I'm at a Capitals game right now. It's first intermission. Normally I get up and walk the concourse during the intermission, but I don't feel like it. I'm going to sit right here instead
It's the night before Thanksgiving, and Slapshot is dressed like a pilgrim. It's not a good look. The Capitals are winning 1-0, and the crowd is happy because it’s a long weekend. And because we're at a hockey game, so what's not to be happy about?
I'm not cooking tomorrow, except for potatoes, which I will make tomorrow; and macaroni salad, which I made before we left for the game. Macaroni salad has nothing to do with Thanksgiving but people asked me to make it, and I bow to the will of the people. I have mixed feelings about not cooking. Normally, I'm all for any arrangement that gets me out of the kitchen, but me hosting Thanksgiving is kind of a tradition and you don't monkey with tradition. Plus what about leftovers? Did no one consider the leftovers? Did no one think this through?
*****
Now it’s Thanksgiving, one of my very favorite days of the year. I woke up early, peeled potatoes, and walked the neighborhood with my friends. It’s something of a tradition. We call it the Turkey Trot, because we’re like that. The potatoes are ready now, and I’m soaking in the November light at 2:30 PM. In another week, we’ll have a different kind of beautiful pale golden gray sky, but not exactly this kind.
My mother-in-law is making dinner. She made Thanksgiving dinner one other time, when I had a new baby at home, and I think it was fine. She’s a very good cook in any cuisine. I don’t know if she’ll remember to make stuffing, but I suppose I can do without the stuffing. I can’t, however, do without the jellied cranberry sauce from a can, so I’m bringing my own, just in case.
*****
11:30 PM. Dinner was delicious, and she always makes too much of everything, so we have more than enough leftovers. And the Capitals won, too. Thankfulness abounds.
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Monday, November 25, 2019
Autumn authentication
It’s November 22, and I had a good day; such a good day, in fact, that I was going to spend several paragraphs writing about the beauty of the light this afternoon. For just a few days in late November, right around Thanksgiving, the afternoon light has a clear and golden quality that is only present for a few precious days of the year. The sun is almost as far away from Earth as it gets and the trees are almost but not quite bare and the remaining canopy is a golden orange that colors the sunlight, and the sky when it’s clear is the palest pearl gray with only a barely visible hint of blue and twilight comes so suddenly and so early.
So I was going to write all about that, all about the elegiac beauty of the fading autumn and winter approaching and blah blah blah-bitty blah blah blah. And then I came home and tried to log in to online banking to pay my bills and forgot that I had changed my password and now my account is disabled; and with the realization that I have no choice but to call the bank to have my access restored, I felt my will to live exit my body with a great rushing noise. Plus it’s dark now, anyway. Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell.
*****
So now it’s Saturday. I went to the bank to get my account number because I couldn’t bear the thought of calling on the phone to ask for it because I knew that they'd ask me fifty-seven questions for my own security. Now I just have to go through the 50-step re-authentication process that will restore my online access to my own money. I’m not so much writing right now as avoiding. After I finish here, maybe there’s a toilet that I can scrub. Maybe there’s some goo at the bottom of the refrigerator that I can clean up. Maybe I can have root canal or something.
You know, I work in an IT organization, and the problem of authentication is one that we discuss quite often. By “we” I mean other people who are technically capable and qualified, of course. I listen, though. And that's how I know that log-ins and passwords are intrinsically insecure because we are people and we like shortcuts. We’re also idiots who forget the passwords that we create and then we either write them down (as I should have and as I normally do), leaving them vulnerable to detection by malefactors (how I love that word); or we end up locked out of our accounts and we have to start over again (as I’m avoiding doing right now).
And you know what else? “Pay bills” was on my to-do list for this week. But “restore access to online banking” was not. So not only have I not crossed off a critical to-do item; but now I also have to do a much more painful and onerous task and I don’t get to cross it off the list because it wasn’t on there in the first place. And no, I can’t just add it to the list and then cross it off. That’s not cricket. It’s just not done.
*****
OK, disregard most of the previous, because that was nothing! So easy! I recovered my account number, followed the prompts, verified my security code, reset my password, confirmed my reset password, did that again because the passwords didn't match, and here we are. My bills are paid, my list is crossed off, and equilibrium is restored. Such a big fuss about nothing at all. I feel rather silly. All is quite well. Except that it's November 25. The light was extraordinary this afternoon, but we will have it for only a few more days.
So I was going to write all about that, all about the elegiac beauty of the fading autumn and winter approaching and blah blah blah-bitty blah blah blah. And then I came home and tried to log in to online banking to pay my bills and forgot that I had changed my password and now my account is disabled; and with the realization that I have no choice but to call the bank to have my access restored, I felt my will to live exit my body with a great rushing noise. Plus it’s dark now, anyway. Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell.
*****
So now it’s Saturday. I went to the bank to get my account number because I couldn’t bear the thought of calling on the phone to ask for it because I knew that they'd ask me fifty-seven questions for my own security. Now I just have to go through the 50-step re-authentication process that will restore my online access to my own money. I’m not so much writing right now as avoiding. After I finish here, maybe there’s a toilet that I can scrub. Maybe there’s some goo at the bottom of the refrigerator that I can clean up. Maybe I can have root canal or something.
You know, I work in an IT organization, and the problem of authentication is one that we discuss quite often. By “we” I mean other people who are technically capable and qualified, of course. I listen, though. And that's how I know that log-ins and passwords are intrinsically insecure because we are people and we like shortcuts. We’re also idiots who forget the passwords that we create and then we either write them down (as I should have and as I normally do), leaving them vulnerable to detection by malefactors (how I love that word); or we end up locked out of our accounts and we have to start over again (as I’m avoiding doing right now).
And you know what else? “Pay bills” was on my to-do list for this week. But “restore access to online banking” was not. So not only have I not crossed off a critical to-do item; but now I also have to do a much more painful and onerous task and I don’t get to cross it off the list because it wasn’t on there in the first place. And no, I can’t just add it to the list and then cross it off. That’s not cricket. It’s just not done.
*****
OK, disregard most of the previous, because that was nothing! So easy! I recovered my account number, followed the prompts, verified my security code, reset my password, confirmed my reset password, did that again because the passwords didn't match, and here we are. My bills are paid, my list is crossed off, and equilibrium is restored. Such a big fuss about nothing at all. I feel rather silly. All is quite well. Except that it's November 25. The light was extraordinary this afternoon, but we will have it for only a few more days.
Friday, November 22, 2019
Trying to stop me is futile
I used to doodle a lot. My school notebooks were filled with haphazard notes, framed with tiny pictures of little cars, and intricate filigree designs colored with Bic Bananas, and little boxes filled with ever-smaller concentric boxes, and grid designs colored in alternating two- or three-color patterns; and of course, pages of cursive writing. I was a better doodler than note-taker, and the doodling didn’t distract me. It actually helped me to concentrate.
We went to Catholic school in the 1970s, so we had nuns as teachers. Nuns didn’t like to see students doodling during class, but I was a very good student and they let me get away with it as long as I didn’t make a show of it. Eventually, I grew out of the habit. My high school notebooks (none of which are extant) contained only pages of notes, with the occasional page of random lines in fancy cursive writing. But no more patterns and no more filigree designs. And no more little cars.
*****
One day, I was sitting in a long meeting (I could write that sentence about almost any day of the week, and it would be true). I didn’t have to present or take notes or anything else except listen. The subject was technical, and kind of boring, so I started to doodle. I filled a page with filigree and geometric designs, and colored them with my beloved 4-color Bic pen. The meeting ended, and I had a page of interesting and colorful designs; plus, I knew a lot more about call center technology and ticketing systems than I had before (any amount of knowledge being more than none, of course).
Still, the people who were sitting to my left and right seemed distracted by the doodling. I could feel them glancing surreptitiously over at my notebook, wondering what I was working on so diligently. I felt sure that they were judging me for not paying attention to the meeting, and I wanted to explain that the doodling helped me concentrate. I hoped that call center solutions would come up later in conversation, so that I could casually demonstrate my grasp of the topic, proving that I’d been laser-focused the whole time. That’s the trouble with doodling. People see you doodling and they think you’re wasting time. But you know what you’re doing. I know what I’m doing.
*****
As I mentioned here, I read The Woman in White because Nora Ephron told me to. She was quite right. I won’t go into the plot here, but an important thing to know about The Woman in White is that it’s told as a series of first-person narratives, which alternate between characters. Most of the narrators are reliable; they just tell different parts of the story from their own points of view.
An evil plot to steal a woman’s identity is at the heart of The Woman in White. This is especially interesting because the story takes place in 1850, so it’s a completely different kind of identity theft. Toward the very end of the novel, the reader understands most of what has happened, and most of how it happened. Count Fosco, one of the two villains (the other having died, good riddance) is left to tell the rest.
"One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas,” the Count boasts. “Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
And that’s how The Woman in White ends, with Count Fosco “arranging his ideas” by hand on tiny sheets of paper, leaving his confession in a pile of scraps for the hero to collect and organize and decipher; which of course, he does.
*****
I love Saturday afternoons; especially when it’s not baseball or swim season, and I’m just driving around running errands and listening to NPR. Not long ago, “This American Life” aired a story about Robert Walser, a Swiss-German writer who spent most of his adult life in a mental hospital. He covered scraps of paper in near-microscopic pencil scribbling that when discovered were thought to be gibberish or a personal secret code, but that instead turned out to be tiny handwritten stories and essays. Scholars spent years deciphering these “microscripts,” which were eventually published to great acclaim.
*****
Robert Walser and his microscripts made me start to think about what people leave behind in writing. On Wednesday, I was packing up my things to go home from the office, when realized that I didn't have my datebook. I looked through my desk and my bag, and it was nowhere to be found. All of my lists, and all of my appointments and reminders, and all of my cryptic notes to myself were gone. I started to panic a little. Then I remembered that I’d taken my datebook with me to a meeting earlier in the day. I ran back to the meeting room, and there it was. Well, it was on a windowsill, for who knows what reason, but it was there. .
A little later, I was listening to the impeachment hearing as I drove to a meeting at Rockville HIgh School. Every time I listen to or read about high-level government investigations and hearings, I wonder if any of the witnesses share my habit of writing about everything and filling datebooks and notebooks with reams of scribble, and if they think about how they'd explain their notes to a panel of questioners. I'm not likely to ever have to testify before a Congressional committee, so I probably don't need to worry about the discoverability of my datebook, but it’s something to think about. You don't want to be sitting in front of the House Intelligence Committee with the C-SPAN cameras trained on you as you try to explain to the committee chair that you keep detailed notes, but you just happened to lose them.
*****
I was up very early the next morning, and I watched next-day coverage and analysis of Gordon Sondland’s testimony, which I didn’t get to see live. The Republican counsel questioned the reliability of Sondland’s statements, given his lack of notes or other written records. It's hard for me to believe that a person in a high government position doesn't keep notes. When you’re summoned before the Grand Inquisitor, do you really want to rely on nothing but your own spotty, foggy memory?
Can something be spotty and foggy at the same time? I don’t know. I don’t know. I do know, however, that I have to write everything down, in one form or another. If summoned, I won’t lack for written records and documentation. I’ll just have to consolidate all of it; the years of datebooks, the Keep notes on my phone, the stacks of unfinished drafts on my various hard drives and in Google Docs, this blog; and of course, the pages of doodles and scribbles that fill both sides of the pages of dozens of notebooks. Call me, Adam Schiff. I'm ready.
(Leave a comment or email me if you get the title reference.)
We went to Catholic school in the 1970s, so we had nuns as teachers. Nuns didn’t like to see students doodling during class, but I was a very good student and they let me get away with it as long as I didn’t make a show of it. Eventually, I grew out of the habit. My high school notebooks (none of which are extant) contained only pages of notes, with the occasional page of random lines in fancy cursive writing. But no more patterns and no more filigree designs. And no more little cars.
*****
One day, I was sitting in a long meeting (I could write that sentence about almost any day of the week, and it would be true). I didn’t have to present or take notes or anything else except listen. The subject was technical, and kind of boring, so I started to doodle. I filled a page with filigree and geometric designs, and colored them with my beloved 4-color Bic pen. The meeting ended, and I had a page of interesting and colorful designs; plus, I knew a lot more about call center technology and ticketing systems than I had before (any amount of knowledge being more than none, of course).
Still, the people who were sitting to my left and right seemed distracted by the doodling. I could feel them glancing surreptitiously over at my notebook, wondering what I was working on so diligently. I felt sure that they were judging me for not paying attention to the meeting, and I wanted to explain that the doodling helped me concentrate. I hoped that call center solutions would come up later in conversation, so that I could casually demonstrate my grasp of the topic, proving that I’d been laser-focused the whole time. That’s the trouble with doodling. People see you doodling and they think you’re wasting time. But you know what you’re doing. I know what I’m doing.
*****
As I mentioned here, I read The Woman in White because Nora Ephron told me to. She was quite right. I won’t go into the plot here, but an important thing to know about The Woman in White is that it’s told as a series of first-person narratives, which alternate between characters. Most of the narrators are reliable; they just tell different parts of the story from their own points of view.
An evil plot to steal a woman’s identity is at the heart of The Woman in White. This is especially interesting because the story takes place in 1850, so it’s a completely different kind of identity theft. Toward the very end of the novel, the reader understands most of what has happened, and most of how it happened. Count Fosco, one of the two villains (the other having died, good riddance) is left to tell the rest.
"One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas,” the Count boasts. “Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
And that’s how The Woman in White ends, with Count Fosco “arranging his ideas” by hand on tiny sheets of paper, leaving his confession in a pile of scraps for the hero to collect and organize and decipher; which of course, he does.
*****
I love Saturday afternoons; especially when it’s not baseball or swim season, and I’m just driving around running errands and listening to NPR. Not long ago, “This American Life” aired a story about Robert Walser, a Swiss-German writer who spent most of his adult life in a mental hospital. He covered scraps of paper in near-microscopic pencil scribbling that when discovered were thought to be gibberish or a personal secret code, but that instead turned out to be tiny handwritten stories and essays. Scholars spent years deciphering these “microscripts,” which were eventually published to great acclaim.
*****
Robert Walser and his microscripts made me start to think about what people leave behind in writing. On Wednesday, I was packing up my things to go home from the office, when realized that I didn't have my datebook. I looked through my desk and my bag, and it was nowhere to be found. All of my lists, and all of my appointments and reminders, and all of my cryptic notes to myself were gone. I started to panic a little. Then I remembered that I’d taken my datebook with me to a meeting earlier in the day. I ran back to the meeting room, and there it was. Well, it was on a windowsill, for who knows what reason, but it was there. .
A little later, I was listening to the impeachment hearing as I drove to a meeting at Rockville HIgh School. Every time I listen to or read about high-level government investigations and hearings, I wonder if any of the witnesses share my habit of writing about everything and filling datebooks and notebooks with reams of scribble, and if they think about how they'd explain their notes to a panel of questioners. I'm not likely to ever have to testify before a Congressional committee, so I probably don't need to worry about the discoverability of my datebook, but it’s something to think about. You don't want to be sitting in front of the House Intelligence Committee with the C-SPAN cameras trained on you as you try to explain to the committee chair that you keep detailed notes, but you just happened to lose them.
*****
I was up very early the next morning, and I watched next-day coverage and analysis of Gordon Sondland’s testimony, which I didn’t get to see live. The Republican counsel questioned the reliability of Sondland’s statements, given his lack of notes or other written records. It's hard for me to believe that a person in a high government position doesn't keep notes. When you’re summoned before the Grand Inquisitor, do you really want to rely on nothing but your own spotty, foggy memory?
Can something be spotty and foggy at the same time? I don’t know. I don’t know. I do know, however, that I have to write everything down, in one form or another. If summoned, I won’t lack for written records and documentation. I’ll just have to consolidate all of it; the years of datebooks, the Keep notes on my phone, the stacks of unfinished drafts on my various hard drives and in Google Docs, this blog; and of course, the pages of doodles and scribbles that fill both sides of the pages of dozens of notebooks. Call me, Adam Schiff. I'm ready.
(Leave a comment or email me if you get the title reference.)
Friday, November 15, 2019
Food and clothing
It’s Saturday morning, unseasonable cold for November and sparkling clear and sunny. It feels like December; like we skipped from summer to winter with almost no fall. But who cares. Winter is like a colonoscopy--dreading it is far worse than living through it.
I just went through a ton of old drafts and couldn’t figure out how to finish any of them. But I write every day, so here I am. I love early Saturday mornings, before anyone else in the house is up. I stay in my pajamas and I put a clay mask on my face and I drink coffee and read and watch Netflix and write (usually all three at once).
We turned the heat on for the first time just last week and now it’s arid like a desert in here. There’s not so much as a droplet of moisture in the air. My fingertips are cracked and bleeding and the contact lenses feel like they’re going to crack and scratch my eyes and my hair is crackling with static electricity. Forget that first paragraph. Winter is just as bad as I always think it will be. And you can’t sleep through it.
*****
I did some completely unnecessary shopping last weekend. I have a lot of clothes that I don’t wear. So many in fact that while I was shopping, I noticed a sweater that I liked very much and when I picked it up to look at the price, I realized that I already own the very same sweater. Embarrassing. I didn’t buy the sweater. But I bought two blouses (which I actually do need) and a jacket (which I definitely do not need). I don’t know why I bought that jacket.
OK, I actually do know why I bought it. I watched a few minutes of a TV police drama in which a female detective was wearing a utility jacket, and I wanted to look like that. I wanted to BE like that--no-nonsense tough and fearless and always ready for anything, with a utility jacket hanging on a hook right by the door near my keys and my handbag. The character was played by Toni Collette, so I suppose I just wanted to look like Toni Collette. Anyway, now I have her jacket, or something like it. I’ll have to get rid of another jacket or I’ll just have far too many.
I also have far too many drafts in my Google Docs drafts folder; and they’re just like my clothes. Instead of using what I have, I keep writing more. Fortunately, they don’t cost any money and they don’t take up any space.
*****
Now it’s Monday, Veteran’s Day; and although I am not a veteran, I do love a paid day off. I’m up early because I’m always up early, and because the public schools here do not have the day off so I had to drive my 9th grader to school. And now I have a lovely day ahead of me. It’s not cold today, though it will be by Wednesday, so I can wear my utility jacket today.
I finished reading Heartburn. It was a very quick read. And not Nora’s best. Like lots of other Nora Ephron, it’s filled with references to upper-class cultural and political preoccupations. Reading it reminds me of when I was 12 years old, paging through The New Yorker or Philadelphia Magazine, knowing that there was a very sophisticated world outside of my working-class neighborhood. I didn’t understand that world, and I wasn't even sure that I’d be happy there. And now I know that I wouldn’t have been. It’s nice to understand all of the references; even nicer not to know that they have nothing to do with me and to not care about that at all.
It’s not the scene-setting and name-dropping and class-consciousness that make Heartburn a not-so-great book, but I can't put my finger on exactly what's not right about it. Well, except for the casual, thoughtless racism, which is not altogether attributable to the era. I mean, I was alive in 1980 and I’m fairly certain that even then, it wasn’t OK to describe a mixed-race person as “high yellow.” For God’s sake, Nora.
*****
Heartburn is set mostly in Washington; and any time a book is set in a place I’m very familiar with, I like to imagine the characters in the locations. In one scene, the main character reminisces about a romantic moment with her then-fiance in “the Pension Building,” which I had never heard of. As it turns out, the Pension Building is now the National Building Museum; and having been there, I knew exactly why she chose it as the most romantic location in Washington. It’s such a good building that it’s literally an example for all other buildings.
*****
It’s Wednesday now, and after a few days of gradually improving (meaning increasing) temperatures, we’re back to crazy cold, only mid-way through November.
I was chopping bok choy a little while ago As I chopped, I imagined myself as Rachel, the protagonist of Heartburn. Rachel would have thought a lot about the social and cultural implications of her bok choy. She’d have wondered if cooking bok choy made her avant-garde, just fashionable enough, or passe. She’d have thought about whether or not bok choy was still relevant, or if it had maybe been supplanted by daikon or taro. She’d have successfully duplicated some delicious bok choy recipe, musing to herself that she’d had to hunt for the bok choy, but that soon it would be readily available and then soon after that, there’d be a glut of the stuff and everyone would be sick of it. Bok choy is the new pesto, she’d have thought.
And so that’s what else bothered me about Heartburn. If it’s that easy for me to imagine a Hemingway-contest style parody of a character's interior life, then it’s probably not a very good book. But the rice noodle lo mein that I made with the bok choy was a very good dinner. Bok choy is delicious.
*****
I’m waiting for a batch of soup to finish cooking. Thanks to the Instant Pot, I can cook and write at the same time, simultaneous-like.
It was cold again yesterday, clear and sunny and dry winter cold. My coat and scarf looked pretty hanging on my cubicle wall; so pretty that I almost took a picture of them. The coat is a simple dark red insulated duffle coat, and the scarf is wool, a multi-colored Fair Isle pattern with red that matches the coat. Together, they make winter almost OK.
This is why I keep buying clothes, I guess. I’m always looking for just one more thing that makes me feel like my coat and scarf make me feel. I’m always looking for another turtle’s shell. Maybe I want to wear something that will make someone else want to dress like me, or even be like me.
*****
Or maybe I’m looking for something else altogether, something better than reading and writing and eating and even perfect jackets. Maybe Nora Ephron characters aren’t the only self-involved over-thinkers in this blog post. I think I’ll have a glass of wine. If you read this all the way through, then you probably need one too.
I just went through a ton of old drafts and couldn’t figure out how to finish any of them. But I write every day, so here I am. I love early Saturday mornings, before anyone else in the house is up. I stay in my pajamas and I put a clay mask on my face and I drink coffee and read and watch Netflix and write (usually all three at once).
We turned the heat on for the first time just last week and now it’s arid like a desert in here. There’s not so much as a droplet of moisture in the air. My fingertips are cracked and bleeding and the contact lenses feel like they’re going to crack and scratch my eyes and my hair is crackling with static electricity. Forget that first paragraph. Winter is just as bad as I always think it will be. And you can’t sleep through it.
*****
I did some completely unnecessary shopping last weekend. I have a lot of clothes that I don’t wear. So many in fact that while I was shopping, I noticed a sweater that I liked very much and when I picked it up to look at the price, I realized that I already own the very same sweater. Embarrassing. I didn’t buy the sweater. But I bought two blouses (which I actually do need) and a jacket (which I definitely do not need). I don’t know why I bought that jacket.
OK, I actually do know why I bought it. I watched a few minutes of a TV police drama in which a female detective was wearing a utility jacket, and I wanted to look like that. I wanted to BE like that--no-nonsense tough and fearless and always ready for anything, with a utility jacket hanging on a hook right by the door near my keys and my handbag. The character was played by Toni Collette, so I suppose I just wanted to look like Toni Collette. Anyway, now I have her jacket, or something like it. I’ll have to get rid of another jacket or I’ll just have far too many.
I also have far too many drafts in my Google Docs drafts folder; and they’re just like my clothes. Instead of using what I have, I keep writing more. Fortunately, they don’t cost any money and they don’t take up any space.
*****
Now it’s Monday, Veteran’s Day; and although I am not a veteran, I do love a paid day off. I’m up early because I’m always up early, and because the public schools here do not have the day off so I had to drive my 9th grader to school. And now I have a lovely day ahead of me. It’s not cold today, though it will be by Wednesday, so I can wear my utility jacket today.
I finished reading Heartburn. It was a very quick read. And not Nora’s best. Like lots of other Nora Ephron, it’s filled with references to upper-class cultural and political preoccupations. Reading it reminds me of when I was 12 years old, paging through The New Yorker or Philadelphia Magazine, knowing that there was a very sophisticated world outside of my working-class neighborhood. I didn’t understand that world, and I wasn't even sure that I’d be happy there. And now I know that I wouldn’t have been. It’s nice to understand all of the references; even nicer not to know that they have nothing to do with me and to not care about that at all.
It’s not the scene-setting and name-dropping and class-consciousness that make Heartburn a not-so-great book, but I can't put my finger on exactly what's not right about it. Well, except for the casual, thoughtless racism, which is not altogether attributable to the era. I mean, I was alive in 1980 and I’m fairly certain that even then, it wasn’t OK to describe a mixed-race person as “high yellow.” For God’s sake, Nora.
*****
Heartburn is set mostly in Washington; and any time a book is set in a place I’m very familiar with, I like to imagine the characters in the locations. In one scene, the main character reminisces about a romantic moment with her then-fiance in “the Pension Building,” which I had never heard of. As it turns out, the Pension Building is now the National Building Museum; and having been there, I knew exactly why she chose it as the most romantic location in Washington. It’s such a good building that it’s literally an example for all other buildings.
 |
| National Building Museum, December 26 2017. See what I mean? |
*****
It’s Wednesday now, and after a few days of gradually improving (meaning increasing) temperatures, we’re back to crazy cold, only mid-way through November.
I was chopping bok choy a little while ago As I chopped, I imagined myself as Rachel, the protagonist of Heartburn. Rachel would have thought a lot about the social and cultural implications of her bok choy. She’d have wondered if cooking bok choy made her avant-garde, just fashionable enough, or passe. She’d have thought about whether or not bok choy was still relevant, or if it had maybe been supplanted by daikon or taro. She’d have successfully duplicated some delicious bok choy recipe, musing to herself that she’d had to hunt for the bok choy, but that soon it would be readily available and then soon after that, there’d be a glut of the stuff and everyone would be sick of it. Bok choy is the new pesto, she’d have thought.
And so that’s what else bothered me about Heartburn. If it’s that easy for me to imagine a Hemingway-contest style parody of a character's interior life, then it’s probably not a very good book. But the rice noodle lo mein that I made with the bok choy was a very good dinner. Bok choy is delicious.
*****
I’m waiting for a batch of soup to finish cooking. Thanks to the Instant Pot, I can cook and write at the same time, simultaneous-like.
It was cold again yesterday, clear and sunny and dry winter cold. My coat and scarf looked pretty hanging on my cubicle wall; so pretty that I almost took a picture of them. The coat is a simple dark red insulated duffle coat, and the scarf is wool, a multi-colored Fair Isle pattern with red that matches the coat. Together, they make winter almost OK.
This is why I keep buying clothes, I guess. I’m always looking for just one more thing that makes me feel like my coat and scarf make me feel. I’m always looking for another turtle’s shell. Maybe I want to wear something that will make someone else want to dress like me, or even be like me.
*****
Or maybe I’m looking for something else altogether, something better than reading and writing and eating and even perfect jackets. Maybe Nora Ephron characters aren’t the only self-involved over-thinkers in this blog post. I think I’ll have a glass of wine. If you read this all the way through, then you probably need one too.
Friday, November 8, 2019
Insides
It's Monday. I have to have a colonoscopy on Wednesday. Look that up and see if it doesn’t make you want to run screaming off the face of the earth. But I’m a middle-aged lady, and that’s what middle-aged ladies do. We go to some doctor, who tells us that a disgusting medical assault on our dignity is the only thing standing between us and grim death; and we say, "Oh, OK, by all means. Do schedule my appointment." I dread this the way I dread election season but I guess it’s better than being dead.
Well that was fun, wasn’t it? That paragraph, I mean. No time has elapsed and I’m not yet in the happy position of telling you all about the colonoscopy as an event that occurred in the past. Lucky for you, I won’t be telling you all about it at all, because it’s disgusting. It’s 8:55 PM now, so I’m going to have a snack, my last solid food until Wednesday.
*****
It's Tuesday now. I guess I've always wondered what cholera felt like, and now I know.
By the way, guess what I'm doing?
No, don't really guess. You don't want to know. The less said, the better.
*****
OK, the worst might be over. Drinking the solution was the hardest part. I had to drink a 10-ounce bottle of magnesium citrate this morning, and then the first of two doses of Suprep this afternoon. Both were vile, but the magnesium citrate was worse.
Now I'm just drained, very tired, and very cold. I'm in my bed, wearing flannel pajama pants and fuzzy socks. I'm reading and writing and looking forward to having this over with.
What am I reading? I'm glad you asked, imaginary person. I finally finished The Woman in White, and now I'm back to Nora Ephron, another book of essays called I Remember Nothing. I feel for you Nora. I can't say that I remember nothing, but I remember a lot less than I should. It's not so good.
*****
I'll write about The Woman in White another time, except for this one observation. I wouldn't want to be a woman (or even a man) in Victorian England, but it would be nice to be allowed to be sick for a day or so. Characters in The Woman in White are sent immediately to bed as soon as they sneeze. Meanwhile, I might as well have dysentery, but still I worked like a fiend all day.
*****
Reading Nora Ephron is like taking a class on the 20th century American cultural elite. You should always have easy access to the Internet when you read Nora. You'll probably need to look some things up.
*****
I need to Google Lillian Ross. Nora obviously thinks that I should know who she is. My next dispatch will be from the other side of this dreadful procedure. Until then.
*****
It’s Wednesday afternoon now; and I’m home, free from the clutches of the medical establishment, for now. It wasn’t that bad except that I woke up during the procedure; and judging by the astonished look on the anesthesiologist’s face, that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it went well otherwise.
I finished I Remember Nothing. And it turns out that just like me, Nora also hated the end of summer. And she worried, as I worry, about the ridiculous and sometimes cruel effects of aging. She worried about the inevitable decline. One day you can’t remember things; and the next day, you can’t see things; and then the rest of your life is a series of infirmities and indignities.
Nora Ephron’s life was so different from mine; and she was so much more fearless and sophisticated and accomplished than I could dream of being. She probably wouldn't have had much patience with me. But reading her feels like reading emails from a friend. She died in 2012, so sadly, there won’t be any more Nora Ephron books, but there are a few that I haven’t gotten to. I’m going to read Heartburn next. But first, I'm going to go to sleep for a while. I feel strangely groggy.
Well that was fun, wasn’t it? That paragraph, I mean. No time has elapsed and I’m not yet in the happy position of telling you all about the colonoscopy as an event that occurred in the past. Lucky for you, I won’t be telling you all about it at all, because it’s disgusting. It’s 8:55 PM now, so I’m going to have a snack, my last solid food until Wednesday.
*****
It's Tuesday now. I guess I've always wondered what cholera felt like, and now I know.
By the way, guess what I'm doing?
No, don't really guess. You don't want to know. The less said, the better.
*****
OK, the worst might be over. Drinking the solution was the hardest part. I had to drink a 10-ounce bottle of magnesium citrate this morning, and then the first of two doses of Suprep this afternoon. Both were vile, but the magnesium citrate was worse.
Now I'm just drained, very tired, and very cold. I'm in my bed, wearing flannel pajama pants and fuzzy socks. I'm reading and writing and looking forward to having this over with.
What am I reading? I'm glad you asked, imaginary person. I finally finished The Woman in White, and now I'm back to Nora Ephron, another book of essays called I Remember Nothing. I feel for you Nora. I can't say that I remember nothing, but I remember a lot less than I should. It's not so good.
*****
I'll write about The Woman in White another time, except for this one observation. I wouldn't want to be a woman (or even a man) in Victorian England, but it would be nice to be allowed to be sick for a day or so. Characters in The Woman in White are sent immediately to bed as soon as they sneeze. Meanwhile, I might as well have dysentery, but still I worked like a fiend all day.
*****
Reading Nora Ephron is like taking a class on the 20th century American cultural elite. You should always have easy access to the Internet when you read Nora. You'll probably need to look some things up.
*****
I need to Google Lillian Ross. Nora obviously thinks that I should know who she is. My next dispatch will be from the other side of this dreadful procedure. Until then.
*****
It’s Wednesday afternoon now; and I’m home, free from the clutches of the medical establishment, for now. It wasn’t that bad except that I woke up during the procedure; and judging by the astonished look on the anesthesiologist’s face, that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it went well otherwise.
I finished I Remember Nothing. And it turns out that just like me, Nora also hated the end of summer. And she worried, as I worry, about the ridiculous and sometimes cruel effects of aging. She worried about the inevitable decline. One day you can’t remember things; and the next day, you can’t see things; and then the rest of your life is a series of infirmities and indignities.
Nora Ephron’s life was so different from mine; and she was so much more fearless and sophisticated and accomplished than I could dream of being. She probably wouldn't have had much patience with me. But reading her feels like reading emails from a friend. She died in 2012, so sadly, there won’t be any more Nora Ephron books, but there are a few that I haven’t gotten to. I’m going to read Heartburn next. But first, I'm going to go to sleep for a while. I feel strangely groggy.
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