Questions from alchemi:

If a movie was made about your life, what essential scenes would have to be cut to come in below a NC-17 rating?

If you're filming the gritty exposé, about half of college and a few stretches in my twenties. If you're more interested in emotional significance, then before Jeff, there were three. The specific scenes might as well be the beginnings with each of them; my beginnings have tended to carry more dramatic weight than my endings.

What does your best writing say about you as a person?

I think that really depends on what I'm writing about. My best academic writing reveals that I can produce compelling and nuanced close readings of texts, and that I am capable of doing interdisciplinary work that isn't a disservice to the disciplines from which I'm drawing. My best personal writing might tell you something about how I love, how I screw up, what makes me laugh, what pisses me off: it depends on when you catch me. I do think that people have a tendency to forget that the personal writing they read in people's journals is not the person herself. People want to connect the dots, to build scenes out of snapshots, and while I have control over what I write, I don't have any control over the way readers interpret it. In short, if someone wants to decide that I'm smart, friendly, insightful, and funny, they will. If they're looking for evidence that I'm idiotic, cranky, flaky, and annoying, they'll surely find it.

What is your ideal wardrobe? (Photographs depicting said wardrobe expected). Why?

Well, I suppose one version of the ideal is what I'd buy if you gave me someone else's credit card and set me loose at Anthropologie. I tend to like skirt and blouse pairings that are casual enough for everyday use but nice enough to wear to work (bear in mind that my jobs almost never require that I wear suits or formal office wear). I don't like to look sloppy, but I hate being uncomfortable, so there's a sort of easy femininity to a lot of the clothes I like: strappy sandals good, high heels bad. I'll wear heels if I'm more dressed up, but my ankles have both been sprained so many times that they turn easily, so while I'm wearing them, I worry constantly that I'm going to seriously gimp myself out.

I can't give you pictures of the above stuff, because most of the clothing I own that fits into that category is too big for me at the moment, and I can't afford to replace it right now. Instead, I tend to purchase the types of outfits I end up wearing most of the time, which is typically some variation on jeans and a black shirt. The combination isn't particularly exciting, but I do suppose it really is another version of my ideal. Anything that serves my purposes so much of the time has to be an ideal of a sort, right? Anyway, since I have whole drawers full of jeans and black shirts, taking a picture of that is easy. Here you go.

What is the worst thing about marriage? The best?

The worst? The times when I realize just how much damage I could do and wonder if I'm capable of not doing it.

The best? I get to live with my best friend and get free nookie. It's a good deal.

At what time have you felt the most intelligent? Appealing? Sexy? Why?

I've probably felt most intelligent during some of my better teaching and tutoring sessions. I've felt the most appealing and sexy during times of sexual tension.

How goes that-which-cannot-be-mentioned?

I'm actually quite serious about not wanting to answer questions about my dissertation right now. Here's the deal: I think many of the people who are closer to me know that I don't want to talk about it in general. However, they feel that since they're closer to me, they can ask when they're curious, because they aren't "in general" kinds of people. My friends are indeed extraordinary people who help me with all sorts of things, but I don't want help on this right now. My dissertation is a sore spot, for all the obvious reasons, and talking about it won't change that. I've talked about it. Lots. So much that I'm fucking sick of hearing myself talk about it. When there is a change, it will be because I've done some work, not because I've shared my feelings about doing some work or told you—once again—that I haven't done dick. Until then, just hang tight and be confident in the knowledge that I'll say something when I have something to say.

This post from razorart reminded me of a conversation I regularly used to have with parents who brought their non-swimmer children to the municipal pool where I was a lifeguard. It went something like this:

Me: "Hi. I just rescued your child. The shallow end gets deeper than you might think. Your son got in over his head, and he began to drown."

Parent: "Oh. Can he go back in?"

Me: "All parents who bring their children here are required to supervise them at all times. Since your child is a non-swimmer, you must be in the water with him in order to supervise him properly."

Parent: "You mean I actually have to get in the pool? I can see just fine from where I am."

Me: "Did you see your child drowning a few minutes ago?"

Parent, defensive: "No, but I wasn't watching just then."

Me: "Exactly."

Parent: "Well, what are you lifeguards here for, then?"

Me: "We're here in case of emergencies. Our regulations require that parents supervise their children at all times so that we can keep emergencies to a minimum. Look, I'm not here to argue with you, and it's important that I get back to my post. However, I will tell you that the rules are not optional, and if you would like details on the reasoning behind them, my manager would be happy to talk to you. In the meantime, please wait at least 10 minutes before going into the pool with your child. He needs to rest for a bit, because—as I mentioned—he was drowning a few minutes ago."

Last month, a friend of mine who has been living in Tunisia wrote about Americans' obsession with safety. I think he raised some good points, and I think it's probably true that the average American parent is relatively safety-conscious. Does it go too far at times? Sure. Risk management procedures these days often have less to do with preventing accidents than preventing lawsuits, and on a more individual level, there are certainly parents out there who are overprotective.

At the same time, I'm coming at this from a different angle. I worked in parks and recreation every summer from age 14 to age 24. Most of that work was at a YMCA camp, where I was a junior counselor for 3 years, a counselor for 3 years, and an assistant program director for 2 years. I worked at the municipal pool where parents tried to drown their children for 2 years, and I was a program director for a day camp in Santa Monica for another 2 years. (If you're actually doing the math and are confused, I worked at both the pool and the YMCA camp one summer). During that time, I came to believe in three basic principles:

Kids will fuck themselves up. Even under the best of circumstances, accidents will happen. Kids will fall. They'll swallow things they weren't supposed to swallow. They'll get poison oak, they'll be stung by bees, and they'll run into each other. Some things are inevitable. However,

Kids who have help fucking themselves up will fuck themselves up worse. Let the five year-old with anger management issues draw with a sharp pencil, and she will use it as a weapon at some point. Leave a nail sticking out of a wall, and someone will get caught on it. That nub from the old horseshoes pole that's still in the ground? Some poor kid is going to fall on it and end up with a huge gash in his side. Anything you do—or fail to do—that makes injuries more probable will make those injuries more common.

Parents are idiots. All parents are not idiots. In fact, most of them are not so bad. That doesn't matter, because there are still a whole lot of idiots. They're a veritable army. Those of you who have ever worked retail will know what I'm talking about: 90% of your dealings with customers in a given day might be unremarkable, but the other 10%? Hooboy. Seriously, I'm sure I could find parents who would act surprised if I advised them to stop letting their kids eat broken glass.

And that's why I'm all for hyper-awareness when it comes to things like child safety. The rules and regulations might seem overwhelming; they might be overwhelming. If you work for a childcare organization, the documentation of safety procedures required by your insurance company might be excessive. Still, until common sense becomes far more common than it actually is, we'll just have to keep codifying it.

Interview questions from springheel_jack:

To what does your username refer?

It's from a Wallace Stevens poem, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." If you go to my journal or friends page and look at the navigation bar on the right, you'll see the section of the poem in which "major weather" appears.

East Coast/West Coast, California/New York? Thoughts?

West Coast, definitely. For one thing, I've spent very little time on the East Coast—a total of maybe four weeks over my lifetime. Most of that time, I was in Marblehead, Massachusetts to visit my paternal grandmother, who died in 1997. I've never been to New York. Actually, I think that's not quite true; I believe I went there with my mom when I was very young and she was on the road with the Doobie Brothers. Still, I was too young to remember that trip, so it doesn't count. My first real visit was scheduled for the third week of September, 2001 12:00:00, but that didn't end up being such a good time to go play tourist in Manhattan.

I once posted an entry that, among other things, included some blathering about physical space and furnishings. lexophile commented jokingly that I was a "latent New Englander." If we're just talking about aesthetic sensibilities, she's right: the sprawling strip mall that is Orange County does nothing for me visually. Then again, I can get in my car and, without too much trouble, end up at the ocean or the desert, Disneyland or Mexico, wine country or Las Vegas. And I never, ever have to scrape ice off my windshield.

What is Truth?

Christ, I don't know. I should probably mention that I'm just not temperamentally set up for questions like this. Ask me "what is Truth?" or "what is Justice?", and my inner eyes start rolling almost immediately—not because I don't think people should ask such questions, but because I simply don't ever start a line of inquiry with a question so abstract. It's not how I work. I could spend years formulating an answer, and I'd still think whatever I came up with was full of shit. It would be like trying to define "God": God is obviously an important concept, but I'm not really interested in the concept as as a concept. What does interest me are the effects of that concept, the uses of that concept, the aspects of the human mind that make such a concept so appealing to so many.

And similarly with Truth: if indeed it exists as anything other than a militant sort of optimism, I rather suspect that thinking harder would be one of the worst ways to get at its fundamental core. Why worry about deciding what Truth is when it's hard enough to figure out what's true?

I haven't answered your question, of course. However, on the off chance that you ever wondered why I'm not a philosopher, this was probably as good an answer as any.

Do you worry about earthquakes or other natural disasters?

You know, I really don't. The only earthquake-related worry I've ever had consistently was actually when I lived in Seattle, not in Southern California. On part of I-5 in Seattle, you end up under a portion of the downtown area for a bit—Seattle people, do you know where I'm talking about?—and I read some article about how the whole shebang would likely collapse during a major earthquake. Every time I drove that route, I thought at least briefly about being crushed under a bunch of concrete and steel.

Would you ever own a gun?

I'm not categorically opposed to the idea, though I can't imagine why I'd want one.

That answer would be different if I had kids.

What do you bench?

You mean a max? I really don't know; I haven't tested my limits in that way for years. Right now, I lift light weights and do tons of reps, not because I'm afraid of bulking up, but because I go to a weightlifting class, and that's how the class works. We typically do somewhere around 8 sets of 8 for each exercise with no breaks between sets. I like the class because I'm lazy and do better with structure. Also, there's just no way I'd do that many lunges on my own.

When I was actually going for maxes, I never benched all that much; the most I ever lifted was 135 pounds. I build strength in my legs more easily than most women do, but not in my arms or chest.

Ever have a paranormal experience?

When I was a kid, I thought I saw a ghost in our neighbor's back yard. I later learned that the neighbor had died.

That about covers it.

We headed out to UCLA yesterday to go see a small production of a play our friend Ryan wrote. It was a comedy called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, and it was inspired by the true story of three mental patients, each with a Christ complex, who were put into group therapy together at a state hospital in the '60s. I already knew Ryan was funny, but it was a very cool thing to see his creative efforts materialized. I like knowing interesting people.

While on campus before the play started, I was having a cup of coffee in an outdoor lounge-type area when a guy I didn't know walked past me on his way to a trash can. He threw away whatever it was he wanted to throw away, looked right at me, and started humming the theme song from "Dawson's Creek." Now, it could be that I'm making too much of this interlude, but given the fact that I first became aware of that show's existence when someone told me I looked like Michelle Williams—and that it would take two hands and a foot to count the number of subsequent times random people compared me to Jen, her character on the show—I am fairly certain I was being WBified.

It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, kids. Cha-cha.

I went to the Sephora in Downtown Disney tonight to pick up some sunscreen. It's probably ridiculous that I buy my sunscreen at Sephora, but I wear it on my face every day, and I have very specific sunscreen needs. Whatever I choose has to provide broad-spectrum protection, which means it has to include titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, or avobenzone (which is the same thing as Parsol 1789). At the moment, my skin is too sensitive for avobenzone, so I'm limited to the other two ingredients. My sunscreen also has to be at least SPF 15, and it can't contain algin, coconut oil, cocoa butter, isopropyl myristate, or isopropyl palmitate. In fact, pretty much any ingredient starting with "iso" is bad.

I say all that because I do actually feel a need to assuage some guilt over the fact that I could feed a small village somewhere with the amount I just spent on two ounces of sunscreen. Okay, and one or two more items. It couldn't be helped. Sephora is a vortex. It's a good thing the sampled perfumes that hang thickly in the air in a tribute to the general philosophy of air quality in these parts—a smogcrocosm, if you will—make my eyes sting and water after a while. Without incentive to leave, I'm sure I'd be able to convince myself I need things like heated eyelash curlers; never mind the fact that I don't curl my eyelashes.

So, anyhoo, the nice Sephora lady is ringing up my purchases, and she shows me a sample of a perfumed lotion she's about to stick in my bag. I don't pay much attention at the time, but when I remove it from my bag later in the evening, I notice the label:

MICHAEL
MICHAEL KORS

AN EXPENSIVE
BODY CREME

It's expensive? Fabulous! What's in it? Who cares! What does it do? Well, I don't really know, but I'm pretty sure it makes you smell expensive.

As I was walking towards the parking lot, six different young-ish guys said "hi" to me in a span of about two minutes. You people think I'm just imagining a conspiracy, but I'm telling you it's bona fide. Proximity to Disneyland be damned; the Magic Kingdom doesn't make people that nice. After the third "hello," I was wondering when I'd be handed a pamphlet informing me that I was missing out on what heysinner would call the "FUCKING RIGHTEOUS LIGHT." The Rev would be talking about the ALMIGHTY FRANK. They wouldn't.

As it turns out, they talked about nothing. They just said hello and went on their way. There's a back story; I'll swear to it. Maybe they were weapons inspectors. "Hey, weapons inspectors, now that you didn't find a goddamn thing, what are you going to do next?"

Some kids I used to know called whatever they didn't like "crummy network reruns." As in, "this nature hike is crummy network reruns," or "the current administrative regime is crummy network reruns." Every time I remember the phrase, I wonder why I don't use it all the time.

I've made some substantial changes, adding a navigational scheme that better integrates the main portions of my site and my weblog. The weblog is still hosted at livejournal.com, but the style of my journal there now matches the layout here. Feel free to let me know what you think in my guestbook. I archived the old entries, so the main page is looking rather stark at the moment. It's so blank, so fillable! Plus, as Matt would say, "it's very 1998—but in a good way."

Finally, I made some changes here and there to the content of my links section. Of special note is a new addition: The Sinatraist, a THRILLING PULP SERIAL written by my friend Gregory Crosby and hosted here at majorweather.com. If you've been following the story from the beginning, you can relive the adventures of Henry Bethel and Maude S— in all their pulpy glory. If you're a new reader, I highly recommend this engaging and fun piece of fiction-in-progress—welcome! Besides, I designed the site, and it's swanky over there.

Maybe one of these days, I will get more than three hours of sleep the night before I go on vacation. Maybe I'll finish packing more than a half hour before our scheduled departure time. Not that I'm finished now.

So, I'm off. We're dropping the dogs off at Jeff's parents' house in Carson City, then heading to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, then going to my parents' house in Napa, and then meeting Jeff's family (and our dogs) in Tahoe. It's entirely possible that I won't have Internet access at all until I return on the 23rd. It's all very Gilligan's Island.

See you later, little buddies!

In the last week and a half, I:

- drove over 2000 miles
- visited my parents
- saw three plays
- bought some hiking boots that didn't cause a single blister
- visited Jeff's parents
- camped at Lake Tahoe for the first time
- took the dogs into water, mountains, and meadows
- made s'mores
- went without power or hot water for five days
- came home and took the Longest Shower Ever; and
- received over 300 emails, about five of which were actually worth reading.

I'm tired and sniffly and not good for much tonight, but I'll post more tomorrow. In the meantime, here are a few pictures.

Mount Shasta

On the beach at Lake Tahoe

Hiking near Fallen Leaf Lake

Roots

Napa looks down the trail as Ivy contemplates plunging to her death because, you know, it's hard to resist a good chipmunk.

At a brewery in Ashland. Jeff = toasty. Me = toasty. Mom = toasty. Dad = not.

Before seeing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Elizabethan Theater in Ashland. That's my dad's signature "you're taking a picture of me?" look.

Ben Stiller wipes the slate clean as Owen Wilson laments her unfortunate loss.


Bridge over troubled water joke goes here.


Napa loves her some swimmin'.


Down on the beach at sunset.

Part of a habitat for the Bald Eagle.

Passing through Lassen National Park.

There were gopher holes everywhere in this meadow. Bill Murray would have gone mad.

From our hike near Fallen Leaf Lake.

And another from the hike.