dovetailing

Forget it, I found the answer. Yoga. Yoga studios have to be some of the most anticorporate businesses ever: small, privately owned places that people pay to teach them breathing and living better in their bodies and how not to believe that you find happiness only through buying stuff that corporations make you think you want.

I've also completed my transformation into abject yuppiedom by watching a documentary, shopping at an organic grocery store and practicing yoga all in one weekend. (I also finished the first draft of the novel this weekend.)

(Did you like how I stuck that in there?) (Not too suave.) (It freaks me out.)

(Although I must say, I am pretty excited about NaNoEdMo site, which my writing-group compatriots adore and the use of which I have been coveting for months. The prospect of the editing process itself freaks me out too, but the website doesn't.)

(Anyway.)

This "Origin of the Species" article in this morning's Post magazine supplement was really interesting -- I had always wondered how that Democrats-became-Republicans-who-hated-Federalists-who-weren't-Whigs thing worked. Good reading for Convention Eve.

morality: like, complicated and stuff

I saw The Corporation last night, a documentary about the rise of the, duh, corporation as a presence in the world economy and the general social consciousness. The most interesting part about it, aside from the wacky stuff about the 14th Amendment granting rights to coporations as well as slaves, was the morality aspect; that corporations are extra-moral -- as in outside morality, not as in more moral than most -- because they operate outside the framework of human ethics. All the people collectively becoming one body makes the body itself inhuman and therefore releases it from human constraints. Amoral, not immoral.

And I just wonder how that applies more broadly... if groupthink changes us, releases us from society's bonds instead of constraining us the way I always thought it did. I'm used to thinking of society as limiting, not as freeing. This freeing isn't a good thing, necessarily. Definitely not a good thing for the corporations, and probably not a good thing for people.

Oh, society. You're such a drag. And corporations are a drag, too -- the movie was great but, again, a total drag. Once again, a really effective and affecting movie that leaves you nowhere. I have no clue what to do about how deeply corporations have influenced us as individuals and as a collective. There's no escape, as far as I can tell. Let's wear our Nikes to the local McDonald's because we have no choice, but we'll be careful not to step on any third-world children on the way there -- not directly, anyway, just metaphorically. Ugh.

hulk! smash!

As some of you know, like any good 10-, I mean 26-, year-old, I have returned from a sun- and friend-soaked weekend to write a sentence full of dangling hyphens. I mean, to provide a good home for two hermit crabs I bought on the boardwalk.

Their names are Hulk and Smash. (Angie wanted to call them both "Better Than A Boyfriend," but that was a tad impractical as well as factually inaccurate, as you will soon see.) Hulk, appropriately, has a green shell; Smash's shell is chipped and broken as though it cannot contain his infinite, inarticulate anger. He's even missing parts of his front leg-claw things, he is so smashful. Hefk put it best: Instead of a dog, which is what I really want and really can't have, I got two walking shells that are incapable of showing dog-like love and that will probably die very quickly. Whee! It's fun to be me.

So I guess it serves me right that Hulk and Smash hate the world. They HATE. I put them in Meatball's old tank and bought them three pieces of coral. I am following all the slightly hysterical directions of the book I got free with their purchase, which says they like to burrow, so one should put at least a few inches of rocks in an enclosed tank that retains humidity.

Wow, do they like to burrow. They spend so much energy and time burrowing that you can't get them out of their new tank without taking out the coral, their water and food dishes, the other shells and some of the rocks. (It was easy to get them out of their temporary wire cage, where they could not burrow, but, sayeth the book, they were terribly unhappy.) They also ran around a lot then when you took them out -- all over the Scrabble board and the table at the beach house -- but now, after you unbury them, they are really displeased and they let you know by not moving until they've already been out for 20 minutes, by which time your roommates are no longer amused with the new pets and just want you to get them off the freaking coffee table already so we can watch TV without worrying if they're falling off and Gwen, why the hell did you get these stupid things in the first place and do they have to stay on the mantle where everyone can see them.

To which I answer yes, yes they do, but it's not easy to make a case for Hulk and Smash. Every time you get near them, they basically do the hermit-crab equivalent of screaming obscenities while warding you off with garlic necklaces and the sign of the cross.

Are they dying already? Do they hate living away from the beach? Should I be worried about this? I mean, I do care -- I brought these living things here and I have an obligation to them, but... I don't know. They aren't good pets. I really want them to be. Can I train them to greet me at the door or something, do you think?

helter-skelter in the summer swelter

The ducks and I are pretty busy these days, and we're all going to Rehoboth Beach tomorrow until Tuesday afternoon. Maybe four whole days, hurrah, of not waking up before 5 a.m. will encourage them to line up in a more orderly fashion.

Here is a quote from the biography of Gr*nny D to tide you over until our return. [This in no way means I endorse her candidacy for S*nate, I just loved her wonderful book. --Paranoid eds.]

You sit back most of your life, and you assume that there are grown-ups somewhere running the show. If you really get out there, if you look behind the curtain, you see it is just a bunch of tired people like yourself, needing help, trying their best and not doing half as well as they would like. That is the moment when you have an opportunity to grow up and take your part.

And here's another, because she is the best:

There is an urge to just walk into the desert, away from the road, and be done with it. There is also an urge to have some ice cream with chocolate sauce. Life is what we patch together between those competing desires.

extending the metaphor

I'm not a listmaker. I can usually keep most of what I need to do in a non-concrete list in my head; writing it down makes it feel like it's hanging over me, waiting to be done, telling me not to relax until it is. But this weekend, there was so much to do and my head is cluttered with so many other things that I caved:

ironing
call Verizon to switch account names
car re-inspected
car re-registered online
pick up dress
call K
call G
call L
L's wedding present
library books 7/15
read writing group stuff
send J's CDs
finish book review

Now the list is driving me crazy, because many of those things -- send J's CDs, Verizon, car re-inspected, library books -- can't possibly be accomplished today, and many of the things I am going to do today -- gym, get cell phone fixed, grocery shopping -- are not on the list. They are list-worthy items, errands that need to be done, I just didn't think of writing them down yesterday morning.

As I was expressing this to one of the roommates last night as we were watching HBO and eating Chinese food, two distinctly non-list activities about which I was feeling vaguely guilty, he made some reference to "getting ducks in a row," and I started thinking about ducks and how they're totally not in any kind of row. Why is getting ducks in a row a good goal? Where did that come from? And then I started imagining my ducks:

One duck is wandering around thinking about going to the beach next weekend and how it really wishes that were happening today instead of next weekend.

One duck is off by the wall stretching, wondering if trying pilates this morning for the first time is really a good idea.

One duck is trying to round up the rest of the ducks to get them in the row, thereby not being in the row himself.

One duck is sitting in the corner and facing the wall, worrying.

One duck is standing near the window to get better reception on his duck cell phone, talking to someone who can fix the mistake he made at work Friday morning that has been bothering him ever since he saw the e-mail about it last night.

One duck is leaning against the wall and finishing the biography of Gr*nny D, which he freaking loves.

One duck is considering packing up and moving to L.A. to live a life of glamour or at least work as a waitress in a cocktail bar.

One duck is actually in the row, but he's feeling deeply annoyed about how the items on the list are not written in parallel structure and fighting the urge to add verbs to the ones that don't have them.

That's eight ducks, and now I am going to the gym because the pilates duck is telling me I'm going to be late if I don't leave now. Demanding little bastard. I might throw the list in the trash on the way there…

not that I would ever

waste perfectly good time taking a quiz this ridiculous when I told myself I'd be taking a nice nap before going out to dinner and a late movie tonight, but if -- completely hypothetically -- I did take the Country Quiz? I would be the Falkland Islands.

You're pretty insignificant in the big picture, but when you have influence, it affects the most important people in your world. Sadly, you don't have much of a will or voice of your own, and it's hard to develop it when your big aspirations are to live on a farm.

And then I might think every single word of it was true...