Today is a lovely day. Yesterday and the day before were hot, with highs over 100 degrees. Now, before you chime in with comments about how much worse you have it wherever you live, I would like to state for the record that your comfort levels have absolutely nothing to do with my comfort levels. (See "abscond with your popsicles," July 2002.) When people chime in about how much worse they have it than the person who has the gall to complain about, say, 102-degree DRY heat, they are essentially saying, "You are a huge wuss. Me? I am the Rambo of All Things Weather." And folks, that's annoying, because even if you were correct about your Rambosity in some sort of objective sense--which is doubtful--that would not change the fact that when it's over 100 degrees in my house, I get heat rashes, sit around sweating all day, and find it very difficult to get any work done.

We got an estimate recently of how much it would cost to fix this situation by installing central air. We were expecting it to be spendy, because installing central air is fundamentally spendy. Then, the guy started looking around.

"That's asbestos right there," he said. Ch - ching! went my mental cash register. "We'll need to get an abatement team out (ch - ching!) to remove that before we install anything."

"Your electrical panel needs to be upgraded," he informed us as we stood in the back yard. Ch - ching!

"Oh, and there's more asbestos up there." Ch - ching!

As it turns out, the mental estimate we started with plus four ch - chings! total around $10,000. That's less than we were expecting as the estimator tossed around phrases like "bubble suit" and "could kill you," but it's more than we were expecting for a house that's just under 1200 square feet.

So here's the part where I ask those of you who have a portable evaporative cooler which kind you have and whether or not you would recommend it. Jeff's study and mine are the hottest rooms in the house, but they are both small, so I imagine we could each get a relatively basic cooler and be comfortable enough to work during the day. (The only concern there is that Jeff does a good deal of work with computer hardware in his study, and we're not sure whether or not the moisture added to the air by an evaporative cooler would be bad for the boards he uses.) We might get one or two more coolers--perhaps bigger, perhaps not--for the living room and bedroom. Let me bask in your knowledge! Thrill me with your consumer savvy!

Just don't tell me that 100 degrees isn't actually hot.

Getting older happens gradually. In fact, as I once told the owner of a convenience store that was about a block away from the house where I lived at the time, "I was old enough to buy cigarettes two months ago, when you first checked my ID. I was old enough to buy cigarettes two weeks ago, when you checked it again for about the thirtieth time. I was old enough to buy cigarettes two days ago, when your tally was up to somewhere around forty. And today, I am still old enough to buy cigarettes. You know why? Because I get a little older every single day. I will never, ever walk into your store and suddenly be too young to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights."

So, yes, getting older happens gradually. But feeling older happens in little jolts. Maybe you turn on the radio and wonder what possesses people to listen to the crap you hear coming out of your speakers. Maybe you and your husband are loading your labrador retrievers into the station wagon and you realize, holy cow, my husband and I are loading our labrador retrievers into our station wagon. Maybe you laugh ruefully as you reflect on the fact that these days, when you make an expression, your face kind of does stick that way: you've got the wrinkles to prove it.

Or maybe you're clicking around on the Internet, and you come across a post in a Tim Burton community in which a 15 year-old girl describes The Nightmare Before Christmas as her "favorite childhood movie."

Little jolts.

My dog has become a vicious killer of opossums.

Ivy: Vicious Killer of Opossums

Napa: Enthusiastic Sidekick

I bear no great love for opossums. In fact, they are one of my least favorite animals. If you were to ask me, "Hey, Shasta, would you rather be locked up in a room with an opossum or with a dozen cockroaches?" I might have to go with the roaches. And I hate roaches. This hatred originated in Texas, where I lived for a time in an apartment building that was quite infested with these miracles of evolution. When your apartment building is infested with roaches, there is very little you can do in your individual apartment to keep them out of your personal space. Roaches, as you might know, have developed the ability to survive on lint. More recently, I have heard that some roaches have even started to burrow inside televisions and other appliances, where they live off electricity. This is fantastic if you are in a cyberpunk novel, but incomprehensibly creepy if you are not.

You think roaches can't teleport? Think again. Those bastards can just beam themselves into your cabinets if they put their diabolical little bug minds to it. Now, while it is something of a myth that everything in Texas is big, Texan roaches are indeed enormous. If you are a little girl who just wants to get a bowl so you can sit around in your Wonder Woman Underoos while eating Cap'n Crunch, the cockroach that ambushes you as you reach for the aforementioned bowl will seem approximately the size of a guinea pig. A guinea pig with a hard shell. And while you might think that Wonder Woman should just be able to get into her invisible jet and fly away from the vermin, I've got to tell you that escape isn't always possible.

Hopefully, this provides you with some scale--a measuring stick by which to understand the degree to which opossums freak me out on an intensely visceral level. They seem fundamentally, cosmically wrong, with their beady little eyes and their pointy little teeth and their naked rat tails. Have you ever had an opossum hiss at you? My god, it's terrifying. I can watch half a dozen zombie movies in a row with very little change in my blood pressure, but I think I would be totally incapable of watching a horror movie in which ill-fated protagonists battle troops of embittered opossums. That would be worth at least two thousand therapy points.

My dog Ivy doesn't like opossums, either. However, while my preferred approach would be to pretend that opossums don't exist, and to wipe all traces of encounters with opossums from my mind--surgically, if necessary--Ivy is a little more direct. She sees an opossum running across the top of our fence, she runs and jumps, and she does her best to make sure that the opossum will never again run across the top of a fence. Napa, who doesn't have the prey instinct that Ivy has but is nonetheless descended from bird dogs, does what she can to help out her packmate. I've tallied their kill count at four now, and who knows how many more they have injured?

Neither dog understands why Jeff and I aren't more supportive of their efforts to decimate the opossum population of North Orange County. I imagine they feel like the kid whose parents never showed up for her soccer games, because Daddy was too busy with his PBR and NASCAR on Saturdays, and Mommy was last seen at a truck stop in Tehachapi. Still, this communication barrier is not what's foremost in my mind when I have settled down for the evening with Jeff to watch a movie, and perhaps we've had some wine, and we're feeling quite relaxed--until we let our dogs out before we all head to bed, not realizing that Ivy is about to sprint after one of the grey, furry creatures she hates so much. When that happens, I am left to call the dogs in and peer out into the yard, where I can tell an opossum still lies--its status as a living being questionable--and wonder what to do. Is the creature suffering? I wonder, mulling over my responsibilities as a compassionate human being. Should I go out there?

Then, I experience what in addiction parlance is referred to as a "moment of clarity." I am seriously considering venturing into the darkest corner of my back yard while half-crocked, armed with nothing but hope and a bottle of Bactine, to mend the wounds of an animal that will probably spring at my throat like that killer bunny from Monty Python. At the very least, it will get me signed up for an endless series of rabies shots. Did I learn nothing from Jeepers Creepers? When somebody says, "I really think we should go back and check on those people who were wrapped up in a bag and dumped in a hole," what you say is "no." If that same somebody then asks you how you would feel if you were one of the people who had been wrapped in a bag and dumped into a hole, the appropriate response is, "Dead. I'd feel dead."

First things first: many thanks to sun_set_bravely and mabellongettifor the postcards and to mloconno for the care package! Michelle, the Rice Krispie treats were excellent, and you make a mean CD. It's quite possible that you and I are the only people I know who will not only admit to loving Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues," but will also put it on a mix disk. Elton owes us, man.

In other news, I've been terrible about updating lately, so there are some things you don't know. Here is one.

I am on an audio book binge. It takes some getting used to, this audio book business, because the way I listen is quite different from the way I usually read. When I read, I underline material, scribble notes in margins, mark especially important spots with Post-Its... it's a habit that is difficult to break entirely, even when reading for pleasure. I get twitchy when I don't have a pen or pencil handy. Because, you see, you just never know what you might find in a book; even the most wretched of potboilers could contain a passage that perfectly exemplifies something you didn't even know needed exemplification. If it does contain such a passage, you're sure to find it when you're nowhere near a source of ink. Hence the twitch--it knows.

Listening is different. I was about to claim it is more passive, but I don't want to overgeneralize, and really, the fact that I think listening is more passive than reading says less about listening than it says about me and the culture in which I've been raised. There are relatively few situations in which my job--the only thing I'm supposed to be doing at a given moment--is to listen. I think that's part of why academic conferences can be so tiring, in addition to jetlag and last-minute editing and uncomfortable chairs and all the other obvious reasons. Academics at conferences, when they aren't presenting their own papers, are listening to other peoples' papers, and most of them aren't particularly skilled listeners. The worst ones deal with their lack of skill by mentally composing elaborate responses to deliver during the question and answer session. I'm not talking about the people who raise tough questions and press speakers on their arguments, but about the people who stand up and blather for ten minutes about a topic that is only marginally related to the speaker's topic, and who manage to do so without asking any real questions. They can't ask real questions, because they only have a foggy notion of what the speaker actually said.

So this audio book binge has required some practice, some experimentation. I've figured out that I like to listen to them while I walk the dogs, wash dishes, file papers, or lie in bed unable to sleep. They are perfect for the times when I can't sleep, because the book keeps my mind from getting stuck in the endless loops that add frustration and anger to the insomnia experience. It still might take a few hours to nod off, but I'd rather fall asleep listening to a reader's voice than to the harridan in my head--the one who doesn't know the difference between trivial and important matters, and who sometimes won't stop talking until I feed her several milligrams of Ambien.

Yet the appeal goes beyond that. I often choose to listen to books that I probably would not choose to read any time soon: they aren't on any of my reading lists, have absolutely nothing to do with my field of study or my dissertation, and are often lighter fare. I'm not above listening to Dante while I scrub the toilet, but I prefer Neal Stephenson. And so I get to listen to The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner, which I thought was going to be about a woman and her posse of drag queens, but is actually about Southern women who are funny in that particular way that only Southern women are funny, and who make recipes that involve ingredient combinations like bacon, cream, sugar, and cinnamon. I get to listen to The Da Vinci Code, and Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Professor and the Madman, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which I last encountered some time during high school). I even listened to From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, because Claudia Kincaid is the patron saint of bookish girlchildren, and I felt like visiting her again.

Not all of my selections fall into the beach reading category. I like listening to audio versions of Shakespeare's plays. Last month, I finished a dual biography of Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as a survey of British history. More recently, I've started on Crime and Punishment, which, when I finish, will knock the items remaining on this list down to one.

It's good, this listening thing. Now, if someone would just invent some tiny, wireless headphones, I would be grateful for the opportunity to stop yanking out my earbuds when I get the cord stuck on things like doorknobs, desk corners, and elbows. While you're at it, please invent an automatic sunshade machine for the windshield of my car. Somebody already invented Jelly Bath, so you're off the hook on personal soaking products.

You're not really supposed to love Los Angeles. Or if you do, you're supposed to do it ironically: you can love L.A., but only in a Randy Newman kind of way.

Part of the problem is that nobody really knows what anyone's talking about when they say "Los Angeles." "Los Angeles" could mean anything from south of the Grapevine to north of San Diego. It could mean any spot in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, or Ventura--an enormous expanse of land that is home to over 17 million people. Your actual, physical experience of Los Angeles depends largely on your immediate neighborhood and the places you're able to travel by car. Forget the bus or the train; the chances you'll be able to get where you need to go with public transportation are slim. Jeff and I once shared an airport shuttle from LAX with a Danish family who came to do a quick Orange County theme park circuit and wanted to know how they might be able to get to downtown Los Angeles to do some sightseeing.

"Rent a car," we advised.

"There's no shuttle that goes that way?" the mother asked.

"Well, you could take an airport shuttle back to LAX and then take a cab to wherever you wanted to go from there," I answered, "but that would end up costing more than just getting a rental car."

"Could I take the train?" the father wanted to know.

I shook my head. "You could catch a cab, have them take you to the train station--which is about 20 minutes away--and then take a cab or buses to wherever you wanted to go, but that wouldn't be cheap, either. And you could spend all day just getting there and back."

I've lived here long enough to need periodic reminders of just how terrifying the prospect of driving in LA can seem to visitors. I forget how many people get that deer-in-headlights look when you give directions involving four different freeways. I forget what it's like to be truly afraid when nobody seems to be going slower than 80, or when someone who wants to go faster than that--there's always someone who wants to go faster--gains on you so quickly and menacingly that you mentally replay old hunting scenes from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

I actually like switching freeways: it breaks up the monotony of a trip, makes things more interesting. My former smoking patterns no doubt reinforced this. I went from smoking a pack a day to a pack and a half a day when I began commuting between Huntington Beach and Claremont four days a week. The trip was about 45 miles each way; I spent ten hours a week or so on the freeway (and considered it a reasonable, albeit longish commute). Stuck in traffic? Have a cigarette! Running late? Have a cigarette! Sick of all your tapes? Have a cigarette!

Eventually, the frequency of my responses to nicotine's siren song left my lungs feeling like they had ventured into waters sullied by a drunken oil rig captain, so I made an arbitrary rule: my commute took me along three freeways, and I could smoke one cigarette on each of them. Changing freeways suddenly seemed much more psychologically rewarding. If I needed pampering on a harrowing day, perhaps I would have an extra smoke when I reached the interchange from the 57 to the 22--a spot referred to as the "Orange Crush." Then, I would think about how I wanted a soda, because I can be ridiculously susceptible to the power of suggestion. Truth ads on the radio didn't make me want to quit smoking; they reminded me that I'd like to be lighting up again, especially at this point in my drive. After all, I'd come a long way, baby!

As for the freeway culture--and it is a type of culture, with its own sets of norms; indeed, the freeway culture is one of the few things that nearly all residents of the greater Los Angeles area have in common--once you're in, that's that. Gooble gobble, &tc. You might not be particularly fond of the Caltrans nation, but its natives rarely rattle you in any serious way. Yes, yes, I almost got killed today. What are we going to do about dinner?

A couple visiting from Denmark with their three children could hardly be expected to head over to the Hertz office with casual alacrity. Some might be happy to do so, but these tourists were not. It's just as well: you don't simply hop in a car and go sightseeing in downtown LA. You don't go downtown unless you have something to do there, something specific. Maybe you're seeing a play or visiting a museum. Being goal-oriented is the only thing that will give you the fortitude necessary to endure the labyrinthine freeway structure leading in and out of that particular area, where the signs are rarely posted with information as simple and helpful as "101 N." Instead, they say something like "Harbor Freeway" and then, in lieu of an actual direction, they give the name of a city you may or may not have heard of. Moreover, some of the freeways have more than one name. The 10, for example, could be the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino Freeway. Depends on where you are. Were you given directions that list numbers but no names? Are you unfamiliar with the geography of the Southland? Fabulous! Have fun going too far north and ending up in the parking lot at Dodger stadium!

A word on this "Southland" business: yes, that's what people call it here. Or rather, people on TV call it that. Heather Havrilesky, a television critic for Salon, refers to it as the Southland! (with exclamation point). I assume she does so because local newscasters--especially Paul Moyer--seem to take inordinate delight in pronouncing the word, which most people outside the Southland! would never, ever consider using in reference to the West Coast. The Southland is sun tea and biscuits with gravy and Flannery O'Connor and rocking chairs on porches. It's Alabama. It's Mississippi. It's Louisiana. It's not California. The exclamation point perfectly conveys the Hollywood touch people here give an otherwise normal word. The emphasis is so self-important that it's almost charming, like Jon Lovitz's "acting!" It's absurd, of course, but absurdity is always penciled in for lunch here in the Southland!

But back to your downtown excursion. Let's see how it went: you got confused, and you didn't know whether you were going north or south. Eventually, you tried exiting the freeway and getting back on again going the opposite direction, only to find you were going the right way in the first place. You fought your way across four crowded lanes of traffic at least three times, and you checked out the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. What did you manage to see when you eventually got downtown? Or, if you were on your way out of the downtown area--getting out is way harder than getting in; I blame the Eagles--what did you see while you were there?

Probably not much: some 99-cent stores, a couple of El Pollo Locos, some small establishments with signs in Spanish that advertise forged passports and driver's licenses. Some bars where you'll see the same faces at 2:00 pm and 2:00 am, features blurred with drink and smoke. (Blatant disregard of the state-wide smoking ban is a dive bar specialty). A handful of tall buildings. If you did enough wandering, you might have seen some scattered examples of more unusual architecture. Many of them are interesting, and some are quite beautiful, but few seem to fit with their surroundings: they are the Best Actor, not the outstanding ensemble cast. And, like the Best Actor, these standouts seem rather removed, perhaps even a bit unreal.

Let me give an example. You might have heard of the Westin Bonaventure; I had heard of it before I ever saw it in person. Amusingly enough, the source of my introduction to the Bonaventure was Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I read selections from it for one of my grad seminars at Claremont, and I later returned to it when it appeared on the syllabus of one of my History & Theory classes at UC Irvine. It was slotted for the last week of classes, a time when my classmates and I were staring deadlines for all of our seminar papers right in the face. I chose to write on Postmodernism, and I honestly suspect I got an A on the paper simply because it was evident to the professor that I had actually finished the book. Completing your reading isn't generally considered noteworthy in graduate classes, but this is a decidedly big book, and the timing was bad, and Fredric Jameson's writing style is at best dense. Some of his harsher critics actually dismiss him as being altogether "unreadable." It's a mistake, because much of what he has to say is truly interesting. Of the four shiny towers that comprise the Bonaventure, he says this:

... with a certain number of other buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris or the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically originally kind of hypercrowd. In this sense, then, ideally the minicity of [architect John] Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute. That is obviously not possible, whence the downplaying of the entrance to its bare minimum.

It sounds ridiculous, this idea that the Bonaventure is essentially a building that aspires to inaccessibility--until you go there. When you go there, you match up the address you had scribbled down with what you see in front of you, and then you drive around the building wondering how the hell you get inside. You might have to circle the block a second time before you realize that an opening in back of the building is actually the entrance to the hotel's parking garage. You descend a steep ramp, disappearing into the belly of the Bonaventure beast, and then you hand your keys to a valet who makes your car disappear.

Once inside, you find yourself in a lavish lobby with clear-glass elevators for each tower. Curiously, doing so doesn't seem to help you figure out where you need to go. Back to Jameson on this, who remarks on the ways in which the lobby seems intentionally disorienting:

What happens when you get there... can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, color coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate, attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has been obvious since the opening of the hotel in 1977 that nobody could ever find any of these stores, and even if you once located the appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices.

I'm not so much interested in whether or not Jameson's description of the Bonaventure still holds true--or whether my own description of it still holds true, for that matter. The hotel might have changed since I last visited. If it has, the change is of no import. That's because what I'm getting at is not a singular description of what it's like to visit this particular hotel. What does interest me are the ways in which Jameson's impressions (and my own) of the Bonaventure capture an experience of space that is repeated elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, and which, on a larger scale, is characteristic of the downtown LA area more generally. It's the experience of getting where you need to go and still not knowing where you are, of finally stepping into the center and discovering it's not the center at all--or if it is, being there isn't actually "centering," because the space somehow resists the bounding that would make it easy for you to translate your physical experience into a coherent conceptual map.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that I think this is crucial to understanding how "Los Angeles" can come to mean an expanse of several thousand square miles that contain more than 30 cities with populations of over 100,000 people. What do you do when your city doesn't have a center? You recenter, and then you recenter again, and again. None of these new spots is THE center of course, because there isn't one. But they continue to multiply as more people are drawn to the area, and this process of growth--the proliferation of urban simulacra--tends to happen along horizontal axes. The space spreads outward, not upward, sprawling in in a manner that has achieved its closest architectural realization in the strip malls so ubiquitous in these parts. They are links on a massive daisy chain.

I have all sorts of thoughts on what this might actually mean, and I might take up the train of thought later on. If I do, the cars on that train will look something like this: 1) LA: Not At All Chicago; 2) Some connections between sprawl, architecture, and individualism; and/or 3) The film industry and its function as the default conceptual "center" of LA. But now, I have to make some phone calls. There's a big storm, you see, and a good deal of water is leaking in through my chimney. I'm no seasoned homeowner, but I'm pretty sure that's not good.

The tattooing went very well. And it was fast! My appointment was for 11:30, and I left at about 1:00. My tattoo artist, Paul, said that the process went quickly in part because I'm good at not squirming and because my skin absorbs ink quickly. I was surprised when he announced that he had finished--and glad, too, since the left side was starting to sting quite a bit.

I don't yet have any pics of the actual tattoo. I brought my camera along and intended to have Jeff take a picture before Paul bandaged up the tattoo, but that whole area of my skin is a very bright shade of red right now, so I'm going to wait on photos until the irritation subsides. Until then, I can offer you a couple of images. One is a very important message:

And the other is a scanned image of the design from which the artist was working:

I got the image from Roderick and Marjorie Webster's WESTERN ASTROLABES, which is from a series of volumes called "Historic Scientific Instruments of the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum." About the drawing, the book says

THE SPHERICAL ASTROLABE - This astrolabe was described in the "Libros del saber" of Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284). The stars and ecliptic circle are shown on a rete that takes the form of a cut-out spherical shell. This shell encases a ball on which are marked the horizon, altitude lines, azimuths, etc. Several small holes in the ball permit moving the pivot to adjust the instrument to the proper latitude.

The actual tattoo is about the same size as the image you see above. Some of the detailing had to be left out, but not much.

In just a few short hours, this will be what my upper back used to look like, because a man named Paul is going to put a shiny new astrolabe tattoo there.

I'm kind of nervous. My other tattoo is small, and I got it almost twelve years ago. This one will be larger--close to four inches in diameter--and considerably more detailed. What do women wear when they get tattoos on their upper back, anyway? Can I wear a tank top, or am I expected to just hang free in the shop for the three hours the work is supposed to take? Summer of Love, all right! Altamont, all right!

I just sold my little Corolla to a random guy who appeared in my driveway and offered me cash for it as-is. For a variety of reasons, including a possible out-of-state move in the near future, Jeff and I have been waiting on getting it fixed since the great a/c unit debacle. I probably could have gotten more for it if I had fixed it up and put an ad in the paper, but this was a billion times easier. And the guy seemed nice and was buying the car for his teenage son, so I felt better about making him a good deal.

But it's happening so fast! It's my little Corolla! I've had this car since New Year's Day of 1994; it was my first major purchase. I've taken countless trips in it, some long, some short. I've spent seemingly endless hours behind its wheel as I was stuck in traffic on the 10 and the 405. I've travelled nearly the entire length of I-5 in that car.

I do think I'm doing the right thing, but I'm going to have to mourn for a while. O Corolla! O humanity!

Sometimes, when you wake up before 6:00 am for no good reason and decide it's important that you have soup for breakfast, you don't want a Wolfgang Puck hearty penne kind of soup. Nope. You don't want that, and you don't want Amy's Organic lentil soup, either. You don't even want your leftover homemade sweet potato chowder, which any reasonable bacon-eater would agree is a damn good soup.

What you want is ramen: long, bland noodles boiled for however long you feel like boiling them, because hey, it's not like you're going for an al dente texture. Ramen: with little floaty bits that may or may not have once been sea monkeys. Seasoned with chunks of bouillon-flavored sodium from a foil packet. Ramen: if you're feeling highly motivated, you might crack an egg into it. It's an egg! It's fancy!

This is why it's a shame that I seem to have stopped purchasing ramen when I stopped living entirely on student loans. Maybe I'll have mac and cheese for breakfast instead. It's not ramen, but at least preparing it will require that I open a foil packet.

My name is Shasta. I was born in 1971 to a pair of San Francisco hippies; my mother worked for the Grateful Dead at the time, and my father was--and still is--a luthier. When I was 5, my parents divorced, and my mom, little brother, and I moved to Dallas. As it turns out, the integration of hippie families from San Francisco into Dallas community life is not especially seamless.

Since my parents' divorce, I've had three different stepfathers, but the first two weren't my stepfathers for long. My current stepdad has been married to my mother since the mid '80s, and when I say "dad," I'm usually talking about him. I have four brothers who range in age from 33 to 8: one is a full brother, two are half brothers, and one is a stepbrother. No sisters.

I moved a great deal as a child, both within and among cities. The one I ended up thinking of as my hometown was Seattle, where I moved when I was 12. I actually rather liked high school, which is, I realize, an unfashionable thing to say, but it's true. I liked college, too. I started out and finished up as an English major, though in between, I flirted with the idea of studying drama, comparative religion, or communications. I had enough credits in drama courses to count as a minor at most schools, but the University of Washington didn't allow students to declare minors. I graduated at 21 and took a job as a receptionist for a real estate company; the year I worked there seemed very long.

At 22, I moved to Southern California and started graduate school. I have master's degrees in English and history, and I am currently writing a doctoral dissertation on female cross-dressing in seventeenth-century English drama. School was much easier when I was set on pursuing a traditional academic career. Now, I'm not really sure what I want. This uncertainty, combined with certain temperamental flaws and the fact that researching and writing 250 pages on an obscure topic is inherently difficult, has been a major source of emotional turmoil for me over the last couple of years.

I am married to a man I met in grad school; he's completing a Ph.D. in math and works full-time as a software engineer. We balance each other out: he helps me to be more grounded when I need to be grounded, and I help him remember how to play when he forgets. We have two labrador retriever mixes and an orange tabby cat; at the moment, we're also taking care of a second cat, who is happiest when you throw Q-Tips across the room and let him fetch them for you.

I don't know whether or not we'll ever have kids. Maybe. We'll see how I feel after I finish my dissertation.

I hate wearing fingernail polish, but my toenails are almost always painted. I am sometimes cynical, but I'm also idealistic. I believe in the knight but not the fairy tale. I love the road, but I do not love cars. I romanticize the idea of living in the country, but I know I could never be happy living far from a city. If you stand on the Santa Monica Pier with me at dusk, I will probably point to the sky and tell you that I love L.A., albeit in a Randy Newman kind of way.

I get restless sometimes, and I think I always will. I'm not so good at moderation. In anything, really. My short-term memory is excellent, but my long-term memory is terrible. Concepts and impressions stay; facts don't. I keep a journal in part because when I don't, huge chunks of my life disappear from my head. When I read my journal, I sometimes think I must seem totally insane. You may or may not be happy to know that most of the time, I feel mostly sane--the madwoman in my attic is really just kind of neurotic on occasion, and she's in no danger of setting anything on fire. Not intentionally, anyway, and those of you who happen to know about the time I burned up the microwave in seventh grade can just zip it.

I worry that I'll never do anything I'm truly proud of. I'd like to be great at something, but I suspect I'll have to settle for being good--sometimes very good--at several things. I can be counted on in a crisis. If I love you, I will dig you out of a Mexican prison with a spoon, but I'm not as reliable when circumstances are less dire. Which is most of the time.

I appreciate what's around me, but Orange County does feel soulless at times, and when I feel that most acutely, I miss things. I miss autumn air and autumn sweaters. I miss living near my family. I miss independent theaters and bookstores with hardwood floors.

And you, too. I also miss you.

You know, I am a relatively coordinated person. I move fairly well, and I pick up on things like dance steps quickly--not as quickly as some, but more quickly than most. In high school and college, I was even part of a couple of different groups of people who got together and then danced in front of larger groups of people. (That was intentionally vague.) More recently, I've been taking Advanced Step Aerobics classes. Ballys has six or seven different gyms within reasonable driving distance of my house, so I've tried a whole slew of different classes with 20 or so different instructors.

My favorite of these classes, by far, is a class that meets on Fridays and is taught by a woman named Keila. I like the class because it's fast, it's hard, the choreography is complex, and Keila is funny. Many of the people who show up every week have been doing so for ages; I've been going to that particular class for about a year now.

I do not feel like a chump when I take this class. Some people do; nearly every week, there's a handful of new faces in addition to the core group of participants, and nearly every week, one or two of those people walks out after ten minutes because they weren't expecting the Advanced Step class to be quite so advanced. That makes sense, as the choreography for most Advanced Step classes really isn't as involved as the choreography for Keila's class.

To recap: what we've established so far is that, according to me, I'm a relatively coordinated person, and support for that claim can be found both in historical precedent and in current practice. We have also established that I regularly take classes that I think can be objectively described as difficult, and I do not feel like a chump when I take them.

The Monday class I've recently started attending has changed all that. The Monday class has transformed me into the Queen of Chumpmania. The Monday class has made me that girl who always bumped into her partner when the sadistic gym teacher made everyone square dance. The one who could never figure out how many times to clap while singing "Bingo." The one who could always be counted on to screw up her blocking in the school play, no matter how small a part you gave her.

The class is called Multi Step. It has two different incarnations: one is called Inline Step, and the other is called either Four Square or Multi Step. Inline Step is fine. It's hard, but it's fine. The steps are all arranged in rows, and it's basically an Advanced Step class in which everyone moves across their row, left to right. When you get to the far right step, you run back to the left-hand side of the room and join in again. It can be easy to miss a cue to move to the next step, but I felt like I pretty much had it by the second time I took the class on an Inline night.

The Four Square nights, on the other hand, are scary. You have a "home" step, and you make extensive use of the four steps in front of you, in back of you, and to your left and right. Moreover, there are moves like the "diagonal corner pivot," which involves hopping diagonally across one step, hopping diagonally across the next step, pivoting on the step after that, and then hopping your way back following the same diagonal line. This is all well and good if you get it, but here's the problem: if you don't get it, you are in someone else's way. If you miss a hop turn, suddenly everyone else is halfway across the room, and you're left swearing at yourself and trying to calculate where they're going to end up, becuse if you don't move there, you'll be in the way. Again. If you know a step but can't execute it immediately when the instructor calls it--if you stop to think for point-five seconds--you'll find yourself at the wrong platform, shoulder-to-shoulder with an unfortunate neighbor who actually knows what they're doing.

I am going to love it eventually. I can tell. But before I can love it, I'm going to have to keep my chump crown well-polished for at least another two or three classes. Nearly everyone at these sessions is a regular; new people almost always walk out. I hate humble pie, but I don't fucking walk out. I don't blame anyone else for doing so, but dammit, I am a relatively coordinated person, and I can do this. So I will.

I really do hate that pie, though.

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.

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.

Today, I went to Home Depot, and I bought some bags of dirt and some bags of rocks. I also bought some thirsty little plants in dirt and some unthirsty little plants in rocks, as well as a little tree that I soon need to put in a large pot. I then pulled all the weeds out of the bed that lines one side of the patio and covered the dirt with rocks. After two years of trying to get different types of plants to grow there, I have finally accepted the fact that even if cultivation of anything but clover or miscellaneous weeds is possible in that spot, it isn't possible for me. Rocks I can do. I then weeded my succulent bed, which is in a rather odd-shaped area on the patio that used to be a koi pond or something along those lines. Not a whole lot of planning has gone into the succulent bed. Basically, I buy things I like, and I then just pick a spot for them at random. So far, this has worked out okay for all the plants except the lithrops, which lacked the strength and stature to defend themselves against the crushing weed onslaught.

After that, I spent a whole lot of time hacking away at bamboo. A friend who visited not long after we moved into this house told me that lots of people really hate bamboo. At the time, I didn't understand—the plants added some nice color to the end of the patio, and they required virtually no care. What I didn't know is that bamboo wants to be everywhere, and when you only want it to be in one or two places, you have to battle stalks that grow like seven feet a day and have a bizarre root system that seems to run horizontally for a mile or so in every direction.

I was in fifth grade when I got chickenpox. I had a run-in with some poison ivy on a school field trip just a month or so later. Both were bad; I spent what seemed like half the year taking baking soda baths, trying to see through eyes that were swollen shut, and just generally feeling miserable and ugly. Even my mom told me a good ten years later that she had secretly feared my face would somehow stick like that, and I'd end up looking like Mr. Magoo with a bad sunburn for the rest of my life. I got away with three or four barely-noticeable scars instead. The only thing that truly stayed with me was a recurring fever-dream from the worst days of the first illness. I would lie in bed, with the socks on my hands held in place by tape—I ripped them off my hands while I slept if they weren't held in place by tape—and I would find myself inching as far away from the edge of the bed as I could get. Since the bed was in the corner of the room, I'd eventually end up at the spot where the two walls met.

And then, I'd open my eyes and find that the bed had stretched out; it had moved away from my corner while remaining part of it, but it had moved so far that I couldn't see the edge, and it had taken some of my breath with it. Everything had become a sterile white: the comforter, my pajamas, the space where the far walls used to be. And my corner felt smaller. Constricting. It was refuge that wasn't refuge, but I preferred it to the vast white bedland that I was pretty sure never stopped. I would lie as far as I could get from the edge of the bed, smashed against pillows that didn't have any cool spots left, and I'd curl up into a ball. Small, to match my corner.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this fever dream, though I don't think I've talked to anyone about it, so I can't say for certain. Really, though, these sorts of things are rarely unique. My subconscious might come up with a bizarre sequence or two on occasion, but the symbolism is heavy-handed and sometimes embarrassingly Freudian. That might concern me more if I were a poet, but I'm not, so it doesn't bother me much. It certainly doesn't make the memory of the thing less vivid—especially when the thing returns to you, plays itself out again and again, is served up repeatedly by your cooking brain. Memories of things that really happened aren't always more powerful than memories of things that never happened, and that's why real life can remind you of something that's only real in your head.

Curling up never really works; everything looks about the same when you can see again. It's better, I think, to stay busy: to avoid getting lost in the looking when you can't seem to take anything in, to keep the smallness from swallowing you. You have to make a plan. Right now, mine involves going to Home Depot, buying some bags of dirt and some bags of rocks, coming home, and then sticking my hands in the ground. Despite thoughts of poison inspired by recalcitrant bamboo stalks, it's working a little, I think. Besides, if I keep pretending that I'm good at this, eventually, it will just be true.

It occurs to me that LiveJournal users seem to get remarkably few comments from people who aren't registered LiveJournal users. In some cases, it's just not an option, as the only way for an unregistered reader to comment is to do so as "anonymous" and then just sign a name, and many journalers here don't allow anonymous commenting. However, many of us do—I do, and I have for some time. I seem to get anonymous comments at a rate of about one per year. There was that one guy who weighed in on a brouhaha that had started over at academics anon: a college instructor posted one of her students' papers in her journal so that her readers could make fun of it, and I got disgusted by the fact that several people were defending the instructor's "right" to make such a post. The anonymous guy tried to make a case for the notion that teachers could help prepare their students for the world of work by ridiculing them publicly. It was an absurd line of reasoning, but he did sign his name to his comments, so I knew who he was. I also got an anonymous comment a couple of months ago from someone who really was anonymous. And there was one post in which I encouraged a free-for-all, but that only half counts, because most of those comments were from people who have LJ accounts but felt like being saucy.

And that's about it, really. I can only think of a couple of people here who I've seen interact regularly with unregistered readers: marstokyo used to, but I believe those readers eventually got accounts here, and schpahky got comments from nickelchief before he started his own journal. There are a few others here and there, but that's about all I can come up with, and I know that a large number of us both allow anonymous commenting and have friends and family members who read what we write here.

I wonder what stops people? Readers are free to lurk, of course; people who object to having outside readers tend to make their journals friends-only (and if they don't, they should). But it seems like there's something about the LiveJournal set-up that specifically discourages commenting from non-users. Is it the fact that there's no place for them to put their name on the actual comment form, so if they want us to know who they are, they have to sign their comments? Does it seem like they're not supposed to comment? Or maybe it's that LiveJournal seems insular—perhaps cliquish—and they don't want to play croquet for fear that they'll end up underlining the word "eskimo" in someone's copy of Moby Dick. Don't they know we'd probably let them underline whatever they'd like in our copies of Moby Dick as long as they don't murder us first?

And by "they," I might very well mean "you." And if I do mean "you," and you want your own username here but don't want to fork over any cash to get one, let me know. I have about a zillion codes I can give out. A few dozen, anyway. And even if you don't think I mean you when I say "you," because you are a different "you" than the first "you," you can still ask me for a code. If you aren't mean or scary, I will give you one.

Overheard in a waiting room:

Man #1: "Well, that's just sick how O.J. got away with all that. Just plain sick. Somebody should do something about it."
Man #2: "That's the Lord's job. O.J. will have his time of reckoning, and the Lord will sort everything out."
Man #1, unironically: "Well, when that happens, the Lord had just better not give him any leeway."

Received in the mail today:

My membership registration and temporary membership card. From the AARP. Um, what?

Taken a couple of weeks ago:

Hi. I have been feeling anti-Internet lately. I realize that's like being, say, anti-electricity, and it probably gets me put on some sort of List, along with anyone the Unabomber ever talked to and that crazy one-man militia on 24 who is currently locked up with Kim in the "bomb shelter." Why is Kim even on that show this season? She does so many stupid things in each episode that you'd think she would have naturally-selected herself out by now.

"The day it rained," someone said to me this weekend, "I got stuck in traffic for over three hours."

It took me a second to realize how absurd it was that I knew exactly which day she was talking about, and that day was nearly a month and a half ago.

But it's not absurd, really; that's the way things are here. It was just one of those moments that jolts you into realizing that you aren't from here—which, of course, you already knew, but on some days, you don't see things as you might normally. If you're me on those days, you find yourself predisposed to seek metaphor in the mundane, omen in the ordinary. I've lived in Southern California for nearly as long as I lived in Seattle, but Seattle was home, and this place always seemed like somewhere I was stopping on the way to another place.

When my paternal grandmother—we called her "Bama," as all the grandmothers on that side of the family had been known as "Bama" for several generations—was still alive, she made a point of saying that she wasn't a Boston native. She lived in Marblehead for half a century, but "I'm not a Boston native," she would say, her lips a little tight in the tight-lipped way she had of saying true things. The way she said it used to strike me as vaguely apologetic: It was as though she didn't want to represent herself as something she was not, so she preempted misimpressions with verbal fine print.

That was only part of it. I didn't really understand until much later, when I heard her talk about New York. She spoke of cocktails and jazz clubs, of hanging laundry out the window to dry, of supporting herself by selling poetry to magazines, and it was clear to me that she couldn't ever not be from New York. She was too polite to put it that way—she didn't, after all, want to seem ungrateful to the town in which she had become so firmly entrenched—but she was not a Boston native.

Here in LA, it rained again today. It rained hard, and it rained for several hours. I decided that what I wanted to do was have a beer and get into bed with my book. I'd get under the covers, and I'd open the blinds so that I could look out the sliding glass door, and I'd turn pages lazily while I listened to the rain. My plan worked for about ten minutes. Then, the kid next door hooked up his bass to his amp and started alternating between random notes and the opening bars of "Stand By Me." He is a terrible player, and I suppose he'll only get better if he continues to practice, but I'm not at all sure he needs to be quite so loud during this phase of the learning process.

I could wait him out, I thought. So I put my pillow over my head, which shut out most of the sound from the bass, but also shut out the rain. And my book, of course. Still, I decided I would be patient—perhaps it was just resignation, but patience and resignation often look similar—and I'd lie still for a while, and I'd wait. When everything seemed quiet again, I cautiously removed the pillow from my ear and listened. With relief, I confirmed that I heard nothing.

But it was too much of nothing. The Ben E. King had stopped, but the sky had dried up. Perhaps you can understand what it's like to be homesick even when most people think you're already at home, and perhaps you've abandoned rituals because they were rituals from a different place. If you can, and if you have, then you might understand how melancholy a thing it can be for your mind to go North on an afternoon like this one, in a place where people talk about "the day it rained."

Hi there. I'm in one of those little stretches where I have nothing to say. It happens from time to time, especially after a big writey sort of time. It'll pass. It always does. So, if you'd like the short version:

I got my hair cut and highlighted today. I realize it's superficial to be as attached to that whole process as I am, but so be it. My cut is meant to be short, and when it grows out of its style, it's all kinds of shaggy.

I'm more ambivalent about the hair color issue. I am a natural blonde, but I went from white blonde as a child to medium blonde as I got older. I'll go into a more in-depth psychological explanation of why this might cause distress if anyone wants a more in-depth explanation, but the basic deal is that the stuff on the shelves at the grocery store make you look like a fake blonde—and damnit, I'm not a fake blonde, just a highlighted blonde. However, I used to be quite opposed to such hair shenanigans. They seemed silly to me, as did things like shaving. And now, it's not so much that things like shaving and sitting in a chair with your hair wrapped in foil don't seem silly to me—they do—it's just that I've accepted the fact that I feel better when I take a shallow measure or two to make myself look different.

Here's the meat of it, in outline form: I feel guilty because the way I want to look is a pretty fucking standard way to want to look. I feel guilty because doing something that makes me feel more attractive also means drawing attention to all the ways in which I'm the blonde girl, no matter what that means to people. In some places, it means confronting a whole set of cultural and intellectual expectations I had no interest in confronting on that particular evening.

Okay, now for reals, I had nothing to say tonight.

I said I was going to switch to swimming until my ankle healed enough to permit me to do other types of exercise, but I didn't. I finally got stressed out enough about the fact that I wasn't exercising to brave the paper towel brigade in the locker room. They seemed to be missing today. I think they were all in the spa instead. The spa is in the main pool area, and it's enormous. I have this theory that some people never get out of it. You walk on deck, and there they are. You do your whole workout, and there they are. You shower, get dressed, come back into the room for a quick drink of water, and there they are. You leave, sneaking a peek through the window into the area to see if they've moved yet, but of course they haven't. You can prune up any time you like, but you can never leave.

I woke up this morning after getting well under three hours of sleep or so, and I'm now realizing that I'm having trouble with activities that require, you know, cognitive abilities. About the best I can hope for is getting a load of laundry done while I watch 24, but the idea of trying to match socks seems well-nigh impossible.

Insomnia + avoidance of real work + not wanting to do laundry + vanity + distractibility + finding a dress you bought while on vacation + digital camera = posts like this one.

It probably would have been good if I could have been bothered to brush my hair or something, but nope.

My ankle hadn't hurt at all for about three days, so I assumed it was fine. By the end of my step class last night, I realized that it felt fine just because I was sitting on a plane and then sitting around at home, and sitting around is much easier on a sprain than step aerobics is. Now, it hurts quite a bit, and Christ, is it ever ugly. It's not a pretty ankle under the best of circumstances, since the big lump of calcified tendon I have from previous injuries isn't high on most people's lists of desirable ankle attributes, but it's worse than usual. I briefly considered going to the doctor, but here are the reasons I'm not going to:

1) I hate going to the doctor.
2) I see no reason to go unless I suspect it's actually broken instead of sprained. I'm fairly certain it's not. Nope, I'm pretty sure what I have is a minor tear in the calcaneo-fibular ligament, compounded by excess calcification in that area, and some stretching in the anterior tibio-fibular ligament.
3) Even if it were broken, the chances that my HMO would actually bother to recommend x-rays would be slim, so I wouldn't know that it was, in fact, broken.
4) Given numbers 1, 2, and 3, do I really need to shell out a copay and wait in a disease-filled lobby for who-knows-how-long to be told I should elevate it, ice it, avoid high-impact exercise, and take Advil? No! No, I say!

I might have to switch to swimming for a while, which I already would have been doing regularly if my gym had a bigger pool. But it doesn't; it has one of those 20-yard numbers that drive you crazy if you're used to swimming in a standard or Olympic-size pool. You do a flip turn, push off the wall, and have space to take about four strokes before you've reached the other side. Okay, not four, but not enough. Besides, swimming at my gym would require spending time in the locker room, and while I'm not phobic about changing in such shared spaces, I'm freaked out by this particular shared space.

For one thing, it smells funny, and not funny ha-ha. For another, people there have this bizarre habit of not drying off with towels they've brought from home and stowed neatly in a locker. Instead, they get out of the spa or shower, walk over to the sink area, push the lever for the paper towel dispenser about 400 times, and then stand there dabbing at themselves. Some of them are also concerned about walking on the floor barefoot. That's not weird; that's why I wear shower shoes. What's weird is that instead of just buying a pair of flip-flops, these folks go to the paper towel dispenser—the same one they're about to make into a bath towel dispenser—and set pieces of towel down at intervals along the floor, walking from sheet to sheet like you or I might walk on stepping stones.

I can't possibly be the only person who thinks this behavior is not just wasteful but borders on freakish, can I? Yet it seems to be the norm in these parts, and Jeff assures me they do the same thing in the men's locker room. They always did tell me California was full of people who are loose in the head. You know, crazy in the coconut.

Original Plan:

11:30 - Leave for Claremont to pick up friend
12:15 - Leave Claremont for Redlands
1:00 - 3:00 - Attend baby shower
3:45 ish - Drop off friend in Claremont
4:30 ish - Arrive at home. Stop by bank. Pick up bottle of wine.
6:15 ish - Leave for L.A.
7:00 - Arrive at shindig. Drink wine and eat cheese. Go out for dancing and general cavorting.

Monkeywrench:

Rain + L.A. Drivers = Festival of Dumbassity

What Actually Happened:

11:00 - Leave for Claremont to pick up friend
1:00 - Leave Claremont for Redlands
2:15 - 5:00 - Attend baby shower. It was nice; the mother-to-be and her husband are obviously happy and excited, so it was easy to be excited for them. Nobody made us play stupid shower games, which I always appreciate. We all chipped in helping to paint little wooden tiles for the baby's room, and it was very funny to see a room full of academics holding paint pens and looking horribly confused. "Whatever I want? Just draw? But what do you want, really? Can I just write about somebody else's tile?"
6:15 - Drop off friend in Claremont. Realize that even if I skipped the going home part of the original plan, I'd still end up being well over an hour late if traffic stayed about the same on the 10. Realize, too, that I've already been on the freeway with a bunch of dumbasses for 4-1/2 hours today, and I'm sick of it. Call to cancel evening plans.
7:30 - Arrive at home. Be glad hubby bought beer. Curse all people who get in their cars and insist on being freaked out and stupid, both on principle and because I'm not happy about not having wine, eating cheese, and going out for dancing and general cavorting. Mentally add, for the newscasters, that it is absurd to institute "Storm Watch 2002" every time water falls from the sky. Curse CalTrans for building freeways with the worst drainage I've ever seen, which is the only bona fide problem I can think of to partially justify the greater L.A. area's wholesale discombobulation.

I miss the Blind Melon bee girl. Not Blind Melon. Just the bee girl.

This country's going to hell in a handbasket. I've always had this idea that where I should really live is on a commune. Really. I want to buy a small, rustic inn somewhere near a lake, and then invite people to come live there. We'll split things up. The people who like to cook will cook, and the people who like to grow things will grow things, and the people who write or make music or paint will write or make music or paint. There has to be a way to make it financially sustainable. Maybe I'll raise dogs, like the monks of New Skete. Or maybe I'll get myself certified as a massage therapist, and I'll talk some other people into getting certified as massage therapists, and we'll pay for the place that way. Sort of like the Heartwood Institute. I used to go there sometimes on days off when I was working at summer camp. Or maybe I can buy enough acres to have a building available just for people to rent out—for retreats, weddings, family reunions, whatever.

If you're thinking this sounds good but are concerned that it would mean being sucked into a vortex of dirty hippieness, I'll appease you by banning hackeysacks and patchouli. It's not like I'm going to force you to make bread or anything, though you're perfectly welcome to do so. Me, I plan to keep just sticking jalapeno cheese bread mix into my bread-making machine.

Who's with me?

It used to seem like I was always starting over. I went to thirteen schools in nine years, and I switched houses and apartments at even shorter intervals. There was always a new bed, a new room full of faces, a new recess hierarchy to figure out. Elementary school children can form some of the most rigidly hierarchical social structures I've seen outside of the Discovery Channel, but that's a topic for another entry. Or maybe it isn't; such an entry would no doubt bring my extensive background in kum-ba-yaing into conflict with a latent desire to proclaim that William Golding was right, right about it all. Sucks to your ass-mar!

It wasn't all bad. I got do-overs. When I moved, no one at this new place could possibly know about the time I slipped on a piece of paper and fell flat on my face on the way to an assembly, or about the time I stabbed that Jay kid with a pencil after he made a comment that would probably piss me off more today than it did then, though the chances I'd react by stabbing him with a pencil are now quite low. No one could read the history I carried with me, and unless I let on, they wouldn't know that I was shy, or that talking to them scared me. I started to pretend to be bolder than I was. At first, I wasn't very good at it, but I got a little better.

(Oh, come on. I didn't stab Jay hard. For all I know, he learned a lesson and was spared the more effective forms of retribution that would later have been dealt him by people older than eight.)

So, the moving wasn't all bad. It also wasn't all good. I got used to leaving things behind, to leaving people behind. I suppose I couldn't help but do something of that sort. Holding on too tightly for too long would have been of no use, and besides, when all is said and done, I'm at least glad we left Texas. I once stepped into a fire ant colony in Dallas. At the time, it seemed like a metaphor. "The natives know you don't belong here," the ants hissed through their tiny ant lips when they weren't busy gnawing at me.

But I do wonder if perhaps I didn't get a little too used to closing doors. There's a euphoria that comes with intense new friendships—you know it, I imagine? It's not unlike the beginning of a love affair, that stretch of time when you're still having sex at every reasonable opportunity and at some not-so-reasonable opportunities, before you know things like whether your partner is stoic or needy when in bed with the flu. Now that I think about it, I suppose when that period is over, it's not really an affair anymore, is it? It's just what it is and what it's becoming.

I find that transition terrifying in relationships, in any friendship that is kicked off with a honeymoon. I do believe that people sometimes come into and out of our lives to play some sort of role, that people can be drawn to each other because they need something from each other, and once one or both people get what they need—or accept that they won't get it—there isn't always enough common ground left to stand on. It sounds a little utilitarian, maybe, but that's not how I see it. There is in it, after all, room for the genuine.

Yet that's not what I think of when talks become less frequent, when time together seems harder and harder to arrange, or when physical distance starts to seem like less of an obstacle than emotional distance. What I think of is that this kind of uncertainty feeds into some of my worst anxieties, and I wish I could just know whether what's happening is loss or metamorphosis. I can't know that without giving it some time, of course. And effort; these things do require effort.

So, yes, I know that. Which is why it baffles me that I periodically make myself so wholly unavailable to people who matter to me a great deal, that I can find it so difficult to devote myself to maintaining intimacy when it actually counts. Or to just pick up the phone and return a call, even when I remind myself to do it constantly. What this comes to is that I have letters to write, and I think I will go to the ocean to write them. The ocean is enormous, you see, and watching and listening to it makes me feel small in a way I think it's important for me to remember every once in a while. It's either the ocean or the mountains, and the ocean is closer.

Do you know I started this entry months ago? It's true. I abandoned it because I was exhausted, but after I had slept, I couldn't find the document anywhere on my computer. Tonight, I came across it as I was moving some files around. Not only had I saved it in the wrong folder, I had also made the search process more difficult by naming the file "antlips.txt." I wonder about myself sometimes. I really do.

I'm not sure why I never heard it before, but somewhere nearby, there is a clock that chimes every hour. It's a few blocks away at the post office, perhaps? It sounds like the kind of grandfather clock I listened to while staying with relatives and former step-grandparents and other people's families, but I think this one is too loud to be standing in a dark spot in a neighbor's house. Those clocks always stand in dark spots, and when I hear this one tell me it's three o'clock in the morning, I'm sometimes tired enough to be a little confused about where I am. Yet my memories are too vague to permit the confusion to set in for long: I can't fill in anything beyond the clock and dark spot and a shag rug, so I add a Christmas morning at the house of my second stepfather's parents in Texas. His mother had a sort of beehive hairdo, and his dad wore a hat that said "Kiss My Bass," and they gave me something Strawberry Shortcake related, because they had absolutely no idea what I actually would have wanted, and why should they, I thought while I smiled and pretended to like the gift.

That was one of the only times I ever met them, so I suppose it makes sense that I can't say for sure whether or not they had a clock that sounded just like the one I now hear every day. Sometimes, I think I write just because my long-term memory is so faulty that I won't be able to write my memories at all if I wait too long. Sometimes, that doesn't bother me a bit: if I can't write the details as they happened, I choose details that could very well have happened; if I can't remember exactly what someone said to me years ago, I choose words that seem plausible. It won't do to apologize constantly for the fact that your mind is a sieve, because you can fill in the holes with putty, and you can start and end wherever you'd like, and you need not be a historian to make a true story true.

Every once in a while, it does still drive me crazy when I can't make more of the past than dark wood on '70s carpets, and maybe that's because when I hear that clock chime several times each day, I simply can't imagine that it's new, which means that I've been missing it the whole time I've lived here. I get a little disappointed with myself when I miss something like that, a feature of my sensual environment that should be obvious. It makes me feel like I haven't been paying sufficient attention to what's happening around me. But it's been quiet here, profoundly quiet, and I've spent a great deal of time in bed. I'm not entirely sure how I feel. I think the answer is fine, and I think it's quite possible that you only hear the clocks of ghosts chime when you're profoundly quiet. I've blocked a great deal out lately, and I need to stop that, because some of those things don't belong out there. But it's also true that I've let a thing or two in. And really, even if I find that the sound I didn't used to hear is coming from the post office, I'll insist on imagining a bell tower with a shag rug.

I thought I was pretty safe. I really did. I didn't turn on the TV, and I didn't turn on the radio, and all I wanted to do was go to the gym. So, I go to a class I've attended and enjoyed a couple of times before tonight, and the instructor, Roberto, is testing out a new tape. At the beginning of this tape is an inspirational message from George W. Bush. Since Roberto is testing out the tape, he keeps rewinding it and starting it again. And again. And again. Following the message was an hour chock-full of techno versions of pretty much every traditional patriotic song ever, plus a little "West Side Story" thrown in for good measure: "Everything's free in America, and LUNGE, two, three, four!"

I suppose a Dubya-free day would have been too much to ask. Still, I didn't expect to find our stupid fucking president in my aerobics class. Roberto told us that he paid $25 for the tape, which went to some sort of relief fund. Fine. I have no problem with that. But if he continues to play it, I just won't be able to go to that class anymore. It's hard enough to stomach Britney Spears samples.

I make elaborate plans in my head for things that aren't at all likely to happen. Mostly, these things involve getting in my car and driving to places I've always wanted to see, as well as a few places I didn't know I wanted to see. I take care of all sorts of details for these trips in my head; I figure out what to do about bills and pets and tires and brakes and sunglasses. It's important to have the right sunglasses when you're driving for weeks on end. I suppose I'd have to borrow a convertible for at least part of the trip, and then buy a scarf or two to match the wind. I'd have to be careful, because poor Isadora Duncan strangled herself that way, you know, and I am sometimes quite susceptible to the power of magnificently tragic cautionary tales.

I've long thought I would die in some sort of car accident, so it surprises me that the road is so alluring in these fantasies, but it is. I think it's because when you're going wherever you'd like to go, being in a car by yourself is the most perfect kind of being alone. Did I mention I'm always alone on these trips? Yes, I'm always alone, and I also have just enough money not to have to worry about expenses as long as I'm reasonably frugal. I'm not sure why there's such a strong element of practicality even in my road trips of fancy, but perhaps it's because I tend to indulge in them when I'm craving a particular kind of independence—not the kind that can lead to relentless loneliness, but the kind that leads to triumphant aloneness. When the aloneness begins to turn lonely, I wait a few days to see whether I'm feeling that way out of habit or if I'm really done, and if I'm really done, I come home. I suppose, then, that it makes sense to allow for things like whether or not I'll need to have the fence replaced before leaving.

Besides, when I'm not feeling practical, there's the villa in Italy. It's very romantic and cozy there, and the village where it's located is populated entirely with people who think being scantily clad while feeding me fresh fruit is a delightful way to spend an afternoon.

Yet there's still the matter of how a fear of cars and a love of the road combine for me. I suspect what I think is that there is pleasure in coming to peace with something you're convinced is likely to kill you; it brings an exhilarating sort of serenity. When you can calmly tell your own mortality to fuck off and really mean it—even if you only mean it for a short while, even if you didn't know that's what you were saying—you get that peculiar feeling that you haven't cheated death, but you still have a few cards up your sleeve. After all, you've reconciled fate and free will, and when you can do that, it's hard not to look at the route ahead of you and feel sure of possibility.

It doesn't last. It can't. But you can remember it, and you do so at times when you'd like to get away but aren't able to. You can also laugh at yourself for thinking of Isadora Duncan, because you strongly suspect you won't cut nearly so picturesque a figure in the moments leading up to your death. No, you'll probably be wearing sweats, and you and your automobile will end up upside-down in a ditch after you swerve to avoid, say, an armadillo. If you can't always feel sure of possibility, at least you can take some comfort in the absurdity of the whole thing. I mean, really! You'll be offed by an armadillo.

Because I was going through some old pictures today, and because I really don't care if anyone thinks it's cheesy to post multiple photos of your pets.

When I was in high school—and when I was home on breaks from college—I worked part-time as a clerk in a family-owned video store called Best Video. Only a few of us worked there, and we all knew the customer ID numbers of the regulars. You could reserve new releases there, and we would call you as soon as the movie was available. The cash register didn't always work properly, which meant we sometimes had to add and subtract totals, including tax, by hand. This was an awful thing when I found myself having to carry ones and twos in front of boys I had crushes on, because when I was seventeen, something about seeing boys I had crushes on in front of the counter completely obliterated my ability to do math. It was embarrassing. One night, I actually gave the piece of paper I was using to figure the sums to the boy. "You do it!" I said, and then I pretended to look for something under the counter. Looking back, the part that bothers me is not so much that I turned into a blithering fucking idiot, but that I did so in such a stereotypically gendered way. I mean, really. I've taught math, and there I was, making the guy do it for me. I should have asked him if he would also change my tire, take out my trash, and leave me out of a discussion about sports while he drank some beer and I had wine coolers.

The store later shut down after Blockbuster came into town and diverted all of Jim and Nadine's business, because that's the Way of the Man. But that isn't my point. My point is that I watched a whole lot of movies. And sometimes, I see one of them again on TV, and sometimes, they surprise me. When I first brought home "Joe Versus the Volcano," I remember being bored out of my skull during some of the raft scenes. At other times, I wondered idly if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were going to do it or what. When the movie ended, I gave it two and a half "hmphs" and forgot about it.

Several months ago, I watched it again, not without some misgivings. After all, it starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Also of "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail." And what I decided was that "Joe Versus the Volcano" is an excellent movie. It isn't a great film, but it is an excellent movie: a witty exploration of what happens when the quotidian finally grows too oppressive to bear. Melville might have written the screenplay if he were alive today and had somehow managed to get himself a sense of humor. Joe is a sort of cross between Sam Lowry and Lester Burnham, an antihero turned hero simply by doing something different. It's often quite beautifully shot. Plus, there are natives who drink orange cola, and Abe Vigoda is their chief.

I thought of this today as I reflected that after a week of persistent insomnia, I have a Brain Cloud just like the one Joe is diagnosed with, only not terminal. I hope. But it does help to think that on my island, the natives drink Jones Cream Soda.

You probably don't actually want to read this. Really.

I have been cruising the web for bra size calculators this evening. The results have been strange.

The calculator at afraidtoask.com tells me that my bra size is a 36 DD or E. That is completely absurd. You could fit me and about 8 pairs of socks into a bra that size. I've been wearing a 36 B.

So then, I looked for some other calculators. According to Hanes, Victoria's Secret, Wonderbra, Bali, and brafitters.com, I should be wearing a 36 A.

36 A? A?

See, the thing is, I've never worn an A-cup. Never in the history of my actually being an adult person, anyway. That bra I made my mom buy me when I was eleven—the one I had absolutely no need for, but I'd been reading too much Judy Blume, so I got one from a company with a name like "Preteen Magic" or something similarly awful, and proceeded to walk around in it until I figured out that it was uncomfortable, 'cause hey, bras kind of suck—that bra doesn't count.

I've lost some weight recently, and it seems like I've lost about half of it in my chest. "Hey, you two," I've said to the twins once or twice, "thanks for putting in so much effort. But it's really not necessary for you to get any smaller. You need to relax and then let the ass pick up some of your slack." And, you see, long ago, when I was sixteen years old and worked out fifteen hours a week, when I weighed at least ten pounds less than I weigh at the moment—even then, I wore a B-cup. I wore the same bra size I'm wearing now, in fact. Which seems a little bit odd, too.

Is it really possible, then, that I have never, ever worn the correct bra size? That in 17-some-odd years of semi-diligent bra-wearing, I've never managed to get it right? And what if I should ever drop down to my high school weight, will my breasts keep disappearing into the ether while my hips make like Gandhi at a demonstration? It is possible for that to happen, you know. I lifted weights like a crazy person back then, so a higher percentage of that weight was muscle mass than it is now. I could weigh the same as I did then without being in the same kind of shape. My breasts could vanish entirely, leaving me with tiny little man-boobs.

Is it shallow of me to worry about such things? Yes, yes it is. Oh well. I told you that you probably didn't actually want to read this post. I'm now going to have to go to the mall tomorrow to test out this 36 A theory. I generally avoid the mall as often as possible; it's a strange place populated entirely by roving packs of semi-children who aren't yet old enough to do anything but spend time at the mall, mixed in with people who buy "Success" posters and books by Jackie Collins. It scares me, all of it. But I have to go there.

I had this idea when I got in bed last night and tonight that I'd actually go to sleep. I guess that was wrong. I caved in and took a sleeping pill shortly before five last night, and I was finally able to get to sleep, but I slept like crap and had all sorts of fucked-up Caligari dreams. After a night of those—combined with the cat's insistence on standing on my chest and pretending to purr charmingly while he hatched a nefarious plot to steal my soul, and the hubby's (albeit unconscious) decision to regard half of a king-sized bed as chump change in the world of slumber—I wound up thinking of Faulkner for much of the day. And I don't care how much you have to say about Faulkner's incontrovertible genius or his unfathomable contributions to the development of American prose or his nasty hooch habit, you can't think about the Bundren family and be chipper at the same time. Under normal circumstances, you might be able to bounce back, but in this case, being in the state of mind that got you thinking about them in the first place has really set the tone, so you walk around silently claiming that your mother is a fish and imagining someone drilling holes in your coffin.

By this point on night two, if you're me, you might find that you are angry at all homeopathic remedies for insomnia and at the people who tell you that you'll be able to fall asleep if you use them. "Goddamn hippies with your kava kava and your valerian root," you mutter, embracing the irony of the fact that you have nineteen different kinds of herbal tea in your cupboard and a medicine cabinet full of stuff you've bought from shops with names like "Nature's Way." Then you remember about melatonin, and it's all you can do not to throw your hands up in disgust, because melatonin is clearly for assholes who can sleep any time they want to, for the kind of people who participate in clinical trials and gush endlessly about how well their placebo worked. Then, you take some Tussin, because Tussin has never failed you, and even though you don't have a cough, you just know that Tussin will do your bidding.

I'm going back in.

30 seemed very old to me when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It seemed like a sort of deadline for turning into a real adult. By that time, I thought, I'd have my Ph.D., and I'd be struggling to find a job as a professor in a tight job market, and maybe I'd be married, and maybe I'd even be trying to have children. But the gap between the things I thought I'd be doing and the things I actually am doing doesn't entirely surprise me. Things change, and they always have, and I learned even as an elementary school student that no matter where I thought I would be in a couple of years, the landscape could change (quite literally) before I'd even figured out where I was.

It would be nice, I think sometimes, if I had managed to maintain the momentum I built up during my first four years of grad school. If I felt more sure of myself. If I had somehow been transformed into a woman who feels together. On top of things. Someone who never floats directionless, or drinks too much, or smokes like Keith Richards. Someone who knows why she does everything she does.

But I wouldn't trust anyone who said they met all of their own standards, and besides—I've gotten better at love, and at listening, and at remembering there's more to me than what other people say I'm good at. I see different things now when I look around, and I can grow flowers.

So, no, it isn't what I thought I'd be doing that seems strange. It's the way that there's no connection between the way I thought I'd feel and the way I do feel. Even stranger is the fact that I don't know what I thought would be in store for me—I just guessed that at some point, certainly by 30, I'd be grown up and I'd know it.

I once had a conversation with some friends who had recently conceived their daughter. That was their big news; mine was that Jeff and I were thinking about buying a home.

"This is all very bizarre," I said to J. "I think everyone must know that I'm a big fraud who's just playing house."

"And M. and I just successfully played Doctor," J. responded.

I think it's that disconnect, more than anything else, that makes 30 a difficult birthday for so many people. It's not actually feeling old, I don't think. It's impossible to ignore the signs that we are older than we used to be, whether it's the little crease between your eyes that doesn't smooth out after you've been squinting, or the first time you go several weeks without being asked for identification at the liquor store, or realizing that people who were born when you were in high school now have driver's licenses, or the fact that turning on the radio can make you decide the world's going to hell in a handbasket, or the glimpse you catch of your hand as you're reaching for a pencil. You see that the skin looks different, even if you're the only person who would notice. Such things don't really make you feel like you're halfway to the rest home, though they might be annoying, worrisome, or even astonishing when they happen.

It's the disconnect—the fear that at any moment, you'll suddenly feel your 19 year-old mind's version of 30. You don't know what that is, but it sounds awfully ominous. And I'm realizing, nearly seven months into being 30, that it isn't going to happen. If it does, it won't happen suddenly, and it won't be what I imagined at all. While I knew a lot when I was 19, I didn't know a damned thing about this, and I suspect I won't truly feel old until I stop surprising myself. I also suspect that I'll keep doing that for a very, very long time.

I conked out on the couch some time around 10 last night, woke up at 3, went back to sleep at 6, and then slept way too late. Usually, I'd feel terrible after getting so much sleep, but I actually feel way better, so maybe I did need to be one with my pillow for an extended stint.

In Chicago, I saw a guy at Navy Pier who had a shirt that said:

I LIKE
GOOD MUSIC
YOU LIKE
CRAP
I have what seems like approximately 1 billion things to do today. Right now, I have this idea that hanging around on the Internet is "pre-work." Sort of a warm-up.

We were in a rush to leave town, so we returned to a mess of a house, and something must be done. I also need to hammer out a fellowship proposal, which is always a kind of "no whammies" undertaking. Does anyone want to be my research assistant? I am currently afraid to go to the library because I owe them money, and they won't give me books unless I give them money. I think I need to renew my alumni membership at UC Irvine so that I can continue to avoid the library at my own institution of higher education.

I'm struck with the wanderlust again. This exchange got me thinking how much I would absolutely love to set aside a big block of time, get in the car, and drive to the best roller coasters in the United States. I've heard good things about Kennywood; Pennsylvania is apparently an amusement park mecca of sorts. I'd make my way there with help from Amish folk. I'd live on Big Gulps and optimism.

This could work.

Somewhere around 5:00 pm...

"Wow, honey, you're still organizing?"

"Yup!" I say, diligently separating the tacks from the nails from the screws from the picture hangers and putting them into their proper compartments in my handy sorting box.

"That's really great, but didn't you say you were going to work on a paper tonight? Are you procrastinating now?"

"I prefer to think of it as removing obstacles to progress."

A few hours later...

"What are you doing now?" the hubby asks, as I move vitamins and medications and hair products and suntan lotion and Advantage for the dogs between the two bathrooms.

"I'm organizing the medicine cabinets."

"This is a good system. Thank you. But would you say that you're procrastinating now?"

"I prefer to think of it as reallocating resources."

Last night, I filed... everything. No, really. This was a huge undertaking, as my file systems were truly a mess. I've been chipping away at it for weeks, and finally, I just decided to stay up until everything was sorted into a wholly revamped, eminently sensible system and then labeled properly. It took me approximately nine hours.

I threw away two trash bags full of stuff I don't need anymore. I replenished my supply of paper with one good side, because I like to recycle when I print drafts. Within seconds, I can now locate the service records for my car since 1994, all the handouts for workshops I've led since 1996, notes and syllabi for every class I've taken as a graduate student and for some of my undergraduate classes, all the documents related to the purchase of our house (sorted!), information on obscure library databases, records of the bills I've paid for the last two years, notes from random lectures I've attended, miscellaneous bibliographies, manuals and/or instructions for each appliance or gadget we own, and all the materials from every class I've ever taught—even the SAT classes, because although test prep gigs are academic whoredom, they pay well, so you never know when I might need them again.

Those of you who manage to maintain flawless organizational systems habitually will probably consider this a spurious "accomplishment," much as you might think someone who says, "Look, I did the dishes!" after leaving them in the sink for a week really shouldn't be lauded for cleanliness. Those of you who have a tendency to shove things into file cabinets willy nilly—or to bypass cabinets entirely and "file" things on the floor, in various bookcases, or in mostly-inaccessible boxes and then leave them there for weeks, months, or even years—will recognize this as a victory in an enormous battle against the looming specter of chaos. Take heart, soldiers. There is hope for us all.

I believe I have mentioned that we are having serious budget problems at work. In response, we've had to scale down our services dramatically. Hours had to be cut. My own hours were cut by more than half. We had no warning that anything like this might happen before the semester began; my first week at reduced hours was last week.

On Friday of last week, I got an email from my supervisor at my other campus job. There are serious budget problems there, too. I am the only member of the senior editorial staff who is not being paid through work study. This means that 100% of my pay comes through the journal's budget, while only 25% of the pay for work study students comes through the journal's budget. The long and short of it is that there isn't enough money left in the budget to pay me until the beginning of the new fiscal year, which begins in July.

I kept my jobs at school because they've been great jobs. I've gained wonderful experience, and I've enjoyed my coworkers. I'm good at my jobs, and the personal investment I have in each of them is large. These perks were worth the nasty-ass commute from Orange County to the Inland Valley Empire. However, while things like enjoying work are nice, they really aren't absolutely necessary. What is necessary is that I make money, and I am now finding myself making approximately $500 a month less than I had budgeted for this semester because my employers did not realize they wouldn't be able to afford my services.

So.

Today, I told the boss at the first job that I would finish up the semester and not return after that. I am about to email the other boss to tell her that I will not in fact return at the beginning of the next fiscal year, because if I can't count on the job, I need to find another one. If I'm going to find another one, it might as well be close to my house.

It makes me sad, really. I've been at each of these organizations for several years. I believe in what we do there. But I also believe in paying my mortgage.

When I stay up this late, I find myself nearly buying things like Bettie Page lighters, retro cocktail sets, and backpacks for the dogs. It's a good thing there's a shred of reason left in my head somewhere.

I am in the midst of a massive feat of organizational re-engineering. The casual observer would probably not recognize what I'm doing as cleaning, but casual observers rarely grasp the big picture. I have a vision, I tell you. By the time I'm done, I will be able to locate any file in a jiffy, I'll never wonder whether or not I have any Post-Its, and I will rest easy knowing that extra ink for the printer is close at hand. It's all part of my plan to hack away at the tendrils of Things Undone, which sometimes swirl around in a mass that seems not unlike the head of the Medusa—which, of course, I must avoid looking at for fear of turning to stone. Ironically, not looking produces a similar effect, and as any good procrastinator knows, avoidance requires a good deal of emotional energy. So begone, vile gorgon!

I rather like thinking of the process as an epic of sorts. It feels more stirring that way. Indeed, I am fighting off many years of horrible habits that can be traced back to my pre-teen years. My mother would firmly request that I arrange my belongings to better facilitate walking on my floor, and I responded by drawing an imaginary line down the middle of room: half of the sea of crap went under the bed, and the other half went in the closet. Yes, this is a battle. I even have a bruise on my chin to show for it.

Today is better. I am at home, and I have Rufus Wainwright to listen to, and I have Big Plans in the cleaning and organization department.

Still, there are times when it starts to seem like there is something really wrong. Not with me specifically; it feels like something big: a collective series of bad days, a sense that many of us are walking closer to the edge than we normally do, a feeling that right now, it's much harder not to feel so sad or frightened or angry or even just annoyed. It seems like a rift. It sits in my stomach and my chest, and I have to fight off jitters every once in a while, like when I realize that I've had an entire pot of coffee, but today, it's not the coffee.

It's entirely possible, of course, that I'm just projecting my own personal issues onto the universe at large, but I really don't feel this way very often, and my individual anxiety is, as a rule, much more selfish. This thing makes me want to gather people together in a place where we can sit in front of a fire, pour everyone a glass of wine, and let ourselves convince each other that there is comfort to be had, and that we're almost always much stronger than we think. We'll make small gestures that mean a great deal, and we'll come away knowing that things are more right than they were when we arrived. And part of the jitters that feel like too much caffeine but are not is a sense of helplessness. I can't gather everyone together and pour them all a glass of wine.

But maybe, if you know what I'm talking about, if you feel it too, and if you also wish you could do this, it will help just to wish that we could and do what we can.

Then again, maybe I'm not exactly sane.

I hate it when my favorite clothes wear out. When I started grad school and was living on $12,000/year, I discovered that the best way to avoid wanting things was to avoid shopping entirely. Especially the mall. Never, ever go to the mall when you're dirt poor, is what I decided.

As a result of my time away, the mall now seems like an entirely bizarre place. Teenage girls don't wear real clothes in Southern California; did you know that? They wear shiny, soft chest plates. And watching them try to slip their hands into the back pockets of boys whose pockets hang down somewhere around the backs of their knees is quite funny. Nobody sells leggings anymore. It is quite probable that they went horribly out of style while I wasn't paying attention. These kinds of things are part of what mystifies me when I'm still asked for ID. Good lord, are you kidding? One of my favorite shirts is almost old enough to buy cigarettes.

Luckily, my own dress preferences tend to be casual enough to outlast most trends. There were the times I favored denim prairie skirts with legwarmers, and I admit that I succumbed to the inexplicable lure of acid-washed jeans for a time, and I did sport an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt after "Flashdance" came out (as long as we're talking about things that don't stand up over time). However, I can also honestly point out that I never decked myself out in bright pink and green neons, and I do not now, nor have I ever owned anything that says "Boy Toy." That has to count for something.

So adieu to you, my supremely comfortable black sweater that went with everything. And to you, my sweats that have served me faithfully since 1988. And to my lovely cardigan, an around-the-house staple that has only narrowly avoided the clutches of admirers. And most of all to my trusty jeans. You are old, denim friends, but you are so soft that it's easy to ignore the fact that a rip in an inconvenient location will happen at any moment.

If I must replace you, at least I'll insist on an Orange Julius to ease my grief at your loss.

I got out of the house for a while yesterday. I received an email on Friday saying that my brother's band would be in LA this weekend, and it suddenly seemed very important that I see him. They were playing at the Santa Monica Pier, and I arrived quite late, but I went. He saw me step in front of the stage, and he got a big smile on his face, and when the song ended, he said, "Hey, you guys, that's my sister!" to the band members. He didn't know I was going to be there.

I met his girlfriend, and my friend Danielle and I spent a couple of hours with the two of them on the 3rd Street Promenade. Ethan's girlfriend is very tiny and very sweet. She's shorter than I am, weighs about 95 pounds, is covered in tattoos, and has several piercings. They seem good together. We talked, and we poked our heads into shops, and it felt strange to be in a truly public place. We looked around us.

I saw a little boy lying on the ground, writing on one of a series of posters that had been set down for people to write on. I saw a mannequin hanging from the roof of a shop, on the outside. She held on to the roof, one foot braced against the wall, and the expression on her face was vacant. I had never seen that mannequin there before, and I found it haunting. I don't know why it was there. There was a street performer, a boy of about 10, who was playing the guitar. He was actually quite talented, but I couldn't help but laugh at his song choices. He was playing Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and when he started "Stairway to Heaven," I had to work hard to repress the urge to request "Freebird."

There was a woman dressed in multi-colored, flowing robes. She had a makeshift veil over her head made out of a shirt; I'm fairly certain that she wasn't actually Muslim, but wanted to pretend for a while. She came up and talked to us. Someone had been handing out American flags, and she wanted to buy my brother's from him. He just gave it to her, and she was very grateful, and I do think she was just a touch crazy.

I don't remember learning how to swim. It seems like something I've always known how to do. I remember learning one stroke—the butterfly—some time in elementary school, but learning the other strokes was like learning how to read. Once I could do them, I couldn't imagine not being able to do them.

When I was in high school, I was on the swim team. I swam fly: the 50 fly in the medley relay and the 100 fly individually. I swam other events, too, but those never felt like mine. Strange that I gravitated towards the only stroke I recall actually having to learn; I don't know what that means. I smelled a little like chlorine most of the time, a lot like chlorine some of the time.

I also lifted weights. My legs are naturally much stronger than my arms and shoulders, but I was working out around 15 hours each week, and my shoulders and back grew enormous. An enormous that I quite liked. I remember trying on formal dresses with my friend Rachel—unlike me, she was built to do amazing things with her arms. She started lifting weights about a year after I did. The very first time she ever had a go at the bench press, she kept asking me to add weight, and I told her that she needn't take things too fast, that she didn't want to hurt herself. But she really did know what she could handle, and what she could handle was three sets of ten at 140 pounds. Her very first time lifting, ever. She later went on to be an NCAA All-American because she could shot put and throw the discus—especially the discus—like no one else I've known personally. And, before this dance we were going to, she and I tried on formal dresses, flexed at each other in the mirrors, and laughed. We both had to buy dresses that were two sizes too big for every part of our bodies but our backs.

I knew I was strong. I knew I could swim for hours and swim some more, and I still love the feel of it. Running competitively ruined me for running; I still do it occasionally, when I hit a workout stride, but for me, it lacks the kind of purity that swimming still holds. I'm sure this has everything to do with where I was emotionally when I started to get sick at every track meet, with the injuries I ran through in spite of the fact that I was really too injured to be running, rather than with the activities themselves. But the swimming... there was a rhythm to it, a peaceful, almost meditative quality.

That's what I was thinking about when I was on vacation with my family in Maui, where I did a great deal of ocean swimming. Ocean swimming is different from pool swimming. Salt water makes the body float more easily, currents require that you compensate for movements you didn't necessarily expect, and waves make it necessary to turn your head farther to the side when you breathe. And there's always the awareness that you don't know exactly what's beneath you or where the bottom is.

One afternoon on this family vacation, my stepfather and I decided to take a swim out to a buoy that was some distance from the shore. We had done this swim several days in a row, and it was starting to become a vacation ritual—strange that such a term makes sense, no?—but on this afternoon, we miscalculated. It was too late to be out for a swim in the ocean. We swam, and I aimed for the buoy, paying no attention to anything else. I reached it, and then took a moment to tread water and look around me.

Everything was black. The sun had gone down, gone down that fast, and I could no longer see anything. I wasn't tired, but I tried to stave off the panic I was feeling. Which direction, which way? I turned around, and around, but I didn't know. And then I saw some lights—faintly, because we weren't staying in a metropolitan area—and I knew that I should aim for them. So I did, but as I swam back, I was acutely aware that the current seemed much stronger than it had seemed on my way out, that I was perhaps getting turned around, and that I was in the middle of something huge, huge and powerful.

I looked up to reorient myself periodically, and I kept swimming. I remember the feeling of relief that came over me when I first was able to touch sand with my feet when I looked up, and I remember finally stepping out of the ocean at a spot nearly 200 yards to the right of where I had started. I walked along the shoreline and found my very concerned father waiting for me—he had noticed that it was getting dark early in our swim, and he turned back after trying to get my attention with no luck.

I wonder where the shoreline is now, and I wonder if I have enough energy to get there. I see some lights, but they seem distant, and I keep having to check to make sure they are still there. I'm afraid. Afraid that I don't have enough energy, afraid that even if I do make it, everything will be changed once I have returned. That I won't reach the spot where I started, but will instead return to a shoreline that itself has shifted 200 yards right. Not me, it.

And I wonder how long I can tread water.

1) Waking up on a cold weekend morning, feeling warm in bed, realizing I don't have to go anywhere, and snuggling back under the covers to drift asleep again.

2) Sitting in front of a window and watching a storm.

3) That feeling you get just before you kiss someone—you know the one.

4) Resting my head on my partner's chest, listening to his heartbeat and his breathing.

5) Sitting around with friends, having a wonderful conversation, and then realizing what a wonderful conversation I'm having.

6) Reading the last fifty pages or so of a great book. I start to realize that I'm going to part with it soon, and I do all sorts of things to prolong the experience—I turn back a few pages, read certain passages over and over again, let myself linger a little longer over the words.

7) Rolling down Imperial Highway, big nasty redhead at my side. Oops—that's from Randy Newman's list.

8) Hiking up to a secluded area, sitting near the edge of a cliff and feeling as though the things I'm seeing have managed to go straight from my eyes to my heart.

9) Floating.

10) That feeling of hope that comes when, no matter how things look, you realize that somehow, some way, things will be OK.

Interviewing people for jobs is always interesting and a little draining. We've been interviewing candidates for positions at the Writing Center for next year, and it's really quite fascinating to see how differently people react under what is undoubtedly a stressful situation for many of them.

I've had three different jobs in which part of my job involved interviewing. Some people walk in, completely relaxed, and you sit down and have a pleasant conversation about pedagogy, the job, the responsibilities and challenges. Others walk in with a definite "game face," and while they often give impressive, well thought-out answers to the questions I've asked, it sometimes feels like talking to someone who used to sell used cars for a living. I've actually found myself trying to calculate "bitchiness potential" with the game face folks; it's hard not to wonder if they're just acting nice.

[Side note: I actually think my own interviews are usually somewhere between these first two, depending on how much I know about the position and how comfortable I feel with the interviewers.]

Others come in seemingly unprepared to answer any question, no matter how sensible, and sputter out answers that are at best ill-advised. Why would you tell a potential employer that you want to work somewhere because it doesn't seem too stressful and you really hate grading freshman comp papers? Or that you've had trouble getting jobs in the past? Or that your best job experience was good "because you really didn't have to do anything"? These are also the people who seem absolutely shocked when we ask them to do things like look at a sample paper and tell us what they would say about it if we were students who had come to them for an appointment. They shoot us a slightly accusatory look, say, "You mean right now?" and then choke for a bit.

Then there are the people for whom interviewing is obviously a semi-traumatic experience, and these are the hard ones. You can often tell that they're really quite qualified and friendly, but you sit there and observe as they panic, see them sweating in a cool room or breaking out in hives, and watch as their minds—obviously not empty as a rule—go completely blank. It's hard to watch. I want to take them out for a beer and get them some jalapeno poppers and chat more informally so that I can actually get some basic sense of who they are.

And if they don't like beer and jalapeno poppers, well... then I'm at a loss.

So, you know that wedding you went to ages ago, and at the reception, there was this godawful band with a lead singer who was bad when he sang, but even worse when he talked, which he never seemed to stop doing? He made unremittingly unfunny jokes and kept trying to get people to do interactive dances, when all everyone wanted to do was grab another cocktail and dance like normal people. You said nothing, not wanting to offend your friends who were getting married, but you suffered silently and perhaps rolled your eyes once or twice to communicate your discomfort to your date.

My neighbors hired That Guy to help along with the festivities at some sort of shindig this evening. I tried hard to tune it out, but I kept catching lines like, "and then, they ran out of rickshaws."

The new washer and dryer are supposed to arrive tomorrow. Never in my life have I looked forward so eagerly to doing laundry. I'm sure the feeling will wear off quite quickly, but for now, I'm going to try to ride that domestic wave.

I'd like to take a brief moment to welcome the kitty back to our family fold. After being gone for almost a week, he showed up outside the sliding glass door by our bedroom with a "meow," and he seems to have fared well during his absence. He's slightly thinner, but I think he found food somewhere, and he doesn't have a single scratch. The house feels much more like home with him here.

We finally got phone service hooked up after staging a minor production of "Waiting for PacBell." They gave us a four-hour window to wait on Thursday, but they never showed up, and then we had to wait from 8 to 5 on Friday. Things I did while waiting included:

- hand-washed a bunch of clothes because I really hate going to laundromats
- organized both medicine cabinets
- added "PacBell" to my Official Shit List
- decided to give the keyboard a thorough cleaning, realized that I had no idea what I was doing when keys started to fall off it; spent an hour and a half trying to get everything back in the right place and working again; swore off any future "taking things apart" shenanigans
- cleaned both bathrooms and the kitchen
- thought about stuff I'd like to buy
- painted my nails, knowing that the polish would just get chipped as I continued to unpack
- stared at some of the plants that came with the house; realized that I could fit everything I know about gardening on a 3x5 index card; considered taking pictures and posting them to get help identifying them; wondered where my camera was
- wished I had some beer
- started organizing closets; kept abandoning organization as I found fun, interesting things in the boxes I had packed
- talked to the dogs

Our friend S. is coming over tonight, so I need to hop in the shower and get ready. It's good to be back online and on my way to settled, though. Things might actually be relatively normal soon. It feels nice.

The kitty has gone AWOL, and I miss him. Apparently, he got out while I was in Vegas, and it's now been almost four days since he's been home. He's normally mostly an indoor kitty who makes occasional forays outside, but he's never been gone for more than a full day at a time. I think he must have either gotten lost, hurt, or taken in by someone else. Jeff's been calling the humane society from work, but short of going down there periodically to see if he's been picked up, I'm not sure what to do. I keep going outside, shaking his food bowl, and calling him, but I've had no luck. Maybe I'll make some signs and post them just in case someone thought he was a stray. He was wearing a collar, but it was one of those break-away collars that comes off easily if it gets caught on anything, so it could very well have fallen off.

I feel like an awful kitty momma, and I want my little Leo back.

We got almost all our stuff moved into the garage of the new place yesterday, and the process went about as well as such things can go. I sustained only minor injuries: a few bruises and a nasty cut on my wrist.

Today was worse. It was all about finishing up the "last few things" that we left there (and it's always more than you thought) and cleaning. 8 hours of finishing up and cleaning. Ugh. Days on end of lifting and scrubbing... extended periods of manual labor and I don't do very well together.

S and I did take the dogs on a long romp today before the cleaning fest began. I was wearing a tank top and managed to get my shoulders pretty badly sunburned. I realized tonight that, from the collarbones down my arms, my skin now has four distinct colors: white, then red, and then a very slightly tanned area around my biceps. My forearms are considerably darker. I am taking the farmer tan to whole new dimensions here, and something must be done about it.

We also met the weirdest duck I've ever seen while we were walking. It walked right up to all four of our dogs and stuck its beak in their noses like it was trying to make friends. My dogs, being bird dogs—and with just enough training to get "sit" and "down" when they aren't distracted, but not enough to get "no" around squirrels or anything that flies—can be very difficult to control around ducks. I was worried they would hurt or kill this strange, exciting bird. I attempted to drag them away, but the duck wouldn't stop following us. We kept looking back, and there it still was, waddling along. This went on for about 300 feet, which is a long way for a duck to waddle. We thought maybe it would be easier if it just pinned a suicide note to itself and walked into the street. Really, it was like one of those movies where someone keeps checking the rearview mirror and discovering that someone is still in pursuit of them. I wish we had been able to film it and put it to a soundtrack.

I'm exhausted, but I refuse to go to bed before 2, because going to bed early hasn't been working out for me. I keep waking up insanely early after a terrible night's sleep. Plus, I feel much more comfortable monopolizing my friend's phone line and computer when she's asleep.

We hear that we should close on the new house some time this week, so we might be in and settled by next weekend. If anything goes wrong with the deal at this point, I might start thinking that our little duck friend had the right idea. That's not actually true, but it's not far off.

I didn't do much today, but it was all good. We had fresh bagels from Noah's for breakfast and then took the dogs on a long walk. It was beautiful outside, and the puppies asked us if they please could just chase one or two ducks. We said no, but they got over their disappointment. When we got back, we snuggled up, watched a sub-par movie (we had fun anyway), and then split a bottle of wine over dinner. I love days like this.

I was chatting with some friends about something Jeff said today that made me laugh: "We need a wet bar in the bedroom," he announced. "And a TV that hangs from the ceiling. And a chimpanzee butler." As a result of these statements and the conversation that followed, I am now the proud owner of www.chimpanzeebutler.com. I have no idea what I'll do with it; I have two other domain names I don't actually use. Still, I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Must get work done tomorrow. After an astonishingly unproductive couple of days, I'm starting to feel like Jude Law's character in The Talented Mr. Ripley, only without all the money and without the murderous stalker. I do sometimes wish I had the means and the constitution to achieve full-blown prodigality. I believe I would enjoy it, though I'd probably start to feel guilty after a while.

We had our inspection on the new house done yesterday, and it went just smashingly. The sellers were there, so we got a chance to meet them—I think they took a semi-paternal interest in us. They have kids who are our age, and one just bought a house of his own, so I think they were glad that we are so excited about the house. Moreover, the wife was an English major and the husband was a math major. Hooray for happy parallels.

We had no idea how much work they've done on the house. They did a full termite treatment, put on a new roof, replaced one full sliding glass door, painted, treated some dry rot on the rafters, roto-tilled the back and front yards (new grass just got planted yesterday)... I know I'm forgetting some things, too. Because the sellers have worked so hard to fix everything up, the inspector really only had a few, very minor concerns. I got more and more excited about moving there with every minute I spent in the house.

Our loan officer says she might be able to have our loan closed as early as the 31st. She rocks my world.

After the inspection, for which I had to get up way earlier than I ever get up on a Saturday, we returned home, took a disco nap, and rallied for dinner & drinks with a friend, who came over to pick up her fuzzmonster. I helped her start her own LiveJournal account last night. Now all she has to do is post in it. ;-) She very dear to me, and I do hope some of you will wave hello to her when she joins us in full force.

Later in the evening, I had a good, long talk with J—a sort of "state of the relationship" talk. We haven't done that enough lately; it's altogether too easy to get caught up in life's quotidian rhythms and forget about stepping back a little to see where you've come. Where we are is mostly good, but we both have some concerns, and I think we were able to discuss them in a constructive way. It was one of those talks that reminded me why I got married.

To the Vegas crew: I missed you this weekend about as much as it's possible to miss people you've never actually met. I wish I could have been there with you. Soon, though. I'll even buy the drinks.

Our landlord is declaring bankruptcy. Apparently, his lawyer told him that he actually has to be living in our house to have the proceedings go through. He just gave us a month's notice to move. (We're on a month-to-month agreement). He was very apologetic, but said there was nothing he could do. We've lived here for three years.

It is really, really, really hard to find decent rentals in Orange County that will let you have two big dogs and a cat.

I suppose we could try to buy a house, but we would incur penalties for taking the down payment money out of a CD that hasn't yet reached maturity, and I still don't know if we really can afford it. Even if we could buy a house, wouldn't that still leave us with nowhere to live for a while?

I have old paper journals.
I thought looking at them again
would be embarrassing.
like remembering when I slipped
in front of my fifth grade class.
or was a Methodist.
or waved around crystals and
pretended to be New Age.
or wanted the Girl Scouts to like me.

(And it is OK if you wave around crystals.
It is just that religion does not become me.)

And there are things I will not tell you.
I feel sure you don't want to know.
And if you do, I will tell you it would
feel like fumbling for words when
someone hands you a Bad Poem and asks
what You Think.

(There. Have I squished it?)

And it is embarrassing sometimes.
Mostly when I would like to think
I was young then and didn't know
any better. But that's not always true.
And maybe that is just the place for
inferior poetry rendered in a loopy,
undisciplined hand. Or for naive meditations
on love unrequited and fates undecided
scrawled in a shaky script
over a glass of cheap Merlot.

(Sometimes it was coffee.)

And I read your journals and see that
you have different eyes. And sometimes
you help me see a little more. But I
have to remind myself. Don't ever walk
past that tree without thinking it's
beautiful. Because then you will not
be seeing enough. And some of you talk
about walls and maybe I do want to peek
over a little bit more. So maybe I will
take away a brick or two but I don't
always know why I want to.

(I could say 'Elves' to you, but it's
not elves exactly. Yes, I will borrow
a little bit. It is nice to speak
with someone else's voice.)

Maybe I will call them elves anyway.
Because I'm too tired for precision.
And maybe I'll tell you that sometimes
I want to know where the fuck they're
going with my bricks. Even when I'm alone.
But maybe I will tell you about them
someday if they get the better of me.
And maybe it will not be so bad.

My space heater nearly caught on fire a couple of hours ago. I heard something break within its bowels, then I smelled that funny electrical burning smell, and then I saw a sort of glow begin to form in one particular spot in the coils, accompanied by little poofing noises. The up side is that I was here when it happened, and my house did not burn down. It would be ignominious indeed to be slain by one's space heater. The down side is that it's really damn cold in here now.

I am very afraid of accidental fires. A house I used to live in when I was a child was burned down under suspicious circumstances. They told me it was arson, and I thought arson was somebody's name. I used to walk around proclaiming my hate for him. After learning that arson was a crime rather than a person, the field actually narrowed. "Mom says she thinks you burned down the house," I once told dad's (now ex-) wife. I don't know whether or not she actually started the fire, but I do know that she had few redeeming qualities, so remembering the look on her face still makes me chuckle.

My older brother was in a motorcycle accident in which gas leaked and ignited, causing third-degree burns all over his body. He still has scars over most of his body below the neck. Years later, his entire neighborhood burned down. More recently, my husband got some nasty burns in a cooking fire. Aside from the obvious reasons, I find myself haunted with images from Foxe's Book of Martyrs when I think of such burning, and it always makes me shiver.

So, thank you to the forces of protection that helped me to avoid a fiery end this evening.

In other news, I recently remembered that I said I'd have a dissertation proposal in next month. I don't know if I can do it. I still have a shitload of work to do before I can even coherently describe my project and my goals. If I don't get it done by next month, I can't apply for a dissertation fellowship. I must combat my anxiety with productivity.

I do like candles and fireplaces, after all. The key seems to be mastering the art of the controlled burn.

and from this site...

Lost lands and peoples are not the province only of far-flung oceans. The west- coast region of the United States has also been attributed to have once been a part of Lemuria, remaining above water when it sank, and then becoming attached to another continent. Related to this notion has been the emergence of Mount Shasta in northern California as the purported site of a select colony of Lemurians. Frederick Spencer Oliver in an 1894 novel A Dweller on Two Planets, set in a Utopian Atlantis, speaks of Lemuria, a community of sages established on Mount Shasta to preserve the wisdom of the ancients, and a subterranean temple located inside a hollow chamber of the mountain. A 1932 article in the Los Angeles Times Star claimed to have observed Lemurians holding sacred night-lit ceremonies on the mountain's slopes. Though the article was proved to be a fraud, this did not deter the formation of a Lemurian Fellowship in 1936, which has further developed the idea of Shasta's inner mountain temple to include a great stone door in the mountain and a series of passageways leading to an entire inhabited underground realm. Lemurian 'adepts' are in there, it is said, and occasionally come out. They have been sighted performing rituals, dressed in long white robes.

Do I really think they exist? Well, no. But isn't it pretty to think so?