trade routes

As though there needed to be another wonderful thing about Gmail: Gmail Swap. Basically, people with extra invitations offer to trade them to people who want Gmail accounts. Wanters offer things; sometimes physical things, although money's not allowed, but sometimes intangible ones. (Here is a list of the most noteworthy.) And seeing as I've already doled out about 20 invitations to everyone I know who's interested, I obviously -- obviously -- needed to try this.

In the last 48 hours, here's what I've received in return for an invitation:

1. one recipe for "prize-winning" salsa and five recipies for "family-secret" pies, one of which is called Durbin Hotel Sugar Cream Pie, which sounds oh so Jazz-Age chic

2. a marriage proposal, although that was from Anne's coworker and I had already given him an invitation and he was just thanking me, but I am still counting it in the tally

3. a Father's Day gift for a stranger, who said his father wanted a Gmail account more than anything else in the world

4. an Irish man's promise to burn a good-luck candle in my honor for two hours last night

5. another man's promise to donate his hair to Locks of Love, which I did around this time a few years ago (he sent me a "before" picture today and says he will follow with an "after" picture immediately following his appointment next Tuesday)

(6. should have been a note for Angie's mom in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but that person never wrote me back, sadly)

And Lauren, who is similarly swap-obsessed, is doing even better than I am -- they are her own stories to tell, but they involve swing voters in Florida, long-distance lesbian relationships and handmade sock puppets.

Is it too much to say that my faith in the creative potential of the Internet has been restored? Probably, but it has been said And you're probably tired of hearing me extol the virtues of Gmail, but you'll have to get over it or I will swap you for a postcard from Cuba, a Britney mp3, a wink and a smile.

chim chim-i-ney

Wasting time online and I followed a link to the Clean Sweep Assessment. Unless you intend to follow The Program it suggests -- and who wants to follow scary Programs -- it's useless, but... er, no but. It's useless. Who can resist a self-obsessed pointless quiz, though? I got a 54.

more love for mr. j. stewart

From an LA Times story about last night's season premiere of Six Feet Under (by the way, apologies for the enthusiastic use of italics... I'm trying to wean myself off of quotation marks. Anyway.):

[If the show] feels more feminine than ever and its women oddly real, that's because three female writers make it a point to depict Ruth, Claire, Brenda and Vanessa as multidimensional characters who often do the wrong thing when they're trying to do right.

Well gee. Thanks, there. Hey, did you know that women have multiple dimensions? Just like men! Glad we gone and got us some of them WOMEN writers so we could go and figure that out, because god knows men can't write "oddly real" women characters! Only women even care enough about women to try! Maybe it's because in my own writing, I spend a lot of time trying to get into the head of a multidimensional middle-aged man, but I found that an insult to the show's writers, both male and female -- not to mention utterly asinine in general. Sometimes it seems like feminism fights the same old "hey, women are people too" battles over and over again. Why is this news?

To counter that, here's a really interesting journal from a woman serving in Iraq. She twists the gender paradigm better than my sarcasm.

To further counter that, anyone want one of these? I do. He would certainly make idiocy a federal offense. Combat the Axis of Assheads or something.

and the answer is...

... c. We had three clues left in the crossword puzzle, just a few too many empty spaces to fill in letters that seemed like they made sense and pretend we'd really gotten them all. (The three we had left were impossible, too, historical horse names and 16th-century Indian dancers.) All the rest of was true, true, true. Pickled cactus isn't bad; the swing voter was honest-to-goodness real; the visor is blue, with hearts and flowers; I was actually pleased when the Red Sox won. Fenway Park is pretty fabulous, and it was a beautiful day, and they were tied 7-7 the bottom of the 12th... that sort of thing, even from fans of whiners, is contagious.

So yes, I'm sorry. No candy for any of you. You're not missing out on much, though, because all I have left are one mff dvr gumball and a lone generic sweetart earnestly exclaiming, "Eat me!"

I have a bunch of links to put up here some day soon, but they will have to wait -- I must go attend to my My Seven Homeschooled Children.

never traveling again, part I

If I am ever tempted to set foot outside the DC metro area ever ever ever again, someone stop me. If it's not a 15-minute journey from my house by foot, car or public transportation that costs under $1.20 ($3 if it's rush hour) I'm not going. Actually, if it's rush hour, I'm not going period.

BWI, I give up. An hour delay on the plane in Boston because the engine isn't working, a 45-minute wait for a bus to return to Daily Lot B for the privilege of paying $35 to retrieve our car, a two-hour crawl through a Memorial Day traffic extravaganza -- that would have been enough. But just to cement the deal, there's a flattened rat in the parking space behind the house, apparently done in by my right front tire when I pulled in at the end of the super-awesome journey. I get it, BWI. I don't understand how you managed to put that rat there, but you win. Gwen 0, BWI 40 million + 1 dead rat. I'm never leaving again.

Here is a quiz for you. Ready? Find the statement that is not true. This weekend, I:

a) went to Fenway Park for the first time

b) actually cheered for the stupid whiny Red Sox

c) completed the Sunday Boston Globe crossword puzzle

d) ate pickled cactus

e) gave a stranger in a bar a piece of candy that said "blow me"

f) gave a stranger in a bar a piece of candy that said "nice tits"

g) gave a stranger in a bar a piece of candy that said "muff diver"

h) met a fabled swing voter -- a drunk fabled swing voter -- and discussed the voting record of Jhn Krry*

i) went miniature golfing wearing a visor with my name on it

Winner gets 1,000 prestige points and the rest of the box of X-rated candy from the bachelorette party, if it's not all smashed at the bottom of my suitcase.

---
*vowels removed so there are no hits on this page for people seeking "Jhn Krry mff dvr" -- that's not my target demographic

hauling up and down the east coast, part III

First Cherry Hill, then Hartford, now Boston. Gone 'til Monday night. I am tired. Happy memorializing. Take a nap for me if you can.

intimate strangers

I keep looking for a single story that will distill this weekend's reunion into a cogent thought, and I can't come up with one. There wasn't really any singularly representative moment or anything profound like that, and even the usual cop-out route I take with this stuff -- jamming sixty million snippets of description into one sentence and not explaining any of them -- isn't going to work. Summary: I had a really wonderful time. Chalk another victory up to low expectations, seriously -- it was a hundred times better than I imagined.

And it's not like things were perfect in my life when I lived there, and it's not like they were perfect when I went back this weekend. I'm not whitewashing. But something about being at Wesleyan... it was fun and funny to see the random acquaintences, but my college friends, including and almost especially the ones I don't keep in great touch with and don't really need to, make me feel more like myself than I usually do. They open me somehow. I feel grounded. Safe and whole.

You know what was the craziest part? The way everything smelled. UNBELIEVABLE. I know smell is supposed to be that kind of sense, that puts you right back where you were, but oh my god. The cafeteria, the hallway of my freshman year dorm, the mailroom, the courtyard in front of the COL building, the trees behind the hill in the center of campus. Incredible.

I'm totally blathering now. I didn't get eight hours of sleep if you add Friday and Saturday nights together. I'm going to watch crazy mobsters kill each other and then I'm going to bed. I wonder if some day a long time from now I'll walk into this house and it'll smell the same and I'll feel this way.

112 over 73

I had a routine physical last week, and the doctor did all the stuff you see doctors do in movies. He tapped my knees with one of those rubber hammers, he looked in my eyes and ears, he took my temperature and my blood pressure and my pulse. I even had an EKG, which was kind of cool. And I got the results of my bloodwork back today, and they are normal. In fact, all the rest of that stuff was normal, too. I'm normal! Even though I didn't really expect anything to be wrong, my inner pessimist was telling me otherwise, so now it's amazing how relieved I feel. One small step for Gwen, one giant leap for Gwen getting over her irrational fear of doctors. That doesn't even make sense, but I'm normal, damn it! The doctor said so.

Here is a commencement address Jon Stewart gave at William and Mary. We watch "The Daily Show" every day at work at 10 a.m., so the Jon Stewart bandwagon -- driven by my fanatically Jon-Stewart-worshipping coworkers -- would have run me over if I didn't learn to love him. But how could you not: "We declared war on terror -- it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui."

a deluge, both traditional and footnote-al

Last night, headachey and strung out after a long day of painting and baking in the sun and turning green at "Super Size Me," roommate C. and I set out for a party given by one of my new coworkers in Georgetown. The sky had that weird thunderstorm-threatening tinge to it, and we were smart enough to bring a huge umbrella before we set out for the bus stop.

We, of course, were NOT smart enough not to wear a white tank top and the new white-and-black-striped skirt that we had just bought. In the middle of Dupont Circle 20 minutes later, as the half-dollar-sized drops turned into a solid sheet of vertical rain and the skirt clung to my legs and dragged on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum, as we tried to hold the sides of the embattled umbrella out with our hands and became increasingly incapacitated by hysterical laughter, as we were literally brought to a full stop and couldn't go another step -- then it felt like maybe good things can happen, sometimes.

please excuse the interruption

Remember how they used to say that on the intercom at high school? Is that was it was called, "intercom?" I don't remember.

Anyway -- there's a slight possibility that access to leafygreen will be interrupted in the next few days, because the credit card that keeps us in pixels is gone and the new one has not yet arrived, and the bill-collectors are pounding at the door. As soon as the updated information is in my possession, we'll be back in black -- but if we're lucky, it'll never go away at all. And as for take it easy, it will return soon too. (Because apparently when I take a little random break, Blogger decides to hideously overhaul its interface. It's still free and relatively reliable and I'm grateful for that, but I feel so disenfranchised. What's up with the wide-eyed, disingenuous "what's a blog?" on the login page, and aren't web designers over the whole rounded-corners phase yet? What is my dashboard and why do I want to go back to it? Am I in my car? If so, why are there so many gigantic cheesy graphics everywhere? What?)

Something nice from The Sun's Sy Safransky: "I'm less likely to judge another person when I remember I'm always working with insufficient information. Just as every tree has roots that are out of sight, underground, so does every person have roots the eye can't see. It's important for me to remember, when the hanging judge enters the courtroom, that this is equally true about me."

g-happy g-accidents

When I went to click on my weight-training site this morning, I missed the bookmark and hit Blogger, the one above it, instead. And this little Gmail icon caught my eye.

Do you see where this is going? I have Gmail. Rejoice and make merry, fair citizens! (If you are a Blogger user, I'd stop reading this immediately and go sign up for one yourself. If you aren't a Blogger user, I apologize, but maybe you could start a new account if you feel it's worth it...)

I was just discussing how Google's marketing hype is so good that I want the damn thing even though I barely know anything about it, and apparently all of California is screaming about privacy rights because of the AdSense text search, and Alissa read me the part of the service-terms agreement about how machines will read my email, and woo! Who cares! Now I know some things about it: 1000 MB of space! Search function! Cool labelling system that lets you group all your messages! Clean, spare, lovely Google-esque interface! Automatically generated contacts list!

Honestly, the privacy thing does trouble me, but deep down I don't believe there's privacy on the internet anyway -- this is just putting my metaphorical nonmoney where my mouth is. Not like I say anything so controversial in my email anyway that Big Brother will really be interested. Big Advertising Brother doesn't fool me, and he doesn't distract me from not ever buying whatever he wants me to buy. I know that's not the point, and I respect the point, but the point doesn't let me save all my email messages. The point doesn't let me never again have to call up a publicist, shame-faced, to ask her to resend her author's phone number because all messages older than 30 days are automatically deleted and I didn't know.

Speaking of Verizon and its evil email from hell, surprise surprise -- none of the "advanced" (ha) features on my account are working right now because they're "doing service" (double ha) to the e-mail "program" (triple ha). Which means that I'll be changing my email address again, and for that I sincerely apologize, but not that sincerely, because I have Gmail. To make sure all is well with the account, I'm going to wait a few days to send the official address-change email, but the new address will be g[mylastname] at gmail.com. Sadly, I couldn't do gg at gmail.com because it had to be six letters long, but it's still g-tastic.

to go, to go, whither or no

My five-year college reunion is at the end of May. It doesn't really make me feel old or anything, as I think cliche dictates, and it actually feels like I've been away from W*sleyan longer than five years. Which is not to say I don't miss it at times, but I'm pretty mixed on this reunion thing -- I had decided not to go for a variety of reasons/excuses and was comfortable with that decision... until I talked to someone who's excited about going, and now I'm torn again. Let us list pros and cons, shall we? We shall.

pros

· Seeing good friends, specifically Former Roommate Emily (moved to L.A. the day after graduation; haven't seen since) and Former Israel Roommate Tara (moved to San Francisco; have seen her a few times but would love to see her again).

· Seeing random acquaintences, especially old newspaper people.

· Spending time with people whom I do see but never for long. Especially the Boston people, whom it turns out I will not get to see this summer because I'm going to the New York convention instead... if I do go to this stupid thing, they'll be a big part of the reason. I actually can't think of much I'd rather do than spend 48 hours doing nothing with them again.

· Writing. I hear reunions are unbelievably excellent fodder for fiction. Something about past and present colliding.

· Sleeping in my first-year dorm. This would just be funny.

· Wandering around campus, which I did love quite a bit. I would love to visit the new building the newspaper is in and see what happened to the old one.

cons

· Money. I have none. I am already buying at least three sets of plane tickets to New England this summer. This is bad.

· Seeing random acquaintences. Just... I don't know. And now I am giving in to the cliche, but in the five years since college, I have not become fantastically successful. I have not fantastically saved the world from poverty and disease. I have not completed a fantastically wonderful trip around the world. I have not forged a fantastically perfect relationship I can show off revoltingly. I have not even become fantastically beautiful, witty, charming, intelligent or interesting. Maybe no one else there will have done these things either, but it could feel weird.

· No professors. At least not the two I'd most want to see -- one died two years ago and the other didn't get tenure, which I will hold against W*sleyan's asinine administration forever.

· Weekends. Committing to this means (I think) I'm away every weekend in May, and that makes me a little stressed out.

· The idea of reunions. I don't like it. Something icky and rah-rah cheerleader-y about it. At the same time, there's something catty and judge-y and negative about it, too.

· Haircut. I need one.

· "Grosse Pointe Blank(e)". I didn't like this movie and didn't understand why everyone else did. What if someone there is a hit man and I don't get it?

a link in time saves, um, time?

Don't worry, have cookie. Me want you have cookie. Have new archive and link page, too. Mm, archive and link page. Tasty treat.

Here is an interview with Nellie McKay, for those of you who may be interested. She comes off sounding extremely freakish and arrogant, but I think that might be the reporter's fault and not hers -- when I heard her on XPN, she was very random and intelligent and curious. Bizarre as hell, yes, but freakish in a good way. Mr. Reuters seems to have edited out her better qualities. Her best quality, in my opinion, is her album's anti-Norah Jones title, "Get Away from Me." Makes me happy just thinking about it.

Most of you know I'm not big on the dietary rules of Passover -- and don't particularly think God would care if I ate a giant statue of bagels, ham and cheeseburgers that I had carved in his/her/its image while coveting my neighbor's wife -- but I do like a lot of the traditions that go along with the seders, and I found a reading this year that I really wish I had taken to my family's seder (where they love to hear me talk about slavery and genocide!). I've been reading recently about the civil war in Sudan, and it's so appalling. I don't even know where to start. Maybe here.

On a lighter note, you've all seen the Subservient Chicken, right? I recommend yoga and tango.

And to conclude our Thursday links roundup, some ancient Weight Watchers' recipe cards. Anne forwarded this the other day -- I'd actually seen it about a year ago, but I clicked on it anyway and rediscovered the beauty. Here's a teaser, and this isn't even the best one, because you really need to see them in context: "The one on the right is skim milk and orange pulp. The one on the left is made with water, sherry extract, and two beef bouillon cubes. No, really. Well, there's also celery in it. Oh, and SELF-LOATHING. "

spring has sprung...

... at take it easy. Thought maybe it would be a refreshing change if this page were actually legible to most of you.

Confession #1: This is the same font-family/font-size/line-height combination that I used on Angie's redesigned webpage, which--

Confession #2: I lifted directly from Reuben in the first place. I was going to be all trendy and use some weird serif-y thing, but I had to recover from that ill-fated foray into Courier with something nice for a little while.

Confession #3: I also stole the pattern from Squidfingers, although you're supposed to steal them, so that's not much of a confession.

Confession #4: Once again, I have lazily resorted to a messy HTML/CSS combination that, sadly, has a table in it. Only one table total, no nesting, and all the div stuff is relatively well-organized, but I still feel chagrined in a 1997 sort of way. I know no one cares about this, but I must come clean.

None of the links above are updated yet, so consider them a sneak preview. And as usual, let me know if I didn't meet the legibility goal -- also as usual, I haven't looked at it on a PC yet.

city as (not too literal) metaphor
I went to see "The Eternal Sunshine Whatever Whatever" last night, and we had extra time between dinner and the movie, so we walked around the neighborhood for a while. The theater, which itself is pretty new, is in a part of the city near Metro Center that's being redeveloped at an unbelievably quick pace -- new buildings in; abandoned buildings out -- so naturally there's a lot of construction.

On F Street, in the middle of the block, there are these old facades of buildings that are being preserved. They're very cool-looking: rows of pillars, beautiful old stone and brick, old-fashioned lettering on the signs. Masons and carvers made the fronts of banks and federal buildings and whatever else beautiful during a time when the fronts of buildings were naturally beautiful, I guess, because every one had to be done by hand, so it wasn't cheaper and more expedient to make things homogeneously ugly the way it is now. I like that the facades will stay -- the metaphor isn't about how surface-level beauty is overly important or anything.

But the insides of the buildings aren't useful or structurally sound or whatever, and they're all totally knocked out, so the facades stand in front of huge pits of rubble. They're supported only by scaffolding. It doesn't look too sturdy. The doorways and the windows just lead to the space where the substance of the buildings used to be; you could see the empty sky through them last night.

And I feel just like that. We all hang on so narrowly.

who, meme?
[Please just pretend that you are now reading the obligatory statement about how I never do these things because they're pointless and self-centered, but this one seemed fun, and what's the harm since I never manage to write anything here anymore except paeans to my anthropomorphized clothing. Thanks! -- Ed.]

Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says.
"Slowly the sand grew more luminous, and along the edges." The sand grew more luminous? Why do I keep getting Umberto Eco books even though I know I don't like them? But it has such a good title...

Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
A blue curtain. If I reached past that, I'd be touching outside.

What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Ten minutes of "Drumline" while I was eating dinner before yoga.

With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
Sarah Harmer singing and street noise, as usual. There's also the most amazingly wonderful smell coming in from the window -- I don't know if it's a certain kind of flower or tree or just your basic spring or what, but it's amazing. It's the smell that every scented candle and jar of potpourri aspires to be.

When did you last step outside?
Ten minutes ago. This is starting to feel stupid.

Seen anything weird lately?
Now I'm editing it by skipping half the questions and it still feels stupid. Um, let's see. I hung a "Sharpton 2004" poster over my desk at work today -- does that count?

What is the last movie you saw?
I watched the whole first season of "Sports Night," if that counts as a movie. Liked it a lot. I think the last actual, full movie was "Spellbound" and I liked that, too.

If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
Aside from peace, joy and eternal harmony for all god's creatures, and we're talking for me and me alone, I'd say a hybrid car. Or else a house on a lake somewhere in New England. Or Vancouver. Or a dog. Or I guess all of those, which are sort of pedestrian, huh... a literary agent for my book, that's the ticket. No, wait -- my own publishing house, so I wouldn't need an agent. And I'd buy a million people to read it and then I'd pay them to like it.

Do you like to dance?
Indeed.

George Bush.
No comment. Ha.

an open letter
Dear My Favorite Gray Yoga Pants,

I just wanted to write and tell you how much I love you. I apologize for my recent underappreciation. I'm not sure why I sometimes put you away and forget you exist... it might be because, like so many other things and people I like, you're somewhat unclassifiable.

You don't belong with the pajamas because you're more versatile than their modest reach; you don't belong with the work pants because they're terrible snobs; you don't belong with the gym clothes because, despite your name, you are not really worn to yoga -- you are a little too baggy for that, but don't take it personally. You are perfect just the way you are. You should have your own section, your own special unclassifiable shelf lined in raw lavender silk and cedar panels, labeled "Perfect."

Don't tell Best Black Work Pants or Fuzzy Blue Pajama Bottoms, but you are the crucial pants component of my post-nuclear-holocaust clothing set. If I had to give all of you up one by one, you and Wesleyan T-Shirt and Striped Red Hooded Sweater would be the last things protecting me from the cruel world.

Winter, spring, summer or fall, Yoga Pants. All you've got to do is call.

Sincerely,
Your Ever-Faithful Servant.

so much to plunder
I got three new CDs from the XPN music store yesterday. The physical CDs came in the mail and are now in my physical possession. I BOUGHT them. Like, with money. It is very old-school. Although not that old-school, I guess, because I did it using the web certificates I get free from my credit card, but I still paid for them. With intangible digital money that never really existed. Never mind.

This is exactly how I feel about the whole "decency" movement, and also why I feel so uneasy whenever smoking bans come up. I KNOW why banning smoking is a good thing, I have heard all the reasons and I do care about the health of bartenders and yes I would like it if you could come home from a bar without smelling like an ashtray, but I still hate it. It feels -- feels, not is, necessarily -- like an infringement on people's rights, and I don't like the idea of something we were allowed to do before suddenly being not allowed. It just makes me wonder what's next. Drunk(en) driving kills way more people every year than second-hand smoke; will we not be allowed to drink in public soon? Gee, I hope they don't take away access to my lead-contaminated water! Now THAT would be tragic.

and now for something completely different
Because I still remember when she got fired for talking about her job on her website, paranoid me has decided that I can no longer mention anything about politics here. This basically brings my number of potential topics that don't involve utterly inconsequential musings about nothing down to 0. But I have actually thought of several topics to write about that DO involve utterly inconsequential musings about nothing in the past few days. They include:

· The apparent disappearance of Phyllis. Now I'm a little worried about her.

· Dinner with my dad tonight at Nora, the only DC restaurant I have always wanted to try. It was ultra-fabulous. I had a whole artichoke. And coconut sorbet. And Amish chicken (for real). And I like my dad.

· The lead in the DC water and the fucking fact that the EPA knew about it for fucking TWO FUCKING YEARS and now their fucking solution is to make the fucking city pay for filters to be distributed ONE TIME, NO REPLACEMENTS to the 23,000 households with the lead service pipes so that we can solve the problem for TWO MONTHS ONLY fucking oh my god I can't even talk about this one.

· The fact that one and possibly two or three of my roommates is/are probably moving away this summer and I am sad.

· My new obsession with the nuances of various active verbs.

· Playing video trivia games at a karaoke bar last weekend with Hefk, Wev and two nurses from Johns Hopkins, one of whom had those spacer things in his ears. Our team was named "Tito."

· What it's like to spend six hours at Ikea and come home without $180 you once had, but with a lamp, two printer stands, a bookshelf, a desk organizer, 10 greeting cards and half a cinnamon bun -- and then not have time to do a damn thing with any of these items so that they now just hang out in boxes in the dining room.

· I'm ignoring like 10 political topics right now. It sucks that the time I feel most like I have to be objective is the time that I am learning the most about the things I want to be objective about. Oh, Mr. Paranoia. I wish you would find a new very best friend and bring back my old companion, Mr. Apathy. I so enjoyed his company. At least he knew how to relax.

But now I don't really have time to talk about any of those things because I have to go to sleep at 10 p.m. Goodnight, sweetheart, well, it's time to go...

whatchoo lookin' at, Phyllis
Every morning, when I am walking to work at approximately 5:40 a.m., there's this woman at the bus stop at the corner. She is always leaning against the front right corner of the little enclosure, which has an ad asking if you've had your three servings of dairy yet today, and she is always smoking a cigarette, and she is always looking at me. Not just looking at me -- following me with her eyes like a creepy portrait. GLOWERING, even.

I do not like this.

I do not know what her problem is, but I assume there is one, and I'm not all that eager to find out. All is clearly not well in her world. I don't know.

On the up side, I filled out an application to get press credentials for the Senate gallery today. That was cool. I affirmed that I am not, in fact, a terrorist who is going to get paid to pass information gathered there to evildoers. Not gonna do it. I hope Phyllis (probably not her real name) isn't a bus-stop terrorist who will demand information about the Senate from me and then force me to accept money for it.

head!
The head pictures are everything I thought they'd be and more. They are hilarious. I love them. My favorite is when Gwen Head is slugging champagne straight from the bottle. And also when Gwen Head is hanging out with the Thinker. And also when Gwen Head is reading a menu with Michael, whom the rest of Gwen has never met. You are all so, so funny. Tree!

yogurt retreat*
You guys? Go on a yoga retreat. I'm serious. In fact, I'm incapable of being cynical ever again.** We slept on the floor of a schoolhouse. There was this beautiful sunny room and nice people and a really cute dog with a huge head and a hot tub under a clear night sky. Not to mention the 10 hours of yoga. I got into a good, comfortable shoulder stand for my first inversion ever. And I liked wheel pose. And my ego didn't freak out when I couldn't get my head on the floor in whatever that was. And my spine feels more solid and aligned than it ever has in my entire life. And I have to stop before I start talking about my heart chakra on my weblog and am forced to make some cynical comment about myself talking about my heart chakra on my weblog, because I want to hold on to this for just a little bit longer.

---

*my dad kept calling it that on the phone. No yogurt was actually consumed on the yogurt retreat, however.
**or until I stop being sore, or until I hear our commander in chief say "nucular" again. Whichever comes first.

mm, humble pie
I'm going to an Urban Funk class at my gym tonight. I am loosely Urban but definitely not Funk. I will probably hurt myself and everyone will laugh at me, and, I am thinking increasingly as this week goes on, that can only be good for me. I'm a little lonely and displaced, out of my element -- but maybe that's good for me too.

... and, a week later, still too early for headlines...
... but this, apparently, is the time that my body wants to get up after only one single solitary day of 5:20 wake-up time. Without prompting by bad dreams or old percussion instructors or anything. It could also have something to do with the first before-midnight Friday bedtime I have had since I was about 7. It's a whole new world.

I had written a long ramble about nostalgic Indigo Girls lyrics and how quiet the streets are in the morning and transition and all this crap, and then my browser crashed and it's disappeared. You are not supposed to do that, dear. My iBook is probably exacting its revenge for hearing the phrases "using a PC is not so horrible" and "right-clicking is quite nice, actually" uttered in its presence over the last two days.

Anyway, the gist was that things are good. Leaving the old job was hard; the new job has been good so far. Not that there won't be bumps -- two of which I anticipate being debilitating caffeine addition and abject self-doubt over not knowing the name of the deputy secretary of agriculture -- but the transition itself is going pretty smoothly, knock on everything you see. Or right-click everything you see.

too early for headlines
Dream: I was in this palatial movie theater that had a kind of garden forest in it, and I was winding my way around this maze of palm trees and decorative hedge sculptures and hanging vines and all kinds of crazy green stuff that didn't belong together in one climate. It looked sort of like the Amazonia exhibit at the National Zoo, and it was really strange and beautiful, but it was completely deserted except for me and I was scared that I would never find my way out.

(Frightening side note: Someone who looks like more like C*lin McC*sky than anyone except C*lin McC*sky possibly could is walking by my window RIGHT NOW, in a gray sweatshirt that says Iowa. I am serious, you guys. I'm scared he's going to come in here and... I don't even remember anything he used to do except be intimidating and wear those awful Big Dog shirts and conduct while holding a Coke or something in one hand, and how he once was upset with me for not wanting to try out for district band on mallets because I'd already spent three months learning the oboe piece and that was nice of him. Holy C*lin McC*sky outside my window, I am so not even kidding.)

But then I guess I did find my way out of the forest somehow and I was in the movie theater, which was totally shuttered and closed -- it was like a ghost town with the weathered storefronts and a big wide road that ran down the middle of part of the theater. It was really windy inside, and I was walking forever down these silent carpeted hall/roads, past abandoned popcorn stands and broken-down doors and burned-out cars. (I remember consciously thinking in the dream that it was sort of like the world in a book I just read, Amnesia Moon, where one of the characters lives inside an old movie theater in this post-apocalyptic hellhole, but it wasn't really like this.) I went into one of the actual theaters, and instead of a screen there was a huge abstract painting of concentric circles, and all of the empty chairs were staring up at it silently. This was around the time that I once again realized it was totally deserted and I didn't know my way out, and that was when I woke up.

How obvious can you get. Abandonment concerns, anyone? And please pass the anxiety.

Alissa, queen of the biographical dreamers, just told me about a dream she had this week in which she and Dave let me out of a car and watched as I lay in the middle of the road and an eight-lane-wide truck came barelling toward me. This movie theater thing doesn't seem quite as dramatic as that, but still. A bit creepy.

---

Unrelated: Would any of you be sad to see the fortune cookies go when I give this page a facelift, or would you survive? I'm a little attached to them myself, but I'm not sure how they'll fit in with my new minimalist leanings.

sittin' here on Capitol Hill
Raise your hand if you knew there was a subway connecting the Capitol building with the rest of the legislative buildings. I didn't (know about it before this morning, not raise my hand. although I didn't do that either). But now, I've ridden on it. And it was cool. So very cool. I am tired. There is also a Hair Care room in the basement of the Senate building. Apparently, Paul Mitchell products are the products of choice for your elected representatives. I saluted Pennsylvania by greeting the Robert Fulton statue in the side rotunda thing where all the states are represented. He's toying lovingly with this little model of a steamship. And I looked at the mural of George Washington ascending to heaven on the inside of the Capitol dome, which I have seen 40 million times from the outside but never from the inside until today. It was cool. Did I say that already? Raise your hand if you're tired. Paul Mitchell and Robert Fulton agree: It's time to go to sleep.

travel bug
All the countries I've ever visited:

create your own visited country map

Wow — look at all those vast expanses of white space. I feel like a relatively well-traveled person, but I look at this map and realize what a complete fallacy that is. Only six percent. And at 15 percent, my US map didn't look much more filled out than this one. Anyone up for a road trip? What about one to southeast Asia?

nanny nanny boo boo
Looks like the authors of "The Nanny Diaries" won't be putting out their new book as soon as they thought -- which is kind of too bad, because their first sentence is either hilarious or atrocious, depending on how you look at it. Here it is. Either way, though, that sentence would probably have kept me reading, so hopefully they'll find another publisher for it. A smaller guy that's more willing to take risks, perhaps. (Quick journalism aside to Mr. NY Times: Quoting unnamed sources in a business brief about a book deal? Haven't you people learned anything?)

I tried to get into handstand in yoga yesterday. It didn't go well. I am sore. But overall, I am feeling better than last week. Go read Angie's new web page -- it's more entertaining (and more attractive, if I do say so myself) than what you'll find here.

walk along the highway
So the oblique references were leading to this: I got a new job this week. I've been avoiding writing about any of it because a) I am extremely paranoid, which is also why I'm not telling you the name or details of the new place out here in the wide wide web world and b) because I've sort of been avoiding it in other ways, too.

Most of you know this, but I'm not much of a change person in any aspect of my life. I think and work and do everything best, pretty much, in places where I feel secure and where I don't have to prove myself all the time. My noncompetitive nature works against me in situations where I am being overtly judged, and it makes me defensive and petty and distracted, and definitely not at my most creative and interested and interesting. I can fight the good fight sometimes, but only if I feel safe.

I am totally excited about the new job -- really, I absolutely am. I think it will be a fabulous job. It's tailored very much to my interests (politics, writing and editing, online stuff) and I can WALK there (only 15 blocks) and I think I can wear jeans every day to work (hurrah). I had to take a really complicated test to get the job, and it makes me feel good that I did decently on it. It's an exciting time to be working for the website of a political paper magazine, I have to get used to saying that. The people seem laid-back and friendly and smart. This is a really good thing for me.

But -- and you knew there was one -- I am so sad to leave my current old job, I have to get used to saying that too. It isn't perfect, especially recently, but I've been working there forever and I love it there. Telling my direct editor-boss was especially difficult and surreal, because I basically think he's the best person on the planet and I knew he'd be unpleasantly surprised. (He was, but he was also very supportive and kind and great.) And I was so focused on telling him and the couple people that I'm closest to -- most of whom knew anyway because they, especially one in particular, had already been listening to me freak out about it for weeks -- that I didn't really think about telling anyone else. For whatever reason, the random people I probably won't ever see again have been the most difficult for me to deal with, the ones who are making me the most sad. I'm sort of lying about that, though. The ones who make me the MOST most sad are the people like my boss and another of the editors, whom I have no idea how to be friends with outside of work, and don't, in fact, think that it's really possible.

And, see, this is why I wasn't talking about it here. I'm terrible at goodbyes even when I'm excited about what's coming next, and I'm all melancholy and melodramatic and dumb and I don't have anything remotely profound to say about it. I know this is going to be fine, but it-- whatEVER. I'm stopping now. You're welcome. Here is a poem.

where we are, by Gerald Locklin

I envy those
who live in two places:
new york, say, and london;
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris;
hawaii and switzerland.

there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be a homecoming.
i am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: i am talking about hope.

empuzzlement
Liz Phair's "Johnny Sunshine" has been stuck in my head for a week. All day, every day:

You took the car
It was my favorite one
A little white Dart
And drove it to Idaho

You took the horse
It was a thoroughbred
Saddled it up
Out on the interstate

I'll skip the verse about the cat and the antifreeze, but that's basically it. The song really has no direct relevance to my life, but apparently my subconscious has other ideas. And now that I really think about it, the song might just represent general edginess about multiple topics, which IS sort of how I'm feeling, so maybe there is a connection.

But for the first time in a while tonight, I took a quick break from being tense and sat across a table from my friends and drank some and ate some and laughed a lot and threw some shredded carrots at Debbie and felt so much better. H*alth Bar's crappy generic techno drowned out the song for a while — it's back now, but at least now I remember why I liked it in the first place. Thanks to all of you who have been helping me be a little more sane recently. I like you too.

I can't concentrate on anything today
From The Washington Post:

"Without question, the Washington media descended unfairly on Dean -- both because he was the front-runner and because he's leading a movement that's hostile to their insider culture," said Yale historian David Greenberg, author of the book "Nixon's Shadow." "They turned the 'scream' from an amusing if slightly weird sidelight into a four-day front-page story that may seriously damage his chances."

I usually bristle at all the finger-pointing at the media, but I think this is true, and also dangerous. This really is kind of a fascinating time to be watching politics -- don't get me wrong, I still am as cynical about it as ever, but this race is really interesting.

Here's another:

After Dean's Tuesday concession speech, according to ABC News, a reporter asked campaign manager Joe Trippi what happened in New Hampshire. "I'm not talking to you," said Trippi, hours before resigning from the campaign. Why? "Because the media is a pain in the [butt]."

Having your campaign manager refuse to talk to the media is a stupid strategy, but then again, your job isn't to pretend to be something you're not to make the media like you so that, in turn, you can be the Democratic nominee. Wonder what he really said -- I don't think it was "bracket-butt-bracket"...

until someone loses an eye
I've been playing a little game with myself the last few days entitled "It's Too Cold to Blank." Its recent incarnations have included some sensible things, like tonight's It's Too Cold to Watch TV (the ground floor of 17-- Wouldn't-you-like-to-know,-you-internet-stalker,-you Street is basically unheated during the winter). Also, It's Too Cold to Go Buy Milk for Hot Chocolate, Let's Have Tea Instead and It's Too Cold to Go for a Walk in the Snow. [Look at this thing the Post has now -- the expert snow yardstick says six inches so far.]

But I've now expanded this game to other, less sensible things. The most recent includes It's Too Cold to Go to the Gym Tomorrow Morning. There are several reasons why this is not OK. One is that the gym is very near to my house -- as in visible from my window. I could have walked there and back about 13 times in the amount of time it just took me to write this paragraph. Another is that the gym is, not surprisingly, indoors. If I had to run on the elliptical thingie in some kind of outdoor arctic courtyard like a hearty Norweigan cross-country skiier with blond pigtails and a Saint Bernard, perhaps Too Cold would be a valid reason. It is not.

Here are some more miscellaneous phrases I thought or said tonight: It's Too Cold to Talk About Politics, It's Too Cold to Drink Water, It's Too Cold to Take Another Look at the Faulty Code of Your Web Site, and It's Too Cold to Read This Book About How People Who Live in the Oklahoma Panhandle Are Not Cold. Don't look for any explanations; I can't provide them.

Damn, it's cold. And I'm going to the damn gym tomorrow morning, damn it. I bet those guys driving the snowplows down the damn street every 30 damn seconds are pretty unhappy. It's Too Cold to Drive a Damn Snowplow.

the moral of the story
I love this list of What Literature Has Taught [Him], especially the "Lord of the Rings" and Bible entries. Ha. It also made me want to add my own: "The Naked and the Dead" taught me that war is bad, that being both naked and dead at once is less than desirable, and that I really don't need to personally climb a scary mountain in Japan to figure any of that out.

l'chaim
Here at take it easy, there is no State of the Union on TV right now, and no monkey in a red tie is telling me that taking away funding from public schools and testing students into oblivion actually strengthen public schools. La la la! I can't hear you!

Mo, my new favorite web person, posted this list on her blog today. I'm not certain where her local paper is, but these "10 best nutrition moves" sound sensible to me:

1. Eat seven to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

2. Eat fatty fish two or three times a week.

3. Restrict red meat to once or twice a week.

4. Eat 25 grams of fiber a day.

5. Use olive oil primarily.

6. Eat "good" carbs.

7. Drink three or more cups of tea a day.

9. Shave portions by one-third to half.

10. Take a daily multivitamin.

She has explanations of them all, if you want more detail, also. Except for 9 and 3 (but 3 only by default, not for health reasons), I don't do any of these. In the winter, I get about 2/3 of 7. Sadly, I don't cook most of my own food, so I don't know about 5. I try 10 periodically, and even set up a dorky reminder for it in Outlook, but I do it MAYBE once a week. If a week were actually two weeks long. And I am actively trying to be healthy and good, here.

None of these seem diet-trendy and I'd like to incorporate some of them into my daily eating habits, but nuts? And 25 grams of fiber? And ew, fatty fish. I don't know. Do any of you guys do any of this stuff? Are $300 tax refunds going to save the world?

here, birdie birdie birdie
Our disastrous house with the leaking roof and the yummy leaded water had its first living creature (that I know of; the only one I want to know of) today -- we heard these funny scratchy noises coming from the fireplace in the living room, and the next thing we knew there was a little guy hopping around in there. Long yellow beak, pretty black patterned feathers. Clearly stuck in the fireplace. So. How to get him out.

Luckily I was home alone with the good calm roommate, the one who has castrated bulls in Equador. We took a sheet and put it up in front of the fireplace, opened the doors, and he flew out into the sheet and got sort of trapped between my right foot and the wooden pole of the fireplace. He was pretty relaxed, all things considered -- either that or he was too scared to flap around wildly. I could feel his tiny bird heart beating hard against my foot, but he held very still and poked his beak out of the top of the sheet, and I kept it pinned to the wall as C. scooped him up and took him outside. He flew up into a tree and looked down at us, and when we looked out a few minutes later he was gone.

OK, now I am going back to my initial form of book-review procrastination: The City Paper article about DC debutantes that's freaking me out way more than the bird. Scary article help me! Come on, you knew I couldn't write a whole thing about birds without a single reference... :)

apple butter and politics
Have nothing to do with each other as far as I can tell. I was trying to think of an elegant metaphor to link them together, but really, I'm just going to make you read my boring political musings before I give you the recipe I promised back when we were broken. But you're stuck with the politics before the apple butter! Ha ha! All my base are belong to me! [Or you could just scroll past that part to the recipe. --Eds.] [Da scroll! Da scroll! Da button! Da button! Scrolling so smooth like da butter on da muffin! --Strongbad]

Sorry about the not making sense to most of you. I swear these connections are clear in my head, but it's late and I'm well on my way to breaking my new year's resolution about going to bed earlier for the first time. Yes. Ahem.

So D.C. held its Democratic primary today. What? you ask. Isn't that before Iowa and New Hampshire? Isn't that breaking the rules? Well, yes. It is. That's why it's total bullshit -- and, I found out today, even more bullshit than it seems:

D.C. Democratic leaders sought to comply with party rules by making the primary non-binding and agreeing to select delegates to the Democratic National Convention at caucuses in February and March, after New Hampshire and Iowa had their votes on Jan. 19 and Jan. 27.

So let's be clear, here. D.C.'s votes at the convention are marginal -- in fact, I think "votes" is really "vote," because it's only one ? in the first place. But now, with our "non-binding primary," our meaningless votes are meaningless EVEN TO OUR OWN REPRESENTATIVES. Maybe that explains why only 10 percent of registered D.C. Democrats voted. This is what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like? Oy.

I voted for Howard Dean. I don't even Howard Dean particularly, it was just that he was the only viable candidate on the ballot -- he, Sharpton, Kucinich and Mosely Braun were the only names you'd recognize. I mean, I guessed that saved me some time actually informing myself about which candidate I really would like to be the nominee, and I can use that time to do my nails and watch old episodes of Degrassi, but it would have been nice to actually have a vote that counted for anything. Apparently the whole point of this fiasco was to raise consciousness about D.C.'s lack of representation, so I'll do my part: We have no representation. It sucks. It's stupid and I want to stop paying federal income taxes until I have some, and that would get me arrested. So please, people, when you go vote in your nice cushy states that actually count for something, remember us disenfranchised paupers over here, and vote for someone who's going to at least take the idea of statehood seriously. Which means voting for a Democrat, first of all. Among them, I don't know -- at least Dean had the decency to flout the DNC and put his name down on our ballot; maybe he'd pull through. Hell if I know, though, because I didn't have to learn anything about his candidacy, because he was the only real candidate I could have voted for.

Alright, I'm done. What do you have to do to get some apple butter around this place?

Six big apples, cored, peeled and finely chipped
1/2 c. apple cider
2 c. brown sugar, firmly packed (we used much less because our apples were very sweet, not at all tart)
1 1/2 t. ground cinnamon
1 t. ground nutmeg
1 t. ground cloves

Place apples and apple cider in 1 1/2-quart microwave-save bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap (we used a plate because we were paranoid about that no-microwaving-saran-wrap thing). Microwave on high 15 minutes. Carefully remove plastic wrap (duh) and stir in remaining ingredients. Return to microwave and cook, uncovered, 10 minutes more, stirring every 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer mixture to a blender or food processor and process until smooth. Store in airtight container in refrigerator. Yield: about 2 pints of apple butter.

Weird, huh? I forgot about all that microwaving, but it was really easy and the stuff turned out well. Yum. I need to go to bed before I decide it's time for a big cooking project.

and we're back
Sort of. Except I still don't understand— whatever. I don't understand anything about what was wrong. Just don't ask questions and smile like you know what you're talking about, and you will fool the FTP gods into thinking you've got it made.

look, ma...
... no wires! Thanks to the time and talents of the best network-setter-upper who ever roamed the earth, I am writing this from my bed, connected to nothing. I could be writing it from the kitchen table, or the balcony, or across the street, or suspended from the ceiling. Miraculously, it turns out that my iBook had a wireless card ALREADY INSTALLED in it -- god bless the gentle folk at the F&M computer store. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles. What a good day.

Unfortunately, however, it's still about 10 below in here, so this evening's computer use will have to be curtailed. If only Reuben could install a wireless heating network.

high-brow, low-brow, no-brow
I really like the image from this Washington Post article about established literary writers (however you define them) walling themselves inside the canonical castle while "torch-toters, best-selling barbarians" like Stephen King bang on the gates and demand to be let in. I've been thinking about the whole debate since they announced the National Book Awards for this year, and certainly since I read the speeches at the dinner, which unquestionably pitted King and Shirley Hazzard against each other in a really dramatic way. [They are here and here if you so desire.]

But really, it's not that much of a fight. The National Book Award is pretty populist -- "Three Junes" won last year, and that was entertaining but not exactly fine lit -- and it's a little nonsensical to have the popular vs. high-brow debate in that context.

Let me preface this by admitting freely that I don't like Stephen King's books and I do like Shirley Hazzard's. I know. I'm sorry. If you're the guy who responded to one of my book reviews last year by telling me that I am "illiterate" and "have a hole in [my] head," I'm extra sorry. Not really. But I do think Stephen King should have won that award. He's a smart guy, and very talented, and sometimes a lot of people are right about things -- I can see that even though I don't personally like his books. And I wish that everyone would stop demonizing "literature," because it doesn't automatically mean "overintellectual" or "hard to read" or "if you like it, you're a terrible snob who should be burned at the stake for not complying with what the editorial 'we' think popular books should be."

Things can be both popular and good. Lots of good things are not popular (Elizabeth Bowen, Roddy Doyle, eating cottage cheese and apple butter together); lots of popular things are not good (Ms. Steele, Jan Karon, Star Wars novels). But they don't automatically preclude each other (Alice Sebold, Anne Lamott, David Sedaris). And I'm going to read "The DaVinci Code" one of these days, really.

resolute
Yay New Year's long vacation time with family friends Angels in America fun nice telescope (we saw Saturn -- it has rings! it looks like a picture of Saturn and it is cool! and the surface of the moon and the messier object star nursery something and Mars and the pleiades and so so so so cool). I haven't written down words in a coherent sentence in a couple weeks and I don't think I can start today, but here are some resolutions for, I think, the first time ever.

1. Will go to bed earlier on weeknights. Number on clock will usually begin with a 1, only rarely with a 2, never with a 3.

2. Will go to yoga at least once every weekend am home.

3. Will listen more and better.

4. Will regularly invoke Richard Rhodes' Knickerbocker rule and apply ass to chair writing-wise.

I don't think I ever made any specific resolutions before -- I am actually feeling a bit uncharicteristically optimistic right now. Can these things really work? Anyone else have resolutions?

B-I-G F-U-N
I played Scrabble with my friend Meredith today for three hours in a coffee shop. Amazing words were spelled. Marvel. Voltage. Avowal. Gussie. Winnows. Hairy (as in, "oh, Mr. Lehman, your arm is so _____"). I was one letter short of "troubled" -- which perhaps applies to broader things as well, but we'll let sleeping Scrabble implications lie.

It was a better three hours than the three(-plus) hours I spent with the Lord of the Rings movie last night. Not that that wasn't fun too, but the thing didn't start until 10:45, which meant the theater didn't go dark until 11, and then there were 800 previews to get through. Too much boring fighting, again, and too many false endings for 2:30 a.m. I wonder if Orcs (Orks?) would be worthy Scrabble opponents.

juniper and lamplight
It's raining on top of the snow right now just like it always used to -- and presumably still does -- in Connecticut. Dark December days make me want the library at Wesleyan... I spent quite a lot of time there, especially in my thesis carrel or the downstairs reading room that was halfway underground, whispering to T. and sneaking sips of instant hot chocolate made with coffee. Would be nice to be there right now, in one of the big armchairs by the windows reading one of these, many of which have just graced my ridiculously extensive wishlist. (Idea stolen from the stupendous Bookslut.)

It's such a cliché to want good books and hot drinks and warm light and big armchairs on cold, rainy days, but there you have it. Unlike rules, clichés are made to be proven correct.

Alissa and I are looking at Storypeople right now even though I am supposed to be mach schnelling her
My dad always told me, the right tool for the right job, but all he ever had around were a few screwdrivers, so he ended up using the telephone a lot.

Go find one of your own. Mach schnell!

a gift hoarse
That's two bad animal spelling puns in a row, there. Whoa, Nelly.

So, after way too nice a weekend, I seem to have lost my voice. I don't really feel that bad but I sound horrendous, like I swallowed a cactus, or a rasp, or a bunch of razor blades (speaking of swallowing razor blades, is anyone else in the world besides me and my roommates watching Carnivale on HBO? Brother Justin and his black eyeballs is/are the scariest, scariest, scariest character(s) to ever come out of a writer's head. We watched part of "The Shining" this weekend and it didn't even hold a candle. Brother Justin is creepier than the redrum kid and Jack Nicholson combined.)

I left work early today, drove home, had some tea, slept for two hours, got up and worked on the novel for four uninterrupted hours. I wrote through a part that had really been bothering me -- I'm not sure if I'll keep it, but at least it's out of my head and on the screen. And if I were able to speak, namely to call people on my cell phone, I don't think it ever would have happened.

Sometimes it feels like we just have to figure out the same few lessons over and over again. (If I believed in fate or "larger plan" or what have you, I would have written that setnence as, "Sometimes it feels like life just teaches the same few lessons over and over again.") I need to remember to carve out space for writing and other things that require mental quiet. Mouth closed, eyes and ears open, settling the extrovert down a little and encouraging the introvert to come out. I'll still be calling all of you back just as soon as I can talk again, because it's not like I can really live without that, but remind me to make time for this too so that I don't have to learn the same damn lesson that I've already learned 400 billion times 400 billion MORE times.

In the meantime, while I am still silent, take a look at this. I read it at the gym this morning and have been thinking about our one-man Rorschach test all day.

tails of the city
I took the Metro home from work tonight and, woefully underdressed for the 38-degree evening, decided to stop at Cosi for hot coffee to fortify me for the 15-minute walk home. I was probably about 20 steps out of the store, ready to turn down 19th Street, when this gigantic -- when I say gigantic, I mean absolutely insanely unbelievably gigantic -- dog bounds around the corner and slams into me. Puts its paws on my shoulders, literally, and sticks its huge doggie face into mine. I spill half of a very large coffee, complete with milk and Equal, onto its back.

The dog's owner comes around the corner, chasing after it with a leash, and begins apologizing profusely. (Because this is my life and not a Meg Ryan movie, the owner is a graying man who is at least old enough to be my father and wearing a rainbow flag pin on his coat besides. Figures.) I, in turn, am also apologizing profusely about spilling coffee all over his dog which, in the meantime, is hopping up and down with unfettered joy. His mammoth horse-sized head is swinging to and fro. His monstrous tail easily would have taken out any passing compact car. His paws could have trampled children or small adults. A non-dog person would have been horrified, but, of course, I loved it, despite the loss of most of my coffee. I really think the universe is trying to tell me something if random dogs are singling me out like this. Can I have a puppy for Chanukah? Please?

no time, but...
... I can't leave that thing up there about being miserable when I had such a good weekend. The pre-Thanksgiving turkey was brined and cooked in a hilarious turn of events Friday night, and a day later, 20 people and lots of food sat on the floor on cushions to eat it and talk to each other. It was one of those times that added up to more than the sum of its parts... halfway through, I looked around and had one of those so-many-people-I-care-about-are-in-one-room frissions of happiness. Really was warm and lovely and great.

OK, now it's back to work. (Later, we will go back to take it easy's regularly scheduled doom and gloom. I read an article in US News this morning that made me want to rip out my hair -- we can talk about it later, though. Concentrate on the happy pre-Thanksgiving and almost-real-Thanksgiving for now. :) )

bleh
I'm having one of those days when the world seems like a very harsh place and I'm just trying to duck out of its way so I can get on with my small, unimportant life. Avoid eye contact. If I can't see it, it can't see me either.

I've been working on the stuff about the trials for the two sniper suspects for so long that it's basically unreal to me -- a story, a page full of words, a loose bunch of details that need to be spelled correctly and posted quickly. An abstraction. Then this kind of testimony crops up and I remember that it's too real, unbearably sad, horrifying.

I know that losing perspective is a defense mechanism, and that it lets you think on a different plane so that you can operate objectively and make dark jokes about terrible things. I know a lot of journalists have to do it to stay sane. But the horrible jolt you get when you come back to earth and remember what you're really talking about might not be worth it. I feel awful. Too callous and too sensitive, too everything.

all artistic-like
This weekend, I went to The Corcoran to see an exhibit called "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited." A sculptor named J. Seward Johnson has basically taken a bunch of famous paintings and made them three-dimensional -- life-sized statues, hills full of fake grass and poppies, fully decorated rooms that you could step into and around.

There's something sort of trivializing and naughty-feeling (trying and failing to resist the liberal-arts pull of the word "transgressive," but at least I wrestled it inside the parentheses) about the whole exhibit. It was packed, and there were kids all over the place, touching the statues, climbing on everything. And the thing was that the exhibits didn't really create a feeling of anything the way that looking at -- or into -- a painting does. You'd think it would draw you in more, but it didn't, really.

That said, it was pretty cool. Johnson's statues are actually amazingly cool and not trivial at all. There was a lot of playful self-referencing in the exhibits, too, that showed a different level of awareness of the project. But I don't know, maybe I'm too snobby, but it didn't really have any kind of emotional impact at all.

Intellectually: cool. Practically: not so much. Except maybe the Van Gogh bedroom. My roommate had to drag me out of that one, which was, in fact, rather incredible. It sort of made you feel like you weren't really standing on the ground.

coaxing, gently
Come on, leafygreen, cooperate.

enemy terrirory
Scotty Claus suggested to me on the phone tonight that perhaps writing something here for a change might be a good idea. So to placate my innumerable (Scott + Carl = 2) West Coast readers, I figured my newly acquired DSL and I could cooperate to make his dream a reality.

One of my friends, who works for the defense department, is going to Iraq, probably for six months, and I had dinner with him last night to say goodbye. (He is an excellently secretive military employee as ordered, and I have absolutely no idea what he does at his current job, why he is going to Iraq or what he will be doing once he gets there. He soldiers with his brain and not with his brawn, but I don't know more than that. I am also deliberately not using his name or talking much about his reaction or feelings because I know D*nald R*msfeld stays up late every single night reading my blog and I don't want to screw up my friend's career. OK? OK.)

Anyway, I think I was playing the role of pep talker -- despite how much work it will certainly be, and how it's more than a little dangerous, and how far from home it is and how long six months will feel, this is an unbelievably cool opportunity. It's someplace no one from this country will ever get to see otherwise. Way more importantly, he's going to be a part of something so much larger than himself, something that is so important on a global scale. Talk about making a difference. If people as smart and capable as he is are in charge over there, I feel a little better about the whole thing.

But later, he pulled his dogtags out. Then I got it. He's really going away, and those pieces of metal are hanging under his shirt for only one reason.

I'm not sure how I feel about it now. I still think it's incredible and important, but there's an awful lot of dread and worry for him mixed in. And I'm still not that crazy about this whole thing. In case you were in doubt.

My pal Donny R. and I are going to go check the new fun blogs I am now reading, and then I am going to go to bed. Maybe tomorrow someone will explain to me why it seems as though we have traded weather with Iraq, and now it's 85 degrees in November.

the best birthday EVAAAAAAAHH
(Read this while keeping in mind that of course it would have been better if all of you had been there too, OK? OK.)

There was a restorative yoga workshop. For my birthday. In my house. Seven of us and our unbelievably awesome yoga teacher lying on the dining room floor. There aren't really words to describe how perfect and hilarious and perfect and awesome and perfect it was, so you'll have to trust me, but it was great. Visiting friends and long Metro rides and fun brunch, etc.: great. All of it: great. I still am on a fun-weekend high. Best. Birthday. Ever.

the coffee cup, I think about you
See, I don't blog for like a zillion years and then I have all these random things to talk about... so instead of forcing some kind of arbitrary connection, I will make a list without any paragraph hooks.

1. I saw "Follies" at *phrata Saturday night. When we did this in high school, I was sitting behind a lot of scenery (while juggling an oboe, an English horn and a baritone saxophone so I wasn't in a position to pay attention to the words anyway), and this was the first time I had ever actually *seen* the show. And it was good, but wow, is that show ever psychotic. Who knew all that crazy stuff at the end meant the four main characters were having nervous breakdowns? I don't know what I used to think all the wacky music was about. Probably I didn't think about it at all, because I was too busy trying to remember to switch reeds or something.

And -- with apologies to Hefk, who heard this train of thought yesterday -- thinking back on what we did makes me realize that having 16-, 17- and 18-year-old high school students perform that play really adds a layer of meaning to it, like the Langley Schools Music Project kids singing "Desperado." What having young people playing older people watching their younger selves imply? Inevitability, sure, and another serious layer of hopelessness on top of that. Whew. I remember a bunch of adults getting upset about the appropriateness of students doing that show, but I always thought it was just about the language or the "sexual themes" or whatever.

Also, there was an awful lot of H*mpfield-ity to this production, seriously. (Warning: a lot of google-proof vowel-asteriks coming up.) S**n *'D*nn*ll's mom was in it. Mrs. K**tt*r was in it and choreographed it, and it definitely looked it. Kr*st*n P*ntz got tossed around by C*dy Sm*th (who is tall!). J*sh D*b*rd is still cute. The woman playing the character originally played by Hefk had, like, the exact same fringy red dress on for the end as she wore. They all danced Dance-Theater-tastically. The show was good, but kind of eerie -- like imagining people you know really well totally naked, and realizing that for all of this time they've been naked underneath their clothes. That's not a perfect metaphor, but you know. Eerie.

2. This is how I totally feel about fall. I like gourds, too, and it is so beautiful outside that I want to scream. I went apple-picking last weekend and am still reaping the applicious bounty via applesauce, apple crisp, apple pie, apple bread pudding, apple-strawberry jam and apple butter. No exaggeration. Also, I basically have a completely new wardrobe this year, and that is expensive as hell but it's fantastic. I feel good in my skin.

3. Thank you for all the birthday wishes. Yay birthday! My parents' surprise party went off without a hitch, although I do think the gigantic leftover MEAT TRAY I was forced to take home afterward might count as a hitch. Ew. God. You all know how I feel about meat, but "you have roommates, someone there will eat it!" It's like 20 lbs. of roast beef and turkey. Each. Ew.

4. There are about 400 other things, but they'll have to wait because work is unbelievably busy right now. OK. Hope all is well in your respective worlds.

alissa is smart
It IS time for Storypeople:

How many people can you love before it's too much? she said & I said I didn't think there was any real limit as long as you didn't care if they loved you back.

debriefing
So the GBC was fun, eh? A little too much challenge in the challenge. Some of us did fall apart a bit at the end. But it was still content-ful and good, and next time we'll take the Big C's suggestion and do one topic a week for a month or something like that. We rule, though, basically. I like us and I like our writing.

Unfortunately I can't set up comments on that page because I'd need a new YACCS account, and they're not accepting new people, and commenting systems in general are a huge pain. So the central commenting location suggested by Hefk will have to be an idea for another day. Until then, you can keep your ideas for the next one snug in your giant brains. Let me know when it's time for GBC II: The GENTLE Blogging Challenge.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Five: Something Worth Publishing
In the hopes that it will be inspired by its inclusion under the title "Something Worth Publishing," I'm going to talk about the book I'm writing now. It's something I never talk about with people I know -- or, if I do, only with sort of a hemming, hawing, aw-shucks kind of attitude. So I'm going to talk about it.

It's about a guy. A guy who leaves his life and moves to a farm that's populated with a host of characters. And, uh, things happen to them.

See, this is why I can't really talk about it. I don't know what to say. I'd much rather that you read it for yourselves, but I don't want people to read it because it isn't finished. And although I love feedback and hearing comments about the work-in-progress, I'd really rather have people read it finished. So it's not that I'm being secretive -- it's that I'm being selfish.

Now all I need is a really long stretch of not doing anything but writing. That's what I want most in the world, and also something I'm really scared of. I've been working on this thing for almost a year and a half; it's two-thirds done. It's no coincidence that its very best parts were written during long stretches of being able to work on it for several consecutive days while I was on vacation or something similar. Do I need to do nothing but work on it? No. Would I like to, and would the book be better for it? Yeah.

There's the rub. I wish I had something enlightening to say about it, but I don't. Maybe twenty-years-from-now Gwen can look back on this problem and laugh and laugh and laugh while she thumbs through her fifth published novel.

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Four: A Movie That Taught Me A Life Lesson
Dead Poets Society. Oh yes. If there's any way in the world that any of you have missed it, it's the story of a bunch of overprivileged white boys in the stuffy 1950s who go to a private school. Robin Williams is their English teacher and he inspires them out of their dull daily drudgery and makes them love literature and rebel against the constricted society in which they live. To demonstrate their rebellion, they get to dance around in the woods with bongos, quit the yearbook, build forbidden radios, star in plays, kill themselves in heartwrenching ways involving hats made of sticks, read poetry to pretty blond cheerleaders and stand atop desks to sound their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world.

The now-cliched "inspirational" parts of this movie really did inspire me deeply. When Professor Keating stands in a hallway in front of all the pictures of past students and tells Our Young Heroes about how they're all worm food, and has the kid read, "that same flower that smiles today/ tomorrow will be dying," and hisses "Carpe diem, boys, seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary" in their ears, it really, really did it for me.

And although the specific situation of the movie has lost some resonance over the years, the general message still works. Back then it confirmed something I had suspected about literature and now it reminds me of it when I forget: that books and words are a gateway to something larger than yourself, and that they can connect and inspire people in ways that few other things can. Also that Robert Sean Leonard looks wonderful without a shirt on.

Day Three: Games
OK, I pretty much blew this one -- I was going to be all creative and write my own Mad Lib, but I didn't have time yesterday and so I waited, and now I don't have time today. Also I just burned my fingers on a really hot popcorn kernel and it hurts to type. Shut up. Anyway, some genius put Mad Libs online! Go here. I'm sorry. To anticipate the next topic, in the immortal words of John Bender from the Breakfast Club: "Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place."

***Visit the homepage for the Great Blogging Challenge for topics, rules and contributors.***

Day Two: Earliest Memories

There are a couple. The one that I think is the very very earliest is from nursery school, and it's really just a picture of an object more than anything else. Is it weird that my first memory is mostly of an object that has no consequence in my life? Hm. Anyway. It was a green plastic inchworm with wheels that you could ride. It had a brown saddle on the middle part, the top of its inching body. Everyone coveted the inchworm, and I can see it absolutely perfectly, frozen in my mind. I don't remember riding it, or even the feeling of wanting to ride it -- just the feeling of looking at it, on the cement patio in the back of the church, in front of two glass sliding doors. Can see it like it's in front of me now.

My first real memory was when I was a little older than that, I think, probably about 4. I was in a shoe store -- Irving Shoes in Prk. City Mall, to be specific -- with my mom, and she was trying on shoes, and I got bored and decided to go to the toy store next door. So I did. By myself. I went to the back where the books were (some things never change, I guess) and sat down on the blue carpeted floor and started reading. And my mom found me eventually, but not before she called security and all that good stuff. But that's not part of my memory, because I wasn't there -- I just remember going in and then getting spanked afterward, which I think only happened two times total in my entire childhood and, in retrospect, was entirely justified. I remember looking at the yellow case of Smurfs on the checkout counter while I was getting dragged out of the store, and not really understanding what I had done wrong. Presumably I understood post-spanking.

And then there's another random one, which I really can't place age-wise, but it involved sitting in the black fuzzy recliner with my dad and Lambie, who was really one of a series of identical stuffed lambs that I loved to their early deaths. I would freak out when Lambie would get lost or forgotten, and I wouldn't stop until he was found or retrieved. He was awesome. No one messed with Lambie.

Day One: My Fictitious Weekend
This weekend, the Magic Money Fairy came to my house and threw 17 giant bags of money in the window.

This weekend, at age 90, I gave birth to a son. I was kind of jealous of my husband Abraham's concubine, who also gave birth to a son, so I had her and the baby banished, thus beginning 3,000 years of strife between two major world religions. Actually, thus creating the separate religions in the first place, which, when you get down to it, are the real problem.

This weekend, I grew a second head to act as a back-up hard drive for my brain, which is already coming in very handy, because I managed to remember how to get somewhere difficult this morning.

This weekend, I decided that Arnold would actually make an excellent president governor.

This weekend, I learned to leap tall buildings in a single bound. My cape is coming in the mail tomorrow.

This weekend, I finished "Seabiscuit." (Ha. That one is even more fictitious than the others.)

Pre-GBC: Anticipation
From "Poetics," by A.R. Ammons

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self

I think it's a mixed blessing, anticipation. Sometimes it's better than the thing that's being anticipated; other times, it's more like cold dread. I read a statistic a long time ago about how people spend 93 percent of their lives waiting, and I always wondered how that was measured, because, really, you spend 100 percent of your life waiting for SOMETHING. Currently anticipating: the phone ringing, 2 p.m., the good news and the bad news, Rosh Hashanah food with my family, someone getting here someday, my 26th year, the leaves changing and the air getting cold.

get set
Actually, get set here: GBC homepage. (My sincere apologies about the very basic, very unlovely HTML, but I was in a hurry.) I will leave this link at the top of my page so that you can get to the topics every day, even when I begin writing about them. Which will happen tomorrow.

on your mark
Get your warmup suit (warmup typing mittens) on, 'cause it's time for the Great Blogging Challenge.

Here are the rules:

1. You do not talk about-- OK, that's completely played out.
2. Go ahead and talk about the GBC. Tell all your friends. Talk about it all day long.
3. A list of all GBC participants will be posted on this site for your click-through convenience. If for some reason you are participating but do not want your name included, please let me know.
4. All the topics will be posted now to facilitate advance planning, but try to do each topic during the 24 hours of the day assigned.
5. Or don't, whatever.
6. But let's not start until Monday.
7. But, in the spirit of contradicting myself as much as possible, there is a pre-GBC topic to be undertaken from now until midnight Sunday just to get us warmed up.

Here are the topics:

Pre-GBC (Wednesday-Sunday): Anticipation. They say hindsight is 20/20, but what about foresight?

Monday: My Fictitious Weekend. What could have happened to you this weekend, but didn't?

Tuesday: Earliest memories. Pretty self-explanatory. Visit Lauren's Sept. 12 entry for inspiration.

Wednesday: Games. Make up a quiz (per Angie), write an original Mad Libs thing that people can fill out, just generally ruminate upon the idea of games and the many forms they take. Interactivity preferred.

Thursday: Movie(s) that Taught You a Life Lesson. Must include a short description of said movie(s) in case people haven't seen it/them. This is mostly for Alissa's benefit, because somehow she still hasn't seen "Sixteen Candles," and honestly I can't fathom how she's made it this far.

Friday: Something Worth Publishing. Loosely suggested by Kelly, we will finish the week with a free-form entry. Write something of worth -- however you choose to define that -- that you'd want to see on your webpage in 20 years. Could be letter to your older self, poetic ode to shoelaces, personal manifesto, larger commentary on the world, favorite recipe for squash soup, whatever.

And that's all, folks. List of contributors will be posted posthaste.

hurried-cane
OK, that title doesn't even make sense. Whatever. Sometimes I'm not up for clever.

So the hurricane sort of sucked. I wish someone would have canceled it. Our power went off for about 12 hours, just long enough for it to be decently amusing to be in the dark -- we played backgammon by candlelight and debated the merits of opening the freezer for long enough to eat all the ice cream, and then the power came back on with a whoooooosh in the middle of the night. I woke up when everything whirred back to life around 4:30 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep because the eerie green glow of the sky and the branches slapping against the side of the house. The office didn't have full power Friday, so I went to a friend's house to use his DSL and worked like a maniac, and then the weekend just kind of slipped away from me in a blur of shopping and gymming and I don't even know what else. Overall, the hurricane was just disruptive enough to inconvenience a lot of people, and not disruptive enough to be fun for anyone who doesn't work for the federal government. I give it a D. D minus, even. It sucked.

In other news, who's up for a blogging challenge? Too bad blink tags don't work any more. That would have been a good candidate. But anyway, blogging challenge, hm? Blogging challenge? What if we all blogged something every single day for a week, and enlightened each other with our wisdom? I'm tired of how I never write anything interesting, or even not interesting, any more. We need to liven these here pages UP. We could even have themes or something. Yeah, themes. What if we thought of a theme every day and then we all, uh, wrote something about it? Is that too much work? Any other ideas? Who's with me?

last night I had the strangest
I dreamt I was starting another semester abroad in Israel, and I was in an apartment that looked nothing like the one I actually lived in but I knew was the same. There were a lot of hallways and some kind of courtyard, and my old roommate Kim was running toward me through one of the halls. I can't remember much more except that I was so excited to be there -- unlike the first time, when at the beginning I was too freaked out to be excited about much of anything.

I know this happens to many of us every fall, but I have that old give-me-something-new feeling. I want to go to art school. I want to move to England. I want to disappear somewhere so I can finish the book.

I look at people (one person in particular) who have sort of forsaken "regular life" to embrace unscheduled possibility, who have taken really big scary leaps to start doing something they love stop doing something they didn't love and welcome fluidity and uncertainty into their lives. I don't know how to do that, mainly because I don't know if I would really be happier if I decided to quit everything. Too much of what I do love is wrapped into my average day. I am happy to get out of bed in the morning. I like my life.

<Sex in the City voiceover>But, in the fall, you can't help but wonder: What if different would be better?</voiceover>

brown eyes blue
It's like the sky suddenly remembered what color it's supposed to be. Oh yeah, blue. I'm blue. I'm not gray or tan, or weirdly yellow. Rain, although preferable to previous summers' alarming droughts, does not have to come out of me ALL the time. Your pollution has done your best to make me a vile, choking, muddy smudge -- but I will prevail. I will not be vanquished. I am blue! And beautiful.

Know what else is cool about the sky? Mars. Mars is really cool. 600,000 years -- we're smack in between the Neanderthals and the spacepeople of 2287, yo.