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.
Monday, November 25, 2019
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.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Red October
I was writing something for work on Tuesday. It was a very simple thing, but I just couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t summon the right words. But all writing is re-writing; and after a few minutes of fighting with words and sentences and semi-colons, I had a draft that I could live with.
*****
Earlier that same morning, I had wondered why it was still so dark when I was getting ready for work. With the return to Eastern time and the earlier sunset, I thought to myself, we should have had an earlier sunrise and thus earlier daylight. I left the house with my son at 7:15 and it was still almost dark. What’s happening, I wondered? Is there some environmental phenomenon that’s causing extended darkness following the time change? Have the world’s latitudes shifted in some way?
By now, you’re probably looking at a calendar and seeing what it took me two days to figure out, which is that the fall time change didn’t actually happen last Sunday at all. It happens this coming Sunday.
I worry about myself sometimes. The left side of my face is a little bit droopy and I’m apparently also a little bit of an idiot. Maybe I had a stroke and and I didn’t know it. Maybe I’ve had a series of transient ischemic attacks and the after-effects have left me unable to tell the difference between one week and the next.
*****
The rest of that day and the following day proceeded without incident. I finished my work without undue mental strain, and I didn’t confuse one day or one week for the next, and I collected myself. I got a grip. A stroke, for crying out loud. I mean, really.
*****
Still, I should have figured out the time change thing a lot faster than I did. If the morning darkness didn’t clue me in, then the ride to work should have. On the morning after the time change, my husband normally goes through the house and sets all of the analog clocks, and the digital ones reset themselves automatically. But he doesn’t reset my car clock unless he happens to ride in my car. And left to me, of course, that clock will stay on Daylight Savings Time for the next six months. Two very big clues--the morning darkness and the car clock--not to mention that not one single person or news report or social media post had said a word about re-setting clocks. I don’t know what I was thinking.
******
Yesterday, we had a training class, on a semi-technical topic. And I finished my practice exercises--correctly--before almost anyone else in the class. So maybe I’m not the sharpest proverbial knife in the proverbial drawer, but I’m not an irredeemable idiot just yet.
Wait, is irredeemable a word?
What is happening to me?
*****
OK, it’s Thursday now, a very quiet Halloween. Normally, we have lots of trick-or-treaters, but the weather’s not good, so traffic is light. The kids who show up are making bank, candy-wise. I’m throwing huge handfuls out there, scattering candy largesse like there’s no tomorrow. I’m making it rain. It’s a damn free-for-all.
The Washington Nationals won the World Series last night, and we’re watching a replay of Game 7 as we wait for the next doorbell ring. This was one of the most intense, high-drama World Series I’ve ever seen and it’s fun to watch again when we know that it ends happily. The 2019 Nationals are one of the all-time great teams. It won’t be the same next year. We might lose Anthony Rendon or Stephen Strasburg (my favorite player). Ryan Zimmerman might retire. Gerardo Parra might change his walk-up song. They’ll still be a great team, but they won’t be the very same team that won the first World Series in Washington in over 90 years. It’s been a great pleasure to watch them.
*****
Almost 9 PM, and we still have a lot of candy to give away. The next kid who shows up is going home with untold candy riches. And I’m going to bed early. I’ve been up late watching baseball; and of course, I never did get the extra hour of sleep.
*****
Earlier that same morning, I had wondered why it was still so dark when I was getting ready for work. With the return to Eastern time and the earlier sunset, I thought to myself, we should have had an earlier sunrise and thus earlier daylight. I left the house with my son at 7:15 and it was still almost dark. What’s happening, I wondered? Is there some environmental phenomenon that’s causing extended darkness following the time change? Have the world’s latitudes shifted in some way?
By now, you’re probably looking at a calendar and seeing what it took me two days to figure out, which is that the fall time change didn’t actually happen last Sunday at all. It happens this coming Sunday.
I worry about myself sometimes. The left side of my face is a little bit droopy and I’m apparently also a little bit of an idiot. Maybe I had a stroke and and I didn’t know it. Maybe I’ve had a series of transient ischemic attacks and the after-effects have left me unable to tell the difference between one week and the next.
*****
The rest of that day and the following day proceeded without incident. I finished my work without undue mental strain, and I didn’t confuse one day or one week for the next, and I collected myself. I got a grip. A stroke, for crying out loud. I mean, really.
*****
Still, I should have figured out the time change thing a lot faster than I did. If the morning darkness didn’t clue me in, then the ride to work should have. On the morning after the time change, my husband normally goes through the house and sets all of the analog clocks, and the digital ones reset themselves automatically. But he doesn’t reset my car clock unless he happens to ride in my car. And left to me, of course, that clock will stay on Daylight Savings Time for the next six months. Two very big clues--the morning darkness and the car clock--not to mention that not one single person or news report or social media post had said a word about re-setting clocks. I don’t know what I was thinking.
******
Yesterday, we had a training class, on a semi-technical topic. And I finished my practice exercises--correctly--before almost anyone else in the class. So maybe I’m not the sharpest proverbial knife in the proverbial drawer, but I’m not an irredeemable idiot just yet.
Wait, is irredeemable a word?
What is happening to me?
*****
OK, it’s Thursday now, a very quiet Halloween. Normally, we have lots of trick-or-treaters, but the weather’s not good, so traffic is light. The kids who show up are making bank, candy-wise. I’m throwing huge handfuls out there, scattering candy largesse like there’s no tomorrow. I’m making it rain. It’s a damn free-for-all.
The Washington Nationals won the World Series last night, and we’re watching a replay of Game 7 as we wait for the next doorbell ring. This was one of the most intense, high-drama World Series I’ve ever seen and it’s fun to watch again when we know that it ends happily. The 2019 Nationals are one of the all-time great teams. It won’t be the same next year. We might lose Anthony Rendon or Stephen Strasburg (my favorite player). Ryan Zimmerman might retire. Gerardo Parra might change his walk-up song. They’ll still be a great team, but they won’t be the very same team that won the first World Series in Washington in over 90 years. It’s been a great pleasure to watch them.
*****
Almost 9 PM, and we still have a lot of candy to give away. The next kid who shows up is going home with untold candy riches. And I’m going to bed early. I’ve been up late watching baseball; and of course, I never did get the extra hour of sleep.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
A handful of total nonsense
It’s a Tuesday night and I’m watching Capitals hockey, my ever-present proof that October isn’t all bad. It’s not that good, but it’s not all bad. I was just reading my backlog of drafts. I have so many that I forgot about some of them. They’re like handbags. They’re like eggs or milk or strawberries--I get more than I need and then some end up going bad. Some of those old drafts are no longer relevant to anything in either my life or the world at large. OBE, as the Feds say--overcome by events.
Ten million (give or take) drafts in progress, but nothing to write about today. It’s OK. Even the most brilliant creative minds only have a few ideas at any one time, and I’m not a brilliant creative mind. I’m just a girl with a cluttered pile of Google Docs drafts, sitting in front of a keyboard, hoping that a post will finish writing itself.
*****
It must have been about two weeks ago when I wrote that.
Actually, it was just over two weeks. October 8, to be exact. Today is October 24. I realized, because I’m just that brilliant, that Google Docs must have some way to track versioning; and after I realized this, it was but the work of a moment to figure out how to do it. And so I did, and now I know exactly when I started writing this. My literary executors will need this information .
I’ve published three posts since October 8, including one from my draft backlog. Of course, I also started another draft, so I’m still overstocked with drafts. Maybe I’ll have a sale.
It turns out that there’s another good thing about October; that is, when your favorite baseball team is playing in the World Series. I love the World Series no matter who is playing as long as they’re not in New York or Boston. But I love it so much more when my team is playing. And it’s too early to say anything more about that.
*****
It’s Friday night now and we’re watching game 3. That’s not a prediction or anything, just a statement. It’s OK to mention that we’re watching a game; it’s just not OK to speculate on the outcome.
If I’m being honest, which I always am, I’m not 150 percent sober right now. I’ve only had a glass and a half of wine, but my tolerance is not what it was. I just registered my son for his first year of high school swimming, completing an online form that makes the FAFSA look like an Amazon order. I’ll recover my will to live, I”m sure, but it will take days. I should have taken screenshots. I’ll need to document the entire process so that I’ll be able to repeat it in the spring when I have to register him for baseball. I’ll have to remain clear-headed and sober. I’ll have to train. Maybe a few days of fasting and meditation first. Or maybe I’ll make my husband do it next time.
*****
Now it’s Saturday morning. I have some plans today but right now, I’m the only person in the house who’s awake, so I’m reading and writing and watching old movies. Yes, you can do all three at once.
I have always disliked Woody Allen movies rather intensely. Even before poor Dylan Farrow (who I am sure is telling the truth) told the world about her childhood sexual abuse, I found his movies annoying and self-indulgent. But “Match Point” might be the exception to my no Woody Allen ever rule.
Right after “Match Point” ended, “A Handful of Dust” came on. I didn’t watch it because I love the book, and because it was time to get off the couch and do something. I mean really. But “Match Point” seemed very much like what Evelyn Waugh (who wrote the novel A Handful of Dust) would see in 21st-century life, especially among the English upper classes, and especially in the relationships between men and women. I’m pretty sure that Woody Allen wouldn't expect anyone to compare him to Evelyn Waugh, but there it is.
Waugh was smart enough that he would have known that once abortion is available as a choice, then it’s not long before the choice is no longer in the hands of the pregnant woman but instead in the hands of the unwilling father of her baby. He would also have known that a man who demands that a woman abort his own child would have no problem killing her when she fails to cooperate.
The murderer in "Match Point" gets away with it and the viewer has no reason to think that he’ll ever pay for his crimes, but I still think that Waugh would have approved. He was smart enough to know that bad people get away with things all the time. He also knew that there are always consequences; if not in this life, then in the next.
*****
So that’s what happens when you let me get mixed up with movie reviews and theology. I’m competent at neither. I just know what I know.
It’s the last Tuesday in October now, and I’m still not making any World Series predictions (though it’s do or die tonight). I’ll say only that this weekend didn’t go quite as we expected. Much like this blog post, in fact. Maybe it did write itself.
Ten million (give or take) drafts in progress, but nothing to write about today. It’s OK. Even the most brilliant creative minds only have a few ideas at any one time, and I’m not a brilliant creative mind. I’m just a girl with a cluttered pile of Google Docs drafts, sitting in front of a keyboard, hoping that a post will finish writing itself.
*****
It must have been about two weeks ago when I wrote that.
Actually, it was just over two weeks. October 8, to be exact. Today is October 24. I realized, because I’m just that brilliant, that Google Docs must have some way to track versioning; and after I realized this, it was but the work of a moment to figure out how to do it. And so I did, and now I know exactly when I started writing this. My literary executors will need this information .
I’ve published three posts since October 8, including one from my draft backlog. Of course, I also started another draft, so I’m still overstocked with drafts. Maybe I’ll have a sale.
It turns out that there’s another good thing about October; that is, when your favorite baseball team is playing in the World Series. I love the World Series no matter who is playing as long as they’re not in New York or Boston. But I love it so much more when my team is playing. And it’s too early to say anything more about that.
*****
It’s Friday night now and we’re watching game 3. That’s not a prediction or anything, just a statement. It’s OK to mention that we’re watching a game; it’s just not OK to speculate on the outcome.
If I’m being honest, which I always am, I’m not 150 percent sober right now. I’ve only had a glass and a half of wine, but my tolerance is not what it was. I just registered my son for his first year of high school swimming, completing an online form that makes the FAFSA look like an Amazon order. I’ll recover my will to live, I”m sure, but it will take days. I should have taken screenshots. I’ll need to document the entire process so that I’ll be able to repeat it in the spring when I have to register him for baseball. I’ll have to remain clear-headed and sober. I’ll have to train. Maybe a few days of fasting and meditation first. Or maybe I’ll make my husband do it next time.
*****
Now it’s Saturday morning. I have some plans today but right now, I’m the only person in the house who’s awake, so I’m reading and writing and watching old movies. Yes, you can do all three at once.
I have always disliked Woody Allen movies rather intensely. Even before poor Dylan Farrow (who I am sure is telling the truth) told the world about her childhood sexual abuse, I found his movies annoying and self-indulgent. But “Match Point” might be the exception to my no Woody Allen ever rule.
Right after “Match Point” ended, “A Handful of Dust” came on. I didn’t watch it because I love the book, and because it was time to get off the couch and do something. I mean really. But “Match Point” seemed very much like what Evelyn Waugh (who wrote the novel A Handful of Dust) would see in 21st-century life, especially among the English upper classes, and especially in the relationships between men and women. I’m pretty sure that Woody Allen wouldn't expect anyone to compare him to Evelyn Waugh, but there it is.
Waugh was smart enough that he would have known that once abortion is available as a choice, then it’s not long before the choice is no longer in the hands of the pregnant woman but instead in the hands of the unwilling father of her baby. He would also have known that a man who demands that a woman abort his own child would have no problem killing her when she fails to cooperate.
The murderer in "Match Point" gets away with it and the viewer has no reason to think that he’ll ever pay for his crimes, but I still think that Waugh would have approved. He was smart enough to know that bad people get away with things all the time. He also knew that there are always consequences; if not in this life, then in the next.
*****
So that’s what happens when you let me get mixed up with movie reviews and theology. I’m competent at neither. I just know what I know.
It’s the last Tuesday in October now, and I’m still not making any World Series predictions (though it’s do or die tonight). I’ll say only that this weekend didn’t go quite as we expected. Much like this blog post, in fact. Maybe it did write itself.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
It will be night
Not long ago, I was walking and listening to NPR on the radio. Ari Shapiro was interviewing Karina Sainz Borgo, a Venezuelan journalist who just published a novel, It Would Be Night in Caracas.
The novel is about a woman struggling to survive amid chaos in crumbling Venezuela. I haven’t read it yet. Ari asked the author about the difference between journalism and fiction-writing, and she said “Journalism provides answers and fiction provides questions.”
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the idea of fiction as a question or a way to figure out the truth was appealing to me. Sainz Borgo left Venezuela in 2013 and she hasn’t been back. She has to just imagine how much Venezuela has deteriorated in the last six years. She has more questions than answers.
Sainz Borgo also talked about survivors’ guilt. She still has family in Venezuela. She has friends and former neighbors and schoolmates who are struggling to survive, while she lives safely in Europe, and the guilt weighs on her.
******
I walk almost every day. I finish work pretty early, around 4, and I walk when I get home, before I start dinner. Soon it’ll be dark early, and I won’t be able to walk after work. I’ll have to go to the gym instead.
For months, I have walked almost the same route every day. I didn’t even think about it. I just put on my sneakers and my earbuds and walked. During the last few weeks, the route has seemed longer and longer every day. On the day I listened to this broadcast, I almost dreaded going and then I realized that I was probably just tired of the same walk, and I could just walk a different way. And I did. And it was lovely.
My neighborhood is small, and I’ve lived here for 15 years. I’ve been walking through this neighborhood for a decade and a half and so I know every street and every corner. It’s all so familiar. Every house reminds me of a neighbor or a friend or a kid’s friend or a friend’s kid.
I’d miss this place if anything happened. And anything can happen. A reviewer wrote that It Would Be Night in Venezuela is a reminder of how quickly things can change and how fast the world you know can just disappear. Some people never think about this; I never stop thinking about it. The worst-case scenario is my default option. Believe it or not, there are advantages to this all-anxiety all-the-time mindset. When it finally does all hit the fan, I won’t be surprised. I won’t necessarily be ready, but I won’t be surprised.
*****
Karina Sainz Borgo misses the Venezuela that she grew up in, but as she told Ari Shapiro, “The country I want to go back to doesn’t exist anymore.” She probably remembers her old neighborhood. She probably remembers her old walking routes and her neighbors’ houses with their children and their dogs. Maybe she hung out at a swimming pool or a park, or maybe she had a favorite coffee shop. Maybe she dreams sometimes about her old haunts, and wakes up grieving her loss.
*****
I was a baseball fan when I was young, and I still really like the game (thought not as much as hockey). My grandfather taught me how to watch a game, and how to score a game. The Philadelphia Phillies were my team. And I still like the Phillies, but we are a Washington Nationals household now; and if you have been following the news, then you know that the Nationals are playing in their first-ever World Series.
During Game 1 of the NLCS, Nats vs. St. Louis, I thought about Venezuela as I watched Anibal Sanchez take a no-hitter against the Cardinals into the eighth inning. How does Sanchez feel, I wondered. Does he think about Venezuela and wonder why he’s here enjoying great success in the United States when his country has descended into chaos, and his fellow Venezuelans are suffering and struggling to survive amid shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Does he feel fortunate, or guilty, or both? Does he dream about returning to a country that no longer exists?
*****
So Daylight Savings Time is over now, and we’re back on Standard Time. Last night, everyone got a single one-time-only extra hour of sleep in exchange for losing an hour’s worth of daylight every single day for six months. Not a good bargain at all. I’ll have to get my walk in as soon as I get home from work, until late November or so, when I’ll have to give up the afternoon walk and go to the gym to exercise. We don’t have sidewalks here, so night walking is kind of hazardous. Plus bats and foxes. I don’t socialize with wildlife.
At the end of the NPR interview, Sainz Borgo read a short excerpt from the novel. The passage ended with the words “It's always night there. The people look like ghosts.” I guess that’s what I’ll try to think about every time I feel like complaining about the early darkness, which will be every single day until April. I’ll try to think about every place in the world where people can’t depend on the basic things in life--the bare necessities like food and water; and the not-quite-necessary-for-survival-but-still-really-nice-to-have things, like bright cheerful light on a dark evening. I’ll miss the early daylight, but it will be back. I hope the lights will come back on in Venezuela soon. I hope that the lights will come on in the rest of the world, too. Let’s go Nats.
The novel is about a woman struggling to survive amid chaos in crumbling Venezuela. I haven’t read it yet. Ari asked the author about the difference between journalism and fiction-writing, and she said “Journalism provides answers and fiction provides questions.”
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the idea of fiction as a question or a way to figure out the truth was appealing to me. Sainz Borgo left Venezuela in 2013 and she hasn’t been back. She has to just imagine how much Venezuela has deteriorated in the last six years. She has more questions than answers.
Sainz Borgo also talked about survivors’ guilt. She still has family in Venezuela. She has friends and former neighbors and schoolmates who are struggling to survive, while she lives safely in Europe, and the guilt weighs on her.
******
I walk almost every day. I finish work pretty early, around 4, and I walk when I get home, before I start dinner. Soon it’ll be dark early, and I won’t be able to walk after work. I’ll have to go to the gym instead.
For months, I have walked almost the same route every day. I didn’t even think about it. I just put on my sneakers and my earbuds and walked. During the last few weeks, the route has seemed longer and longer every day. On the day I listened to this broadcast, I almost dreaded going and then I realized that I was probably just tired of the same walk, and I could just walk a different way. And I did. And it was lovely.
My neighborhood is small, and I’ve lived here for 15 years. I’ve been walking through this neighborhood for a decade and a half and so I know every street and every corner. It’s all so familiar. Every house reminds me of a neighbor or a friend or a kid’s friend or a friend’s kid.
I’d miss this place if anything happened. And anything can happen. A reviewer wrote that It Would Be Night in Venezuela is a reminder of how quickly things can change and how fast the world you know can just disappear. Some people never think about this; I never stop thinking about it. The worst-case scenario is my default option. Believe it or not, there are advantages to this all-anxiety all-the-time mindset. When it finally does all hit the fan, I won’t be surprised. I won’t necessarily be ready, but I won’t be surprised.
*****
Karina Sainz Borgo misses the Venezuela that she grew up in, but as she told Ari Shapiro, “The country I want to go back to doesn’t exist anymore.” She probably remembers her old neighborhood. She probably remembers her old walking routes and her neighbors’ houses with their children and their dogs. Maybe she hung out at a swimming pool or a park, or maybe she had a favorite coffee shop. Maybe she dreams sometimes about her old haunts, and wakes up grieving her loss.
*****
I was a baseball fan when I was young, and I still really like the game (thought not as much as hockey). My grandfather taught me how to watch a game, and how to score a game. The Philadelphia Phillies were my team. And I still like the Phillies, but we are a Washington Nationals household now; and if you have been following the news, then you know that the Nationals are playing in their first-ever World Series.
During Game 1 of the NLCS, Nats vs. St. Louis, I thought about Venezuela as I watched Anibal Sanchez take a no-hitter against the Cardinals into the eighth inning. How does Sanchez feel, I wondered. Does he think about Venezuela and wonder why he’s here enjoying great success in the United States when his country has descended into chaos, and his fellow Venezuelans are suffering and struggling to survive amid shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities. Does he feel fortunate, or guilty, or both? Does he dream about returning to a country that no longer exists?
*****
So Daylight Savings Time is over now, and we’re back on Standard Time. Last night, everyone got a single one-time-only extra hour of sleep in exchange for losing an hour’s worth of daylight every single day for six months. Not a good bargain at all. I’ll have to get my walk in as soon as I get home from work, until late November or so, when I’ll have to give up the afternoon walk and go to the gym to exercise. We don’t have sidewalks here, so night walking is kind of hazardous. Plus bats and foxes. I don’t socialize with wildlife.
At the end of the NPR interview, Sainz Borgo read a short excerpt from the novel. The passage ended with the words “It's always night there. The people look like ghosts.” I guess that’s what I’ll try to think about every time I feel like complaining about the early darkness, which will be every single day until April. I’ll try to think about every place in the world where people can’t depend on the basic things in life--the bare necessities like food and water; and the not-quite-necessary-for-survival-but-still-really-nice-to-have things, like bright cheerful light on a dark evening. I’ll miss the early daylight, but it will be back. I hope the lights will come back on in Venezuela soon. I hope that the lights will come on in the rest of the world, too. Let’s go Nats.
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Liquids
I wasn’t very productive today. I’m working on a new project at work, and it’s early stage, the part where I don’t really even know what the project is yet, or what I’m supposed to do. I’m doing some research. This is helping me to see that there are great, gaping holes in my knowledge, but it is not helping me to fill those holes. It’s humbling.
As I filled my water bottle for the third time, I remembered a conversation from a few days ago. Actually, I remembered part of the conversation, but not the context--I couldn’t remember where I had been, or to whom I had been speaking. Anyway, the other person said that the first thing she did every day was to fill her 2-liter bottle of water. Then, no matter how productive (or not) the rest of her day might be, she’ll have accomplished something when she finishes that giant container of water.
That’s the kind of day I had today. I didn’t get much work done (because I didn’t know what to do) but I drank the water, metaphorically speaking. And I felt better about not being the only person who did nothing but drink the water. Until I remembered that the other participant in that conversation is actually one of the most highly organized and accomplished and productive people I know. There is no day on which water-drinking would be her only accomplishment.
*****
It’s the next day now. I had an opportunity to teach someone something today. It was something that seemed pretty obvious to me, but wasn’t obvious at all to the other person. She was genuinely grateful for my help, and I was genuinely grateful for the reminder that I do have something to offer other than water-drinking and blogging about nothing.
I write every single day, seven days a week. It might be too much. I read Daphne Gray-Grant’s writing blog every Tuesday, and although I don’t follow all of her advice (mind-mapping doesn’t work for me), I do follow some of it (don’t edit as you write! brilliant!) Like most writing experts, Daphne says that writers should write every day. But she defines every day as five days a week. I”m not sure that I’m ready to give up the seven-day schedule yet. But it’s a possibility. I might be trying to do too much. I might need to make some room in my brain for something other than words.
*****
And now it’s the next day again, and if I’m going to a five-day a week schedule, then I guess I’ll start that tomorrow. Or next week.
I read something yesterday, and I admired the writer’s raw honesty, but I couldn’t decide if the piece was good or not. I still can’t decide.
I was plowing through my (figurative) pile of drafts, and I found something that was much more personal than what I usually write. I thought for a moment that I should try to do more of that, try to reveal more, be more honest. But I probably won’t. The particular draft that I’m referring to will for sure never see the light of day. There’s nothing scandalous in it, it’s just too personal. And I also really can’t decide if it’s good or not.
Yes, it’s definitely time to think about something other than words. Maybe I’ll take this weekend off and then see where I am. I’ll drink two liters of water, or maybe two glasses of wine. I’ll regroup.
As I filled my water bottle for the third time, I remembered a conversation from a few days ago. Actually, I remembered part of the conversation, but not the context--I couldn’t remember where I had been, or to whom I had been speaking. Anyway, the other person said that the first thing she did every day was to fill her 2-liter bottle of water. Then, no matter how productive (or not) the rest of her day might be, she’ll have accomplished something when she finishes that giant container of water.
That’s the kind of day I had today. I didn’t get much work done (because I didn’t know what to do) but I drank the water, metaphorically speaking. And I felt better about not being the only person who did nothing but drink the water. Until I remembered that the other participant in that conversation is actually one of the most highly organized and accomplished and productive people I know. There is no day on which water-drinking would be her only accomplishment.
*****
It’s the next day now. I had an opportunity to teach someone something today. It was something that seemed pretty obvious to me, but wasn’t obvious at all to the other person. She was genuinely grateful for my help, and I was genuinely grateful for the reminder that I do have something to offer other than water-drinking and blogging about nothing.
I write every single day, seven days a week. It might be too much. I read Daphne Gray-Grant’s writing blog every Tuesday, and although I don’t follow all of her advice (mind-mapping doesn’t work for me), I do follow some of it (don’t edit as you write! brilliant!) Like most writing experts, Daphne says that writers should write every day. But she defines every day as five days a week. I”m not sure that I’m ready to give up the seven-day schedule yet. But it’s a possibility. I might be trying to do too much. I might need to make some room in my brain for something other than words.
*****
And now it’s the next day again, and if I’m going to a five-day a week schedule, then I guess I’ll start that tomorrow. Or next week.
I read something yesterday, and I admired the writer’s raw honesty, but I couldn’t decide if the piece was good or not. I still can’t decide.
I was plowing through my (figurative) pile of drafts, and I found something that was much more personal than what I usually write. I thought for a moment that I should try to do more of that, try to reveal more, be more honest. But I probably won’t. The particular draft that I’m referring to will for sure never see the light of day. There’s nothing scandalous in it, it’s just too personal. And I also really can’t decide if it’s good or not.
Yes, it’s definitely time to think about something other than words. Maybe I’ll take this weekend off and then see where I am. I’ll drink two liters of water, or maybe two glasses of wine. I’ll regroup.
Friday, October 18, 2019
Everything is copy
Last week, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room, monitoring my husband’s status on a screen that provides alerts to waiting family members so they’ll know when to expect their loved one to emerge. Each patient is assigned a number, and you can watch as the person’s number progresses through color-coded phases: Pink for Pre-Op, Orange for OR, Blue for Post-Op, Green for Recovery. After a short time in Recovery, assuming all goes well, a smiling volunteer taps you on the shoulder and asks you to follow her to the recovery room, where your post-operative spouse or parent or friend is sitting comfortably in a chair, still wearing a hospital gown and fuzzy socks, sipping Coke over ice and eating graham crackers.
I was reading The Woman in White as I waited, because Nora Ephron told me to read that book, and where books are concerned, I generally do whatever Nora tells me to do. As I read, I overheard a conversation between two fellow waiting room occupants. “How old was he?” the woman asked.
“Eighty-two,” said the man. “But you’d never have known it to look at him. He looked more like 62.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the woman. Terrible that the man died, I suppose, not that he apparently looked decades younger than he was.
“Yeah, it was so unexpected,” said the man. “He was out for a run, and he had a sudden heart attack. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.”
“Terrible,” said the woman. “I guess we never know.”
******
Nora Eprhon writes about death in “Considering the Alternative,” the last essay in I Feel Bad About My Neck (which was much better than I described it, by the way--take all of my literary criticism with great crusty grains of salt). To paraphrase, she writes about our tendency to think of death as a remote contingency, a possibility that we should maybe, possibly be prepared for; rather than what it is--an absolute certainty; a when, not an if; the end that waits for every single one of us. Eventually, sooner or later, we’re all going to die.
Nora would have been amused, I think, about the apparent shock with which the 82-year-old jogger’s friend reacted to his sudden death. A sudden death is of course always a shock, but that an 82-year-old man dying of a heart attack during a run should provoke such disbelief speaks to a universal human tendency to pretend that death is something that only happens to other people, other people who should have taken better care of themselves.
*****
You know what else was going on on the very same day? It was apparently National Handbag Day. This should be the most important of national holidays from my perspective but I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been in a hospital. Because a hospital is the only place where I’d ever watch the Today show; much less the third or fourth hour of the Today show, and that’s where I learned that it was National Handbag Day. Thank God, I can imagine the Today show producers saying to each other. It’s National Handbag Day, so we can do show and tell with the contents of Craig Melvin’s backpack and Dylan Dreyer’s tote bag (which was a mess, by the way--throw away your used tissues, girl). For all I know, the producers of the Today show made the whole thing up, just so they could fill a few minutes of the hours and hours of air time that the Today show occupies. It must be exhausting to work for the Today show. Relentless.
Anyway, there it was, National Handbag Day, when I had just read Nora’s essay “I Hate My Purse.” We had a doctor with what had to have been a surgically altered neck, a TV personality whose purse was an even bigger mess than Nora’s (really--don’t put chewed-up gum in your handbag, even if it’s wrapped in paper--just throw it away) and a real-life proof of Nora’s theorem about people’s reluctance to accept the inevitability of death. It was a little eerie.
Nora Ephron so disliked handbags that she didn’t even carry one when she had enough pockets to carry her essentials. Nora was right about a lot of things. In fact, she knew enough that she could write about my day 13 years before it happened. But she was dead wrong about handbags. I love pockets, but there’s nothing like a handbag. Thanks to my new favorite handbag (Longchamp Le Pliage in my favorite wine color) I was able to carry my wallet, phone, little cosmetic case, rosary, lip balm, keys, Kindle, and pen and notebook; and I still had plenty of room for all of the stuff that my husband had to hand over before they rolled him away. There was room for a water bottle. There was room for the prescriptions that we picked up at the pharmacy before we went home. I clipped my keys to the straps with a carabiner, but I could have also stuffed them inside if I needed to.
Nora hated her purse because she had the wrong purse. There’s no other reason that I can think of to hate something that’s so obviously an undisputed good. A good handbag is pretty, it carries everything you need, and it gives you something to do with your hands. An undisputed good.
*****
Not long ago, I tried to re-create a favorite childhood dish. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but it was OK. I wrote a whole thing about it, actually, and then forgot about it. I have a pretty big backlog of drafts. I wrote about that, too. Everything is copy. That’s what Nora said. Unsurprisingly, Nora also wrote about food nostalgia, in “The Lost Strudel,” because every time I think I’m writing about something new, I find that Nora has beaten me to it.
Apparently, there is a thing called cabbage strudel. Nora described it and it sounds delicious. It was sold at Hungarian bakeries all over New York City until one day, tastes abruptly shifted and cabbage strudel was no longer a fashionable food. Nora was heartbroken. She hunted in vain for her beloved strudel but it was gone until a few years later, when a friend told her that a new Hungarian bakery had opened. The new bakery sold cabbage strudel and it was just as good as Nora remembered. A happy ending.
Maybe my next attempt to re-create a favorite childhood food will be successful, but not today. Today we’re having leftovers. I don’t think that Nora Ephron had anything to say about leftovers, but I’m about to read I Remember Nothing, so I’ll find out for sure. If she didn’t write about leftovers, then I will. Everything is copy.
I was reading The Woman in White as I waited, because Nora Ephron told me to read that book, and where books are concerned, I generally do whatever Nora tells me to do. As I read, I overheard a conversation between two fellow waiting room occupants. “How old was he?” the woman asked.
“Eighty-two,” said the man. “But you’d never have known it to look at him. He looked more like 62.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the woman. Terrible that the man died, I suppose, not that he apparently looked decades younger than he was.
“Yeah, it was so unexpected,” said the man. “He was out for a run, and he had a sudden heart attack. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.”
“Terrible,” said the woman. “I guess we never know.”
******
Nora Eprhon writes about death in “Considering the Alternative,” the last essay in I Feel Bad About My Neck (which was much better than I described it, by the way--take all of my literary criticism with great crusty grains of salt). To paraphrase, she writes about our tendency to think of death as a remote contingency, a possibility that we should maybe, possibly be prepared for; rather than what it is--an absolute certainty; a when, not an if; the end that waits for every single one of us. Eventually, sooner or later, we’re all going to die.
Nora would have been amused, I think, about the apparent shock with which the 82-year-old jogger’s friend reacted to his sudden death. A sudden death is of course always a shock, but that an 82-year-old man dying of a heart attack during a run should provoke such disbelief speaks to a universal human tendency to pretend that death is something that only happens to other people, other people who should have taken better care of themselves.
*****
You know what else was going on on the very same day? It was apparently National Handbag Day. This should be the most important of national holidays from my perspective but I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been in a hospital. Because a hospital is the only place where I’d ever watch the Today show; much less the third or fourth hour of the Today show, and that’s where I learned that it was National Handbag Day. Thank God, I can imagine the Today show producers saying to each other. It’s National Handbag Day, so we can do show and tell with the contents of Craig Melvin’s backpack and Dylan Dreyer’s tote bag (which was a mess, by the way--throw away your used tissues, girl). For all I know, the producers of the Today show made the whole thing up, just so they could fill a few minutes of the hours and hours of air time that the Today show occupies. It must be exhausting to work for the Today show. Relentless.
Anyway, there it was, National Handbag Day, when I had just read Nora’s essay “I Hate My Purse.” We had a doctor with what had to have been a surgically altered neck, a TV personality whose purse was an even bigger mess than Nora’s (really--don’t put chewed-up gum in your handbag, even if it’s wrapped in paper--just throw it away) and a real-life proof of Nora’s theorem about people’s reluctance to accept the inevitability of death. It was a little eerie.
Nora Ephron so disliked handbags that she didn’t even carry one when she had enough pockets to carry her essentials. Nora was right about a lot of things. In fact, she knew enough that she could write about my day 13 years before it happened. But she was dead wrong about handbags. I love pockets, but there’s nothing like a handbag. Thanks to my new favorite handbag (Longchamp Le Pliage in my favorite wine color) I was able to carry my wallet, phone, little cosmetic case, rosary, lip balm, keys, Kindle, and pen and notebook; and I still had plenty of room for all of the stuff that my husband had to hand over before they rolled him away. There was room for a water bottle. There was room for the prescriptions that we picked up at the pharmacy before we went home. I clipped my keys to the straps with a carabiner, but I could have also stuffed them inside if I needed to.
Nora hated her purse because she had the wrong purse. There’s no other reason that I can think of to hate something that’s so obviously an undisputed good. A good handbag is pretty, it carries everything you need, and it gives you something to do with your hands. An undisputed good.
*****
Not long ago, I tried to re-create a favorite childhood dish. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but it was OK. I wrote a whole thing about it, actually, and then forgot about it. I have a pretty big backlog of drafts. I wrote about that, too. Everything is copy. That’s what Nora said. Unsurprisingly, Nora also wrote about food nostalgia, in “The Lost Strudel,” because every time I think I’m writing about something new, I find that Nora has beaten me to it.
Apparently, there is a thing called cabbage strudel. Nora described it and it sounds delicious. It was sold at Hungarian bakeries all over New York City until one day, tastes abruptly shifted and cabbage strudel was no longer a fashionable food. Nora was heartbroken. She hunted in vain for her beloved strudel but it was gone until a few years later, when a friend told her that a new Hungarian bakery had opened. The new bakery sold cabbage strudel and it was just as good as Nora remembered. A happy ending.
Maybe my next attempt to re-create a favorite childhood food will be successful, but not today. Today we’re having leftovers. I don’t think that Nora Ephron had anything to say about leftovers, but I’m about to read I Remember Nothing, so I’ll find out for sure. If she didn’t write about leftovers, then I will. Everything is copy.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Post-operative
It’s Wednesday. I worked from home today, unusual (though not unheard-of) for a Wednesday. I have far too much work to do right now, and the panic helped me to focus and direct my energies. I got quite a lot accomplished today, enough that I have some breathing room. Enough, in fact, that I can stop working now and write about having too much to do, instead of just doing it.
Yes, I know.
I finished Not that Kind of Girl, and now I’m reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. I like Nora Ephron, God rest her soul, though I sometimes find her intimidating. She was a very successful journalist and writer and cultural observer and influencer, who probably accomplished more in a day than I do in a month. I don’t think I could have kept up with her in real life.
I Feel Bad About My Neck is good, though not nearly as good as Wallflower at the Orgy. It reads as a little lazy and scattershot, a little fast and loose. It was published in 2006, when she was NORA EPHRON, Nora Fucking Ephron, and so people were willing to read anything she wrote. I’m still willing to read anything she wrote, but I know the difference between really good Nora Ephron and phoning-it-in Nora Ephron.
I don’t feel bad about my neck just yet. But I don’t feel good about it either. I’m aware of it. I suppose that’s the first step, the beginning of the slippery slope. Once you start to notice your neck, a completely utilitarian body part that you used to be able to ignore, you’re on the downward spiral from middle-aged to old. And I hate turtlenecks.
*****
What is middle age anyway? What does it mean to be middle aged? I have heard comedians and others suggest that it's absurdly optimistic to call 50 middle aged because it assumes that a person should expect to live to be 100. Not an unreasonable argument, I suppose. But if you remove childhood from the equation and count only the phases of adulthood, then 50 or so is right in the middle of middle age.
Let's establish the ranges right now:
That's my final word. If you're 40 or 65, don't @ me to argue about your placement. It is what it is.
By these final and incontrovertible rules, my husband (almost 50) and I (over 50) are both middle-aged. Because we have been middle-aged for a while, it's long past time for at least one of us to accept that there are certain things that middle aged people shouldn't do. Like playing softball.
By now, you're thinking "this is going somewhere, isn't it?" And it is. We're at Montgomery Medstar Medical Center right now, waiting for an anesthesiologist to put my husband under so that a surgeon can fix his mangled hand. Softball. Ridiculous.
We're in the pre-surgery waiting area, in a semi private little curtained-off cubicle, with just a tiny hospital bed, a visitor's chair, and a hand-painted ceiling tile that I suppose is there to relax the patient. It's a nice, thoughtful touch.
My husband is uncharacteristically nervous. He's wearing a hospital gown and hospital-issued fuzzy socks and he has an IV for fluids. He can't eat or drink anything and he can't sleep because of the IV. The surgeon, a very energetic, wiry Asian man with close-cropped gray hair and an unnaturally unwrinkled face, just stopped by to check on my husband. He seems like a nice man and he comes very highly recommended, but I'm not sure I trust a man who has what appears to be quite a bit of Botox. And his neck is very very tight. Nora Ephron would be envious.
*****
This is the second time this year that I've been here at this hospital, waiting for someone else to endure the attentions of medical professionals. Last time I was only in the waiting room, feeling sorry for the obviously sick people who had to sit in a public place, visible to all, when they were at their most vulnerable. Today I'm in the pre-surgery waiting area and even here, the patients are exposed to the prying eyes of every passer-by. I feel intrusive and unfairly advantaged, with my street clothes and my shoes and my car keys that allow me to walk out of here and drive away if I want to.
*****
My husband’s surgery went well. He spent Thursday afternoon in bed, napping and watching sports and recovering. He returned to work on Friday, at least three days before he should have, but there’s no stopping him. I hope that everyone else who had surgery last week is doing as well.
Yes, I know.
I finished Not that Kind of Girl, and now I’m reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. I like Nora Ephron, God rest her soul, though I sometimes find her intimidating. She was a very successful journalist and writer and cultural observer and influencer, who probably accomplished more in a day than I do in a month. I don’t think I could have kept up with her in real life.
I Feel Bad About My Neck is good, though not nearly as good as Wallflower at the Orgy. It reads as a little lazy and scattershot, a little fast and loose. It was published in 2006, when she was NORA EPHRON, Nora Fucking Ephron, and so people were willing to read anything she wrote. I’m still willing to read anything she wrote, but I know the difference between really good Nora Ephron and phoning-it-in Nora Ephron.
I don’t feel bad about my neck just yet. But I don’t feel good about it either. I’m aware of it. I suppose that’s the first step, the beginning of the slippery slope. Once you start to notice your neck, a completely utilitarian body part that you used to be able to ignore, you’re on the downward spiral from middle-aged to old. And I hate turtlenecks.
*****
What is middle age anyway? What does it mean to be middle aged? I have heard comedians and others suggest that it's absurdly optimistic to call 50 middle aged because it assumes that a person should expect to live to be 100. Not an unreasonable argument, I suppose. But if you remove childhood from the equation and count only the phases of adulthood, then 50 or so is right in the middle of middle age.
Let's establish the ranges right now:
- Young adulthood, 21 - 39
- Middle age, 40 - 64
- Old age, 65 and beyond
That's my final word. If you're 40 or 65, don't @ me to argue about your placement. It is what it is.
By these final and incontrovertible rules, my husband (almost 50) and I (over 50) are both middle-aged. Because we have been middle-aged for a while, it's long past time for at least one of us to accept that there are certain things that middle aged people shouldn't do. Like playing softball.
By now, you're thinking "this is going somewhere, isn't it?" And it is. We're at Montgomery Medstar Medical Center right now, waiting for an anesthesiologist to put my husband under so that a surgeon can fix his mangled hand. Softball. Ridiculous.
We're in the pre-surgery waiting area, in a semi private little curtained-off cubicle, with just a tiny hospital bed, a visitor's chair, and a hand-painted ceiling tile that I suppose is there to relax the patient. It's a nice, thoughtful touch.
 |
| Don't worry about the guy with the scalpel. Just look at the ceiling. |
My husband is uncharacteristically nervous. He's wearing a hospital gown and hospital-issued fuzzy socks and he has an IV for fluids. He can't eat or drink anything and he can't sleep because of the IV. The surgeon, a very energetic, wiry Asian man with close-cropped gray hair and an unnaturally unwrinkled face, just stopped by to check on my husband. He seems like a nice man and he comes very highly recommended, but I'm not sure I trust a man who has what appears to be quite a bit of Botox. And his neck is very very tight. Nora Ephron would be envious.
 |
| I don't know about your neck, Doctor. You're suspect. |
*****
This is the second time this year that I've been here at this hospital, waiting for someone else to endure the attentions of medical professionals. Last time I was only in the waiting room, feeling sorry for the obviously sick people who had to sit in a public place, visible to all, when they were at their most vulnerable. Today I'm in the pre-surgery waiting area and even here, the patients are exposed to the prying eyes of every passer-by. I feel intrusive and unfairly advantaged, with my street clothes and my shoes and my car keys that allow me to walk out of here and drive away if I want to.
*****
My husband’s surgery went well. He spent Thursday afternoon in bed, napping and watching sports and recovering. He returned to work on Friday, at least three days before he should have, but there’s no stopping him. I hope that everyone else who had surgery last week is doing as well.
Monday, October 7, 2019
40 hours
It's Sunday afternoon, 1 PM, and I'm sitting on a school bus in the parking lot at St. Patrick's, on my way to do what the priest at Mass this morning called a "crazy Catholic thing." Rosaries and scapulars and the Blessed Sacrament. Me and 100 old ladies and a bunch of Knights of Columbus.
Yesterday was the first truly fall-like day this year. It was sunny and very breezy and cool enough for an outdoor fire. We had friends and family over, and we sat around the fire pit all day long. I had awakened that morning feeling so depressed that I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had to. We had plans and I had to do what felt impossible, which was to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, and smile and greet and welcome people. It turned out better than I expected.
So now I'm standing in a field on Norbeck Road with a rosary wrapped around my wrist and my phone in my hand, writing about the traffic whizzing by and the overcast, almost-leaden sky and the almost-damp, almost-chilly breeze that made me decide to put on a jacket before I left the house. In a few minutes, the priests will arrive, and the old ladies and the handful of young people and the Knights of Columbus and I will walk a mile or so back up Norbeck to St Patrick's, praying and singing and making something of a spectacle of ourselves. Catholics. We are a mysterious crew.
*****
My jacket and my sneakers and my handbag are all a similar color. Burgundy is probably the best word to describe it, or maybe maroon. That's what my mother always calls this color. I think that wine is the best word. Wine, like the wine-dark sea. My son is a freshman in college, and I remember two phrases from my freshman year in college: Wine-dark sea, and bare, ruined choirs. My literature professor tried his hardest to make us see the beauty in those words. And I do see it now, more than 30 years later, so his time wasn't wasted.
*****
It’s Monday now, I had to stop writing when the procession got underway. We shuffled rather than walked up Norbeck Road, singing and praying, Repetitive prayer is soothing and meditative. I don’t often forget myself, but I did forget myself for a few minutes as a drop of rain or two fell and the procession inched up the road, led by a lights-flashing silent police car. The trees have just begun to turn; and I pondered bare, ruined choirs as I listened to the chanting. The choir was the huddled and barely moving crowd of humanity making its way to the waiting church, and it didn’t feel bare or ruined at all. A wine-dark sea of maroon jackets and wine-colored jackets and burgundy sweaters and dark red raincoats made its way into the church for an hour of quiet prayer for the world. And then we went home.
Yesterday was the first truly fall-like day this year. It was sunny and very breezy and cool enough for an outdoor fire. We had friends and family over, and we sat around the fire pit all day long. I had awakened that morning feeling so depressed that I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had to. We had plans and I had to do what felt impossible, which was to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, and smile and greet and welcome people. It turned out better than I expected.
So now I'm standing in a field on Norbeck Road with a rosary wrapped around my wrist and my phone in my hand, writing about the traffic whizzing by and the overcast, almost-leaden sky and the almost-damp, almost-chilly breeze that made me decide to put on a jacket before I left the house. In a few minutes, the priests will arrive, and the old ladies and the handful of young people and the Knights of Columbus and I will walk a mile or so back up Norbeck to St Patrick's, praying and singing and making something of a spectacle of ourselves. Catholics. We are a mysterious crew.
*****
My jacket and my sneakers and my handbag are all a similar color. Burgundy is probably the best word to describe it, or maybe maroon. That's what my mother always calls this color. I think that wine is the best word. Wine, like the wine-dark sea. My son is a freshman in college, and I remember two phrases from my freshman year in college: Wine-dark sea, and bare, ruined choirs. My literature professor tried his hardest to make us see the beauty in those words. And I do see it now, more than 30 years later, so his time wasn't wasted.
*****
It’s Monday now, I had to stop writing when the procession got underway. We shuffled rather than walked up Norbeck Road, singing and praying, Repetitive prayer is soothing and meditative. I don’t often forget myself, but I did forget myself for a few minutes as a drop of rain or two fell and the procession inched up the road, led by a lights-flashing silent police car. The trees have just begun to turn; and I pondered bare, ruined choirs as I listened to the chanting. The choir was the huddled and barely moving crowd of humanity making its way to the waiting church, and it didn’t feel bare or ruined at all. A wine-dark sea of maroon jackets and wine-colored jackets and burgundy sweaters and dark red raincoats made its way into the church for an hour of quiet prayer for the world. And then we went home.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Sleepless
I don’t sleep sometimes. Sometimes, I sleep almost through the night, for days at a time; and other times, I just don’t sleep. Or I sleep for a few hours, and then I’m awake at 2 and can’t fall back asleep.
Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.
Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.
*****
Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.
So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.
But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.
*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.
*****
At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.
I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.
*****
Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.
Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.
*****
Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.
So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.
But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.
*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.
*****
At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.
I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.
*****
Monday, September 23, 2019
Note to self
Did you know that it’s really easy to make your own meatballs? You probably did know that. But I didn’t, until today. For some reason, I had always been afraid to make meatballs, so I just made sauce with meat in it, and that was what we had with our spaghetti. But today, I found a recipe, and decided to make meatballs. And it was astonishingly easy, and they were very good. The End.
Were you waiting for me to turn that into some kind of lesson about overcoming fears or leaving comfort zones or some shit? No, sorry. I have nothing for you but meatballs. Slightly too-spicy but very delicious meatballs.
*****
When I say that it was easy, I don’t mean that it was fun. Rolling meatballs is like making cookies, and I hate making cookies. And I’m terrible at quantities, too. I had two pounds of ground beef, because the recipe called for one pound, and I wanted to make enough to freeze, so I wouldn’t have to roll meatballs again. But then I looked at the two pounds of meat and I thought that it wouldn’t make nearly enough meatballs to serve everyone and then have enough left over to freeze. And I was wrong, because two pounds of ground beef turns into a quantity of meatballs best described by the measurement “shitload.” Look it up. It’s somewhere between a buttload and a shit-ton.
*****
That was yesterday. My kids are still talking about those meatballs. A culinary triumph. Today, I went to an after-work happy hour, and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday present for a three-year-old girl. I’m sure she’ll get lots of toys, so I bought her a lovely hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables. It’s so pretty that I was tempted to buy a copy for myself.
I bought a notebook instead, because my current notebook is almost full. I’m picky about notebooks, and I usually like the selection at Barnes and Noble. But I skip the Moleskine section. Moleskine is full of itself. They lost me when they introduced the silly Evernote thing and the $179 pen. I do like their bright, hard-cover notebooks, though.
Barnes and Noble also carries Leuchturm1917 notebooks. These are like Moleskine notebooks for people who don’t think Moleskine is hard enough to pronounce. I liked their red cover color, too, but they only had the red one with graph paper. So no Leuchturm1917.
The clearance section had what appeared to be lots of options, but the selection narrowed after I ruled out the ones with the inspirational sayings on the covers, and the obviously ugly ones, and the ones with the hand-tooled leather covers, and the ones from the 300 Writing (Creative/Sketching/Drawing) Prompt series.
I mean, I’m writing about shopping for a notebook. Yesterday, I wrote about meatballs. I don’t need writing prompts.
Among the remaining notebooks, at least half were bullet journals. Bullet journals are a big trend now. And because this trend combines technology rejection in the name of “authenticity” (use real notebooks with paper and real pens, not electronics!) and consumerism (not just any notebook and pen--THIS kind of notebook and THIS kind of pen!) and social media influencers (hundreds of Instagram-filtered notebook photos accompanied by multiple hashtags), it is an easy target for mockery.
Silly as it may be, though, I’m not going to make fun of bullet journaling, because if I’m being honest (and I’m always being honest), I really love the whole idea. Bullet journals are neat and pretty, two of my favorite characteristics of anything. Do a Google image search and see if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing right now and make a beautiful bullet journal. I do. I mean, what am I doing, anyway? Writing about meatballs? I could be bullet journaling.
But I know myself. My handwriting is appallingly bad, and I doodle, and I write in the margins, and I scribble. Notebooks, in fact, are my only refuge of untidiness. Notebooks and my sock drawers. Marie Kondo didn’t get to them yet. So my bullet journal wouldn't look anything like the ones that litter the Pinterest landscape. I'd feel like a failure.
Or worse. Because it's just as likely that I'd start bullet journaling and become compulsive about it, and then it would become another chore that I have to do every day. As I said, I know myself.
I saw one very nice-looking bullet journal notebook and was still tempted to buy it, bullet journal reservations notwithstanding. The notebook was covered with cellophane wrapping with a paper band for the price and brand name. "For the iist-makers and note-takers," it read. Well that's me, right? I spend a good part of my life taking notes and making lists so this notebook was obviously meant for me. But the back side of the wrapper also had a little illustration of the notebook pages and they were way too complicated. A dashboard for your notes. That’s too much to do. It’s too much work. It's the compulsivity again--give me a notebook page with seven different sections dedicated to specific content types, and I will feel compelled to use them appropriately.
Assuming you’re still reading this, at what point did you thank God you're not me? Was it the part about thinking that two pounds of meatballs wasn't enough to feed four people, or the 45 minutes of deliberation over a notebook?
And that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe 20 minutes, or 25 at the most. After no more than 25 or 30 minutes, I picked a "modular" notebook with a very lovely soft blue faux leather cover. It's modular because it comes with three interchangeable and refillable inserts, so you can have blank paper for drawing if you draw, and graph paper for graphing stuff if you do that, and lined paper for writing. I will use all three of the inserts for writing, with a few doodles here and there, and then I’ll get more inserts because the cover really is so pretty that I’ll want to keep using it. And it’s an unusual size, compact but much longer than wide than most notebooks. It’s very well suited to both lists and notes. It has a clear pocket in the front for business cards, and a clear zipper pocket in the back, where I can keep my little ruler (neat underlines under dates and list titles being my only concession to neatness in my notebooks).
*****
The notebook is just right, and my notes are very neat and well-organized, as they always are during the three- to four-day notebook honeymoon period. The inside of the notebook will soon be a jumble of scribble, comprehensible only to me. And that’s the way I like it. And now it’s time to cook dinner. I have a new perfect-for-weeknights chicken recipe that looks very promising. If it’s anywhere near as good as the meatballs, then maybe I’ll have to use one of the little notebook sections for recipes. Maybe I like to cook now. I have a new notebook, so anything is possible, anything at all.
Were you waiting for me to turn that into some kind of lesson about overcoming fears or leaving comfort zones or some shit? No, sorry. I have nothing for you but meatballs. Slightly too-spicy but very delicious meatballs.
*****
When I say that it was easy, I don’t mean that it was fun. Rolling meatballs is like making cookies, and I hate making cookies. And I’m terrible at quantities, too. I had two pounds of ground beef, because the recipe called for one pound, and I wanted to make enough to freeze, so I wouldn’t have to roll meatballs again. But then I looked at the two pounds of meat and I thought that it wouldn’t make nearly enough meatballs to serve everyone and then have enough left over to freeze. And I was wrong, because two pounds of ground beef turns into a quantity of meatballs best described by the measurement “shitload.” Look it up. It’s somewhere between a buttload and a shit-ton.
*****
That was yesterday. My kids are still talking about those meatballs. A culinary triumph. Today, I went to an after-work happy hour, and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday present for a three-year-old girl. I’m sure she’ll get lots of toys, so I bought her a lovely hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables. It’s so pretty that I was tempted to buy a copy for myself.
I bought a notebook instead, because my current notebook is almost full. I’m picky about notebooks, and I usually like the selection at Barnes and Noble. But I skip the Moleskine section. Moleskine is full of itself. They lost me when they introduced the silly Evernote thing and the $179 pen. I do like their bright, hard-cover notebooks, though.
Barnes and Noble also carries Leuchturm1917 notebooks. These are like Moleskine notebooks for people who don’t think Moleskine is hard enough to pronounce. I liked their red cover color, too, but they only had the red one with graph paper. So no Leuchturm1917.
 |
| I was tempted. The red cover is very nice. |
The clearance section had what appeared to be lots of options, but the selection narrowed after I ruled out the ones with the inspirational sayings on the covers, and the obviously ugly ones, and the ones with the hand-tooled leather covers, and the ones from the 300 Writing (Creative/Sketching/Drawing) Prompt series.
 |
| No. |
I mean, I’m writing about shopping for a notebook. Yesterday, I wrote about meatballs. I don’t need writing prompts.
Among the remaining notebooks, at least half were bullet journals. Bullet journals are a big trend now. And because this trend combines technology rejection in the name of “authenticity” (use real notebooks with paper and real pens, not electronics!) and consumerism (not just any notebook and pen--THIS kind of notebook and THIS kind of pen!) and social media influencers (hundreds of Instagram-filtered notebook photos accompanied by multiple hashtags), it is an easy target for mockery.
Silly as it may be, though, I’m not going to make fun of bullet journaling, because if I’m being honest (and I’m always being honest), I really love the whole idea. Bullet journals are neat and pretty, two of my favorite characteristics of anything. Do a Google image search and see if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing right now and make a beautiful bullet journal. I do. I mean, what am I doing, anyway? Writing about meatballs? I could be bullet journaling.
But I know myself. My handwriting is appallingly bad, and I doodle, and I write in the margins, and I scribble. Notebooks, in fact, are my only refuge of untidiness. Notebooks and my sock drawers. Marie Kondo didn’t get to them yet. So my bullet journal wouldn't look anything like the ones that litter the Pinterest landscape. I'd feel like a failure.
Or worse. Because it's just as likely that I'd start bullet journaling and become compulsive about it, and then it would become another chore that I have to do every day. As I said, I know myself.
I saw one very nice-looking bullet journal notebook and was still tempted to buy it, bullet journal reservations notwithstanding. The notebook was covered with cellophane wrapping with a paper band for the price and brand name. "For the iist-makers and note-takers," it read. Well that's me, right? I spend a good part of my life taking notes and making lists so this notebook was obviously meant for me. But the back side of the wrapper also had a little illustration of the notebook pages and they were way too complicated. A dashboard for your notes. That’s too much to do. It’s too much work. It's the compulsivity again--give me a notebook page with seven different sections dedicated to specific content types, and I will feel compelled to use them appropriately.
 |
| Simple on the outside, complicated on the inside. I'd have needed a training class to use this notebook effectively. Ain't nobody got time. |
Assuming you’re still reading this, at what point did you thank God you're not me? Was it the part about thinking that two pounds of meatballs wasn't enough to feed four people, or the 45 minutes of deliberation over a notebook?
And that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe 20 minutes, or 25 at the most. After no more than 25 or 30 minutes, I picked a "modular" notebook with a very lovely soft blue faux leather cover. It's modular because it comes with three interchangeable and refillable inserts, so you can have blank paper for drawing if you draw, and graph paper for graphing stuff if you do that, and lined paper for writing. I will use all three of the inserts for writing, with a few doodles here and there, and then I’ll get more inserts because the cover really is so pretty that I’ll want to keep using it. And it’s an unusual size, compact but much longer than wide than most notebooks. It’s very well suited to both lists and notes. It has a clear pocket in the front for business cards, and a clear zipper pocket in the back, where I can keep my little ruler (neat underlines under dates and list titles being my only concession to neatness in my notebooks).
*****
The notebook is just right, and my notes are very neat and well-organized, as they always are during the three- to four-day notebook honeymoon period. The inside of the notebook will soon be a jumble of scribble, comprehensible only to me. And that’s the way I like it. And now it’s time to cook dinner. I have a new perfect-for-weeknights chicken recipe that looks very promising. If it’s anywhere near as good as the meatballs, then maybe I’ll have to use one of the little notebook sections for recipes. Maybe I like to cook now. I have a new notebook, so anything is possible, anything at all.
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