Not too bad.

Anybody besides me nurture a secret little affection for the not-too-bad movie? Tonight we saw Bonneville, a movie that should have been wonderful because it had Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Joan Allen, not to mention Christine Baranski. Sadly, its plotting was wildly unimaginative and the characters were repurposed Thelma and Louise plus one, and the pace, well, the pace was sedate, to put it kindly. If someone were to ask me, "Was the movie good?" I would have to answer, "No, the movie was not good."

The historian asked me whether the film had touched a nerve--and why not? The main character's husband dies, his daughter from a previous marriage acts all peremptory about his remains, not to mention the house the main character lives in, which she owns because the husband never quite got around to changing his will after the second marriage. Plus the characters are Mormons. It's quite possible that the outlines of all that might parallel to some of my own anxieties. But I had to say, "Well, yes, but honestly, it would have probably moved me more if it had been a better movie."

Still: sometimes, I am not up to watching a great work of art. Sometimes, I am not even up to being entertained too strenuously. Sometimes I am just fine with watching a movie that doesn't tear it up all over the screen, being perfect and unattainable and getting all you couldn't make this movie in a million years on me. Sometimes I am just fine with a movie that delivers small pleasures like seeing Jessica Lange's beautiful face looking just the age she is, and Joan Allen's quite perfect impersonation of a Mormon woman who really, really wants to be good. And the settings, many of them in Utah, are beautiful. And the not-too-searching parallels with my own worries and fears--that was just fine too.

It's like being hungry. Who wouldn't like a thrillingly delicious snack? But if you're hungry and there is no thrillingly delicious snack to be had, then saltines aren't a bad substitute. In fact, when you're hungry, sometimes saltines are just the thing.

Bonus: the movie had a beautiful Pete Droge song on the soundtrack--you can hear it to your right by clicking the play button in the "Pretty Music" feature of this blog.

And they did not call it.

Things I've heard the historian say from the other room, where he is watching the final fatal minutes of the Jazz/Lakers game (I can't bear it):

"Oh!"

"Williams just hit a three, and they fouled him."

"I can't believe that. Kobe just put a shoulder into Williams twice, and finally knocked him down, and they called it on Williams."

"We just can't-- we've had two chances, we've missed a layup and a little jumper by Boozer."

"Travelling. Travelling!"

Chad speaks:

"I went to the Supermarket the other day, and I about fainted when I
saw the prices of things!! Yellow Bell Peppers at $2.58 each, Ancho Pablano Peppers at $2.58 each, OUR PRICES are less than half that, any customer that doesn't come to our Farmers' Market is Crazy!!! This week we have some SUPER DEALS on your favorite produce items,
including Jicama!!!"

My winter farmer is not only a treasured resource in terms of purveying excellent, locally grown, unsprayed vegetables, but also a stylist of the first water:

" Item #6 It is hard to believe that for months now I have been harvesting BIG BEETS, and lil beets! The organic material we have added to our soil has made these beets the biggest and best ever!$2.25/ bunch *LIMIT 1 bag*"

Is it any wonder that I make the trek downtown every other Saturday to buy vegetables from this man?

" Item# 19 NEW! Really nice firm LARGE Ancho Pablano Peppers, Roasting or Stuffing,,Super markets almost charge 3 dollars for one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ours are ONLY $1.00 each and firmer! *LIMIT 3*"

I love him. I ♥ Chad. !!!!!!!!!!!!

Read this. Right now.

Here is the full text of Barack Obama's speech, the one he gave in Philadelphia today. Searching, remarkable, stirring. This is not an ordinary election, dear readers.

Disappointment/frustration/failure update.

Today, the day that was supposed to be the last day my students were to post their preliminary portfolios on their e-portfolio sites, I got a plenty big rash of student e-mails saying, "Uh, I know you said to ask for your help last week, even begged us to ask for your help, but, dude, I totally thought I could figure it out, but I can't, so, uh, what should I do?"--or some variation thereof.

Today, when college daughter and I met up at Brewvies, which would have been her first time there, and where we would have ordered up a tasty lunch to eat whilst viewing Charlie Bartlett, we found out that there were workers doing something noisy and smelly to the carpets in the theaters. The ticket guy said, "They said they would be done by the time we opened, but . . . I'm pretty ticked about it," while handing us vouchers to come back later. Or never.

Today, I got an e-mail from the custom publishing person at a large textbook company, saying that the little plagiarism "thing" they hounded me to include ("it won't cost students a thing!") with the new edition of a textbook we've used for like ten years made the textbook a custom publication, words they never used with me in the midst of all the hounding. The consequence of this is that our bookstore can only return 20% of the copies they have on hand. I am mad and also I feel like a chump, even though it turns out to be of little real significance, probably.

Today, the dog park was filled with big muscular dogs, some rather small-ish children, people holding their teeny dogs up high, and in general a host of dangers for Bruiser. It was like the Slough of Despond for me, since watching an excitable dog in the midst of temptation is kind of enervating and maybe a little depressing.

Today, after I had sent a chatty, voluble, filled with cheery details letter to running son the missionary, one feature of which was a series of questions I needed to have answered (Can you print out the e-mails you get? Will you be limited to 30 min. a week of e-mail time in the field? how is your hip? etc.), the e-mail I got in return was comprised only of answers to my short series of questions.

Today, when I tried to start some curriculum work I would very, very, very much like to get done before school starts again in a week, the curriculum site was down.

The first day of spring break has clarified the following points:

1. Don't read student e-mails for a few days. Just don't.
2. Publishers are jackals.
3. I will bombard running son the missionary with letters for the remainder of this week, come hell or high water.
   
4. Screw Brewvies.
5. Curriculum work is for suckers.
6. I may be a chump, but I will prevail with a carefully worded, civil-but-savage e-mail to the publishing people, outlining the book reps' perfidy.
   
7. I will use the word "perfidy" a lot in said e-mail.
8. The dog park is a good place, but it will be better starting April 1, when it's open later, and therefore we can spread out the dog-per-hour ratio (that was a mathematical analysis, by the way, hope you enjoyed it).
   

Surprise shoes.

I'm taking things a little at a time. For instance, yesterday, it seemed to me that one way to make a little headway in my study would be to organize some stuff. Okay, organize my shoes. And it did help. Approximately fifty percent of my study is sorted, organized, possibly tidy, and I can visualize and then put my hands on any pair of the shoes in that closet.

Today, I started in on the shoes in my regular closet (as opposed to those in my auxiliary closet, see above). Which yielded an unexpected benefit--two pairs of shoes I had totally forgotten I owned.

One pair I wore today down to my sister's house for a big family gathering--a pair of open toed pumps with a stiletto heel and some kind of fake jewel ornamentation. They are probably black, but to me they look a little bit navy, so that's what I call them. They are swell. I bought them at T.J. Maxx for the kind of price that makes you buy stiletto heels with fake jewels on them--cheap. I figured I could easily get $20 of pleasure out of them, and I was right, even before I forgot I had them. Now I'll probably get twice the value out of them. Thrice the value, even.

Finding the other pair made me feel a little chagrined. I bought them in the U.K. the last time I was there. They are very cute, blue, with a reasonably not-too-high heel, a strap and a big button. They are Mary Janes, in effect. With a big button. Just this week, I saw a young woman wearing a pair of shoes like these with jeans, and I thought, Cute! then, I wish I had shoes like that! and then again: I wonder where I could find some?

The stage.

Even this empty stage, blue-lit and breathless, before Rufus Wainwright has come out, is thrilling. More thrilling than many, many things.

Post-concert update: It was beautiful. It was sublime. He played alone--accompanying himself on piano and guitar. He sang "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," "California," "Grey Gardens," "Going to a Town," "Nobody's Off the Hook," "Sanssouci," "Little Sister," and "Gay Messiah," "Beauty Mark, and "Matinee Idol," with "The Art Teacher" and "Hallelujah" as encores. The venue was perfect and he was perfect. I love his voice, with its edges and resonance, and how wholeheartedly he sings. Not one single disappointment about this concert.

Bitter: some thoughts.

Today while avoiding work, I took a tour around my kitchen and swooped down on some leftover salad from the night before. Touring the chaos of my house is one of my prime work-avoidance techniques, and it's basically how I get my laundry done, clothes put away, kitchen straightened, etc. But I digress: the salad was made of some spring mix, two heads of white endive, and blood oranges. I dressed it with olive oil and salt and pepper--the orange was juicy.

Because the endive is sturdy, the salad was really none the worse for wear for having stood around for a few hours. If this horrifies you, I'm very sorry. In fact, the whole thing tasted just wonderful, and part of what made it wonderful was the acid of the orange juice, the unctuousness of the oil, the salt, and the bitterness of the endive. It was perfection.

My oldest friend who has impeccable and discriminating taste once told me that she found herself, as she got older, craving intense flavors, and she loved bitter flavors especially. I am finding this myself--some sharp taste in the mix of things makes everything more vivid. Even a possibly sorry, leftover salad. Even, possibly, the occasional bitter thoughts I try not to nurture in myself.

Not bitter: we saw Honeydripper tonight, John Sayles's latest. Wonderful. College daughter and I continued our pre-spring break schedule with a viewing of Step Up 2: The Streets (I dared her to say the entire title to the ticket girl, who was completely unfazed by this--why does it seem so funny to me, this title with a number and a colon and a pretty funny subtitle? Oh well, another opportunity for comedy missed, but what else is new?). It was fabulous, in the way that a good dance movie is fabulous--lots of dancing, not much pretense of doing anything other than the required plot moves, and then more dancing. The final sequences were rather electrifying. I thought of you, assertively unhip, and agree: this movie just made me want to step up and dance. And the final unbitter thing? The Jazz beat the Celtics tonight. Yeah yeah yeah!

Will the thrills never stop.

I'm going to see Ben Folds at Saltair in April, with the historian, singing son and his wife, and my daughter the makeup artist. Then, Dr. Write managed to wrangle the fact out of the internets that Rufus Wainwright is coming to Park City this weekend! The stupid website of the venue won't work, at least not for buying tickets, but I'm hopeful that first thing tomorrow morning I will have purchased tickets, one for her and one for me. This is all a little bittersweet, it must be said, because Ben Folds and Rufus W. are two of running son's very favorite artists. But I've got to go (I've got to go, I've got to go, cause I'm leaving on a midnight train to . . . Magna? Heber?).

This afternoon, college daughter and I started our spring break early by seeing Vantage Point, which is a risible exercise with a rogue Secret Service Agent and a car chase that made me want to exit this life prematurely. However, the film also boasted Dennis Quaid in a performance that simultaneously channeled Clint Eastwood's, in In the Line of Fire, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's, in The Terminator. I wish I could show you a visual. Seriously, he just wouldn't die no matter how many times they killed him. But luckily? They saved the president, so the world could go on and order was restored. Thank goodness there was root beer to ease the pain.

After that, we bought our first pairs of flipflops for the year. Because spring is almost here, sort of. And then we took Bruiser to the dog park in the rain. And then, after making dinner, I fell asleep for half an hour--apparently, it's just too much excitement to stay awake for.

Humorless.

I'm having a hard time getting over the whole Eliot Spitzer thing. I heard a discussion of it on On Point as I was driving into work, and it pretty much sums up why for me.

There are things that are just no longer funny to me, and this is one of them. I remember reading a piece in The New Yorker a few years ago about a venerable (though amateur, actually) scholar of the dirty joke, Gershon Legman, who wrote a vast tome called The Rationale of the Dirty Joke. Legman died in 1999. (You can read the article here--I recommend it, very interesting and instructive.)

The author of the New Yorker article, Jim Holt, notes that

Reading through Legman’s vast compilation of dirty jokes is a punishing experience, like being trapped in the men’s room of a Greyhound bus station of the nineteen-fifties. And the jokes in “Rationale of the Dirty Joke” are what Legman deemed the “clean” dirty jokes, arranged by such relatively innocent themes as “the nervous bride,” “phallic brag,” and “water wit.” In 1975 he published a second fat volume, “No Laughing Matter,” which contained the “dirty” dirty jokes—nearly a thousand pages of jokes about anal sadism, venereal disease, and worse. Legman’s avowed purpose was not to amuse the reader or furnish him with material for the locker room; he saw his work as a serious psychoanalytic study, one that would disclose the “infinite aggressions” behind jokes, mainly of men against women.

Sick of hearing jokes on this topic, sick of the common imagining of the sexual exploitation of women and children of both genders as a laughing matter. Sick of powerful men like E.S. doing stuff like this. Sickening.

Things I said at dinner tonight that may or may not be true.

"I'm renouncing all of my ambitions, except in poetry."

"I'm giving up giving up stuff."

Break: the schedule (to date).

It's reached that point--the point when, in anticipation of spring break, I realize that I am no longer working within the rules of the Elasticity of Time--there's no way I can do everything I want to do in that short little week. As of right now, I plan to be

• relaxing
• doing the curriculum paperwork for about half a dozen courses
• writing the 2010 assessment report
• doing a little desultory online course cleanup
• relaxing
• going to the movies with college daughter, Dr. Write, and possibly my own personal self
• doing a tiny bit of recreational shopping
• reading
• cleaning up my study
• possibly getting running son's room sorted (it's about time--)
• helping college daughter prepare to go to Boston, in which city she has accepted a position as a nanny
• writing/relaxing
• other unagenda-ed items.

I will have to make a flow chart and plot all the relaxation, in half-hour increments. However, as my office area-mate notes, "Just three more days and it's spring break. And after spring break, it's only five more weeks, and then it's summer." See, it's not spring yet, officially, but baby, in six weeks and three days, it will be summer.

The cake diaries.

Today at poetry group, we all had the great good fortune of having a piece of our hostess's Sicilian Cassata, a truly divine cake comprised of two layers of genoise, between them a layer of whipped ricotta studded with candied orange peel and chopped dark chocolate, all covered in a layer of green tea marzipan and decorated with elegant cutouts of candied orange peel and Meyer lemon peel. There was no talking about poems during the consumption of this cake, as it was so elegant, so delicious and complex, it deserved one's complete and rapt attention to its attributes and aspects, making their statements and counterstatements in the mouth. Our hostess is famous for her splendid cakes, but this one was my favorite so far.

This led to a lot of speculation on my part: did the hostess estimate that, on a given day in her household, there was a high probability, a fair chance, or a rather limited chance that there would be some cake, somewhere? What was the cake part of the cake, and what was the filling? We had a brief discussion of the qualities of genoise as the cake in fancy cakes. We also established that Rose Berenbaum Levy's book The Cake Bible is, indeed, the canonical work for cakes. The Meyer lemons came from California. The candied peel cutouts were made with truffle cutters. I think we may have discussed nearly every pertinent aspect of the cake by the time we had all finished, lingeringly, the last bite.

"Thank you for the inspirational cake," I said, as we were leaving.

"You've given Lisa another entry for her cake diary," joked another poet.

"You're assuming I don't actually have one," I said. Which I don't, actually, though I do have a diary of menus and recipes, recording who was present at a party, etcetera, which I use to brainstorm parties and future menus. All of this rumination about cake has led me to the following conclusions:

1. It's time to have a dinner party.
2. That party should involve a delicious dessert, probably cake.
3. I need a copy of The Cake Bible, and probably The Pie and Pastry Bible, as well.
4. How does one manipulate marzipan? (not a conclusion)
5. With regard to how this cake was beautiful and also sublimely delicious:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

Also:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Listen: it was really, really good cake.

Poemless in West Jordan.

Yes, that's right, dear reader, it's Saturday night, tomorrow's my poetry group, and I got nothing.

So, my options are:

1. Try some constrained poetry exercise thing-y, preferably from my notes from AWP, the small portion of my notes that I didn't lose on an airplane.
2. Take an old, hoary poem from the September Poem-a-day project of Dr. Write's and mine and see if I can make it better.
3. Finish the canzone I started last August. (To this, I say, ha.)
4. Be inspired by some new subject matter or bit of language or image. Or something.

To wit, there was a bit of wonderful dialogue in the movie the historian and I saw tonight, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was quite a charming little number, but that's not the point. Let me, for a moment, cite: Frances McDormand, dressed in a horrible brown dress and a horrible drab overcoat, and sad, horrible hair, stands with Amy Adams, resplendent in a robin's egg blue ensemble completed with beautiful burgundy shoes, at a shop window. Three mannequins sport scarlet dresses of various styles, but are also wearing gas masks--it's the eve of World War II. As they gaze at the window:

Miss Pettigrew (F. McDormand), who has lived through and remembers WWI: It's so frightening.

Delycia Lafosse (A. Adams): I know. Cap sleeves. What a nightmare.

I wish I could make a poem out of that.

New career plan #119: pattern-maker.

In a profile of designer Rick Owens in the issue of The New Yorker that came to my mailbox today (also arriving: tickets to the Ben Folds concert on April 24!, the Nordstrom catalog, other crap), I read this:

"Owens left Otis-Parsons [art school] after two years, to study pattern-cutting at a trade college. He began creating costumes and sets for local artists and performers, members of what he has called 'the wicked Hollywood hustler-bar world.' For four years, he worked in knockoff houses in Los Angeles, copying in cheap fabrics the work of well-known fashion designers. The experience proved invaluable. Many designers never master the difficult art of pattern-cutting, and the originality and sophistication of Owens's clothes--his ability to plant seams in unexpected places and to hang fabrics on the bias so that the cross grain clings to or drapes dramatically from the body--derive from his years in the knockoff mills. 'Picasso did classic figure drawing in the beginning, and then, after that, he's abstracted,' Owens told me. 'You can't convincingly get abstract until you really know the fundamentals. It's the same thing with pattern-making. You can't start distorting things unless you kind of know what you're doing.' As Cathy Horyn wrote last week in the Times, in an admiring review of Owens's Fall 2008 collection, 'A designer who controls his pattern making can say the most with his clothes. It's just like a writer with language.'"

"Just like a writer with language." Ta-da! Where's a trade college that teaches pattern-cutting?

"Money, breakfast, and the good things in life."

I saw this headline in the Fraywatch on Slate. For the life of me, I couldn't find the actual item that prompted it, but it did get me thinking about the good things in life, such as

• yellow sweaters. I was frantically culling my ridiculous sweater pile for ones I knew I wanted to give away this morning--the Friends of MS people were coming to pick up several bags of discarded clothing. It turns out that now I have a tidy little collection of yellow sweaters, how did this happen? Yet each one provides material cheer when I wear it--a slightly different version of yellow sweater cheer.
  
• organic greens. I used to think that the sturdier greens, such as kale, were inedible. Not at all! They are gorgeously delicious, especially sauteed with garlic or making a roasted tomato sauce more robust or with grains of sea salt on them or, most heavenly, a little squeeze of Meyer lemon juice.
• a good mix of songs when your iPod is shuffling. This morning, I heard Rory Block, Gorillaz, Ben Lee, and The Legendary Pink Dots. Maybe that could be improved upon, but not through sheer randomness, I don't think.
  
• money. Come on, it is good. (For perspective on this, it's useful to have memories of not having very much, or quite enough.)
  
• and, come to think of it, yes--breakfast! I used to have a breakfast routine that involved cycling through oatmeal cooked with dried fruit (cherries are good), with chopped almonds on top; some kind of smoothie and wheat toast (almond butter on top); just plain old toast (ditto the almond butter); cottage cheese and fruit (and chopped almonds), and possibly toast. During the anti-carb mania, I stopped drinking almost any kind of juice, ever, but now I allow myself a chaste little glass of orange juice most mornings, and damn, it's good, that little hit of sweetness in the morning. [Note: Don't think I didn't notice the almond theme in the above. Will consider if it is something to be concerned about. Probably not, right?]
  
• watching The Office on dvd, with Bruiser.
  
• finishing a crossword puzzle.
• having fun with an adult child--a conversation, movie, hanging out--anything.
  
• anticipating spring break.
• having lunch with your friend.
• the way spring brightens up everything--the sky, the day, your mood--everything.

Notes from a separate universe.

Also known as the "Missionary Training Center":

"People were right--learning the tones in Chinese is hard, but not nearly as hard as their crazy grammar rules. You have to change your mind to think like a Chinese person. . . it is out of control, but I get better at it daily."

Also:

"I have gained 13 lbs. since being at the MTC, no big deal. Even with that gain I am still underweight. I just need to evenly spread my weight around magically. Those brownies were incredible! I only wish I didn't have to share, but I did because without charity I am nothing."

Progress, sort of.

I have:

• Read a pile of drafts and given feedback to students.
• Conferenced with almost every one of my online creative writing students, via chat, a phone call, or an in person visit.
• Co-taught a workshop on writing local history with (guess?) the historian (at the Community Writing Center).
• Listened to the Clash, The Essential Clash, while responding to student work, because apparently I never uploaded Combat Rock to my iPod.
• Prepared an excellent and (may I say) a little bit sexy handout for my classes today.
• Put together a darn near perfect outfit which lifted my spirits all day long.
  
• Overcame ennui and pre-spring break laggardliness in my classes with charm, pure charm, baby.
  

Still to do:

• Read more student drafts.
• Conference with remaining creative writing students.
• Teach the other half of the writing local history workshop next week.
• Help students troubleshoot their wack eportfolios.
  
• Receive and respond to massive amounts of preliminary eportfolios.
• Keep the good outfit mojo going.
  
• Upload Combat Rock.
  

Adjudicating.

On the one hand, I hear it's supposed to snow again. On the other hand, the wind smells more like earth than ice. On the other hand, it's pretty gusty tonight, like a storm's coming. So, winter.

I can hardly bear to wear a heavy coat anymore, but when I don't wear a heavy coat, it's cold. Pretty cold. I couldn't bring myself to wear tights today, and I have a personal policy that once I stop wearing tights--i.e., once I go bare-legged--I can't go back. So it might be getting closer to spring through the sheer force of my sartorial choices. You can thank me later. On the other hand, is it narcissistic to believe that my own desires might have an effect on the weather?

Yes. So let us turn back to the empirical evidence: more light in the morning, and that light is more golden and less blue, as my friend Ann points out. The world seems more crocus and less poinsettia, more lilac and less bare branch, more like prune the grapes back and less like hole up inside. Soon it will be all asparagus and spinach and peas at the market. When I drove past Okubo's greenhouses today, I thought about the flowers and herbs I long to plant. My longing≠ spring, however--does it?

Still, it's March and not February. In eleven days it will be the mid-semester break. Spring break. So, spring.

Possibly the laziest person alive?

The work just sits there and sits there and doesn't get smaller; yet somehow my reasons for not doing it alter slightly, flickeringly, chimerical, as the hours pass by and I drift from room to room.

Today, I have, however, read the entire paper, discussed its contents with the historian, gone with him and Bruiser to the dog park, uploaded a ton of photographs to flickr, played with my grandson a little, and pondered my lassitude. Pondered it, I say. Deeply. Penetratingly. As the hours pass by.

The Misogyny Police, or why I can't quit Hillary C. just yet.

As I have frequently avowed to all my friends, compatriots, and fellow travelers, in the general election I will vote for the nominee of my party, because that's the kind of person I am. I'm a party person. There will be no fetish of "independence"--those days are over, over, over for me.

However:

As part of my newly self-appointed position as Deputy in the Misogyny Police (motto: "spotting sexism everywhere"), I continue to note that, whatever you may think of HRC, it's impossible to deny that the general reaction to her, both in the media and on the ground (certainly not among my friends, compatriots, and fellow travelers--you've been vetted by the Misogyny Police) has a hint--let us say a whiff--or perhaps let's say the fetid stench--of misogyny about it. I will pass along the following two commentaries, which I thought were right on:

Exhibit A, an interview with novelist Sara Paretsky in the most recent issue of The Progressive:

Q: What is your view of Clinton and Obama?

Paretsky: I'm very torn. Barack was my state senator in Illinois, and I was one of his earliest supporters. I've always thought very highly of him. Here's what I admire about Hillary: every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.

Exhibit B, the perspicacious Tina Fey, guesting as the Women's News Correspondent on the Weekend Update, Saturday Night Live:




I found this on Slate, where the blogger Emily Bazelon notes that "this is the kind of gender satire the phenomenon of the Clinton candidacy has been woefully short on" (see "impossible burden" above).

Weakling.

I have been out three nights in a row--not late, home either before or just after nine each night, and frankly I feel kind of trashed. I ask you. There was a time in the not so distant past when I was often out on week nights, and it didn't kill me. But I think, actually, that I could lie down now and not get up for, oh, twelve hours. Would that be okay?

And to top it all off, I'm not caught up and I'm not on top of things, and my neck hurts a little. I think I'll spend the weekend contemplating these facts and figuring out what movie to go to tomorrow night.

Also, it's only two weeks to spring break. That's good, and then after that it's not very long until the end of the semester. Stuffed in there will be some work, some grading, some finishing projects, probably some podcasting. But the weeks until spring? hardly any. The weeks till the semester's over? hardly any. Single digits. I can do this thing. I can do it prone, from my bed, with a remote in my hand.

Fancy handout.

All this week, the necessity of making a document that would be the end of all documents pressed on me like a weight, a powerful physical force that made me feel that my character, my job performance, my reason for being in this world, all depended upon an excellent, perfect handout that would explain everything there is, and ever will be, to know about how to integrate and document source material in every possible rhetorical situation.

Possibly, I am overstating; and yet what other explanation is there for the amount of time I spent trying to adjust the placement of text and image in Dreamweaver; figuring out how to import little handmade concept maps; in fact, making the little concept maps; developing simple tables and importing those; choosing a font (serif? sans serif? what would be best? what would communicate the importance, the documenting-sources-is-next-to-Godliness of it all?); how to get it all on one page, so that a handy exercise for practicing it all could fit on the back; how to make comments on the little bit of MLA-formatted academic writing I borrowed, so students could see the nifty little machine that MLA-style documentation is; etc., and so forth. And so on.

Well, there you have it, a super fancy handout, what I'm calling a self-teaching artifact: error-proof, teacher-proof, even, except for the handful of typos I found after I'd printed out 20 copies on a color copier.

The lurgy: an essay.

Tis the season, as they say:

1. I got it.
2. The historian got it.
3. College daughter got it (actually, she might have had it first).
4. Scotland daughter got it. (She sent an e-mail to me, saying, "I think I caught the lurgy talking to you yesterday.")
5. Her husband got it (actually, he might have had it first).
6. Now, little Evie in Scotland has it, so much that she's had to go to the hospital.

At a meeting tonight of a board I'm on, a friend commented that he'd had some variety of the flu a couple of weeks back. "I'm about ninety percent," he said, then added, "of course, that assumes that I was one hundred percent before."

Exactly.

The body is reliable, until it's not. I think of myself as a sturdy person ("yes, you're a big healthy girl," as the historian once said, with great affection), rarely sick enough to have an actual sick day, but I've certainly had more than my share of underachieving days in the last few weeks, days where I roused myself to do what was necessary--teach, tutor in the Writing Center--but came home to have pressing naps that lasted for hours. I don't think my body's letting me down, exactly--just that I feel more vulnerable to whatever's out there. And I don't like thinking at all of the vulnerabilities of little ones, their fevers and vomiting and how easily they get so very sick, how carefully we have to watch out for them.

Good days--the ninety percent days--are to be cherished. Maybe even eighty percent days, or seventy-five percent days. The hundred percent days--and maybe what counts as a hundred percent day changes, depending on the part of your life you're in--those are like finding a four-leaf clover or a quarter on the sidewalk, or seeing a hawk circling over a field, or getting a letter from an old friend you've not heard from in forever. Lucky.

Coursework.

Today's Doonesbury:

Friend of Zipper, perennial slacker student at Walden College: I can't believe you got into "The Poetry of Barack Obama," man! I didn't, and I applied last fall . . . I wrote the professor three times. Plus I've got the black thing goin' on!

Zipper: Yeah, who knows why I was selected? But that's the bodacity of hope! So what are you taking instead?

Roommate: "The Prose of Hillary Clinton." I don't want to talk about it.


See it here.

The politics of politics: a sentence.

All politicians--the straight-talkers, the hope-mongers, those going negative, the so-called principled ones, the focus-group-watchers, the great orators, the clunky orators, the thrilling ones, the plodding ones, the ones you kind of like even though they support things you truly don't believe in, the ones you wish were a lot more progressive than they are, the ones who kind of sound progressive even though they're really not--are just politicians, at the end of the day: in the deepest part of their souls, they just want to get elected or re-elected.

Cate Blanchett played the pitbull in No Country for old Men?

I did not know that.

[note: I will continue blogging the Oscars on twit.]

Discuss amongst yourselves:

Who is too skinny? the woman who just accepted the award for costume design? Keira Knightley? Possibly Jennifer Garner, post-baby?

Blogging the Oscars, part 1.

1. DVR: genius, but there will be a small lag between my posts and real-time Oscar action.
2. At our house, we're already arguing, pretty much par for the course. However, we are well-fed, which I hope will mitigate the arguing.
3. I have heard from college daughter that Tilda Swinton looked like "a scary human being," a point I disputed without having seen her at all.

How did they do the whole animated beginning what with the writer's strike? Did I just see Indiana Jones on horseback followed by a 80s laughing Eddie Murphy? I could rewind, but it's time to get on with it.

Important note: my previous post was my 500th. Woo hoo!

Oscar preparation.

Necessary reading: Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue. Lots of pictures, although I am now hating the new concept that seems to govern the photo shoots, which is to place contemporary movie stars in sets from old movies--this year, everyone's placed in classic Hitchcock scenarios. Fine, very clever. Whatever.

However, and more importantly, I found a more interesting item, the "Vanities Dare," which for this month is the Primary Polling-Place Dare. For instance:

• for one point, you can "complain that something is wrong with your ballot because Oprah's not on it."
  
• for three points, you could "construct crude cardboard effigies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then from inside the voting booth, enact a Punch-and-Judy-style puppet show for those behind you in line, in which the 'candidates' poke through the curtains and beat each other with swizzle sticks." And,
  
• for five points, you could "take a closed container of dry ice into the voting booth, open it while inside, vote, and then emerge in a dramatic fog while loudly proclaiming, 'Yeah, I voted for the witch, bitch! Mwah-hah-hah-hah-ha-haah!'" Or, also for five points,
• you could "greet all gathered ballot holders with the phrase 'God bless you!' and earnestly, insistently ask them if they'll be voting for Mike Huckabee. Should anyone irritatedly ask you if you've ever had a civics lesson, explain that you were home-schooled."

Not that I could, or would, do any of those things. Ever. Also, even if I were so inclined, it's too late for me, since I have already, quietly and without fanfare, cast my primary ballot, saying nothing to anyone. The excess cleverness ship has sailed.

Weekend plans.

1. Appointment with Chad to pick up vegetables and eggs.
2. Possible movie (Savages, I hope I hope).
3. Possible jazz concert (Cannonball Coltrane Project).
4. Possible dinner out.
5. Possible outing with college daughter.
6. Responding to student drafts.
7. Several important e-mails to send.
8. Extra sleep?
9. Dog park.
10. Various procrastination efforts to undercut #6 above.
11. Watch the Oscars whilst blogging the Oscars (a plan I thought of just now).
12. Buy important hair care products.
13. Procrastinate some more.
14. Eat cookies left over from theory book group.
15. Contemplate a crowded next week.
16. Contemplate how, in the words of my immortal former dissertation chair, "a perfect Sunday can be utterly abolished by Monday."

A fuzzball with lips does not enhance my Coke-drinking experience.

Does anyone really like this commercial? Doesn't it seem like the Coke would be warm by the time it gets to the person buying it out of a machine? Wouldn't you worry that the bottle would be fuzzy? Who wants fuzz on their Coke bottle? A bottle of Coke should have either (a) frost, or (b) condensation from the frost melting slightly on it. No fuzz. Too many critters touching the bottle. It has to come too far. The critters look a little sweaty. The only sweat near my Coke bottle should be metaphorical (see "condensation" point above). To this commercial, I say ick. In my memory, I will be pulling my Coke bottle--because in my memory, I am lucky enough to drink Coke from a cold glass bottle--from my granddaddy's soda cooler in his country store in Georgia, a soda cooler which was icy and very cold, as the last place a soda spends time before it reaches my hand, and then my gullet, should be.

Pop quiz: answer key.

I didn't see Steve Carell in a Sugar House Smith's Food and Drug, but my daughter did. She has already posted about it on her blog, and it's been a few days, so I feel entitled to appropriate her story as if it had happened to me. Me, her, same diff--I'm her mom.

Dr. Write notes that she would "quietly follow him around, looking for a reason to ask him, casually, in front of the frozen foods, 'So, what kind of ice cream should I get?'" Amelia, from Inverurie (Scotland, the United Kingdom, The World, The Universe), notes that she would most likely "have smiled politely from behind a cereal box..." Whereas various and sundry of my daughter's friends said they would have stalked him with a cellphone to get a picture, or asked him when there would be new episodes of The Office, because "life is so uneventful without that show....Thursdays are meaningless without it!"

Sheonagh from Stonehaven (Scotland, the United Kingdom, The World, The Universe) says that she "would obviously throw myself at him and offer to have his children." Close, Sheonagh! But the correct answer is (wait for it . . . ), "What are you doing in my grocery store?" followed by, "I always tell my husband that I want you to father my next child."

Whereupon, Steve Carell graciously replies, "Meet my wife, Carol."

Overlooked.

Here are my nominees for performances, scripts, and films the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences missed:

Performances: Kate Winslet in Romance and Cigarettes; Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd; Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. in Zodiac; Irfan Khan and Tabu in The Namesake; Leslie Mann in Knocked Up; Michael Cera in Superbad; Russell Crowe in something--he was terrific every time I saw him this year; Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men

Writing: The Lookout; Rocket Science

Picture: Zodiac

Pretty good year, actually, for movies, in my opinion.

Pop Quiz: If you saw Steve Carell in your grocery store in Sugar House, what, if anything, would you say to him?

Underexposure.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with the very nice guy, aka genius, who does my hair, wherein I mentioned that I liked Amy Winehouse. He was, shall we say, derisive.

Me: The thing is, since I never listen to the radio, ever, I only barely heard "Rehab," like, three weeks ago. So I never got sick of it.

Genius: [his exact words are lost to memory, but basically, the gist was, "In that case, I'll allow it."]

Me: Shut up.

But this came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I happened to be in the car when This American Life was on. I am hardly ever in my car when that show is on, and generally I never listen to the radio in the house. So that means that I hardly ever listen to This American Life, which means--I never got sick of it.

[All of you who are sick of This American Life: In that case, we'll allow it.]

Well, if you didn't hear the "Tough Room" show a couple of weeks ago, I recommend that you listen to the last segment, Malcolm Gladwell discussing his first real journalism job at the Washington Post. It is so hilarious I probably shouldn't have been driving while I was listening.
You can hear the whole show here--the Gladwell bit is at the end. One other tough room--two Mormon missionaries trying to contact people in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Ouch.

Pride and Prejudice.

I am finally watching the famous Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, which I sort of accidentally happened upon last week as it was more or less starting. I was actually devastated when this week's segment ended, with Elizabeth Bennett's backward look at Mr. Darcy upon leaving Pemberley. Apropos of this, earlier today, I also happened upon this bit in The New Yorker, Jan. 21 edition, in which Nancy Franklin says,

Since "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice" are old news, I will just say that they should not be missed. "P. & P." is especially well done. It's marked by good taste and exquisite restraint, and the result is very hot stuff--by the end, you'll be ripping your own bodice.

Since the Keira Knightley version (which I loved, and not that it was her fault) got twitted for its excessive romanticism, I would just like to point out that, in this version, Colin Firth's hair is positively Byronic.

Plan B.

If I had won the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship, I would have

• figured out a way to live someplace in France,
• become fluent in French because I would have been living there,
• bought vegetables at a market every other day,
• had the life-transforming experience of living abroad for a whole year,
• received visitors as they came to see me living in France,
• written poetry as gorgeous and ornate as that of the Provencal troubadours.

But I did not win the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship. Alas. So instead I will

• live in West Jordan,
• continue to speak English (albeit fluently) and perhaps listen to some French music,
• buy vegetables at the farmer's market and from Chad,
• have the life-transforming experience of writing and making small films every day,
• receive visitors as they venture into the wilds of West Jordan,
• write poetry as gorgeous and plainspoken as that of the . . . what? cowboy poets?

It was a beautiful dream while it lasted.

Friday is for sneezing.

Due to the recent "security" concerns at my work, I have reset my password to everything work-related, but am still "locked out" of my work e-mail. I will contemplate whether that is a bad or a good thing, as I have been laid low by a new cold. This cannot be fair. I ask you.

When we got home from our whirlwind trip to Idaho, which, by the way, is a dang cold place, and where a restaurant called Smitty's ("Pancake and Steak House") closed at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night which happened to be Valentine's Day, I fell into bed after greeting a very excited Bruiser and slept the sleep of the infected for several hours. I got up, cautiously, thinking that perhaps I was feeling better--but it was an illusion, the kind of "maybe I'm not feeling so bad" delusion that comes after a three hour nap, after which you get up, rustle up a little snack, look at the paper, etc., and then you have a big attack of whatever it is that's ailing you, like it wants to teach you a lesson of who's boss.

This evening has been (a) DayQuil, (b) hot-and-sour soup that the historian fetched for me, (c) television with a side of dognap. Wow. The historian and I are supposed to celebrate our anniversary (which was Monday) tomorrow, nine years' worth of happy marriage, and I'm hoping for (1) a miraculous recovery, or (b) a successful self-dosage of OTC medications, either of which might approximate enough good health to allow for a little downtown action, a little revelry.

And then we have idaho.

On our way to idaho falls for the funeral.

Things I'm thinking about, even though I've got other stuff on my mind.

1. finishing my teaching portfolio
2. a potentially not-safe drive up to Idaho tomorrow
3. I appear to be relapsing, or else getting a new and improved burst of MiracleWinterCold (the sequel)
4. I still haven't made a podcast
5. Other blah blah blah
6. turning my inchoate mess of thoughts into an actual tribute to my grandmother tomorrow
7. it's snowing
8. there's plenty of work to do in the online classroom
9. more blah blah blah, like laundry and what will we have for dinner, will we get the kitchen, at least, cleaned up before we leave at the butt crack of dawn tomorrow, etc.
10. etc. Etc. etc. etc.

Looking for a poem, I'm not sure what one.

I found this, Marie Ponsot, in Springing:

Call

Child like a candelabra at the head
of my bed, wake in me & watch me as
I sleep; maintain your childlife undistracted
where, at the borders of its light, it has
such dulcet limits it becomes the dark.
Maintain against my hungry selfishness
your simple gaze where fear has left no mark.

Today my dead mother to my distress
said on the dreamphone, "Marie, I'll come read
to you," hung up, & and in her usual dress
came & stood here. Cold--though I know I need
her true message--I faced her with tenderness
& said, "This isn't right," & she agreed.

Child, watched by your deeper sleep, I may yet say yes.

Irresistible.

Post-Grammys commentary:

Me (via e): Just wondered if you saw Amy Winehouse (performing in the UK, I think)--did not look good, I didn't think.

Scotland daughter (via e): I think she is kind of a mess most of the time... she went blond for awhile, but looks like she's gone back to black (I could NOT help myself).

The Grammys suck, by the way. Worst awards show ever.

My grandmother.

When I was a girl, we went every summer, at least, to my grandparents' house in Idaho Falls. Idaho Falls was basically heaven, in my book. The house had a basement, which no house I remembered living in had had. It was cool and dark. There was a fruit cellar. There were an assortment of toys that included a jack-in-the-box, a jumping jack, a cash register, and a doll that came in its own trunk with its own clothes, shoes, and a tiny little hairbrush. My grandmother had, on her dressing table, a mirrored tray with perfumes, jewelry, and a bowl full of quarters. She had cookies and ice cream. She had particular ways of doing things, like lining the sink with rubber mats when we did the dishes. The dishwater was scalding hot. She played endless games of cards with us. I was the oldest grandchild, and there were uncountable stories about me that she told as part of the family lore.

Lately, when I've gone to visit her, when she was having a good day, she'd say something sweet about my beautiful hair or what a pretty sweater. Her beauty was pared down to its essence. When she was young, her hair was dark, curled beautifully in the style of the day. She was a dish. I love the bones of her face, her gorgeous Roman nose, her white hair in a flurry on her pillow. The last time I saw her was last Wednesday. She wasn't feeling well. Her eyes were closed--it was late. She was talking anxiously, feverishly. I'm so glad I got to sit with her, stroke her hair, touch her. I sang to her, a little. Then I had to go, I was exhausted; this morning, I woke to a call, telling me she was gone. All day I've been remembering her, thinking back to before these last few years, when she was younger, full-bodied, full of life. Quiet day. I spoke several times with my father, my aunt, my children. Remembering what a great pleasure it was to drive up to the house on First Street, with its poppies, its great pine trees, its roses, and a bower of geraniums; to go in, to tear downstairs with my brother, to revel in the wonderful playhouse she and my grandfather had made for us.

Keeping score.

Stuff I left in, or on the way home from, NYC: one elbow-length leather glove, small notebook with 75% of my notes from the conference

Days I've felt sick: 7

Collateral sickness: historian, college daughter

Movies seen since coming home: 0

Christmas tree: down

Cute new clothes at Old Navy: a ton

Clothes purchased at Old Navy: none

Fabulous dinners in SLC since coming home: 1

Dinners made from boxes and/or cans since coming home: a lot (Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable soup is a godsend. Also couscous from a box, pineapple and cottage cheese, and frozen pizza. I am not kidding.)

Poems I still need to write for poetry group tomorrow: 1

Days in a row I've taken an urgent nap in the afternoon: 5

Getting better starts tomorrow. Tomorrow, I say!

A little Spooky.

For anyone thinking about how art, technology, Marcel Duchamp, and the remix all add up, here is the answer, courtesy of DJ Spooky at the Dallas Art Museum. It's worth watching all the way to the end--he sums everything up in a wonderful way. (thanks to Stephen R. for passing this along.)

St. Megastore Infirmary.

It's all Advil and DayQuil around here, as the historian is feeling under the weather, my whatever-it-is-I've-got has malingered, and now college daughter came home from work with a migraine.

We are all prone. We are laid out flat by a late winter miasma, or some malevolent creeping malady-monger. Around here, we are are all sicked up.

Pray for us, or send us some soup. There's no one who feels well enough to cook dinner!*

*okay, I did rouse myself from my bed of affliction long enough to go to the store and score some random food. We ate. I just needed to whine a minute.

New York, recollected in DayQuillity.

What the hell? You take a trip to New York City--a trip you're taking for the benefit of your place of employment, or else why would they be paying for it?--you overpack, you learn a bunch of new stuff, you go to sessions, you buy judicious amounts of useful books at the bookfair, you schlep your sorry self from JFK to midtown and back again, hauling your judicious amount of books plus the extra new shoes you bought in Soho or wherever, you eat yourself into bliss/a stupor several times, you improve yourself by seeing (a) art and (b) a play, and when you get home, you feel tired and sick. For crying out loud. I'm kind of bitter about it, if you want to know.

But actually, even this illness comes with a little Manhattan aura. The day we left, I got to see these paintings. I saw them first at the Tate Modern, and since I thought I'd never see them again, I sat there in that gallery and looked at them for as long as I could. But then, when Dr. Write and I walked down the stairs in the MoMa, there they were, big as life or even bigger.

Vote.

The historian and I agreed, for one moment, in the parking lot outside the elementary school where each of us had just cast a vote in the Super Tuesday primary, to acknowledge the remarkable fact that there was a qualified, capable female and a qualified, capable African-American candidate in the Democratic primary, aside from whatever other issues we might have with either of them.

Okay, moment over.

For starters, learn how to cook.

This is Poet Laureate Charles Simic's advice to people who want to learn to be happy, at the conclusion of his little interview with Deborah Solomon in this Sunday's New York Time Sunday Magazine:

Solomon: Have you noticed all these new nonfiction books on “happiness”? It’s an industry.

Simic: It’s really frightening. People need to read a book on how to be happy? It’s completely an American thing. Can you imagine people in Naples sitting on a bus or in a trattoria reading a book about happiness?

Solomon: What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

Simic: For starters, learn how to cook.

Some simple things I think might improve the likelihood that you'll be happy: find something you like to do that there aren't too many barriers to doing--like taking a walk, going to the library, watching sports on television. Develop some kind of hobby or art, and give yourself over to it. Enjoy the people closest to you. Get enough sleep. And yeah, learn to cook.

I do think a certain modesty in what you want is conducive to happiness. I read somewhere in The Nation awhile ago an argument that aiming for happiness is unreasonable, given the state of the world. I certainly have felt that way. I have often thought that the steady state of the human condition is actually grief, and that happiness is lucky, infrequent, a blessing when you find it, but you shouldn't expect to feel happy all the time. On the other hand, how unreasonable is it to tell people that? Like, somehow advising people that coming to terms with misery, sorrow, and grief as your lot in life would be persuasive. I think I'll keep working on that cooking thing. And getting enough sleep.

Last day at A W P

My first subway ride.

We just spent a bundle on dinner!

Out the window of the Hilton.

Dr. Write and I made it to the big city. We ate amazing food at the Union Square Cafe, and now? Now we are exhausted, so we are watching Sex and the City, in a stupor.

Ready.

Or not--I have piles of black skirts, black, white, and gray shirts, jeans, black tights, ready to pack . . . how boring can you pack? Sheesh. Next, I will add my two pairs of black boots. Gaaa. Maybe I'll paint my nails black and wear black lipstick.

New York City: look out. The Salt Lake Contingent is on the move. Wearing the least exceptionable clothing possible, unless another wardrobe concept (that's Wardrobe Concept®) presents itself. Maybe I'll do all the magic with scarves. And earrings.

Critical factors in the Jazz win over the Spurs.

1. I left the room when the Jazz started to play bad.
2. I stood up rather than sitting down when the score got too close (easier to leave the room if necessary).

and, most importantly,

3. used the remote to mute Craig Bolerjack, because when you couldn't hear his voice, the Jazz played better.

The Jazz may want to think about that last one. They may want to do a little informal research of their own.

Stressed out? Anxious? Need to calm down?

Remedies:

1. Make some tea and drink it while reading a big fat paper. Talk over the interesting stories with your companion.
2. Talk to your daughter in Scotland.
3. Finish reading your Scottish police procedural.
4. While you're at it, fall asleep for a little while or an hour and a half. If possible, have your dog take this nap with you.
5. Go to the dog park where the melting snow sluices off and out of the park like a harmless flood.
6. Make a supper out of vegetables and also have some apple crisp.
7. Contemplate the list of stuff you still have to do in the next two days.
8. Watch part of the Screen Actors Guild Awards show because it's important.
9. Decide to get up early tomorrow.

Must:

1. put together teaching portfolio.
2. not freak out whilst in NYC, because it is big and I am small, it is groovy and I am not, it is large and contains multitudes and I, I might be puny and kind of a wimp.
3. remember that NYC and conference therein are an opportunity! a big fun opportunity!
4. pack economically.
5. get all work done before leaving Wednesday morning.
6. take down Christmas tree before Feb. 1.
7. stay calm.
8. read Scottish thriller to stay calm.
9. send three packets of poems, the ones that have come back from the short-sighted editors with bad taste, out before I leave on Wednesday.
10. remember not to not have a good time in NYC.

Who do you love.

Or what? My daughter the makeup artist (and so much more!) tagged me to post three things I love, not to include my husband, my children, or Diet Coke (everyone loves those!). Here are three things I love:

1. I love the movies. I said to my friend the poet Jennifer once that I thought I loved movies more than literature. "I think we all feel that way at least sometimes," she said in a reasonable tone. There are times at the movies when I think life just doesn't get better this: when the way the opening frames unfold makes me feel like sitting up and paying attention with every cell in my body, or like I can relax into total bliss. Remember the beginning of Trainspotting? When Renton and Spud are racing along the pavement, and Renton, in voiceover, says, "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. " Remember that? I loved that. [note: for those who love me but don't love that language, please forgive me. But I did love it.]

2. I love cooking a feast for my family. I have a little book that, come to think of it, my daughter the makeup artist gave me; in this book, I plan the meal, including sometimes the platters and bowls upon which I will serve each dish. I write recipes that I have devised in the process of cooking the feast. I label the event and sometimes the date. I love the planning, the shopping, the feast itself, and the aftermath, even, when we sometimes do three loads of dishes in the dishwasher. The historian is an excellent collaborator, making the house fit for company while I cook. We both clean up, and he is endlessly tolerant of my post-game analysis. "Wasn't that sauce amazing? I think everyone loved the salad. It was cool to have three desserts, didn't you think? I think everyone had a great time, don't you?" Plus--the leftovers.

3. I love it when Bruiser runs. Last night, after it snowed a little during the evening, the historian and I took Bruiser out for a walk. Because it was dark and not very many people or cars were about, we let him run without holding his leash--he's become more responsive, not as in days of yore when he would bolt out the front door and play keep-away endlessly. He'd draw up to a fence or a low-lying shrub or a lamppost or a mailbox to sniff it diligently, deposit three drops of pee, and sniff again. Then he'd wheel around and run for one hundred feet or so, pause to check out our progress behind him, locate another sniffable object to investigate and mark. It was a lovely half hour, watching a completely happy dog take off in search of the purely beautiful, cold, fascinating world.

I feel that Abbey, counterintuitive, assertively unhip, Dr. Write, middlebrow, and gilian should declare their loves. No spouses, children, or beverages allowed.

Bonne anniversaire to the historian.

Here are ten of my many birthday wishes to the historian:

1. that the most progressive possible Democrat wins the nomination, and then the White House.

2. that someone in his life gets it together to create a calmer, gentler, less chaotic household.

3. that he gets plenty of nice days to take a bike ride. Soon.

4. that when we show up to eat out, the restaurant has excellent, innovative vegetarian options.
5. that the grandkids give him doughnuts for a birthday present.*

6. that the good health he deserves for living so well and so mindfully be his in full measure.

7. that we have many gatherings with the whole family this year at our house.

8. that his clothing be sweatshop-free.

9. that he will take the opportunity to turn up the volume when he plays jazz on the stereo.

10. that bluebirds sing when he walks by, flowers nod at his passing, and fish leap from the river, because he is so swell.

Happy birthday!

*Mission accomplished--the grandsons chose a box of doughnuts to give to their Papa.

Listen up, people.

Something's got to give. It's late January, and the vestiges of Christmas, well, they're about to bury me. My desk in my study is eight books deep on every square inch, and where it's not eight books deep, it's art implements or old cameras or other kinds of whatnot. Ribbon, giftbags, tape, scissors. That's because I needed to move the books, art implements, old cameras and whatnot into the study so there could be Christmas in the living room and kitchen. But that was weeks ago, and now there's clearly some serious cleaning and organizing to do and I cannot seem to summon the will to do it. Tomorrow is the historian's birthday, and I need to get his presents sorted. But Christmas is still in the way.

This is leaving out entirely the whole Christmas tree situation. Which is not good.

Where are my inner resources, people? Are they somewhere buried under the books, art implements, cameras and whatnot? Or has Christmas eaten them?

Better jobs than mine (part 39).

People, it was cold today, particularly during the part of the day when I was walking to my car, and thereafter. Cold, as in "cold." But it was all good, because after an extremely warm greeting from both Bruiser and the historian when I got home, the mail came, and there was a Sundance catalog. Good for browsing, good for venal envy, good for a good time before tossing it into the recycling bin.

Near the end of the catalog was an item: Paradox Pants. How, you may ask yourself, can mere trousers be paradoxical? Simple: they are "soft yet strong, fashionable yet functional."

Trendy yet timeless? Cute yet insufferable? Smart yet stupid? Maybe, cropped yet full-length? Come on, play along: ------- yet ---------. Dingy yet distinguished. Dorky yet delectable. Dopey yet Sleepy. Clearly my great powers of language manipulation are misplaced, misspent, misapplied, misused. Also: undercompensated. Undercompensated yet unappreciated. Wait, that's not a paradox.

Holiday roundup.

Today I:

1. got up and ate raisin bran.
2. answered a few student e-mails.
3. improved the design of a week-to-work schedule for one of my online courses, although I'm pretty sure the design isn't actually improved, and there will still be confusion. Time for a sabbatical.
4. went to see a movie with College Daughter (Mad Money, which was what it was, and nothing more, which was just fine with me--it had to be seen for various reasons, including Diane K., who needs someone to write her a better movie, already!).
5. came home and ate leftover soup for lunch.
6. took a very small nap.
7. started a novel, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands, a French thriller (in translation) by Fred Vargas, a woman, and it's good, as well as one of a series, all good news.
8. read the novel obsessively.
9. made and ate a modest supper.
10. went to a jazz concert, which had some high points and less than high points.
11. came home and ate a cupcake, which was what it was, which was delicious, which was just fine with me--it had to be eaten for various reasons, including the fact that every day goes better with cake.
12. made a handout explaining how to create an e-portfolio for one of my classes.
13. posted this blog post.

I didn't: clean up one damn thing in my house. Write a new poem. Watch tv. Take down my Christmas tree. But it was a pretty good day, all the same.

I know, no one cares,

but I made a delicious salad for dinner: it was

• a bunch of arugula from Chad the farm entrepreneur and winter vegetable purveyor--so it was very rough, not all delicate like spring arugula, with some of the leaf tips kind of bronze-y--
• two clementines, peeled and sectioned,
• raw unsalted pistachio nuts, and
• a slice of toasted, dried out, rubbed-with-garlic, then broken-into-pieces country French loaf, also known as "croutons."

Twas all dressed with olive oil, a splash of champagne vinegar, salt and pepper. Just so you know, it was delicious.

For the record.

The last four games of Scrabble I've played, I've lost to running son, other teenage boys, my niece, and the historian.

Things I like about my job (January edition).

1. Two weeks into the new semester I am still mostly caught up.
2. There are only two semesters in the year.
3. The second week means only about seven weeks till spring break and maybe just twelve or thirteen until it's all over.


4. And the students. Of course. Gosh! The students.

The interesting bits.

I'm reading a novel, Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively, a writer I've been only dimly aware of. I picked it up because Maureen Corrigan talked about Lively briefly on one of those end-of-the-year discussions of the best books of the year, on Fresh Air. This isn't the book Corrigan mentioned--this one won the Booker Prize in the late 80s. Anyway, I'm not crazy about the book so far--the main character, the narrator, seems to be smug and rich, condescending, and (worst of all!) a self-confessed terrible mother! (Yes, my feminist readers, this speaks volumes about me, I realize.)

However: I'm forging on because of these two passages which really spoke my language:

"We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version surface in supermakets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive."

and this:

"Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost and can never recover. We do not remember childhood -- we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was. And all the while the inhabitants of this world are among us, like aborigines, like Minoans, people from elsewhere safe in their own time capsule."

Fake blood.

1. Johnny Depp is quite amazing--scary, compelling, vivid--in Sweeney Todd. So are Helena Bonham-Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Alan Rickman, and various other more minor players, including the kid who plays Toby, Edward Sanders.

However:

2. Whosoever claims that the blood, gore, and throat-slitting of this movie is somehow not scary or dread-filled, is campy or played just for fun, is either way more sophisticated than I am (probably, it wouldn't be too hard to be more sophisticated than I am) or has seen too many scary, bloody, gory and throat-slitting movies.

I had to watch whole scenes/songs by not watching them. I actually thought this movie was quite powerful--but I couldn't watch the bloody parts. And not only was it bloody, it was dark. Very dark and nihilistic. Like, so dark I might be thinking about some of it for quite awhile. Or maybe having horrible, bloody, gory nightmares about it, despite what some sophisticated superannuated types may say.

My sincere apologies to all herbivores.

It's possible that you, my dear reader, have already viewed this hilarious clip about bacon. But I think it's also possible that many of you have not. I found it on dooce (essential reading, by the way), but it was my Scotland daughter who kept nagging me to watch it. I thought I felt too low to laugh. She was right, I was wrong. I laughed, and so will you.

Incoming.

Here's the poem I took to my group yesterday, with some revisions based on their feedback:

For days on end it snows

I’ve had enough of this quiet, woven of baffled fans,
sleep, and everyone gone. Out of our bed, I want a nest

made of newspaper, dogs, books, children, music and chatter.
In the night I wake, expect to hear her huff and shift.

At the end she lay her head on her paws. For as long
as we wanted, we could still stroke her soft ears.

Downstairs, a bedroom no one sleeps in,
the bed unmade, discarded socks dimly remembering

their former feet. The bird once trapped there, beating.
Medallions, pennants, trophies. I ready myself to order it.

I should open the door, let everything out that wants out,
let stillness settle before I arrive with my heave and flow.

On the lawn up the street, snowmen, four of them,
still and cold. On his walk, our other dog abruptly

bristles and growls at them: something amiss,
a new series of masters, white overlords aligned

suddenly in the yard he used to sniff and prowl.
I always loved waking to what had fallen in the night:

first thing, she’d bury her face in it,
then lie down, the snow like a mother.

Nothing on.

Currently, I'm watching Mean Girls. Actually, I'm in the other room, so technically I'm not "watching" it. I'm blogging. Also, I have put away some clothes and started a novel and taken a little nap with Bruiser. And had a cup of hot chocolate. With marshmallows. Now I feel a little sick and possibly a bit overheated.

College daughter watched Extreme Home Makeover and cried her eyes out, and now she's recounting the whole sad, horrible story. What the hell.

I have a few questions.

1. Is there someone who's planning to take my Christmas tree down for me, or help me decide what to do about the poinsettias, or who plans to enfold my shiny little Christmas objets in tissue paper? Because I could use some help with that.
2. When will there be a movie (preferably a comedy) that I can watch without effort and still feel happy at the end of it?
3. Is Bruiser lonely? He seems lonely.
4. Am I missing something, or have I eaten at all the restaurants in SLC and now they seem stale and unimaginative?
5. Is the world more full of incompetent people than it was just a couple of weeks ago? Or is it that all the systems they have for doing practically everything have taken a turn and become really, really bad?
6. Why is it just pasta polenta rice polenta pasta around here?
7. Why did the people at Wild Oats let me leave without the butter, the cheese, and the mushrooms that I paid for?
8. Is it just me? Because it seems like maybe it's just me.

The house isn't empty, but there is an emptiness in it.

No movie tonight--we had to fuss around getting to a restaurant that wasn't too crowded, and I felt so very put out, like a child, that I just didn't want to see Margot at the Wedding. In fact, I might never want to see that movie. We were home by 8:30. Bruiser was whole-body-waggingly glad to see us. College daughter was out with her friend. Our bed is kind of nestlike, with the historian gently snoring and the dog curled up between us. I realized earlier today that one time I miss my son is when I pick up my cell phone, because I usually texted him sometime during the day, and now I won't, and he won't be texting me either. Or when we lock the door when the three of us--me, the historian, college daughter--are home. No one else will be coming home tonight. Watching a crappy movie on television. Should just go to sleep. Will, soon. Getting the television to a volume that is still audible but won't disturb the historian--I'm pretty good at it. Should just go to sleep. Will, soon.

Getting through the days after.

1. Drank a whole pot of tea with milk and one cube of demerara sugar per cup.
2. While working, listened to a lot of music I've recently acquired or downloaded--Mavis Staples, Martha Wainwright, Colleen (Les Ondes Silencieuses), Mike Wexler, Rufus Wainwright, DJ Rekha, Cat Power (her Covers recording).
3. Answered a kajillion student e-mails about trying to add my classes.
4. Reordered the discussion topics on my online course.
5. Wore new earrings.
6. Tried to stay warm.
7. Laundered while working.
8. Finished giving late grades (no more nagging e-mails from the e-Registrar Overlord of Failure to Give Grades).
9. Oatmeal with raisins for breakfast.
10. Tried not to brood, which is challenging, as I am a world-class brooder.
11. Rejoiced over the fact that my nervous stomach pains are abating.
12. Missed Betty's huffing and sweet dog smell.
13. Looked at the pictures from yesterday several times. A lot of times.

The day in pictures.

Betty.

Indicators that my organizational strategies might not quite be working for me.

Today, I found myself at the Martha Hughes Cannon Building on North Temple, State of Utah Vital Records Department, ordering and paying for three copies (one for me, one for his dad, one for him while he's traveling) of my youngest child's birth certificate for something like the 6th time in his still rather short life.

But who's counting.

Artifacts from my personal history.

My dad passed these photos along to me--thanks, Dad!

I'm the one on the left--the other is my second cousin Connie. (At least I think she's my second cousin.)

Here I am, wearing the national costume of Japan.

A new human art.

This afternoon, I went over to running son's dad's house to help with the packing. The dad and his wife are very organized and philosophical packers, far more so than I am. They know excellent ways to pack everything, from shoes to socks to dress pants.

For instance, they believe in keeping a photocopy of documents (passport, birth certificate, immunization records) in each separate suitcase. They know how to roll socks and how to roll the garment bag. Shoes? each wrapped in a separate bag (so as not to mark the clothes or scuff each other), but put at the bottom of the bag, because they're weighty, and you don't want them weighing down the clothes, plus they form a base at the base of the bag. I did not pause to reflect how many times I have put shoes any old wherever in my bags. I do not have a philosophy of packing, but I could see how such orderly, considered packing might lead to other forms of order and consideration. So it was good running son had this tutelage and mentorship in the art of leaving this country, his friends and his family, to go to a foreign land.

Running son's dad went on an LDS mission to Argentina, Buenos Aires, back in the 70s. He lived through a coup and the craziness of the post-Peron years. It was a transformative experience for him in nearly every way. Today, I enjoyed watching running son and his dad transform chaos into order, every single thing he would need, just about, for two years into just three bags; seeing the dad teach the son a minor art, preparatory to the major one.

Things you need to pack carefully away when you're going to be gone for 2 years: all Nintendo systems and games. Choice concert and other important tee shirts. Utah Jazz player jerseys. Your various sports medals. Your dvds and cds. Your library card. Your old beat up belt.

The best thing I ever bought (part 1).

How did I manage to get to this point in my life without realizing that, when you get home from a hard day on high heels, putting slippers on is not just comfort but more like therapy? Say your feet have sad, sorry issues, dating back to childhood when they were forced to wear very cute but not wholly comfortable shoes, and going on through adulthood, the same old thing? But then you put on slippers, and all of a sudden your feet have a breakthrough, an insight into their condition that allows a new lease on life. "Faux shearling! All over and under! That glorious scuffing sound, as if made by an old person, on her way to make a tidy cup of cocoa!"

Infected.

The bad news is, Betty is sick again, and it probably means she won't be with us much longer. She has new tumors, this time on her spleen--we saw them on an ultrasound. Also, a mass in her thigh that's also probably a tumor. When we took her to the animal hospital for the ultrasound, we also noticed an infection on her front leg, which turned out to be an abcess, which could well stem from a compromised immune system. She was anemic, her gums very pale--it seemed like this all happened in, like, a weekend.

So she's had a blood transfusion which she seemed to be "holding onto," as the vet phrased it. So that's good. They infused her with antibiotics for the abcess, and we're continuing that process, but for the moment it's still pretty ugly, still draining. And the thing about dogs and an ugly draining wound? Apparently it's delicious, because they want to lick it.

This afternoon, after the long-ish holistic reading/bagel/pizza/assessment party, aka the 2010 assessment, I came home a little on the exhausted side, ready to take a little rest. I am having my traditional post-holiday collapse, with a little cold on top, just to make life special. I lay down with the dark little thriller I'm reading, a novel by Arnaldur Indridason called Jar City, set in Reykjavik. I kept dreaming possible directions for the plot, very wintry and subarctic, all accompanied by an anxious music of licking.

When I woke up, I took Betty outside. She wandered to find the perfect spot to pee, then found another spot to bury her face in the snow, then roll in it. Big snow-loving girl. She's happiest in the winter, in the snow.

Occupational hazards; or, Pedant, c'est moi.

From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, a letter from one Robert Epstein, no doubt a medievalist of great merit:

"Edward Hirsch's review of Simon Armitage's new translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' (Dec. 16) welcomes with such sincere enthusiasm a book that will no doubt bring new appreciation of this great poem that only a pedant would quibble with details. I am that pedant."

In 2008,

I plan not to be exhausted. Ever.

I plan to launch no more young people on major ventures, thereby having to buy them 8 white shirts and 8 pairs of dress pants and small first aid kits and get them expedited passports. Or anything like this kind of preparation, or heartbreak.

I plan to keep the new couch [cue angelic choir] dog-nibble free.

I plan not to overbake for parties--if anyone wants a large pan of surplus buttermilk brownies, holla!

I plan to appreciate my parents more, because they are awesome.

I plan to get out of the house and walk around the block or a few blocks, nearly every day.

I plan to enjoy Betty while she's still around.

I plan to have my Christmas tree down before school starts.

I plan to cut way back on over-reacting.

I plan to see more movies, because I'm always pretty sure I'm not seeing enough.

I plan to play the Haydn Klaviersonaten, Band I, sitting on my piano.

I plan to paint the bedroom.

I plan to read novels, poetry, and select nonfiction (up immediately, Jar City & Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason; Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively; Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand by Fred Vargas; also Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins).

I plan to let go of things. I plan to take fewer things personally.

Also: I plan to capitalize on my 2007 successes, which include seeing my friends more regularly and acquiring more comfortable seating throughout the house. I plan not to backslide in a robust social life and good chair acquisition.