Unworthy

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m sitting on my couch with warm socks on my feet and a very large smudge on my forehead. The socks are neither here nor there. I just wanted to write a neat symmetrical independent clause about one thing and then another thing. But I do need the socks. My feet were cold.

If you’re Catholic then you don’t need to ask why I have a big hot once-flaming mess on my forehead. If you’re not, then I’ll explain. It’s Ash Wednesday, the very first day of the long season of penance that we call Lent. Six weeks without chocolate, and unto dust I shall return. The ashes are a reminder of the unto-dust part. 

You don’t have to go to Mass or receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, but the whole point of Lent is making sacrifices that you don’t necessarily have to make. It's good for your soul, and mine needs all the help it can get. So I went to Mass even though I didn't have to, and now I have a dirty face. It’ll wash off. That’s why we have soap and water.

Speaking of soap and water? Today was not only Ash Wednesday, it was  critical mass day for coronavirus. Yesterday, I could have sneezed right in someone’s face and they would have said “God Bless You,” and gotten on with their day. Today, the whole world is obsessed with coronavirus and what we should do to ready ourselves for the inevitable spread of this newest viral plague. I’m going to do exactly nothing, except to wash my hands as often as possible. Soap and water can wash the Ash Wednesday memento mori right off my face, and it can wash away most of the germs, too. Soap and water solves a lot of problems.

*****
There are some things that soap and water can't fix, though. Sometimes, you need to see a professional. So I'm sitting in a chair at Nail Club at Plaza del Mercado, as a very kind woman scrubs my scaly winter feet.

It's Thursday night, a busy night for manicures and pedicures, but I was lucky enough to walk in just as they had an opening, so I didn't have to wait. I'm only getting the pedicure. I don't have the kind of life that allows me to maintain a manicure for more than a day, but pedicures last forever.

I don't spend a lot of time getting spa treatments but on the rare occasions when I do, I am never not conscious that another person, a person whom I don't know particularly well, is taking care of me in a very personal way. At work, at my white collar job in a Federal government office, I'm surrounded by hothouse flowers who are afraid that an errant sneeze from three cubicles over will land them in a quarantine ward. Meanwhile, this lady is uncomplainingly touching a near-stranger's feet. Jesus washed the Apostles' feet, too. They weren't worthy, and neither am I. No one is.

*****
My face and my feet are clean now, and I'm ready to do penance.. It's only six weeks. It'll be over in no time.

All quiet on the Portrait Gallery steps

It’s cold but sunny, and getting warmer as afternoon approaches on this late Sunday morning; and I'm on my way to Chinatown to watch my beloved Capitals play the Pittsburgh Penguins, the most evil franchise in the history of organized sports.

Is that an exaggeration? A slight overstatement? Maybe. Maybe.

*****

The Capitals are in a slump. This is almost routine in February so I'm not worried. Not much. All the same, though, I'm taking some steps to turn this situation around.

I have an old red cordura nylon handbag that's not very stylish, and I don't like it very much. But I carried this ugly bag for the entire duration of the 2018 playoff run, and look how that turned out. So I'm carrying the bag today. And I'm wearing my least favorite of my two jerseys, because they always win when I wear it. This is all I can do.

I've never actually never seen a Penguins game live. I've never seen the fan showdown on the Portland Gallery steps. I've never gotten to yell "Mur-ray!! at Brian Murray. I'm looking forward to it.

*****
So that turned out exactly as I’d hoped; meaning the Capitals won and the Penguins lost and it was very very quiet on the Portrait Gallery steps. It was almost 60 degrees, sunny, and still broad daylight as we (meaning 40,000 or so happy Capitals fans and a handful of gloomy Pens fans) streamed out onto F Street and into the sunshine. Cars passed, honking three quick “Let’s go Caps!” blasts, and the crowd responded with cheers. A win against the Penguins at home is a big deal.

It was a nice day. I wish I didn’t feel so bad today, and I wish I knew why I do, but there it is. Sometimes even watching Sidney Crosby break his hockey stick in frustration on a beautiful Sunday afternoon isn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. But this will pass, like everything else. Good triumphed over evil at Capital One Arena yesterday, and this too will pass.

A tale told by an idiot

I’m reading Conversations with Friends right now, because the whole internet told me that I should be reading Sally Rooney. It’s just as good as everyone says it is, and I keep trying to take it apart to figure out why. The best thing I can say is that it’s alive throughout. That was Flannery O’Connor’s standard for literary merit in fiction, and so it’s mine, too.

*****
Google, of course, knows exactly what I’m up to, because as soon as I started reading this book, Sally Rooney stories started popping up in my newsfeed. Here’s a headline: “Sally Rooney is capturing what it feels like to be alive now.” Here’s what actually happens: A person reads a book and five seconds later it’s a data point in someone’s AI-generated algorithm. That's what it really feels like to be alive now.

*****
I’m almost finished Conversations with Friends. I’m rationing the last few pages, because I’m not ready for the story to end; and because I don’t know what to read next.

(A few days ago, I heard a radio commercial for a coming stage production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and I thought about my woefully inadequate Shakespeare knowledge, leading me to the brilliant idea of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. And then I thought about spending the next six months obsessively reading all 37 plays and checking them off a list, possibly annotating as I read, possibly writing about each play. And then I thought better of that and decided that i could live with my continued ignorance. I’ve read “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Henry V,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” and “Othello.” That’s probably enough for now.)

Anyway, I’ve been sick for a few days. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Nothing serious, I’m sure. We had to rearrange some furniture last night; and when I say “we,” I mean “they,” as in my husband and sons. I sat on the couch reading my book as the men worked. There’s something very restful about remaining still amid a flurry of movement and activity. Better them than me, I thought.

The main character in Conversations is sick, too, with a mysterious illness that turns out to be endometriosis. I’m not yet sure how things will turn out for her because I’m still not finished with the book, but I feel better than I have all week. I ignored it, and it went away. I’m telling you, that always works.

It’s Saturday morning now, and I have a plan for the day. I have places to go and things to do and a book to finish reading. And then I have to figure out what to read next. Maybe I WILL read all 37 Shakespeare plays. Or maybe I’ll just think and talk about Shakespeare for the next few days, and then Google will magically tell me all about the 20+ Shakespeare plays that I never got around to; and I’ll tell you all about that, too. “To write and read comes by nature.”

As funky as you can be

It was Friday night, and I was down at the New Amsterdam. Or maybe I was at the gym, running around the track listening to music, with the 90s on a loop. I almost never go to the gym on Friday, but my son wanted to go and play basketball, and since I was already there, I decided to exercise too.

Friday night, as it turns out, is a great time to go to the gym. We had the place almost to ourselves, with just a handful of other Friday night people (that’s how I think of them, because that’s who they are). My son practiced layups or whatever people practice on a basketball court, and I ran and walked around the track and listened to the 90s songs that kept popping up in the random shuffle, thinking deep deep thoughts and wondering what the other Friday night people were thinking. I have a tendency to wear my mind on my sleeve. 

It’s Sunday now, day two of a three-day weekend. Last night, we went to a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood not our own. At first, I felt a bit like an interloper. My husband’s boss was hosting a guest bartender night as a fundraiser for a local family, and we needed to make an appearance. We ran into lots of people whom we hadn’t seen in a long while, and we ended up having a good time. I stood at the bar with my third Antietam Irish Red, listening to more 1990s nostalgia blasting from the sound system. Everybody loves me when I’m three beers in; and when everybody loves you, that’s about as funky as you can be.

And now it’s early in the morning and part of me thinks that I should do something today, that I should go somewhere, have some sort of adventure. And the other part of me thinks that I should just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while. The sun is out and it’s not so cold today. But winter will end in a few weeks, God willing; and then there won’t be much time, nor much excuse, for hibernating. What to do, what to do? It’s only 7:30, so there’s time to decide what to do with another day of my semi-charmed kind of life. Baby.

*****
I tried to add footnotes, but my HTML skills aren't up to the task, and they won't paste from Google Docs. Song lyrics, in order:

Counting Crows, “Mr. Jones”
Barenaked Ladies, “One Week”
Sinead O’Connor, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Third Eye Blind, “Semi-Charmed Life”

#amwriting

It’s 6:30 in the morning, a rainy Tuesday, New Hampshire primary day. Morning Joe is taping in a cafe in Nashua or Concord or maybe Dixville Notch, in front of a live audience of dressed-for-winter New Hampshire primary voters. Lots of ragg wool and Fair Isle. I wonder if these people are born and bred Granite Staters, or transplants dressing the part.

I always thought that it would be fun to be in New Hampshire during the last few days before the primary. I’m sure they’re happy when it’s over, but there must be a letdown, too, as the candidates and the media abruptly pack up and head to South Carolina, not to return for three and a half years.

I usually write in the evening, but I have an unexpected hour this morning. My son has early-morning baseball workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I was supposed to drive him today because my husband had a physical therapy appointment. Stuck behind a bad accident, the therapist cancelled at the last minute, so my husband came home and picked up my son, leaving me with the choice between going to work absurdly early or writing. Even at my normal time, I’m among the very first to arrive in the office. If I get there any earlier, the place will just feel deserted and creepy. So here I am.

I noticed a new hashtag this week. Well, I don't really know if it's new, or just new to me. Probably the latter. I'm slow to pick up on trends. Anyway the hashtag is #amwriting. As in “I am writing.” People post bits of their works in progress or pictures of their laptops and their half finished coffee, along with a few words about how whether it’s going well or badly, and the hashtag #amwriting.

*****
Daphne Gray-Grant says that you shouldn’t try to edit as you’re writing, and I think she’s right. I'm trying not to edit this as I go along, but it’s hard.

*****
Right now, I’m reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist. God rest Carrie’s soul. I loved her as an actress, but I love her even more as a writer. This is the book in which she famously revealed the long-suspected affair with Harrison Ford, who appears to have been a bit of a jerk. She shares long entries from her 1976 journal (she was 19 at the time), and they are astonishingly good. I write every day, but when I read writing that’s so effortlessly beautiful and incisive, I wonder why I bother. But then I go back and read some of my own work, and I know why. It’s because I’m good at this.

So back to the hashtag. I could share a post about almost any moment in my life, tag it #amwriting, and the post would be true. Even if I don’t have a pen or a keyboard, I’m almost always writing something in my head. There’s always a running narrative under construction (and edited live as I go along--sorry Daphne). I write every day not just because I’m good at it but because I can’t not write. It’s 7:09 now. Time to get dressed and go to work. It’s nice to have a head start on the day.

Ninotchka

Early last Sunday morning, I watched a few minutes of “Ninotchka,” one of my favorite movies. I just love Greta Garbo’s performance in this movie. It’s so hard to reconcile Ninotchka with the Garbo of popular myth--the forbidding, unapproachable, unsmiling Swede who famously wanted to be alone. The movie poster for Ninotchka reads “Garbo Laughs!” because it was the first time moviegoers would see Greta Garbo as anything other than serious.

Garbo plays the lead character, Ninotchka Ivanovna Yakushova, an ambitious Soviet bureaucrat and party apparatchik. She is stern and earnestly dedicated, but full of wry cheer. Ninotchka is torn between her genuine commitment to the ideals of the Russian revolution and her honest and clear-eyed realization of its grim reality in practice. The political conflict is real and timely (“Ninotchka” was made in 1939, just as the worst of Stalin's purges were winding down) but it's also a metaphor for Ninotchka's personal conflict, between her desire to succeed in her work and her desire to be a happy woman. Ninotchka is resigned to the demands of life as a rising star of the Russian Communist party but she can't hide her love for life and people and her lively sense of humor, especially from Count Leon, played by Melvyn Douglas. He falls in love with her and she with him. Their only problem is the jealous Duchess Swana. And the vise grip of the party, of course.

Greta Garbo as Ninotchka with Melvyn Douglas as Count Leon.
Was there a more fun couple in any movie, ever?
No, there was not. 

"Ninotchka" is a comedy about the most serious of subjects. It was banned in the USSR and its satellite states, possibly for brilliant dialogue like this:

Buljanoff (the errant party apparatchik whom Ninotchka is sent to Paris to retrieve): How are things in Moscow? 

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

Despite her determination to complete her assignment in Paris and return to Moscow, and her uncompromising dedication to the Revolution, Ninotchka falls in love with more than Count Leon. She falls in love with the beauty and joie de vive of pre-war Paris. “I’m so happy,” she says. “Oh I'm so happy. No one can be so happy without being punished. I will be punished and I should be punished.” Ninotcha’s devotion to the Fatherland and her guilty love for Paris form just one of the movie’s love triangles. The other is between Ninotchka, Count Leon, and Grand Duchess Swana, a White Russian exile in Paris and Ninotchka’s rival for Leon’s affections. Ninotchka and Swana first meet at a Paris nightclub:

Grand Duchess Swana (commenting on Ninotchka’s elegant evening dress): Isn't it amazing? One gets the wrong impression of the new Russia. It must be charming. I'm delighted conditions have improved so. I assume this is what the factory workers wear at their dances?

Ninotchka: Exactly! You see, it would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear low-cut gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks across our backs were not very becoming. And you know how vain women are.

Grand Duchess Swana : Yes. You're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

Like everything else in “Ninotchka,” this conversation is about more than one thing. And like almost everything else in the movie, it is both modern and timeless. It’s a perfect verbal sparring match between two beautiful women who are competing for the same man. But it’s the political passive aggression that makes it as relevant today as it was in 1939.

Picture Grand Duchess Swana and Ninotchka at a Super Bowl party.

Grand Duchess Swana: I hope that we won’t see any of this disgraceful kneeling during the National Anthem. I’m not political, of course, but I do think it’s so important to show respect for our military men and women. 

Ninotchka: Exactly! That’s why I’m so glad that my father and uncles all served in Vietnam. They would have been deeply ashamed to avoid service because of a minor ailment, like some politicians I could name! But I suppose that bone spurs are terribly painful for a certain weak and delicate sort of man.

Later:

Grand Duchess Swana: Well, Ms. Lopez and her friend Shakira are certainly talented, but I thought that poles were used in another form of dancing altogether! I suppose that halftime show performer is the world’s second oldest profession (laughs gaily).

Ninotchka: Oh yes, I do see what you mean. Perhaps someone should call the White House and see what President Trump thinks. He does seem to know a great deal about ladies in that line of work (smiles sweetly). 

Political intrigue and aggression aside, "Ninotchka" ends happily because love wins over all. Given a choice, people prefer beauty and friendship and art and fun and laughter to ideology and dialectics and the vanguard of revolution. It’s 1939 again, and most of us prefer Paris to Moscow. 

One Person in New York

I was listening to "All Things Considered" one day last week, and I heard a story about a snowplow driver in Montana (or Wyoming) who wrote a song about being a snowplow driver. He recorded it on YouTube and (as they say on the Internet), the silly thing went viral. People liked the song so much that they called their local radio station and asked to hear it over the air. The radio station offered to produce a professional recording of the song. Asked what he thought about the song’s success, the man said that people like the idea of an ordinary person with an ordinary job doing something creative or artistic.

Later the same day, I scrolled my news feed and was shocked and saddened to read about Jason Polan’s untimely death at age 37. Jason Polan was an artist. His best-known project was published in part in Every Person in New York, a book of his sketches of New Yorkers (he also had a blog of the same title). Polan drew quick sketches of thousands of people, some of them famous and many of whom didn’t know they were being captured on paper. He aspired to draw literally every person in New York, an impossible goal no matter how long he might have lived, but he finished over 30,000 drawings. Who knows how many he might have done if he had more time?

According to his New York Times obituary, he held informal drawing meet-ups, usually at Taco Bell restaurants. Anyone could show up, and lots of people did, many of them non-artists. They drew pictures of each other, or of their food or the contents of their bags, or whatever else was in front of them. It didn’t matter if they were talented or skilled or not. Something about the idea of carrying around a sketchbook and drawing what you see appealed to Polan’s roving band of part-time would-be art students. Maybe they were ordinary people with ordinary jobs, but they were also artists, because they made art.

Jason Polan wasn’t ordinary at all. His other major project, Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, was apparently an attempt to get a job at MoMA. MoMA didn’t hire him, which is probably good for the rest of us, though I have to wonder about the competence and vision of museum curators who aren't capable of recognizing and rewarding such obvious genius. Their loss.

I don't write songs (though I do sing quite a lot) and I don't draw much, but I do this. I write about whatever I think about, whatever is interesting, whatever is in front of me. I'm just one of a million other ordinary people who try to spend a few minutes a day making something. Jason Polan was a great artist who saw the beauty and value of ordinary people, not just as subjects but as fellow artists. It's a terrible loss.

Estate planning

It's Saturday afternoon, cold and drizzling. It's 5:15, not quite dark yet, but soon. 

January finally ended after three months or so, and it's the first day of February. The groundhog will come out of his little hole tomorrow to let us all know if we should expect an early spring or another six years of winter. Six weeks. Six months. Whatever. 

I made a will today. No, I don't have a terminal illness, nor do I plan any especially dangerous excursions. My husband is a police officer and he made me go to a Wills for Heroes event today. It was fine. I know now, not that I didn't know it before, that I would never want to be a lawyer. My volunteer attorney looked exactly like Walter White, and he was very particular about where the notary placed his seal. 

*****

It's 5:40 now. I'm at MLK Swim Center for the high school swimming divisional championship. It's going to be a long meet, and my son is swimming in exactly one event. But my friends are here and there aren't many other places where I'd rather be. Winter will end, eventually; and my affairs are in order, so it's all good. It's all good.