Balls! Balls! Balls! Turkey!

That xkcd guy built himself a ball pit instead of a buying a couch. Of course, I'm totally in love with his geeky math sarcasm, and, besides, something about pictures of nerds sitting in a sea of primary colors cheers me during this cold and dark season. I think we've all learned a valuable lesson about Al. She likes her colors bright, her days long, and her men a little bit silly and a lot bit geeky.

I imagine his Thanksgiving gathering with TV trays set up in the ball pit. It makes me happy, even though I know he's probably really at home with no ball pit for the holiday since he's just a young guy.

Mine will not involve any plastic balls at all. I'll be at the dad's for the meal. We will, however, play games and eat lots of good food. Happy Thanksgiving to anyone reading. Be good to yourself as the seasons shift to a darker and grayer time. Today, I am thankful for ball pits and geeks and lightboxes and the fine dusting of snow covering our gray and dormant ground.

Falling

It seems like little kids always have skinned knees, and it's no big deal. They just shed a few tears after hitting the pavement and then get up and run around again like nothing ever happened. On the other hand, I fell yesterday (for no apparent reason, just a misstep off the edge of a sidewalk), and now my knee is raw and bloody and it seems like it's still all I can think about even 24 hours later. I suspect that this may the difference between surviving the impact of a 40 pound body falling on top of your knee and a 140 pound one, although it could also be that I am just wimpier than your average 4-year-old.

Speaking of little kids, the overly intelligent and far too-good looking Nephew was baptized today. He was the oldest baby at the font, hardly even qualifying for that term. In fact, he took a stroll through the pews while waiting his turn to get anointed, ducking his head and playing peek-a-boo with whatever grandfather or aunt who happened to look his way. Because of his childcare situation (daycare by Jimmy on Thursdays and Fran on Fridays) he looks at older men as a source of comfort and care, which amuses his maternal grandmother who has to carefully warm him up to her each time they meet while the grandfather can just pick him immediately even after a long absence.

The Dark

It's starting. The sun barely rises just as I arrive at work. It sets long before I get to leave. Little things, like filing papers, answering phone calls, and planning for class seem overwhelming. I can't force myself to do laundry because I still haven't put away the clean clothes from last time, and I can't put them away because they aren't even folded yet. This is the season when I most need to get my ass outside for a run, but it's also the season my ass is least likely to want to go outside. "It's dark out there," says my ass. "And cold. Leave me alone. I'll make microwave popcorn, and we can watch TV. It's much easier than all of that running."

My house, buried in newspapers (I can't recycle them because I haven't read them. I can't read them because there are too many of them) groans under my neglect. Buddy's footprints cover the floor. His hair finds its way into all of the corners. I'm cold even in my sweatshirt. It would be so much easier to just crawl back into bed. Why do I always have to clean? I'm never even home to enjoy it.

But I'm wise to this business, and I know it means two things. #1 I have to suck it up and clean, or I'm going to beat myself up for living in squalor and #2 I'd better start taking care of myself before the I get to that God-awful crying stage. Crying for sunlight never seems to produce it. It just gives me another reason to beat myself up (weakness, you know, so unattractive).

The Wounded

There was the one who couldn't even hold a pencil or type an email, because of Pain. There was the one who gambled away his house and had to move in with friends before running home to his family. There was the blind date who really was blind. There really was a crack addict, even though it seems like a lie. There was one who gave himself a vasectomy because of what a terrible parent he thought he would be. There was sort-of one who still woke up swearing over the woman who abandoned him years before. And the one who divorced his new wife for cheating on him.

I keep telling myself that I, in comparison, am pretty healthy and happy. I'm the one who has emerged from this battlefield relatively unscathed. I can barely even pick at any of my scabs anymore to remember what the pain felt like.

On the other hand, I seem to be the one encased in bubble wrap. I'm the one who doesn't feel any more. I can go from smitten to over-it in three short weeks. I have turned off my compassion to you for your depression/your gambling debts/your suicide attempts/your chronic pain/your inability to combat your own drunkenness/and your broken heart, because feeling it for each of you turned out to be too much for me.

And so, I say it again, because I keep forgetting: I'm opting out until I can feel my own self again. You can keep your wounds and your stinking pheromones. I'll be the one at the dog park with Buddy.

Stevie's Obitchuary

In April, my cat died. On the way home from the vet (where I swear she spoke twice after she was pronounced dead by the vet) her obituary came to me nearly fully formed before I got home to frantically type it out. Here it is, in honor of a very old, very mean cat.

4/10/2007

20 years ago...

in the midst of the Iran-Contra Affair, Stevie was born. Ronald Reagan was president. The Twins had never been World Champions. I was 13-years-old and for Christmas I got a fuzzy little blue-eyed kitten with certain violent tendencies, but she was mostly OK as long as you didn't make eye-contact or pet her the wrong way or piss her off by laughing or talking too loudly.

Today, the oldest cat I know died quietly at the vet.

Some facts about Stevie

• Her parents were siblings. She was the only kitten in her litter. “Auntie Mom” ate the next litter of kittens. And we wonder where she got her personality...
• She was named after Stevie Smith, a little-known poet, about whom a little-known Glenda Jackson movie was made. I happened to see parts of it before I met Stevie. I have since thought about changing the story so I wouldn't have to pretend to know much about Stevie Smith the poet. A good alternative: She was named after Cat Stevens.
• She's lived in eleven different houses and apartments, and twice traveled across country in a moving van.
• She's lived with eight pets: Mandy, Dewey, Theophania, Corey, Sati, Louie, Koji, and Buddy. Nobody ever bossed her around until Buddy, who took a month to learn to submit to her will.
• Her roommates included Janice, Marvin, Perley, Jimmy, Judy, Jake, Beau, Dorothy, Sarah, Anne Marie, Josh, Jen, Rory the Boy, Ann, Nicky, and me.
• Her claws were stuck in my face twice.
• She's eaten the “senior” version of Science Diet since 1994.
• She's been totally deaf since 2001.
• Her favorite place in the house was behind the toilet.
• In the end, she lost all of her violence, and enjoyed sitting quietly on my lap, just absorbing heat and hanging out with me. She liked it when I sat still. She even let me touch her back feet.

Bridezilla

I was never the kind of kid who dressed as a bride and fantasized about getting married and having a husband and kids (well, at least not the husband part). Blame feminism. Blame divorce. Whatever it was, I just never got into the whole parading down the aisle thing. Well, never, except for that one time.

I was thirteen years old. My dad and step-mom used to take me up to the North Shore every summer for a week in a cabin on Lake Superior. We played a lot of board games, cooked homemade food, and drove up and down the shore looking for good hikes. We picked fresh raspberries and saw the witch tree, and then every year, we'd take part in some kind of indoor/cultural activity, too. There was a little play house in Grand Marais, we'd sometimes attend.

One year, my dad took us out to dinner at the Naniboujou Lodge up past Grand Marais. I fell in love the minute I walked in the door. It could have been the immense rock fireplace (the largest in Minnesota) with elaborate natural stone designs, but, since I'm not really a subtle person, I'm thinking it was probably the brightly painted walls and ceiling. They are decorated in rich primary colors with Cree Indian designs. After a lifetime of white walls and subtle trim colors, the effect blew me away. I couldn't believe that this abundance of color hid behind the sedate exterior of the place. There was a hush in the dining room. People talked, but, at least to my teenage ears, it seemed that they spoke with reverence. They were in the presence of great and unusual beauty. These were people who survived the grayest months of winter, so they knew how sacred it was to spend even one meal basking under vividly saturated walls.

I toured the rest of the public spaces of the Lodge. I discovered the "solarium" with the immediate infatuation of a dedicated reader. I longed to stay there instead of our simple cabin, spending my week next to the warmth of the fireplace and those improbable walls. I would have been reluctant to leave even for hikes and excursions to Witch Trees or Canada. I decided, since I knew it was too expensive for just a regular summer week, that someday, I'd get married at the Naniboujou, and when I did I'd spend one perfectly happy week in my own personal temple to beauty.

Anyway, this weekend I finally did get to attend a wedding there, even if it wasn't my own, and I did get to square dance under that fantastic ceiling, even if I didn't have a partner to swing round and round. I also finally lived my dream of sleeping at the Naniboujou, in a single bed, granted, across the room from Fern's single bed, and the bed totally sucked, even for a single bed. But I did wake up the next morning and drag my book down to the solarium for some quality time before I ate my final breakfast under a resplendent ceiling.

The Novel I'm Not Writing

There's a perpetual question for teachers. "What do you do over the summer?" I always try to come up with something good to answer, because, damn, I don't know what the hell I do over the summer. Somehow day after day, I just use up the time, and then after the exhaustion from the school year has finally passed and just when I'm starting to get bored, it's time for school to start again.

My first year, I bought my ticket to Hungary at Christmas time, so that I knew I was earning something good for surviving until June. The trip was only two weeks long, but no one had to know how short it was, and I could answer with confidence: "I'm going to Hungary to build houses." Theoretically this was enough for a summer. It sounds impressive, anyway.

Two years ago, I told everyone about my brilliant knitting-pattern book idea and pretended like I'd spend my summer working on it. I even fooled myself that year, because I spent some time at the library researching architecture for my patterns and talking to librarians about the idea. Notice: I said talking about the idea. Very little in the way of knitting-patterns actually got put to paper that summer. Still, you know, it was a great answer to the question and gave me all sorts of freedom not to plan another trip to Hungary to build more houses.

Last summer was the summer I was writing my novel. Writing my novel was an outstanding answer to the question. I explained that November is National Novel Writing Month, and I pointed out that I can't possibly write a novel in November, when school is in full swing, so I would have my own personal Novel Writing Month in July. Perfect. Well, almost perfect. It turned out that the thought of a novel paralyzed me. I wrote fewer words last summer than ever before in my life. The thought that what was supposed to be coming out of my fingers was a Novel was enough to shut down my brain. I had nothing. I can't even call it the Summer I Had Writer's Block, because that's giving me too much credit for trying to write. It'd be more fair to call it the Summer I Slept in a Lot and Took Buddy to the Dog Park.

All of which just increases the amount of impressed I am with all of those regular people who started their novels today. I'm not doing it. I might write pithy little blog posts this month, but I leave the novel-writing to the un-paralyzed.

What Happened to You Over the Summer?

I ran into a former student in the hallway today. She was the kind of student who made me want to tear my hear out in big clumps. She didn't have basic skills, but she had a strong desire to do well, rivaled only by her desire to have a good time. The two desires didn't coexist well, and she wound up failing my class with some miserable percent I try not to remember. Along the way, there were tears and calls home to her mother and screaming fits at other students. In short, she was the kind of student I loved, but also the kind of student I sometimes wanted to be absent so that the class would get a day-long vacation from her drama. When she was absent (or suspended) the class always ran much more smoothly. It also had much less "personality", as Youngster calls it.

Anyway, now that she's not my student, but just a kid in the hallway, it's all love between us. She asks me where I teach, because she wants to visit my class. She always greets me by name, loudly, and with great affection, even when she's standing in the middle of her crowd of cool kids. And I see her personality as the wonderful asset it is, rather than the reason I can't get my class to shut up after lunch.

Today when she saw me, she yelled my name across an empty hallway to stop me, and then said, "I barely recognized you."
"Yeah," I said, shrugging, "'cause I'm getting old."
"No," she said, seriously. "You look younger and happier. What happened to you over the summer? Did you get married? Did you get a boyfriend?"

I just laughed. I'm not a hugger, but some kids make me wish I were. And the truth is, it's not a husband or a boyfriend that makes me look younger: I just finally bought some pants that fit.

The New Going Steady

On the second date, he said, "Do you think we should change our status to 'Seeing Someone'?" This is the new "going steady" for Internet daters I guess, and it sounded exceeding dorky and flattering at the same time. My mom asked if it was like getting an ID bracelet and then instantly claimed that she never got to "go steady". Of course, as near as I can tell, her entire dating career involved getting engaged twice before she was 25, so how much more steady can you get, really?

On the same note, I kind of wish that I could date someone who was a little bit more aloof. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm great and gorgeous and all that, but he should be able to pretend that I'm no greater or more gorgeous than he is, so that I don't start wondering whether I can do better. We all saw Swingers. Whatever happened to waiting 48 hours before you call the beautiful babies?

I mean, it's still fun, but I'm just saying...

Smote

I met a guy. He has good pheromones. He likes me. I like him. I'm extremely tired from staying up late talking and stuff, so I don't feel capable of the words I need to describe what this feeling is like. It's been such a long time since I've been able to talk about a date without using every non-committal adjective I know. "It was fine." "He was nice." "We had an OK time." Now I need new words, like "smitten" and "giddy" and "don't tell my mother."

Disguise

My college roommate was a psych major. Actually, by the time I was a senior, I had two psych majors sharing my sextet. Naturally, they'd get home from class and diagnose us all. Somehow my math major was never quite as handy as all of those psych classes. I just couldn't find a way to work "Functions of a Complex Variable" or "Set Theory" into everyday conversation. And I must say, heat differentials really don't count as everyday conversation.

So, I was a senior, up to my ears in my thesis, preparing to give the longest talk of my life about "Quadratic Reciprocity in Number Theory", and my dad (the librarian) was going to come to my talk, so I had to make at least the first fifteen minutes interesting and somewhat comprehensible (to an intelligent but non-mathematical man), so I was spending nearly every waking moment at the library. I was, in fact, that girl standing outside the library on a Saturday morning, waiting for 9:00 to roll around so the student worker would finally show up and unlock the door for me. So, I was pathetic. OK, but I was determined not to stutter though my whole hour-long talk.

On one of my study breaks from my little private room on the quietest floor in the libe, I found myself sitting around our kitchen table with the roommates. Fern and Skinny were talking about their latest psychology class, and one of them turned her gaze to me.
"You, Alex," she said with the authority of a senior psychology major, "Are a low self-monitor."
"Oh, yes," agreed the other. "The lowest."
"OK," I said, having ignored the conversation until it turned toward name-calling, "What does that mean?"
"It means you can't fake it. You don't know how to be something you're not."
"Oh, yes, I can," I said (thinking I probably couldn't).
"OK, then," said Fern. "Frown."

Well, I frown all the time. I'm one of the moodiest people I know. One of my earliest memories is of how my elementary principal used to stop me the hallway to tell me to smile - which always made me want to smack him. So, I turned the corners of my mouth down, and I looked up, triumphant, not the lowest self-monitor after all. Except. Except they were laughing.

"She can't do it," said Fern, between giggles. "She doesn't know how to frown."
"It's OK," said Skinny, ever the peace-maker. "It's a good thing, really. It means you can't wear a disguise around other people. It means that the way you act is the way you are. You don't know how to put on a face for the crowd. It's good. It means you're genuine."
"I don't get it," I said, "I'm frowning. This is a frown." I turned my lips down again, to their great amusement.
"Your lips are like a creepy, weird line, and your eyes don't match," explained Fern. "That's not a frown. And stop doing that thing with your mouth. It freaks me out."
"OK, fine," I said, "but can other people do it? Can you just frown on command?"

Instantly, their faces went grim. They looked like they'd each lost a favorite kitten. They were right. They could do it. And for a second by the light of their frowns, I caught a glimpse of how other people did it. Other people didn't have to wait outside the library for it to open. They didn't have to spend every waking moment memorizing the patter for their hour long talks, so they wouldn't have to stammer through the real thing. Other people could fake it a little bit, disguise themselves as someone who knew their shit, and put on a smile to cover up for any nervousness they felt inside. Me? I just had to be genuine. Damn.

Virtual Crushes

So it happens when I'm Internet dating that I begin to receive emails from some dude somewhere who looks pretty good in his photos. He might even mention Jane Austen or costume dramas or Buffy or Say Anything in his emails. He spells tricky words like "it's" and "there" correctly. Maybe he'll say that being mathematical is hot. And, so, without meeting him, I develop a crush. I look forward to his emails. I imagine that we'll meet and immediately hit it off. I forget all of the other Internet men I've met before, and instead I imagine the happy times of actually being in a relationship with someone I respect and admire.

I don't really know how I do it, because when I'm not in that email-crush-stage of one of these things, I know intellectually just how deceptive it can be. I realize that the percent of the male population I can actually stand in real life is ridiculously small, and I know that the chances that one of them will like me back approaches zero. Yet, I hope when I get these promising emails. I get a little bit devastated when they don't write me back. I flirt ridiculously when they do, revealing way more about myself than I ever would if I weren't suffering from the effects of email-crush hormones.

Sometimes when we meet, the disappointment is so great that there is no hope of a second date. Sometimes it's there, but I ignore it so I can feel my initial high a little bit longer. And maybe someday, there won't be disappointment at all, and we can live happily ever after.

But I doubt it. I think the man for me is in the real world somewhere, and not hiding behind the Internet, which probably means I have to close this post now, and get myself out into the real world.

You Can Never Go Back

Fern and I drove to Carleton today to get new sweatshirts, eat Hogan Brothers' Sandwiches and breathe the Malt-o-Meal laden Northfield air. According to the radio, this is the last weekend for peak fall color viewing, although, for me, there's no point in viewing bright orange, yellow, and red leaves unless they are splashed across a clear, blue sky, and clear, blue skies have been in very short supply this gloomy October.

It wasn't until we arrived on campus and saw all of the prospective students milling about with their parents that I remembered that MEA weekend 17 years ago was the very weekend I decided to attend Carleton. I remembered walking across campus with my mother who spent that year riding a Sine curve of my annoyance with her and so treated me with gentle standoffishness that weekend in order not to jinx my Carleton weekend. We were near what later became my favorite spreading elm tree on campus when some current students saw a crowd of prospies walking across campus and chose to fuck with us by announcing loudly that they were on the way to the library to write their 30-page papers due the next morning. I liked that these existing students noticed us and created some humor for us. It was very different from Northwestern, where, if anyone noticed that I was walking across campus with 20 other high school students, he didn't find it worthy of remark. I remember turning to my mother to see if she got the joke and finding her at close to -1 on the annoying scale, which was how I knew that the Carleton campus was already having an effect on my mood.

It still does. A quick walk across the bald spot, staring at the little kids who currently pose as Carleton students is almost sure to bring a smile to my face. It was Friday today, so the student mailboxes overflowed with Friday Flowers and my heart joined them. Of course, we only get to visit now and bemoan our slacker senior year, when we had the chance to take such fascinating classes and we blew it by only taking the bare minimum load. We only get to see the outside of the windows of our old rooms in Nourse, and we can't head on over to Goodhue for a round of hall 'bee before dinner.

Still, we left refreshed with that feeling that we always get, that we were lucky for those four years, happier than we knew, surrounded for the only time in our lives by people at least as smart as we were. It's good to see that it still exists, even though we know that it's not really there for us anymore.

Polynomials

I'm teaching the dread chapter 9 again. In this book chapter 9 is polynomials. Naked, unadorned polynomials without an equals sign. I struggle to make polynomials relevant more than any other math, because really (and don't tell my students this) it sort of isn't relevant. All of the polynomials in chapter 9 are really just a test of your dexterity at symbol manipulation.

Watch me distribute across these flaming parentheses! Oooh and aaah as I undo it with a little greatest common factoring. See me divide a polynomial by a monomial. Shiver as I disobey the very laws of physics and conservation of matter by adding two trinomials together to get a binomial!

Sometimes our book in an attempt to make polynomials "real" for the kids will throw in a story problem. Unfortunately the story problems are total bunk and go something like this: "Mt. Kilimanjaro is (5x² + 4x + 9) meters tall. Mt. Everest is (11x² + 8x - 15) meters tall. How much taller than Mt. Kilimanjaro is Mt. Everest? How tall are the two mountains stacked on top of each other?" Anyway, I skip these pathetic attempts at relevance, and I'm left with nothing. Nothing but a bunch of rigid rules about symbol manipulation and a feeble attempt at enthusiasm...

The Secret to Getting the Grading Done

I refuse to turn on the heat. I might break down in November. My (somewhat whack) theory about heat is that if the pipes don't need it, then neither do I. So far, my pipes haven't frozen, but I, on the other hand, have discovered that it's really not such a bad deal to pay $6 for a bowl of soup in a coffee shop, since then I get to sit in the coffee shop soaking up the heat, and I can take off my jacket for a brief while. At home, the jacket stays on until I get to crawl under the 20 pounds of blankets I have set up on my bed.

Anyway, I was sitting in the coffee shop with the bowl of soup, and I got out my tests, and I was really on a roll, grading like a machine, when a cute guy with a little girl squatted down beside me to talk about teaching the math. He teaches math at a small Montessori charter school. Asked me my name twice. Made intense eye contact. Then, oops, mentioned his wife. Oh, well, my coffee-shop romance was nice while it lasted.

I could feel that the grading was practically going to do itself as I basked in the free coffee-shop heat, when suddenly I got an uncomfortable feeling that everyone else was leaving. Damn. Was this one of those crazy Minneapolis places that closes at 6:00? Yes, alas, it was. Sometimes I miss Portland. Besides, in Portland, Mr. Montessori Blue Eyes wouldn't have a wife at his age.

And so I was left with a class and a half of tests to grade and a cold, uninviting home to grade them in. Where in my neighborhood would be open late enough in the evening for me to take in the warmth while I got my work done? Where, oh where? And then it hit me. There are places open late into the night. Warm places, places with a lot of people and music and beverages. I found such a place (an old favorite: The Chatterbox), and I sat alone in a corner with my tall glass of cold beverage and my stack of tests, and before too long I had just a half a class left. My lips weren't even blue, and by the time I got home to finish the last class I barely even minded the cold.

A Greener Day

I used to think that we'd blow up the Earth. I was so convinced of it that I deluded myself into believing that the Soviet sense of fair-play would not allow them to nuke us while we slept. It was my secret way to trick myself into sleeping at night. Before I made up the fair-play rule, it was during the darkest hours of the night that my fears of planetary destruction would pound in my ears and keep me from thinking about anything else. During the daytime I could put Nuclear winter out of my mind unless I happened to see photographs of mushroom clouds or the hear the engine of a low-flying propeller plane (which I must have associated with the Enola Gay, because I always thought the bombs would be traveling by plane, even though I swear I had heard of missiles).

Nowadays superpowers blowing up the Earth occurs to me less and less. I spend that familiar nervous energy worrying about what we're collectively doing to it instead. The Earth will survive our game of chicken with the enormous bombs. It won't go out with a bang (or a series of back-and-forth bangs between ticked off superpowers). Instead it will go out with an almost too quiet whimper.

It will complain of the heat, like a menopausal coworker. "Is it hot in here or is it just me? Do you mind if I open a window?" Only the window won't help, and the Earth will continue whimpering. "It didn't used to bother me, but now, well I guess, I just never expected to be able to wear shorts Trick-or-Treating in Minnesota. I'm hot. Are you hot? I used to could go North to cool down, but there's hardly any ice up there anymore. When was the last time we cross-country skied, anyway?"

We'll hear stories about how the roofs in Poland collapsed last winter under the weight of the snow, and we'll pause for a minute, "Hmm. Doesn't it usually snow in Poland? How much snow did they get to collapse roofs that were built for snow?" And then we'll hear about mudslides in California and hurricanes in Louisiana and torrential rains all over China, and we'll stop each time, listening to the faint sound of the Earth whimpering, but caught up in our own lives as usual, grading papers, getting home to the baby, trying to figure out a route home that doesn't involve that 35W bridge. And the Earth will groan a little bit more. A drought here, a flood there. A late-season tornado that wipes out a small town. "We weren't expecting it. The sirens didn't sound." And the weather-person tries to come up with new non-threatening ways of telling us that we've broken heat records. "Record-high temperatures today. Lots of sun. Hope you got a chance to get outside and enjoy it." Nothing ominous there, except that I just don't remember setting so many records back when I was a kid.

And so I'm glad that we haven't blown up the Earth, don't get me wrong. I just wish I could remember to focus my anxiousness about this climate thing the way I used to when I was a child. I also sort of wish I could think up a good lie to tell myself so I don't have to lie awake at night. The Right does it all the time. Why can't I?

Going Public

I was going to post regularly for a while, and then when I felt like I had a pattern going, I was going to announce my little blog to the world (or, more accurately, I was going to quietly make it a public searchable blog). However, I am not posting regularly because I get caught up in my regular life, and it has occurred to me that if I had regular readers, like Lemon Gloria does, then maybe I'd write regularly. Yeah, except that the reason I read Lisa's blog regularly is that she posts regularly. So, I guess I'm the egg trying to convince myself that the chicken came first (even though I really know that dinosaurs laid eggs long before chickens walked the earth).

Also, I'm trying to use the word "regular" as many times as I can in one paragraph. My student interrupted me one day while I was teaching and using the word "garbage" to stand for the stuff next to the x, to say, "Have you ever noticed how a word can sound weird if you say it enough times? And besides I don't like the word 'garbage'. I like 'trash'." Excellent point. Also, exactly the reason why I really like teaching kids with "attention deficit". They say much more interesting things than their on-task classmates.

Writing Club

I joined a writing club today. We sat at a coffee shop and did timed exercises. Here's one of mine. The prompt was "Willie's husband died. She bought a Harley and dyed her hair flaming red..."

...but you can't change who you are, because after a jaunt across country and the prerequisite pilgrimage to Sturgis, her roots came back as mousy brown as ever and the Harley gathered dust in the garage. Willie just couldn't hack it as a biker chick. Of course, she had had some meaningless sex in Sturgis - with a guy who arose the next morning and pulled on a grimy t-shirt that read, "Of course I love you, darling, my dick's hard, ain't it?" which was enough to get the poor asshole kicked out of Willie's warm bed forever. Even before he revealed his true nature, though, sex with the nameless man in Sturgis only made Willie feel lonely and cold. Did he really think she was the type of person who had flaming red hair and drove a Harley? Would he toss his head back and laugh if she farted in bed? Could she tug on his earlobe if she had something to say while he slept? Would he snore companionably beside her so she could pace her breathing to his and sleep, finally sleep, the way she hadn't been able to since Frank?

Typed out it looks much shorter than it does written out longhand on the page. Huh.

Names for a Girl

We took dinner to some old friends who are expecting their second child any day now. They had some baby name books. The first child took their girl's name, so they need a replacement. These are not the sort of people to find out the sex of their child until the doctor holds it up and shouts, "It's a _____!" Nor, it turns out, are they the sort of people with any time before 9 months of gestation to decide on a name. Oh, well, we all know how long it took Beau to get a name (and only by the skin of his teeth did he avoid being called Ivan).

And so, here are my favorite girls' names, since I spent the evening looking through them.

1. Clara. It's just simple and clean. It reminds me of Claire my old baby-sitter, but it's a wee bit more elegant. I'm probably just thinking of the Nutcracker, and extrapolating that any girl named Clara knows ballet.
   
2. Asdis. This one is definitely because I had a girl-crush on the girl named Asdis at my high school. It's Icelandic. I don't think it works with my last name, but if I mother a child with an Icelandic type we can give her his name, just so her first name can be Asdis.
3. Isabel. I know it's trendy. I just like it. I can't help being a herd follower.
4. Molly. It just strikes me as a solid, friendly name. Could you imagine someone named Molly embezzling money from retirees? Are you going to cry because you got stuck sitting next to Molly on the seating chart? No, you're going to be glad to be so lucky. You could be sitting next to Brittani, and then you'd have to defend yourself against tattling all day long.
5. Nora. I seem to like surprisingly girlish names for girls. Girlish and elegant, like Nora. I liked being an Alex, but I'm drawn to names with a clear femininity to them.

OK, so those are the names. We'll see if the pregnant friends go and steal one of them from me.

A Quiet Morning in Bed

We awoke this morning to the sounds of a domestic disturbance in the ol' neighborhood. Fern woke up earlier from upstairs and heard more than I did. She also saw one of the participants of the disturbance standing around in our (fenced-in) back yard. I woke up at 5:00 when the woman two doors down joined in the yelling. It was lots of "f*** this sh**" and "f*** you" with a little bit of "b****" mixed in, not to mention the "get these n*****s out of my house". We also both heard the dude admit that he had pushed the woman ("Only one time, and you act like this."), and we also heard him threaten another resident of the house ("F*** Richard. I'll f***ing kill Richard.") So my question is, at what point do we break down and call the cops?

For me, I considered calling to the point of wondering whether it constituted a 911 call, or whether I'd have to get out of bed to find a phone book so I could call the actual police number. I was deep in a sleep when it started, and I remained half-asleep throughout the argument. My overriding thought was that calling the cops didn't seem like it would improve the situation any more quickly. The man (the threatening, pushing man) was already leaving the house, which is why they were outside yelling, and the woman sounded fully able to tell him to "f*** off" (in fact, I think she did, at 5:10 and maybe also 5:12). I didn't really believe the threat on Richard's life. Of course, I'm not a highly trained police officer, but here was my fear: the cops come, the woman defends the man, they make up, and then we're back to having an on-going abusive relationship, instead of the man leaving the house, maybe never to return...

However, if I had seen the guy standing in our back yard, I might have done it then. I'm not sure what Fern's tipping point was. It was obviously past having a yelling man in our yard. Mostly, I'm just shocked that Bev didn't call. She seems to have no trouble telling the city when our weeds get too big.

Meanwhile, Buddy slept through the entire incident. Some watch dog he turned out to be.