Soon and very soon

It's a Saturday in December so I must be at a high school swim meet, and here I am. I don't usually get too hot but an indoor swim center is no place for a long skirt and sweater and boots so I'm roasting. It's fine. It's character building.

I don't have a job today because I came here halfway through the meet, directly from a funeral. Hence the skirt and sweater and boots, which are not my usual swim meet attire. It's midway through the boys' 500 yard freestyle, so I have time to write as the boys finish the distance race and then the girls swim the 500. When I am the referee or starter, I have to watch this race carefully, counting laps so we know when to ring the bell, but I'm a spectator today, so I can slack a bit.

*****
I should have brought flip flops with me.

*****
It’s a few days later now; Tuesday to be exact. It’s 7 in the morning and I have to leave for work soon but we have dinner plans tonight and this is the only time that I have to write. I was trying to finish a book review of a novel that I just finished reading, but I doubt that I’ll ever finish writing the review. I read faster than I write so I won’t get to write about every book that I read this year. I don’t think it matters. Writing every day has become a compulsion-driven to-do list item that I have to check off the list no matter what, and only about a third of what I churn out as I stand in front of my computer or sit at band concerts or swim meets or in waiting rooms tapping out paragraphs on my phone will ever see the light of day. And by “light of day,” I mean this blog and I’m not sure that it’s the right term because no more than a handful of people ever read this. But it’s what I do so I’m going to keep doing it. It’s a week until Christmas Eve and I still have some shopping to do, but there’s plenty of time. There’s plenty of time.

*****
It’s Wednesday, December 18, one week until Christmas. I’m no closer to finishing my book review than I was yesterday, and I’m not going to worry about it. I’m on to the next book, and the next thing.

*****
Ha! I did finish and publish that book review, no more than 15 minutes after I wrote the preceding paragraph. There’s always a way, is what I always say. There’s always plenty of time, is what I am always telling you.

It’s Thursday December 19, and I have 20 minutes or so to change and get ready to go to a local ballet company’s performance of the Nutcracker, so naturally, I’m sitting here writing about the clock ticking. But I can get away with this, obviously, because I continue to demonstrate such outstanding time management skills. I’m a time management wizard.

I started this post only five days ago but it seems like weeks. Now it’s December 19 and it’s almost too late to do any more shopping or planning for the holiday. Whatever we haven’t accomplished or acquired by now will just not be accomplished or acquired, and that is a strangely peaceful feeling. One more day of work (well, maybe a half day on Monday) and one more trip to the grocery store (well, maybe two--three at the most) and then the preparation will be complete or as complete as it can be, and then it’s Christmas. “Celebrate the birth of the Savior”--it’s right there on my to-do list. Peace.

Asleep

I’m reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and it’s a bit of a slog. I’m 83% finished, according to my Kindle, and it will take me another day or so to work my way through those last few chapters.

I think I’m too old for this book, is what it is. It’s not hard to read in the traditional sense of difficulty in a book. But it’s a hard story to bear, in which the first-person narrator, a young woman who is never named (I’m spotting a trend), spends a year trying to remain in a drug-induced sleep for as much time as possible.

The character is beautiful, rich, and alienated from everyone and everything. She is grieving the loss of her parents, but her grief isn’t recognizable as such because she didn’t know her parents very well, nor did she like them very much. And the reader doesn’t blame her for this, based on the brief interactions we have with her cold and distant father and her beautiful, selfish mother.

The character (why the unnamed characters? why?) is, I guess, an exemplar of hopelessness and disaffection among millenials, although the book is not quite contemporary (it is set in 2001). The story walks the reader through the natural outcome of extreme selfishness, especially in families.  More than anything else, it reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis--some of the angst and ennui and despair of Less than Zero and lots of the mindless materialism and social taxonomic snobbery and casual, brutal sex of American Psycho. The narrator’s endless recital of designer labels and brand names, and her constant disdainful observations about her erstwhile friend’s (friend--singular) declassee Long Island background reads like every icy cold 1980s downtown New York novel.

*****
I finally finished it. I never read book reviews, but I read a few reviews of this one because I honestly didn’t know what to make of it and I wanted a reality check. I had missed one big idea completely, which is that My Year is a satire on the millennial obsession with “self-care.” I don’t necessarily think that millennials are any more selfish and self-indulgent than any other generation. I don’t even think that they’re any more preoccupied with self-care than we were. They just talk about it more and in a more public way, because they can. Once you turn something into hashtag, it’s an easy target for satirists. And "self-care" is as good a metaphor for disaffection and despair as any other.

The more I think about My Year, the more I think that all the fuss about it might be right. It has something to say about what it means to be a person, especially what it means to be a young woman. A person like the character in this book, raised by cold and selfish parents who regard her existence as an inconvenience and an outrageous encroachment on their autonomy will naturally assume that it’s right and reasonable to put her own needs first in every circumstance, no matter what. She will naturally seek to eliminate all suffering and discomfort through drug-induced oblivion (including a fake drug, Infirmiterol--fake drug names are another literary micro-trend).

Despite a character’s tragic death, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends on a hopeful note; and not a moment too soon. It ended just when I thought I couldn’t bear to read another word.

*****
It’s Christmas time and for my next book, I thought about re-reading Little Women or David Copperfield or Anne of Green Gables or any of a number of my favorite novels. I don’t have Ambien or nembutal or trazodone or Infirmeterol. I hibernate by re-reading books and re-watching movies. But I started something new instead. Maybe I’ll write a review.

Is Rusty still in the Navy?

It's raining and I'm sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office, waiting to have my six-month checkup, which is six months overdue, making it an annual checkup. And I no sooner wrote that sentence than they called me in and commenced with the checking.

I don’t know anything about the history of dentistry, so I don’t know who decided that barbarity was the proper approach to tooth care. Why the scraping? Whence the blowing of the puffs of air? What in the actual hell? I have a cavity, so I have to return to get it filled. All flesh is grass.

Are teeth technically flesh? I don’t know. I don’t know.

*****
Because it’s Advent, our church is offering Confession tonight, even though it’s Tuesday and not Saturday. So I’m going to go because I need to attend to the state of my soul. There might be a little decay there, too. My son and I just made fun of a commercial in which a guy learns that he has cancer, so we’re assholes. We should be first in line at the confessional.

*****
It’s coming on Christmas and they’re cutting down trees. Every year, there’s a day when I finally start to feel the Christmas spirit, just a little bit. Today was that day. It was cold and still and the sky was clear but pale gray rather than blue. The afternoon had a Christmas-like silence. Smoke rose from the chimneys in my neighborhood, and the roofs were frosted with the remains of the tiny bit of snow that fell last night; too little to force the longed-for two-hour delay. It would have been a nice morning to stay in bed, but I didn’t mind being up before the sun.

I worked later than normal, not because I had to but because I was so absorbed in a project that I didn’t want to stop. And now I’m sitting and writing rather than menu-planning or shopping or wrapping or any of the other myriad holiday chores that remain on my list. And I know that I’ll pay for this later. But for now, I will rest in the Advent peace and silence and the evening darkness, with only the Christmas tree for light.

*****
It’s December 12, so there are just 19 days left of 2019, and I don’t think many people will miss it. Good riddance and don’t let the door hit you on the way out, nahmsayin?

I can really tell that it’s almost Christmas because my kids are watching “Christmas Vacation.” I sang along to “Mele Kalikimaka” as I cleaned up the kitchen, and my son whistled the accompaniment. We’ve been doing this number for years, so we’re good at it.

It’s a weekend of holiday parties and more shopping and planning and eating. Sadly, a friend died this week, too. His memorial service is on Saturday. He wasn’t a close friend, but his daughters swim with my sons, and his wife went to school with my husband, and they’re a lovely and wonderful family. He was a kind and funny person and a true gentleman. I hope that his family will find some comfort in their grief. I pray that he’ll rest in peace.

Fast away the old year is passing. The days are very short now, fading from bright daylight to dusk and then dark in no time, no time at all. It’s clear and cold and it smells like snow. There are 19 more days, and not one of them is promised to any of us. 

Awake

I couldn't sleep last night. I was tired, and I did sleep for a little while, but then I woke up and I couldn't fall back to sleep. 

It was 1:30. That's too early to just get up for the day. So I tried to relax. This was hard because of all the noise from the party raging downstairs, which was weird because I don't have a downstairs. The doorbell kept ringing and I heard my sister greeting the uninvited guests as they stormed into my house. "I don't even know this many people," I thought, "and why is she answering the door? She doesn't even live here." 

Eventually, the doorbell stopped ringing, and things quieted for a bit. Then the dancing started. The music was loud, and the dancers' shoes pounded and clattered on the wood floor. This was also weird, because I don't have wood floors. 

I looked at the clock. Midnight. "It's midnight on a Sunday night," I thought. "Am I the only one here who has a job? And how is it midnight now when it was 1:30 an hour ago? How is time moving backward?" 

*****

It's Monday night now, and it's very loud again. It's icy cold and the red and blue strobe lights are flashing. The knocking and clattering is the sound of skate blades on ice, and the people are all invited guests, having paid for their tickets. There's no sleeping at a Capitals game, so I know this isn't a dream. I'll sleep later. It's time to do that hockey. 

Prepare the way

Another Saturday in December, another aquatic center, and another attempt at multi-tasking. I'm timing today, and half watching the dive meet while I wait for the swim meet to begin. I wouldn't know a good dive from a bad one, but I am dutifully applauding each dive. The judges hold up their score cards the moment the divers surface. I could judge diving if I could watch an instant replay in slow motion. But for now I will stick with swimming. I know something about swimming.

I finally started my Christmas shopping yesterday, after a few nights of my usual anxiety dreams about waking up on December 24 and realizing that I had forgotten completely to shop or clean or decorate or bake or prepare in any way. Aren't you glad you're not me?

As if I'd forget to clean. Ridiculous.

*****
Remind me to look up "pike position."

*****

I love timing at swim meets. It’s such a fun job. You get to see the races, you get to cheer, and you don't have to make any decisions. I never have anxiety dreams about timing. Not so for refereeing. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. I don’t have to worry about that today, because I’m just I'm a lady in waiting.

But still. During the pre-meet briefing (yes, there’s a briefing), when the starter asks "Has anyone never timed before?" and not a single hand goes up, then maybe he doesn't need to give a 15-minute seminar covering of the stopwatch and proper recording procedures and the importance of our role as timers. And that part about the thumb being faster than the index finger? I think you made that up so you could keep talking.

*****
It’s Sunday now, and my house is in temporary disarray, as it’s decorating day. I still have a lot of Christmas shopping to do, and I have no idea what to wear for my company’s holiday party this week, but I do know what pike position is now, and that’s useful knowledge to have. The swim meet went well, even though I wasn’t the one with the clipboard and the whistle. And I’ll finish my shopping and decorating and cooking; but Christmas will happen whether I’m ready for it or not, which is actually a reassuring thought, oddly enough. We wait in hope.

Just a girl

"Looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50 years old."

Nora Ephron wrote that. Can you imagine? One of the most successful women of the 20th/21st century, and she claimed to have been clueless for the first two-thirds of her life. She interned in the Kennedy White House, wrote for newspapers and magazines, wrote novels, wrote and directed movies, and who even knows what else. And she thought she was clueless. Where does that leave the rest of us?

*****
I just finished reading Anna Burns’ Milkman, about which I will have much more to say. I’m just getting started here. At the beginning of Milkman, the first-person narrator explains her first encounters with a stalker named Milkman. We know that she’s 18, and that he is much older than she--probably in his mid 30s or so. She is an ordinary Belfast girl (Burns never names her character’s city, but we know that it’s Belfast in the 1970s). Milkman shows up at odd hours and places; when the girl is running, or walking along reading (one of the many quirks that places her among her neighborhood’s “beyond the pale” near-untouchables) or as she’s leaving her place of work or coming home from her evening French class. He makes her feel threatened and she begins curtailing her movements so as to avoid further harassment. She knows that he has plans for her that she wants no part of, but what’s she going to do? Report him? Complain to her family? She knows that according to the established rules of her time and place, she has no real, legitimate case against him; and she has a hard time even articulating her own feelings about the matter. "At eighteen,” she writes, “I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment."

*****
When I was 17, a young man in my neighborhood stopped his car in the street as I was walking by. He said hello and asked me my name and said that he knew my parents. He probably did know my parents; everyone in my neighborhood did. And I knew his family, too; one of his sisters was two years ahead of me in school. He asked for my phone number and I gave it to him, like an idiot, like a 17-year-old idiot who has been taught never to offend men or to come across as stuck-up or standoffish. But of course we were also taught to be careful with ourselves, not to do or say anything that would give even the slightest impression that we would welcome any untoward behavior or inappropriate advances. It went without saying, of course, that if such inappropriate advances occurred, then it would be 100 percent our fault.

The young man (he was in his mid twenties) harassed me for a few weeks. He called me all the time, and asked what I’d been doing and who I’d been doing it with and where I’d been; and he demanded in a whiny yet vaguely threatening way to know why I didn’t seem as interested in him as he was in me. Was I frigid? Was I dating someone else? Was I a lesbian? Did I think I was so hot that I could do better than him? I stopped walking around the neighborhood for fear that he’d pull up beside me in his car, as he sometimes did. He never overtly threatened me. He never did anything to me other than to bother and embarrass me. I didn’t know why I was embarrassed but I was. I didn’t know why I felt so uncomfortable and even scared about him, but I did. I was 17, and clueless. Clueless.

A girl of 17 today, asked by a near-stranger what she’d been doing and why and where and when, would probably stand up for herself. She would think, and rightly so, that nobody outside of her own family had any right whatsoever to monitor her movements, or comment on her behavior, or insert themselves in any way into her business. But in working-class Philadelphia in the early 1980s, young girls were fair game for comment from everyone and anyone.

Adults, especially male adults, had very clear ideas for how girls should conduct themselves and how they should look, and they didn't hesitate to call out any girl who didn't measure up. But it wasn't just the men. Women tried to manage their daughters and other young girls, with kind or critical advice on dress, demeanor, deportment, to make sure we knew where the lines were, and that we stayed within them.

Maybe lines isn't the best word. Maybe circles would be better. Think of a Venn diagram.

Sluts on the left. Stuck-up prigs on the right. Click to enlarge (I hope that works). 

One of the overlapping circles is for the goody-goody girls, while the other is for the sluts. There is a very narrow tolerance, a very small pointed oval, between those two undesirable categories. That small pointed oval represents the acceptable range of behaviors for 17-year-old girls in 1982. Adults, especially men, but women too, considered it their right and their duty to make sure that we all understood how easily a girl could end up on the wrong side of the little oval and how fast she could veer to one side into prudishness and to the other side into whorishness.

I'd like to think that we resisted this very specialized form of oppression, but most of us didn't. We accepted it without much complaint. We sought approval and validation. I was a hospital volunteer when I was in high school and several retired men who worked at the hospital as security guards made sure that I knew that I met their standards for nice young girls, and that one or two of the other candystripers definitely did not meet those standards. And I smiled at their praise and never thought even once about asking them to please go and fuck themselves. I was clueless.

Let me clarify--I don’t wish that I had been the type of girl who’d tell a 70-year-old man to go fuck himself. But I do wish that I’d been the type of girl who thought about it.

*****

That wasn’t a book review at all, was it?

I never realized until recently how really clueless, how blissfully ignorant, I was for most of my life, but especially my teenage and early 20s life. At eighteen, I had no proper understanding of the ways that constitute encroachment because at eighteen, no girl does. But I get it now. The fog has lifted, and much is illuminated. Not all, but much. I know better now. It only took 50 years.

Welcome to the working week

It's Saturday and today is a test of my determination to write every day, a test that I am passing right now, as I sit on a bench at the Germantown Indoor Swim Center. I'm a stroke and turn judge for my younger son's first high school swim meet, and I have 15 minutes or so while the dive meet wraps up and the swimmers warm up.

Last year, I had to referee all of the high school meets because the person who would have had that job, and who really likes that job, was recovering from knee surgery. I'm a competent referee but I don't like doing it. It's too center-of-attention. It's a lot of pressure. Plus, if I was the referee now, I'd be bossing the coaches and officials, monitoring the time, and generally running the show, rather than sitting and writing. I won't pretend that it's not fun to blow the whistle and bark orders, but I'm much better suited to the support role.

*****
Diving is fun to watch, but other than the really outstanding dives and the obviously egregiously bad ones, I can't tell one from another. In about a second, the judges have to decide if the dive was executed correctly, with the correct number of turns or rotations or whatever for the particular dive, and then score it for quality. Again, it's a lot of pressure. Better them than me.

Diving just concluded and warm-ups are about to begin. I'm going to try to get a picture of my son before the meet begins. Once the whistle blows, I'm on duty. I take my responsibilities seriously. Even my relatively subordinate role is an important one. I don’t have time to play.

*****
It’s Sunday now, Sunday of a very busy Thanksgiving weekend. I love Thanksgiving weekend and I’m sad that it’s almost over, but it’s only 12:30 and I still have a nice afternoon of walking (if it stops raining), movie-watching, reading, and soup-making to look forward to.

The swim meet went well. I had only one call, for a bad backstroke turn. I won’t burden you with the technical details; just know that there’s a right way and a lot of wrong ways to execute a backstroke turn, and this swimmer found several of the wrong ways during his three turns. He’ll learn. I’m not sure what might have happened in the other judges’ zones. That’s the referee’s problem. That’s above my pay grade. I never did get a picture of my son, but he has 8 more meets, so I’ll try again next week.

It’s dark and gray and cold and rainy now. The walking might have to wait for another day. I might have to proceed directly to reading and movie-watching and soup-making. There are far worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon. It’s been a lovely weekend, and I don’t even mind going back to work. It doesn't thrill me but it won't kill me. I don’t have to work standing up, and my shoes stay dry, and I even get paid. It's all good.

Thanksgiving

I'm at a Capitals game right now. It's first intermission. Normally I get up and walk the concourse during the intermission, but I don't feel like it. I'm going to sit right here instead

It's the night before Thanksgiving, and Slapshot is dressed like a pilgrim. It's not a good look. The Capitals are winning 1-0, and the crowd is happy because it’s a long weekend. And because we're at a hockey game, so what's not to be happy about?

I'm not cooking tomorrow, except for potatoes, which I will make tomorrow; and macaroni salad, which I made before we left for the game. Macaroni salad has nothing to do with Thanksgiving but people asked me to make it, and I bow to the will of the people. I have mixed feelings about not cooking. Normally, I'm all for any arrangement that gets me out of the kitchen, but me hosting Thanksgiving is kind of a tradition and you don't monkey with tradition. Plus what about leftovers? Did no one consider the leftovers? Did no one think this through?

*****
Now it’s Thanksgiving, one of my very favorite days of the year. I woke up early, peeled potatoes, and walked the neighborhood with my friends. It’s something of a tradition. We call it the Turkey Trot, because we’re like that. The potatoes are ready now, and I’m soaking in the November light at 2:30 PM. In another week, we’ll have a different kind of beautiful pale golden gray sky, but not exactly this kind.

My mother-in-law is making dinner. She made Thanksgiving dinner one other time, when I had a new baby at home, and I think it was fine. She’s a very good cook in any cuisine. I don’t know if she’ll remember to make stuffing, but I suppose I can do without the stuffing. I can’t, however, do without the jellied cranberry sauce from a can, so I’m bringing my own, just in case.

*****

11:30 PM. Dinner was delicious, and she always makes too much of everything, so we have more than enough leftovers. And the Capitals won, too. Thankfulness abounds.

Autumn authentication

It’s November 22, and I had a good day; such a good day, in fact, that I was going to spend several paragraphs writing about the beauty of the light this afternoon. For just a few days in late November, right around Thanksgiving, the afternoon light has a clear and golden quality that is only present for a few precious days of the year. The sun is almost as far away from Earth as it gets and the trees are almost but not quite bare and the remaining canopy is a golden orange that colors the sunlight, and the sky when it’s clear is the palest pearl gray with only a barely visible hint of blue and twilight comes so suddenly and so early.

So I was going to write all about that, all about the elegiac beauty of the fading autumn and winter approaching and blah blah blah-bitty blah blah blah. And then I came home and tried to log in to online banking to pay my bills and forgot that I had changed my password and now my account is disabled; and with the realization that I have no choice but to call the bank to have my access restored, I felt my will to live exit my body with a great rushing noise. Plus it’s dark now, anyway. Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell.

*****
So now it’s Saturday. I went to the bank to get my account number because I couldn’t bear the thought of calling on the phone to ask for it because I knew that they'd ask me fifty-seven questions for my own security. Now I just have to go through the 50-step re-authentication process that will restore my online access to my own money. I’m not so much writing right now as avoiding. After I finish here, maybe there’s a toilet that I can scrub. Maybe there’s some goo at the bottom of the refrigerator that I can clean up. Maybe I can have root canal or something.

You know, I work in an IT organization, and the problem of authentication is one that we discuss quite often. By “we” I mean other people who are technically capable and qualified, of course. I listen, though. And that's how I know that log-ins and passwords are intrinsically insecure because we are people and we like shortcuts. We’re also idiots who forget the passwords that we create and then we either write them down (as I should have and as I normally do), leaving them vulnerable to detection by malefactors (how I love that word); or we end up locked out of our accounts and we have to start over again (as I’m avoiding doing right now).

And you know what else? “Pay bills” was on my to-do list for this week. But “restore access to online banking” was not. So not only have I not crossed off a critical to-do item; but now I also have to do a much more painful and onerous task and I don’t get to cross it off the list because it wasn’t on there in the first place. And no, I can’t just add it to the list and then cross it off. That’s not cricket. It’s just not done.

*****
OK, disregard most of the previous, because that was nothing! So easy! I recovered my account number, followed the prompts, verified my security code, reset my password, confirmed my reset password, did that again because the passwords didn't match, and here we are. My bills are paid, my list is crossed off, and equilibrium is restored. Such a big fuss about nothing at all. I feel rather silly. All is quite well. Except that it's November 25. The light was extraordinary this afternoon, but we will have it for only a few more days.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.