calling the moon, revisited

When I was in Yom Kippur services last weekend, I read this Talmud story (reading a separate book about commentary on the holidays because I was boooooored and unhappily wondering what I was doing in services anyway if it isn't meaningful for me at this point in my life. but then I read this story and it felt very profound, and I feel like little moments like this sometimes happen to me at synagogue, and maybe that is reason enough to go. but they also happen on the subway sometimes, so I don't know what that means) that went a little something like this:

A big important rabbi presided over his congregation for Yom Kippur. At the end of the service but before breaking their fast, everyone was supposed to go out and celebrate the appearance of the new moon, which symbolized rebirth for the new year -- but this year, the rabbi looked outside and the moon was invisible, completely clouded over. He got very worried and, fearing this was a bad sign for the coming year, tried to will the clouds away and force the moon out with his mind.

It didn't work, and the rabbi sat alone in silence, concentrating on the moon. But his faithful followers -- his hasidim -- didn't know to worry about the moon, and they were so full of joy about the end of the sad holiday and hope for the new year that they began to dance. Eventually, their enthusaism was so contagious that the rabbi got up and danced with them and forgot about the moon. And the moon looked down and saw their dancing, and it smiled, and (you guessed it) came out from behind the clouds. And one of the hasids looked out the window and told the rabbi the new moon was out, and the rabbi saw it and realized his mistake.

Moral of the story: joy, not concentration.

I think I've been applying too much of the latter and not enough of the former to my problems these days. You can't force joy and you can force concentration, which makes the concentration easier in a way -- it makes sense that we'd try to tackle uncontrollable things by addressing them as though they were under our control. But it doesn't work, and there's no dancing in the process. Not sure exactly how to fix this, but I'm working on it. A friend gave me an awesome book tonight about how to knit socks... maybe socks are good first step...

it's a 72-chicken day for Chucky

Leafygreen's First-Ever Breaking News Update: Chucky Caught!

And none too soon. Six no-chicken days in a row -- that's fit for neither human nor reptile.

Thankfully, Chucky was recovered safely. He was not shot. We saw video of his capture on CNN, and he looked fine, although some guy was sitting on his back... probably standard procedure for securing 12-foot alligators who can swallow grown humans whole, but still. Chucky is not a chair.

This also was occasion for the most inane comment ever heard on CNN. The anchor, interviewing some guy who works for an alligator rescue league, asked moronically and slightly hysterically, "Why would you ever have a job like that?" Um, hello? Did the guy not just secure a 12-foot alligator who can swallow grown humans whole? Did he need a chair and thought becoming an alligator rescuer would be the easiest way to get one?

Welcome home, Chucky. Most of you know how I feel about zoos, but I think this turned out best for all involved. Somewhere in Alabama, a happy alligator sleeps tonight.

a journalistic coup

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the best lede paragraph in history, from a Post story entitled On Top of Alabama's Other Headaches, Gators Gone Wild:

Sometimes Chucky has three-chicken days, and sometimes Chucky has six-chicken days. But Chucky does not enjoy no-chicken days -- and Thursday was his second in a row.

I am adopting this, the Chucky Standard, as my new measure of life. For example, today I had a four-chicken day -- without the first two hours or so, it might even have been a five-chicken day. How about you?

back from outer space

today, even though living in DC means it basically counts for nothing. But voting! Important! Yes yes! And speaking of voting, Mr. Carl, I've been meaning to tell you since I read this -- you should vote. I agree with Cindy's comment and I know the lesser-of-two-evils situation makes you want to stay home, but seriously, Washington? Important! Yes yes! If you lived in Texas or New York, you could stay home, but they're not kidding about that swing state stuff. And not voting isn't really making a political statement... it's not like nonviolent resistance or anything. It's an absence instead of a presence, and it's hard to base positive action on that.

End of the PSA before I get all yoga philosophy.

I also just went to Hem's Web site to look up lyrics to this song that's been stuck in my head today -- the sidewalk bends where your house ends/like the neighborhood is on its knees -- and apparently there is some deal that allows you to preorder the new CD and get free downloads and oh my gosh I have to go spend $16 right now to do this. Rabbit Songs was literally stuck in my computer at work for weeks and, seeing as I listened to it an average of four times a day anyway, I didn't mind. Fortunately the computer gave it up without a fight when I needed to take it out this afternoon, or we would have had words. And then I would have had some kind of blunt instrument to force open that little plastic door, and then I would have won.

Going to buy that CD now. I win again, evil work computer, because you will not have six new free downloads and I will! Happy Rosh Hashanah. L'shana tova. While I start the new year by spending money online, take a look at this hilarious entry (and then the one above it to finish the story) on a random blog I had never read before but has now earned a bookmark based solely on this story.

GR* in NY* for the GO*

The asteriks make that a little kicky, no? Like a boy band.

Off to cover the convention and then on to a wedding in Boston. Leaving by train Friday morning and returning by plane Sept. 5. This -- five 18-hour workdays and yet another mad dash up the east coast -- is what passes as a vacation for me this summer... woe is me, but not really woe, because I think it's going to be kind of fun. Be good. Pray for my objective, immortal soul among the Elephants, if you're into that sort of thing. :)

embracing the idiot box

Like all Bob-Costas-loving Americans (and really, what American isn't loving Bob Costas right now?), I've been watching my share of the Olympics. I've also been watching the share belonging to people who don't have TVs with reception. I have watched fencing and tennis and gymnastics and swimming and swimming and swimming. Actually, that's all I've watched, and I wish I'd been watching a few more of the random sports like handball and bridge and street luging and synchronized snoring and donkey kicking and whatever else, but I suppose there are still a few more days. I have been not doing anything I should be doing, such as sleeping, now, so I can watch scary prepubescent girls stake their entire lives on a quarter of an inch of one heel over a piece of white tape.

Bridge is for real, by the way. There is bridge in the Olympics this year.

Today, I even interrupted my daily gym viewing of "A Different World" -- it was a good episode, too, Dwayne and Whitley were moving to Japan ("but Duhwaaaiiyyuunn, ah don't spayk Japuhnaiyce") -- to watch women's tennis. Martina Navratilova and some other woman no one was paying attention to played doubles against two Japanese -- Japuhnaiyce! -- women who eventually wound up winning. But it was so great. The Bravo announcers, who are less grating than Bob, kept talking about how Martina was playing in her first championship in 1973, and both of the Japanese women AND her doubles partner weren't even born until '75 or '76. It was great. She is the most badass thing ever -- I love how she jams her elbow into her side when she does well and screams "fuck!" when she messes up. Can you imagine doing anything for almost 30 years with that level of intensity? Amazing.

I have to go to bed now, but Michael Phelps is in lane 4, and Bob Costas is still wide awake...

the sunspot effect

You spend so much energy trying to explain yourself, trying to fit into whatever places you're trying to make or find, that when suddenly you look at these faces in a circle, and you know that rightfully they are strangers to you because rightfully we are all strangers to each other, but suddenly in this wide-open world there are these people who are yours and you are theirs -- a time when it's right, just right, when it fits -- you want pin it down, to name it, to quantify and keep it.

It doesn't work, and the words you will try to find later are only oblique and failing. But not being able to stare straight at it doesn't make it any less real.

if you dish it, we can take it

Before I get to the story about "A Different World," I just took a Find Your Spot quiz, and my spots are apparently Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Oregon. Johnson, Vermont is my top spot, followed by Shelberne Falls, Massachusetts. Hm. Interesting, if by "interesting" one means "not at all surprising."

But the different world of which I have literally been dreaming is the TV show. Two nights in a row, I have dreamt of Whitley and Jaleesa and Ron and Freddie and Dwayne Wayne. Seriously. The first night, it sort of made sense, because I'd been watching it at the gym that day; that dream featured some kind of boat in New York and the Statue of Liberty and one of those big trailer attachment things that drags canoes. The second night, though, Whitley and Dwayne and I were just hanging out. I don't remember anything else about it. Maybe they will move to Johnson with me...

miscellany

1. You may have noticed that the site was down for a while. Something was wrong that's fixed now, and that's all I know about that.

2. I created a new books page, which I cannot imagine any of you read for any reason, but it now has a beautiful new template and is updatable through Blogger. Now I might post to it more than once every 632 years.

3. Backbends in yoga today:

In Sanskrit, the heart chakra is called Anahata, which means “unstruck” or “unhurt.” Its name implies that deep beneath our personal stories of brokenness and the pain in our heart, wholeness, boundless love, and a wellspring of compassion reside.... In many backbending poses, the heart is positioned higher than the head. It's wonderfully refreshing to let the mind drop away from the top position and instead lead with the heart.

4. Hulk and Smash, I am beginning to suspect, have very rich inner lives.

    4a. They have very specific ideas about the proper feng shui of their tank. For example, the small shell must be in the water dish. I take it out every day and refill the dish; every night they must put it back in, because every morning it's in the exact same spot. I look in at them and they look back at me: "It belongs in the dish. IN the dish. That's the money corner, dumbass. GOD."

    4b. Smash has been climbing to the top of the coral and staying there for hours, outside his shell but not moving. I want to get him a little flag so he can plant it there and claim Mount Smash as his own -- he clearly has some kind of imperialist agenda.

    4c. They eat green grapes but not purple ones.

    4d. I forgot to credit the original pet of RAGE: Lauren's Bella. Perhaps Bella is contributing to Hulk's and Smash's rich inner lives by serving as a spiritual guide.

5. Wow.

6. I went to hear a friend of a friend's band last night at Iota. A woman behind us did that thing when you have to scream to be heard over the loud, loud, loud music, and then the music suddenly stops but you're still screaming something wildly inappropriate and out of context and everyone stares. What she screamed was this: "... licking and licking and-- shit, did everyone hear that?"

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...

that time of year again

The time of the pamie.com book drive, that is. I gave some classics this year -- The Outsiders, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Cat in the Hat -- to balance out that weird book about the Pakistani chicken I gave last year. They were from the Spring Valley Branch's wishlist, which, now that I glance at it again, is absolutely begging for someone to buy the Hulk Sticker Extravaganza.

And I'm still trying to stay apolitical, but my god does it suck that libraries have to rely on the fabled kindness of strangers -- even when it's a lot of kind strangers -- for these sorts of things. It does concern me that Those In Charge will look at things like this and think, "if private citizens will take care of community programs, the government can get away with slashing funding! Hey, could you hand me another tax cut?" while they lean back in their leather chairs and count their money like Scrooge McDuck. But then I picture strung-out school board members trying desperately to fight budget cuts and not knowing what to do, and I feel better.

Still, I hope Those In Charge realize these donations do not absolve them of one ounce of their obligation to the people of their districts, counties, states, country, damn it. I mean it.

This is appropriately timed, too, because I've been using the D.C. public library system more lately. Its main branch is walking distance from my office, and although it's sort of a depressing building full of people doing more sleeping on the tables than reading, which honestly I do not begrudge them but is really sad but that's another story, I've been shocked at how great its selection is. Almost everything I look for is there. I've been going down my Amazon wishlist and being pretty psyched… I love that library-shelf thrill of the chase…

Anyway. Help give that to someone else: Go donate a book. It will make you feel good, it will help nice librarians, and maybe it'll somehow stick it to Those In Charge, the greedy selfish jerks.

happy trails

The view from the next-to-highest point, I think. The pretty little river down there would be the mighty Potomac.

Putting the falls in "Great Falls." This actually was off the trail in a visitor-friendly section with ramps and railings and things near the parking lot. This was also at the end of the day, right before we got into the car; these are totally not in chronological order. Apologies if that ruins my journalistic integrity.

The mighty Potomac stops posing for the camera, looking less picturesque and more like the wretched, polluted, muddy swamp it really is. But still pretty, and the sky was damn blue.

Us. Note that the river settles into a nice medium level of ripply greenness.

My favorite picture of the day, for some reason. Mighty P smoothes himself out like glass in one of the many little pools off the trail.

sinking is all I have planned

I spent yesterday afternoon hiking at Great Falls -- the less-popular Maryland side, for you locals -- and it was wonderful beautiful wonderful wonderful perfect beautiful wonderful. More breathless praise and perhaps photographs to follow later.

But while we were walking through the easier parts, I was thinking about the Aimee M*nn show I'd seen at the 9:30 Cl*b on Saturday night. It was a great concert, and she actually seemed pretty relaxed. For her. Which is to say totally on edge, but at least interacting with the audience. The two other times I've seen her, she literally stared straight ahead and didn't say one word between songs.

What I was thinking was this: Shawn C*lvin would go hiking with you. Most of the other women singers I like, at least the girl-with-a-guitar ones, would go hiking with you. Melissa F*rrick would go hiking with you; she would bring beer and cigarettes and sit out on the highest rock she could find. The Ind*go G*rls would go hiking with you and then take you out to a nighttime bonfire at an Indian reservation in the back of their friend's pick-up truck. There would be naked children running around and many, many barking dogs, and Emily would give you her flannel shirt if you got cold.

Then I went down the whole list. All of us are already besties with Dar, basically, and would do anything with her. Antje actually kind of IS our friend, tangentially anyway, which is a bit surreal. Erin McK*own would totally go see bad movies with you on a rainy Sunday and then run around the supermarket with a watergun throwing grapes or something.

Even Beth Ort*n, who is sort of cool and remote, would have coffee with you at the diner in the middle of the night. You'd probably be intimidated, but you would be able to have a cool, remote conversation. And Liz Pha*r, Ms. "Fuck and Run" Herself –- you might only be able to discuss how she's such a HUGE SELLOUT, but you could concievably be with her in a bar at 3 a.m., drinking steadily while she furiously seduces men like a black widow spider.

But Aimee M*nn? Would not go hiking with you. Would not have coffee or talk or watch movies with you. I can't begin to picture it. I think she is so freaking fantastic and her lyrics absolutely blow me away, but she's kind of scary. I'm scared of people who are that intense in general –- they just burn so brightly and so angrily. The word "brilliance" comes to mind in both the intellectual and physical senses.

So yeah. When we organize a hiking trip with all these people, Aimee might have to wait and be brilliant by herself in the car. I sort of don't think she'd mind, though -- hopefully she won't be realizing the Beauty of the Rain any time soon...

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?