Sic transit gloria

What we have here is a total breakdown of law and order. It's Monday, and I haven't even MADE a to-do list yet. Now, I'm debating whether or not to even bother. I just finished a chore that I had particularly dreaded, and didn't even have the fun of crossing it off my list, because I don't have a list. TOTAL BREAKDOWN! Civilization is dead.

Why didn't I make a list? I'm sure that's what you're wondering. Well, I'm glad you asked. I didn't make a list because the list would have been so long that I couldn't even stand to think about it. This time of year, which already induces daily panic attacks for different reasons altogether, is also extremely busy. Yes, I know that's tiresome. You can't swing a cat without hitting some suburban mother who thinks she's the busiest person in the world.  Maybe you're one of those people who wouldn't swing a cat under any circumstances. It takes all kinds, I suppose. But I really am a little busy. A full-time job, three volunteer jobs, and a house that's not going to compulsively clean itself leave little time for list-making and blogging about nothing.

Why do I have three volunteer jobs? I'm glad you asked that, too. It's because I'm an idiot.

*****
It's Tuesday. I finally wrote a to-do list, because I can't seem to breathe without one. Then, in a distinct violation of the to-do list end user license agreement, I wrote down a task that I had already finished, and then crossed it off. I'm pretty sure that I got nailed by a red light camera on my way home from work, too. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe just and deserved retribution for my unethical to-do list practices. I needed a red light camera ticket anyway; that is, if I want to make a Rosary out of my camera-issued traffic tickets, using speeding tickets as Hail Mary beads and red light tickets for the Our Fathers. I'll be almost two decades in after this latest ticket arrives in my mailbox. I got your Sorrowful Mysteries, right here.

And now I'm going to Hell, too. Damn it.

Or maybe not. I might have redeemed myself. I teach 8th grade catechism. Did I mention that? It's one of my volunteer jobs. I like 8th graders; I like adolescents in general. This group, however, is a little challenging, and one girl in particular can be very challenging. Often disruptive and occasionally disrespectful, she is also very bright and full of fun. It's hard not to like her.

This girl obviously likes one of the boys in the class, who obviously likes her in return. He is, I have learned (because people tell me stuff), one of the popular boys at the middle school that they both attend, and because the girl is not conventionally pretty, I think that his obvious attraction to her confuses him. He doesn't understand yet that he might not ever meet another girl as lively and fearless as she is.

But how does the redemption come in? Again, I'm glad you asked. When she came into class last night, I said hello, as I always do, and told her that I liked her hoodie. She smiled happily and said "Thanks! It's my favorite thing right now!" And that's when I decided not to tell her the whole truth, which is that I, her 51-year-old catechism teacher, have the same hoodie. That should be ten years off my purgatory sentence, at least.

"OMG! Twinsies! Wear it again next Tuesday--I'll totally wear mine, too!"

*****

Wednesday. I left work early today for a doctor's appointment. It was weird to be at large at 3:30 in the afternoon.

After the doctor, I went grocery shopping. My husband called me as I was loading the groceries into the back of my car. As usual, he said "Safeway? You're at Safeway again? Didn't you just go to Safeway?" And as usual, I wondered how this could possibly be cause for questioning, because he and I both live with the same two teenage boys who eat is if it's their job, as if it's the actual profession for which they studied and trained. Blissfully unaware that the food that my sons consume in vast quantities will not replenish itself, he persists in asking me why I must return to the store, when I was just there.

My husband is a police detective, and speaking of vast quantities of food, he interviewed a crime victim today whose girlfriend is a competitive eater. As the man told my husband, this woman came in second in a recent competition to the woman who defeated Kobayashi. And so speaking of questions, this prompted several:

1. Competitive eating. Why? Why does this exist?
2. Why did I not need to ask "Who's Kobayashi?" Why did I know who he is?
3. WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE? Oh my God.

*****
Friday. Yes, I skipped Thursday. Well, except for one thing. Apparently, the rules no longer apply, and hockey players can now just throw their bodies onto the puck as if it was a football. Maybe they can just kick it into the net, now, too. Or toss it in, like a basketball. It's a damn free-for-all. Anything goes.

I'm home sick today. I can't stand being sick. But I did get two watch two episodes of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and one of them featured Rhoda's mother, played by the brilliant Nancy Walker.  There's always a silver lining.

*****

I was flipping channels one night last week (yeah, I know--too busy to make a list, but not too busy to watch TV), and even though I've seen it a dozen times, I was delighted to find that "Rushmore" was on HBO (we had a free preview).

"Rushmore" is one of a small group of movies that I'll watch whenever they're on. These movies don't have to be good (for example, "The American President" and "Stepmom" are both really terrible movies that I can't seem to look away from when they're on) but "Rushmore" is really good. In fact, it's as good as movies get. There are movies that make me laugh really hard, and movies that make me cry, but there are only a small handful that make me both laugh and cry, over and over again. I'll laugh my head off every time Jason Schwartzman sneers "oh are they?" at clueless Luke Wilson, as Bill Murray nearly spits out his drink. And I'll cry happy happy tears every time Max offers his punctuality award to Herman, and then finally introduces him to his dad (the barber and not the neurosurgeon). A really good day for me is a day when I have an opportunity to say "Oh yeah? Well you tell that mick that he just made my list of things to do." I'm from an Irish-Catholic family, so that happens more often than you might think.

*****
Saturday: I don't have the strep that I thought I had, but I do have bronchitis, the cure for which is apparently nothing. The sun came out and I feel capable of doing something other than lying down, so I guess I'm getting better.  My list is about 75% crossed off, and I don't care (that much) if I finish it or not. I'll start over again on Monday.

Home and native land

For the second week in a row, I'm blogging on a day other than Friday. But it'll take me at least three days to finish this post, whatever it's going to be about.

It's 9:45 PM now, and I'm watching the round-robin slapping scene in "The First Wives Club." I think I'll be up for a while. I had more coffee than usual today, including a rare Starbucks. It tasted like 1996.

Wait, J.K. Simmons was in "TFWC?" Who would have predicted that he's the one who'd eventually win an Oscar? Ivana (not Ivanka) Trump, too. "Don't get mad--get everything." I wonder what she's doing now. She would probably have LOVED to be First Lady.

*****

I'm on book 4 of The Cazalet Chronicles now. Spoiler alert, if you're planning to read the books, as you certainly should, Rupert is alive! Of course, I suspected that he was. The surprise was in how it was revealed, and in what he was doing during the time that he was missing in action, not so much in the fact that he had actually survived.

So other than poor Sybil (cancer), all of the Cazalets survived the war--no one died in combat, or in a bombing raid. Now they have to survive something altogether different.  After the initial joyful relief of the war's end, the Cazalets and the rest of England are war-weary, poverty-stricken, and depressed. 1946 was a bleak year in England.

It's raining today. My son and I spent part of the morning and most of the afternoon delivering mulch for Rockville High School's annual mulch sale. The rain continued; sometimes a drizzle, and sometimes a heavier, steady rain. Everything seemed dirty. Well, we were hauling giant bags of topsoil and mulch in the rain, so everything actually was dirty. And now I'm sick. My eyes are burning and my throat is raw and my body feels like it's been through a fight. Bleak.

*****
But speaking of the opposite of bleak (Were we not speaking of the opposite of bleak? Well, we are now), there are few things more fun than watching your team win a playoff game in overtime, live. I'd never been to a playoff game before. We ended up sitting in what was obviously the section reserved for Maple Leafs fans with anger management issues. Canadians aren't as nice as everyone thinks they are, and the Capitals' overtime win didn't make them any happier. No exaggeration to say that we were lucky to get out of Verizon Center without witnessing off-ice bloodshed. It was awesome.

*****
Sunday. The rain ended, and we had a few hours of thin, chilly spring sunshine. It's gray now at 4 PM, and tomorrow is supposed to be a cold and rainy Monday. I'm going to make a pot of chili.

Son of a birchtree

Monday: It's spring break now. The three male residents of my house are off for the week, but I'm working. It's a busy week, so if I don't start writing this now, then there won't be a post this week.  Too much to contemplate, I know.

I got mad at a writer today. Well that's not quite true. I got mad at a sentence.  A sentence so long and so convoluted, which took so many meandering turns and detours before finally reaching, in its own good time, a not-altogether-clear conclusion, that I had to read it five times before I finally figured out what it was trying to tell me.* And I still wasn't sure.

In a perfect world, I'll only have to read something once. But the fact that it's not a perfect world is one of the reasons that I have a job.  But still--three times is my limit. If I have to read the sentence more than three times in order to discern meaning, then I consider that the author is just having fun at my expense. And I'm not amused.

*****

Tuesday: Scene from the Greek cafe where we're picking up dinner after Confession:

Cashier (on the phone): What? I mopped last night!  I took out the trash, too. Check the camera! What? No, it wasn't my turn to do the bathrooms. Yeah. No, we're pretty slow today.

Cashier (to coworker, having hung up the phone): Yeah, he's all mad and yelling at me about the trash, and then I told him to check the camera, and he got real quiet. Hmpf.

*****

Wednesday: I'm supposed to be writing an article for our neighborhood newsletter. Instead, I'm shopping on Amazon and watching the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs (Columbus vs. Pittsburgh).

You know the scene in "Elf" when Buddy befriends the mailroom guy, who confides in Buddy that life in the mailroom isn't as glamorous and high-powered as it looks from the outside?

No? You haven't seen it? That's just ridiculous.

Forget that entire last paragraph. I'm going to just assume that my many readers are decent members  of society, who have seen "Elf." Anyway, when you watch that scene (three times a year, minimum), don't you think to yourself, "Wow. That's the oldest-looking 26-year-old I've ever seen. Sunscreen, you know? Antioxidants. Something." Well, that's what I was thinking about as I watched 29-year-old Phil Kessel and the Pittsburgh Penguins demolish the Columbus Blue Jackets. No particular reason; it just popped into my head.

*****

Thursday: It turns out that Android OS is yet another thing that's more polite than me. The Capitals are playing Toronto tonight in round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Toronto scored, a minute and 35 seconds into the first period, while I was at the grocery store shopping for Easter dinner ingredients.

Naturally, I was somewhat perturbed, and I tried to text "Son of a bitch" to my husband. You know, when you type the word "son" on an Android device, the predictive text function will suggest "of a" as next words. What do you think should come next? I can tell you what Android OS thinks should come next: "By," "but," or "boy;" but not "bitch."

I added an i, which refined my selections to "bit," "bin," and "bill." Even when I added a t, Android refused to cooperate. It offered me "bite," "bits," and "biting."

If cursing were a crime punishable by fine or imprisonment, then evidence that you typed the letters "son of a bitc," would be enough to convict you, I'm fairly sure. By adding the c, I felt certain that I had made my intentions clear and unambiguous.  So imagine my confusion when predictive text offered me one option, and one option only: Bitcoin. Son of a Bitcoin. This is the expression of dismay and anguish that Android believes is appropriate when your team gives up a goal just over a minute into the first game of the playoffs.  Ridiculous.

All's well that ends well.  The Capitals made the game rather interesting, as they tend to do, but they won in overtime and we're up 1-0 in the series.

*****

Friday:  Good Friday.

Question for Waze and Google Maps: Is "Proceed to highlighted route" meant to be helpful and instructive? I mean, if a person is even remotely capable of navigation using an actual map, would voice-directed satellite navigation apps be even necessary? Asking, as the Internet says, for a friend.

*****

Saturday: I have too much to do today.  This is why I'm sitting on the couch at 10 AM, drinking more coffee than I should and watching "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire." I like to think that I work better under pressure. There's no evidence that this is true, but I continue to procrastinate, telling myself that the adrenaline rush of panic will drive me to accomplish great things. I have no idea why I do the things that I do.  I'm a cotton-headed ninnymuggins.

*****
Later, but still Saturday. Still behind, but I've made some progress. I'm having a little bit of an indecision- and anxiety-fueled panic attack. Not a big deal. Just a little hard to breathe. I hate this time of year. T.S. Eliot was right.

(2 hours later.) That took an unexpected little turn there, didn't it? I'm back to normal now, whatever that means. I still can't decide how to cook the potatoes for tomorrow.  Maybe I'll drop them into a solution of vinegar and food coloring and pass them off as eggs.  Happy Easter.

*****

* That sentence suffered the same fate as the former Yugoslavia.  It's now a bunch of different sentences.

A proportional response

Well, hello, handful of readers.  It must be Friday night, yes?

*****
"There's never an egg timer around when you need one." Nor a pair of scissors, nor a sock that matches the one that you want to wear.

Ovation is airing "The American President" right now.  On MSNBC last night, Brian Williams kept talking about the "proportional response" scene, and maybe someone in the programming department at Ovation was watching. Or maybe it's a coincidence.  "TAP" is an objectively bad movie, but I always watch it when it comes on. I don't understand why.  Another thing that I don't understand is why on earth the President's credit cards would have been "in storage in Wisconsin."  This has never made any sense to me.

Part of me is inclined to think that the airstrikes against Syria are right and justified, Trump notwithstanding. I don't trust his motives (on this or anything else), but even a broken clock is right twice a day.*  Not that I'm comparing Trump to a broken clock. Because he's not right anywhere near as often as twice a day.

My favorite line: "I hope so. Because if that was an undecided, then we need to work on our people skills."

*****
It's Saturday now. My 12yo had baseball practice this morning, and I was actually going to sit in my car and write and read. It was still a little cold, and it's a new season and a new team, so I don't really know anyone yet. I'm not the most outgoing person in the world. I'll talk to anyone, but it wouldn't occur to me to just walk right up to a group of people whom I've never met and introduce myself and join the conversation. So if there are little clusters of women who all appear to be friends, deep in conversation, and none of them make any welcoming gestures, then I'm likely to just stand or sit by myself.

I like to sit (or stand, as the case may be) by myself, so this isn't a problem. This is not one of those tiresome rants about bitchy mean girl suburban sports mom cliques. It's not that complicated. Because I'm just as likely to be standing and chatting with people I know, and to not notice and welcome the person standing by herself.  I don't do that intentionally, and so I'll assume that other women don't do it intentionally, either.  But today, two very friendly women waved me into their group and introduced themselves, and I spent a pleasant hour and a half talking about the same things that I always talk to other mothers about.

*****
One day last week, I came into the kitchen to find my son scrubbing his sneakers with the brush that I use to scrub pots and pans. I threw the brush away. But then I realized that we had probably been eating out of pots washed with the dirty shoe brush for at least several weeks. Gross.

*****

On Wednesday and Thursday, I worked at HHS headquarters, the Hubert Humphrey Building.  It looks East Germany circa 1971-ugly from the outside (though it does have a really nice view of the Capitol and the U.S. Botanic Garden), but it's rather impressive inside; well, at least the lobby is.  You might think of a huge government ministry, housed in a huge mid-20th century building, and picture a bloated, inefficient, and agonizingly slow bureaucracy. And maybe that's a little bit true of HHS.  From the video displays in the lobby, I learned, for example, that March is both National Nutrition Month and Save Your Vision Month, but March was five days gone, and I guess that no one had thought to look up the awareness months for April.

On the other hand, the place was crackling with energy. You can argue all day about whether or not government should do whatever it's doing, but it's doing stuff.  I have tons of neighbors and friends who work for the Federal government, and I've worked for government contractors for most of the last 18 years or so.  Government people work, and they care about what they're doing, and they believe in what they're doing.  They just need to look at a calendar once in a while.

There's a Metro stop, Federal Center, right around the corner from HHS, but on a beautiful day, I'd rather walk a bit.  Plus, I hate to change trains.  As far as I'm concerned, if it's not on the Red Line, then it doesn't exist. Union Station is exactly a mile from HHS--not long, but long enough when you're wearing work shoes and carrying a computer and a bunch of paperwork.  I walked with my colleague, who lives in DC.  She is a native Washingtonian, and I've lived in the DC suburbs for 18 years, but we snapped pictures and pointed fingers like tourists. The light was perfect at 6:15 PM. We walked on the Capitol grounds, and Dana Bash of CNN rushed right past us. (She's very pretty. And very tiny.)

It's nice that even in the security state (it took me no less than fifteen minutes to get through security at HHS), you can still walk around on the Capitol grounds. Lots of people were out--tourists, runners, government employees just off work, Capitol Hill residents--and no one had to go through a metal detector, or submit to a search.

I took this picture of the Capitol on Wednesday evening. The lady on the lower right might have been a tourist, but not necessarily.  With her anorak and her canvas tote and her hair up, she reminded me of someone.  OK, it was me. She reminded me of me. I don't normally use filters, but I tried one and liked the color effect; the creamy soft shine of the dome against the pale turquoise hazy sky is very 1959 postcard, which is a good thing.

Kodachrome. 

*****
Later today:

3YO: AUNT CLAIRE!  YOU CAN'T CATCH ME!

Aunt Claire: You're probably right. (Sits down.)

(Scene.)












So that's all for now.  Once again, I was trying to use a movie line as a funny title; and once again, I ran out of post before I could make the metaphoric connection.  I have things to do, and I need to bring this train into the station.  Until next week, avoid Dupont Circle--it's a mess.

*****

* The one I'm wearing on my wrist, for example. Daylight Savings Time commenced about a month ago, and I just haven't gotten around to setting my watch to the correct time.  Five more months and I'll have the correct time again.

The end of the rainbow

I should go to bed now.  I'll be tired tomorrow.  But I don't feel like going to bed. There aren't many things that I miss about being young and single. Staying up late, in fact, might be the only thing. Well, staying up late, and eating whatever I wanted with near-impunity. Those two things.

I used to stay up until all hours. If I was reading a book that I didn't want to put down (and I was almost always reading a book that I didn't want to put down), then I'd stay up until 3 or so.  I worked later hours then, and I seldom had to get up before 8, so I'd still get five hours of sleep, give or take. It was enough.

*****
I still don't get much more than five or so hours a night, and it's not really enough anymore.  But it's OK. I will catch up, when I'm (really) old, or dead.  By the way, that first part was a rare Thursday night entry.  I'm unpredictable.  But it's Friday night now, my normal start-to-cobble-together-a-post time, and so I'm starting to cobble together a post.  I'm also waiting for eggs to boil.  Lent can't end soon enough.

I'm approaching the halfway mark with the Cazalets. There are actually five books in the series: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change. I'm just starting Confusion now, and I'm finding it hard to avoid the temptation to read ahead (or to look up plot summaries on Wikipedia, just to see what happens.)

I still can't imagine how I never heard of Elizabeth Jane Howard or these books until this year. No other novels I've read have conveyed the heroism and romance of England during World War 2, without sparing the truth about the fear, privation, grief, and (often) terrible boredom of war. Right about now, the Cazalets and all of their friends and their remaining servants (most of whom have joined the armed forces) are obsessed with food, which makes me feel a little guilty for complaining about eating eggs again.

*****

Social media and hip-hop artists share a preoccupation with fake people. They must be everywhere.  The fake people, that is.

*****

We just returned from an overnight road trip to Philadelphia. I drove, because my husband was on call and couldn't leave town.  I like to drive; the only problem is that I can't read in the car when I'm driving it (as far as you know), so I didn't make much more progress with Confusion.  It was a very good drive--both ways--except that I panicked a bit midway through the Fort McHenry Tunnel.  The tunnel hasn't bothered me in years. Perhaps my 12-year-old's questions had something to do with the panic this time. "Wait--does this really go underwater?  Like we're driving a car, under the Harbor? So there's water on top of us, right now?"  And the answer was yes. We're driving underwater through a dimly lit dark tunnel that feels five miles long. But we did emerge from the tunnel, and the rest of the drive was quite easy and pleasant.

*****

The 12-year-old is the one who notices things, and remembers things.  We were driving last night from my brother's house (where my nephew's birthday party had just ended) to my sister's house (where we were staying) and he said "you know the bench, Mom?  The one with the sign next to it, that says The End of the Rainbow? Ever since I was little, that's how I knew we were getting close to Aunt Carole's."  I always like to hear my kids' reminiscences, though it reminds me that they're getting older. A 12-year-old has long memories; he remembers his childhood in segments, and thinks of himself as quite old, relative to when he was little.

And again, he notices things.  I actually have no idea what bench he's talking about.  I must have driven past it no fewer than 100 times, and I couldn't pick it out of a lineup.

*****
I have things in common with both of my children. Although I don't notice things like my 12-year-old does, I have the same long, encyclopedic, and detailed memory.  Although my 15-year-old is fortunately free of my tendency to borrow trouble at high rates of interest (in fact, he probably worries far less than he should), he shares my scatterbrained distractibility.  (Blogger is flagging that word as either misspelled or not a word. I assure you, Blogger, that it is a word, and a correctly spelled one.)  They're both really good company, and great traveling companions, and I'm glad we got to ride together this weekend, tunnels of terror and nonexistent rainbow benches notwithstanding.

*****
We're watching hockey now. The Capitals are winning a very important game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.  In the perfect world, the Penguins will also lose to Carolina (because in a perfect world, the Penguins will always lose), but the win over Columbus will leave us nicely positioned to let Columbus and Pittsburgh face one another in the first round of the playoffs. I'm not going to jinx anything. The less said, the better.

*****

Normally, I try to make sure that these long and winding roads actually lead somewhere.  But not tonight. I'm flat out of words for now.  The Penguins won, but the Capitals are beating Columbus 3-0. Let's go Caps.