Dull Is the New Fabulous

Semi-annual Update

2012-01-24T08:28:00.000-08:00

I considered a New Year's resolution to post more frequently here, but my history with resolutions is spotty at best. I generally think it makes more sense for me to make post-April 15th resolutions, since that's really when life restarts for me, but I don't keep those resolutions very well either.

I was having this discussion with That Guy in his bed one evening shortly after the New Year. I asked him if he'd made any resolutions, and he said that he had resolved to live his life more fully and to have increased financial discipline in 2012. I pointed out that his resolutions were a) helplessly vague, and b) self-contradictory, and he didn't really appreciate that. When he asked me what my resolutions were, I said, "I'm going to moisturize this year." He didn't really appreciate that, either, but I figure moisturizing is a) specific, b) useful, and c) achievable. At which point, he said "Kiss My Face," which turned out to be a brand recommendation rather than an invitation to anything amorous. For what it's worth, I'm sticking with Aveeno. That's pretty much the entirety of my skin care regimen, except that I mostly remember to shave in the morning.

As it happens, I broke things off with That Guy this past weekend. There isn't any point in going into details. If you complain about boyfriends or ex-boyfriends, either you sound petty, or you invite people to wonder why you put up with him for as long as you did. I'll just say that over the course of the year-plus that I dated him, I learned a number of valuable lessons, and my tolerance for spicy foods increased by a factor of maybe three. You should really try my chocolate pots-de-creme with cayenne and cinnamon. My only real regret is that I ordered his Valentine's Day gift before the split, but I'm happy to have it over before tax season gets grueling. Live and learn.

Anyway, the big news of the past few months has nothing to do with departures. We have added a new member to the household. After an application process that was probably only slightly less involved than getting a high-level security clearance, we adopted a rescue greyhound.

We picked Luna up from her foster home the day after Thanksgiving. And, well, let me just say that I love having a dog, and I especially love having this dog. She is perhaps not overly bright, and she's kind of clumsy, but she's incredibly sweet and very pretty. I don't have any really good pictures of her because she is, apparently, genetically programmed to move quickly whenever a camera is trained on her.

For years I've wanted a dog, but I'd held out because of my schedule. But with EFU living with me while she gets her master's (and then, the plan is, during her first year of teaching), it works out pretty well. EFU feeds and walks Luna in the morning, and I feed and walk her in the evening. When tax season gets hairy, EFU will likely take over more of the duties. Also, when EFU moves out in another eighteen or so months, she may take Luna with her. At that point, I might volunteer for foster care during the slower months of the year.

The adoption organization (which, believe me, is an incredibly thorough group of greyhound lovers) requires us to take Luna to obedience training, and we're starting that this coming Saturday. I found a beginning class on Saturday afternoons at 4, so I should be able to make that even when the returns are coming fast and furious.

Greyhounds are pretty great dogs, and they work really well with my lifestyle because they're very active for about fifteen minutes twice a day, and then they mostly turn into couch potatoes. (Because we had her, we drove to Florida right after Christmas this year to visit my mother and some of the rest of my family, and Luna was a champ all the way down and back.) Also, their racing background means that they're crate trained and they actually feel very comfortable staying in their crate, so I can just give Luna a treat and latch the crate door when a gentleman caller shows up.

Some of their other quirks include their leanness and their short hair which combine to make them need a coat when the weather turns cold. I've made a couple of coats for Luna. This is not one of them:

That's actually Luna in the pajamas that my mother sent to EFU for Christmas. They are not so appropriate for a twenty-two-year-old with a fear of synthetic fibers, but EFU had a lot of fun making Luna wear them. Luna tried her best to ignore the rather obvious affront to her dignity (as well as the poor fit). She's good at that.

Anyway, having a greyhound is great, and I highly recommend it, especially to anyone with a high tolerance for having his face licked. And the ones that don't get adopted get shot, so there's that, too.

There's not a lot of other stuff going on. The holidays were very pleasant, despite the $244 speeding ticket I got in Waldo, Florida (apparently, I'm the only person in the continental U.S. who doesn't know there's a speed trap there) while driving down for the holidays. In general, I don't recommend twenty-hour car rides, but with such pleasant company, we managed to have a wonderful time, our encounter with Officer Friendly notwithstanding. I and the girls (two daughters, one dog) ended up spending New Year's Eve in a motel room in Greenville, North Carolina, where we ate substandard Chinese takeout, played card games, and watched a marathon of The Big Bang Theory. It was not, perhaps, fabulous, but it was great.

Time on My Hands

2011-11-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

Now that the extended tax return deadline (October 15) has passed, I have a few months during which everything is much less hectic at work. There is, of course, the holiday season to contend with, but since I discovered that a) the girls only really care about turkey, mashed potatoes, and pie at Thanksgiving, and b) the Internet makes Christmas shopping a breeze (Amazon Prime, yo), the holidays are nothing but fun. Of course, the holidays have always been predominantly fun for me. Family, food, and singing: what's not to love?

With an attitude like that, you might well suppose that no one is less qualified than I to take up the mantle of curmudgeon laureate so recently fallen from the shoulders of Andy Rooney. (To be honest, I haven't seen an episode of Sixty Minutes in years, and I had no idea that the dude was still alive until I'd heard that he'd died.) And you'd be right: I don't see the need for professional curmudgeons. And if I did perceive such a need, there are so many people more qualified than I to whinge about life's inconsequential insults.

Nevertheless, when I saw the above sign affixed to the new shopping carts at the supermarket closest to my house, I had a moment of curmudgeonliness. Or maybe it was just disbelief. I took a quick look at the wheels on my shopping cart, and I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't really lock if I were to push the cart beyond the yellow line in the parking lot. I have not, of course, tested this: why would I want to steal or even appear to be stealing a shopping cart? I wonder whether Andy Rooney would have been similarly skeptical. Regardless, a week or so later, I saw a few shopping carts that had been abandoned five or ten yards beyond the yellow line. I didn't bother to investigate, but I'm pretty sure a number of other people decided to test their suspicions about the so-called locking wheels, got beyond the yellow line, verified that the carts still rolled, and then abandoned the carts because, well, they didn't have any better idea than I what to do with them.

Ok, so you may have a fancy iPhone 4 or 4G or whatever the hell the latest version is, but did your kids give you an iPhone case with a llama in a yellow cab on the back? I didn't think so. I win.

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Speaking time on my (or anyone else's) hands, I heard the other day that American GDP had rebounded to pre-financial crisis levels. Yet unemployment remains at 9%. Does it not occur to anyone that there's only so much work that the economy can support and that if some combination of technology and increases in worker productivity mean that it takes fewer workers to do that much work, there can't help but be fewer jobs? This doesn't seem all that complicated a notion to me. The obvious thing to do here is to have people who do work work fewer hours so that more people can work.

The slightly less obvious answers are to end the wars and tax the rich, but, truly, those answers are only slightly less obvious. I don't feel like getting into it right now, though.

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So one of the ways I've been spending my temporarily somewhat more available free time is on the very popular iPhone (and, I'm sure, other smart phone/tablet/whatever) app Words with Friends. I don't like to brag, but most of the time I kick ass at this game.

I especially love it when I'm trailing coming into the last round, and I pull a humongous score out on the last word to take the game.

But I also like leading from start to finish, crushing the hopes and dreams of my opponents. Yeah, I'm a little bit ruthless when I play.

I win somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of my games I reckon (Hey, app developers, how about some better tracking of my record and statistics? I paid the $0.99 for the non-free version of this game, and I realize it's only a pittance, but the only thing I got was an absence of ads. Maybe come up with some features and more people will buy? It seems reasonable to me.), but I'm sure that much of my success is due to playing random opponents. Some of y'all must rule at this game: challenge me!

No One Ever Gets There But You Can Try

2011-09-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

Recent events:

This past Sunday, I was the soloist at church. I'm the soloist at church regularly, mostly because I'm a reliably good singer, but also because I'm willing and able to sing without much notice. This last time, for example, the music director sent out an email to her list of soloists and small groups, and she had a series of dates for which she needed music, and one of those dates was ten days after the email. Other people started responding quickly (reply all? yikes!) for the later dates, but I was pretty sure that I'd be the only one to say, "Sure, I can sing a week from Sunday." That means I get one thirty-minute rehearsal before choir practice on a Thursday night, plus a run through before the service on Sunday morning. I've been singing for a long time, so I can do that, provided I don't want to do something difficult. So no Handel arias, but I do get a fair amount of freedom in deciding what I want to sing, so long as it's arguably appropriate to the sermon topic. This past Sunday, the sermon was about learning, so I chose three selections from Schoolhouse Rock. It's decidedly kick-ass to get to sing Schoolhouse Rock in church. I did "Interjections" for the prelude, "My Hero Zero" just before the sermon, and "Conjunction Junction" as the postlude. They were very well received, particularly by people about my age, for whom they were moments of major nostalgia. Saturday morning TV from the 70s. That was before Scooby Doo jumped the shark, y'know.

Also in attendance was That Guy, whom I have been dating for about ten months now. He'd never heard me sing before, neither had he been to my church, so it was nice of him to come. His comment, after hearing and seeing me do "Conjunction Junction": "Who knew you had so much rhythm? We have to go dancing sometime." There's no pleasure without pain, I reckon.

I am somewhat unfamiliar with the world of intermediate-term dating. The last two times I dated anyone for over six months, I ended up married to and/or cohabitating with said person for a period of thirteen and six years, respectively. I don't foresee any such outcome with That Guy, but then I have given up on trying to see what's coming. I'm content with the way things are.

This past Tuesday, EFU came home from classes (she is now pursuing a Master's in education; she is also doing a student teaching internship this year) and announced that there was "a situation," by which she meant that she'd picked up a stray dog on her way home. The stray dog had been running in traffic on a major highway, and I could hardly object to her having saved a dog (her mother, on the other hand, would certainly have turned the dog away). This particular dog was an extraordinarily well behaved golden retriever who, alas, made me itch. A craiglist ad and a visit to the local humane society later, Lexi (we had temporarily named her Lola, which seemed appropriate because we were having trouble getting a good look under the hood, so we thought she was a she, but we weren't certain) has been returned to her owner, who was apparently having some issues with her invisible fence. Operator error, I reckon.

Earlier this year, I had started the process of adopting a rescue greyhound, but then EFU had said that she might seek employment abroad next year when she's finished with her master's degree. Part of the deal with getting a dog was that I'd have someone else around to walk him or her during the part of the year when I regularly work fourteen-hour days. Now that Lexi/Lola has gone, EFU very much wants a permanent dog, so I will likely restart the adoption process, provided I can satisfy myself that the allergy issue either won't recur or will be manageable. I'm not allergic to That Guy's dog, but it's a Labradoodle, a breed known for not causing allergy. And for the first few years b&c and I were living together, he had an elderly Sheltie who never caused me any problems at all. My mother's dog (a Shitzu) also doesn't make me itch, so the whole thing is a puzzlement.

September has become a month when a lot of things happened. Personal things, that is. February is the biggest month for commemorations since I and the girls were all born in February. September holds the anniversaries of my father's birth (80 years), his death (1 year), and the purchase of my house (2 years). These are not occasions for which one sends greeting cards (at least not any more), and the actual dates tend to sneak up on me and then pass so that I only realize a day or two later, but they're still big time reminders of that whole tempus fugit thing. I reckon in two -- or at most three -- years I'll have to think for a while to remember how many years it will have been since any of those events happened.

I don't much like to dwell on the passage of time because it makes me sad, and it's not like I can do anything about it. I mean, sure, there are people who say that a keen awareness of the brevity of life helps them live life to the fullest, but lately I've begun to wonder whether living life to the fullest isn't more trouble than it's worth. Don't get me wrong. If you're the sort of person who wants to climb Everest or worry about his legacy, then go for it, and good for you. I'm just not convinced that, in the long run, achievement is better than contentment. I go back and forth on that one, but consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, right? Some days I want to get stuff done; other days, I just want to sit on the couch and watch the girls play Legend of Zelda (Wind Waker is my favorite, but I'm really not that picky) or make out with a nice guy. I'm convinced that the relatively breathtaking technological progress of Western civilization is mostly evidence that Europeans were bad in the sack. Nowadays, I reckon Europeans are more content than in the past (which likely means that they're better lays, but I suppose it could be all the alcohol; let's hope it's both), but I think that's because they're mostly over the notion of conquest.

I don't know exactly when I got over the notion of conquest, but I'm clearly a lot more content these days than I used to be, and it's not only because I'm so much better in the sack (I jest, but then again, I don't) than I used to be. I'd like to think that it's something like wisdom, but the more likely answer is that it's just time.

Old

2011-03-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

I lose track of my age all the time. Or at least I lose track of TED's age. TED, of course, is an Internet construct, but the differences between me-TED and me-just me are not profound. And TED not infrequently shows up in my offline life, since it's the name I have used to arrange many of my encounters of a horizontal nature. This quasi-double identity has never presented much of a problem, in part because many of these encounters are a one-off, but also because I have grown accustomed to hearing myself called TED by the people who know me in a primarily horizontal context.

There is one gentleman in particular who phones or texts me with some regularity, and his usual spiel begins, "Hey, TED. I'm in the city, and I thought I might stop by and say hello." He always refers to horizontal quality time as "saying hello": he has since the very first time we met. (As euphemisms go, HQT is infinitely superior to "say hello.") His meaning was relatively clear, but part of me wanted to say, "You're coming all the way out here just to say hello? Don't you want to fuck?" But I suppose politeness and gentility are very important to him (politeness is important to me, too), and I have noticed that there is sometimes a correlation between politeness before HQT and depravity during it, and that's a good thing.

Anyway, this particular gentleman doesn't know my real name, and it's unlikely that he ever will. I think (I have not done the math) that in most cases where there's a repeat offender, I let him know my real name, but the two minutes of polite post-coital conversation that I regularly have with this guy are entirely indicative of a desire on his part to be genteel: he has no real interest in who I am. Besides, he lives in Northern Virginia, and by my reckoning, a gay man living in NoVA is only a click or two away from being GOProud. I suppose that it's wrong, or at least a little sad, to be so dismissive of someone who is so eager (on occasion) to see me and who (more importantly) kisses well, but there it is. There is a reasonable probability that at some point during the next few months I will be asked to move an existing relationship to an exclusive level, and if that's the case, I won't have any regrets saying goodbye to Mr. NoVA. Would that I could say that about all of my horizontal acquaintance, but I suppose I'll cross those bridges if and when I have to.

The keeping-track-of-my-age question is really mostly important in the context of TED because the only people who give a rat's ass about my age are folk on the Internet who want to meet me for nefarious purposes, and for the most part, these people want, or at least expect, to be lied to. In that vein, a few years back, I quipped to my then-partner that for Internet purposes, I was going to be forty-three for the next few years, until such time as my birth certificate would indicate that I was fifty, at which point I would leap frog directly to fifty-five, where I intended to stay, presumably until death.

I mention this mainly as the background that explains why when V. (formerly b&c, the aforementioned then-partner) emailed me a couple of months back to ask who* he should invite to my fiftieth birthday party, he also asked me how old I intended to be. I sent him some names, but I told him I'd have to get back to him on my age. I'm still working on that

It hadn't occurred to me that V., or anybody, would be throwing me a party, but it was very nice of him, and I found -- after he'd told me it was happening -- that I was rather looking forward to it. My birthday (which, to my everlasting pique, I share with Ronald Reagan: we differ by exactly half a century; also, I'm still breathing) falls right on the cusp of when tax season usually starts to kick into a higher gear, so I typically celebrate it by buying myself something nice and cashing a small check from my mother.

Mom had asked me, a couple of weeks prior to my birthday, whether I was worried about turning fifty. She said that my father had had a very difficult time with fifty. This puzzled me: my father never seemed to have much difficulty accepting the inevitable. Besides, it's just fifty. It's my impression that forty is typically the more difficult milestone (some would say thirty in the gay community, but at thirty I was still in fairly deep denial), and I don't recall any angst at forty, so why should fifty bother me? Nothing really happens when you turn fifty except that you start getting pestered to join AARP (which is, I suppose, a bit of a knock to people who bother to open their junk mail), and you can put more money in your 401(k) or other qualified retirement plan.** And I suppose that there's a somewhat ominous medical procedure that your doctor recommends merely by virtue of your age, but I've found that it's better not to mention that somewhat ominous medical procedure, unless you want people to go on -- at great length and in an inappropriate amount of detail and in a manner that's meant to be reassuring but is not -- about that procedure. And you do not want this.

The party itself was a lot of fun, though a bit of a blur. I had about twelve ounces of wine upon arrival, and -- loath though I am to admit it -- twelve ounces of wine pretty much ensures that I'm going to be pleasantly drunk for several hours. And when I say "pleasantly drunk," I mean drunk enough that when someone presents me with a rainbow-glitter top hat and a purple feather boa, I don them with good humor, but not so drunk that I don't remember to insist that someone take a picture of it with my iPhone. That way, no one feels the need to capture elsewhere that particular ridiculous outfit, and I maintain control over the image. As it happens, the glitter top hat (in jewel tones) is a pretty good look for me. That guy kept telling me how good it looked on me. For days afterward he mentioned it.

I had asked V. to invite that guy to the party because it seemed like we had been dating long enough for him to meet some of my friends. This was a matter of some trepidation for me, not his meeting my friends, but I was not thrilled about explaining to V. that I'm dating someone in a manner that may not be entirely casual, and I wasn't sure how that guy would feel about being invited. But V. wasn't the least bit troubled, and that guy loves a party. That guy, in fact, appears to love any party: this is not something we have in common. But we did both have a great time at my fiftieth, and my friends all liked him, of course.

(In fact, one of them liked him so much that he asked that guy out, probably -- I am giving him the benefit of the doubt here -- because he didn't realize that I and that guy were dating. That guy went, not realizing that he'd been on a date until he was recounting the evening to me, and I said, "Dude. You were on a date." A month later, that guy is still not quite ready to concede the point, arguing -- rightly -- that going on a date with the man in question would be like going out with a certain public television children's television host who is known for make believe. Of course, a lot of people really like cardigans: I don't judge. I am highly amused by the entire incident. To my shame, I am not above whistling "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" at inappropriate moments, which never fails to elicit, "It was not a date.")

I've had about six weeks now to get used to the notion of fifty, but I am still unable to ascribe any particular meaning, let alone dread, to it. I think for a lot of men, the forties are typically a period of great struggle and the fifties are more a period of stability and acceptance, but I've always been pretty good about acceptance, and stability is always an illusion, albeit a pleasant one. I do feel qualitatively and significantly different (and better) than I did a year ago, in a number of ways, but this has nothing to do with fifty, and everything to do with the death of my father. As awful as that was, getting through it has opened me up in ways that I could not have anticipated. It is a useful coincidence that his death occurred a few months before I hit fifty.

I still haven't figured out what to do about TED's age, though. Fifty is a nice, round number, and it's easy to remember, but there's a certain hunger and disreputability to the mid- to late-forties that is much more useful for the purposes of TED. I don't think I'm quite ready to give that up, but it may be only a matter of time.

*I have elected not to use "whom" here. I am not up to arguing about it.

**Fifty also presents some horizontal opportunities with the sort of, often young, person who will only date people fifty or over, but, apparently, I do not look sufficiently fifty for this sort of person. Alas. I am starting to get some flecks of gray in my hair, and I'm very happy about that, though more for aesthetic than horizontal reasons. I have always wanted to be salt and pepper.

New

2011-01-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

The other morning, I was still congratulating myself on having avoided having to summon a plumber to deal with my bathroom clog, when I walked out the front door without my keys and locked myself out. Pride goeth before a fall, or so they tell me, but I am by habit so paranoid about closing doors without checking my pockets for my keys that I had not bothered to conceal a spare.

Fortunately, I did have my iPhone, so I was able to determine that there is a locksmith located within a half-mile of me, so I placed a call, and in twenty minutes or so, a young man of terrifying efficiency was drilling out my lock and letting me back in. He managed to convince me that I needed to have both the lock he'd drilled and the deadbolt changed, and what with the service fee, and the drilling out, and the changing of two locks keyed together, he was gone twenty minutes later, and I was poorer by $414, which I figure is about how much it would have cost me for two visits by a plumber. Oh well. At least I have shiny new locks, and the locksmith (admittedly not a disinterested party) assures me that my old locks were a break-in waiting to happen.

My mother, who no longer likes to brave shopping malls and does not appear to understand how to order gifts over the Internet, sent me some money to spend on myself and the girls for Christmas. I quashed the impulse to just put the money in the bank (the impulse didn't put up much of a fight, really), and instead bought myself something that met the two main requirements for a gift: a) it's something I really like, and b) it's something that I was unlikely to buy for myself. So I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. It seemed to me that if one is going to own an e-reader, one ought to break it in, as it were, with an especially good book, so my first download was Pride and Prejudice, which had the additional benefit of being free.

I must admit that I was feeling just the eensiest bit obligated when I made the choice. I adore Jane Austen, and P&P (or, if you prefer, PnP, though if you're involved in any sort of online interaction that is likely to lead to you and your correspondent in a mutually horizontal position, I must caution you that if he mentions PnP, you are likely to be bitterly disappointed if you believe him to be a fan of Ms. Austen) is one of my favorite novels, but it's just possible that I was resisting being in the mood for something a skosh, well, trashier. (One acknowledges that the sets of "all novels" and "all novels trashier than Jane Austen novels" are very nearly identical.) But I was no more than a few pages in before I was transported. I remembered the excellent writing and all the humor, but I had forgotten what an absolute page turner (note to whomever: "page turner" may be obsolete with e-readers; come up with an alternative) it is, even if you've already read it four times and have seen both the excellent and the execrable movie versions, so that there's really very little doubt as to how it's going to come out.

It's been some years since my last reading, so it's not surprising that I was struck by a lot of what had not occurred to me so much in the past. What I especially noted this time through was the character of Mr. Bennett, who deals with a situation of his own creation, but not to his own liking, by removing himself from it as much as possible and making himself something of a recluse in his own library. The consequences of his seclusion range from the (minor) deterioration of his own character to a family scandal. Within the context of a Jane Austen novel, those are quite big deals. I took his example as a reminder of how important it is to remain engaged.

The second book I downloaded was The Pilgrim's Progress, and that is going, um, not so well, but I intend to persevere, much like Christian. John Bunyan, frankly, was not much of a writer, and The Pilgrim's Progress is really more proto-novelist allegory than novel, but it was the first book that I read in my first literature course as a freshman. The course is still offered (or was as late as 2009, at least), but the reading list has changed considerably, and the professor who taught it has long since retired, a fact which makes me a little bit sad. Tempus fugit, I reckon.

In other media-related news, I had a series of such unpleasant interactions with Comcast's so-called customer service that I have entirely abandoned cable television (and Comcast) in favor of Verizon FiOS internet only, with a Netflix account (streaming through the Wii, plus a one-at-a-time DVD rental). I thought I would miss some of my favorite reality TV shows, but so far I haven't, and, well, how did I live without Netflix?

Naturally, I love all of the movies and TV shows, from the sublime (my first DVD was A Single Man) to the profane (Spartacus: Blood and Sand; the mind boggles), but what I especially appreciate is the Netflix' user interface's continuing efforts to define and predict my tastes. At some point, a new category appeared in my browsing menu: "Emotional Gay and Lesbian Dramas." I was a little sad when it went away, but then it was replaced by "Edgy Gay and Lesbian Romances," which was followed by "Dark Gay and Lesbian Romances," and, finally, "Steamy Gay and Lesbian Romances." These are pretty obvious choices for me, but I'm a bit impressed by Netflix' ability to withstand all of the attempts to throw it off the track: YFU also uses my account, and it's not uncommon for her to spend six hours on the couch watching half a season of The Office or a completely inscrutable (to me) Japanese anime series. Somewhere there's a psychologist writing a thesis about me.

I don't have what I perceive to be the usual issues with new year's resolutions; (I.e., that they create unreasonable expectations and then guilt when they're broken, as they nearly always are. When I break mine, I just shrug.) indeed, I think that any excuse at self-reinvention or self-improvement is a good thing. But getting them done by January 1 is just too much pressure. Also, it leads to bad choices, and it lessens your enjoyment of the holiday. (I had a splendid New Year's Eve, by the way. I went to a late party, and before that, That Guy came over for dinner, and he brought a bottle of Laurent-Perrier demi sec, and it was delicious.) It makes much more sense to me to spend a bit of time during the first week of the year thinking about one's goals for the coming year and then to implement resolutions as necessary throughout the year, beginning with the first resolutions on January 6, which has the virtue of being Epiphany/Twelfth Night/Three Kings' Day. (I typically wait until after April 15 to institute additional resolutions: the strain of eighty hour work weeks is too much for anyone's resolve.)

The specifics are not really of interest, but this year my goals are achievable and my resolutions are not especially onerous. In any case, after the events of 2010, it's almost a given that 2011 is going to be a good year, if only by comparison. Looking at life year by year is arguably artificial, but you have to have an organizing principle of some sort. The new year is sufficiently close to the winter solstice that it's still a time when the days are very short and the temperatures are very cold, so you want to be at home under a blanket, reflecting on what from the past you want to let go, and what you want to pick up in the coming year.

The Zombie Wants Brains

2011-01-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

Just today, I've been sitting in my office, humming one of the choruses from Messiah. (I was in the stage chorus for this year's Kennedy Center Messiah sing-along. It was good to get a second use of the tux that I'd bought a year earlier, and having to learn all of the choruses from the work may prove useful in later years.) But because I was up until two am last night, doing something entirely different from what I'm typically doing if I'm still up at that hour, instead of singing "His yoke is easy; his burthen is light," I was singing, "My hands are dirty; my drainpipe is clean." It got very well lodged in my head that way until a member of my online knowledge base wrote something that led to my replacing that lyric with the probably even more obscure "The cow is angry; the zombie wants brains." It is probably best that I don't attempt to explain how that happened, but I will note that the way the melismas run in that particular chorus meant that I was suddenly having to articulate "brains," and I have always found the first half of the long a diphthong to be especially hard to articulate at speed. I recall a particular instance seven or eight years ago where I was doing a bass aria from some piece (possibly a missa brevis, but I can't be at all certain), and the music director snarled (I am not exaggerating) at me because I insisted on articulating the first syllable of "saecula" on the ee rather than on the eh. But it was so, so, so fast that I just couldn't do it any other way. I was so distressed by the ferocity of her reaction that I nearly walked out. I figured that if it was that important to her, she should have hired a professional. Besides, I reserve most of my linguistic pedantry for English. My reasoning was: it's Latin, it's a dead language, so fuck it. Also, I sounded great.

Anyway. It was an odd autumn and early winter for me. I have been both myself and not myself as the grief over my father's death became less acute and then went underground, transforming itself into a sort of mild incompetence that is not especially bothersome. I hypothesize that at some level I'm still processing the grief, and that my subconscious is busy enough with it that my conscious mind sometimes neglects to do things that ought to get done, like setting the oven timer. In any event, I am at once happier and more inept, and that seems like a pretty good trade to me, though perhaps not so much last night at 2 am when the drain clog finally yielded to, of all things, the plunger. I probably should have tried that first, though I think it's reasonable to tell myself that the plunger (which has, in fact, proved ineffectual on previous clogs of the same sink) would not have worked without the prior application of the two Turbo Snakes (as seen on TV!), the drain auger, and the multiple rounds of baking soda and vinegar (the chemical drain opener having been similarly ineffectual). Also, I am now the proud owner of a super-keen pipe wrench. Woot.

I have a history of autumnal upheaval -- my father's death, the beginning of the end of my marriage, and the dissolution of my partnership all having happened in August or September. I'm pretty sure all of that is simple coincidence, but the upshot has been that the worst of the bad is ending as the holiday season is beginning, meaning that Thanksgiving and Christmas come just as I'm truly able to appreciate how much I still have to be grateful for.

This was a really good holiday season for me. There are three things that are both necessary and sufficient for me to have a great Christmas: family, music, and food. (I can have a great Thanksgiving with just the family and the food.) I am blessed with two daughters who have a great appreciation for substance over form, so most of the trappings are not essential. I do find that the ebullience which accompanies the season makes me want to do some level of decorating, but when, for example, it's Christmas Eve and I can't find the wrapping paper, I know that the girls won't mind at all, provided that the gift is appropriate. And they're smart girls who leave little to chance: they each emailed me a Christmas wish list, with web links. If not for the decentralized nature of purchasing on Etsy, I'd have been done with the shopping in less than half an hour. As it was, it was still done quickly, and while I did end up having to make a couple of shopping trips to crowded stores in the week before Christmas (I have mostly put these out of mind, in order to avoid death of the soul: the trauma of last-minute non-Internet Christmas shopping can hardly be exaggerated.), I was mostly left with plenty of additional time to bake cookies. Also fruitcake -- against which I will hear no calumnies. (This guy who I may be dating was at my house for what may have been a date, and I served him some of my fruitcake, and he exclaimed, "Oh! It's good!" as if that were a great surprise. I was not amused; fortunately, he is the sort of person against whom it is impossible to hold a grudge, and I am supremely confident in my fruitcake, which everybody likes.)

As for music, I sang so much during the last week before the holiday that by the end of the Christmas Eve service, when I was required to hold a low D at the end of an "Alleluia," I was very nearly croaking. Christmas was on a Saturday, and in addition to the Christmas Eve service on Friday, I had the Messiah on Thursday, a full choir practice on Wednesday, and a two-hour Messiah rehearsal on Monday. On Tuesday, I went to hear the holiday concert at YFU's high school, and it was surprisingly good. YFU's group, in particular, did a fantastic job. I am aware that there was some bias in my reaction, but they were spot on in their intonation and diction. They opened with a particularly lively (and well-choreographed, by one of the members) version of "If They Could See Me Now," and it was just great. YFU was thrilled.

She was less thrilled with the candied orange slices that she asked me to make after she read about them somewhere. I had warned her that she probably wouldn't like them because they'd be bittersweet, but she wanted them, so I made them, and they were fantastic, but even as I was enjoying my first, I realized that they appealed to a more mature palate. Both girls rejected them. More for me.

Anyway, the only real trouble I went to preparing for Christmas was the 2-D tree. I realized early on that having a regular Christmas tree would mean removing furniture from the living room, and I just didn't feel like dealing with it, so I went for a 2-D tree. I went through several iterations before I wound up with a pegboard and 1x4 frame onto which I layered quilt batting, which I then covered with canvas. It happened that I had giant rolls of both in the basement for reasons which I understand completely but which are impossible to explain to anyone else without having them think I'm either eccentric or a lunatic. Neither of which is either necessarily wrong or a bad thing, but, well, let's just say that the batting and the canvas both came in happy when 2D tree versions 1.0 and 2.0 failed miserably.

Christmas day itself was blissfully relaxed. Since I couldn't/didn't have to wrap presents, I just piled things underneath the tree before I went to bed. The girls were arriving shortly after noon, so I got up at eleven o'clock. [Fair warning: carbohydrate-hating homosexuals will want to skip the next several sentences. Move immediately to the next paragraph.] Over time, I have become more and more basic with holiday meals involving my immediate family, so for Christmas dinner, I made very good macaroni and cheese. And nothing else, though there were beverages and cookies, of course. Then for Christmas supper, I made mashed potatoes. The girls were thrilled, and I could spend my time with them instead of in the kitchen. We opened presents, ate, and watched movies all day. It gets no better.

More Irrelevant Pictures of Beaches and Birds

2010-09-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

My father died two weeks ago. I was at the opera, of all places, when it happened V. (formerly b&c) and I had gone to see Un Ballo en Maschera at the Kennedy Center. I had, as usual, slept through much of the first act and was looking forward to a period of post-nap wakefulness for the final two acts when I noticed people using their iPhones. I was so shocked by the possibility of AT&T reception in the Kennedy Center that I pulled my own phone out, and I saw that I had three messages: one from my mother, one from my sister, and one from my brother. "Well, shit," I thought.

The official causes of death were listed as prostate cancer and renal failure. He had not had too much pain until the very last days, and on the one hand, it is very good that he didn't linger. On the other hand, of course, it sucks that he's dead. I have a little bit of distance on it now, and it appears to be true that time heals. On the other hand, time is also what kills us all.

We had a memorial service for him the following Sunday afternoon, at his church in Bradenton. My sister sang, beautifully, and I marveled at her composure. My mother had asked me whether I'd like to sing, and I told her my voice was wrecked from the crying. My sister told me, "I'm an Army wife. We learn to process things quickly."

My brother, my sister, and I had all been to see him within two weeks of his death, and I think that we had all pre-grieved to some extent. That may have been helpful. Or not. At the very least, we all knew it was coming soon.

I spoke at the service, and I had to speak slowly, so as to be only a moderately weepy mess. It was one of those things that I did because I figured I would regret it later if I didn't. I had made sure to tell my father certain things for the same reason. Grief is enough to get through without piling on regret. I also thought that speaking would honor my father's memory and that it might be therapeutic for me. I was right, I think.

This is what I said:

My father spent a lot of time with us when we were young: he was very active in our church and he taught Sunday school; he helped coach our little league teams; he took us camping all over the country. But what I remember most from my early childhood is what a hard, hard worker he was, and sometimes when I was lucky, he would get a call from a store during the weekend, and he'd take me with him. We'd get in his big truck, which was full of all sorts of mysterious tools and equipment, and we'd drive a ways, and he'd fix the problem, and then we'd come home. It was awesome. My father always tried, very patiently, to explain what he was doing, but I was pretty young, and I didn't have his mechanical aptitude, so I didn't really understand. But even then, it was apparent to me just how conscientious and competent he was at his work and how respected he was by the store managers and other people he worked with. They knew that if he showed up, the problem was going to be solved.

I think I was about twenty and home from college one winter when my father was out on a call and suffered a severe injury that ended his career and subjected him to years of painful surgeries. For a long time he had trouble walking. I can't help thinking how difficult it must have been for someone so active to have had something that he liked doing and was so good at just taken away from him. But I never once heard him complain about it. And over the past year, I never once heard him complain about cancer or his other medical problems, either.

The only way I can understand my father's cheerfulness and peace and gratitude in the face of such adversity is to think that the only two things that Dad really loved -- the only two things that really mattered to him -- were God and family. I think he must have felt that if he still had God and his family, he still had everything that was important to him.

I guess that every little kid thinks that his dad is the best dad in the world. Over the years, I've learned from talking to a lot of people that a painful part of growing up is coming to the realization that your father isn't everything that you thought he was, that he has shortcomings as a parent. That was something I never had to deal with. On the one or two occasions when -- with great provocation -- my father got mad at me, he later came and apologized to me for having lost his temper. That was a great lesson for me.

My father was always such a kind and caring and supportive and just such a good man that I always have known, and always will know, that he was the best Dad anyone could have. And I am extremely grateful for that, and for him.

After the ceremony, my brother thanked me for having spoken and said, "I couldn't have gotten any of that out today."

I think I have learned a few things from all of this. I doubt any of them are especially insightful or even remotely original, but I'm going to write them down anyway.

It is acceptable, and even therapeutic, to cry in public, but you want to choose your venues carefully, if you can. I do not have such an exaggerated sense of dignity that I'm embarrassed about crying when I have good cause, but it can make other people uncomfortable if they don't know you, because they have no idea how to respond. V. offered to take me home after the second act of the opera, but I figured I would rather sit through the third act because you can cry in a dark theater and no one will notice. Also, crying at the final act of an opera is highly appropriate because someone's almost certainly dying on stage, either dramatically or vocally. I also wept copiously during a portion of choir practice that week, when we were singing something either very sensitive or a little bit sappy, depending on your point of view.

It is also a good idea to spend some time alone with your grief. I went into the office for a couple of hours on the day after my father died, and it was a big mistake. Everything was so recent and raw that the slightest expression of condolence was enough to set me off. I ended up closing my office door and taking care of what I needed to do in order to be out of the office for a few days, then escaping. It would have been better to call my boss, explain the situation to him, and then come in late at night for a few hours when nobody was around.

Moping is another appropriate form of grieving. I had a couple of days off where there wasn't much for me to do but make airline and hotel reservations and the occasional familial phone call. It was really better for me to sit around the house and not have to worry about retaining my composure and watch crappy TV than to try to go out and do something.

Distraction is good, too. YFU was with me the night after my father died, and we were both pretty tender, so I took her to her favorite Chinese restaurant. Then we went to see Scott Pilgrim v. the World. I was reminded of the time when I was still undivorced but freshly separated and out, and I fell in love with a man for the very first time, and he broke my heart, and after three or four days of unrelieved moping, I walked into a movie theater and saw Notting Hill and for two hours did not think once about my sad situation. Ever since, I have not been able to think ill of Julia Roberts (not that I am aware of any particular reason she has given me to). Similarly, I have no idea whether Scott Pilgrim v. the World is a good movie (I suspect it may be), but it was terrific at that moment. I did still manage to find Michael Cera annoying, however.

Talking about the person who died is especially helpful. It's also hard, but most effective therapies are not easy. It's a good idea to start with little things you remember, and to start with the people who are closest to you, so you feel safe. Over time, it has become easier to talk about Dad with people whom I don't know all that well but who want to offer condolences. Those things were impossible to hear in the immediate aftermath, but the more I've discussed it, the easier it's gotten, and the less painful everything has felt. Besides, people want to be remembered, especially if you remember them fondly.

All of the traditional things that people do are helpful, too. When I was younger, I really didn't much see the point of a funeral or memorial service. (I still don't see the point of an open casket service. Ugh.) And I thought that all that sitting around and eating was pointless. But being with your family and friends is both comforting and therapeutic. And to eat you have to cook, which gives you something easy to do. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my sister, and I found it immensely comforting. Hearing other people say kind words about my father at the service only reinforced what I already knew, but that reinforcement was balm.

Mourning is not a time for discipline and denial. If you want to take a thirty-minute shower, go ahead. Eat the cake and the ice cream and don't beat yourself up about it. When we were in Florida, a bunch of us took a trip to an outlet mall, nominally to get a few things that YFU and EFU needed for the memorial service. I ended up buying them a bunch of other things, too. Buying things or eating things or long showers don't heal your grief. Time heals your grief, and you're just buying time, and that is OK. Your normal responsibilities and self-denial will come back soon enough.

Similarly, you don't want to deny anyone else their comforts. When I talked to my mother late on the night my father had died, she told me that my father had been "called home" and that "God had finally finished polishing his crown." I spent a lot of time when I was in Florida having to smile in the face of evangelical Christianity at its most aggressive. Any number of people wanted to pray with me, and I let them. The prayers themselves don't make me feel better, but the intention behind them do, mostly. I actually took great comfort from listening to and singing the very Christian music at the memorial service, even though when the minister gave the call to salvation (as my father had requested; I did not respond: sorry, Dad), I thought to myself that it was all horse shit. The only time any of the religiosity bothered me was when it got exclusive. As I was explaining to the girls in the car after the service, I think it's great when Christians derive comfort from their religion. It's their insistence of evangelicals that everyone else is going to hell that bugs me. The mixture of "God is love" and "God will send you to burn in a fiery pit for all eternity" is really not helpful. Right after the service, EFU wanted to stop at a store to pick something up. There had been a brief, intense downpour during the service, and there was a rainbow as we drove up to the store, then another downpour. I drove up to the awning and let the girls out, then went and parked and waited for the rain to stop or lessen, and I thought about the rainbow and the story of Noah, and I thought, "Yeah, God destroyed almost all of humanity, but he sent us this pretty rainbow, so we're square, right?" I was angry for a minute, but it's hard to stay mad at somebody you don't believe in.

Walking on the beach is always good. I guess I've mentioned that before. We were set to fly back on Monday afternoon (I managed to get all three of us on the same flight to Baltimore, and then I got EFU a connecting flight on to Manchester. It was good to be together as much as possible.), so I got up early Monday morning and drove out to the beach for a brief walk. I only had a half hour, but it was really nice to be on the beach when the sun was low and the people were few and the birds were numerous. It seemed like a good opportunity to cast some grief off into wide open spaces. Moping, weeping, talking, spending time with family, diversion, self-indulgence, walking on the beach. Grief is a big thing: you have to throw anything and everything at it that might work.

Kind words, from any source, are especially helpful. It is amazing how sympathetic people can be and how even the simplest form of condolence can help you to feel better. Especially the condolences of people who've been through the same thing. I'm very grateful for all the kindness that I've received, and I hope that the entire experience will make me more mindful of the grief and suffering of others, and that I'll do what I can to lessen someone else's grief, however slightly, when the opportunity arises.

Life and Death in Bradenton

2010-09-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

I had taken the last week in August off, it being the only week during the summer that YFU didn't have full with summer school. (She had decided to take Geometry in the summer before high school so she wouldn't have to take it during high school. I had warned her that her classmates would likely be people who were taking it a second time as a result of having failed it, but she didn't care. She found the class ridiculously easy, and enjoyed spending time with people for whom academics are not a priority, so I guess it really was good education.) We spent a few days doing things locally, but I thought we had better take a trip to Florida to see my parents. My father had gone into a rehab facility for physical therapy and general care when my mother was no longer able to take care of him, and though he had sounded fully alert in the earlier part of the summer, two side trips from the nursing home to the hospital (one for a MRSA, the second for acute anemia and a possible UTI) had left him weak and occasionally delusional, though his mental faculties had returned whenever he'd been given a transfusion. His cancer, and its treatment, have taken erratic turns, and I worried that if we didn't go right then, we might not see him again.

We flew down Wednesday morning, picked up the rental car, and drove to my parents' house to say hello to my mother, then we headed over to the hospital, where he'd been for four or five days.

My father was barely recognizable; in fact, when I got to his room, I had to check the admissions bracelet on his wrist to be sure that the withered old man sleeping in the hospital bed was Dad. I had known for more than a year that he was dying, but what I had known before, I suddenly felt. It was the first acutely painful moment of a trip that was full of them.

As gently as I could, I woke him up, and he was very glad to see us, though it was a few minutes before he realized that YFU was there, even though I'd told him immediately. His nurse told us that he had recently had a Percocet and likely wouldn't be able to stay awake long. I sat next to his bed and talked to him and tried not to cry whenever he was awake. After about forty-five minutes, we got back in the rental car and returned to the house to see Mom.

My mother refuses to accept my father's illness, or at least his frailty. She gets angry when he doesn't answer the phone in his hospital room, and when I reminded her that he was too week even to feed himself, she says that he just isn't trying. Her short temper is difficult to accept, even when I think how much harder all this must be for her than it is for me. I only see my father a few times a year, and I'm devastated by his illness. She has spent the last sixty years with him, and who knows how she'll fare alone? YFU, on the other hand, seemed mostly unfazed by my father's frailty and ghostly appearance. But she never really knew the man I knew and probably can't understand how insubstantial a shadow of his former self he's become. It was not especially difficult for me when my grandparents died, and if I'm fortunate enough to have grandchildren, I reckon it won't be all that hard on them when I go.

By the time we returned to the house, it was nearly 6, and my mother had dinner ready. We were all tired, but it was a pleasant enough meal. I cleaned up the dishes afterward, and my mother went to answer email. YFU and I watched TV for a while and played with my mother's Shih Tzu. In the past, I have not especially appreciated the breed, as its appearance seems to bespeak a certain amount of fussiness not entirely unassociated with gay men. We were with my mother when she acquired this particular dog, as a puppy, and we had lobbied for Spike as a name. She had settled on Otis, which seemed like it would do nothing to counteract any fussy tendencies. Fortunately, however, Spike's hair had been cut short, giving him much less of a Shih Tzu look. He was also very friendly, especially with me. I found it comforting throughout our visit to play with a small animal.

My mother joined us and began to tell me about my aunt B., who is my mother's youngest sister. She lives alone in Orlando, having become estranged from her own children during her husband's final illness -- cancer, again -- last year. I do not understand the details, but apparently when he died, he managed to leave her without any funds or survivor's benefits, and now she is angry. I have not seen aunt B. in a number of years, but if memory serves, she was never very far from angry. My mother tells me that aunt B. has decided to take up Internet dating, in the hopes of finding men who will take her to dinner without demanding sex. Apparently, the endeavor is not going so well: her first date arrived at her house and suggested that they have sex first "to get it over with," and when my aunt demurred, he informed her that he had already taken a pill, to which she replied, "Then I guess you're going to be walking funny, and I'm going to laugh at you." To his credit, perhaps, he took her to dinner anyway, but she has not heard from him since. I suggest that -- personality not being my aunt's strongest suit -- she might want to loosen up on the dinner-only position, and my mother explains that my aunt is self-conscious about her body. I suggest leaving the lights off. My mother says that she'll pass the suggestion along, and it sounds like a joke but probably isn't.

Before going to bed, my mother tells me that my aunt N.'s first husband recently passed away. Cancer, again. I have not seen him in probably forty years, and the only memory I have of him is that in his and my aunt's house, he had pictures of himself in full Klan regalia. Apparently, he was very abusive towards my aunt, though only when he was drunk, so: all the time. My aunt N.'s second husband died ten years ago. I don't recall of what.

On Thursday morning, we sleep late, and when we get up, my mother has already gone to the hospital to visit Dad, so I take YFU out for a late breakfast. My mother returns from the hospital and makes some phone calls about getting my father -- who has received his transfusion and does not have a UTI -- back to the nursing home. Then she takes us to the cemetery where her and my father's ashes will sit after they're dead. It is a nice enough place, I suppose, though perhaps nicer when it's not August and there haven't been recent thunderstorms dumping inches of rain. There is still a lot of room for ashes and markers, but I suppose dying people are never really in short supply.

There are several receptacle/display options, including these sort of mini-wall crypts where, apparently, they drill a hole in the marble, put the ash container and ashes in, and then cover the hole over with a plaque. And perhaps a marble plug under the plaque: I didn't think to ask about the particulars. The wall crypts are very efficient, being able to handle the ashes of perhaps one hundred or more people in something not much bigger than a modest-sized display at a trade show.

The ashes of my great aunt, who died this summer, and her two daughters, rest in or beneath a family bench, upon which is also carved the name and year of birth of my great uncle. He is a man of noted parsimony, and it is a bit surprising that he was willing to pay a separate engraving fee to have his own year of death engraved after the fact. Perhaps he has resigned himself to the notion that you can't take it with you, but I would have expected him to have a target date (perhaps 2030: he is only 85, and it is unlikely that either Jehovah or Lucifer is particularly eager to have him) engraved and and figure that it was close enough. Sadly, he will be the last of his family to die, and it is unlikely that many people will visit his family ashes bench after he passes -- unless it's to gloat, but who would bother?. My great aunt was an especially vibrant person, even well into her eighties, and even after the deaths of both her daughters. I think that as bad as it is to have a father dying, it must be far worse to lose a child. I suppose that must be the gold standard of grief, worse even than a messy divorce, which, in turn, is worse than losing a beloved parent. So far, anyway.

The interment bench strikes me as an odd choice: people stand at graves, they kneel at graves, and occasionally someone comes to dance on a grave, but who sits on a grave, let alone on the grave of an entire deceased family? The wall crypt is perhaps slightly less odd, but my mother seems a bit unsettled at the notion of not having any control over whom she's buried next to. There are a great many people (both individuals and types of people) whom my mother would deem objectionable in this regard, but she seems to care less and less about this sort of thing as time goes by. She does care about being cremated, however. I was a bit surprised at her choice (less so at my father's agreeing to it since he defers to her in almost everything, and he may feel fortunate that he's one of the few people she is willing to be interred next to; let us hope she doesn't change her mind), but she explained to me that it's because she doesn't want anything crawling in and out of her eye sockets after she's dead. I guess it isn't particularly surprising that people choose their personal disposal options based on what they fear least.

After the cemetery visit, I send YFU off shopping with Mom, so I can go see Dad by myself. He is, over all, a little more alert, but still very wilted. When I get there, he's sitting in his recliner, with his uneaten lunch on a tray in front of him. He isn't able to feed himself, so I feed him as much of his lunch as he can eat, which isn't all that much, really. We start with the lemon meringue pie because, well, why not? Helping him eat gives me something productive to do, which is good, but yet another reminder of his overall state of helplessness is hard to take. He wants to get back into his bed, and a nurse, a nurse's aide, and an orderly move him from his recliner and check the dressing on his back.

After they leave, I pull up a chair and sit next to him. What he likes most is having his hand held and his head stroked. He keeps saying, over and over, "That feels so good." He is so grateful. He has worked so hard for everything and has had much misfortune and pain in his life, but it takes so little to make him happy. I wish I were ever as good as he has always been.

He seems like he's falling asleep, and I want to do something else for him, and the only thing I can think of is a hymn. I'm too shaky to sing, but I hum a couple of verses of "Precious Lord," which -- aside from not being a hymn he's really used to -- makes me feel at first ridiculously self-conscious, but he is obviously appreciating it, and I am glad that I can do something, but it just gets harder and harder the longer I hum. It is not so good, strategically, to bring music into a situation when I'm already just barely holding back tears. Clearly, I can handle a little more emotional trauma if it makes Dad feel better, but when I get to the end of the second verse, he starts to speak, and I can tell he is about to tell me how good hearing the music makes him feel, and I know that I am about to dissolve into a puddle of saline when we are interrupted by the arrival of his urologist and the nurse.

My dad had seen the urologist (inappropriately, I couldn't help noticing how cute the doctor was; alas) just a few weeks before, but after examining my father, he is visibly affected by how much weaker Dad looks. I try not to think about his reaction. I sit with my father another fifteen minutes, stroking his head and hearing him say "That feels so good," until he falls asleep. I go out to the car and cry behind my sunglasses, thinking of the urologist's reaction. And everything else.

When I return to my parent's house, I am very unsettled, and I want the solace of wide open spaces, for which nothing is better than the sea. It is late in the day, and no one else wants to go, so I make the drive alone. The beach is nearly empty, and I find a parking space immediately after turning off the highway. I have not packed any beach-appropriate footwear, so I take off my trainers and socks and carry them with me as I walk in and out of the water.

I don't have much time, and I end up walking only two jetties down. Standing on the first jetty is a group of impossibly young and attractive men who appear to be university students from Germany. They are likely not thinking about death. I watch the birds and stop to pick up a shell fragment, then stand there, slowly sinking ankle deep into the sand as the waves move in and out. There is a nice breeze, and the sun is low, and it's the first time Florida hasn't seemed oppressively hot and damp.

I would have liked to stay there longer, but I reckon that while you can never get too much of the ocean -- if you lived there, being on the beach every day for hours would still be helpful -- it takes not very long to get just enough. In any case, I feel better. The expansive vast, the water, the birds, the sand, the people, they all merge together into something like the collective unconscious which is the closest thing I have to god. I am grateful to have it for comfort. And I am grateful that Dad gets comfort from a personal god.

Sadly, a personal god makes no sense to me in a context of monotheism. For that matter, it doesn't make any sense in a context of ordinary polytheism. I think it requires massive multitheism at a level even greater than the most massive of massive multiplayer role playing games, which is something that I shouldn't say, given that I don't really understand the whole MMORPG concept, let alone its scale, but I can really only get behind a personal god concept if I posit a personal god for each fundamental unit of the universe. And I don't mean a sort of typical animism, like "there is god in this rock," because while that's certainly among the best practical attempts at massive multitheism, it doesn't go nearly far enough. Sadly, I don't even know what the fundamental unit is. In the past, I suppose we might have posited a god for each atom and then a god for each proton, neutron, or electron, but I feel confident that we've gone further in and farther down, even though I don't know where we are now. Quarks? Strings? Something more detailed than that? I used to fear that my unwillingness and/or inability to keep up with happenings on the frontiers of science would be enough for the faculty of my undergraduate institution to pull my bachelor of science degree, but if that hasn't happened yet, it isn't likely to. Anyway, let's just say, for the sake of willful ignorance, that the fundamental unit is a string; in that case, I'm prepared to accept, if not exactly believe, that each string has its own personal deity. I have no idea how many strings are in, say, an atom of carbon, and an attempt to find out has left me a) with a headache and b) wondering whether the question is even meaningful, let alone answerable, but let's say the number is, well, a lot. So that the number of strings in a small stone would be, well, a whole lot. And for anything out of the ordinary, anything supernatural, anything divine to happen, you need consensus among the various deities associated with each string of each atom of that rock. This is, perhaps, similar to the concept of Brownian motion [you should discount all of this, or at least the specific terms, based on how little attention I actually paid during my Freshman physics classes] and the rather insane odds that if a physics professor standing in front of a classroom dropped a tennis ball, all (or enough) of the subatomic particles in the tennis ball would move up at the same time thereby counteracting gravity and causing the tennis ball to go up rather than down. I do not remember the odds, but I have seen physics lecturers write the odds on the blackboard and then drop a tennis ball. And it did, in fact, go up, but only after it fell and bounced, which, I am given to understand, is the result of simple mechanics, rather than Brownian motion. Anyway, if we posit massive multitheism, we have to go even farther and figure that the stone lying there on the beach will not throw itself unless we can get the deity of every string within the stone to agree to this action, and given the animosities that cannot help arising among absolute rulers of itty bitty kingdoms, the probability is quite low indeed. This would certainly explain inertia.

That evening, my mother wants to take us to dinner, so we get in the car and drive up Route 70 a couple of exits to the Anna Maria Oyster Bar. My mother fears that we might have trouble getting a table at 8:30 on a Friday night, but I tell her that since it is in fact a Thursday night, the point is probably moot. And, in fact, the restaurant is mostly empty.

Because I want to show my support for the local economy after the Deepwater Horizon incident, I order fried Gulf shrimp. I have not ordered fried shrimp in many years, since there are almost always more tempting items on a seafood menu, but I recall that when I was a child, we would often visit my grandparents in the Norfolk area, and many of these trips would include a stop at a restaurant whose name momentarily escapes me, and I invariably ordered fried shrimp, which seemed like the biggest treat in the world when I was ten. I mention this to my mother, and she tells me that the restaurant closed down many years ago, something I already knew because she we have had the same conversation before, more than once, though without the fried shrimp angle. When I visit my parents, I can sometimes go hours without hearing anything I haven't heard at least three times before. When I was younger, I found this annoying, but these days it's a little bit comforting.

My fried shrimp are very good, and completely free of any sort of petroleum product or taste, though they have clearly been cooked in oil of another sort. My mother also has the fried Gulf shrimp, which she can not finish. YFU struggles to choose between the popcorn shrimp and the garlic Alfredo until she realizes that the garlic Alfredo can be ordered with shrimp added. She enjoys the shrimp, but she does not much care for the Alfredo. I was surprised, as Alfredo is something that is very easy to get right, or at least right enough, but when I take a forkful of her entree, I realize that the sauce is really just a bechamel to which has been added some roasted garlic and half-hearted cheese. Fortunately, YFU is not one to whine over gustatory disappointments. I should be at least notionally outraged at the restaurants' playing bait-and-switch with Alfredo, but it is not something that I ever ate as a child, and there are more pressing matters demanding my worry.

Friday morning, we are greeted with the news that my father is being moved from the hospital back to the nursing home. He would rather be there than anywhere else at this time. A couple of months ago, he was ready to relocate to Texas to live with or at least near my sister, who would have been happy to have him, but he has given up on all that. As far as I can tell, he has pretty much given up on everything, which seems to me an entirely rational and reasonable response to the situation. A year ago he was in hospice care, and then he fought back with some chemo, and now I wonder whether he thinks the exercise was worthwhile, but of course I can't answer that. I already feel guilty enough because I don't think it was worthwhile; besides, I know he would say that it was. When he was better enough to be released from hospice, he credited God with healing him. I also know better than to say that God did rather an incomplete job of it. I am reminded of an interview I heard on NPR with a noted rabbi who had said that you can't really look at the universe without concluding that there are limits either to God's power or to his compassion. The rabbi felt that it was easier to believe that God was not omnipotent, but that belief is not an option for my father. I wonder whether he's troubled by God's lack of compassion. It is another thing that would be pointless to answer him. I want only for him to have peace, which he may have now and will certainly have soon.

There is some difficulty arranging the transport, so we have to wait until the afternoon to see him in the nursing home. My mother tells me that when, in her words, she gets to be too much trouble to handle, she wants us (her children) to put her somewhere where she isn't too much trouble. "Oh boy," I think to myself, "something else to look forward to." We're worried about making our flight on time, so we pack and put our luggage in the rental car before we head over to the nursing home.

When we get there, Dad is obviously happy to be back in his old room, and happy to see us, as well. We talk for a while, and various medical personnel come in to evaluate him and order him something to eat. My mother arrives a bit later and feeds him some of the fruit plate they've brought him. He likes the pineapple.

It is very crowded in the room -- I have to perch on a wheelchair -- and my mother's combination of solicitation and impatience is unsettling to me, but he seems not to notice it. We are there for not much more than an hour before it's time to leave to go back to the airport. It seems probable to me that I won't see him again, but I have already said everything that needed to be said back when I was sure that he could hear it, so I kiss him and tell him that I love him, and we say goodbye to Mom and leave the building.

Unfortunate weather had been our constant companion on this trip. Severe thunderstorms in Tampa had kept the plane grounded in Baltimore on Wednesday, and we were an hour late getting there. The rain had come down so hard during the drive to Mom's that I missed the exit. We had to wait for a slowing in the downpour to get out of the car at the hospital the first day, and when the rain finally let up, the humidity was crushing.

On Friday, the day seems fine, but as we got closer, on the long drive to the airport, the sky gets grayer, and there's lightning. The departures screen tells us the flight is still on time, but this turns out to be a lie. The plane has not even begun offloading its passengers from the previous flight when our scheduled departure time arrives. Once in the cabin, the pilot assures us that the weather is fine -- in Baltimore. And, indeed, most of the way there. Of course, the weather is always fine when you're above the clouds.

On the flight home, YFU reads Life of Pi, her summer reading assignment, which must be finished by Monday morning. She was reading it on the way down, while I slept and then read a few pages of Gravity's Rainbow, which had become my reading material for captive situations. I somehow left my copy on the southward flight when we deplaned. It's true I was a bit groggy, and anxious about the delay, but it's hard not to read more into my abandonment of Pynchon. How long will I keep trying? Surely I should just give up and read some Hardy instead. Thomas, that is, not the Boys.

Throughout the trip, I noticed frequently how mature YFU has become, both in looks and demeanor. My parents noticed it as well, my father exclaiming when she told him, on our first visit to the hospital, that she'd be starting high school in a few days. Seeing my dying father with my maturing daughter, and I thought of the ending of Metamorphosis:

While they amused themselves in this way, it struck Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they looked at their daughter, who was getting more animated all the time, how she had blossomed recently, in spite of all the troubles which had made her cheeks pale, into a beautiful and voluptuous young woman. Growing more silent and almost unconsciously understanding each other in their glances, they thought that the time was now at hand to seek out a good honest man for her. And it was something of a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey their daughter stood up first and stretched her young body.

There is at least some sense of continuation to go along with the grief. Knowing this helps me bear what cannot help but be borne.

Inevitably, I think about the accelerating passage of time: no one knows where it goes. YFU is still young enough for a year to seem like a long time. I have known at least since college that time is a fugitive, but what I knew then, I feel now. My mother told me that my father wanted to live longer than his own father, who died a few months short of his own 78th birthday. My father's 79th birthday was today, so I suppose he succeeded, though it seems not to be the sort of thing that he'd care much about. My grandfather died nearly 30 years ago, and that seems like much longer ago than yesterday, but during the discussion of burial places, my mother mentioned that her mother had been dead a dozen years, and even though in the time since I've come out, gotten divorced, and had and lost a partner, it seems that there's hardly been time for a loaf of bread to go stale. YFU will be in and out of college before I know it. On the flight back, she leans her head on my shoulder while she reads, and -- yet again -- it's nearly more than I can bear; still, it's wonderful.

Works in Progress

2010-06-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

It's tempting to say that getting my home the way I want it is taking a long time because I'm trying to balance the desire to get things just so with the desire to be able to entertain people, and that might be true, but it ignores the much larger considerations: a) I'm really not that picky, and b) I'm lazy. Or I have other priorities: take your pick. Regardless, I have been making some progress, and the areas of progress include a couple of things that I built myself.

Despite having done my best to cull the herd before moving, and despite the losses suffered in the basement flood of '09, I still have some books, where "some books" means more than most people but a shockingly small proportion of what I used to own. Still, they needed to be housed, and rather than give yet more of my money to Ikea (which probably doesn't need it as much as I do), I thought I would build something.

The idea of something other than more bookshelf holding up one's bookshelves is not original to me, of course. In college, I had planks of wood layered with cinderblocks. Immediately after college, I had the same thing, when more affluent people had moved along to glass bricks. Glass bricks still make a great, albeit costly, support, of course, but the last time I was living on my own (maybe six years ago), I decided to try other things for supports. I considered all manner of options before arriving at bottles. The environmental and aesthetic benefits of bottles are fairly obvious, but I was also glad to have an excuse to buy expensive seltzer water.

Back in the day, I used Blu Italy bottles, and they were very pretty, but not long after I bought this house, I happened to find myself in a Costco in Northern Virginia, and I came home with a case of Acqua Panna, a very tasty Italian water that comes in very attractive bottles. I regularly purchase, mostly for EFU's benefit, Pellegrino, and between a case of the AP and two cases of Pellegrino, I had plenty of bottles.

The construction on these shelves is extremely simple, but it still took a while, and only got finished when I decided that I really did like the look of unfinished wood, after all. I'm sure I'll find another use for the quart of stain and the quart of clear acrylic, though.

Aside from the bottles, the only things necessary to build these shelves are some wood planks, a dowel, and wood glue. I originally wanted a tight-fitting dowel, so I purchased a dowel just slightly larger than the inside diameter of the bottleneck. And then I began to sand, and I sanded, and I sanded, and I sanded, and I went back to Home Depot, and I bought a dowel just slightly smaller than the inside of the bottleneck, and I came home, and I cut, and I marked, and I glued. The planks are six feet long and ten inches wide. I wanted the ends of the shelves to stagger somewhat, so I glued a pair of dowel pieces four inches from one end and twelve inches from the other end of each plank. I flipped half of the planks around when the glue was dry. Then I yelled for YFU, and together we started assembling the shelves. Alas, I was a bottle short for the plan I wanted, so I had to regroup, and then I had to reassemble the shelves when no one else was around. That part was a bit dicey because the shelves, which are extremely stable once loaded with books, give the impression of wanting to jump when they're empty. But I persevered, and I soon had six shelves together, without major incident. At least until I put the books on, at which point it became clear that I needed another bottle in the middle of each shelf, to counter bowing. But that was pretty easy to do, and I soon had a set of bookshelves that I'm very fond of.

Organizing the books, of course, was another matter entirely, and the "other European author" section is still horribly disorganized. Also, there are still more books in boxes, so they don't quite all fit, but I got at least 80% of my boxes empty and stored in the basement, so that I can actually walk around my office/library/computer room most of the time now, and that's a good thing.

Speaking of unfurnished furniture, behold my new bed. My old bed, which was due for replacement anyway, broke a couple of weeks ago, and I'm not quite sure exactly how that happened, even though I was there when it happened, and even though there was another witness present. Regardless, I considered my options and decided that the best way to balance economy with a desire to own more power tools was to build my own bed out of 2x4s.

I know nothing about building beds, of course, so I went over to the Instructables site and looked at what they had. And what they had wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I did get some very good advice from someone who had built a similar bed: don't overengineer it. So I made a sketch on a piece of scrap paper, and I headed to Home Depot with EFU and, more importantly, her station wagon, and I came home with a ten-inch miter saw, a sander, a box of screws, an assortment of bolts, and six eight-foot two-by-fours. I took everything to the basement, I measured, I cut, I drilled, I screwed, I swore, I brought partially assembled bed parts upstairs, I drilled and screwed and swore some more, and soon I had a frame upon which to affix the platform slats that I had saved from the prior bed.

The whole thing took about half a day, but I ended up with an extraordinarily sturdy bed. I still need to change out some of the nuts for locknuts, and I misjudged the height somewhat, but having to climb into bed is good exercise, right? Alternatively, in the future, I can always date high jumpers.

In addition to making a bed that is very strong, building my own allowed me to add some uncommon features. For example, at each corner, and in the center foot of the bed, instead of using two regular bolts, I used one regular bolt and one eye bolt. This gives me a place to fasten things to if I ever need to secure something to the bed. Like balloons, for instance. A bed should be a festive place after all.

I get that a bed platform made out of unfinished 2x4s isn't for everyone, but if you don't count the cost of the power tools, which I will use again (I already have projects planned), the cost of the materials for the bed was less than $30. So until I'm ready to spend the money on the bed of my dreams, this one is pretty cool.

Unified Dating Theory

2010-06-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

I accidentally ended up on a date a couple of weeks ago. It turned out pretty well, but I feel like inadvertent dating is the sort of rookie error that I should have learned to avoid ten years ago. Still, nobody's perfect, I reckon.

As ever, it is important to define one's terms. There are, as I'm sure many of you are aware, a nearly limitless number of ways in which two men can interact, but for our present purposes, let's consider two broad categories: the social and the sexual. Under the social column (hereinafter column A), we have things like extended conversation, meeting for coffee, catching a movie, and going out for dinner -- all of which are perfectly respectable, and fun, activities. Under the sexual column (aka column B), we have things like holding hands, making out, and, well, this is not the particular venue in which I want to get too graphic, so just use your ~~filthy, filthy minds~~ imaginations. All of these activities are (or at least can and should be) perfectly fun, though they may not all be perfectly respectable. Some people, indeed, have posited an inverse relationship between fun and respectability, but I offer no opinion on that supposition except to say that if it is true, then it is almost certainly also an oversimplification.

Anyway, it's pretty easy to determine which activities go within each group, and in cases where an activity might be considered theoretically ambiguous (you might, for example, give a shoulder massage to someone with either sort of motivation), in practice, you always know what's what. If your activities with a particular person on a particular occasion are purely social, then you're hanging out with a friend. If your activities are purely sexual, then you're hooking up. If your activities are something from column A and something from column B (I believe the column A/column B meme is still reasonably common, but I was unable to find any current examples of the menus from which it springs. Back in the day, if you went to many Chinese restaurants, there was a group dining option where, depending on the number of diners, you chose a certain number of dishes from each column to get a communal meal. It must have made splitting the check easier.), then you're on a date.

And your activities have to be intentionally mixed, which is to say that you can't hook up with someone and then turn it into a date by having a conversation, of whatever length, in the afterglow. Or even in the glow, for that matter. If you invite someone over for horizontal quality time, and you somehow discover a common interest in Dickens, discussing Our Mutual Friend while you're making out doesn't transform the hook-up into anything else.¹ Though I suppose you could always go on a date later, and, in fact, you probably should if you happen to run into a fellow Dickens lover, though you might want to keep a close eye on your facsimile edition of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

Anyway, I traded some messages with a guy whom I found on a gay social networking application that is popular with iPhone users. This particular app is dedicated to the pursuit of column B activities, but it mostly manages to annoy me because most of the people who are on there pretend that they're there for column A. I tend to think this posturing exists because a lot of gay men are stupid enough to think that if they post a shirtless picture showing off their flawless torsos but say "Partnered and just looking for friends" in their profile, then their partners are stupid enough to believe them. This is not the case, but whatever: I should really not get started (and I really don't judge on moral grounds; aesthetic considerations are another matter, however). This particular guy claimed to be looking for both columns, not necessarily in the same guy, and while that would normally have made me roll my eyes, he had a sense of humor and a Ph.D., so I was willing to make some allowances. More to the point, he likes to cook, and he lives within walking distance of my house, so -- when he gave no indication whatsoever of any sort of column B interest -- I invited him to my place for dinner. These days, I'm doing my best to keep the columns separated, and while I haven't been entirely successful, I couldn't help figuring that having a food-friendly friend within walking distance would be better than having a random hook-up, it being the sad but undeniable fact that worthwhile -- albeit transitory -- column B companions are in much greater supply than their column A counterparts.

I hate dating, and I'm really bad at it. (These two facts may not be altogether unrelated.) I believe I have said before, only partly in jest, that the best reason to stay in a relationship is that if you become single, you might find yourself dating again at some point. But if I don't know I'm on a date, then I'm fine, so the evening went just swimmingly. I took the guy at his word when he said that he liked to eat, so I made some pickled Szechuan cucumbers as a pre-dinner snack, then for the main course, I cooked some very thick pork chops with mushrooms, rosemary, and red wine; some green beans boiled, shocked in ice water, and sauteed in butter; and a salad of chick peas, black beans, corn, tomatoes, and avocados in a cilantro-lime vinaigrette. Everything was delicious, though, uncharacteristically, the lemon pound cake that I made for dessert would have been borderline dry if it had not been well soaked in lemon syrup.

Anyway, the food was good, wine was consumed, and the conversation was funny and fluid and went into all sorts of subjects that I would never discuss on a date, but, hey, this guy wasn't interested in column B, so why not, right? But at some point, it's getting pretty late, and I'm surprised that he hasn't made noises about it being time to go home, and I'm feeling very content but also very tired and stuffed, and I look up from my plate, and he's giving me this look, and it suddenly occurs to me that a) he wants column B, and b) it's my responsibility to make the first move. At this point, I may have uttered an internal expletive, simply because this was not a situation I was looking to be in. I did realize, however, that in the universe of all possible situations, this was well above the median, and as I am not the sort of person to refuse a tasty bon bon when it is placed before me, I did my duty as a good host. I would say more, but I have always thought that detailed explanations of column B activities on the Internet are horrifically tacky.

I've been pretty good in the past at avoiding inadvertent dating, so I'm thinking this was an isolated incident. Nonetheless, I'm currently undertaking a thorough review of my policies and procedures to avoid this sort of columnar commingling in the future. I understand that a full report is due out in the fall.

¹Not that I would know anything about such matters, of course, but if you're going to discuss Our Mutual Friend, shouldn't you do so in the context of a threeway?

The Blogger Is Present

2010-06-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

I heard, via my online knowledge base, about the Marina Abramović thing (installation, performance, exhibit, whatever) at MoMA, and I thought it was silly. I am not really a visually oriented person, I don't follow the art world, I don't read the New York Times, my knowledge of performance art begins and ends with Laurie Anderson (I used to own a number of her records, on vinyl, and I saw her in performance in Boston back in the 1980s: it was a fun show.), and if the OKB hadn't mentioned her thing (presence, staring, whatever) at MoMA, I would surely not have been aware of it, much less taken the time (ok, three seconds) to formulate the opinion that it was silly.

For those of you similarly provincial and ignorant of the performance art world, The Artist is Present works like this: Marina Abramović wears a long dress and sits in a chair. Someone sits down opposite her. They stare at each other until the other person decides to leave or the museum closes. Then, unless the museum closes, another person takes the place opposite Ms. Abramović. Sometimes one or both of them cries. Nobody speaks. And that was it. It went on for seventy-two days.

I likely would not have taken more than the aforementioned three seconds to consider the whole shebang if someone hadn't pointed me to a Flickr set containing a picture of each and every person who sat opposite the artist. They are some seriously great photographs. (There is also one photo of the artist for each day that she sat, but those pictures don't do so much for me.) And it is apparent that the vast majority of these people didn't find the thing (installation, bench warming, ogling, whatever) at MoMA silly in the least.

I did a modicum of reading and discovered just how serious many of the attendees were about participating. In order to sit, people had to wait in a line, often for hours, without any assurance that they would ever get a turn. Some of them had to wait on line several days before getting to sit. And many of them appear to have been genuinely moved by the experience, which raises (but does not beg) the questions: if someone has a profound experience in response to something that's silly, does that make the experience any less profound? Does it make the stimulus any less silly?

The answer to both questions is no.

Having looked at hundreds of pictures, I'm unable to question the intensity of the experience for the majority of the attendees. There are, of course, some exceptions, probably beginning with the people who came to sit multiple times. Most notable among these was one guy who was there over and over again and sat, on one occasion, for the entire day. The people on line must have been livid, and, indeed, he has a couple of e-stalkers in the Flickr comments to his pictures. I'm sure most of these people (especially this woman, who sat about a dozen times) would claim that they returned again because of the intensity of the experience, but it appears that most of the multiples were performance artists. For example, I counted four different sittings forTehching Hsieh. I didn't know anything about Tehching Hsieh, either, before I saw him in the Flickr set, but the "Works" section in his Wikipedia entry makes me giggle. Or perhaps snort derisively, I really can't decide which. Four sittings really wasn't that many, and I only include the pictures because I think he's cute. (Yeah, whatever: like you never had an e-crush on an age-inappropriate performance artist.)

Anyway, despite the presence of people who were likely there, at least in part, to further their own agendas, it's clear that many people had a sincerely moving experience as part of the Marina Abramović thing (inertia, revelation, dust collecting, celebration, whatever) at MoMA, and I would be the last to deny them that experience. It seems to me entirely reasonable to wonder how much of the experience's movingness was due to the hype around the event and/or the long amount of time standing in line, combined with the desire to find meaning and/or the desire to see the emperor's new clothes, but none of that makes the experience less real if the participant perceived it as real, and moving.

But let's face it: it's still just some chick in a long dress sitting in one place and staring at people for hours on end (and, one presumes, being compensated for doing it). It's silly. I have honestly not bothered to go into all the reasons people will claim that it's not silly, but I can rattle a couple of likely candidates off: the Presence should be considered in the context of Marina Abramović's entire body of work, the Presence creates a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between the observer and the observed, and the Presence creates a response in the participants that gives the performance a sort of reciprocal value. I just don't buy any of these arguments. Talented artists, of all sorts, create crap stuff every day. Shakespeare wrote Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus, neither of which are worth performing (though, sadly, they occasionally still are performed) simply because he also wrote King Lear.

As for the audience-based arguments, well, let's just say that if you can have a profound experience staring at someone who stares back at you, you can have an equally profound experience staring at a blank wall, or a mirror, or a stained glass window. Especially a stained glass window, because what the people who stand on line to sit across from Marina Abramović are doing is, essentially, worshipping. I would go so far as to guess that a majority of the attendees are atheists and reject the notion of a higher being, but they are merely replacing one god with another. They are worshipping at the altar of art, and Marina Abramović is their idol. Or their Pope, depending on where you want to go with the metaphor.

For the record, I believe that everyone believes in something, whether they acknowledge it or not, and art is as good a thing to believe in as any, and perhaps better than most. I just probably wouldn't choose this particular so-called art, and I certainly wouldn't think that standing in line to stare at Ms. Abramović is any different than kneeling in a church, praying to the Blessed Virgin (or to whomever). They're both pretty much equally silly: it's just that one of them has had a couple of centuries to build a following and the other had twelve weeks or so at MoMA. I'm sure that, given enough time, Marina Abramović could build a much larger following, and get her own recognition as a church, along with the concomitant tax benefits.

None of this outrages me, particularly. I know that a significant number of people feel abused by organized religion and despise it in all forms, but once you realize that everyone worships something (even if it's just a vague notion of humanism, which is probably what I believe in: I can't be bothered to figure out exactly what I believe in), it's maybe more appropriate to be amused than angry, except perhaps when a particular religion and/or its devotees have done you harm or are trying to do you harm. (One supposes that a similarly high proportion of the sitters support gay marriage, something that can't be said for most of the kneelers.)

Anyway, the photographs are great. I liked them so much that I wanted many of them on my walls, which are still rather barer than they ought to be, so I downloaded bunches of them to see what I could do with them. As it happens, the pictures are very nearly square (787x783 pixels; cropping them to a 4x6 or 5x7 picture ruins them, to my eye), and Costco will do an 8x8 print for about a buck and a half, which is pretty cheap. But I didn't realize that option was available at first, and I also wanted a larger array of the photos, so I used Gimp to arrange twenty-four of the photos into a 4x6 set and sent the very large resulting file to Costco to print out as a 20x30 poster. My previous experience with Costco poster printing had not been entirely great, but I figured that might be because I'd used files that did not have sufficient resolution. And, indeed, the large photo array that I sent came out perfectly. I could not be happier with it, and it's going to look great on my living room wall, once I figure out just how I want to hang it. It cost $8.99, plus tax, which really is a price that just can't be beat. I also got a number of 4x6 prints of the same file (at thirteen cents a print!), so that I can use them as postcards.

You will notice a certain theme among the photos that I chose for the poster. When I showed the picture to my OKB, one of them asked me "Why glasses? And don't say 'Why not?'" Sadly, I didn't really have a better answer for him than that I just liked the way it looked, but I'm sure that if I were to worship at the altar of art, I would come up with something about how it was a comment on the nature of perception. Just like the photo at the top of this entry, which shows my everyday eyeglasses opposite some 3-D glasses that I picked up at a viewing of Avatar, sitting on top of my bed. The piece of lint in between them represents man's inhumanity to man.

Dads and Grads

2010-05-20T08:01:00.001-07:00

It's been a couple of weeks now since I went to New England to attend EFU's commencement from a small liberal arts college in Vermont. How small is it? Well, during the two days I was there, I probably heard fifty times that EFU's graduating class of 85 was the biggest graduating class ever. This proud announcement was almost always coupled with a warning: the graduation ceremony would be commensurately long. Long graduation ceremonies, it appears, are taxing on the students, faculty, and staff; on proud parents, not so much.

The paradox of time dictates that it must be true (and so it is) that my own college graduation happened a lifetime ago but that the intervening years have passed in the blink of an eye, and it was not so hard to remember my own commencement, which I would gladly have slept through, but which I attended to please my own proud parents. (EFU, similarly, would just as soon have spent the morning sleeping, but the similarities end there: I took a leave of absence during college and so took six years to finish up, and I only managed a respectable GPA -- we had a different term for it, as we did for everything -- by pulling straight As on every course in the two semesters following my return; EFU graduated in three years, and with honors. My parents' pride was based largely in cluelessness.) As you might expect, all that nostalgia combined with all that pride made for something of an emotional weekend, and, indeed, even now I can write about it only with some difficulty.

YFU -- who preferred to wield her iPod in my car rather than face the uncertain musical choices of her mother and stepfather -- rode with me to and from Vermont. I had taken Friday off and had meant to pick her up right after school and head north, but I had slept late, possibly due to having stayed up later than absolutely necessary the night before, and then had woken to the realization that my lawn was not likely to cut itself, so I had gone to the Home Depot and purchased a lawn mower. I brought it home, assembled it, and proceeded to nearly destroy it before sorting things out, but then the afternoon was nearly gone, and I had still to pack, and, well, it is too late to make a long story short, but we left the house a little before 7, stopping at an entirely nondescript motel in an entirely nondescript town in Connecticut (which some people have uncharitably described as a nondescript state, but I reckon that any state that has ever been represented by Joe Lieberman has already suffered enough), sometime around 3 the next morning.

After breakfast, we continued northward, and shortly after noon, we met up with EFU, and, lo, there was much rejoicing. Well, I rejoiced: EFU, having worked like a fiend to finish her thesis before the submission deadline, was enjoying some well-deserved sluggishness. (Almost literally: I was tempted to poor salt on her.) She roused herself at the mention of lunch, however, so we ate at a local diner and then headed into Brattleboro.

Brattleboro is an exceptionally charming small town, especially the southern part, which houses several used book stores and a great number of small gift shops with prices that seem unburdened by such trifling considerations as supply and demand. It is really just the sort of place where one would expect New England liberal arts-type liberals to congregate. I wondered momentarily why it is that I don't spend more time in such places, but I decided not to think about it, as there were other things to do. I thought instead that the town's policy to put its parking citations in pink envelopes was charming but perhaps incongruous.

We walked around town for a while, and I allowed both YFU and EFU to make small purchases at one of the less overpriced gift shops before we went to one of the used book stores. I recalled briefly just how many hours I used to spend in used book stores when I lived in the Boston area, and when (of course) I was much younger, but that sort of reflection rarely leads to anything good, and there were, after all, other things to be done, so I allowed myself only fifteen minutes and one purchase.

We had still not checked into our accommodations for the weekend. I was not planning to spend any significant amount of time in my room, which, as it turned out, I would be sharing with YFU, so I had gone to one of the nearly innumerable Internet travel sites and found what seemed like a very good rate on a room at a chain motel. The travel site likely didn't know that the Ramada was also hosting the Vermont gun show this weekend. The situation gave me a bit of pause, especially since the gun showroom was located immediately adjacent to the bar, but I had already and non-refundably paid for the room and, again, was not expecting to spend much time there, so we checked into the room, which was clean and otherwise unremarkable. As we were walking down the hallway, past the gun show, EFU noted, "Northern Brattleboro is very different from Southern Brattleboro." Indeed.

We had to be at the college around 4 for a trustees' reception for graduating seniors and their families, so we set off in the car. The college itself is located in a neighboring town that is so small as to seem to not quite exist, the town hall and some signage notwithstanding. The drive there is very pretty, especially in mid-May, when there are lilacs everywhere. And the college itself is very pretty, though at the same time it bears rather a strong resemblance to a summer camp.

In general, I would have no interest in attending a trustees' reception, and certainly neither EFU nor YFU would want to do so when they could be sleeping or reading (respectively), but in this particular case one of (and the youngest, apparently by a significant margin) the college's trustees turned out to be an online acquaintance whom I have known without ever having met for nearly ten years, off and on, so I had someone to talk to. I was loath to monopolize his time, but he apparently felt under no obligation to mingle, and I had no interest in making small talk with people who were virtual as well as actual strangers, so I spent a very pleasant hour chatting with him. Not surprisingly, he has a great deal of affection for the college, though he thought that it could use some cosmetic work. I told him that I found it entirely charming, though large parts of it could certainly pass for the sort of place where J.D. Salinger might hide from society. He told me that it doubles as a music camp during the summer.

EFU did not want to attend the community dinner that followed the reception (Because she's graduating in three years, most of her friends are juniors, and she doesn't feel that much of a kinship with her classmates. She told me that, not having wanted to make small talk, she arrived late to the senior dinner and had had to take the only seat remaining, next to the president of the college.), and my trustee friend told me that we would not be missing anything by skipping it. My ex-wife and her husband arrived right at the end of the reception and wanted to take EFU to meet her advisor. EFU didn't think her advisor would be in his office and wanted to go back to her cabin and then to dinner, so I said that I would meet her at the car in fifteen minutes. I took the opportunity to spend some time with the lilacs, of which I am inordinately fond, though much more so when they are on the tree than in any other context.

Fifteen minutes stretched to an hour, and I struggled a bit to maintain good humor, as I suspected that the delay was largely due to something my ex-wife wanted to do. It later turned out that the group had made its way to the library where my ex-wife had taken the opportunity to use the college's computers to spend nearly an hour reading her sister's website. This struck me as unnecessary. Fortunately, I still had the lilacs to look at. I also spent a significant amount of time listening to and watching some very colorful birds who refused to be photographed.

When the girls finally showed up, with apologies, we all returned to EFU's cabin. It was something of a mess, even though EFU had already spent a considerable amount of time packing. It seemed that the other four or five residents had not been similarly industrious. We headed back towards Brattleboro, to a restaurant of EFU's choosing. It was a sort of pan-Asian establishment that served a large number of highly sweetened and dangerously alcoholic beverages in pleasantly kitschy ceramic vessels. The food was very good, though. The decor relied heavily on pandas, provoking a discussion as to whether the panda is, indeed, a bear. My ex-wife was sure that it wasn't, but I was able to pull out my iPhone and consult the Internet, which had the twin benefits of making YFU complain about my iPhone boasting and proving my ex-wife incorrect on a matter of zoology.

I very much wanted to avoid being late to the ceremony the next day, as we had been warned that seating would be available on a first-come-first-served basis, so YFU and I turned in early. We got up on time the next morning and had a large and pleasant breakfast at another diner-type establishment near the motel, and then we set off for the college. I may have overestimated the amount of time we would need to get dressed and eat.

Fortunately, YFU had brought a GameBoy, and I had had the foresight, at breakfast, to download a game to my iPhone, cell phone service being spotty at best out in the wilds (EFU had spent much of the past several weeks having her sleep interrupted by a black bear who was showing an unhealthy level of interest in her cabin's trash) of Vermont. I spent the next forty-five minutes launching Angry Birds as the hall filled up.

Once the ceremony started, of course, I couldn't play any more games, so I had a lot of time to think. This was not so much true in the beginning, when there were a number of very good speeches, but the reason I had been repeatedly warned about the length of the ceremony is that when each student receives his or her neatly printed and enfoldered explanation as to why the diplomas are not yet ready, the president or the dean reads not only his or her name, but also a considerable amount of additional information about his or her field of study and thesis/project. It takes about thirty to forty-five seconds per graduate. The ways in which EFU and I are alike begin with our last names; unsurprisingly, the class was graduated alphabetically, which meant that EFU was the penultimate recipient of a bachelor's degree.

It is always a dangerous situation when I have a lot of time to think, and the danger is particularly compounded when so much nostalgia is wafting about. And things were only made worse by the excellent speeches. I could not help remembering my own graduation, or at least bits of it. From the whole day, I remember three bits distinctly: during the procession, my much-loved boss was standing next to the sidewalk watching us go by and gave me a flower; our graduation speaker was Lee Iacocca, whose commencement address was a sort of paean to protectionism; and when it was my turn to get my diploma (which, let's give MIT efficiency some credit, was my actual diploma), President Paul Gray had trouble picking mine out of the pile, and when I pointed to my name and said, "That's me," he had some trouble grasping the concept, and I very nearly had to fight for it before he realized it was indeed mine. That was the only conversation I ever had with him, by the way.

That is really not a lot to remember from a day that's meant to be momentous, and as I was sitting in the audience at EFU's graduation, listening to the senior class speaker, I couldn't help thinking that none of his classmates would forget who had spoken or what (generally) he had said. It was a very thoughtful speech with one paragraph that went just far enough astray to give my daughter and her friends something to joke about and remember, probably at least until their fiftieth reunion.

I experienced something very like longing during the main commencement address. The speaker was a local poet. She is, apparently, quite successful as a poet, though neither I nor my trustee friend had ever heard of her (but then, I could probably not name a single living poet: oh, the shame), and she spoke with great intensity and speed. Her speech included an exegesis of a well-known Frost poem ("After Apple Picking") and ended with a new, as yet unpublished, poem of her own, and it was so good and so moving that when it -- and her speech -- was over, I stood to applaud. (Days later, when I was home, I downloaded the recording of the ceremony and played the reading of that poem over and over so that I could transcribe it and have it, though I should certainly buy the book when it comes out.)

During the nearly endless reading of names and information that followed, I thought about the notion of private failure, which is a notion that I likely cadged from a years-ago short story in the New Yorker. It's the idea that successful, or even relatively successful, people reserve a measure of regret for the less remunerative road not taken¹. It was hard not to compare the profundity and presence of this poet, whose name I do not recall, with the inanity of Mr. Iacocca. Lee Iacocca was, when I graduated, a big deal, and I'm sure that most of the graduating class, and nearly all of their parents, were impressed to have him as a commencement speaker. But he had surely given the same address, with minor modifications, numerous other times, and he just as surely had not written it himself.

I couldn't help wondering, briefly, what would have happened if I had known about and considered a liberal arts education when I was in high school. I lived in a mostly upper middle class neighborhood, but my own family was solidly blue collar, and I had no guidance about applying to college. I ended up at MIT through a series of accidents, followed by a hard sell from the admissions office, and I certainly don't regret having gone there, but I couldn't help wondering whether, if I'd spent four years in the woods reading poetry, I mightn't have been among the bored faculty, wearing a set of robes instead of a jacket.

The question, of course, is always: at what cost? It's intellectually dishonest to pick and choose aspects of your life and think how they might be different if you'd done something differently twenty-five years ago. I can't posit the existence of a more engaging career without recognizing that the increased self-awareness that would have come with that option would likely have precluded having a family. Isn't there a line from Sundays in the Park with George about how the only things that have lasting value are children and art? I'm no artist.

It is possible to consider having made different choices and still having had a family, but every child is unique, and a product of a unique combination of sperm, egg, time, place, and history, and it is really no less unthinkable to me to consider having different children than it is to consider having none at all.

But all of that is the intellectual response to the intellectual longing for a life I never knew and would not choose in place of the one I have. There was no emotional longing for anything other than what is already mine, and the primary emotions of the day were joy, and pride. At least for me: I think EFU was mostly just feeling relief. I beamed as she nearly ran across the stage, as if she wanted to be sure that she got her tassel shifted before someone changed his or her mind.

EFU is always impatient to be moving on, so after we made a brief appearance at the reception, where her thesis advisor and one of her other examiners told me that EFU had truly earned her honors, we went back to her cabin and filled up my car, which EFU had instructed me to have as empty as possible. I had complied with her wishes, as I do whenever and insofar as possible, and soon the car was loaded down, leaving only room for YFU and I in the front seat. We left the college early in the afternoon and were safely restored to home and our quotidian existences before bedtime.

¹I have little patience for people who take Mr. Frost's poem in vain, and the next time anyone is tempted to set himself up as some sort of paragon of nonconformity by saying that he took the less traveled path, I hope that he will go and actually read the text of the poem. All it is really saying is that choosing between two nearly identical options will have profound and unforeseeable consequences. It's basically a poetic realization of chaos theory and the scientific notion of sensitivity to initial conditions.

Lost in Translation

2010-05-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

I spent much of this past weekend visiting a friend who owns a place in Rehoboth. He was there with his partner, who was recovering from shoulder surgery, and another friend of his whom I once found impossibly cute, but who now is merely possibly cute and so serves as a reminder that time and tide wait for no man.

I did not actually see any tide while I was there, the Delaware beaches not being among my favorite things. Also not among my favorite things are crowds, traffic, or shopping, so I typically only visit this friend, whom I have known for a good many years, only once during the summer and perhaps two or three times in the off season.

In any case, the weekend was mostly unremarkable. I got in very late Friday night because b&c and I had tickets to see American Buffalo at Studio Theatre. I didn't end up leaving Bethesda until nearly eleven, and then I stopped three times, mostly for caffeine, but also for gas and to put some air in one tire. I am a big fan of making the drive to Rehoboth very late at night, so long as I don't actually fall asleep at the wheel. There is a grittiness to the wee-hours combination of caffeine and fatigue that I find compelling, and the long empty roads through flat fields reminds me of trips to the Norfolk area to visit my grandparents when I was a small child and the Interstate highway system wasn't what it is today.

The last thing I did with my friends was to go to breakfast on Sunday morning, at Crystal Restaurant, an eating establishment that specializes in breakfast and lunch and is very popular with an orientationally diverse clientele. I was on my third cup of coffee and had just started into my blueberry pancakes, when my friend John picked up one of the lucite advertising stands sitting on the table and said, "Look at this! They're going to start serving dinner." There followed a discussion of the likelihood of Crystal being a good dinner place (it had, apparently, not done so well in the past), but I was intrigued by the advertisement itself:

I picked it up, stared for a moment, and then said, "Oh, look. Kristallnacht. There's a good idea." Two of my three breakfast companions didn't know what Kristallnacht was, and the third just shrugged. I was tempted to launch into a those-who-do-not-learn-the-lessons-of-history-are-doomed-to-repeat-them rant, but I didn't because a) I don't really believe that saying, except perhaps as it's applied to history classes, and b) I didn't want my pancakes to get cold.

We were done with breakfast before eleven, and I had packed my car before we had set out, so that when we got back to the house, I had only to say my goodbyes and head off. Under usual circumstances, I would have been home well before 2pm, but as it happens, I had -- just before leaving the office Friday night for dinner and the play with b&c -- downloaded my first iPhone app, a social networking application designed specifically for gay men, and whose name is derived from a word that is used as, among many other things, a New England regional term for a submarine sandwich. I have in the past pooh-poohed this app -- not least because it's misspelled, but also because I didn't have an iPhone -- as a non-productive time sink, but while marveling at its very existence and widespread use did eat up a not inconsiderable amount of time (and battery life!) over the weekend, it did not turn out to be entirely non-productive: several different gentlemen contacted me over the weekend, when I was not really in a position to make or receive social visits, so upon saying goodbye to my friends, I did pay a call on one of them and was thus delayed by about two hours.

When I finally got home (having had to stop and pick up YFU and some groceries) I noticed that another tree was in full bloom.

It's very pretty, and it has a pleasant, though not especially pronounced, scent.

Later in the evening, I had an opportunity to ponder the nature of online social networking when I turned on the same application and noticed that (unlike in Rehoboth where the expense tends to encourage a more mature and moneyed crowd, almost all the men who showed up on my iPhone as being within 1.5 miles of me were a) extremely attractive, and b) roughly half my age. Often less than half my age. Alas.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, and, especially given the relatively small amount of time I put into it, it was a lot more effective, and a lot less annoying, than Facebook, which I have -- beginning some time ago -- abandoned until such point as I can figure out a compelling reason to keep up with people who didn't especially like me in high school. Currently, I approve all friend requests but don't otherwise visit my page. Which may or may not be reflective of how I behaved in high school. My memories are a bit fuzzy.

Es Ist ein Ros Entsprungen

2010-05-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

I was reminded, yet again, of just how differentially aware I am of my surroundings a few days ago when, shortly after finishing a blog entry that mentioned how the roses would likely be coming soon, I walked outside and saw that my tall rose bush had two fully open, even slightly past their prime, blossoms on it. This is me, or one aspect of me, in a nutshell: I will spend minutes examining a single maple seed without taking note of the tree whence it fell. My memory works in a similar way: vast tracts of the past have been deemed unworthy of storage; irrelevant details remain. If I were able to go through my memory like a desk drawer, or a hard drive, I'd have said, "No, thank you, I don't really need that memory, I'd rather be able to remember more about EFU's third birthday, if it's all the same to you." I'm not uncomfortable with the notion of limited storage space (or limited attention), but I'm not so thrilled with the notion that what gets kept or thrown away is so arbitrary. It's like walking into the kitchen and finding that all of your knives have been discarded and you've been left with bags and bags of twist-ties.

Anyway, when I got over the shock of the rose, it was obvious that it needed some attention. Look:

Now imagine me standing there in front of it singing, "Lo, how a rose ere pruning" because that actually happened. Sadly, I couldn't think of any clever way to continue the song, so I stopped there, though the melody remained trapped in my head for a while. I'm revisiting it now, though with the German lyrics. Trust me: there are things you could have stuck in your head that are much worse. For example:

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes aah!

Deal with that one for a while! I have the impregnable armor of a 15th C. German song to protect me from the poisonously dulcet tones of Astrud Gilberto, but I suspect that you may not be so strong.

Anyway, I don't know from pruning roses, so I consulted my online knowledge base, which informed me that a) I was a little late in the year for pruning, b) I should go for it anyway, and c) I should prune the everloving hell out of my rose bush. The advice was to cut away anything that was smaller than a pencil. Also to get a good pair of gloves. Also that if I overpruned (unlikely, I was told), it would all grow back as long as the roots were healthy.

So last night, I stopped in at the local Home Depot, where I am a regular -- and not just because it's the best source of eye candy within two miles of my house -- and bought some pruning shears. I may or may not have made additional purchases: it is difficult to go into HD and not realize that there are things that you didn't know that you needed until that very moment but that at that very moment you understand you just can't live without. And then I came home, put on some gloves, took the safety off the shears and set to. Behold:

I left the two branches with blossoms, as well as one other that seemed especially promising, but otherwise, nothing on that bush is thinner than a Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencil. I also discovered that cotton gloves really are insufficient protection. I'm glad that bush is right outside my living/dining room window. I like to leave it open at night to cool the house down, and no burglar is going to get past those thorns.

I am given to understand that I should also deadhead the rosebush after the blossoms have passed their peak. I reckon that means I should find a) a forty-five minute version of "Uncle John's Band" and b) some weed, but as I have neither, I guess I'll just cut them off in a few days.

---------------

In other news, my cell phone was so clearly upon death's door a couple of weeks ago that I went out and bought an iPhone. I am now super cool; also, it is 2007.

I like the iPhone a lot, but I have to admit that the second best* thing about owning it is that it has made YFU insanely jealous. (EFU has not expressed jealousy, though when I responded to one of her emails from my iPhone, she called me back immediately to say, "You have an iPhone?" the implication, I believe, being that I am too old and/or unhip to own such a piece of equipment. Youth.) I may or may not have played to this jealousy. There are some rumors, which I can neither confirm nor deny, that I might have, on eight or fifteen occasions, been sitting with YFU in the car at a stop light and said, "Gee, it seems warm. I wonder how warm it is. Hey, I can find out with my iPhone!"

The goal for this week is to see how many times I can work, "You know, I bet there's an app for that" into the conversation. Ah, the joys of parenting and technology.

*The best thing being the ability to check all of my email accounts at once. The limit of ten accounts is unfortunate, but I'm making do.

Yard

2010-05-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday was b&c's birthday, so I took him out for dinner and a movie. Dinner was at Mandalay, a Burmese restaurant and one of our favorites, and the movie was 8 1/2, part of the Fellini retrospective currently showing at the AFI Silver, probably the best place to see movies in the Washington metro area, though the popcorn is usually not what it should be.

I had not seen 8 1/2 before, and b&c had not seen it since the 1960s, and it's a little on the long side, and my experience with Fellini has been decidedly mixed (the AFI is also showing Satyricon, but I've seen it before, and even I'm not dumb enough to make that mistake twice), so I was a bit nervous, but it turns out that in addition to being visually stunning (such beautiful women so lovingly photographed, and what would I not give to have Marcello Mastroiani's hair?), 8 1/2 is pretty much nonstop fun from start to finish.

Near the end, there's a scene where Guido has decided to abandon his film and is riding in a car with a film critic who is congratulating him on having made this decision, and the film critic says that it should be the practice of each of us to educate ourselves to silence: the less said the better, always. The scene is ironic, of course: this particular film critic never shuts up. Still, the statement has merit, even if the critic didn't.

"Silence" usually doesn't mean the absence of sound so much as it means the absence of speech, and I've had plenty not to talk about lately. The notion of owning a home is very unfamiliar to me, even though it's considered the essence of Americanness, and even though I've owned one before, though not by myself. It's a good sort of unfamiliarity, and there's something very stabilizing about it, even though the situation and the home itself are entirely new to me. I am unused to coming home to an empty place, and especially to an empty place that still needs so much work done to make it what I want it to be, but the simple fact that it's mine means a lot more than I'd expected it to.

What's perhaps even more unfamiliar than having a home of my own is having a yard of my own. And the yard is something that seems to engender even greater quantities of both happiness and shutting up than the house does.

I live on rather a busy street, so even in the back yard, there's never true silence, but at the same time there is. What I hear in the back yard is mostly the sussuration of semi-distant traffic, a noise not entirely unlike wind. It's almost as if the yard is whispering to itself.

And it's a lovely yard. In the very back, there are tall maples over ivy, with a large azalea thrown in. There are, in fact, azaleas all over the place, azaleas being a default landscaping plant in this area. You can get a good idea of their ages from their sizes, and I suspect that the neighbors azaleas (which inspire all manner of rhodo-envy) were planted in the fifties, at about the same time the house was built.

At this time of year, it's usual, whenever there's any breeze, to see maple seeds helicoptering their way down to the ground, like some sort of giant benign occupation. They are everywhere, and -- like so much of what comes from or into the back yard -- beautiful.

Spring is a time of rapid change, of course. The azaleas that were so beautiful a week ago are pretty much gone now, though the ones that get little or no sunlight during the day started blooming later and are still gorgeous. Similarly, the lilac bush, which I was so pleased to see, is no longer recognizably lilac, the flowers and scent having nearly entirely gone away for another year. It is good to have such constant reminders of the turning wheel: the forsythia came and went, then the azaleas and dogwood and lilacs, soon the roses, soon the autumn leaves, soon the snow again.

There have been birds, too: robins, and even cardinals.

I have been making some inroads on home improvement. For the most part, tax season left me with an intense desire to do nothing at all for a while, but I did manage to add some kitchen over-sink storage in the form of a hanging rack made from an Ikea curtain rod, and a drying rack made from a ClosetMaid shelf. (A miter box, a length of molding, some finish nails, and a hacksaw were also involved.) They keep the stove and countertops from being impossibly crowded. Also, having clean, drying/dry dishes hanging around not put away is very in keeping with my aesthetic. Or would be, if I had an aesthetic.

My other major HGTV project was to make two sets of identical curtains. And OMG y'all, nobody who actually owns a sewing machine (And, really, how did I come to own this sewing machine? It's not like I know what to do with it.) should be allowed to watch Project Runway: it leads to delusions of competence, and from there, to tears. It was one thing when I bought a few remnants of fabric, tore them (I never buy anything that can't be torn along a straight line) into lengths, and clipped them to the curtain rings. But this time, I decided I wanted color blocks, so I bought multiple fabrics, measured them, tore them into lengths, stitched them together, hemmed them, and clipped them to the curtain rings.

I really like the way they look, but sewing straight lines on a sewing machine is just way to complicated for me. I prefer my complications to be culinary, thank you very much, so I guess I'll just stick to making my own puff pastry and leave the sewing to Bravo or Lifetime or whoever it is. Lifetime, I reckon: Bravo is all Real Housewives these days, and you know those women have their curtains custom made, and, should they ever lose a button, they hand it off to a servant, who gives it to another servant, who repairs it before sending it back up the chain of command so that the so-called real housewife can have her picture taken while donating it to charity.

You can also see my new couch in that picture. It's red in a room of blue, and I like it a lot, too. I bought it from Overstock, and I had a bit of trepidation about that since they've been very good on everything else, but furniture? It arrived one day when EFU was home on spring break, and I arranged for her to be at the house. The UPS person helped her bring the boxes in, and she opened them and assembled the sofa all by herself! So I was expecting to come home from a long day at the office and assemble a sofa, but instead I came home and found her sitting on it. Impressive, but she's like that.

Forsythia Happens

2010-04-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Two things.

It is really nice to discover, after a brutal winter, that a couple of the bushes you didn't pay much attention to when you bought the house last fall, are fully exuberant forsythia. It is not so nice, though, to be reminded that you don't have the time to enjoy said forsythia because you're in the office whenever the sun is up. And it seems downright cruel that all of the yellow will be gone by the time I would have had time to enjoy it, so I'm thinking that, as much as I like forsythias, a landscaping change may be in order. At least the azaleas haven't bloomed yet. Yardwork is near the top of an impressively long list (including everything from auto maintenance to a haircut) of things that shouldn't -- but will have to -- wait until April 16.

Through what I assume was a matter of unintention, eHarmony appears to think that I am Jack (or at least that my email address belongs to Jack). Jack is apparently quite the catch since he potentially has deep compatibility with an impressive number of people, each of whom generates a separate email from eHarmony. In case you're wondering, eHarmony believes that I am interested in finding true love with someone who is

1. Nineteen to twenty-two years old
2. Located somewhere between DC and New York
3. Female

Well, I suppose one out of three is still better than nothing. I mentioned this to some friends of mine, one of whom quipped that these girls obviously are looking for the sort of love that only a gay, forty-something father of two can provide. Well, who isn't?

Haphazard - 1

2010-02-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in the splendid Prizzi's Honor where Kathleen Turner's and Jack Nicholson's characters are executing a hit, and in the middle of said hit, the elevator opens, and a woman walks on the scene. She gets a good look at Kathleen Turner, who then shoots her, though not before the woman mumbles something about being on the wrong floor. Ms. Turner (There is a rhetorical device whereby one refers to someone as a stand-in for someone else. I can't remember what it's called, but in this case, I'm using it by referreing to Kathleen Turner as a stand-in for her character in Prizzi's Honor because another thing I can't remember is the character's name.) is upset at having to kill someone whom she was not meant to (and is not being paid to) kill, but as she explains to Mr. Nicholson, she had to because this woman had "made" (i.e., was able to identify) her.

To this day, if I am in an elevator and either I or someone else pushes a button for a floor other than my, his, or her intended destination, I experience a mild spell of Prizziphobia, which I define as the fear of being killed by a professional assassin when the elevator stops at the wrong floor.

You might consider this more a quirk than a phobia, but the (or at least a) definition of phobia is "a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it." Persistent? More than twenty years now.

Irrational? Boy howdy. What, after all, are the odds of a hit in an office building in Bethesda, which is where the overwhelming majority of my elevator experience occurs? And even if there were a hit, what are the odds of my stumbling upon it. And we simply cannot ignore the likelihood that most paid assassins are neither as diligent nor as scrupulous as Ms. Turner: they probably just shoot into the elevator as it opens.

Compelling? Well, that's why I call it a mild case of Prizziphobia. (I'm not even going to argue about the appropriateness of the name. I will stipulate that I have no other organized-crime-related phobias.) If I had a moderate case, I'd likely start to shake, sweat, or breathe faster when someone says, "Sorry, wrong floor," and if I had a severe case, I'd likely avoid elevators altogether, which would be a real nuisance. But I only have a mild case, so when the elevator opens at the wrong floor, I stare at the ground. And I feel like an idiot, because I'm compelled to do so.

It almost seems a little sad this is the best I can do: I have no other phobias, or at least none that I'm aware of. I have a fairly strong startle reflex when, say, a bug drops on me or I come unexpectedly into contact with vermin, but it's just a reflex, I'm not afraid to examine the insect, reptile, rodent, or person bursting into my office after I climb back into my skin and/or get it out of my hair.

Ultimately, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Prizziphobia. People don't hit the wrong button all that often, and staring at the floor for a few seconds can't really be considered a major inconvenience. It certainly doesn't seem worth curing. Especially given that I can, if I really want to, overcome it. I can't help glancing at the floor, but I can, if I really want to, look up. I can, if I really want to, stare out the doors of the elevator and shout, "Bring it Kathleen!"

But I don't really want to. Besides, elevator floors are interesting.

Hell of a Town

2010-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

That's a view of the bus. To get from the DC area to New York, you have a number of options, but in terms of cost and convenience, you really can't beat the bus. Especially if you work in Bethesda and can leave your car in your office garage for free and then walk either across the street or a couple of blocks to where one of the bus lines leaves from. And if you go in the middle of the day, the trip takes about 3.5 hours. The Tripper bus gives you a bottle of water and free WiFi, too.

I was headed to New York to sing as part of the chorus in a production of Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. About twenty-five of the members of my church choir were going, and many of them were traveling together on a different bus, but that bus left from Rockville, nearer the church, so it wasn't as convenient for me. Besides, bus travel, like hiking is best done as a solitary endeavor. The slow accumulation of miles and the mild rocking of the bus are nearly trance inducing, and it's best to let the fatigue and grit of the current trip merge with that of trips past, yours and everyone elses. As it happens, grit is in very short supply on the Tripper bus, but bus travel in generally is a significantly gritty undertaking, so it requires only leaning your head against a window for a bit to imagine yourself a blues guitarist riding to Memphis, or a prodigal son returning home with only a few dollars and the hope of a kind greeting.

I tend to recall the forty-five hour (each way!) bus trip I took to visit my brother and his then-wife in Colorado Springs back when I was seventeen. I think my parents didn't want me to go, so they told me that I could only go via bus, and I thought, "Why not?" and went. I was an especially naive seventeen-year-old, so when an older man (I have no idea now how old he was, maybe forty-five) started to feel me up, I freaked out a little, albeit quietly. He stopped. Also, I had to ask some guy who was mumbling at me to repeat himself a third time before he finally said, with considerable volume, "I SAID, 'DO YOU WANT SOME HASH?'" I, barely, had enough sense to understand that he was not offering me foodstuffs, and I declined, very politely. Anyway, there was plenty of grit, and plenty of fatigue, on that trip. On this trip, there was mainly plenty of Interstate, and the occasional very large retail establishment.

We didn't stop at Ikea, though, which is just as well since there wasn't a lot of spare room in my luggage, what with my having to pack a tuxedo and everything.

I had had very mixed feelings about the trip. I figured that singing at Lincoln Center could be kind of cool, but it just didn't seem likely to be the experience of a lifetime that most of my fellow choir members expected it to be. For one thing, the concert was being run by a group that was charging us to sing with them. They seemed a reputable outfit, and they had the blessing of the composer, and they didn't invite just anybody to fork over a few hundred bucks to sing with them, but still, paying to sing is always at least a little bit Florence Foster Jenkins. On the other hand, I figured that spending time with a very large group of good singers (and they were very good singers) under a different director would be good for my choral development, and mid-January is a slow time at work for me, and, well, five days in New York. Also, I wanted to be a team player, even though I figured that I probably wouldn't spend a lot of time with the team, outside of rehearsals, once I got to the city. So I decided to look at it as a vacation with fifteen hours of rehearsals and performance thrown in, and off I went.

There's no real point in my writing much about New York itself. I tend to go there about once a year, and I always enjoy myself, but I don't have the sort of pilgrimage-to-Mecca reverence for the city that so many gay men do. And I don't, frankly, work all that hard at getting beyond the surface of the city. I have a relatively short, modest list of things that I want to accomplish when I visit:
1. See a show.
2. Walk by the Bethesda fountain.
3. Buy a cheap watch from a street vendor.
4. Pick up some sort of souvenir for the girls.
5. Stop by Kalustyan's for spices.

I should say right off the bat that I failed to procure a cheap watch. I was down on Canal Street and someone approached me muttering "Rolex," and I stopped briefly, but then I thought better of it. I already have a fake Rolex from Florence. Besides, I figure the fake Rolexes in New York are likely to be a) too expensive, and b) not sufficiently obviously fake. Wearing a real Rolex is ridiculously pretentious, and wearing a fake one is only better if the watch says "Rollex" or something equally ridiculous. So what I usually do is get something from one of the tables in midtown, but I didn't spend a lot of time in the thirties or forties this trip: I was staying up on 67th, which was very convenient to Lincoln Center, and I spent a good deal less time out and about this trip than I have in the past, when I usually visited with b&c. So this time, instead of a watch, I spent some time making the acquaintance of the local population. I probably could have done both, but if I had to choose, I'd probably go with making the acquaintance of the local population.

Anyway, a list of five things is ridiculously long for traveling. I've always felt that the way to travel is to have one goal that can be relatively easily achieved, so that one can ensure the trip is a success. I'd had a brief discussion with b&c about what to see while in New York. I had nixed Rosenkavalier at the Met, and I was decidedly cool to either Finnian's Rainbow (why does he even suggest such things to me: dude, the project of teaching me to care about the history of musical theater is a big fail) or South Pacific, when he mentioned, as if it were a matter of no importance, "Well, there's a revival of Hair that's gotten good reviews." So there was my goal for the trip. I'd never seen Hair on stage.

I arrived in New York around 3pm, somewhere on 34th Street, so I took a cab to the hotel, where I checked in. I was shocked to find that my room was huge, especially by New York standards. Arguably, 57th street between 9th and 10th is not the most convenient location in the world, but if one is hoping to make the acquaintance of the local population, a large room is a plus, and it was still only a couple of blocks (albeit long blocks) to an entrance for the Columbus Circle station. Besides, the entire four-night stay cost me under $500, including all the taxes, fees, whatever. Such a deal!

I spent a little while unpacking, corresponding, and making the acquaintance of one member of the local population, and then I headed down to Times Square, which, no matter how many times I go, is always brighter than I remember.

I stood in line at the TKTS booth for at least two minutes.

And I ended up with 40% off tickets -- orchestra, row L, center -- for Hair.

And OMG, y'all. That was likely the best production of a musical I've ever seen. So much energy. So much youth, displayed in a way to make me joyful, rather than wistful. So much talent. So many hot naked bodies arrayed on the stage at the end of the first act, though the moment passes rather too quickly. And such a devastating ending, followed by an equally joyous curtain call. I regularly resist standing ovations, but I stood eagerly at the end of Hair. I did not dance on the stage, as much of the audience did, but I did sing along. Let the sunshine in, indeed.

Anyway, I'd only been in New York five or six hours, so my trip was already a rousing success. I also figured that, artistically, there was no way to go but down, but I decided not to dwell on that. When I'm granted the great good fortune to see something like Hair, any response other than joy seems ungrateful, and I have come, lately, to feel that ingratitude is rather a large transgression.

The next morning, I was due at the rehearsal venue at 8:30, so I walked up Tenth Avenue, which is also called something else altogether.

The rehearsals (a four-hour rehearsal Saturday morning, another Sunday afternoon, and a dress rehearsal Monday afternoon, all for a Monday evening performance) were a lot like choral boot camp. They were a bit grueling, but, as I expected, I learned a great deal, and I'm hopeful that what I and others learned will be very valuable to the choir on a going-forward basis.

When I wasn't in rehearsal or in the hotel room, I wandered around the city.

I was, on Saturday perhaps, having a post-horizontal conversation with an extremely affable Frenchman, who lives in New York, but who is originally from Paris. We were conversing in French, and when he told me that he came from Paris, I said it was the best city in the world, and he said yes, after New York. I was a bit shocked that a Frenchman would prefer New York. He said that he preferred Paris for ambience but that he preferred "le vibe" of New York. Chacun à son goût, I reckon. New York is, of course, a beautiful city, especially if you visit it at the right time of year and have nice weather. My usual luck with vacation weather held: there was rain on Sunday, but mostly while I was in rehearsal, and the rest of the time it was fine, and not nearly so cold as it had been days earlier.

As of mid-day Monday, I had still not gone for a walk in the park, and I was concerned that I would not get the chance, but when I arrived at Avery Fisher for a group photo with my church choir, to be followed immediately by a dress rehearsal, I realized that I was an hour early. And only a block or so from the park. Serendipity!

Shortly after entering, I went through a tunnel that had a wonderful acoustic. I sang for a bit to enjoy it, but then I stopped. I am, occasionally, sensitive to not wanting to appear bizarre, though, surely, if there's a venue where bizarre is appropriate, that would have been it.

I do not navigate well inside Central Park. I have been known to enter on the east side, intending to cross the park, and come out back on the east side. So I might well have consulted one of the maps (which, amusingly [not so much], often do not include a "You are here" designation) posted around the park, but I figured that in an hour I could not get so badly lost that I could not find my way back. Besides, I always find the Bethesda fountain by wandering, and on faith.

Not that it's all that easy to miss, mind you.

As with many angels, and fountains, there's a story behind this one. I didn't bother to look it up, but if memory serves, it is believed that the statue will one day come to life and kill all the pigeons who have ever perched upon it. And their descendants. Apparently, however, the pigeons themselves are unaware of the prophecy. Or perhaps they figure that they're already damned because of the sins of their fathers, so they may as well perch and enjoy the view. Who can say?

I took a picture of three young women and their dogs with a camera that they handed me, and then I stood for a while and stared at the serene countenance. For a moment, I could have sworn that her face moved, but I am pretty sure it was just my imagination. I blame Tony Kushner. In any case, the pigeons never moved.

I had approached the fountain from above, but I decided to walk back under the road. It's very pretty down there, and it really was a gorgeous day.

There was, sitting near the arches, an Asian man playing a long, one-stringed instrument, which he would occasionally set aside to play a short wooden flute. He seemed as serene as Bethesda. Just up the stairs was a Black man, who appeared to be in his fifties, skating up and down the stairs, stopping occasionally on the landing to do an extended spin. I listened and watched from below, and then from above. It was a very calming, expansive moment, the sort of thing that makes people want to move to cities generally, and New York in particular. Quelle vibe!

It's unlikely that I'll ever live in New York, the vibe, and the local population, notwithstanding, but it's a great place to visit. And who knows? Maybe when I retire, I could spend a couple of years living in, say, Queens. I'm pretty content where I am, though. Grateful, even.

I found my way out of the park and back to Lincoln Center without incident. I met up with my fellow choir members. The director remarked that she hadn't seen much of me on this trip and wondered whether I'd been enjoying myself. "It's a hell of a town," I replied. Then I mentioned the instrumentalist from the park, so as to avoid having to give a more detailed account of my actions. I'd already raved to her about Hair, and it seemed likely that my getting to know the local population was something she really didn't want to hear about.

The rest of the day passed somewhat unremarkably, at least to the extent that putting on a new tuxedo and standing with two hundred people on the stage of Avery Fisher hall can be unremarkable. We sang very well, I thought. The house was only about 2/3 full, but that was because we were only half the program. The other half was a Requiem by the same composer, and the chorus for that piece was composed of groups that included a girls' high school choir from New Jersey. All of their parents had bought tickets and then didn't bother staying for the second half. For some reason, I found that almost impossibly amusing.

I did manage, after dress rehearsal, to miss a step while heading towards the stage door and come crashing down hard on my knees on concrete steps. It was somewhat painful, but it didn't really affect my ability to stand and sing during the performance itself. The swelling set in fairly quickly, but the big bruises took a few days to show up. They're still around, making my left leg look much worse than it feels.

It'll be fine in another few days, I reckon; in the meanwhile, I figure it's a souvenir.

Wide View

2010-01-10T20:48:00.001-08:00

The slowness with which I have been domesticating my domicile has begun to be something of an embarrassment. Just the other day, when I was entertaining a particularly toothsome Latin American lawyer, I actually went so far as to lie about how long I'd been living here. He asked me when I'd moved in, and I said, "Oh, just before the holidays," which, I suppose could technically be the truth, provided that you consider "the holidays" to include Halloween.

Anyway, I went through some of my old vacation photographs on my computer and came up with a series of six shots from Joshua Tree National Park. I took them using the panorama feature on my camera, which causes picture 2 to overlap picture 1 by about a third. I had taken the series using a lightweight tripod that I took with me. I use Costco's online service for most of my photo processing, and then I pick the prints up the next time I'm there to get some groceries or whatever. My camera takes pictures with a 4:3 ratio, and Costco doesn't offer 9x12 prints, but the significant overlap from one picture to the next allowed me to crop them down to 8x10 without losing any content. So I sent the six prints off, picked them up, got some map pins at Staples, lined the prints up, and pinned them to the wall. It only took me two tries to get the result I wanted, and the total cost for a panorama that's about 8x47 was less than ten bucks. Plus a sore thumb from pushing the map pins into the drywall, but I reckon that'll sort itself out in a day or two.

There's some unevenness in the color from print to print, but I'm very happy with the overall effect. Since this was sort of the test case, I put it on one of the interior walls in the office/library, or what will be the office/library if and when I ever get around to erecting bookshelves. Right now, it pretty much just has my computer and a lot of boxes, but it also has white walls, and unframed prints look good on a white wall.

I was sitting in church this morning, and my mind wandered, as it is wont to do. I was thinking of writing "Ode to Osculation," which would begin something like this:

Though I have the body of Adonis, but do not kiss, I am nothing.
And though I can suck without cease like a Dyson, but do not make out, I am as a torn condom.
And though I can crack pecans between my marble smooth buttocks while never damaging the nutmeats, but will not kiss, I am as empty Whip-Its.

But then I had to stop. I would like to pretend that I stopped out of deference to the Biblical source material, but the simple fact is that the rest of 1 Corinthians 13 doesn't lend itself as easily to replacing "love" or "charity" with "kissing," and I was too lazy to make it work. And then there was another hymn to sing.

The young couple sitting in front of me had their infant son with them, and during the last hymn, he kept looking back at me and smiling, causing me to smile back at him and miss some of the words, which was just as well since it was some sort of dreadful humanist hymn trying to link religion and science, two things that I usually feel should be kept apart. I was unable to work up any pique about the hymn, though, because of the smiling baby, sitting on his mother's hip.

It took me back to eleven or twelve years ago when YFU was a baby and always wanted to be with me when we were in church. I would sing solos with her on my hip, which was definitely a win-win situation. She liked it because she got to be with me, and I liked it because everyone was looking at her, so I had less reason to be nervous. I sure wish I had a picture of that. These days, I'm rarely nervous when I sing, and YFU isn't even in the same room. In about a month, she'll be fourteen. EFU will be twenty-one, also next month. Tempus fugit, eh?

February is also the month when I turn a year older, at least in those years when I acknowledge that my age has changed. I can't remember the last time I thought that my birthday was a big deal. Probably when I was twenty-one, I reckon. Since I was in my late twenties, all of my birthdays have fallen during my busiest season, when there's no real time to celebrate, and perhaps that's part of why thirty and forty came and went without any dread on my part. Or maybe I'm just generally content enough not to worry about arbitrary temporal landmarks. Then again, maybe panic will start to set in when I'm approaching fifty. But probably not. I am blessed with low expectations. I come from a lower middle class family, and my parents never really provided a context by which to judge my accomplishments, if any. If I had any goals as a child, they were probably to grow up and have kids of my own, and I'm already doing that.

The toothsome Latin American attorney who visited me last week told me that he doesn't often spend HQT (horizontal quality time) with men because he's so busy with his job and with getting his next book published, and sex dilutes his efforts in those other areas. Whatever makes him happy, I suppose, though I didn't get the impression that he was an especially happy person, despite his somewhat impressive accomplishments, his thoroughly slamming body, his sartorial splendor (French cuffs!), and his generosity of spirit.

It almost seems like someone with so much going for him is obligated to be happy, if only to avoid ingratitude; then again, it seems uncharitable to blame him for not being happy. Surely he's already suffered enough.

Occasionally, I'm tempted to think that my own high level of contentment keeps me from accomplishing what I might accomplish if I were more of an unhappy sort, but I'm not sure to what extent it's really a choice as opposed to just how I've always been. If it were a choice, though, I'd choose contentment.

A Death on the Internet

2010-01-07T12:12:00.000-08:00

A good man I never met died this week. Bradford Graham (more commonly referred to as Brad L. Graham) passed away on or about January 4. Places as diverse as Metafilter and NPR have reported his death and celebrated his life: he was a blogging pioneer and coined the word "blogosphere" (as a joke), but he was more proud of the fact that Fred Phelps had called him "the most dangerous Sodomite in Missouri." I just knew him as somebody I used to hang out with online, back in the day.

There is much about him, in his own words, at his website, and I leave it to others who knew him better and more intimately to reflect more completely on his extremely ample and joyful life, but I couldn't not take a moment to remember his kindness and humor. Part of me regrets never having met Brad face to face; I know from our online friendship that we would have gotten on well. And I'm sure, from the accounts of many, many other people, that he was someone who did not disappoint in person. But mostly I'm grateful for the interaction that we did have.

I'm also grateful for his boldness. When I knew him, I was something of a newbie gay, and he was frequently an inspiration, though one that I rarely lived up to. One of his comments on the site where we both spent a good portion of our days back then is still my favorite contribution of his:

I actually just came back from the eye doctor's office. My doctor is very, very handsome and so awfully nice and funny.

After he had examined the fit of my new contact lenses, he said "I'd like to see you again in about four weeks for a follow-up exam."

"OK," I said. "I'd like to see you sooner, perhaps for dinner and a movie."

"OK," he said.

That's how I'll always remember him: as someone who knew what he wanted, wasn't afraid to get it, and made a lot of other people happy in the process.

If there's a heaven, no handsome man is safe there any more, but a lot more of them are smiling.

Fixed

2010-01-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

Our long, national nightmare is finally over: my shower is fixed. The second contractor and his crew appear to have done a competent job, and they were in and out in only a few days. The only problem was that they weren't able to match the tile, so the bottom row doesn't match the rest of the wall. It's not the sort of thing that bothers me; besides, I like the new tile on the floor much better than the old tile. The shower was actually finished on New Year's Eve, but the older Chinese couple (I'm guessing they're a couple) who worked for the contractor had to come back the next day to finish off some ancillary matters and to do some additional plumbing fixes I wanted taken care of, and they left their tools (neatly) piled in front of the shower, so I decided to wait an additional day, even though the contractor said the grout, etc. didn't need any additional drying time. So I got to use it the first time on January 1.

The Chinese couple (or not) talked to each other in very loud voices, but every once in a while, they'd start to murmur, as if they didn't want me to hear them. I suppose you should never take it for granted that someone doesn't speak your language, but I would have thought that our earlier difficulties communicating would have made it clear that Chinese is not one of my languages. Still, caution is usually a good thing.

Because of said difficulties in communicating, I was presented with a somewhat awkward situation. On December 31, the plumber/subcontractor told me "Home Depot" and I said, "Back tomorrow?" and he said, "No, today." That was around noon. Home Depot is about five minutes, if traffic is bad, from my house, and when he wasn't back by 2, I figured they were gone for the day, which comported with what the main contractor had told me, so I extended an invitation to a potential friend, and at about 4:15, when said potential friend and I were horizontal and comfortable, I heard a noise downstairs. Fortunately, we were pretty much done with our socializing, so by the time the contractors came upstairs, we were both vertical. And dressed.

I think my potential friend, with whom I had much in common, was somewhat put off by the intrusion, given that he didn't answer my subsequent email. Then again, it's more likely that he was put off by the deplorable state of the house. I really must get unpacked and organized. There are still boxes and piles everywhere, and there is nothing on the walls. The print that I picked the wall color to match (I hope) is still leaning against the wall in b&c's bedroom.

But I've been busy with other projects. This past Saturday, for example, I spent an hour or so fixing my bed. When the movers put it back together, the side rails somehow ended up slanted so that the bottoms of them were farther apart than the top, with the result that the slats holding up the mattress did not fit snugly on their supports, and if the bed moved, as it is wont to do from time to time, some of the slats would eventually fall off their support, causing a loud bang and the bed to sag in the middle. If there happened to be someone other than me in the bed at the time (which may or may not have contributed to the movement: who can say?), he would generally be significantly disconcerted by these events, and by being shooed off the bed while I lifted the mattress and pads, rested them on my back, and replaced the slats. It seemed like a less than ideal situation.

So on Saturday morning, I pulled everything off the bed to examine it more clearly during a period when my attention was not otherwise occupied. The driver side foot corner seemed particularly loose, and when tightening the bolt produced no effect, I decided to try removing the bolt entirely, whereupon I learned that the connecting bolt and the barrel nut had different thread sizes and had thus never been engaged. This, too, seemed less than ideal. I headed off to Home Depot and spent twenty minutes in the hardware aisle trying to find an appropriate combination of nuts and bolts. I eventually succeeded, returning home with a pack of four nuts and two packs of four bolts (I wasn't sure about the length). Further inspection revealed that three of the eight bolt/nut combinations holding the bed together were not really attached. It's a wonder the bed didn't fall apart even more entirely than it did. Eventually, though, I had a repaired bed with snug slats. As you might expect, I felt the need to test the bed, strictly for quality control purposes, you understand. I can report that it held up well under a variety of conditions. Also -- albeit at the risk of extrapolating from a limited sample size -- I can report that button-fly jeans appear to be experiencing something of a comeback. If, indeed, they ever left.

My other weekend project involved trying to get EFU home from Mexico. She had gone there to do some field research for her thesis, and she had originally scheduled almost three weeks to get her questionnaires filled out. But I got an email from her Friday night saying that she had finished her data collection and requesting help rescheduling her trip home. So at about 1:30 Saturday morning, I spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Delta, during which time I learned that:
1. There was a $200 rebooking charge associated with her ticket.
2. She had gotten a very good fare, and the fare differential would be an additional $200 to $400.
3. To get the total amount under $400, she'd have to wait to fly until at least Wednesday.
4. Because the first leg of her flight was controlled by AeroMexico, I couldn't handle the rebooking over the phone: she would have to go to the airport.
5. Even though she was in Mexico City, and even though her return flight was routed through Mexico City, because the original flight originated in Guadalajara, she would have to return to Guadalajara and rebook the flight at GDL.

When I explained all of this, via email and then a gmail chat session, to EFU, she wasn't happy. I told her that between the money she'd gotten from her grandparents for Christmas, the money I'd get from returning the camera she hadn't needed, and the additional money I was willing to kick in, she had about $320 available without going into her own savings. She looked around, found bus tickets from Mexico City to various Texas locations for about $100 and asked me to call my sister and see whether she could pick her up. And then she asked me to find a plane ticket from Texas. My sister (who lives near Fort Hood) said she could pick EFU up from Houston but that the easiest and cheapest place to fly out of would be Austin. I found EFU a ticket for about $160 on Tuesday on Southwest, and EFU purchased a fare on Autobuses Americanos.

Everything seemed fine until I got a call yesterday midday from EFU who was near the border (after, I suppose, about fifteen hours on the bus). She said that there were thirty buses ahead of them, and the driver reckoned on a seven-hour wait before they cleared the border. This made a 4pm arrival in Houston seem very unlikely. I figured she must be right near the border, and I knew that she had to transfer buses in Laredo, so I told her to find out if the bus station was near the border and see whether crossing on foot was an option. I was beginning to get very nervous.

Twenty minutes later, EFU called to tell me that the driver had said it was only a two-hour walk (only!) from where they were to the bus station in Laredo and that she was on her way and that someone had told her she was headed in the right direction for the border. I was, um, anxious.

JUST YOU WAIT UNTIL YOU HAVE CHILDREN OF YOUR OWN, YOUNG LADY!

But I did my best not to let my growing anxiety show. After all, EFU had told me that she had been feeling inexplicably anxious a couple of days before (I think it's impending-graduation-in-a-weak-economy anxiety.), and I thought it best to appear calm. Besides, it's not like anyone can tell her what to do. Fortunately, it only took her about ninety minutes to cross the border and reach the bus terminal, whereupon she called me to let me know she had made it. I wasn't totally relieved until I called my sister at 9:30, and she told me that EFU was in the car with her. I would have been a little put out with her for not having called me as soon as she picked EFU up, but she did spend all day traveling back and forth to Houston to retrieve my child, so I couldn't legitimately complain.

I'm convinced that parents die because it's the only way they can stop worrying about their children. I don't know why the childless die. Lack of adversity, I suppose.

Apophatic

2009-12-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

About midday on Christmas Eve, I was out doing the last of my Christmas shopping and feeling relieved that the rather severe traffic had not elicited a meltdown. Traffic is my hot button, and I never know how I'm going to react to it, but I rarely handle it well, particularly when I'm the only one in the car. But whether it was the time of year or having slept in because I'd taken the day off, I was relatively unphased by the somewhat glacial pace of traffic into and out of various parking lots. Anyway, I had left World Market and was on my way to Barnes and Noble when I turned on the radio and heard Karen Armstrong on the Kojo Nnamdi show. She was talking about the evolution, or relative lack thereof, of religion during the axial age, and someone called in to ask her to comment on the difference in the use of language in Western and Eastern religions, and she said that, by and large, the Eastern religions were skeptical about the use of language, believing that the nature of God is ineffable (my favorite word!). She described them as apophatic. I don't remember her exact phrasing, but I was so taken by the word that I grabbed a pen and a receipt and scrawled "apophatic." Yes, I know: writing while driving at 0.0001 mph is a highly dangerous activity, but I didn't want to forget, and my memory is a bit dodgy these days.

Similarly dodgy: my vocabulary. I have felt some measure of shame whenever I haven't known the meaning of a word ever since that 780 I got on the verbal section kept me from getting a perfect score on my GRE. (I was too lazy to retake the test; similarly, I was too lazy to use the results to apply to graduate school. When I finally got around to applying for a master's program, the admissions office only wanted my GMAT scores, which were slightly lower. My failure to pursue a career in academia would be one of the great regrets of my life if it weren't absolutely clear to me that I'm almost preternaturally ill-suited to be an academic, though I suppose I wouldn't mind having tenure, provided I didn't have to work for it. Now I'm wondering what exactly are the great regrets of my life, but I don't think I have any. I would now say that not having any great regrets is my principal regret, but I would be lying. One could argue that my lack of regret is indicative of a weakness of character, but overall I'm happy about it. I suppose that I almost regret not deleting this parenthetical.) Karen Anderson had explained the meaning of "apophatic," but how was I not already familiar with this word?

As it happens, apophatic is not quite a synonym for ineffable, which, one supposes, is why there are two separate words. Apophatic is defined as "of or relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not." I have left the capitalization the way I found it in the definition, even though my conception of some Eastern religions is that they would posit neither a singular nor an exclusively masculine god/God, but I don't even know whether Sanskrit has any concept of capitalization. Maybe I should have gone to grad school. I mean a real one, not business school.

But maybe not. As it happens, I'm at least as wary of words as your garden variety Buddhist. I don't believe in god per se, and I'm not entirely sure that I even believe in the concept of the divine, though I would certainly like to, but if there's anything I believe utterly, it's that if the divine does exist, you won't reach it through words. Words are always at least two levels of meta from reality. Example: here is the world, over here -- slightly removed -- is how we perceive the world, and way over here is how we describe how we perceive the world. Similarly: here is the (posited) divine; out here are the antechambers of the divine, which we reach by wordless practice; and way over here are the ways that we talk about the idea of deity. Maybe the words help you to get to the antechambers, but they just as often take you farther away, I reckon. I think that's why people chant: if you say the same thing over and over, the words themselves disappear while the rhythm gets you closer to where you want to be.

Or, in a simpler formulation, if the divine exists, it must be infinite and indefinite. Words have definitions and meanings: they limit rather than expand.

But on other levels, that's all a load of bollocks, or at least it only makes sense within a very specific context. Most people's minds expand as their vocabularies increase. And ineffability is a very impractical concept for day-to-day life. I mean, let's just assume that I'm right and that the only paths to enlightenment are non-verbal. Are you going to give up speaking? How exactly could I do that? Is there a meeting? If you show up at Verbalists Anonymous, you'd want the conversation to go something like:

TED: Hi, my name is TED, and I'm a compulsive user of language. I haven't spoken in d'oh!
Group: Hi, TED! D'oh!

But instead you'd just have to stand there looking plaintively at each other, hoping to be understood, surely the most vain hope in all of creation. And sooner or later, your group's time would be up, and the ESOL class that had booked the room after you would be at the door, verbally demanding entry, and all hell would break loose. Also, I'm thinking that if I gave up language, representing clients before the IRS would become even more challenging, and it's already tough enough. It's tempting to think that an agent would come in, sit down, and be so impressed by the obvious sincerity of my countenance that he would merely shake my hand and not assess my client any additional taxes, but the more likely result would be interest and penalties.

[By the way, and you likely realize this already, if this discussion doesn't make any sense, I'm going to blame its lack of sense on the inherent limitations of language rather than on any specific flaws in my logic. I used to think that certain things that I felt to be true were less likely to be true because I was unable to formulate them in logically compelling language, but nowadays I'm more likely to trust something that I feel to be both true and profound because it can't be formulated into language. (This analysis doesn't apply to more mundane matters, where logic and language are still necessary; I suspect that Karen Armstrong would refer here to mythos and logos, but I don't know for sure because I've only heard fifteen minutes of her on the Kojo Nnamdi show while I was driving about half a mile on Rockville Pike and then into a parking lot; I considered buying one of her books, but it seemed counterproductive given an apophatic philosophy; besides, she's written so many books, and it would appear from some of the reviews I've read that she may be considered something of an intellectual bantamweight.) You can decide for yourself whether my conversion comes from enlightenment or laziness: I tend to think that it's both.]

Practicality isn't the only argument, though: words are like crack. Rather, like what I imagine crack to be like, minus the legal consequences and potentially injurious physical issues. The chagrin that I feel over not knowing the meaning of a word pales in the face of the delight I feel in learning a new word. I love words, they have tremendous power over me, I'm frequently adept at using them, and I take much greater care with them than do most people. (The common lack of care with language is probably a separate issue. The imperfection of verbal communication is certainly amplified because so many people are so inexact (or flat out wrong) in the way they use words, but even if someone knows precisely the definition of every word he uses, he's not going to be understood because words are abstractions and definition is not the same as meaning.) I have a very sharp wit when I want to, but wit is linguistic cleverness, and cleverness is a double-edged sword.¹ Wit can create amusement, even euphoria (and God/god knows there's nothing wrong with amusement or euphoria), but ultimately it has no substance: it fails to instruct. It's a lot like the sarcasm that's ubiquitous on the Internet (and elsewhere, and God/god knows I indulge in it): at best it makes me smile but fails to instruct; at worst it's like Red Bull, creating a temporary agitation but leading to a sugar crash, perhaps followed by falling asleep at your desk and waking up to find that you've been drooling. (Full disclosure: I've never actually had a Red Bull; like crack, it's something I'm content to let others experience. I do, however, abuse Diet Pepsi on a regular basis. There's probably a group for that, too, but in all honesty, I am not much of a joiner.)

You know, this is all really difficult to write about, so I'm going to take a moment here to relate that I ended up using the rest of my ornament hooks to hang kumquats from my Christmas tree.

I ended up using the rest of my ornament hooks to hang kumquats from my Christmas tree. They look pretty cool. I also made a bunch of star-shaped cookies, which I intended to decorate and hang from the tree, using ribbons that I was going to affix to the back of the cookies with melted sugar (i.e., caramel), but I was unable to convince YFU that Christmas should properly be celebrated through Twelfth Night, if only so that I could have a hope of having an epiphany. Also, since all of the other tree ornaments are made directly from various types of fruits, I really should have hung cross-sections of star fruit instead of cookies. Ultimately, though, I was too lazy, for reasons that have nothing to do with apophasis₂ or ineffability, to do much of anything for Christmas beyond making Christmas dinner (I did make the desserts myself, though). I was up very late on Christmas Eve, and didn't even get the girls' presents wrapped. I was encouraged in my sloth by their not caring about whether their presents were wrapped (they seemed mostly interested in hanging out with me and in mashed potatoes), but I take full responsibility. I'll do better next year, regardless of whether they care. Is that enough of a break? I think so.

Literature, on the whole, is more substantive than wit, and I'm very much in favor of reading (What I did end up buying at Barnes and Noble was a $50 gift card for YFU. She was thrilled. Also, a jigsaw puzzle, which was one of only two items on her list. She was thrilled with that, too.), but I only trust it for entertainment, not instruction. I'm sure that someone has said what I'm saying now with a great deal more eloquence (and God/god knows, brevity), but whatever they said wouldn't speak to me until I had already garnered the knowledge wordlessly. Here again, we have an antechamber situation. Certainly fiction (and maybe even non-fiction, which I always trust much less) can propel you a certain distance towards the ineffable, and that's a good thing, but it won't take you the last steps. More concretely, when I think about whatever the hell it is that I'm discussing right now, the passage that leaps to mind is the alphabet passage from To the Lighthouse (which I have previously quoted), but I first read that passage when I was twenty-three, and, while I found it memorable, it didn't speak to me the way it speaks to me now: it reflected a narrower range of knowledge way back then.

It's not clear -- it's likely unknowable -- to me how enlightenment, which is what we're calling the experienced knowledge of the ineffable for at least the next paragraph or so, happens. When it happens is a little clearer, and I've discussed before at excessive length the various practices that work for me, so I'll only mention in passing that the recent incapacitation of my upstairs shower has removed one of my paths to enlightenment: the plumbing to the downstairs shower provides so much water so quickly that one must exercise immense caution to avoid being knocked over by the spray. Also, it empties the hot water heater very quickly, so a hot shower can't last more than three or four minutes, and nothing throws cold water on enlightenment like cold water. But I expect the re-installation of the shower to be completed tomorrow, which means that shower meditation can resume with the new year. Hooray: it's the only form of meditation that I've ever had much success with.

I should seek additional paths, though. The horizontal path to enlightenment has always been the most reliable to me, but now that I'm single again, I have begun to experience certain drawbacks to casual sex that I didn't experience when I was partnered. I suspect the yogis would say that I'm not grounded. Or that I'm less frequently grounded: there are certainly times when coupling still evokes the infinite. And when it doesn't, it's still hella fun, and that's reason enough.

I'm not sure what it would take to be grounded again. I hope it doesn't require a stable relationship: that's something that I don't want right now, for one set of reasons, and that I'm not expecting to happen again, for another set of reasons that are not unrelated to the matter at hand. I have come to believe that a successful relationship requires the ability to be, at least on occasion, fully unreserved with the relationship partner. Ideally, this would mean that you could say anything to the other person without fear of giving offense or receiving rejection, and with the certainty of being understood. But who can say anything of real interest with any hope of being truly understood? There is probably something to be said for the mutual striving for understanding, especially when it is illuminated by affection, but it's something of a minefield. I suspect that the best I could hope for is companionable silence, and I seem to attract men who don't know when to shut up. I reckon my best bet would be to fall in love with someone who speaks a different language and who agrees never to learn mine as I agree never to learn his, so that we could only communicate tactilely and through frequent tender gazes, but, well, I think you can work out the practical difficulties of such a plan for yourself.

Anyway, I reckon that one of my goals for the new year should be to find a non-shower-based, meditative path to enlightenment that works for me. I wonder whether there's room for a labyrinth in the back yard.

Also: happy new year to everyone.

¹Interestingly, if only to me, "clever" (from the Middle English cleven) and "cleave" (from the Middle English cliver) come from entirely different roots, robbing me of the opportunity to make yet another meaningless witticism. Even though a cleaver has only a single edge, "cleave" is, linguistically, a double-edged sword because it has two opposite definitions: it means both to cling to and to split.

₂"Apophasis" is not really the noun form of apophatic. Or, rather, it is, but its principal meaning is within the realm of rhetoric: it means to talk about something by pretending not to mention it, as in, "I'm not even going to mention how fucking wordy I've been lately."

Here Comes the Sun

2009-12-21T13:56:00.000-08:00

We got some snow this weekend, and apparently it was a lot of snow, but I don't know how much because I'm generally not one to measure things. There are exceptions, of course -- I usually weigh my flour when I bake a cake, and I'm reasonably exact about measurments when it comes to home improvement projects -- but I'm not sure that it matters whether we got eighteen or twenty inches of snow. B&c proudly mentioned that in my former/his current exurb, they'd gotten twenty-six inches of snow, but in addition to not really caring how many inches of anything I have to deal with, I often find that the number of inches has been overstated, sometimes significantly. When I was out shoveling the driveway yesterday, I noted that the snow was deeper than the shovel blade, and that means there was more than enough.

I like snow a lot, especially from a distance, and when it begins falling on a Friday night and falls all day Saturday and on Sunday I can clear my driveway in half an hour, it seems like a fine thing to me, though I guess your point of view might be different if you were in retail or had somewhere to be. The only place I might have had to be would have been at church, and all the services were canceled. Sunday would have been the Christmas pageant, so I might not have showed up anyway. The pageant is the same every year, and watching the youngsters stumble through a Unitarianized version of the Christmas story is not more than I can bear, but it's certainly more than I want to bear.

By contrast, the choir's contribution to the Christmas Eve service this year will be three carols interspersed with readings of the Christmas story from, gasp, the Bible. I would like to think that this approach represents a more enlightened way of including Christian texts, but I'm pretty sure that we're doing it this way because the choir director is overwhelmed by all of the work associated with our upcoming trip to New York and the concert that we're giving before we go. The carols are arranged in a very intuitive four-part harmony, and the Biblical text is, well, already written.

I was about to say that people are far too emotional about their religion, but then I realized that a) I regularly find myself crying during church, and b) duh. Still, I wish Unitarians weren't so sensitive about Christianity. Nobody in my church believes that the Bible is the literal word of God, and almost all of them regard it as mythology, plain and simple, so why all the angst over its inclusion in the worship service? We love to include sacred texts from other religions. The answer has to do with personal histories, of course. A lot of the people who end up in a UU church feel abused by Christianity. But I doubt that any of them felt the yoke of fundamentalism any more keenly than I did as a youth, and I've long since learned to enjoy the beauty of the King James version's language and to appreciate the spirit of the Gospels (the Pauline epistles being another matter altogether) while rolling my eyes at any suggestion of fire and/or brimstone. Or let's put it another way: the existence of some douchebag minister in Uganda who's using the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah to justify life imprisonment for homosexuals does not negate the impact of this:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Which is not to say that I find Christianity a compelling religion in its entirety. It's more to say that there are few things I find as compelling as this:

One of the things that I find equally compelling is snow. I have, as is my wont at this time of year, been humming, whistling, and singing the above aria and chorus (I transpose the aria down a bit, obviously; I'm sure that Mr. Handel's failure to set it for a bass instead of a soprano was merely an oversight.) for much of the past weekend, and my sudden, temporary, and extremely incomplete re-connection to the nativity story has little to do with the story itself and much to do with the frozen deluge.

My knowledge of the history of the Bible is weak, but I feel relatively confident in saying that the early writers of the gospels were not inspired by snowfall. Still, the Christmas story as it's told in Luke speaks to the same atavistic desires as a snow storm: here is the world, despoiled by sin and decay, and here is the promise of renewal, in the form of a baby, or a blanket of snow.

There are other paths to renewal, of course. My newly cheerful Christmas spirit kind of mood certainly had a lot to do with the fact that on Friday, I called the contractor who had been second in line to do my bathroom upgrade, told him about my shower woes, and asked him to come take a look at the situation. He showed up later that afternoon and shook his head at what had been done, explaining to me the many ways in which the work that had been done was not up to code. I wasn't pleased at the idea of having to shell out so much money to have the shower ripped out and redone, but the idea of having the matter settled, even if I'm not having the new contractor start work until next Tuesday, was a huge boost.

I got another boost in the form of a mid-snowstorm social call from a new friend with a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. He and I had been trying to connect for some time, and I had begun to think we never would, but he had said that the snow would not keep him away, and when I saw him tromping through the snow up to my door and then removing his boots in the entryway, I could not have been more pleased by the apparition of an archangel. Such social calls are not exactly a rare occurrence for me, but this particular three-hour, mid-snowstorm interlude was special, and I could not look at his partially covered bootprints the next morning without a wide smile. Perhaps next year I can talk him into a horizontal sundown to sunrise celebration of the solstice. The idea has merit.

I am similarly unable to suppress a grin when I look at my Christmas tree. The dehydrated citrus slices certainly have not the level of skill of which Marth Stewart would approve, but I like them a lot. I am not so sure about the so-called red ornaments. I made them by simmering thin slices of orange in a red wine syrup before putting them in the dehydrator. EFU, however, looked at them and thought they were just slices that had turned brown. Perhaps I need to start with some red grapefruit, but a grapefruit will not fit on my little Japanese mandoline.

The cranberry garlands are time consuming to make, but stringing berries is a good thing to do while watching a movie. Idle hands, they tell me, are the devil's workshop. I would still like to make some cookies and hang them as ornaments, and, if the greengrocer cooperates, I would not be averse to a garland of red chili peppers and kumquats. Or something else altogether. After all, I still have ornament hooks to use.

Religion (of any variety) and/or spirituality aside, I maintain that forcing everyone to sit tight in their homes for a day at one of the most hectic times of the year can only be a good thing. After all, isn't this the year when we're all supposed to be cutting back, in recognition of a difficult economy? What better way to embrace the true meaning of Christmas than to stay inside and spend time with the people you love. Or, if it doesn't happen to be your custodial weekend, with an especially fit and intrepid pickup-driving near stranger. In either case, it's a lot less expensive and aggravating and a lot more rewarding than a trip to the mall.

Christmas, after all, is still going to happen without that one day of shopping. Many of my gifts are still in transit, but the kids won't really care that much if a couple of things are a day late. Besides, YFU would probably trade any of her gifts for a snow day, and she got that early.

Sunday, after the snow was finished, was sunny, with an almost painfully blue and clear sky. It was, nearly, a pleasure to reach for my ergonomically designed snow shovel and begin to clear my driveway.

There were a lot of other people out at the same time doing the same thing, and even the people who were forced to walk along the street because the sidewalk was still buried seemed unusually cheerful. It's all that beauty and all that potential inherent in the snow, or else it's that some other poor guy is shoveling a driveway, and they aren't. In any case, it was a beautiful day to shovel snow, and the work went quickly. Before long, I had enough room for both my car and EFU's, and I was buoyed by the knowledge that the volume of snow on the ground ensures a white Christmas.

When Life Hands You a Meta, Make Metaphors

2009-12-17T20:31:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday evening, EFU returned home from college with thirty pages of take-home finals and a hedgehog named Houdini. He's extraordinarily cute, with white quills that will stick up through your shirt if you happen to unbutton your shirt and let him burrow -- he lives to burrow -- in while you're playing with him, which you would probably not want to do, but I managed to extract him with no harm to hedgehog, shirt, or self. The quills are not especially sharp. He's a year old, but he was apparently a runt and is never likely to get much larger than his current size, at which, when curled up, he bears a dangerous resemblance to a tennis ball.

EFU is extremely attached to Houdini; consequently, she is very sad about the idea of having to give him up, though she's not the sort to grieve dramatically. But it appears that Houdini is so troubled by automobile travel (this alone would make him part of the family) that EFU can less easily bear the notion of causing him more trouble because of the frequent relocations inherent in her near future than she can bear the notion of saying goodbye to him. She has already located a local person whom she describes as a "crazy pet lady." In YFU's words, "She's nobody I would ever want to hang out with, but she's very excited about owning a hedgehog, and she'll give him a good home." That's my daughter: practical, responsible, and reluctant to let anyone see her pain. It brings a metaphorical tear to the parental eye.

I looked up at my phone earlier today, read the time and date display, and thought, "Wow. Only a week until Christmas. I probably have things to do," and then I went back to reading Treasury Regulation §1.752-2, which is more interesting than you would expect, not that that's saying very much, I suppose. It is easier to burrow into Treasury Regulations than to deal with the impending holiday, though it is easier still to burrow into the Internal Revenue Code (the ground is less dense, less rocky, and more familiar). And there are plenty of other distractions, plenty of other holes to burrow into.

I have long been an it's-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year sort of person, and it's pretty much unheard of for me not to be caught up in the spirit of the season by now. People have started to notice, too. EFU mentioned the other night that I'd been sighing a lot. I told her, "I'm really upset about the contractor. And it's been a tough year." I've already written way too much about the tough year, so let's talk about my upstairs shower, pictured here:

Last Saturday, I went downstairs to check on YFU, and I heard plop, plop, plop, and I thought, oh please god no, I think I know that sound, but maybe it isn't what I think it is, but it was what I thought it was, and I looked up, and there was a bubble in the ceiling, with water dripping down onto the corner of EFU's bed. A leak from the shower. Leak #3, in fact.

I'm sure you can imagine what came to mind:

There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.

I know what you're thinking, but I absolutely do eschew evil, and this is how I'm repaid.

I have not, quite, the patience of Job, so I fired off a terse email to my contractor. Later that day, when I was out with some friends, the contractor left a message saying that he was sorry about the leak and that I should call him to arrange a time for him to come look at it. He came Wednesday, and first he said that maybe the leak was due to humidity, but when I said that I'd caught at least a quart of water, he decided to open the ceiling. I relocated Houdini to YFU's room while the contractor and his helper put down plastic sheeting and cut a hole. Eventually, he explained to me that pressure from above the drain had caused a gap to open and that water had seeped through. He proposed bracing the drain from underneath to keep the gap from opening it. I went to work. He called me to say that he had also had to take up a few tiles in the bathroom to check the drain area and that he could come back Thursday to replace them. I told him I wouldn't be available until Friday. He said he'd come then.

When I got home, I took a closer look at the drain. I am not a plumber, but I couldn't help thinking that my being able to see the lights on in the downstairs bedroom was a problem.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the drain pipe opens a gap when there is no subflooring under the tile, but who am I to say? I also could not find any evidence of the liner that the contractor assures me is between the subflooring and the tile, but perhaps if there's no subflooring there's no need for a liner to protect it.

I can't say that I was overly impressed with the bracing system he came up with for the drainpipe.

It seems equally unimpressive (the word "kluge" comes to mind) from other angles.

I was depressed about all of this, but I realized it was a metaphorical depression. Clearly, one is never worried about what one thinks one is worried about. Worry is always badly referred, like some kinds of pain. You think your left toe is broken, but really it's your gall bladder. Had I not known better, I might have thought that I was depressed, or even angry, about a shower with no visible means of support, but clearly I was upset about something entirely different. And there is no shortage of possible choices, but the big problem about living a through-the-glass-darkly sort of existence (as we all must needs live) is that exactly what I was upset about remained veiled to me.

It was about this time that I started to wonder about what happens after through-a-glass-darkly. There's the assumption that you move onto a higher plane of existence where you see clearly. But what if it's only more clearly, like when I put on my glasses in the morning. I can get around without my glasses, but they're sure nice to have. What if there's an afterlife, and you see more clearly, but not entirely clearly? Will we then hypothesize a post-afterlife in which you see more clearly still? Is there then an infinite series of afterlives stretching off into infinity like my reflection in the barber shop mirrors of my youth? Isn't it easier to accept the idea that we just die and rot?

Speaking of decay, even though all worry is metaphorical and/or displaced, I'm pretty sure that there's one thing that would appear to be troubling me greatly that would turn out to be the thing actually troubling me.

Mold.

After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.
And Job spake, and said,
Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months.
Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning.
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day:
Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
With kings and counsellors of the earth, which build desolate places for themselves;
Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:
Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.
There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.
The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul;
Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures;
Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?
Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?
For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters.
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.

The contractor is coming back tomorrow morning. It is impossible to express how very much I dread conflict with service workers, but it's conceivable that there will be harsh words.

I haven't entirely given up on Christmas, of course. Given the smallness and lack of organization in my new kitchen, I haven't done any baking, but there have been choir practices, and I did manage to retrieve my tree from b&c's basement and set it up. Real trees are too much trouble for a single gentleman (or at least for a single gentleman like me), but I dislike artificial things that try too hard to look real, so seven or eight years ago, when I found this somewhat, um, schematic tree, I was immediately infatuated. It was also very reasonably priced, so I brought it home.

Charlie Brown has nothing on me.

It looks a lot better when it's lit up and the wires are fanned out to slightly more accurately represent branches.

We're expecting a snowstorm this weekend, so perhaps I'll abandon my usual pattern of weekend socializing and finally get around to decorating the tree. Since the tree itself is uberartificial, I've decided to decorate it only with natural ornaments. I have some cranberries to string on thread, and I've thinly sliced and dried some oranges and lemons. I still have to come up with the ornament hooks. Sadly, I keep forgetting to look for them in any place other than the local dollar store, which didn't have any. I may end up having to string those on thread, too. I did find a number of garlands at the dollar store. I used them to make a Christmas version of hanging door beads for the doorway to the upstairs, but I had to gather them to the side so that the contractor wouldn't have to walk through them while taking tools upstairs.

They look better without flash. Really. Anyway, Christmas is a week away, and I keep reminding myself that I'm an optimist. And I am. If I have faith in anything, it's the ability of the Christmas season to make me grateful for all of the things that are going well, even in the middle of a tough year. The downstairs shower still works just fine, for example. I'm still singing Christmas Eve. The girls will still be over Christmas Day, and there will still be a feast. I may not have made my usual dozens and dozens of cookies. I may, in fact, end up buying desserts, which, by my standards, represents a burrowing of epic proportions. But if the solstice reminds us of anything, it's that things bounce back.

All Over Again

2009-12-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in my living room the other evening, talking to b&c on the phone about rescheduling tickets to see The Solid Gold Cadillac at the Studio Theater when I was struck by a wave of deja vu.

The wording in that last sentence is important. The sensation was a lot like being at the beach and standing in maybe waist-high water and looking back toward the shore and waving at YFU and, hey, I'm underwater, and possibly upside down. It's very disorienting to feel like you're living through a moment that you've lived through before, especially when you add the logistical impossibility (I haven't owned that chair or that house for long enough to have had the experience before) to the ordinary impossibility (time and tide being the things that wait for no man) of living the same moment twice, and then balance all heavy logical impossibility against the very light emotional probability that nonetheless manages to win out.

The disorientation is key here. Deja vu is something more than the normal oh-my-God-not-again-please feeling you get from the inevitable redundancy of life, or at least of most of our lives. The perception that you're stuck in a rut is something that exists and that you might want to deal with, but it's not deja vu. Deja vu requires something extranatural. Something eery.

You will likely recognize this poem, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

I am not much given to the reading of poetry, (This is a lamentable fact, and I set aside at least forty-five seconds every decade to berate myself over the narrowness of my reading habits.) and I would likely be unfamiliar with "Sudden Light" were it not for the splendid choral setting that our choir does at church every two or three years. It's got a great bass part. I searched for a worthy performance on YouTube, but the best I could come up with was almost certainly a worthy performance captured by an execrable recording. You will especially, I am sure, appreciate the distortion in the forte sections.

There are not so many examples of good poems made into good songs, and the above is one of my favorites. Oddly, another of my favorites is something that I have sung as a solo at church around this time of year:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

I say "oddly" because the author of that poem, Christina Rossetti, was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sister. The universe is a wonderful place for coincidence. And, not quite coincidentally, for deja vu.

Apparently ("Apparently" means that I did some research, and that, in turn, usually means that I read a wikipedia article and maybe followed a link. Or, in extreme cases, even two. I wouldn't want you to think that I applied for a grant and ran a study or anything, but I also want you to understand that I didn't pull the discussion entirely out of my own ass. Other people's asses have contributed.) some people believe that deja vu can be either reliving a bit of your own life [Ok, look, people. I can't get through this discussion without attempting to work in this clip from Doctor Who, so let's just pretend that I somehow managed to seamlessly blend in the notion of chronic hysteresis into this paragraph, ok? This is more or less where it would belong, and the alternative would be for me to rewrite and/or edit, and nobody wants that. So, watch:
] or living a bit of someone else's past. So the sense of disorientation, if not necessarily familiarity, comes from momentarily sharing someone else's experience. Hmmmm.

It is tempting -- though illogical, the ill logic likely intensifying the temptation -- to feel that you're revisiting a moment from someone else's life, that the sense of deja vu is another example of the veil slipping from the universe's collective unconscious, granting you a glimpse of that which lies beneath, above, around, and beyond. This is doubtless true in at least a metaphorical sense: regardless of whether there's truly a collective unconscious, the intense similarities existing in diverse human conditions create a sense of the collective, and with something as abstract as the hypothesized collective unconscious, the sense of it and the belief in it are more important than whether it actually exists.

There are any number of phenomena that are not deja vu but that are somewhat related to deja vu. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Reduplicative paramnesia is the delusional belief that a place or location has been duplicated, existing in two or more places simultaneously, or that it has been 'relocated' to another site. It is one of the delusional misidentification syndromes and, although rare, is most commonly associated with acquired brain injury, particularly simultaneous damage to the right cerebral hemisphere and to both frontal lobes.

If I were given to hypochondria, I would likely be alarmed just now.

And then there's anamnesis. Here's another quote, from someplace other than wikipedia.

Socrates' response is to develop his theory of anamnesis. He suggests that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity (86b), but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the shock of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten. (Once it has been brought back it is true belief, to be turned into genuine knowledge by understanding.) And thus Socrates (and Plato) sees himself, not as a teacher, but as a midwife, aiding with the birth of knowledge that was already there in the student.

I should be especially grateful to find the midwife who can assist me in unforgetting Sanskrit, but I suspect it would be a long and painful birth.

[Inappropriate anecdote alert! This past weekend, I may have been in a social situation that may have resulted in another man responding to a particular position I may have been trying (and maybe even succeeding) to put him in by saying, "I'm not Play-Do," and I may have responded by saying, "He was fucking Socrates, wasn't he?"]

My logic may be shaky here, too, but I'm going to posit that if the extralogical explanations for deja vu were valid, then I wouldn't have the experience at moments of such breathtaking mundaneness. I mean, deja vu would probably be most valuable if, say, I were meeting some guy and I suddenly had the feeling of recognition because he was my soulmate from several past lives. A discussion about scheduling a theater performance with my ex: not so much.

At this point, I'm going to fall back on that old bromide: the only honest discussion of a metaphysical phenomenon is one that reaches no conclusion. (Yes, I just made that up on the spot, and, yes, it can still be a bromide even though I just made it up on the spot. Because I said so, that's why.) It's not that I'm not smart enough or diligent enough to get to an answer: it's that I'm too honest. (Again, because I said so.) In any case, let's consider the abstract discussion, or at least this particular abstract discussion, of deja vu closed and move on to the practical application.

I can't decide whether I can stretch the definition of deja vu to the feeling that I have about being single again. Certainly, there's a bit of the upside-down-at-the-beach disorientation going on, though some might reasonably posit that the disorientation is largely due to my inability to unpack my boxes and organize my house correctly. Apartment Therapy readers might tell me that putting a couple of new cabinets in the kitchen would set me right in no time, and, well, Cthulhu knows some extra storage space couldn't hurt. Regardless, I feel a little bit at sea, so we've got the disorientation. And the experience of singleness is certainly familiar, both to me and to pretty much everyone else.

On the other hand, there's no eeriness, so, by my own definition, there's probably no deja vu. And there are ways in which the experience is utterly unfamiliar. I'm a lot less vulnerable than the last time I was single, or, for that matter, the time before that. And at the same time I'm feeling a bit at sea, I feel like I'm in control. Control is always an illusion, but it's a very pleasant illusion. In the past, I've always been content, happy even, to drift or settle as events saw fit to move or place me. It's good for once to feel like I created the situation that I find myself in.

There are still moments, of course. I can't help feeling that anyone over, say, 35 who doesn't stop at least once a week to say "My God, what have I done?" or, at the very least, "Well -- how did I get here?" has a fundamental (and perhaps blissful) ignorance of the way the universe operates.

Part of the way that the universe operates is that opposites are simultaneously true. You have no control, but you have control. You could frame the matter in terms of fate v. free will, but it should be obvious by now that the only honest discussion of that issue is one that reaches no conclusion. You can look at all of that, and you can cry, or you can laugh. I choose both, but these days, I'm mostly just smiling.

The Simplicity of Living Single

2009-12-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

I was reading a post over at Apartment Therapy the other ~~day~~ month, and it quoted Steve Jobs, twenty-seven years ago: "This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that's what I had," and I thought to myself, "As if."

Moving, regardless of why you're moving, always sucks, and as you get older, it sucks harder. This fact is as certain as gravity. But there's meant to be a compensation: there's always a notion that moving represents a fresh start. A fresh start, in turn, means (is supposed to mean) shedding possessions, and shedding possessions (it follows, as the night the day) means arriving at a simpler, purer, and better life: you move and suddenly you're a Shaker. Metaphorically, people.

And there's some truth to the notion of simplification/depossession through moving, especially if your move, like mine, coincides with the annual church bazaar. Sadly, there are several factors working against the noble impulse towards simplicity. And I've been having trouble (for a month!) writing this down, so let's just go with the classic Lettermanesque reverse list. (I'll spare you numbers ten through four, though, because I'm nice. No, really, I am nice. If you met me, you would say that I'm nice, especially if you wanted something from me.)

3. If you're moving from a coupled to a single condition, you end up acquiring more than you discard: I'm not really going to live without a TV. Or a wireless router. Or a sofa, though it may be a while before the exact right sofa works its way into my consciousness and living/dining room. This is a matter of immense importance for me. If you're just out of college or still in your twenties, really, you can survive any manner of unfortunate seating, but if you're in your forties, an otherwise immaculate decoration scheme can be completely derailed by the wrong couch. Or a can fucking opener. How am I supposed to make Thanksgiving dinner if I can't open the can of pumpkin? I do not, thank you very much, need to open the can of cranberry sauce. I make my own. People who are proud of serving sliced, canned cranberry sauce where you can still see the can ridges can suck it.

2. The Marvell factor. (But at my back I always hear ....) Had we but world enough, and time, then I would surely be able to disencumber myself of half, nay two-thirds, of what I own, but these decisions must be made thoughtfully, and when the movers are scheduled to arrive next Thursday, well, it's so much easier to just throw things in a box and tape it up. And if that box ends up in a basement, unexamined, at least it's a roomy, clean, dry basement.

1.

That, readers, is a laundry basket full of the books that I'm letting go, and, oh sweet mother of Cthulhu, do you have any idea of the shame? Seriously, what was I thinking when I decided to start packing my books in a sober condition? There are layers and layers of chagrin that would surely have been more bearable after a case of Tequila. Shall we enumerate the aspects of agony? (This time in ascending order! Letterman is overrated. Maybe: I haven't watched any of the late night shows since the Reagan administration.)

1. Why, oh why, do I own so many books? Are there no libraries?

2. What am I (still) doing with this book? Seriously, Walker Percy? I could probably be forgiven for my youthful fascination with Mr. Percy's works, but I couldn't have gotten rid of them any of the last six times I moved?

3. How can I give this book away? It must have meant something to me once, and getting rid of it is like disposing of a part of my personal history. What's next? Will I toss aside my children so readily? And what if one of my kids needs that particular book sometime, and I have to say that I gave it away? [I'm only giving away the Proust (which I carefully positioned atop the heap so as to make my personal library seem weightier -- a stratagem that seems pointless after hauling the fifteenth 12x12x16 box of the books I'm taking with me into the den: weighty!) because I have another copy of the exact same translation of Swann's Way, and it seems unnecessary to have two, especially given that I'll almost certainly never read it again. On the other hand, what if I lose the first copy?]

It's not all shame, of course: packing up your books is a lot like running into friends you've forgotten you had. But as pleasant as that is, it's also dangerous. That copy of The Monk (the ultimate Gothic novel, by Matthew Lewis) that eventually found its way into the donation pile took me back to my senior year of college and to my advisor, who had recommended it to me after reading one of the papers that I'd written for his class. It's amazing that I was still able to let it go (assuming, that is, I don't have a change of heart and shove it in a box tomorrow), but as awesome a book as it is, its particular brand of awesomeness is one that I'm not likely to appreciate now or ever again. Oh, the wistfulness.

Anyway, the movers really ~~are~~ were coming ~~next Thursday~~ a few Thursdays ago. [My apologies. I wrote this some weeks ago, and now I'm just going to pretend that I can step into the wayback machine and not bother adjusting the tense and the timelines. The Tense and the Timelines would make an excellent soap opera based on the lives of the Bloomsbury set, n'est-ce pas?] I've been very anxious about the whole going-out-on-my-own thing, but I was pushed into finally setting a date when b&c told me that his young, recently unemployed, Greek doctor friend is coming from Germany to stay with him for a month starting next Wednesday, in anticipation of b&c's shoulder surgery (and subsequent incapacitation) the following Monday. I was a bit taken aback. B&c had not scheduled the surgery until after I'd put a contract on the new house, but I had assumed that I'd be shuttling back and forth to take care of him, especially during the period when he's not supposed to move his shoulder or lie on his back. But he had not realized that I'd be willing to help out, (B&c's cluelessness is often charming, but ultimately it's one of the reasons we're separating.) and he was concerned that the level of attention he'll need wouldn't be compatible with my job and the kids and the new place. And maybe he has a point: it's probably a good idea for him to have someone around all the time for the first week or so after the surgery.

B&c tells me that the incipient presence of Herr Doktor Jung is no reason for me to leave any more quickly, and I'm sure that HDJ, like all of the friends that b&c has picked up during his travels abroad, is entirely charming (the last one was entirely charming; he also flirted with me, and that's always nice), and since he doesn't drive, I'll still be called into frequent service for grocery runs and taking b&c to the doctor and the like.

--- Here, readers, is where the previous entry ended. You are to presume that I am an old time DJ working at a country and western station in the early 80s and that I have only just now learned that when I thought I was being nostalgic and putting on "Coal Miner's Daughter" as I left for my cigarette break, I in fact put on "Anarchy in the U.K." and the switchboard is lighting up with listeners who are not amused with the calumny I have unwittingly heaped upon Miss Lynn. Imagine the sound of a turntable needle (Google it, kids) scratching across vinyl, after which begins a new entry ---

So, home ownership. Wow. It's a little overwhelming. There's so much to be done, but there's no one around to hold me accountable for not doing it. Certainly, YFU doesn't care if the housekeeping is, shall we say, lackluster, and I have discovered that I really don't mind living like a graduate student, which is to say that after all the work involved with painting the walls and so on, I cannot bring myself to be concerned about all the painter's tape still adhering to those walls. I mean, it's blue, and all the walls are either white are blue, so it pretty much matches.

Anyway, I'm sure that I'll get around to hanging the curtain rods sooner or later, and I'll probably even get around to hanging actual curtains on the rods (not so much sooner and later still), and if I continue to remember to take out the recycling every week, I'll be through my pile of Ikea boxes in no time at all. Or at least sometime this year. January at the absolute latest.

There are distractions, though. When I get home from work, it always seems more compelling to try to expand my circle of new acquaintances than to deal with window treatments. And so far, most of the new acquaintances have easily taken in stride the work-in-process nature of my new abode when they get the abbreviated tour. Perhaps their attention lies elsewhere. Men are so easily distracted from home furnishings.

I did manage to get the house reasonably clean for Thanksgiving. And by I, I mean we, because when EFU and YFU showed up just after noon on Thursday, before I said anything else, even to my daughter whom I had not seen for almost three months, I said, "I need help." So while I moved in and out of the kitchen, futzing with the food and telling them what needed to be done, the girls restored some order to the living/dining room. It didn't take very long, and then YFU vacuumed while EFU went around the room removing painter's tape. Picky!

Then I went to the basement to remove the hardware from the door that was soon to be the dining table. I was successful with the hinges but the doorknob wouldn't budge. The girls thought that it added character.

The door has deep panels, which render it relatively useless as a table, and I had gone to great lengths, including a trip around the beltway in Thanksgiving Eve traffic, to procure plexiglass panels to fit inside the door panels to make a smooth surface. It was a good idea, and it worked well enough. I had wanted to take leaves from the Japanese maple in the front yard and put them under the panels, but it had rained a great deal in the preceding week, so I ended up taking some other cuttings from the relatively dry plants next to the house. Right after I moved in, the rose bush next to the house began blooming. I'm sure it's a relatively common occurrence, but I chose to take roses in November as an auspicious omen for my new habitat. I used the last of the fading roses as part of the table decorations, and when EFU saw me scattering the petals, hips, and other cuttings in the door/table panels, she remarked, "Wow, Dad, that is the gayest thing I've ever seen you do." It was hard to argue with her, but I did explain that it wasn't half gay enough: there were some problems with the execution.

I sent EFU to retrieve b&c and HDJ from b&c's house. Contrary to all expectations and experience, HDJ had turned out to be not so much a charming young man as an insufferably selfish and distressingly odd individual, given to asking inappropriate questions and not listening to the answers. Whenever I went over to b&c's house to take b&c grocery shopping or bring him some DVDs, HDJ would guilt me into driving him to buy cigarettes, which he went through in great numbers. Despite his reeking of tobacco (How is it that other men smoke and manage not to either smell or taste like ashtrays? Not that I ever tasted HDJ: the smell was more than enough) in my front seat, I struggled to be polite to him, but I managed. I also managed (with less struggle) to deflect his many attempts to turn me into his social secretary. I must admit to a certain amount of glee at the prospect of unleashing EFU on him. She is not a person to put up with anyone's shit, and by the time she had picked the two of them up and brought them back to my place, HDJ had been significantly tamed. Not so much that he didn't still try to invite himself along to the movies with us on the day after Thanksgiving, but we ignored all of the openings he gave us to ask him along. After I drove the two of them home, I mentioned the attempted self-invitations to EFU, who remarked, "Yeah, wanting to hang out with a twenty-year-old woman. Pretty lame." Indeed.

Although I was halfway to zombiehood (I had stayed up very late the night before doing food prep and adding three new temporary members to my social circle) by the time dinner hit the table, it was a success. I tried to scale back dinner somewhat this year. The girls really only care about turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and dessert. I also made dressing, green beans, cucumber salad, cranberry relish, and crescent rolls (from a tube: oh, the shame), but that's a fairly modest spread by Thanksgiving standards. Some people thought that four desserts was overkill, and perhaps they had a point: because of the pumpkin cheesecake, the pecan pie, and the rice pudding, nobody had room to even try the lemon refrigerator pie, but it was just as good six hours later, and, hey: more for me.

I struggled to stay awake as I drove b&c and HDJ home, but I got back to the chez moi without incident and washed most of the dishes before collapsing. Everyone was tired and overfed, so we napped for a few hours, then I set up (finally: I bought it almost a month ago) the new flat screen, and we watched TV and ate more dessert.

On Black Friday, we all slept late, and then I took the girls to Ikea where we bought EFU a dresser (Malm, four-drawer, $99). We stopped by the cafeteria for lunch first, and I was delighted to find that, in honor of the day, the price on the Swedish meatball plate had been reduced to $1. I have of late become a great fan of the Ikea Swedish meatball plate. The first time I had it was when my friend George drove me to Ikea in his SUV so that I could pick up a loft bed (Tromso, twin, $199) for YFU (She helped me assemble it and is thrilled with the result.), and I bought him dinner as a thank you. The Swedish meatball plate was on sale then, too ($2.49), and we each had it, along with a beverage. The total price on the meal was something like $7.31, and I was a little embarrassed at having gotten away so cheaply. Embarrassed but well fed. The girls were not interested in the meatballs, so Friday's meal was slightly more expensive, but still a bargain.

After some additional shopping, we returned home and began assembling the Malm, stopping after about forty-five minutes (EFU shares my mad Ikea assembly skills, but the Malm has many, many pieces) so that we could head to downtown Silver Spring to gratify a) YFU's desire to see New Moon (not good, but not as bad as you would expect, and with eye candy) and b) EFU's desire to eat at Chipotle. We were home not long after 8, and we hung out and watched TV until about 11, at which point EFU took off to visit a friend.

Seeing EFU again when she comes home is terrific, of course, and it's worth the pain that inevitably accompanies her inevitable departure, but I've watched her go back to school any number of times now, and I don't seem to get any more used to it. On Saturday, when she finally got up (2pm: kids these days) and packed her stuff, I watched her walk down the sidewalk towards her car, and I got -- yet again -- all take-another-little-piece-of-my-heart-now. She'll be back in less than three weeks, and just seeing her head back to school after Thanksgiving was more difficult, emotionally, than the dissolution of my six-year relationship with b&c. I reckon that says something unflattering about the relationship, and something less flattering still about me. Oh well.

I really am liking the new house and the freedom of my solitary-four-days-a-week living situation. I'm slightly alarmed by the accompanying dissolut~~ion~~eness, but I was relatively dissolute to begin with, and I suspect that the seasons will turn and the pendulum will swing back. Or at least that I'll be dissolute with more regular hours. '09 has been a pretty tough year by my standards, so I'm looking forward to a very good year in 2010. I always feel like I should knock on wood when I say something like that, but even when I have trouble finding simplicity, I can always find optimism.

He Made His Home in That Fish's Abdomen

2009-10-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

I feel like I need to get the various parts of my life together and tell them to take a number. Hey, you there, contractor problems! Back in line! When I'm done with family issues, work deadlines, and my next set of solos at church, I'll get to you. Nobody likes a line jumper.

Actually, the contractor problems haven't been all that bad, or at least I think they're nearly resolved, though I've been thinking that for about two weeks now. Maybe I'll talk about them in detail another time. Or not.

Now that my latest work deadline has passed, I feel a sense of urgency about getting moved into the house. On Saturday, I set off in search of boxes, but both of the local box stores had been closed. I had assumed the box business to be countercyclical: if you're downsizing, you need boxes, right? But maybe not. Maybe when the recession gets bad enough, people start storing their goods in garbage bags. I suppose that if you're downsizing and want to embrace thrift, you stop a garbage truck, pull out the garbage bags, empty them, wash them (optional), load your stuff into the bags, toss your bags into the back of the garbage truck, divert the truck with carefully positioned IEDs, then retrieve your (slightly compacted: it works best with clothing, and maybe pets) stuff at your new location. I should probably feel like a chump for going old school and hiring movers, but even after years of watching Law and Order and NCIS, I still don't know how to manufacture explosives. My bad.

Anyway, I returned home without boxes, so I looked online, where I found some at very reasonable prices, even after considering the somewhat steep shipping prices. There were also minimum order quantities, so I did have to buy twenty-five of the small packing boxes, but I have lots of books. Besides, a guy can never have too many boxes. In their original, flat condition, they make excellent hostess gifts. Especially with a nice bow. The boxes arrived yesterday, and I started packing my cookbooks, but my packing tape ran out as I was sealing the first box. Nom de plume!

This past Sunday, our church was ordaining one of our former intern ministers. Ordination services are kind of a big deal, so the choir was singing at it in the afternoon. The former intern minister was giving the sermon at the regular morning service, even though he was -- as of then -- still not reverend, and I was the soloist. I had been asked to sing ten days earlier (I usually get a month or more of lead time), when I was still navigating the sturm und drang of the extended tax season, but there are certain offers I almost never turn down. The sermon was about the importance of names, and I had managed to find two marginally appropriate but largely unappealing pieces that fit with the topic. I also got to sing "It Ain't Necessarily So," which is very appealing and always appropriate. The minister put it just after a reading from the Bible and just before the sermon.

I find "It Ain't Necessarily So" difficult to perform, mostly because the intervals I expect are not the ones Mr. Gershwin wrote, and that sort of conflict (correctly) always gets decided in favor of the composer. But I've been wanting to sing it in church (sadly, in my church, it offends no one) for years, and it went pretty well. The postlude, not so much. The music director had pounced upon my rather unenthusiastic suggestion of Jim Croce's "I Got a Name" for one of the pieces, and I could not get our pianist (who was splendid on the Gershwin) to play it at a reasonable tempo. Not that it would have been that much better at a quicker tempo, but if it had been twice as fast, it would only have lasted twice as long, which would have been a mercy, at least to me. The congregation enjoyed it, but from the very first phrase, I had that I'm-singing-on-the-Titanic-and-I'll-be-singing-until-this-damned-ship-goes-under feeling that, well, I don't remember having quite that feeling before, and let's hope I don't have it again. Ugh.

The ordination service was very moving, and the choir sang a particularly rousing arrangement of "Now Let Us Sing." It ran late, and I had to leave the building without congratulating the newly upgraded former intern minister, but perhaps I'll track down his email address. Or send him a nice box.

Home decoration plans have been somewhat on hold, but now that the upstairs bathroom shower installation is substantially completed and the downstairs floors have been refinished, I can move forward. I should be doing some priming and painting this weekend in the bathroom (goodbye, yellow!) and perhaps one or two other rooms. Also more packing of boxes.

Now that I have these beautiful hardwood floors, the first order of business, naturally, is to cover them up so that they stay beautiful, if largely unseen. I really like the idea of floorcloths. They're easy and fun to make (I've done it before), but they feel somewhat insubstantial all by themselves, so I've made a large order from this site. I've ordered 72 of the 24"x24" 10mm thick mats (in blue). The ones that go in the living/dining room will be covered (eventually) by a floorcloth. I suspect that YFU will leave the ones in her room uncovered, but we'll see.

While I was at it, I decided that what the upstairs bedroom really needed was a layer of the 40"x40" inch-thick mats, also in blue. It's the sort of thing that one typically finds in a martial arts studio, but I figure that if I ever take up Judo, I'll be ready. Alternatively, if something ever happens to get thrown out of bed (as, one hears, happens frequently in Judo), there'll be a soft landing. Plus: soundproofing! And insulation! And protected floors! I only ordered one 100-square feet pack of the thick mats, but given the way the roof slopes and where the furniture will be and the fact that I can leave the area under the bed uncovered, I can cover almost all of the usable floor space in my room with that one pack. It looks like I won't be able to get the pipe bed until next year, but at least I'll be well cushioned.

Linked

2009-10-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

Y'all must be as tired of reading about how little free time my work schedule has lately been leaving me as I am of writing about it, but I just thought that I would mention how I was in church on Sunday to sing with the choir, and the sermon was about love, but the service was mainly about gay marriage rights, and after the service, our minister and our intern minister were leading a group who were going to take the Metro into DC and march in the National Equality March. I know there are people who were opposed to the NEM, and I don't really get it. By which I mean that I understand their objections, but I think they make no sense. But I didn't join the group and march: I had to go to the office.

Anyway, the service itself was very moving. The couple who did the chalice lighting are very active in PFLAG, and the wife read the passage from Ruth that is often read at straight weddings:

Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

I got a little choked up. Of course, later in the day, in between tax returns, I took a moment to look the passage up, and it wasn't until then that I realized the person Ruth is cleaving to with such vigor is not her husband (who has died) but her mother-in-law. I couldn't help thinking that Ruth's steadfastness was less a reflection of love for Naomi than fear of returning to her own family. Then I read the rest of Ruth, which is very short, and while the language of the KJV is a little bit opaque, so I couldn't really follow exactly what was happening, it seemed like Naomi sent Ruth -- who must have been something of a looker -- to simultaneously seduce and tease Boaz into marrying Ruth and taking care of both her and Naomi. I reckon that things often seem more romantic when they're taken out of context, though that, of course, is no argument against gay marriage.

Anyway, I'm not sure it was this past Sunday, but it was sometime within the last week or so, and I was at the office, feeling displeased, but then I noticed that there was a new entry up on Mimi Smartypants, and that made me happy. I don't link to Mimi Smartypants on the sidebar because I figure that everyone knows about it already, even though I was once chastised by another commenter on another blog when I complained that the blogger had simply copied and pasted (although he had probably retyped it) an entire MS entry. This seemed to me a) lazy, and b) pointless because everyone already knows Mimi Smartypants, but this other commenter, who was from Outer Mongolia or Idaho or some place like that, told me that I was wrong because he hadn't known about Mimi Smartypants. Of course, my initial reaction was that he likely didn't know about indoor plumbing, either, but I kept that to myself. Anyway, there was a link on MS to a video by some heavy metal group called Teitanblood. I'm not a big fan of metal, but since I was at the office, where I always keep my speakers turned off, I figured it was safe to watch even a video called something very like (or perhaps exactly so: I really don't feel like fact checking on this particular item) "Seven Chalices of Blood and Vomit." I couldn't watch all of the video, because I found it tedious, but I became somewhat fascinated with the etymology of "Teitanblood." I was never able -- in all of the ninety seconds I spent trying -- to figure it out, but I did learn that there was an instrumentalist of some sort named Set Teitan in some European metal band, so perhaps it was his blood and/or vomit in the name of the band and video.

Anyway, while doing my extensive, ninety-second research into the history of both Teitanblood and "Teitanblood," I came across a page which referred to another, apparently also metal, group called We Butter the Bread with Butter, which struck me as certainly one of the most culinarily enlightened heavy metal band names of the new millenium. Unless of course, they went out of existence in the old millenium. it was sort of hard to tell because the site (I would link to it, but I don't think I could find it again. You know how it goes when you're haphazardly surfing, don't you? Exactly what it was that you saw on site A that led you to site B becomes murky over time. It's a lot like the way my mind works shortly before I fall asleep. Except that when I'm falling asleep, I don't ever remember to copy and paste before forgetting where I got the information from.) I found was in what appeared to be an Eastern European language of some sort. Still, I would like to think that, if I had any idea what it said, this passage would resonate with me:

Pod nazwą We Butter the Bread With Butter kryje się duet z niemieckiego Lübben tworzący muzyke na pograniczu deathcore’u i cybergrindu. WBtBWB ‘wyspecjalizowało’ się w nowych aranżacjach znanych i lubianych niemieckich piosenek dla dzieci (Alle meine Entchen; Backe, backe Kuchen itp, itd). Dzięki oryginalnemu połączeniu charakterystycznych, prostych i znanych tekstów, ciężkich i melodyjnych riffów, elektroniki, szybkiej perkusji, growlu i wrzasków zespół szybko zyskał spore grono fanów nie tylko na terenie krajów niemieckojęzycznych.

I mean, that says it all, right? Unless, of course, it says something horrific and/or illegal. I recently read Lev Grossman's The Magicians (recommended: well written and very entertaining), and there's a scene in there where during a lecture, the protagonist gets bored during a lengthy incantation and decides to make the professor's lectern (or something) wobble slightly, and that very small and apparently innocent alteration results in somebody getting killed in a particularly unpleasant manner. So you can imagine the sort of risk one takes by inserting an entire paragraph of an unknown language. Hopefully I haven't posted anything horrific and/or illegal. Or worse: there may be Eastern European metal aficionados out there who simply cannot believe that I would post that because it either over- or understates the influence of We Butter the Bread with Butter, and, believe me, that was never my intention: I believe they were exactly as influential as you believe they were.

Anyway, in case I've inadvertently broken local obscenity laws, ruffled the feathers of any metalheads, or caused your best friend to be devoured by a fictional character, please accept my apologies, along with the nearly infinite cuteness of these kittens. Kittens cure all.

Stuff

2009-10-06T06:18:00.000-07:00

Predictably, I worked a lot this weekend, and I have reached the point where the accumulation of work makes me want to do little more than vegetate in my off hours. I should be spending at least some of that time working on the house, but most of what I want to do needs to be done in a relatively dust-free environment, and the current bathroom construction creates a lot of dust. It's meant to be completed by Wednesday, but we'll see. I stopped by last night to check on the progress, and the shower enclosure looked like it was about halfway tiled.

I think it was Sunday evening when I was driving home from the office (by way of the new house) when I flipped on the local NPR affiliate and heard the last half or so of a fascinating Radio Lab program about parasites. It reinforced the complex nature of, well, nature: the same parasites (hookworms) that were responsible for anemia and laziness in the early twentieth century rural South can also be useful in preventing allergies, and perhaps treating certain auto-immune diseases. I was most impressed -- and disgusted -- by the story of a young (American) man who was so desperate to rid himself of respiratory problems that he was willing to travel to Cameroon and walk barefoot through the latrines of its indigenous peoples so that he might contract hookworm. He did, and his allergies and asthma vanished almost immediately. He now markets -- with unsurprisingly limited success -- hookworms harvested from his own excrement.

I can't even be bothered to go and see an allergist, so I reckon my allergies aren't nearly as bad as I occasionally think they are.

I'm not sure about the exact sequence of events, but perhaps a week ago, I was reminding myself that no situation or concept is so complicated that it can't be boiled down to a single saying, and, most frequently, to a line from a popular song. I maintain that, in fact, any situation or concept can be reduced to a line from a song, and my occasional inability to do so is evidence only of my limited musical knowledge, not of the inadequacy of my theory. In any case, I wasn't quite able to find the song for the mental cacophony I was dealing with at that moment, but I realized that it could be reduced to "life is suffering," which (quite aside from the fact that there is surely a song to that effect) is, at least, the fundamental, and very widely known, teaching of the Buddha.

Except, of course, that I don't agree with the Buddha. Suffering is really the flip side of joy, so it's more accurate to say that life is suffering and joy. I think the Buddha was onto something when he said that the source of suffering is attachment, but what he left unsaid (I'm guessing to some extent: I have no idea what all the Buddha said, and I'm not interested in reading his teachings: every time I've tried, I've found the translations dense and uninteresting) is that attachment is also the source of joy. You can (and I have, to a large extent) avoid suffering by avoiding unwise attachment, but you run the risk of losing out on joy: it's not necessarily a good bargain. If I were to stop and consider it, I feel confident that I'd say that the attachments I've chosen have largely been those that have generated joy, but that it might be worth risking a bit of affliction for a larger joy payoff.

Irrelevantly, I work with someone named Joy. She is a big pain in the ass.

The problem with seeing the cosmos as a series of opposing forces (semi-relevantly, I have never been able to remember which is yin and which is yang, even though I have absolutely no trouble remembering the difference or distinguishing between joy and suffering) is that when you're always saying, "Well, this is true, but that is true also," it's sometimes difficult to make a decision. Or to care very much. But the lack of caring is also an error of balance. This is true: in the context of the universe, the actions, joys, and sufferings of an individual are insignificant, and in a hundred years, who will remember or care? But that true also: each of us is the center of his own universe and nothing matters more to us than ourselves. You can choose either of those statements for any given moment, and I reckon the only trick is to pick the right one for the situation at hand.

I was in church Sunday morning. Despite having been asked to show up at 9 for a 10 am service and despite a lengthy pre-service rehearsal, there were many false entrances in our first piece. False entrances are rare in our choir, and I attribute them to a) frequent changes in time signature within the piece and b) the rehearsal of the piece in fragments rather than as a whole. Once again, failing to see the entirety leads inevitably to error.

We sang just before the sermon. Normally, I view the sermon as a chance to catch up with my inner monologue and/or to ponder the relative virtues of various floor and wall finishes. But I was listening for perhaps as much as half of the sermon on Sunday. Not because of the topic (it was about faith, which is not nearly as fascinating as the notion of staining the hardwood floors Brazilian Cherry so as to obscure the stains which likely come from the pets of the previous owner), but because the minister was having an off day. I wondered whether she was rattled by the interpolation of "Greet Your Neighbor" by the member of the Board of Trustees who had opened the service that morning. I had noticed that the order of service didn't have the usual line item for greeting, and after I had finished turning and smiling and shaking hands with those around me, the alto who was sitting next to me whispered that the minister had, on the previous Sunday, announced that "Greet Your Neighbor" would be suspended for a few weeks due to concerns over the spread of swine flu. I suspect that some eyebrows were raised.

In any event, the minister seemed to be fumbling with her notes a bit, so I was paying attention when she started to talk about Simone Weil's four evidences for the existence of God. And I thought, "Oy. If you're not safe from a discussion about the existence of God in a Unitarian Universalist church, then what refuge is left to me? Should I stay home and watch football?" I didn't actually think that last sentence, but I couldn't think of an easier way to mention that I won the football pool at work this week. Forty bucks! That will buy me a tile splitter, with enough left over for grout.

Anyway, I've already forgotten two of Mlle. Weil's evidences, but I do remember that she believed that the existence of God was demonstrated by a) the beauty of nature and b) the utter lack of mercy in much of the world. I did about thirty seconds worth of research later in the day, and apparently Simone believed that our afflictions are something that God gives us so that we can grow through overcoming them. Or something like that: I suspect, though I don't know, that she said it in a less New Agey manner.

But I'm not going to bother to go and read Simone Weil. I suspect that translations of her works are as dense and uninteresting as those of the Buddha. Besides, while I might begrudgingly admire the ballsiness necessary to take what (i.e., the crappy state of the world) is typically seen as evidence against the existence of God and say that it is, instead, evidence of the exact opposite, I find the point itself ridiculous. Or at least I find it akin to saying that we're not meant to understand the ways of the almighty. Anyway, if you say that the awfulness of the world shows God's hand, you can't, or at least shouldn't, turn around and say that the awesomeness of nature shows the same thing. The utter lack of logic made me a little angry.

Actually, the notion of trying to prove (or disprove) the existence of God makes me a little bit angry. Philosophers have been ~~scamming grant money~~ wrestling with the question forever, and if they haven't solved it yet, it's a good bet that it can't be solved. Let me bottom line it for you: you can't prove that God exists, and you can't prove that he doesn't. Furthermore, the fact that you can't prove that God exists doesn't mean that he doesn't, and the fact that you can't prove that he doesn't exist doesn't mean that he does. Give it up.

There's only one potentially compelling argument in favor of the existence of God, and that's the personal experience of the divine. If you want to tell me that you have felt the presence of God, then I respect that absolutely. But if you want to try to translate that experience into logic or, much worse, into a prescribed code of behavior, then you've lost my respect. And if you try to tell me that the method you used to experience the divine is the only method, or even the best method for anyone other than yourself, then you've similarly lost my respect. If you try to tell me that the only way you can feel the presence of God is through a very specific religious practice, then you won't necessarily have lost my respect, but you will have gained my pity. My personal experiences of the divine have come mostly through hiking in especially beautiful settings, through singing well, and through particularly amazing sex, but if you find yours through meditation, chanting, or 80% dark chocolate, then more power to you.

Less power to you, though, if you want to yammer about it. If the experience of the divine is such a wonderful thing (and if it's not, WTF?), then shouldn't you be spending more time in the presence of God and less time trying to find and explain the nonexistent logical underpinnings of your experience?

The power (we're back to more power to you) of the experience of the divine is in its ability to transcend both logic and the everyday experience. Logic is a wonderful thing, but that which cannot be named is valuable because it lets you take a walk on the wild side, beyond the limitations of logic. Logic is what people need to use to make laws and set public policy. Religion and spirituality are meant to be pathways to transcendence. People who can't embrace walking on the wild side and who attempt to explain the divine in terms of logic simply don't deserve enlightenment.

Toss-Ups

2009-10-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

1. I've lost track of how many appointments I made with various contractors, but I think it was either five or six. Two of them showed up. They both seemed well qualified, and they both came up with workable plans to install a shower without taking away any of my bedroom. Sadly, the plan that I liked best (it involves taking away a closet, but it's a closet that was mostly useless) and that was bid 30% lower than the other one came from the not-so-cute Latino rather than from the tall and buff Korean.

I believe that, upon coming to the end of a relationship with a tri-lingual Ph.D. who reads all the time, it's entirely reasonable to fantasize about striking up a flirtation with the sort of guy whose twice-weekly presence at your house might be heralded by the sight of his workboots standing outside your bathroom and the sound of the shower he'd installed removing the day's soil and leaving him slick and wet. But it's probably not reasonable to pay an extra 30% because of such a fantasy. Besides, I can still fantasize about the tall and buff Korean even after I hire the not-so-cute Latino. In general, I don't go for tall guys, but while my fantasies are straying to the blue collar, why not?

My new neighborhood is mostly populated with blue collar types, many of whom are both Latino and handsome, though some of them are only one of the two, and I'm sure at least a few of them are neither. In any case, there is plenty of eye candy. But then, I find eye candy everywhere. When I'm by myself in the car, it's very rare for me to drive more than half a mile or so without saying, "Oh, pretty!" -- aloud -- about one or more of the passing men. Fortunately, I only do that when the windows are closed.

2. I still can't decide whether the end of my relationship represents a moral failure or a moral success. Maybe it's some of each, but maybe not. This is a question of the utmost interest to me, and probably nobody else, but I suspect that it's not really answerable, so at the same time, it's extremely tedious. I start to think about it and then stop. Again and again. I've decided that the answer to all of life's really big questions is, "Oh, whatever."

3. Earlier this week, I was sitting through a presentation about likely tax changes under the Obama Administration (Bottom line: nobody knows what's going to happen, but everyone has a guess, and he or she is willing to discuss the guess at great length.) and it became clear that one of my colleagues is some sort of supply sider. He's always struck me as something of a dick, so that wasn't a particular surprise. Anyway, between what he said and what the presenter said in response, I was put in mind of a particular passage that turns out to be in Matthew 25:

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

And here is the same passage, in context:

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

This seems to be a passage that cries out for socialism, or, at the very least, for universal health care and a highly progressive tax structure. And that made me happy because even though I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus, or even that he ever said much if any of which he's said to have said, it pleases me when the Bible reinforces my own moral and political beliefs.

Alas. I read back a bit in the very same chapter, where I found this ringing endorsement of capitalism:

14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.
16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.
17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.
18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.
19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.
20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.
21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.
23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:
25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.
26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:
27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.
28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.
29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Is a puzzlement! Jesus was not much of a political philosopher, I fear, or perhaps he anticipated Emerson's pronouncements about consistency, hobgoblins, and little minds. Oh, whatever.

I think I would probably have differently divided Matthew into chapters. It wouldn't have eliminated the contradictions, but it would have made them less glaring. The twenty-fifth chapter begins with the parable of the virgins and the lamps, which doesn't seem to have any political point of view at all. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's only message is that it's better to have sex with the lights on, but frankly, that's another area where I'm fully agnostic, so I won't go there.

Men with Tools

2009-09-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

So let's say that you've just bought a house, and you like this house a lot, but you really think that you want just a little bit more to make you happy: you want to add a shower to the upstairs half-bath, which will make it either a full bath or a three-quarter bath, depending on some criterion that I am unable to determine. Anyway, you're a homeowner with needs, so what are you going to do? Right: go to the Internet.

Because there's a site for that, don't you know. Maybe seven years ago and then again five years ago I needed to move, and I wasn't going to rent a truck and blackmail or bribe my friends, so I found a local website what you were looking for and within minutes, you'd have men calling you up and offering to help you out, asking you how many men and what sort of equipment you needed to procure satisfaction of your very reasonable needs. It all reminded me of something else, though I could never quite put my finger on what that was.

Anyway, it turns out that there's a similar site for guys in need of a little home improvement assistance. You go to the site, you navigate to the ~~M4M~~Bathroom Renovations section, and you post what you're looking for:

I want to add a shower to the upstairs half-bath in the house I just bought. The house is a Cape with a slanted roof, and to make room for the shower, it will probably be necessary to expand the bathroom about 18 inches into the upstairs bedroom. It will probably also be necessary to move the sink somewhat, and I may want to replace the sink. I am hoping to find someone to frame and install the new shower and do the plumbing. I can finish the walls and install a new floor myself after the shower is installed. One of the prefabricated shower stalls (about 36 x 36) would be fine. Email contact is preferred, but phone contact is fine after 5.

Then you sit back and wait (not for very long) and OMG, y'all, you start getting emails and calls from eager men all over the area. They all want to come over and "give you a free estimate." (Exact quote. I am not using scare quotes. I never use scare quotes. I'm hurt that you even had to ask.) Unfortunately, most of them are only free during the day, when you're at work, (And that also reminds me of something: it's just beyond my grasp, though.) but a few of them say they can show up at your place early in the morning or late in the day, though they might have to be quick. So you arrange for these guys to show up, carefully staggering the times so that they don't find out about each other. They probably know they're in competition, and you know you're going to have to disappoint most of them, but you want to put off that disappointment as long as possible while still encouraging them to give you the very best that they have to offer.

But then there's drama. Like maybe you arrive at the house just before your 8 am appointment, and the phone rings, and the guy who's supposed to be there says that he's running behind because traffic is really bad, but that he'll be there by 8:45. 8:45? Ha! But your Mama didn't raise you to be rude, so you explain to him that 8:45 is too late for you this morning and that he should call later to reschedule. Depending on how many other guys schedule appointments, and how many actually show up, maybe you'll make another appointment with him. Maybe you won't. Maybe he won't even call again. Maybe he really was stuck in traffic, or maybe he decided that your project wasn't big enough or attractive enough for him. In any case, all of your excitement has changed to a combination of disappointment and pique that leaves you wondering whether your needs will ever get met.

Inevitably, though, you try again. You're only human, after all, and sooner or later you have to figure that you'll find the right man for the job. Or at least that you won't find him if you don't look.

The federal government says that I'm a first-time homebuyer, but I have the strongest sense of deja vu. Why is that? I reckon the answer will come to me sooner or later.

Mas Feliz

2009-09-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend, a friend that b&c made while doing some consulting abroad was visiting us from Colombia. As with all of b&c's gay male friends from foreign countries, M. is both charming and cute¹. I considered asking b&c why he went so against type in choosing me as his partner, but I didn't want to be accused of being a wag, though now I think about it, I'm a bit sad that no one has ever accused me of being a wag. I am often accused of being a smartass, and I generally take that as praise, but I'm holding out for wag. Perhaps "wag" has fallen out of fashion, so perhaps I need to do something to encourage its usage. Perhaps the best way to be accused of being a wag is to accuse others of the same thing. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Not coincidentally, when we were discussing our favorite songs Sunday night, M. pulled up the Nat King Cole version of "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," and I in turn showed him a scene from Strictly Ballroom featuring the Doris Day version. I will leave it to others to decide which is better: they are both terrific. I wouldn't be able to choose, and I'm glad I don't have to.

It was nice to have music (and YouTube) with which to communicate because M. speaks little English, and I speak even less Spanish. B&c's Spanish is better than mine, but it's still not great, so there was a good deal of trying to find comprehensible synonyms, combined with a good deal of passing around the dictionary. And there were plenty of times -- mostly when we were at the dinner table having a third glass of wine -- when I decided that getting the general sense of the conversation was sufficient. Sometimes too much comprehension is a bad thing. I am reminded, in particular, of a fellow bass from my choir who left the Catholic church after they started celebrating the mass in English: he no longer had plausible theological deniability.

Anyway, we were at table Saturday evening and M. mentioned that a survey had found that Colombians were the third happiest people in the world. I had always believed that the happiest people were Western Europeans, particularly Scandinavians², but if M. is at all representative, then Colombians are a very happy people. Also, well dressed.

Unsurprisingly, there's no universal consensus on which country has the happiest people. I'm guessing that whatever M. read that said that Colombians are #3 was based on this, but there are many other surveys. There are also many different ways of measuring happiness, some of which attempt to factor in objective metrics. I guess some people can't just take someone's word for it that he's happy. Which sounds a lot like imposing your own definition of happiness on other people in an attempt to convince yourself that you (or your countrymen) are happier than you think you are, but whatever.

There doesn't seem to be any way to measure happiness that puts the U.S. in the top spot, but perhaps Americans are only happy when they're unhappy. Or at least when we have things to strive for. "Things" being the critical word there. It seems perfectly reasonable to be happiest when you're striving for, say, literacy in another language, or the addition of another third to the top of your vocal range (as if), but I can't help recalling how, nearly forty years ago, my mother told my father that if he got her a piano, she would never want anything else.

She was mistaken.

Anyway, yesterday I realized what is said to be the American dream when I closed on my house. I was on my way to the settlement when I got a call from my sister telling me that my mother's doctor had decided that my mother is not an immediate danger to herself or anyone else -- at least as long as my father stays safely in Texas. I was as elated about that as I was about closing on the house. Certainly, one happiness was relief and the other was joy, but if you owe someone $100,000, you probably shouldn't care too much whether you win that much in the lottery or your creditor forgives the debt. Both, by the way, are equally taxable events, though there are a number of exceptions to the inclusion of cancellation of indebtedness income under Internal Revenue Code §108, especially if the debt is on your principal residence.

Earlier in the week, Mom's doctor had been recommending that one of us come down to Florida and ask a judge to have Mom committed for a psychiatric evaluation, and I had been planning to fly down next Monday and file the papers at the courthouse. It's a good thing I had to wait: I had resigned myself to having to do it, but I was still dreading it. Mom's doctor feared that she might be bipolar as well as unstable and none of my sister's or my conversations with Mom had given any of us any impression other than crazy.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the very first song I'd pulled up on YouTube when M. and I were discussing favorite songs was Patsy Cline's version of "Crazy." So far, my mother's crazy hasn't done anything to lessen my enjoyment of Patsy's, and we must pray that doesn't change. If I were to lose any of my enjoyment of Patsy Cline's music, well, the terrorists would already have won.

Interestingly, M. said that neither terrorism nor drug concerns have made travelling to the U.S. especially difficult for him. He did say that Colombians flying into Miami are routinely subjected to extra cocaine-related security but that he has found flying into Houston (which is also cheaper) or L.A. hasn't caused the same problems. I offer no opinion as to whether the difference in levels of security is either because of or the the reason for the nonexistence of CSI: Houston. On the other hand, because much cocaine is, apparently, smuggled within the bodies of travellers and because the people who swallow it prior to travelling avoid drinking soda so as not to rupture the membranes separating the swallowed cocaine from their innards, M. was once searched because he doesn't care for Coca-Cola. One can only imagine what would have happened to him if he'd turned down apple pie.

¹Is it wrong to want to learn Spanish mostly because the men are so attractive? I don't think so.

²As it happens, according to that survey, the happiest countries are Iceland and Denmark, so my assumptions were reasonable.

At Home with the Oblonskys

2009-09-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

My cell phone rang yesterday, and I could see that it was my sister calling, and I thought, "Oh just give it up already" because I assumed that she was going to bug me, yet again, about coming to her house in Texas for Thanksgiving. She had been campaigning for some time, with the first invitation coming perhaps six weeks ago. There had been follow up emails with details of low, low airfares, and then, less than a week ago, another phone call which included the following conversation.

TED: It's just such a long way, and I'm not even sure the girls can make it.

Sister of TED: Well, I know, but Mom and Dad are coming from Florida and [TED's older brother] and his family are coming from [whatever Godforsaken corner of Texas they live in], so I thought if we were all here, we could get a big family picture taken for Mom and Dad.

TED: How about if you photoshop us in?

SoTED: I don't think so.

TED: You're right. YFU and EFU will never pose for a picture. You'll have to photoshop in two other children.

SoTED: TED, stop. I was talking to Dad, and he said that he heard Mom on the phone telling someone that since Thanksgiving is just a couple of days after their fifty-eighth anniversary, and since we never did anything big for their fiftieth anniversary, she thought that we were planning something special.

TED: Well. That's transparent, isn't it?

SoTED: I just think we should all get together again, before it's too late.

TED: Yeah, God forbid we should miss out on the opportunity to celebrate fifty-eight years of constant bickering.

SoTED: That is not very nice.

TED: But it's true, right?

SoTED: That is not very nice.

TED: You know, I remember eight years ago, when [TED's older brother] was living in Pennsylvania, and we went up there for Thanksgiving, and we were all saying what we were thankful for, and I said that I was thankful that Mom and Dad went on a cruise for their golden anniversary and we didn't have to plan anything.

SoTED: You're terrible.

TED: Tell me you didn't think the same thing.

SoTED: Did I mention that you're terrible?

So I wasn't all that thrilled about the prospect of having further guilt applied, but then I remembered that over the weekend, I'd had a conversation with EFU:

TED: How much time do you get for Thanksgiving?

EFU: Just the weekend, but I assume that you'll insist that I come down.

TED: Well, I really hope you will. Your aunt is trying to guilt me into bringing you and YFU down to Texas for Thanksgiving.

EFU: Noooooo!

TED: Well, she says that Grandpa says that Grandma said she thought we were doing something special for their fifty-eighth birthday.

EFU: Well, that's transparent.

TED: OMG, I am so proud to be your father.

EFU: Whatever. I really don't want to go to Texas. You're a better cook than she is.

TED: Finally, someone with reasonable priorities.
EFU: Can I bring one of my roommates home with me for Thanksgiving? Otherwise she'll be here all alone.

TED: Oh sweet! An ironclad excuse not to go to Texas!

EFU: Right, but can we act like we're inviting her just because she's my friend?

TED: Whatever.

So I figured it was safe to take my sister's call and that it was a good time to tell her that I was surely not coming for Thanksgiving.

But what she really wanted to tell me was that she had had a call from my parents' cleaning lady, who is also their friend and attends the same church they do. She'd called to tell my sister that she had taken my father to her home because she was afraid that my mother was going to hurt him.

Apparently, my father had expressed similar fears to his doctor, who had been bound by law to inform the sheriff about his concerns. The sheriff had come to the house to follow up earlier yesterday. Fortunately, my mother had been out at the time; otherwise, they'd have surely ended up on the eleven o'clock news. I wonder what my mother's verse of "Cell Block Tango" would be.

My sister arranged for the cleaning lady to take my father to his doctor's appointment the next day (today) and then to take him to the airport so that he could fly to Austin, where my sister would pick him up and take him to her home.

My sister, not surprisingly, was very upset about the whole situation. I told her that she had done exactly the right thing, and that seemed to make her feel better. Then she said, "Well, I'm taking care of Dad. I guess that means you get to take care of Mom." Thank God she was laughing. (I had a moment of abject terror during which I imagined my mother showing up at my new house. Is giving your mother a fake address considered bad form?)

I had hoped to ignore the inevitable fallout from my father's departure for as long as possible (best case scenario: eighteen hours), but b&c told me that I should probably at least call to check on my mother and make sure that her recent change in behavior wasn't due to the onset of dementia. I can remember my mother throwing things at my father as long as forty years ago, so I'm not sure about the whole recent-change-in-behavior thing, but I figured he was right, so I called Mom. She had no idea where Dad was and didn't seem overly concerned about his absence. So without giving her any details that would enable her to hunt him down, I told her that Dad was on his way to my sister's house. It never takes much to set Mom off, so I got the expected rant from her, but at least I got the fifteen-minute version instead of the half-hour version. It seemed best just to let her talk, and when she started saying that my father had abandoned her and that she'd never abandoned him, I deemed it wiser not to mention all of the times that she disappeared for days or weeks at a time when I was a teenager.

When I got off the phone last night, I remembered the opening line of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And I was briefly very pleased, thinking, "Well, finally we get to be different." But then I realized that I'm probably very slow. Surely we're not suddenly an unhappy family. We must have always been an unhappy family, and I was simply too thick to recognize it. (Either that, or happy family/unhappy family is a false dichotomy, but that's unfathomable since it would mean that I'd have to abandon this whole line of thought.) And that troubled me because if it's possible to be an unhappy family and not know it, does that mean you could be an unhappy person and not know it? I mean, Mom's an unhappy person, and not only does she know it, but she makes sure everyone else knows it, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible to be unhappy without knowing it. What if I'm going along, thinking I'm a happy person, but I'm actually miserable without knowing it? You will probably spot the cognitive flaws in that line of thinking, but parents can make you a little bit crazy.

It's been a long time since I read Anna Karenina, and whenever someone brings it up, my initial response is to think to myself, "Oh, shit. Is she the one who eats poison or the one who throws herself under a train?" European novels, whether Russian or French, about bored women who take lovers and later commit suicide have never had much resonance with me, but then I have never much thought about them in the context of my mother. (Now that I think about it, I honestly don't remember whether I've read Madame Bovary, though I'm pretty sure I saw an adaptation of it once on PBS.) Anna Karenina, as it happens, is only secondarily about her story. The primary plot -- the one that ends happily -- is more engaging. Perhaps Tolstoy chose the title so as not to give the lie to his first sentence, or perhaps it was a simple recognition that stories of unhappiness are generally more compelling than stories of happiness. That we find unhappiness more compelling likely says something ugly enough about the human psyche that we're better off not exploring the phenomenon too closely.

I'll admit that after I got the call from my sister midday yesterday, I was pretty beat up and had to close my office door for ten minutes or so. And later in the day, at the beginning of a long and brisk walk, I wallowed briefly in the unfairness of the fact that I have only just gotten to the point where my children have started to behave like adults, and now my parents started to behave like children.

Ultimately, though, I'm nothing like my mother, who has wallowed in perceived unfairness for at least the last forty years, and probably much longer. Her unhappiness is extremely regrettable, but it has long been obvious to me that she cultivates it. There's not much that I can do about her unhappiness except not to emulate it, and not to burden my own children. She has taught me much by way of counterexample.

Predictable

2009-09-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Outlook doesn't put up with passive-aggressive behavior. When someone at work sends me an invitation to a meeting, and I don't respond to it either way, it still goes on my calendar. Worse, people expect me to show up. "Invitation" seems like the wrong word: it's really more of a summons. I don't want to attend about ninety percent of the meetings that someone wants me to attend, but I rarely have a compelling reason not to. Or, at least, it's not compelling to the person who invited me. I consider the very nature of most meetings a compelling reason not to attend them. If someone invited you to a public execution, you could probably get away with saying, "Oh, thanks, but no. Capital punishment is really not my thing," but you can't say the same thing about meetings. And how is that fair? Meetings and public executions are equally objectionable for all but one of the participants.

Anyway, this morning my calendar kept warning me that I had a meeting with our director of human resources to go over the results of my Predictive Index survey, and, boy howdy did I not want to attend that meeting, even though there was only one other participant and even though it was scheduled to take place in my office, so I wouldn't even have to get out of my chair.

I was ~~forced at gunpoint~~ encouraged to take the PI survey six or so weeks earlier. The PI survey consists of two identical screens of adjectives. On the first screen, you're meant to check those that describe how you're expected to behave by others. On the second screen, you're meant to check those that you believe truly describe you. I immediately saw problems with both the methodology and the choice of words. But I filled the survey out with all the attention that I thought it deserved (maybe even more), and, well, that's ninety seconds of my life that I'll never get back.

About a month ago, I got an email with the results, and, well, you know how you hear people talking about this or that diagnostic test (a lot of the people I go to church with, for example, are government workers, and if I hear one more person try to describe another person by reference to his or her Meyers-Briggs profile, I may plotz) and how the results described them exactly? Well, I started reading my results, and I was going, yeah, yeah, WTF? oh hell no! It was a fascinating mixture of spot on and laughably wrong.

We'd been told that the PI would be used as a screening tool for new hires and as a management tool for existing employees. I'm really the only person in my organization who does what I do. I like what I do, and they would have a hell of a time finding anyone else who does what I do, so my job isn't changing significantly any time in the next decade, but I was a little annoyed at the prospect of such a wrong-headed analysis being in my personnel file, so I printed out the index and took it to my boss and said, "Does this sound like me?" And he said, "yeah, yeah, WTF? oh hell no!" But he mostly just thought it was funny.

I told him, "If anyone tries to manage me using this, there is going to be a problem." And he replied, "You can be managed?" And then he laughed at me again, and I went back to my office.

The HR director laughed today when she asked me what I thought of my PI survey results and I said, "I think it's a bunch of hooey." Then she told me that the PI is approved as a tool by the EEOC, which to me says not that it isn't hooey but that it's no more or less hooey for any particular classification of people. Then she went over the charts with me. Sadly, I have forgotten most of what she said. I got momentarily excited when she told me I was a "high C," but after she left I tested myself, and my vocal range had not in fact expanded. Typical.

Later, she said that when we were discussing my results, she could see that I agreed with some of them, and I said, "Well, if you throw a thousand darts, some of them are going to hit," and she laughed and said, "I knew this conversation was going to be interesting." Talking with an HR director is much like talking with a fundamentalist minister: no amount of well-explained doubt will shake the faith of either of them. I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid, and my failure to imbibe is something that anyone who knows me would have predicted, even though according to the PI, I should be lapping it up.

---------
By the way -- and à propos of nothing -- it occurs to me that the problem isn't that you can't convey irony on the Internet. The problem is that most people are either too dumb or too mean spirited to perceive it.

---------
Even more tangentially, does anyone know of any free room layout software? I've been using the free evaluation copy of SmartDraw, but I'm really not willing to drop $200, no matter how much fun it is moving virtual sofas around the virtual living room.

---------
The house closing is now twelve days away, and I find myself behaving in unpredictable ways. Have you ever heard of badly referred pain? Badly referred pain is pain that presents at some distance from the affected organ. One most often hears about the concept in gall bladders. Your gall bladder might be inflamed, and you might eat or drink something with too much fat in it, and the resulting annoyance of your gall bladder might manifest itself as a pain pretty much anywhere in your torso. Or maybe your extremities. Or maybe in your neighbor's cat, I don't know.

Anyway, I've begun to think that the stress from a home acquisition is manifesting itself on other stressors of greater or lesser magnitude so that, for example, I'm finding work very stressful just now, even though it's probably no worse than most other years at the same season. Also, there's a slight chance that I may occasionally be short tempered at inappropriate times.

There's no point in being stressed about the home purchase. I have occasionally wondered whether it's the right thing to do right now, but I always come down very firmly on the side of do it and do it now. And it's going pretty well. I finished arranging the homeowner's insurance this morning, so there are no immediate tasks left for me to complete. I will have to move at some point, of course, and before that I'm sure that there are other hoops to be thrown through, but the closing is in twelve days, and as far as I know, the only thing left for me to do is to show up with a large check and sign lots of documents, and there appears to be no shortage of people to tell me either where to sign or the size of the check.

Still, it's a lot of uncertainty. I've run the numbers, more than once, so I know I can afford the house, but it's a big financial commitment, and a significant majority of the money that used to go into my savings accounts will now go directly to the mortgage and other home expenses. And then there's the whole aloneness thing. I very much want to live by myself (or, rather, the combination that I'll have of by myself and with the kids), but there's always that fear that you'll wake up one night and realize that what you thought was badly referred gall bladder pain is more likely a ruptured appendix or perforated ulcer and that the difference between screaming in pain and being rushed to the hospital by your partner (or an ambulance that he's summoned) and finding your cell phone, which could be God knows where, and summoning the ambulance yourself might be the difference between a painful recovery and eternal slumber. That fear's probably even less reasonable than the financial ones, but it exists nonetheless.

I don't fear loneliness per se. It's not my nature to feel lonely, I'm extremely busy, and I expect that, if anything, my technical singleness will encourage me to spend more time with my non-b&c friends. And I'll probably still spend a significant amount of time with b&c, unless he wises up and sells the exurban house and relocates to Tuscany, the way any sensible retiree who's fluent in Italian would. But he's somewhat set in his ways, so I reckon he'll be around for the foreseeable future. I hope that he'll start dating again very soon. I hate the idea of any dating that involves me, but I love hearing about other people's dating disasters. The successes are not nearly so entertaining, but I reckon that the ratio is at least seven-to-one in favor of disaster, so I'm likely in for a year or two of good stories before he settles down again. Unless he wises up and imports a hausboy from the former German Democratic Republic, the way any sensible retiree who's fluent in German would.

Anyway, between the new house, the moving, the end of my relationship (also the guilt at being so excited about the new house; I don't have a good reason to feel guilty about it, but I was raised Southern Baptist, so guilt happens), the health issues with my father, and the long hours at work, I haven't been sleeping so well, and I find myself forgetting things. For example, I apparently, some time ago, arranged to play bridge this weekend with a couple of my longest-standing gay friends and some guy I've never met. And this totally slipped my mind until one of my friends called me yesterday to remind me, so I also, earlier this week, made arrangements to meet a buddy of mine for dinner and a movie, at the very same time.

And oh the regret, the remorse, the chagrin. There is nothing I fear more than being rude, and, really, double booking social engagements is something that you might expect from, say, people hooking up on craigslist (not that I would know, of course, but I've heard stories), but it is not something one does to one's friends. No ~~wire hangers~~ double booking ever! Fortunately, my buddy was amenable to lunch and an earlier movie. I had to buy each of his boyfriends a pair of leather pants to make it up to him, but I reckon I got off cheap: if the situation had been reversed, I would have demanded one of the boyfriends.

Anyway, I should knock wood and or not jinx myself, but I figure that once the house closes and the last tax deadline passes and I make what should be EFU's final tuition payment, I should have at least a few weeks of relative relaxation before the universe comes up with something else to throw at me. Hopefully in the meanwhile, I can avoid any major disasters like buying the wrong house, misplacing YFU, or doubling someone into game.

West

2009-09-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

This being -- or, by now I suppose, having been -- a holiday weekend, I decided not to go to the office (Saturday morning doesn't really count, right? Surely not on a three-day weekend.); instead, b&c and I headed to the mountains for a quiet weekend. We made pretty good time on the way up because I drove. Typically, b&c drives, but he recently injured his shoulder, and I've discovered that, when there's not heavy traffic around, I really don't mind driving as much as I mind worrying about his driving. He is a charming man, for the most part, but his driving skills are surpassed only by his skill at regenerating limbs.

Anyway, we would have made the trip in about 2.5 hours, but I wanted to stop at Ollie's, a store that specializes in remaindered items. They had, for example, about eight large bins filled with wallpaper borders at ninety-nine cents each. And since each border is fifteen yards long, I could have completely wallpapered several rooms in mismatched borders less than ten dollars. But I forbore. Forbearance is a virtue. Except when it isn't, of course. I did buy several steeply discounted spiral notebooks.

We got to the house in Springs a little before 7. We took a short walk to enjoy the view and the quiet, and then b&c made dinner while I watched HGTV. We ate, and I cleaned up, and then we read for a while. A little later I went outside and tried to take pictures of the moon.

But they didn't really come out. Alas.

I slept late the next morning. It was very cool in the mountains, and the bedroom was relatively dark. B&c, who had retired earlier and who has superior light but inferior noise tolerance, was awoken earlier by several of the neighborhood's many barking dogs. One of these dogs had barked at us the previous evening when we were on our walk. She appeared to be about fifteen years old, and her owner greeted us and then said, "She's a killer" as the dog pursued us at nearly the speed of tree sap.

By the time I showered and descended, b&c had finished breakfast, so I made some toast and fried a couple of eggs and followed it with some instant coffee that I cannot in good conscience recommend. Then we set off for Deep Creek Lake State Park. We visited the so-called Discovery Center where b&c procured a trail map. He suggested that we take one of the moderate trails. It was, apparently, called the Indian Turnip Trail, but I somehow got it in mind that it was the Indian Head Trail, and I spent some time daydreaming about happenings that the trail was not prepared to deliver. Still, it was pretty.

The wild or Indian turnip (Arisaema triphyllum (L.) Schott), like other members of the Araceae (aroid family), contains needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals, raphides, which ingested cause burning pain, swelling of the tongue and membranes of the mouth, and can be fatal. In the mid-1800s the raphides had yet to be discovered by chemists.

Just in case you wanted to know.

The first entrance to the trail was taped off, so we climbed a bit farther along the fire break to another entrance, where we had a choice of the high or low trails. I assumed that the trail looped back to this point, so I suggested we take the high path so that we could climb in the early part of the walk and descend later. I wasn't at all concerned about the hike until we got to a place where the path was blocked by a tree.

I wasn't troubled by the tree so much as by b&c's apparent inability to see the walk-around immediately to the right of the path. I have trouble remembering the minor shortcomings of others; for example, it was not until the fourth or fifth time that she told me, with some exasperation, that I remembered that EFU doesn't like hummus. But, really, who doesn't like hummus? And who can't read a trail map or see clearly painted blazes? The inability to comprehend that question is why I fail to remember that b&c's map reading and trail following abilities are exceeded only by his skill at giving birth. Anyway, the trail was very pleasant, and there was ample evidence of wild berry activity.

It was mostly too late in the season for wild berries, but we were not far into the hike when I happened across some ripe blueberries.

I'm sure you can understand my dilemma here. On the one hand, there is probably a big official frowny face associated with eating the wild berries. On the other hand, it's a pretty safe bet that they're organic. More to the point, though, the concept of sensitivity of initial conditions (more commonly, if annoyingly, known as the butterfly effect) tells us that, over time, the smallest action can lead to vast effects in later events. So, for example, my eating the blueberry could mean that a bird goes without vital nutrition and dies. Because of that, the bird does not contract a case of avian flu and does not go on to start a pandemic which wipes out half of the mid-Atlantic states and leads to Republican control of all branches of government for most of the 21st and early 22nd centuries. On the other hand, not eating the blueberry could mean that I miss a vital anti-oxidant, leading to a very minor cardiac event, because of which I end up dating a very cute cardiologist who, when I inevitably break his heart (figuratively: duh), channels his pain into new research which eliminates heart disease and saves millions. You can see the sort of responsibility that I live with on a day-to-day basis.

I ate the blueberries. I would like to say that I was trying to save millions from influenza and Republican oppression, but mostly I just wanted to avoid having to date anyone. Besides, they were tasty.

After we narrowly avoided losing a clearly marked trail another couple of times, I thought that I had better stop taking b&c's word for it and take charge of the map. Looking at the contour lines, I anticipated some future difficulties.

But I didn't say anything. After all, the hike was said to be moderate. Besides, I kept thinking, "Well, surely it won't be as bad as Cornwall." This thought refers to the vacation, perhaps five years ago, that we took to England, where we spent several days hiking the Cornwall Coast Path. It was the most beautiful trail I ever hiked, but there were several instances along the incredibly steep and rocky trail heading southwest from St. Ives where I thought that surrendering my body to the elements might be the best choice.

And, really, the path was fine, there was an extended portion in the middle that was steep for a prolonged period, but whenever I got tired, I thought, "Really, this is nothing like Cornwall," and before long the path had evened out to a flat and pleasant walk over railroad ties.

We reached the end of the trail, which was not the same as the beginning of the trail, but I was reminded by the views of how much I love nature.

I saw an old, large wire spool that must have been used to transport some of the electrical wire running up to the summit.

Predictably, I thought about how easy it would be to convert it to a combination bar and picnic table for my backyard, but it did not appear to be for sale. Oh well.

I was not in a hurry to head back down the mountain, so I absorbed some more of the natural beauty.

I was a bit concerned about the steepness of the descent. I was unable to get a picture that did it justice, but you can sort of see here how the earth appears to drop away.

Or you can look at this detail for the map. The Indian Turnip Trail having ended abruptly, we had to take the Fire Tower Trail back down. Later, I calculated that over the steepest parts of the trail, the descent was approximately twenty feet every ten meters. When I got to the edge of where the descent began, I was nonplussed. But there was nothing for it but to descend.

I was only a few yards down when I encountered a hiker coming the other way. He was in his forties and moderately cute with a pierced ear. He was walking a somewhat frou-frou canine. I would probably have noticed him more if I weren't worried about falling down the mountain. He said hello, and then, "Be careful. It's very steep, and there are a lot of loose rocks." Men are so shameless when they flirt.

I was perhaps another ten yards into the descent when I thought, "Wow, this is very steep. And there are a lot of loose rocks." And then, "This is way worse than Cornwall." I was scared, especially when I saw b&c, who was twenty or so yards ahead of me, slip and fall. He seemed to be okay, though it is probable that he sprained his wrist. I went very slowly, walking sideways as much as possible, and seriously regretting that I hadn't worn some manner of hiking shoe or boot. Occasionally there was a tree to hold onto, but mostly there was just open, treacherous path. I might have despaired had I not been distracted by brambles.

I ate the ripe ones, without even pausing to consider the potentially catastrophic long-term effects. They were delicious.

When I finally reached flatter ground, it was only a short walk to the parking lot. I thought at that point that I would probably sell b&c's soul for a liter of Orangina, but there is no Orangina in Western Maryland, so I had to settle for something from the vending machine.

Do not.

It was mid-afternoon then, and we were both exhausted (and sore) from the last part of the hike, so we found a restaurant and had a late lunch. The food was unremarkable, but I was very hungry. Then we drove the half-hour or so back to the house. I took some ibuprofen for the soreness, but I was so beat that I felt like I really needed to do a few lines:

I was going to say that I just don't do lines as easily as I did in my youth, but I never really did them in my youth. I was excessively well-behaved as a youth. I should probably regret the lost opportunities, but I'm too lazy.

We read and watched TV for a while and had a late and light dinner. I watched Design Star on HGTV before going to bed.

The next morning was cool and cloudy.

We had breakfast, cleaned the house, and packed up. On the drive home, b&c napped, and, since it was Labor Day, I worried about work. It seemed a fitting end to the summer.

Inspiration

2009-09-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

I acquired the above print, "Lady Turns into Owl and Follows Husband" when I was in Montreal. Not this past summer, but the last time I was there, in the early nineties. My then-wife and I were on vacation, and we had gone into an Inuit gallery, and we saw it, and we loved it. Or at least I loved it: I think she loved the subject matter (The story is about a woman who dies and is so moved by her husband's grief that she turns into a spirit owl -- no shadow! -- and accompanies her husband.) because when we were dividing the property, she thrust it at me and said, disgustedly, that she was no longer interested in it because of what it symbolized. Drama much? Well, yeah, there was lots of drama in that divorce. Boy howdy, but let's not go there.

You will no doubt recognize

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Oscar Wilde said it. I don't know whether it's true. I'm not, for the most part, a believer in objective truth, so whether that sort of statement true is not a question that I could answer with any conviction. The sentiment is often used to make, for example, fans of Wagner feel better about liking his work because, according to Wild, his life is irrelevant to his work. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't much matter because I prefer to think of Wagner's music in terms of another Wilde quote:

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Questions of morality aside, Wagner is tedious.

But there's nothing tedious, immoral, or abhorrent about the Agnes Nanogak print that we bought in Montreal, and I was shocked, though relieved, that I didn't have to fight for it in the property settlement. I always thought that the story behind it was nice, but it was still a nice story even if I was never going to be so beat up about my ex-wife's hypothetical demise that she'd want to sprout feathers. More to the point, I love that print.

It's very rare for me to love visual art. "David," yes, but even if the Italian government had offered "David" to me for 200 $CDN, I would have had trouble getting it home and finding space for it in the living room. I've had similar reactions to other pieces of art in museums and, rarely, on people's walls, but loving a piece of work that was available and affordable has happened once. What can I say? I'm visually challenged; contrariwise, I fall in love with music all the time. (Music is generally pretty cheap, though. So are books.)

"Lady Turns into Owl and Follows Husband" hasn't had a suitable home for a while. I had it hung on the walls of various apartments, but b&c's walls have always been full (feeling like a guest in his home, even after five years, was probably not terribly helpful to our relationship, but whatever), so it was in a box for a bit, and then I put it on one of the dressers in the bedroom, leaning against a wall.

I know you've been wondering when I was going to get around to the home decorating topic du jour, and, well, here we are. It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to choose my new living/dining room colors based on the colors in the painting. The blue is a good bit less vibrant than what I'd been thinking of for the bottom third of the walls, but I think that the blue in the painting is a bit livelier than it appears in the picture here. I'll have to grab some sample cards to match it. And browns are generally not my thing, but I reckon I can find cork that reflects at least one of the browns in the painting and use it on the top half of the short wall that will face the short wall on which the painting will be hung. That way I'll have a large cork board for part of the wall. And I can pin photographs to that: it's really, really easy for me to find or take photographs that I like enough to have on my wall, and between my travel archives, Flickr, and Costco's photo center, I can probably load up the whole wall for less than a Benjamin.

I figure that I can pick up the red in the dog's tongue for the banquette cushions.

(YFU has decided that she wants at least one of the walls in her room to be a deep red, and that she also wants chalkboard paint circles on that wall. It strikes me as a good idea, but I haven't committed to it yet.)

I am still fixated on the aluminum pipe bed. It seems like only a minor extravagance, especially considering how much I'm sure I'll love it. I do have a bed frame already, but it's cheap and rickety, and I can always give it to EFU again. If I decide to be especially virtuous, I can wait a little while on the bed and use the money that I'm sure my parents will give me at Christmas for it, but I doubt that I'll want to be as virtuous as all that. I considered settling for a PVC pipe version of it. It would cost a lot less, even after factoring in the additional pipe needed for it: PVC pipe is strong, but it flexes, so I'd need a lot of cross supports. But I wouldn't love it.

In the comments from my previous entry, Père Antoine mentioned his own plan to put a bed on a pulley system attached to two bicycle hoists. Brilliant. Since I don't live in NYC, I have enough room to have dedicated bed space, but I can think of any number of other things that I'd like to suspend from the ceiling, in the bedroom and elsewhere.

His suggestion put me in mind of a New Yorker cartoon from way back in 1983, which was very likely the first year I subscribed to TNY. I didn't think I'd be able to track it down online, but I managed:

George Booth was probably joking, but I love the idea of a table hoist. I probably won't have one because I have an alternate plan: two Ikea sawhorses and two Ikea tabletops: a small one for everyday and a larger one for dinner parties. I was thinking that I'd have enough room on the cork wall to hang whichever one wasn't in use at the moment. To make the arrangement more decorative, I was thinking of stenciling on one of the tabletops a quilt pattern. On the other one, perhaps a cheap reproduction of another Inuit print. Or some New Yorker covers. Or "David."

Interior

2009-09-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

OMG, y'all. I want that bed.

And I don't just mean that it'd be cool to have that bed. I mean that without that bed, my life will have no meaning. My salt will have lost its savor. Wherewith shall we flavor the meat, readers? WHEREWITH?

Sorry, I got a little bit carried away there, but it's been a tough week, you know? I got deadlines and there was that literature-destroying flood and this morning EFU called me with a list of textbooks that she wants me to find cheaply for her (i.e., buy for her) and there's the house closing in three weeks and then the heavens part and the angels sing and I see a picture of this bed and all is right in the world.

And -- you know what? -- that bed is available online for the low, low price of $1,339.18, plus shipping, and I want it so badly that I might consider paying that, even though that's an obscene amount of money to pay for a bed frame, and if you don't think that's an obscene amount of money to pay for a bed frame, then, well, you're not me. But at that price, it comes as a kit, so it requires assembly, and if that's the case, I might as well buy the parts from a plumbing/metal supply place. So I priced the components, and I could get all the pipes and the fittings for $577.64, including shipping. I'd still need a pipe cutting wrench, but I bet Dad still has at least one of those.

But life is never so easy, is it? As I was dreaming of that bed, and all of the uses to which it might be put*, it occurred to me that I'm buying a Cape, and the ceiling to my bedroom is slanted, and I might not be able to fit that bed in my room. Bitter pill, meet swallow.

Then I realized that I could modify the design, take away the canopy feature (which somewhat limits its functionality, but c'est la vie) and build it for even less ($507.97, including shipping, if you're keeping track). But it's a compromise, and life is full of compromises, but this is one that I'd really rather not make.

And then I remembered that before I'd seen this bed, my dream bed was one that I hadn't actually seen but had only, well, dreamed of, and that dream bed is built entirely from 4x4 lumber and lag bolts.

And heavy wood dream bed, which, with some ingenuity, maintains all of the horizontal functionality of the pipe bed, would be much cheaper. I wasn't able to price it precisely, but based on my most recent trip to Home Depot, I'm confident it could be built for less than $120.

And that would still be awesome, but there's a problem: every source I find for 4x4 dimensional lumber only sells that size in pressure-treated wood, and pressure-treated lumber is generally reserved for outdoor use because of the nasty chemicals they use to make it impervious to the outdoors. And it might be possible to seal in the nasty chemicals with several coats of paint, but there'd still be the cutting and drilling phases, which would subject me to sawdust. And maybe that can be made safe, but I just don't know.

But the main problem is that the sturdy wood bed -- however functional and cool and attractive it might turn out to be -- isn't the pipe bed. This is what happens when you dare to dream, people.

Fortunately, there are plenty of other things to obsess over besides my probable inability to have my dream bed. I'm still thinking of the living/dining room paint treatment and furnishings, for example. I think I've decided to do away with the faux chair rail border, but in the interest of effective space management, I believe that the dining area of the living/dining room will feature a banquette. Like this, but not like this:

Different colors, probably, and I'd have built in storage and maybe not such a thick back cushion and yadda yadda yadda, but still a banquette, then a dining table, and maybe three padded chairs that could do double duty as living room seating for that moment during the dinner party when the guests migrate from the dining portion of the living/dining room to the post-dining lounge portion of the living/dining room.

I still have weeks and weeks in which to ~~change my mind countless times~~ work all this out.

*For instance, it would make an excellent support for a clothesline, or even a frame for a make-shift greenhouse. What did you think I meant?

Le Déluge, Après Moi

2009-09-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

The first time I said to myself that I would probably never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles again was likely back in my thirties when I was packing up my books to move out of the house that I'd shared with my now-ex-wife. On one level, it was a simple acknowledgment that I probably could have let that book go, even though I knew I would choose not to. But the statement came to mean something more to me: every time I thought about the intersection of age, my uneasy role as a collaborator to capitalism, and the slow demise of my intellectual life, I'd put it in similar terms: "There comes a time in his life when a man realizes that he'll probably never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles again." Pretentious, yes, but at least I only ever said it to myself.

It didn't have to be Tess, of course, but she/it was a particularly good candidate: as a youth, with certain exceptions (mostly 20th century southern writers, especially Faulkner) all of my favorite novelists had been 19th Century English writers. And I'd liked Tess very much, but not so much that I'd probably ever feel a desire for it strong enough to overcome the charms of either a novel I hadn't yet read or a novel I liked better. Put another way, Hardy occupied a middle tier between authors I'd keep and re-read (Austen, Dickens) and those I'd eventually donate to the church bazaar (Thackeray, Trollope). I'm not sure exactly who else is in the middle tier, but it likely includes all of George Eliot except Middlemarch. It's important to me to believe that there will come a time when I have sufficient fortitude and leisure to read Middlemarch again. That's a lot of leisure. And fortitude.

Please join me now in a moment of silence for the transition that died but that would otherwise have been here. Thank you.

And now the scene changes to my office. The day is yesterday, the time is five o'clock. Pm. (Actually, it turns out that there really isn't another one.) I'm reviewing a tax return and planning to stay until 8 or so. But then, the cell phone rings. It's b&c's ring.

TED: Hi.
B&c: Hello there.
TED: Yeah?
B&c: Can you come home early today?
TED: Um...
B&c: The basement is flooded.
TED: Ugh.
B&c: I think it's either the pump on the air conditioner or it's the water heater. Your boxes are too heavy for me to move.
TED: Fine.
B&c: Are you coming home on 355 or Connecticut Ave.
TED: Why?
B&c: I wanted to see whether I could get a non-monosyllabic response out of you.
TED: B.

So I spend the next forty-five minutes (the traffic getting out of Bethesda at 5 o'clock is a rare treat) driving home, where I hear b&c in the basement, mopping and cursing, and I go downstairs, and there's water covering the 15% of the basement where most of my boxes are stored, and a lot of the boxes are on top of other boxes, so they just get moved; or they contain non-porous cooking equipment, which just needs to be dried off; or clothes, which I haul upstairs to launder; but then I see a photocopy paper box with "BOOKS" written on it in permanent marker.

I passed on to the box, and stooped down. I lifted the heavy cardboard, put the other dank pages aside, and turned the cover. And it was Tess, cold and dead.

I was not happy. Ordinarily, at such a time, I would take some consolation in philosophy, but the flood got that, too:

[By the way, you know that commercial where the two guys stuff an entire busted grand piano into a garbage bag? Load of hooey. I got the same kind of bag, and it couldn't even handle a small box of damp paperbacks. On the plus side, I did finally locate the power chord to my electronic keyboard.]

By the time I'd moved what I could and bagged up what I had to throw away, b&c was nearing the end of his rope. He'd been mopping for hours but the water kept coming. I tried to suggest, gently, that a leaking water heater qualified as a plumbing emergency, so he could try the after-hours number for his plumber. His response was to say that he needed to go make dinner. And then I asked him whether he'd turned off the water flowing into the water heater, in the hopes that doing so would stop water coming out of the water heater, but he hadn't realized that the blue valve on the pipe leading into the water heater had a purpose. I turned it off and mopped some more and then we had dinner. Then I heard him moaning from downstairs that there was more water. I suggested that since turning off the intake valve hadn't been enough, perhaps it would be a good idea for me to drain the water heater, and his response was to go out and buy a wet vac. Far be it from me to deny any man the pleasure of buying a new piece of equipment, but this is the same guy who could not hammer tacks into fence posts but still insisted that my buying a staple gun was the height of extravagance.

Not that I was angry or anything.

Anyway, draining a forty gallon hot water heater turns out to be a tedious task. If the situation ever arises, make it easier on yourself by hooking one end of a hose to the drain valve, putting the other end of the hose down in a drain somewhere, and opening the hot water taps in the rest of the house, to relieve the vacuum and empty the tank more quickly. Or you can just haul bucket after bucket after bucket of hot water up the stairs and pour it down the toilet: you'll feel more virtuous that way.

I was up until after midnight draining and mopping and listening to b&c swear about how the wet vac was a waste of money, especially when it overloaded the circuit and he had to find his way through a dark basement to the circuit breaker panel. Twice. I suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to turn off the dehumidifier while he was running the wet vac, but he's a Catholic, so I reckon that bumping into things in a dark wet basement is his version of penance. I had always thought that a "Hail, Mary" began with "Hail, Mary," but it appears that "Jesus Christ!" and "Fuck!" are also acceptable beginnings. Live and learn.

One of the other things I learned last night is that while the leak may have happened yesterday, there had been other episodes of water in the basement. In going through some of my boxes, I happened across significant amounts of mold. My eyes began to water and my skin to itch, but fortunately it was only about six more hours after that before I could take a shower. Unfortunately, there was no hot water, so it was a cold shower, but b&c was paranoid about my running the water, so it was only a brief cold shower.

And today my eyes feel like they might swell shut, and I'd take a Benadryl, but then I'd pass out in my office because I'm only just barely staying awake as it is, and that is the sort of day I'm having, and the worst part of it all is that I'll almost certainly never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles again.

R.I.P.

2009-08-31T08:59:00.001-07:00

Frank Beekman posted the last part of his final entry last night. It was the best writing on the Internet, and I've loved his unflinching (if overly harsh) self-examination, coupled with a novelist's sensibility and eye for detail, for years. He's been planning the end for some time now (posts have gotten less and less frequent) and it's a very graceful and fitting departure, but it still makes me sad, for a variety of reasons.

There is, by the way, no point in reading the last entry if you haven't read any of the rest of it. The archives are immense, but worth making their way through (you can cheat and read only the entries marked on the sideline as "quintessential accidental") if you like brilliant autobiography and can handle regular heartbreak.

One great thing about the Internet is that it allows me to explore aspects of myself that aren't well-integrated with my familial or professional life. And then to share that aspect with people who would otherwise find me mostly uninteresting. In that vein, Frank (and/or his altar ego) and I have had (very) occasional correspondences over the last few years, and for unknown reasons (i.e., the more suitable candidates all turned him down, I reckon) he asked me to help him launch his new web site. This involves reading a book and discussing it with him via email. Then he posts the discussion online. The first entry is up, and I'm signed up for one more book, after which he'll find someone more appropriate. I'm not denigrating my own reading or discussion skills, but he and I approach reading in very different ways, and I think his site would work best with a correspondent who shared his approach but has radically different literary opinions. Our first discussion was about Don Quixote, where we had radically different approaches but pretty much the same basic opinion of the book.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun discussing the book with him, even though it was very challenging for me to write about a book that utterly failed to engage me. Reading the book wasn't so much fun, but Don Quixote has its good points, and it's an accomplishment to have survived it. Besides, the next book is significantly less than half as long.

The web site is an intellectual endeavor, and I've long said that true intellectual discourse is not possible on the Internet. But the impossibility of attaining an ideal is no excuse not to work towards it. And it will be interesting to see where Close Reader takes the site, even though I'll sorely miss the further adventures of Frank Beekman.

Adventures in the Arts

2009-08-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

1. Whenever EFU is over, she invites me into her room to sit on the bed which used to be mine but is now hers but will soon be mine again to watch episodes of The Office with her. She has seen them all before, but I haven't. We're about a third of the way through season 4 right now. She always wants me to watch multiple episodes, and sometimes I can handle two, but mostly I want to kermit* after one episode. It's brilliant, of course, and very funny, but even though my current office is nothing like Dunder Mifflin (we're all too busy, for one thing; for another, we're not idiots), I have in the past worked in places where the behavior of Michael Scott and company would have been only slightly out of the ordinary.

It bothers me that the show bothers me so much, but I'm going to assume that it's my sensitivity to the suffering of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation rather than any similarity to my own life that causes the visceral discomfort. I am glad that EFU wants to spend time with me, and I'm hopeful that her great admiration of The Office means that she'll never work in one, but we'll just have to wait and see.

2. When we were in Montreal, the girls wanted to see Julie and Julia because, hey, why spend time soaking in a foreign culture when you can see a movie that you could see just as easily at home. Actually, they were responding more to the heat/humidity/rainstorms, but there may be something to the idea that kids these days (get off my lawn!) have shorter attention spans. We tried twice to see it, but the first theater we stopped at was showing the film dubbed into French, so a couple of days later I looked online for an English showing (there are American films that are probably greatly improved by being dubbed into French, but this didn't seem likely to be one of them), and we went to a gigantic multiplex on the west side of Rue Ste. Catherine. All of the signs, and some of the pre-show, were in French, so I was worried for a bit, but we were in a show with Meryl Streep's actual Julia Child voice speaking English.

Interestingly (or not), at about the same we were watching the film in Montreal, b&c and his daughter were watching the film in Denver. B&c's daughter was the only one of all of us who didn't love the film. She's also the only one who had read the book, so draw your own conclusions.

I don't have much to add to what you've probably already heard about the film. I thought it was terrific, but it would probably be just as good on DVD. I reckon I'll buy the DVD when it comes out, so I'll know for sure then. Of course, if you don't like Julia Child, you probably won't like the film.

I know you're saying, "Mais, comment? Who are zees people who do not like Madame Sheeeld?" Trust me, they exist. My alter ego wrote an entry about two of them some time ago.

3. I don't understand color. The house purchase is sailing unobstructed towards settlement, and I have no idea how to pick appropriate colors for the walls. I have an idea that I would like to paint the living room in three colors: a sort of French/Greek/Mediterranean matte blue along the bottom third or so to mimic wainscoting; a band of semi-gloss bright(ish) white above that to mimic a chair rail; and the remainder in perhaps a nice off white, or something similar. But I have no idea whether the idea makes any sense or how to go about choosing the particular shades. There must be technology to help with this, but hours of reading apartmenttherapy.com and watching HGTV have not helped.

And then there are all the other rooms. YFU gets to pick the color for her own room (subject to my veto), but that still leaves -- at the very least -- my bedroom to be done before the furniture comes in. Am I supposed to go camp out at a paint store and wait for some of the colors to speak to me?

I am really not used to caring this much about my surroundings, but this is my chance to have my own place reflect who I am. (Or a better version of who I am. If it was just going to reflect me, I'd just leave the walls their current white and everything else wherever the movers put it.) I spend minutes almost every day worrying about this.

4. Some NYC-based arts organization has invited our church choir to sing as part of a massed choir at a Lincoln Center (Avery Fisher Hall) performance of Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man in mid-January. It's part of a program that also includes his Requiem, which I haven't heard. Our choir did The Armed Man in June, and we did a pretty good job of it, and there aren't that many choirs who have done it, and I guess it would be cool to perform at Lincoln Center, but they want $590 from each of us, just to show up, rehearse, and sing. Travel, food, and lodging not included, naturally. Our choir director says that the group running this is a legitimate (for-profit) enterprise, and almost everyone else in the choir is really excited about it, but I can't help thinking that paying to sing at Lincoln Center is so, well, Florence Foster Jenkins.

Anyway, I have to decide pretty soon whether I'm in or out. I reckon it would cost about $1,500 all together. I have the money, but I can't help wondering whether it wouldn't be better spent on something else (b&c asked whether I'd like to go to Spain next April or May: there are some really good fares available). I also can't help remembering how much work it was to raise a couple of thousand dollars to mount the production at church, but now the members of the choir are eager to pony up a collective 30 grand or so because it's an honor to be asked. On the other hand, I did like singing the piece, and I'd have three or four days in New York with a relatively light rehearsal schedule. Decisions, feh.

*I am pretty sure I have said this before, but for anyone who missed it, "to kermit" means to run screaming from a room, with one's arms flailing above one's head. The etymology is obscure.