas, spent a couple days there, flew to Sonora and visited friends there, and then left. Saw some great people. Drank some great booze. Ate some great food. Altogether a fine time.

We managed to catch the CSA bus on the way home; this is the bus that
you have to stand in line to buy a ticket and then stand in line to get
a boarding pass and then hope the bus hasn’t taken off while you do
these things, so catching it is kind of a miracle. On the bus the
driver handed out our "complimentary snack"; I asked what kind of meat
it was and he said "It’s not meat, it’s ham," and I laughed because it
is what it is and it’s good to be back in my first/second-world home.

Uhm, there are a lot of pictures here.

I wrote this in Disneyland:
In Disneyland I feel sad, the sort of sad that’s like I have cancer and I’ll never bring my child here again or see my grandchildren ride the teacups, and it’s all terribly fragile and transient, and then I am weeping in Fantasyland except I don’t have cancer and so in Disneyland I feel not only sad but also utterly ridiculous.

That feeling of heartbreaking nostalgia for the moment I was inhabiting was present for a lot of the trip, though I only had to pull the car over to cry once, I think.

I also wrote a long thing about Red Shirt Day, but I don’t know if it interests anyone enough for me to transcribe. I didn’t write, but thought a great deal about, the interesting differences and similarities among my friends, the nature of fear, and the inner battle between sparing someone pain and the need to let people learn their own lessons. And I thought about boomerangs.

My Mind

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Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that’s turning
Running rings around the moon

(from Windmills of Your Mind, by Alan and Marilyn Bergman)

except, not really relaxing and hypnotic and windmill-y. More like: SCREEEEEEE! It’s like the Factory Floor of My Mind or something. Passport, credit card, lipstick, warm socks, see you back here in a couple weeks.

Lock

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Under your thumb,
wrapped around your finger.
Not because you want it that way but
because you thought it would be safer
because they said so;

Nape grazed by knuckles
it’s colder than you expect
under a street lamp and
worse, the darkness between street lamps

footsteps behind you

Where are you going with this?
You just want to go home.

Sweaty leather in your palm –
a trip you took once, a souvenir
of a place you wanted to go so much
you didn’t mind when you got somewhere else.
Remember that, remember how that felt.

Teeth cutting into your skin; why?
Maybe there are no footsteps,
maybe everything echoes in your head,
maybe what unlocks your secrets
can’t also be what shields them.

No one thing is enough;
nothing is enough.
Do you hold the keys or
are you grasping at straws?
After this we can talk about "clutch".

better than nothing

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I went out for a few beers with a friend of mine last night and it was
good, though I came home singing which Friar will tell you and nearly
everyone else will agree is not my greatest talent. He told me to shut
up, using more words and more politely, but I got the point so I killed
him at Scrabble and went to bed.

I’m re-entering one of my periods of having no idea how I look, but
getting a distinctly bad feeling about it. I once went about a month thinking I
oughtn’t leave the house without a paper bag over my head. It’s not
that my image of myself has greatly improved since then, but more that
I’ve realized that people who sit around talking about how ugly they
are are either genuinely ugly, in which case they make others
uncomfortable, or are not genuinely ugly, in which case they make other
people bored, and my fear of being awkward or boring generally
outweighs my desire to tell people they don’t have to look at me when
they talk to me if they don’t want to. Anyway this is not the best
timing, self-image wise, but there’s not much to be done. I think I
will sew myself up a tent this weekend and wear it til the feeling
passes.

For reasons entirely beyond reason I decided to start The Life of Pi.
Dear Yann Martel I am very proud of you for doing all that research!
How many authors can list animals in a zoo for pages and pages? How
many authors can list deities of various religions with the same
fervor? I want to brush your pretty poetic hair for you and pinch your
sweet clever cheeks, but if you do not get me a plot in the next 20
pages I am going to throw your damn book across the room.

Last weekend Squire and I hung out with some old friends of mine,
people who think I’m a good singer by the way, though I think they’re
just impressed that I always know all the words. I remember everything.
I hadn’t seen these friends in uhm five years, so it was strange and
interesting to be sitting around like no time had passed, yakking away
and laughing. Squire fell asleep listening to Jan Werich read Svejk and
when I went upstairs to bed he was still smiling. In the morning we
drank strong coffee and watched the roe deer running in the
field up the hill.

on what’s fair game in an unfair game

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Today I am thinking about public vs. private personality. In
particular, I am thinking about the difference between having a
voluntary or involuntary public persona, especially as it relates to
politics. How much we expect the families of politicians to step up and
work for them, campaign for them, smile endlessly and never even
scratch their noses. I think it’s unfair. I think it’s wrong. It is the
way it’s done, though, and I wish we could agree on some rules. I wish
for rules to protect the innocent, and I also wish for rules that will
make it possible for me to mock the ridiculous.

Though it seems unfair to me, I’ll concede that in order to
win, it is now necessary to haul your family along for the ride. You
can’t be a drug addict and your spouse can’t be either; also ideally
your kids will be reasonably respectable. Somewhere along the line we
started thinking the choices you made as a family member were the
choices you would make as the leader of a country, and while I think
that’s not accurate I understand it’s part of the mythos and okay: You
wanna be president, your family will have to be at your side. And they
will be judged for their behavior at your side. If you don’t like that,
you don’t get to be the boss of the country.

So: You’re a family member of a politician. You’re going to
be judged. I don’t think it’s fair to judge anybody for their personal
appearance unless they’re trading on that appearance or have altered
that appearance. Plastic surgery is always fair game. The big nose you
inherited from your grandfather is not. Tattoos can be mocked. Acne
cannot. Bad makeup, bad perm, bad haircolor, ill-fitting clothes, and
the inability to walk in high heels for any person who is both old
enough to know better and financially capable of rectifying errors? I
have made those mistakes and so half the time I’m laughing with, but
make no mistake: I’m laughing. But it is not fair to mock without
sympathy the cluelessly young, honestly poor, or hopelessly
ill-advised, and it is never okay to assume that appearance (the one
you’re born with, at least) is any reflection of character.

But you can judge people for their behavior, for sure. Any
family member over the age of let’s say 16 should show up, unless they
have the flu or homework. They should look happy to be there. This is
not because they have to actually be happy but because if a family
member is in politics, I expect that member to have good enough manners
to handle a peace summit and I expect the rest of the family to be able
to muster the manners to smile through a a political convention. It is
not harder than telling Aunt Agatha you love that handmade sweater, and
if you don’t have the stamina for that, your family will not survive in
politics.

I
also think if they volunteer to go beyond standing at your side and
smiling and waving, if they, say, want to start their own blog in which
their description of themselves includes their astrological sign…
well, that’s like shooting Playmates in a barrel, isn’t it? And people
who fall asleep in church while trying to make their spouse look
attentive to an issue deserve at the very least to be openly laughed
at, even if they didn’t actually drool or anything.
I’ve yet to find anything funny in dog torture or glocks on a plane,
but I’m sure it will come to me. And it’s fair game, don’t you think?

Line of Beauty

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I finished The Line of Beauty finally. Around the middle, I
started thinking: Are we ever going somewhere with this? and sort of
sped through the second half of the book. I decided that we were not,
in fact, really ever going anywhere, Alan and I, but that I would give
his sentences the attention they deserved, so I went back to the middle
and started again and finished.

It was… good. I guess. I was reminded of the Penn Jillette
rule of clapping for the title of a movie when it appears in the movie,
and clapped dutifully every time Hollinghurst name-checked his own
novel, and ovated whenever he wanted to explain the title. It happened a lot. It’s true that it may have seemed worse to me for having Evelyn Wood-ed
and then seriously re-read the second half, but I think this really was
laid on thick and recurrent. Including, of course The Amazing Parallels
(or perhaps, the Amazing Serpentine Curves, bwaha) between the title of
the book, the plot, and the presentation of the plot. It was a little
anvillicious for me, as was the whole "Wow, and so the character named
Nick Guest turns out to be a permanent guest! Who knew?!" Uhm… the
guy who wrote the book? I know, I should have been prepared after Edward Manners, but… really?

I don’t know, y’all,
maybe I can’t read grown-up fiction anymore. I’m a little too aware of
the author wanting me to go someplace and I feel the pull of the puppet
strings too much and then I’m irritated. I’ve read precious little
contemporary fiction in the last decade where it felt like I was
reading something that was both True and true*, and I think that I now
value the latter, the feeling of the latter, as much as the former. If
you’re going to give me a story set in a world I’ve experienced or
believe is true (Thatcher’s England or whatever, as opposed to, say,
Prydain) I need to have it that things don’t always line up, the murder
isn’t always solved, the object of affection is not always attained;
and the misalignment and unsolved murder and unrequited love don’t make
everything worse–any more than coincidence leads to enlightenment or
solving the murder makes it less gruesome or falling in love means your
troubles are over. I like a revelation on the human condition as much
as the next person, but if it’s too contrived it feels like less a
moment of clarity and more like smoke and mirrors.

*off the top of my head: The Crow Road, Remains of the Day, Cat’s
Eye, and Middlesex all did a great job of making me feel like I was in
a real place and that the people were real without overdoing the
reality and while simultaneously getting to a point.

So Hollinghurst: dude, I don’t know. The sentences were nice,
sometimes even activating that little tingly part of my brain, which is
certainly a thrill. And the way he wrote dialogue, which at first made
me nutty, eventually sort of got entertaining, which may have been the
point in the beginning and I was too slow to catch it. He’s all "Really?" said Nick, meaning to convey his confusion at the
statement and also a sense of disbelief in Rachel’s apparent
unawareness, if she was, in fact, unaware. "Hmm," answered Rachel, and
Nick understood that she was keeping herself unaware, willfully holding
herself in check against the onslaught of inevitable, horrible reality.

So, I liked the sentences. I thought the backthought was
clever. I liked the snooty arty stuff, assuming he meant it to be both
informed, informative, and a bit pedantic. But the insights were…
Hey, did you know that coming of age was tricksy? Did you know that
when you move outside of the social circle you were born in, there can
be misunderstandings? Did you know that no matter how comfortable you
are with your identity, other people may not be? Put against a backdrop
of "hey, conservative politics were bad for lots of people; also, AIDS
sucks" and the message I get is that Hollinghurst thinks his readers
are a bit on the dumb side, and then the pedantic charm becomes a bit
less charming.  Maybe I should have just seen the movie.

NOTE TO G: I did like reading it, for clarity. I think I just miss our book group.

It’s a Key Party QUIZ!

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YOUR KEYS (check all that apply):
are on a keyring
face the same direction on your keychain (all teeth to one side)
line up in the order you normally use them (outside door, inside door, or whatever)
are stored on separate rings according to function (house keys, work keys)
are all on one master ring
have those little color tabs on them so you can find them quickly
are accompanied by an item that is not a key (laser pointer, army knife, rubber toy, etc.)
follow the rules of the James Spader character in "Sex Lies and Videotape"

TRUE/FALSE:
I didn’t know the jagged part was called "teeth".
I already knew the jagged part was called "teeth" but did not know that the part between the head and the shaft was called the "nape".
I knew teeth and nape.
I remember that the character’s name was Graham and am insulted that you spelled it out.
I understand all of these questions.
Yes, even the subtext, pfft.

ESSAY:
Describe your key system.