Reading.

I have Game of Thrones, and I've read about 60 pages of it, but it's due tomorrow, and it can't be renewed, because there are others waiting for it. I have two Nesbos, which I have set aside because I was reading Game of Thrones. I think I'll wait till summer to read it and its brethren, because I think I'll enjoy it more if I can get a run at it and then keep going. So I should start one of the Nesbos, or read some poetry or something dignified. Also, there's a pile of magazines. Sometimes there's too much to choose from. It's an absurd predicament. This is the kind of predicament that makes me feel tired of myself. Who complains about this? Me, that's who.

Anyway, tonight, we went out to fulfill the promise of my own New Year's resolution, to go to at least one reading a month. January was a wash, but there was also a lot of sickness in that month. I have written myself my own doctor's note for January. February, I've gone to two, but one of them was my own. I really enjoyed tonight's reading--I got to see the people, I fulfilled my own promise to myself, and the reading was good, some parts especially good. It made me want to write. Why did I forget this about readings? I don't know. But I'm looking forward to more of them now, if for this reason alone.

Valentine.

you guys all know I love you, right?
even if I'm a day late, and even if
the cookies, which I did bake,
are only, at this point, virtual.
thanks for stopping by and reading.
I mean it.

(and thanks, Jason McF., for the awesome pic.)

One song: 'I Will Always Love You.'

Tonight, at a very late hour, just before we took Bruiser for his final constitutional of the day, the Historian called me in--A Room With a View was on. Oh, how I loved that movie when I first saw it, and then oh, how I loved the book. I walked in while Simon Callow was remarking that the Emersons had taken the cottage slash villa down the road a bit, and darling Helena Bonham Carter was fuming that she had spent so much time cultivating the Miss Allens, to no avail.

I said, "Look at him!" about Simon Callow, who was--believe it--so very young in this film. And then, "And Julian Sands--he was so beautiful in this movie!" He was indeed so beautiful--in the very next scene, with the (also so young, so lovely) Daniel Day Lewis as the effete and poncey Cecil. Such a rapture, to see them all in the flush of their youth, or at least of their younger years. We took Bruiser out and upon our return, resumed the film--our admiration of this forgotten and rediscovered beauty which inheres in youth and which always surprises me.

Earlier, I was watching Glee, a Valentine's Day episode. The Glee-sters were charged to find the best love songs, whilst love-drama swirled all about. When Mercedes began to sing her envoi to Sam, I thought from the very first piano chord, "It's going to be 'I Will Always Love You'," and then, when it was, I thought, "and it will be the Whitney Houston version," as it turned out to be.

Now, when that Whitney Houston version first came out, on the soundtrack of The Bodyguard, I loathed it (and secretly admired it, too, as is so often the way). I first came upon the song in my own youth, in the seventies, when Linda Ronstadt covered it:



Because those were the days when we all read liner notes on the back of LPs, I knew that the song was originally written by Dolly Parton, though it was probably years before I ever heard that version:



I always found the Whitney Houston version to be excessive, florid, self-regarding, too in love with the capacities of the voice to do justice to the modesty and perfection of the song:



But tonight, when I heard this young woman, Amber Riley, with her gorgeous, beautiful voice, sing the song just as--practically phrase for phrase--Whitney Houston had sung it, I heard it afresh, an homage to the greatness of the singer now just gone, who was herself so young, so beautiful, when she first sang it:

Alternative career paths.

The historian is reading At Home, by Bill Bryson:

The Historian: This book is just filled with interesting stuff.

Me: [looks up. Attentive. Am eating potato chips like it is my job.]

The Historian: "Until almost the middle of the century [nineteenth], instructions in cookbooks were always wonderful imprecise, calling merely for 'some flour' or 'enough milk.' What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton's poems weren't selling, her publisher gently suggested she might try something more commercial, and in 1845 she produced Modern Cookery for Private Families. It was the first book to give exact measurements and cooking times, and it became the work on which all cookbooks since have been, almost always unwittingly, modeled."


Me: [having just baked about a zillion tiny heart-shaped sugar cookies: considering it. Perhaps am not sweet-natured enough?] You said 'shy'?

The Historian: [chuckles like a madman.]

Sunday.

The Megastore recommends.

1. Watch kids play sports.  It will make you happy, because sometimes they run down the court (this is basketball) with their arms all a-wavin' because the more effort the more fast, obviously; and usually they've got their arms all up in the air on the defensive end, because the more arms, it's like a thicket of  briars and the ball will obviously not make it through; and sometimes they'll dribble the ball more or less continuously, and if there's a double dribble, who's counting?; and sometimes, they'll shoot the ball and score. And that, the people, is a pure shot of happy.

these are internet children playing b-ball.
who knows if they're even real?

2.  Take down your Christmas tree. The tree is crispy, it's February, the tree is leaning precipitously forward. Go ahead and compliment yourself on your great taste in ornaments while you take them off the branches, needles flying. Or don't. You can check the lights to see if they still work after you've yanked/untangled them. Or don't. Either way, it's time. Feel free to wrap things up in tissue paper or put them lovingly into their boxes, or throw them into a big mess. Christmas is over. We opened all the presents. Time to make some other kind of cookies.

not my tree. at all.

3.  Buy more of the same old thing. Maybe it's true that you have more black and gray skirts than you can shake a stick at. Maybe, upon occasion, you've told yourself that you don't need any more gray/black skirts. This may be the reason you recently bought a red and a blue skirt, and that was good. Fine. Excellent, even. Still, when you happen upon another gray skirt and it is, while still a gray skirt, not like any of the other two dozen gray skirts you own, you might be right--you might need that skirt. So go ahead. Categories exist so we can name what we do and do not like. Gray skirts, speaking categorically, are a pretty great thing. You like them. So buy it already.

I wish I could say I would never buy this skirt.
But what I can say is: I did not buy this skirt.
This is an internet skirt, obviously.

4.  Walk downtown at night. Let's say that the distances between your movie, your restaurant, and your hotel are only a handful of blocks. Why not walk? It makes you feel, at least a little bit, like you live downtown. You know you've always thought that living downtown could be fun. Good thing you wore shoes you can walk in. Tuck your hand in the arm of your beloved and walk while you talk about the good things, like how happy you are to be with him. You're walking in the city that's (more or less) your home on your anniversary, so look up, be on the streets, enjoy them.

Salt Lake City itself.

Ten p.m.