This week-end has found my husband and me revisiting old friends in the form of movies, books and music. Yesterday he sat down to re-watch The Godfather. Prior to that, I sat down to re-read Pride and Prejudice (an annual spring ritual) while listening to Achtung Baby. Funnily enough, I didn't really want to listen to it since the tone of the book and the music are so at odds; I thought it would be jarring and strange, but while curious, it was also quite fine.

I was reflecting earlier in the day how fantastic it is when you can re-connect with something for the thousandth time and still find something new in it. Yesterday that revelation was over realizing for the first time that Charlotte Lucas is twenty-seven. I had never noticed it before, and marveled at myself over it. What a difference it makes in explaining her resolution to have Mr. Collins! Elizabeth, after all, is at least six years younger and hasn't yet come to feel the solidification of her loss of youth and all that entails, including the mortification of knowing that the chances of ever becoming a wife - any man's wife - were becoming ever more remote. Elizabeth isn't the sort to believe it's better to be a wife to someone she can't love or respect than not to be a wife at all, but Charlotte is exactly the type of person who believes this. It makes it a little easier to forgive Charlotte for seeming to forsake her principles. After all, it's really a forsaking of Elizabeth's principles; it's exactly in line with Charlotte's.

My husband and I were chatting a bit while listening to Achtung Baby. With a laugh he recited the dramatic pronouncement he had made to me all those years ago when it first came out: "I will never listen to U2 again. This is one of the worst albums I've ever heard!" Meanwhile, back then, because he worked a graveyard shift and was usually sleeping when I returned home from work, I was listening to it daily (some could say obsessively) using ear phones so as not to disturb him while sleeping. And, I suppose, to help spare him the pain of hearing it if he was awake since his distaste of it was in approximate proportion to my adoration.

After all these years and all these listens and all this love, I thought it impossible to ever feel again that sense of wonder I had way back when at the time when it was new. There are still moments when I hear something in a new way and am thankful that, similar to Pride and Prejudice, the quality of its craftsmanship enables that sort of experience. But getting something new out of it and that sensation of it actually being new are quite different things. Then, yesterday, as I read and he watched sports with the CD as the soundtrack, there was a moment. And that moment defies my ability to find a translation for it into words. It was something along the lines of joy in its purest form. It seems ridiculous to say it's akin to the joy of that moment when you really take in the birth of your child for the first time, or first realize your love for someone is returned in equal measure, or you first come across some particularly beautiful spot on earth on a day with perfect weather so as to make it seem as if that place and that moment were designed just for you...but it really was that kind of joy.

Of course, for each person that thing they've seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted and experienced so many times that it's a part of his or her DNA will be unique. That thing they know so intimately and lovingly that it can even influence their way of thinking at some times is as different from the next person's object as infinity allows. However different the objects, though, I hope everyone can have that same moment of wonder for it is of the kind that is on the border of surpassing understanding - and that's a truly marvelous place to be when it's in relation to something you love.

Tags: books, movies, music, u2

I used to work for a company that specialized in assisting large corporations with managing their risks (with my part focusing on purchasing insurance). I now work for a company that specializes in smaller companies and solely focuses on insurance.

From the day-to-day work-life side of things I couldn't help but notice a difference for myself personally: less corporate oversight and a "homier" tone to the office and people's relationships with one another. I suffered a bit of culture shock when I first started. For example, on my first day, I participated in a discussion with an insurance company representative and the conversation touched on the minimum premium for a certain coverage type. It was $250. I came from a background where we felt lucky when the minimum was $10,000 instead of $25,000. So, like I said, culture shock.

Over time I came to notice that the difference between handling large companies and small companies are numerous and sometimes surprising. One of my biggest surprises was finding that many business owners can't answer basic questions about their companies. I still can't help but feel shocked that people who founded and continue to run a company every day of their lives can't answer basic questions about it.

Worse than that bit of startlement has been finding out how touchy business owners can be. I came across this quote while reading an article about something else and think it's very diplomatically put:

Entrepreneurs often style themselves as frank, no-nonsense individuals, and they can at times have thin skin.

I'm generally easy going and able to work and communicate with a wide variety of people and personalities. However, I still get taken aback at the sheer volume of small business owners who are resentful that they have to buy insurance in the first place (whether due to legal or contractual requirements) and think this means it's appropriate to rant at the insurance agent who is attempting to work on their behalf to help them purchase said coverage. I still feel dismayed when I come across something like what happened this week when a client felt that having to look over and sign an application was the equivalent of telling them they needed to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa if they want to get a Workers Compensation policy – then decided to spend the time that could have been used to perform that task twice over and instead use it to gripe at me about the request.

I never found this kind of attitude when working with representatives for large organizations. Could be there's just a certain amount of wearing down that happens when a person works for a big company: it's just accepted that a set level of red tape and absurdity will be involved no matter what you want to do, so you don't take it personally and react accordingly. Like a foot soldier on the front lines in a war, they take it as read that some things will never make sense and do them anyway. Still, I can't help but think that my contacts at large companies acted consistently in a more reasonable and professional manner. Just now, I really miss reasonable and professional as the expected behavior instead of what some people apparently mistake for “frank” and “no-nonsense”*.

Of course, there are downsides to working with people who are inured to red tape and absurdity, but that's a post for another day…



*Actually, when I think of “frank” and “no-nonsense” as descriptors, there is one particular person who comes to mind: he is an Officer at one of those larger companies I used to count among my clients. Despite the fact that he has a way of cutting right to the point and can unerringly hit the weakest place in an argument so that you want to squirm, he remains one of my favorite clients of all time. What I take from this is that there’s a good way and a bad way to express these personality traits. I guess I think of it as like those people (usually women) who go around talking about how truthful and upright they are and can’t understand why they can’t maintain adult relationships. They never get that they are using what they think of as truth as a weapon instead of the real version of truth which is the foundation for all good relationships.

Tags: work

I have been pondering the recent discussions regarding job recruitment and review of social media pages and I came across this comment:

The researchers believed this was because the version of yourself painted on your Facebook page is more realistic than the idealistic version of yourself you paint in standard personality tests. (from this article).

That's one of the funniest things I've read in awhile. The more I think about the concept that people are "more realistic" on Facebook than on a personality test, the more I laugh.

In fact, it seems to be growing on me more and more. Kinda' like this picture.

Thanks, researchers...I really needed that laugh.

Let's recap my morning thus far, shall we?

-Alarm sounds. The clock radio is a bit twisted to the side, which I can't perceive while coming out of sleep, and as a result I fumble around trying to turn it off and knock several items off my night stand.
-Get ready for work. All goes to plan.
-Leave for work. After approximately 7 minutes on the road, realize I left my purse at home. Turn around to retrieve it.
-Get back on the road to work. About a quarter of the way there, notice at a stop that the car seems to be sputtering. After a few minutes driving side streets to investigate further, decide it's best to park it and leave it than drive and take my chances with stalling in the middle of the road.
-Pull off the road and find a nice out-of-the-way place to park. Somehow manage to inadvertently wedge the car into a small ditch.
-Dig through wallet and cough up nearly every coin on me to buy a bus ticket.
-Catch bus to go to work.
-Get off bus and spy my train connection just pulling into the stop a block away. I *could* make it, except there's a fire engine with the siren going, so I stay put on the sidewalk.
-The fire engine drives by and splashes into a puddle, spraying me. I feel like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Except there's no Harrison Ford to look forward to when I arrive at work.
-Arrive at work 2 hours after I left my house. Use the restroom, then get a blop of hand cream all over my keyboard. While cleaning it up, my email decides to record the random keys that I hit. Then send out that message.

I'd ask "what else?" or compare my morning to the trials of Job, but I really feel like that would be pushing things. Instead, I'm going to sit here meekly and do my best to not piss off the universe any more than I have already. (What? What did I do?)

I went to bed at a reasonable time last night, then woke up at 3am. And that was that. "An hour", my subconscious seemed to ask mockingly, "why lose only an hour's sleep with springing forward when you can lose most of a night's instead?"

Feeling up to nothing remotely thoughtful, I started reading a Shannon Drake supernatural gothic and found myself annoyed with the heroine. I'm not certain if it's the book itself or the lack of sleep that started bugging me so much, but when you get to a point when you'd like nothing more than to take a character by the shoulders and give her a vigorous shake, I think it's fair to say that the author and reader have developed a breach that may be impossible to heal.

Here's the thing: it's understandable that when a person of a "normal" background comes into contact with something supernatural, there's going to be some denial and resistance. As a reader, I'd have a hard time believing in the hero and/or heroine if there wasn't some period of disbelief. However, when incident piles upon incident and that character still refuses to consider the possibility that things may not be what she wants them to be, denial starts to feel a lot more like pig-headedness. Or stupidity.

However, as the next thing I'm about to tell you may indicate, it's entirely possible that any other person may have found the amount of time and incidents it took for said heroine to begin to believe was entirely reasonable, and it's just me being grumpy that's got me to the shoulder-shaking place.

So. Total change of subject...

There's this man at work whom I call "Mr. Good on Paper" in my head. I think of him as a cautionary tale for all women everywhere who are interested in a relationship with a man who is good-looking, reasonably well-heeled, intelligent, well-read and interested in a variety of subjects, well-spoken, and desirous of in being in a monogamous, committed, and long-term relationship. Just what every woman who fills out an online dating questionnaire is dreaming of, right?

When I started where I'm now working a few years ago, he was dating someone that he had been going out with for a long time (a couple of years or so). He broke up with her because she had kids in their 20s who hadn't quite managed to get their own lives going yet and he was tired of sharing her attention with the kids. The very day they broke up, he went to an online dating site and filled out his information, seeking a date. Obviously, he took plenty of time to examine what had happened to make this relationship of a couple of years fall apart. For approximately 9 months after this, he met and dated several women through this online website, always getting right back on there the same day that he and someone he'd been seeing for anywhere from a few dates to a few months broke up. Eventually he met someone, they started dating seriously, and a few dramas later, they became engaged.

Last Tuesday he drove my absolutely batty by pacing up and down the aisle next to where I work, occassionally stopping to chat with this or that person, going back into his office, then popping back out again a few seconds later like a cork ejected from a champagne bottle. His fidgeting was making me fidgety and though generally I can block out such distractions and work regardless, it was so extreme that I was finding it very difficult to concentrate on anything but the number of times he entered then almost immediately left his office. Eventually, the work buddy he'd been dying to talk to arrived at the office and within about 30 seconds of this other guy getting in, he was in there with the door shut to discuss his problems.

The next day he was a bit calmer and I mostly forgot about it.

The day after that he took off work to do some chores around the house, which you would think would mean he wouldn't be a distraction at the office. But no. The first inkling I had that things continued amiss was a person who sits next to me telling me how crazy he was driving her. About 30 minutes later, the aforementioned work buddy arrived at the office, did some work, then came out to tell us how crazy Mr. GoP was driving him.

Then came the story behind the extreme fidgets: the week-end before, the fiancee excitedly ended a phone call to tell him how happy she was that one of her best friends was coming to town for a few days and she explained how long it had been since they had last seen one another. Mr. GoP responded, "Oh, great. We'll have to think of lots of fun things we can all do together." Fiancee responded with, "Well, naturally I'd love for you guys to meet and we'll definintely have to spend some time all together, but for the most part I want to do things with her alone."

Mr. GoP essentially picked up his toys from the sandbox and stormed off at that point, completely insulted, feeling used, abused, and pushed to the side.

By Tuesday he was beside himself because they still hadn't talked. The work buddy, upon hearing how Mr. GoP had responded when the fiancee said she wanted the majority of her time to be spent as just the girls, had immediately responded, "Why?!? When my wife wants a girls week-end, I might even go so far as to offer to pay for a hotel - let them have a couple of days doing whatever they want!" (Which is approximately how my husband reacts, too, so maybe I'm just predisposed to think this is the reasonable reaction.) Work buddy was adamant that an apology to the fiancee was in order, but though Mr. GoP was distressed, he was by no means ready to believe he could be in the wrong.

Thursday, the day off, he was so worried and upset that he couldn't sleep and got up around 4am and decided to power wash his driveway (the neighbors must've loved that one). However, it was actually kind of frozen over that night and things didn't warm up until around 11am. By around 9am, he was convinced that the frozen ground was irrelevent and the power washer he had borrowed from my work neighbor wasn't working and asked the work buddy if he could use his instead. A few hours of annoyance to both work buddy and work neighbor later (involving things like phone calls to them and incorrect/incoherent emails to clients that only stirred up trouble), work buddy gave in and, in an effort to gain a bit of peace and a chance to get some work done, agreed to lend out his power washer and take it to Mr. GoP that afternoon in exchange for lunch. Work buddy took out the power washer, but wasn't given lunch.

We decided to laugh at the drama because it was all so ridiculous. As the work buddy put it, Mr. GoP was acting like a 14 year-old boy in the aftermath of his first disagreement with his first girlfriend.

Friday, Mr. GoP was back in the office and the work buddy was off traveling, and things were relatively quiet.

And now that brings us to today, the point of why I mentioned last week's happenings: he is back to the pacing and constant checking to see if work buddy has arrived, which can only mean further relationship drama is afoot. Some days (like last Thursday) it's possible to laugh over this kind of thing, while other days (like last Tuesday) it's just about enough to push you over the edge of polite behaviour.

I'm willing to be convinced that the quantity of annoyance he is inspiring today is an over-reaction that only seems so great due to my lack of sleep and pre-existing annoyance thanks to Shannon Drake. Nevertheless, if he steps foot out of that office ONE MORE TIME this morning...

Tags: annoyances, laughter the best medicine, work

I woke up this morning wondering where my three-day week-end went. I didn't spend much time sitting around (though I did watch Out of Sight at my husband's insistence - he couldn't believe I'd never seen it before), and yet... Whoosh! Three days went by in a flash.

Friday evening I attended a talk sponsored by the Oregon Friends of Jung which I'll have to talk about in more depth (just not now), even if it's only to make notes of the experience for myself. The topic was the Visual Language of the Unconscious. It didn't turn out to be what I expected, but it was fantastic nevertheless. One thing in particular that I learned from the experience is that I don't think I'm cut out to be a psychiatrist. After the featured speaker finished her presentation there was a Q&A session. Most people did what is expected in such situations and asked questions which were direct and on a specific subject. Then this man got up to the microphone and emitted the verbal equivalent of scattering a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces across a table. As the puzzle pieces fell, the audience grew increasingly restless. Many people left. Some started whispered conversations. Others shifted around in their seats. The experience was kind of what I expect open mic night at the Dadaist Poetry Club would be like. Eventually, he paused. He had never asked a question or made any particular point. However, the speaker pulled all those pieces together and formed a picture that was coherent, made sense, and was somehow was on topic. She did it with good grace and infinite patience and I thought to myself that *I* would've tapped out of that conversation at least 6 minutes earlier were I standing at the podium. Then I thought that the experience is probably not unlike a session with a patient and I would never have the patience to make it through 30-60 minutes of that kind of rambling, much less provide any useful insights at the end of it. Thus, for all my fascination with psychology and related principles, it's probably a really good thing that I never started down the path of thinking psychiatry would be a terrific career for me.

Saturday I worked out at my new gym. (Oh, by the way, I joined a new gym. This is a Big Deal for me for a few reasons which I'll get to in some future post if I can remember to talk about it.) Though I didn't feel like I worked that much harder than usual (except for how the Zumba class went for 15 minutes more than I expected - that was kind of killer!), I was super sore after. I think it's the combination of a new instructor, a different dance floor, and different weight lifting machines that did me in. I did the whole work out all over again yesterday and am literally sore from head to toe today. For the class on Saturday I arrived late and ended up jammed up in the front of the room where I was actually behind the instructor most of the time. Thus I spent the class translating her movements where she was facing the class into the version I should do while facing the other way with the added twist of watching her in the mirror. My brain struggles enough with either the mirror OR the facing me vs facing away thing; dealing with both left me feeling like I'd had a mental work out along with the physical. So what I learned Saturday is to not come in to class 30 seconds before it starts.

Sunday I worked on chores around the house (I don't believe I've ever folded so many loads of laundry in one day in my whole life), including a reorganization of my books. My purchasing of new books has slowed a huge, huuuuge amount thanks to the demise of Borders (man, I miss that place!), and yet, the stacks and piles and mounds of books remain as bad as ever. As I worked through my organization project I realized I had three (3!) copies of Following the Equator, a book I love, yet don't need to possess in triplicate. There were a few other surprises like that as I worked my way through things. I decided that I need to get a barcode scanner and some software so I can bink things in and out of my collection, such as it is. I probably only have a couple hundred books, which I know most of you will agree isn't really that many, all things considered. Still, when you find you have more than one set of duplicates and actually a set of triplicates, it may be time to admit that the memory isn't what it used to be and start relying on technology. After making decent progress with the books, I made what I called the silk-purse-out-of-the-sow's-ear dinner. This involved standing in front of the refrigerator, freezer, and pantry with their respective doors open, staring at things in a blank manner until inspiration struck. What I learned Sunday is that chicken parmesan is pretty damn good when you use swiss cheese instead because you're too hungry to take the extra time to go the store and get parmesan.

Yesterday I tried a couple of recipes I found thanks to Pinterest (if anyone wants an invite, get me a note with your email address and I'll send you an invite). At first I couldn't figure out how in the world I would use that thing (or how it even works, to be honest), but I think I'm getting the hang of it and now I can see its potential. The only downside is that since it works based on links to web pages, if those web pages are moved or whatnot, there goes the link. If I find things I really love, I'm going to have to make hard copies of the instructions or lose the info forever. What I learned Monday is that 1) home made egg McMuffins need an english muffin that doesn't feature as strong of a "wheat bread" flavor as the ones I used and 2) baked kale really is delicious. I didn't actually believe that second one despite the many people who have recommended it all around the internet, but figured that it was worth a shot to try it out anyway. It'll never be popocorn (what is?), but it does make for a nice snack that provides some nutrients that I don't consume in the quanitities I should.

So there it is, a synopsis of three days off. Yet... I still don't really know what happened to my week-end. Now it's a new week and time to get the brain in gear. What I need to learn today is why my iPhone is suddenly doing this weird thing while in iTunes where it won't let me navigate out of a playlist. Plus just how much caffeine it will really take to feel awake.

Tags: cooking, exercise, food

A few things on my mind right now...

A couple of nights ago I had a dream where my adopted mom and my younger brother (both now deceased) played a part, along with other family members. The dream involved going to New York for the first time and various adventures related to being in the big city, navigating around from place to place, and finding hotel rooms and apartments. I have the sense that this portion of the dream cycle went on for some time, but I can't recall much about it. The part I remember the most is that it apparently took place during WWII even though we came from modern-day times. In one scene we were making our way through a large general goods store (like a Macy's) and it was as if traveling through different sections and rooms in the store represented us also traveling back in time. Here were couches and home furnishings from the depths of the dark-brown-and-avocado-loving 1970s, there were kitchen furnishings from the atomic-age 1950s, and finally we arrived at a warehouse/loading dock type area adjacent to the ocean where it was clear that the time period was WWII. In the distance were battle ships at anchor. Right next to us were Navy men working to load and unload goods from boats that were ferrying things back and forth to the battle ships. In my dream I noticed that these men were young and slim and tan and vibrant and I thought about how that contrasted with the way these very same men are in today's time frame.

Last night I also dreamt about things involving public spaces, in this case it was as if I had an apartment within a Gap store at a mall. The Gap products were re-stocked and kept up by employees, but they were really there for my exclusive use. Toward the end of the dream, the Gap goods were removed and it became just a personal space again, though still located within a mall. There was also something in the dream about seeking a large Starbucks peppermint mocha coffee on ice that took up a bit of real estate throughout, but damned if I have any idea what *that* was all about (besides the fact that they're delicious).

What I'm wondering now is what these public spaces mean to me. For example, I've figured out that dreams involving making my way through various rooms and spaces in a home is me symbolically exploring spiritual and religious ideas. I can't quite figure out if dreams involving public spaces are meant to also represent spiritual quests or if something else is at work. It also seems significant that the home/store combination where I lived was specifically a Gap, but I don't know why. Almost as an aside, I am kind of curious about the time travel bit, though at the moment I'm taking that as a rather obvious rumination on the process of aging - just in a more interesting way than sitting around thinking about the process of aging.

All in all, this is far more fascinating to me than to anyone else.

One thing that is likely at work in the back of my mind are two recent deaths: one involved someone younger than me who attended the same high school (stroke) and the other is Whitney Houston. Whitney was admittedly older than me, but still...she is, generationally speaking, in my age range so yeah...quiet freak out is unbdoubtedly at work here.

Last but not least, my daughter dug out a picture of my birth mother this week and it once again confirmed how much I look like she did. I didn't obtain any photos of her until after she died and the last time I saw her was when I was still a child, so growing up I never had any notion that I was connected to anyone in this familial legacy kind of way. My family was discussing that if I styled my hair like she did and had a photo taken from the same angle, it might be difficult to tell us apart. It's hard to explain why that even means anything to me. It just does. It makes me feel a touch less rootless, a little bit less like a spontaneous genetic creation - things I never even realized I felt until I started to sense the intensity of those feelings waning.

Tags: dreams

Last week-end I bought a couple of Agatha Christie paperbacks. I hadn’t seen one of them in several years and was delighted to find it again. As happens when coming across an old friend like that after such a long time, I couldn’t help but start thinking about the first time I read it…

From the ages of approximately 5-10 I was a foster child and visited my birth mother every other week-end; after that I was adopted and never saw her again. I have some random and varied memories of those visits: the places my mom lived, the car she drove, the jade plants I ate (ahem – I was a kid, ok?), the Life Savers she favored (a swirly pink-and-pearly white peppermint kind I haven’t seen in years), the people she knew, the movies I watched on tv after she went to bed, the activity books I raced through when there was no one to play with, my chore chart that hung on a closet door and marked my progress towards special treats, the things we did to pass the time…

Physically speaking, she was the spitting image of Anjelica Huston in The Grifters (except for the features of the face, of which I have a pretty faithful copy). It’s always like a sock to the solar plexus to watch that movie. It’s so eerie to me how much Anjelica Huston reminds me of my mom in that part: the body height and shape, tone and way of speaking, mannerisms, way of holding a cigarette while smoking, style of dressing...it all adds up to a characterization of someone I feel like I know.

Still, the shock to the system watching that movie brings pales in comparison to how certain objects can make me think of her and our time together.

For years I kept a bottle of Avon perfume that she gave me. I hardly ever wore it – the point was to have it, to be able to take it out every once in awhile and sniff it, hold it, look at it, then carefully put it back away. For years my husband kept a trash can his mother had owned. It was ugly and a bit beat up and would certainly have been long gone were she still alive, but because she was dead that trash can meant something, you know? So it was with my little round bottle of perfume with the daisies on the front. It surpasses my ability to explain how or why objects like that can give us something, have some extraordinary meaning fused to them, that other ways of remembering don’t. All I know is that such phenomenon exists. Eventually I had to get rid of the perfume and it kind of broke my heart, but the smell had turned bad and I couldn’t stand the thought of keeping the bottle when the smell was so different and wrong.

Despite losing the perfume, I didn’t lose all physical reminders my mother. She had given me a couple of Nancy Drew books for one of my birthdays and inscribed a little note to me in one of them. I still have those books. A far more ephemeral (and yet also more important) gift that she shared with me was teaching me how to read when I was around 4. I can still remember my utter frustration with the process of learning to read. First there was learning the alphabet and sitting there practicing writing down the letters and sounding them out. Next came learning some simple letter combinations and realizing those combinations created words I already knew. Then was the hair-pulling experience of the Dick-and-Jane books and how the letters suddenly betrayed me and turned back into something I couldn’t understand. Finally was the triumph when it all came together one day, suddenly and miraculously, and how the only thing holding me back from understanding a sentence was whether or not I already knew enough of the words in it to parse out meaning.

When I was around 6 or 7 I remember examining my mother’s bookshelf and deciding I was going to read something that she liked to read. On an upper shelf, waaaay up high, was a clutch of Agatha Christie paperbacks. I pulled a few down at random, read the blurbs on the back, and chose one based on the percentage of words I knew in the blurb. I chose At Bertram’s Hotel.

I wasn’t able to finish it before going back home to the foster family so she let me take it with me. It took me a few days to get through it and when I finally did I was both satisfied with the story and my accomplishment of reading it while also a little frustrated that there were bits I knew I didn’t understand because the dictionary I had wasn’t comprehensive enough to allow me to look everything up. (One simple word in particular caused me hours of frustration because I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. The word was “seamless”. It was used in the context of describing how a female character was dressed and I didn’t get how it was possible to construct a dress without any seams at all. I puzzled over that for hours. When I finally did learn what that word meant, my reaction was somewhere between laughing and screaming. Now I just laugh.)

I think the experiences involving my mother and reading were formative in several ways, not least of which was providing me a way to escape the cares and worries kids experience when the ground beneath their feet feels like quicksand most of the time. In a really uncertain world where the pain was real, it was possible to visit alternative worlds where the pain was only pretend. Of course, there’s also the fact that starting with Agatha Christie as my first challenging read probably set the bar kind of high when it came to being able to appreciate mysteries written for kids (I enjoyed Nancy Drew for all that) and set me up to appreciate things about British writers and culture that it took me years to get with American writers.

Though the odds of it being the specific book my mom owned are astronomical, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m pleased about my reunion with At Bertram’s Hotel. It stirred something – some emotion I can’t name – to have seen it there on the shelf, picked it up, bought it, and taken it home with me. It means something – something I can’t explain – that I own it. There’s something about the physical reality of its existence that means enough to me that I may never even have to read it again to continue to think great things of it.

Still…it’s Agatha Christie, so I’ll probably read it again sooner or later. And I know for certain I’ll smile at least once when I see the word “seamless” describing some character's dress.

Tags: books

According to one of my high school friends, today is going to be a great day for me. He had a theory, which was proven correct surprisingly often, that when a series of bad things happen at the beginning of the day, the rest of the day is going to be smooth sailing.

This is one of those mornings that included:
* Waking up late.
* The water taking an inexplicably long time to come to a boil so I could make tea.
* Something in my eye that I could not find no matter how much I looked, poked, prodded, and applied eye drops.
* The first razor I picked up not working - it was like a vacuum with a full bag: you could run it over the skin and there was no change whatsoever in relation to the hair it was supposed to remove. I'm not certain it was even exfoliating any skin cells. All I could do was look at it, mystified, because it *looked* bright and shiny and sharp, and yet...nothing.
* The next razor I picked up broke apart and the razor head part went down the drain (that'll cost a lot in plumbing bills some day, I can just tell).
* One of my contacts refused to attach to the eye. Repeatedly.
* One of my bra straps broke.
* The leash for the dog broke. He's a runner, so must be on a leash for his morning constitutional. I couldn't locate any rope so finally grabbed a kerchief and used that to at least have something to hold while I put him down on the ground. Of course, the knot I tied came undone after 30 seconds and off he went, happily frolicking, free and easy and just out of my reach for a maddening length of time. (Thankfully, he really had to do his business and I was able to catch him when he stopped for that.)
* I either did or didn't take a pill that I need to take every morning. I was so frazzled by everything that I lost track of whether I took out the bottle and set it on the counter or whether I took out the bottle, obtained and swallowed a pill from it, and then set it on the counter. My daughter, who was running late thanks to me, wasn't paying attention even though she was *right there* and could only look at me in disbelief when I asked her whether she had seen me take it. (And then the smart ass said, "Well, if the pill is supposed to be helping your memory, it's obvious it's not working.")

So. Nothing but a great day ahead, right?

Tags: annoyances, laughter the best medicine

Last night I had the option of either spending an hour+ driving in the rain for a work-out or staying home and doing nothing. I chose to stay home. This was partly due to the thought of another hour+ drive on top of the hour+ drive I had already experienced getting home and partly because my eating schedule had been all messed up thanks to a client meeting which resulted in me being ravenous. Usually a small snack will work for me before I exercise at that time of night, but I was so hungry that I knew that anything besides just giving in and eating a regular meal would make me miserably ill.

Every year my family tries to watch all of the Oscar nominated films before the award ceremony airs (my husband succeeds far more often than I do) and every year this usually means that we have at least a few movies to watch that we didn’t catch at the time of their release. So last night instead of exercising I made dinner, discussed Emily Dickinson with my daughter to help her tease out the meaning of Because I could not stop for Death*, and the family watched Midnight in Paris.

It’s a pretty fun movie for people who know and/or like Lost Generation artists**. The writers, painters, etc. are all played pretty broad (especially Hemingway) and I always get the feeling that Woody Allen has essentially created a set of interchangeable characters that could be plopped into any of his movies and be in a different situation, but move through the story with essentially the same result, but still – I found it engaging and fun. I told my husband after it was over that a lot of the theme is about the same as Jack Finney’s Time and Again, but the time travel part is more elegantly handled. Also, for anyone who is thinking, thanks to the marketing of the movie, that this is a romantic comedy and who also may want to see it because of that – please don’t go in to it thinking it’s actually a romantic comedy. There are funny moments and there are romantic moments, but it does not tick off nearly enough ‘romantic comedy’ checkboxes to qualify for that label. (There’s another question for another day: how things are labeled and how that, in turn, builds an audience’s expectations).

It also occurred to me in the midst of watching it that I don’t know that I particularly think of Owen Wilson as leading man material, but he certainly did fine with this movie and probably has all along in his career – I’ve just not given it a lot of thought. He’s just mostly snuck under the radar for me in that way where I’ve never thought, “Ooooh, he was terrible for that part” or ”Ooooh, he was so terrific I need to recommend him for this”, but then again, he’s also done the job right in every movie I’ve seen. It’s kind of funny how that type of thing happens for some artists: they are just kind of *there* and until you really think about it, you don’t realize exactly how much they’ve done or how much you’ve really enjoyed their work.

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*Oh! Then! I found out that one of my daughter’s class projects for an English class involves various groups of students reading assigned short stories, then parsing their meaning and explaining the respective stories to the rest of the class. After the explanation, the students who didn’t read it are to answer a series of questions to help confirm whether the students who did read the story properly got the point of the story across to the non-readers. I find the whole concept of the assignment a little odd, but I guess also kind of efficient. Anyway, one of the stories is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. That really took the cake for me. Isn’t that one of the worst stories imaginable to use in this kind of assignment? For all of the students who didn’t read it prior to hearing about it, the power of it is pretty much ruined if they ever do read it. (Though my suspicion for all of these kids is that they’ll feel they know all of the stories well enough to think they don’t need to actually read the stories once this assignment is over.) I told my daughter she has to read the story before class and she told me that because of how the assignment is structured, it would be like cheating if she does! Grrrr! What kind of weird teacher is this?!?

**I was naturally thinking of A Moveable Feast before the time travel started and I don’t know why, but that part of the book where Hemingway speaks about the day he went to Gertrude Stein’s house and heard things involving Gertrude and Alice, and his distaste over it popped into my mind. I was a little concerned that the movie would go there and try to do some modern-day re-interpretation of the Gertrude and Alice relationship, but thankfully there’s only the barest hint of Alice in the movie. It’s all Gertrude and as soon as I saw she was played by Kathy Bates, I thought, “Perfect!” and went with it.

Tags: books, movies