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Thursday, October 31, 2002
Well, at least I know now. After this school year is over, I never have to teach again.
3:26 PM
Happy Anniversary, dear.
I'll save the sweet, sappy stuff for later, but I guess I don't mind the world knowing how incredible the past ten years have been. I don't have any lyrical poems or snappy anecdotes to offer to demonstrate the depth of my feelings, but I suspect you already know I'm not that kind of gal. I'm not sure how I--how we--got to be so lucky. The moment I met you, I knew you were beyond my reach. And even if you weren't, I knew I would never be able to pull my act together enough to give you what you needed in a relationship. I've never been so glad to be wrong about something (you know how I hate to be wrong!). You have had my heart in your hand since the first time you smiled at me, and apparently you can see something in me that is hidden from everyone else in the world. It amazes me that someone as screwed up as me can end up with someone as warm, kind, nice, tender, caring, intelligent, and beautiful as you. It's definitely not proof of God, but it's proof of miracles.
It's not so much that I try to be a better for you, but just that I become a better person being near you. For that alone--separate from all the other ten thousand reasons I love you--is enough to make me grateful for the past ten years. I'm excited about the next ten years, it's hard to believe they can be better than the ones we've already spent together, but with you around, I'm willing to believe that anything is possible.
9:04 AM
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
The world can just come to an end right now.
Sir Edmund Hillary doing an SUV commercial. What the *fuck* is up with that? How could he? HOW COULD HE?
8:50 PM
Wow. David says ten members of his family have died from cancer since we left high school. He suspects the pesticides. I think he can skip "suspect" and go straight to "know beyond a shadow of a doubt."
1:45 PM
It is so true that facial cuts bleed profusely.
The Son of Beast slid across my face right after I'd crawled into bed last night. Yelling, I instantly pressed both hands to my face because I thought she had hit my right eye. No...I guess my eye is okay, so I take that hand away. But...why does my left hand feel funny?
I pulled my hand away from my face, looked at the blood, and put it back against my face. Repeated the whole sequence. And did it again. Am I bleeding? I'm bleeding. I'm bleeding! I'm *really* bleeding! Blood running down my face, blood pooling in my palm and running down my wrist. I kept saying, "I'm bleeding," and Catherine kept saying, "I know," until I finally said, "Are you going to help me or anything?" and she went for a towel saying, "Well, I kept waiting for you to get out of bed!"
Good idea. So, I got up and tried to keep the blood away from everything until I could bleed in the bathroom. So there I am, bleeding through my fingers into the sink bowl, and it occurs to me...you know, I don't feel very good. Maybe I should sit down.
It did eventually stop bleeding, and Catherine covered it up w/a bandage and some neosporin, worrying that everyone is going to start thinking that she beats on me. It's not a very large cut, maybe only 1/2" (but "remarkably razor-like" according to C.), and it didn't really hurt that much, but it's a little disconcerting to feel and see blood spilling all over the place. I've had some good cat scratches (for instance, the time Jack gouged my forearm w/his back feet while "playing"), but I've never had one quite so gory before.
What a little demon.
8:58 AM
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Time to empty my mind before I go insane. This should take awhile. I predict several thousand words before I'm sick of talking about myself.
Item One:
Every year about this time, I go into the same old routine. I freak out about where we're shopping, what we're eating, how much energy we're using, etc. I don't know if it's the weather, or just the fact that I grew up in the country so it feels as if I should have just harvested something, but every October, I do this whole environmentalist-anti-capitalist-anti-globalist-vegetarian-separatist routine. I threaten to move us out into a cabin in the woods. I decide to start building a turbine so we can live totally off the grid. I stare longingly at images of the off-the-grid house I wish I could design/build/own. I vow we're going to start shopping at Bloomingfoods more often even though it's all the way across town. And I swear we're going to start a garden of our own in the spring.
Last year at this time, I even went to far as to contact the local extension office about planting an organic garden. Then in January, the city came and tore up our entire yard, including the piece I had mapped out for gardening. And I have to admit, I wasn't *too* disappointed because the truth is, I hate gardening, and am only considering doing it because it seems like the responsible thing to do. I don't look forward to it with any sort of joyful anticipation, yet here I am, calculating the number of board feet of pine I need to build some raised beds this spring.
Quite coincidentally, I picked up a book that sort of feeds this "the world is going to hell in a handbasket so I'd better grow my own vegetables" mood I'm in. I grabbed it because of the cover art, checked it out because of the title: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Nabhan. (Also coincidentally, he has an article in this month's Sierra Club magazine, a publication that should never be allowed in my house because it sends me into a depression so deep I'm in danger of not being able to climb out of it.) NPR has a RealAudio file of Nabhan talking about his book, if anyone cares.
I like the premise of Nabhan's book, that eating locally (and organically) is the ecologically and economically responsible thing to do. Just a quote from the article to demonstrate the kind of stats he's using to support his position:
"Today, locally based diets are nearly nonexistent. Only a tenth of the food eaten in Iowa, America's breadbasket, is grown w/in the state; most produce now arrives by truck via a Chicago redistribution center, traveling more than 1,500 miles before it reaches the dinner table in Des Moines. According to a recent report by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, that distance is up 22 percent from 1981. Nationally, 93 percent of all fruits and vegetables make similarly long journeys, requiring tremendous amounts of fossil fuel and reducing freshness and nutritional value. And w/food passing through six to eight hands before it reaches you, the portino of the food dollar doing to the farmer who produces it shrinks, making family farms increasingly less viable. In 1950, a typical farmer got 41 cents for every food dollar. Today he gets 19 cents." (p. 32, Nov/Dec issue)
The book is interesting for the little bits like that, like the story of why we eat corn-fed beef: according to Nabhan, after WWII, there was a surplus of nitrogen that the military needed to use up, so they took the surplus nitrogen and turned it into fertilizer to boost grain production in the U.S. That created a surplus of corn. So pretty soon consumers were being encouraged to eat corn-fed beef, that corn had to be used for something. The problem is, grass-fed beef is better for you, w/less marbling and less fat. So this led to an overproduction of beef in feedlots, and they had to figure out what to do w/all the excess tallow and fat. That went into chicken feed. Suddenly eggs had a higher cholesterol level than ever before. All because of the military and its nitrogen (p. 72-3).
So, I can recommend it for anyone thinking about food production and global economics. But. Why am I not going to finish the book?
The book is actually about Nabhan's challenge to himself. He wants to go an entire year eating food that was produced w/in 250 miles of his home. This includes locally grown food that he has purchased from other farmers, and food he has foraged from the land. And I admire Nabhan's intent, I really do, but what starts out as a respectable pursuit ends up sounding condescending and classist.
Nabhan spends a lot of time wringing his hand over the fact that old food preparation/eating traditions have died out, and why did this happen, and why can't people see what they're losing, and why won't they just do what he's doing and eat grasshoppers for dinner? He assumes that the spiritual sustenance he gets from the food rituals he is (re)discovering adds some sort of validity to his life that other people's lives do not have. Because he can practically orgasm from eating a lush peach (while blindfolded, I might add), he believes that is a feeling everyone should experience, and that modern life is shallow and devoid of meaning because most of us aren't trading in sex for mesquite-smoked chipotle.
But what mostly bothered me was the basic classism underpinning his political position. He has a year of essentially leisure time (or at least it seems that way) to pursue his goal. It's not clear to me if he's on sabbatical, or what, but let me say, the average working American simply does not have the possibility of spending a full day foraging for saguaro cactus blooms. The average working American can't drive all over the county to buy eggs from one house, milk from another, tortillas from another, and so on and so on. The average working American *works* and works for damn little money. And where are they going to put the 2.5 kids while they're out digging up sand roots on the weekends? It just seems to me that Nabhan has a particular lifestyle--that of an academic--that is considerably more flexible than that of a factory worker.
Add to that the fact that the guy has a graduate degree in agriculture, and you can see his goal can't be met by most Americans. I grew up on a farm, but that doesn't mean I know how to grow stuff. Not well enough to live off a garden, at least. I don't know. Overall, I just didn't think his experiment was viable. The knowledge behind it, the political motivation, yes, I liked that. The rest of it? Not to my liking.
Also, I'm not a spiritual eater. Every meal Nabhan ate was some kind of ritual. I don't like food enough to eat that way. Pretty much I could live off Chef Boyardee pizza and water and be happy. Food doesn't have to have great meaning in my life, or even much flavor. It just has to be handy. And I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. I don't think that I'm single-handedly destroying the world by eating when I'm hungry and not turning each bite into a cultural celebration.
But that's just me.
Item Two:
I thought I was all WTCed out, but it turns out I'm not. Also on the floor next to me is a book of essays: After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. A lot of the essays have appeared elsewhere, most in substantially altered forms.
One essay I knew I would appreciate before I even read it was "The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki, Mohammed Atta and Our World Trade Center," by Eric Darton. Catherine read Darton's Divided We Stand this summer while I was reading another book on New York, and we spent a lot of time reading passages outloud to each other. Anyway, Darton continues the same theme: the building of the WTC was as much terrorism as the destruction of the WTC. He argues that buildings like the WTC separate us from our humanity, and although I think he's a little unfair to the architect, it is interesting to watch him construct an argument that says Atta and Yamasaki were the same man.
Quoting his own book (written in 1999 about the WTC), Darton writes about how the design of the buildings gives no signal to passersby as to their function, and suggests that once you realize this
"you realize the trade towers disappear as sites of human habitation and reassert their power at the level of an esthetic relationship. And it is through recognizing this process that you may be become uncomfortably aware of a kindred spirit linking the apparently polar realms of skyscraper terrorist and skyscraper builder.
"This analogy between those who seek to destroy the structures the latter thought it ratinoal and desirable to build becomes possible by shifting focus momentarily to the shared, underlying predicate of their acts. To attempt creation or destruction on such an immense scale requires both bombers and master-builders to view living processes in general, and social life in particular, with a high degree of abstraction. Both must undertake a radical distancing of themselves from the flesh and blood experience of mundane existence "on the ground."...For the terrorist and the skyscraper builder alike, day-to-day existence shrinks to insignificance--reality distills itself to the instrumental use of physical forces in service of an abstract goal." (p. 88-9)
Well, he wrote that in 1999, after the first bombing, but continues to believe it's a valid assertion. Darnton goes on to conclude that the building of the WTC and the destruction of it are "enactments of polarized daydreams of domination. Whether a master plan entails casting away stones or gathering stones together, the project rests up the creation of an abstract, quantitative logica that supposes itself to operate on a higher plane than that inhabited by the human material beneath it." (p.91)
Well, yes, I do think he's being unfair to Yamasaki. He's pulling a single individual forward and pinning the destructive act of building the WTC (and it was without question destructive in so many senses of the word) on him. He claims Yamasaki is like Atta--the man w/the plan. Sure, Osama bin Laden was behind it, but Atta was the planner. Rockefeller/Tobin were behind the WTC, but Yamasaki was the planner. And I totally see the parallel, but Darnton hasn't convinced me. I just don't think you can single out an architect and blame everything bad about the WTC on his design. I mean, Darnton continues on to say that the building was "an attack planned by the city's oligarchs and carried out w/the general consent of its populace," so I fail to see how he can really set Yamasaki up to take the fall. He was definitely partially responsible, but he had a lot of help.
Anyway, also to be considered is Neil Smith's "Scales of Terror: The Manufacturing of Nationalism and the War for U.S. Globalism." Smith puzzles over the fact that the destruction of the WTC was both a local and an international event: local to Manhattan/NY, international because people from all over the world died. How, then, did Americans manage to co-opt the event and turn it into a national event?
One paragraph in particular really caught my attention (given my recent rant on the Baku oil fields). Smith was considering the role of the attack on the Pentagon, and why it was eclipses by the attack on the WTC, and what it all meant, etc.:
"...the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center have given the U.S. elite the opportunity to pursue a war conceived as an endgame of globalization. It is a war whose real interest is to establish U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, a power broadly eroded in the 1970s with the assertion of OPEC's influence and the 1979 revolution in the client state of Iran. For its possession of massive petroleum resources, the Middle East is a vital geopolitical region, but this is not a war, as some on the Left have claimed, over oil. Such old-fashioned geopolitical calculations are not entirely obsolete today, but they are secondary. Rather, it is a geoeconomic war to reassert control in the only remaining region of the post-Cold War world that mounts a serious threat to the vision of neoliberal globalization emanating from New York, Washington, and London since the 1980s. Various strands of Islam represent an alternative modernity--not just vis-a-vis the United States, but often agasinst Arab states themselves--and "antiterrorism" is a convenient galvanizing ideology for this war. This is the real meaning of repeated calls to move on from Afghanistan, to "finish off Saddam Hussein," attack Somalia, smash Sudan."
So, there you have it.
Well, I could quote the book all night long--19 essays, 19 different points of view. The historical ones are the best ("The First Wall Street Bomb," about the 1920 "car bombing" of Wall Street). And "The Odor of Publicity," which starts out with a consideration of 18th c. cemetery in Manhattan full of the remains of 20,000 or so African slaves (40% of the original Dutch colony, 20% of the original English colony), most of whom were literally worked to death. It's a good essay that can take us from the 1700s to 2001 in six pages.
The best quote of the book came in the first essay written by Marshall Berman. He comments that he doesn't miss the buildings, who does?
"It's a lot harder to feel empathy for those buildings. The earliest epitaphs for the towers were of the don't-speak-ill-of-the-dead variety. The Discovery Channel did a show on the buildings, hosted by John Hockenberry, an NPR commentator I used to admire. "Everything that is best in America," he said, "was embodied in these buildings." I felt America's enemies could say nothing more insulting about us than this compliment." (p.6)
Item Three:
Hockey. I've made an executive decision. I have a home game Nov. 10, and I'm going to skip it so I can go to my hockey lesson here in Bloomington instead. Puking aside, I had a lot of fun on Sunday (again). I've decided to do what I want to do for a change, and have fun. I'll go to practice, I'll go to the rest of my games, but I'm no longer getting emotionally involved w/the outcome. I'm just going to treat them like extra ice time and take what I can from them, skills-wise, and focus on having fun on Sundays for awhile.
I am excited about going to Cleveland this weekend. Not for the hockey. Actually, I'm kind of annoyed w/how freaking *team-like* everyone is acting. Everyone wants to caravan to Cleveland, and we're all supposed to exchange cell phone numbers so anyone can get ahold of anyone else at any moment, and I'm, like....why? Respect my privacy, okay? I'm driving by myself, staying in a room by myself, and not handing out my cell phone number to anyone. So, I'm a misanthrope. But I've got plans of my own that don't include my teammates. I want to drive my own pace, stop when I want to stop, get there and spend a quite evening reading in my room, blah blah blah. I'm not a member of the team until I get to the locker room. So sue me.
But, I'm excited because there is a Frank Gehry exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, about the new Gehry building at the Case Western Reserve University (conveniently located .45 miles from the museum), so I'm going to leave here early on Friday a.m. so I can take in both before the game Friday night.
Anyway, I've got a ton of work to do over the weekend, and I need to be away by myself to get it done. I just don't have time to live by someone else's agenda right now.
Item Four:
Our anniversary is in two days and I haven't even bought a card, much less a present. I am such a freak.
We have stopped arguing about Son of Beast. Catherine thought hard about giving her back, and even mentioned it again today, but we're going to stick with it. At this point, I'd feel mean if I sent it back. Oh, I'm not supposed to call it Son of Beast anymore (and if you don't live in the Midwest, you won't understand it anyway). It's name is Luna, and we bought some film, and an incredibly annoying kitten toy w/bells on it this evening, so I guess it's here to stay. Jack still hates it, but maybe it will get better with time.
Item Five:
"Laura?"
"No...that would be your other daughter."
Mom called and said Dad is out of the hospital. Oxygen forever, and I bet my dad is completely pissed off. If I could figure out how to bring the tobacco industry to its knees, I would. It might take me awhile, but I'll figure out how to crush them.
7:32 PM
Yay! I found my watch and my wedding ring, underneath the last tissue in the Kleenex (tm) box in the bathroom.
8:21 AM
Monday, October 28, 2002
Wow, Doyle just e-mailed me. David Raschka alert!
8:07 PM
I should be a) doing my descriptive geometry homework; b) doing my Solidworks homework; and c) writing a lecture on moisture and thermal protection. Instead, I'm playing on Theory.org.uk.
What I really want is my own Edward Said trading card, but I'd settle for Foucault. And really, it's too bad the theory action figures do not exist, they'd make a perfect gift for that Ph.D. holder who has everything. Well, and Lego theorists...what more do I need to say?
7:47 PM
Hmmm....which looks more unprofessional, a dugout full of kids, or a bench-clearing brawl?
3:39 PM
I find local politics in Indiana somewhat opaque. I've been totally out of the loop during the last five years, and every year I blame it on the same thing: there's no Voter's Pamphlet in this state. What's up with that? It makes finding out anything about the candidates a really difficult task. It appears that what the voter is required to do is drive around town, note down all the names on the various election signs, and then try to figure out how to contact all these people and figure out what they stand for. We don't even get a ton of "vote for me" literature in the mail; in fact, we get more election material from Oregon than we get from Indiana, five years after we've moved out of state.
So, I'm stuck with lawn signs (I won't vote for one candidate specifically because his sign is on my neighbor's lawn, and I won't vote for someone supported by crazy people), web pages (if they even have one), biased newspaper editorials and insane letters to the editor (the Green Party = the antichrist in some parts of Indiana), and...I guess that's it. Sure, I could get really motivated and spend a weekend tracking down all the candidates and locating their campaign headquarters, and as a concerned citizen, I shouldn't bitch about having to exert myself, but....really.
Just publish a Voter's Pamphlet, for chrissakes.
10:47 AM
You know what? Fuck Putin. He's a sorry excuse for a leader, and the Russians deserve what they get for electing him. How stupid do you have to be to kill the very hostages you are trying to save by using some gas you can't even identify? The "competent" people know the name of the gas. Well, let me say--there *are* no competent people in charge in Russia. This is why Americans should be pissed off at our Cold War leaders. The Russians can't do anything right--what ever made us think they could make a functional nuclear weapon? They can't even make a car that runs more than 50 miles without breaking down. They *are* a dangerous nation, dangerous in their stupidity and incompetence. Couldn't they have contacted some outside agency and consulted on the potentially deadly effects of the nerve gas? But, no, of course not. This is the administration that was willing to let its own navy personnel drown unnecessarily because it couldn't fucking ask Finland for help in opening up the hatch on the Kursk.
I tell you, there are days that I think Lebed' would have been a better President, and if that doesn't frighten you, nothing will.
Freaking Soviets. I used to think there was a difference between Russians and Soviets, but I'm not so sure anymore. They are a people crippled by decades--if not centuries--of graft and corruption, and rather than wising up and using free elections to institute change, they revert to old patterns and elect the candidate that most closely resembles a Soviet dictator. I have no sympathy for them at this point.
8:42 AM
Sunday, October 27, 2002
C: I think we should go with "Luna." She seems more like a "Luna" then a "Sam."
Me: She seems more like a "Mohammed Atta," if you ask me.
C: You're terrible!
8:55 PM
So, my wife has a new kitten. Less than twenty-four hours after its arrival, she's wondering out loud: Do you suppose it's too late to take it back?
She was trying to come up with a Halloween type name since our other cat has a Halloween name, and this new one is appropriately all black. I think she's decided on Sam, after Samantha on Bewitched. But this morning, after she'd picked her up out of the plants for the fifth time, Catherine said, "Maybe we should name her...."
Me: Satan?
C: No, but didn't Samantha have an evil twin sister?
Me: Yeah, Serena.
C: She seems more like a Serena than a Sam.
Me: She seems more like a Beelzebub than a Sam. Or a Mephistopheles.
C: She's a bit crazy.
Me: You could call her "Luna," short for "Lunatic."
C: She'd have to be a New Moon, there's nothing very lunar about her.
Me: Okay, call her sin luna, without the moon. You can call her "Sin" for short.
C: That's going to be appropriate.
2:50 PM
Saturday, October 26, 2002
A little less tension in the air this morning.
Neither of us felt like running, so we went for a walk instead. Cold enough to require long sleeves, but not so cold as to demand coats; everything still quite damp from yesterday's serial downpours. Fairly reminiscent of the early days in Eugene, walking and talking without really saying what's on our minds. Even the season is proper for this kind of meeting.
But...overall, okay. Everything's fine.
Right now I feel like I'm just a passive spectator in the game of my own life. Everyone else is moving the pieces, and I just get to watch and hope it works out in my favor in the end.
4:21 PM
Ah....baby showers. So full of cute things. Kind of odd to be expressing condolences (loss of a father) and congratulations (on impending birth of said baby) on the same morning.
4:10 PM
“A man will always be someone appealing that always will be a stranger; a woman is never really completely a stranger with another woman. There is more of an intimacy and a complicity.”--Catherine Deneuve.
Discuss.
10:10 AM
Friday, October 25, 2002
Yeah, and I'll bet they're all sitting around Dean and Joyce's smoking.
11:00 PM
Well, now she's mad.
10:27 PM
What's happening in Moscow is, of course, awful. But what the hell did Russia expect? You can't keep abusing a people and not expect them to react. Russia has totally fucked with the Chechens for over a decade now, and quite frankly, I'm surprised the Chechens haven't done more damage than they've already done. Quite honestly, the Russian gov't deserves everything the Chechen' "rebels" throw at them.
What I can't figure out: why isn't anyone (the U.N., for instance) stepping up and pounding on Russia's head? Why isn't anyone paying attention? Why have none of my friends ever asked me, "Say, Susanna, why is that in the early 1990s, Russia granted autonomy to pretty much any nation that asked for it--Ukraine, Georgia, the pre-Baltic states, all the various -stan states--but not to Chechnya? What do you know about this, oh knower-of-all-Russian-things?"
Well, I'll tell you what I know about it. The Russians have been vilifying the Chechens for centuries. Pushkin didn't pull that "zloj Chechen'" phrase out of a vacuum. But more than that, it's about the same thing it's always about: it's about oil. *Of course* Russia can't let go of Chechnya. And the U.S. can't let them let go of Chechnya. Heaven forbid the pipeline routes to the oilfields of the Caucuses and Central Asia should be jeopardized by not being under Russian control. There is a major pipeline route from Baku through Grozny (the capital of the Chechen' Republic), and it culminates in a Russian city (Tikhoretsk, I think that's how you spell it in English). And the Russians want desperately to preserve that pipeline, as well as access to the Baku/Chechen' oilfields. Russia is doing what it always does: fucking with ethnic hatred to mask its real desire to gain full control of the Chechen/Central Asian oil fields. It did the same thing w/the Georgians, it did the same thing w/the Azerbaijani and Armenians. And the rest of the world sits there and watches it all, hoping for an outcome that is financially beneficial to all the members of the U.N.'s Security Council. Well, fuck that.
The thing is, this is old news. So old, I've forgotten and re-remembered it a dozen times. It's been more than ten years, and still the war goes on in Chechnya.
10:20 PM
Interesting things from my e-mail. My friend, Susana, seems to determined to create webpages that are actually useful. Her newest contribution to the web: http://bayareawomensbasketball.com.
I, on the other hand, haven't updated my main webpage in months. I haven't even updated my architectural consulting webpage recently, and that's bad, because my fee structure has changed and I should really let people know that. I'm so damn web lazy that I'm actually considering *buying* a new template for this journal so I don't have to go through the effort of fixing the lingering errors on this one. Blah. Well, in my own defense, I should note that my hand freaking hurts, but I notice it hasn't prevented me from playing either Free Cell or hockey, so that's a pretty lame excuse.
10:30 AM
"It tastes like childhood!"
Should Flinstones ever decide to market its chewable vitamins to adults, there's their best shot at a tagline.
When we were kids, my siblings and I would drop our Flinstones vitamins in our chocolate milk and stir it as quickly as we could so we could watch Fred and Barney drown in a swirling, lactose-laced whirlpool. Probably they were already in a coma before they drowned from bouncing their foreheads off the glass repeatedly. If we didn't stir our milk, the corpses would settle to the bottom of the glass and dissolve into a solid splash of color. Then we could watch it get picked up with the currents when we played with our milk instead of drinking it.
And speaking of childhood, I just got back from a run in the (pouring down) rain. Catherine completely doesn't understand why I would do such a thing, but it reminds me of being a kid and all those years spent watching/playing soccer in inclement weather. Hell, getting all wet and muddy was half the fun, and why should it stop now just because I'm old? This is the first time--at least since college--that I've gone running "just because." I didn't need the workout since I have practice tonight, and I didn't even take a watch.
Things to do today, probably in the order of appearance:
Go out to Lowe's and pay for our kitchen cabinets--ouch.
Return all those overdue library books.
Find some lunch.
Feed the birds.
Clean the office.
Go to practice.
10:26 AM
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Along the lines of keeping myself busy, I just spent the evening ripping up the carpet from the hallway. It's going to look really good when the wood is refinished. I just need to get the carpet up off the living room floor, and we can begin refinishing. Well, I'd like to do the office and bedroom, too, but that's a goal to be met some other year.
8:25 PM
I heard the White Spot song on the radio this morning, in a Toyota commercial. Really, I think it's Albinoni, but it makes me happier to think of it as the White Spot song. I wonder what Barb's up to these days.
The weather is beautiful, Bloomington is beautiful. I rather enjoyed dashing across town (twice) this morning to deliver drawings to Steve, it got me out in the cool air and under the fall foliage. I love it when the trees are still a lime-tinted virescence in the center but a burnished gold on the outside. When the sun catches them, they look like a flame burning on some yet-to-be-discovered green gas. The kind of beauty that makes you ache. Or as the poet says, "Beauty crowds me til I die." Leave it to Ms. Dickinson to make even the sweetest moment painful.
It has been kind of good being busy w/the drawings, no time to stress out over the bigger issues of life. I can get all worked up about, "Christ, I need to get these drawings done!" instead of "Christ, what if my father dies?" and that helps. I don't know how people do it, I really don't.
I think....my dad must be scared. Mom says not to come home, it's not like he can talk to us since he can't breathe. She and Aunt Rosie are going down to stay in Wenatchee starting today, either at some hospital housing or in a motel, or maybe at Dean and Joyce's. Rosella has 7 weeks of sick leave built up and seems willing to use it, which is good. She was completely there when Dad had his heart attack, and we probably take advantage of her too much. Mom has (had, at this point) an appt. w/Caralee this morning for therapy, so hopefully she'll feel physically better, at least.
And I swear, if I ever see my brother again, he will feel my venom like he never has before. He doesn't have to act like oldest son, I've got that covered, but he'd damn well start acting like some sort of son besides the evil one.
2:28 PM
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Will the adventures never end?
I honestly had no idea it would be dark by 6:00. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself 3/4 of a mile away from my car, running through increasing darkness. I reassured myself, surely it's okay, I don't have that far to go, right? But at the 1/2 mile mark, two teenage boys ran out of the woods behind me and shouted something at me. I could see the outline of one of them when I looked over my shoulder, he had on a white shirt. They started following me on the trail. Maybe they were just going home, but did I really want to find out? I discovered that I can indeed sprint for 1/2 a mile. Of course, afterward I had to puke, but that's just....hm...a technicality. An unpleasant one, but a technicality all the same.
6:54 PM
Oh, my....this is funny. Not the story itself, but the musical they were watching. I simply cannot imagine Dva Kapitana as a musical. "And now I will sing the contents of the letter I found on the ground after the postman with the shiny buttons drowned in the flood and lost his mailbag...." "And now I will sing as my party perishes after our boat is crushed in ice flows far away in the north..." "And now I will sing as my head is shaved clean in an orphanage and I eat my cold gruel and--wait--I don't speak, so how can I sing?"
I had to memorize the entire freaking novel in 3rd year Russian, word for word.
4:27 PM
Kirk, Tom and I must be on the same fashion schedule. This is the second time this has happened: Tom is wearing olive pants and an olive/grey dress shirt. Kirk is wearing grey pants and an olive shirt, and I am wearing olive pants and a grey shirt. Our students probably think we're freaks.
3:57 PM
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Fuck. I knew it wouldn't be good. The last time my mom left me a message like that, Mark had died. Dad is in the hospital, he can't breathe. And I guess he's been slowly developing a case of carbon dioxide poisoning from his weak lungs. Mom says I shouldn't come home, but I think I should. Someone has to take care of things. If he gets out of the hospital, he'll need someone to go to the pharmacy, someone to figure out his meds, and someone to just get things in shape. And it shouldn't have to be my mom. I should be able to trust my brother and sister to do this stuff, but that won't happen, so maybe I'll fly home just to make myself feel better.
And I'm really, really angry at everyone who smokes right now. I wish they would just knock it the fuck off. That includes my mom, all my relatives, and all my friends. STOP IT. I don't want to keep doing this over and over and over. I don't give a fuck how hard it is to break an addiction, I really don't. If you think giving up the smokes feels bad, wait until you have three burly guys throwing you on a gurney, ripping off your clothes and pounding on your chest. Wait until you get strapped onto a tray and shoved in a helicopter and airlifted to another city w/no one to explain to you what the fuck is going on. Wait until you spend a week in ICU w/freaked out relatives hovering in the wings while overweight, out-of-shape, cigarette-smoking health professionals lecture you repeatedly on how stupid you are to smoke.
And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you get to die on the bathroom floor in front of your wife and baby daughter. You get your chest cracked open, your heart yanked out, and in the end, you still die. So maybe you should hope for the week in the ICU.
Just wait until you get an invite to your own wake. I'll tell you one thing--if you die from smoking, I'm not fucking coming to your funeral.
7:21 PM
I completely forgot: Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin was included in the Museum exhibit in Columbus. I was *totally* pissed off when he was awarded the commission for the new addition at the V&A. Not just because I hate his writing, which I think is deliberately recondite and abstruse, but because I knew he would introduce some po-mo monstrosity with no consideration of its context. Well, that's what he did in Berlin, too--his museum completely clashes with urban fabric around it. But. What a neat building. I liked what I read about the way he imagined the design. A backbone of "visible" Jewish culture runs down the building, and it is crossed repeatedly by corridors (sort of a lightning bolt layout) representing "invisible" Jewish culture. Where the two segments meet, there are five voids, representing the losses of the Holocaust. Visually, it looks like a great space, interesting glazing, just very well designed. So, I guess I should give the man a break. I mean, I love Zaha Hadid, and I'll bend over backwards to defend her work. But she really just can't be built, or at least not easily. I pity the poor people trying to translate her models into real, live spaces. I know they're working on the Cincinnati Contemporar Arts Center (you can watch it on the CAC webcam, but is it going to work when they're done? Not that working is actually required of a building (ooohhh, someone is going to slam me for saying that). Remember, I'm the one that loves the Wexner Center.
2:48 PM
I swear to god I didn't touch any poison ivy.
2:24 PM
Augh! I am so annoyed that I can't find my watch w/the black wristband. I know I wore it to Indy on Friday, and I have a vague memory of taking it out of my hockey bag so I wouldn't lose it in one of the lockerrooms over the weekend, but now I can't find it. It's not so much that I need it to tell time, but Catherine gave me that watch (to replace the one she gave me and promptly lost!). And it's not so much the watch but the wedding ring I know I looped in the band. We're getting new rings in a few days, but it's not like I wanted to instantly lose the old one just because I got a new one.
In other commentary: social workers should not have meetings at local coffee shops. All I want is to drink my coffee and read my book. I should not have to listen to two social workers talk about their screwed-up caseloads. They both had out their notebooks and pens, so I'm assuming it was some sort of formal, pre-arranged meeting. But let me tell you, I should *not* be privy to information about a 14-year-old who has been placed in a group home and shouldn't have been because he has a history of sexually abusing younger children. Idiots.
9:53 AM
Ah...so sweet. Last night when I went out to the living room, Catherine was all curled up in her flannel pajamas, playing with the stuffed Halloween bear I bought her yesterday. She was taking off his cute little cat costume, and putting it back on. She even put a piece of candy in his little pumpkin-shaped treat bag. SO CUTE. One of those moments that make my heart clutch.
We've been going around in vague circles, trying to decide what to do for our tenth anniversary. Go to the Limestone Grille like last year? The Story Inn? The Scholar's Inn? Go to the mall and look at little kids in their Halloween costumes? Drive up to Indy for the evening? About half way home on Sunday we decided we'd do something new and exciting: STAY HOME. I can't remember the last time we actually cleaned off the kitchen table and had a real meal together at home. We "cook" something maybe once a week, and I generally clean my plate whilst walking between the kitchen and the living room. I'm not sure when we stopped hanging out in the kitchen together. Anyway, I'm going to clean the kitchen from top to bottom the day before so we can have a nice, quiet, relaxing evening at home for a change.
8:11 AM
Monday, October 21, 2002
Okay, I was living life elsewhere this weekend, and haven't been able to watch the World Series as usual. I made it through 3 innings on Saturday before falling asleep, and only managed to watch 2 ups in the 7th by Anaheim before crashing last night. But this stupid taco story reminds me of why I often almost hate sports. Does everything have to have a freaking corporate sponsor? And god, if I have to watch one more Fox commercial, I will die. I only watched 3 innings, and already I'm ready to slit my throat to avoid all the commercialism, corporatism, and whatever-else-ism that gets on my nerves. If it's a trade off, if I have to put up with all the commercial crap to watch the game on TV, I'd just as soon it not be televised. We'd probably be a better nation if we still listened to sports on the radio. I have no evidence to support that position, just a strong feeling of revulsion every time I turn on the television, and that's got to mean something.
8:19 PM
Oh, yeah. I'm doing another measured drawings job for BRI. But I'm not sure if I'm doing it for money or as a volunteer. I should really ask.
And actually, although the timing would have been really bad, it's too bad I couldn't see Debbie this weekend. She couldn't find her keys, so she missed the game. But hopefully she'll be at the January one, provided I haven't quit the team. I can't believe we live so close to each other yet have not seen each other even once in the last five years. That is so sad.
7:58 PM
Well, Truly has me figured out. We were chatting about why we live in Bloomington (as opposed to Indy or some other city), and eventually she said that could understand how some people feel safer living in the city. "You know, people who are....different." And I said something about how my partner and I feel safe enough in Bloomington, and she agreed that Bloomington was pretty good on the diversity score, and that was that, a sort of silent acknowledgement. I *almost* offered to give her a ride to work in the mornings, but decided I wasn't that nice of a person. But now that it's getting colder, maybe I should.
7:03 PM
There were some really nice things about the weekend, I just need to dig through my anger and my headache to find them.
I (We) love visiting Columbus. We have a little routine that we enjoy, and although we varied it a little bit this weekend, the basic elements stayed intact. We started w/breakfast at Tim's, which is only appropriate since we were there to play hockey. I totally sugar-loaded, but it was good. The cashier offered Catherine a senior discount, much to her dismay.
We had quite a bit of time to kill, so we went to the Columbus Museum of Art. There are some really good collections in the Midwest, I don't think we've been to an art museum we haven't liked since moving to Indiana. There was an excellent photography exhibit (A Thousand Hounds), and an even more excellent architecture exhibit (Museums for the Millennium). I wish I could get my students to make the trip over there, but I guess a ten-hour roundtrip drive is asking a bit much. But the exhibit was definitely worth it, if only for Gehry's Bilbao plans. Absolutely stunning roof plan. Plus, the exhibit included the Tate Modern, which made me want to flee to England instantly. Oh, to be an expat. Totally cool, but no exhibition catalog.
We walked around campus, OSU is really pretty this time of year. Stopped in at the Wexner Center, but it's closed for an entire year for renovations. It's only 10 years old, so that makes me think Peter Eisenman made some fundamental mistakes when he originally designed the building. If it doesn't work after only ten years, it's a lemon. I say that, but I love the space, I hope they don't ruin it with renovations.
Oh, yesterday was the Columbus marathon, and we managed to come across the course around the 23 mile mark. The course had been open for five hours at that point, so you know the people running by were just hurting. I was watching them struggle and kept getting all choked up. I could see Catherine looking at me, then looking at me again, and I finally said, "Quit looking at me! I'm having a sports moment!" and she laughed.
We usually eat at the Cooker after we play at OSU, but I was not going to spend one moment longer with the team than I had to, so I beat it out of the locker room and out of Columbus. We ended up eating at a place called Salvi's Bistro. The subtitle on the restaurant sign said "casual eating," but as it turns out, we were the only casually dressed people there. It was good, but way too heavy. They had these little "pasta Salvi" things that were square egg noodle casseroles rolled in bread crumbs and deep fried. Tasty, but they feel a lot like lead in your stomach.
I pretty much shared every bit of blue language I could come up with w/Catherine on the way home. Poor her, she had to listen to me fume all the way across Ohio. Well, I calmed down some after I ate, but it was a good thing Debbie didn't show up at the game, I couldn't have talked to her afterward w/out looking like a total shrew.
And thanks, dear, for saving my sweatshirt. I really, really, really appreciate it.
4:32 PM
I must be absolutely incoherent at 8 a.m. One of my students brought a cup of coffee to class for me today. When I said thank you, she replied, "You're welcome, dear. You looked like you could use it." I love Hoosiers.
12:17 PM
Saturday, October 19, 2002
It's way too freaking early in the morning to be sitting in front of a computer. But I'm waiting for mapquest to figure out my life for me. What a great service.
This may be the morning to find some caffeine.
9:17 AM
Friday, October 18, 2002
Okay. A weekend away--or at least, an evening away--might do me some good. A game tomorrow in Indy, then a game on Sunday in Columbus. Haven't decided what we're going to do in Columbus Saturday evening/Sunday morning. Sleep? That would be my activity of choice at this point.
Storm is coming, I can hear the wind.
11:26 PM
So...CP is back in my life on a limited basis. We've been exchanging e-mail for a few months now, and generally just sounding one another out about where we are in our lives these days. I sent her a long reply to her latest e-mail last night, then spent a couple hours not sleeping over it.
And here's where I put in a disclaimer in my mind: If anyone could hear what I was thinking, they'd make me wear a big "RACIST" label on my forehead. And if anyone could read what I was typing, they'd make sure the letters were at least a foot tall.
To begin with, I find it alternately sad and amusing that she would have to ask me to recommend Korean music CDs. My god, she grew up in Seoul, her Korean is pristine, and she could fire up any old search engine and learn more about Korean music than I could ever tell her. I mean, really, I speak Korean like a grade school student. And maybe she was trying to make me feel useful, but I doubt it. She simply has blocked all things Korean out of her mind. I suppose I should be pleased that she's even expressing an interest in Korean pop culture, but mostly it just bugs me that she doesn't already know something about it.
I know it's racist, but all I could feel last night was this huge sense of disappointment because it appears CP has finally managed to obtain her goals: to become a white American. It *is* racist of me to assume that she would want to maintain some sort of link with her Korean background. Why should she? I couldn't tell you a thing about my ethnic background. Why should I assume she would want to, simply because her ethnicity is inscribed on her body?
It is perfectly logical that she wouldn't want to be Korean. Or, at least I understand the reasons she gives, even if I don't buy them all. From her point of view, a woman's place in U.S. society is better than a woman's place in Korean society. Well, they both suck, if you ask me, but I do understand what she was saying. I do understand why she cut off her hair so she wouldn't look like traditional Korean woman, and I sort of understand why she would color her hair so it loses its blue-blackness. Sort of.
And--as much as it used to infuriate me--I understand her worship of America. If you're raised with this vision of the U.S. as the promised land, if the man you ultimately considered your father is American, if you go through the indoctrination procedure of immigration, you're going to be a patriot. But, my god, how do intelligent people remain so blind? Okay, maybe she's changed a little bit on this score, I can't tell yet, but really, she's lucky to be alive, because I almost choked her to death during the Gulf War. "The government wouldn't lie to us, would it?"
Okay, first generation Korean-American. Logically, I know she is behaving like a lot (most?) first generation Americans--leave the home country, embrace America, forget the past, etc. Emotionally, I wish she would quit trying to forget who she was and who she is, because let's face it, no one else around her ever will. She's not white, and she's going to get hurt because she's not white, and the only antidote I can think of is some measure of K-pride, of which she apparently has none.
Wow. No surprise we didn't make it as a couple. No surprise at all.
8:41 AM
Thursday, October 17, 2002
It shouldn't surprise me. I know from back in the shrinking days that I'm totally disconnected from my body. I know all about body dysmorphia, I've done all the tedious cognitive behavior exercises. But, still, I'm always amazed at *how* out of touch I am with my physical self.
While I was running today, I was composing a journal entry my head, and it started with the sentence, "Damn, I'm a slow runner." I plod and I poke and I eventually get to where I'm going, it just takes me forever. Today I felt exceptionally slow and lethargic. But I finished my out and back route, and discovered that I had improved my time by a minute and 19 seconds.
How does that happen? I feel really heavy lately--not "My god, I'm fat" heavy, but my limbs feel like they weigh a gazillion pounds, and they don't take me anywhere very quickly. Except apparently they are. Well, I'm still a slow runner, but I'm faster than I give myself credit for.
In other body dysmorphic bulletins, I could have sworn I was gaining weight. I really do feel exceptionally prone to the pull of gravity lately. I avoid the scale if I can, so I can't be certain, but I would have put money on the fact that I was gaining back some of the weight I'd lost.
Except that I wore those jeans today. When I pulled them out of the garage on Sept. 13 (diary entries are so useful!), I couldn't even get them buttoned. Today I would have needed a belt if I had been wearing a tucked-in shirt. It's nothing to get worked up about, it's just sort of puzzling. I walk around with my body all day long, you'd think I would know it a little better than I do.
6:42 PM
I'm looking very femme today. Well....okay. That's an impossibility. I don't know if it's the way I walk, the shoes I wear, or the fact that I carry my wallet in my back pocket, but I couldn't even look femme wearing a dress. However, I'm definitely a step down from high butch today--olive-colored jeans and a khaki-colored linen/cotten blend tunic that falls almost to my knees. It even has sprigs of olive green...hm...looks like baby's breath or something. The butch shoes kind of wreck the feminine effect, though.
I even ironed it myself. And in even more in the way of will-the-wonders-ever-cease-sort-of-news, I put the ironing board away when I was done. I'm not such a bad guy!
Ten bucks says someone compliments me on my shirt today. Whenever I wear Catherine's clothes, I always get compliments. No one *ever* compliments me on my ties, though, and I have some pretty fine looking ties in my closet. What could be the reason? Maybe when I look more like a girl, people feel more comfortable invading my personal space and making comments about my appearance. When I look like a boy, they respect the boundaries I've constructed around myself. Or, it could be that a woman in a tie just sends everyone around me into a panic--they don't know what my game is--is she gay? is she stupid? does she know how laughable she looks?
On my more confident days, I find it fascinating how people are absolutely incapable of separating individuals from their clothes. They see a tie, and they automatically think "man." I absolutely *hate* being taken for a man. And I know it's partly my fault, I could dress in drag, nice feminine frilly clothes, but really, is it all my responsibility? Shouldn't people think about fashion a little more critically?
Sometimes it's funny. When I lived in LA, I ate at the same Subway shop every day, and the same people waited on me every day. And invariably, about once a week, the counter guy would glance up and say, "What can I get for you, sir?" And then there would be a pause, and he'd change it to, "Uh...ma'am." And then, "Sir," and back to "Ma'am." And I was usually wearing a t-shirt and shorts, nothing very gender specific. I just really wanted to ask him--why is it that you could figure me out yesterday, but today you can't seem to pin me down?
Last week, as I was leaving McDonald's, I heard a man behind me say, "Was that a woman or was that a man?" And I wanted to turn around and ask him just when was the last time he saw a guy built like the Venus of Willendorf eating fastfood in Bloomington.
Catherine was totally joking when she said I should go talk to one of the counselors at the Kinsey about my gender "issues." They don't do the kind of counseling I would need. I'm not one of those TG people who wake up every morning thinking, "My god, I'm a man trapped in a woman's body." I'm perfectly fine w/my body. I'm female, and I'm fine with that. I mean...men's bodies are....ick. Wouldn't want to touch one, wouldn't want to be one.
On the other hand, I'm incredibly bad at being a girl. But, then again, I'm not so good at being a boy, either. I don't get half the stuff my teammates talk about in the locker room--particularly not the two most common topics: wedding receptions & getting pregnant. But I'm also not one of the guys--I've always worked in male-dominated fields, and my best friends have typically been male, but I know they change their behavior when I'm around. Which is a good thing, I don't really want to be sitting around making sexist jokes about my wife. So, I don't know. I'm not a girl, but I'm not a boy. I occupy the interstitial space between the socially-enforced gender binary of girl v. boy, and sometimes that really sucks.
9:55 AM
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
I would like to extend my thanks to the individual who invented rumble strips. They're quite effective.
10:34 PM
Okay, apparently I'm just an idiot, but what does it mean when somone says they are having "come to Jesus" talks with their boyfriend? I *think* it means they are trying to save the relationship, but this would be a dangerous time to make an assumption based on vague language.
As an afterthought, I don't get how all those 70s, feminist lesbians managed to do the "let's be friends" things with their ex-girlfriends. I find it incredibly disconcerting to listen to *my* ex-girlfriend talk about *her* (ex?) boyfriend.
1:55 PM
Ouch. Harry doesn't pull any punches. I knew there was a reason I liked that man. It may be an "unfortunate...characterization," but the basic message is the right one: quit sleeping with the enemy.
In other, completely unrelated news, Yay, yay, yay!
1:00 PM
Thursday, October 17, 7:00-9:00 pm, Rawles Hall 100
"MORAL AND PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE BOMBING OF IRAQ"
Professor Salih Altoma, "A Brief History of American-Iraqi Relations"
Kabhim Shaaban, "Report from the Inside of Iraq"
Cynthia Hoffman, "The Children of Iraq"
Deena El Saffar, "Reflections of an Iraqi American"
Professor Salih Atoma is an IU Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Near Eastern
Languages
Kabhim Shaaban is an IU graduate and former instructor, and now a
Bloomington businessman
Cynthia Hoffman, has been long active in humanitarian work for the
Iraqi people
Deena El Saffar is an Iraqi-American and member of the well-known
Bloomington-based band, "Salaam"
Sponsored by the Progressive Faculty Coalition
9:03 AM
Things that will amuse only me:
I'm wearing the shirt I wore when we went out with Fran for the first time in New Orleans.
I didn't cut my hand open on my skate blade this morning.
Just because I'm congested, it doesn't mean I have a cold.
Although I blithely wandered into poison ivy on August 30, I still wake up every night furiously itching the contact spots.
7:47 AM
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Damn, Catherine just yet out a yelp and stopped my heart. But it was just that Esther was on TV, not that the house was on fire.
8:46 PM
Beth had a baby! It's Raymond!
5:19 PM
Okay, I'm starting to lose patience with Alan. How long--and I mean *exactly* how long--do we have to wait for him to come fix our driveway? The tornado was weeks ago, and yet here we are, still no driveway. Yeah, I could hire Bob Rogers to bring in some filldirt and fix it, but Alan should have done it right in the first place, and he should definitely show up and fix it on the day(s) he promised to do so.
5:18 PM
Oh, I so need to comment on this, but I don't have time right now. It is a complete and utter misconception that lesbians don't have as many body image problems as straight women. Lesbians are *not* "protected," they are silenced when it comes to their bodies. They will lie through their teeth and tell you they're okay with the way they look, because that's what they're supposed to say. They want to be good feminists above all else. They're supposed to be all positive and accepting of the female body, but they are absolutely not, not anymore than any other woman in Euro-American society.
Man, I could write a book on how little help there is out there for lesbians with eating disorders. The medical profession en large doesn't know how to treat gay/lesbian patients, and it's even worse when it comes to mental health issues, and even more worse (worser? more bad?) when it come to eating disorders.
But I don't have time to rant right now.
9:51 AM
Awesome. Two e-mails from my coach this morning. I am on the purple team roster for both games this weekend as well as the Cleveland tournament.
9:21 AM
Do you suppose there is such a thing as a Southern California accent? I mean, besides the whole Valley girl thing. Because the voices Susana G. and Susan A. are absolutely indistinguishable on the phone (except for their laughs), and the only common denominator I can come up with is that they both grew up in the same part of the state, more or less.
Also, what is it with the parents of children born in the 1960s? Couldn't they branch out and find a few more names for their daughters? I swear that half the women I know who are roughly my age are named Susan, or some variation thereof. I had 72 people in my graduating high school class, and three of us were named Susan. What's up with that? Not that anyone cares, but I was named after the doll my mom had when she was a little girl. She still has the doll, in fact, and keeps saying she's going to get the arms and legs replaced. It has a china head, but the limbs were plastic, and when she left it out in the sun one day, the doll developed a deep tan everywhere but its head.
Sadly, I do not tan.
C: You two sounded like you were having fun.
S: Yeah. At least, I was.
C: You have a friend!
S: Yeah, it sounds like it, huh?
C: I'm happy for you, honey.
S: Yeah, I'll try not to freak out about it.
C: *knowing laugh*
So far, so good, I did not lie awake all night and obsess about every stupid thing I might have said. I woke up early and took care of that task, instead.
9:13 AM
Monday, October 14, 2002
Something that totally pissed me off and should piss off everyone around me, too:
I stopped at K-Mart because I needed some more undershirts to wear to work. I was back in the men's department when this flash of orange caught my eye--it was a Halloween costume that someone had apparently been carrying around and decided to toss over a rack instead of returning it to its proper place at the front of the store. The costume in and of itself was annoying: what parent in their right mind would dress their kid up in prison orange w/ a number on the back, lock them in a set of fake handcuffs and send them trick-or-treating as a convict?
What really made me steam, though, was the fact that the model on the front cardboard label was a young Latino/Chicano/Hispanic kid with a smear of dirt across his face. Okay, first, you shouldn't be selling convict outfits to kids. Second, if you're going to do that, you'd damn well better put a picture of the rich white guy at Enron on the label. Or a likeness of Cheney or any member of the Bush family. My god--where are the PR people for these companies? Who was it that sat around the table in the board room and approved the signage for this costume? I'd really like to talk to them about the apparent vacuums existing between their ears.
5:51 PM
Crack me up. From my hometown paper:
"I spend a lot of time watching the Seattle Mariner's [sic] baseball games. Some would say that was a big waste of time and a few weeks ago when they were losing every game they played I would have been inclined to agree, but to win three games in a row against Texas, in extra innings, has been encouraging, and also during the times I've watched, I have almost completed a large crocheted tablecloth, so it hasn't been a total waste of time."
2:10 PM
It's not so much that I'm against a change in leadership in the Palestine. It's that I'm against Sharon pretending his hands are free of blood. If he wants to see the leader of a "murderous terrorist gang," all he need do is look in the bathroom mirror.
12:41 PM
This is how far removed I am from the cult of beauty and fashion:
I was reading the packaging of the Krazy Glue this morning to see how long it would take a bond to reach full strength. There was the standard "don't glue your hand to your leg" warning on it, and then a longer list of inappropriate uses for the glue--don't use it on teflon, foam, polyethylene, etc. The final prohibition was "Do not use on artificial nails." I seriously spent between 15 and 30 seconds cycling through all the types of fasteners I could think of--galvanized roofing nails? box nails?--trying to figure out what kind of nail could possibly be considered "artificial," before I realized...damn, they're talking about *finger* nails.
12:28 PM
Okay, cut yourself some slack. Remember? You're supposed to be giving yourself a break every now and then.
Sometimes I feel like I spend half of every night worrying about completely stupid things that don't even make sense during the daylight hours. And even though I *know* I'll think something is silly when I get up, I still let myself obsess about it all night long. How pointless is that?
One good thing about having Kirk for a boss is that he is completely laid back. Sometimes it makes him a less than ideal teacher--he's Mr. Big Picture, which doesn't always work when you're talking about something as detail-oriented as drafting. As a boss, though, it's great. I was digging through his file cabinet (after I'd already sifted through the stacks of papers on his desk), looking for the quizzes I lost, and saying to myself, "I can't believe I lost a stack of quizzes!" And Kirk started to laugh, and said, "Oh, I can," meaning not "Susan, you are so incompetent, of course you lost them," but "Susan, when you have hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper pass through your hands during a semester, it's inevitable that you will eventually lose one."
And when I went back to the CAD lab, I had to just laugh at Kirk, because sitting there next to one of the student machines was a stack of tech graphics quizzes (complete w/key) that Kirk had forgotten there last Friday.
10:38 AM
And the vitamins, too.
I meant to sleep in this weekend, and somehow I just forgot.
7:45 AM
Sunday, October 13, 2002
A prideful moment:
Today the instructors were feeding us pucks out of the corner so we could practice our shots. We had an orange construction cone set up in net to provide a specific target. I hit a one-timer on goal so hard (and so accurately) that I broke the cone. Shattered orange pieces all over the crease, and a puck-shape blast hole in the cone.
Cool.
10:14 PM
Game last night, first of the season. I am one tired kid, and I have a hockey lesson in two hours. My hamstrings are so tight they feel as if they could snap at any moment. It's going to be a long week. We had practice on Friday, then I made the mistake of staying up until 2:00 a.m. for basketball, then we had a game last night, and had to drive back late, then I have a lesson today, then practice Wednesday, practice Friday, a game in Indy on Saturday, and a game in Ohio on Sunday. I may die. If I'm lucky.
And I DO NOT have a cold. I will not, I refuse.
12:01 PM
Saturday, October 12, 2002
I love hockey season. The weather is cooler, and then it gets sharp, and then it gets downright cold. I'm always in the cold, but never cool down enough to really get cold anymore. We get to go to Columbus, one of my favorite cities. Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto...I love to travel. And the smell of ice....mmmm. The sound of ice, almost better. Just walking into a new rink makes me happy. I find myself wishing I could quit my day job and take some sort of rink rat job just so I can be around the ice all day.
The running trail is covered with leaves now, even though there are plenty of green ones still on the trees. The weather is cooperating, providing a fine mist as we jogged this morning. Hopefully the real rain will stay away until we get back from Indy tonight. Winter is coming.
And basketball season has started. Only six months 'til the Big Dance! I can't wait. Some people live their lives by the school year, some by the calendar year, some by the fiscal year. I've always marked mine by the passage of sport seasons.
12:14 PM
Friday, October 11, 2002
I seriously need access to my e-mail.
I hope Catherine doesn't freak out when she gets home from work tonight. I did warn her I was going to start pulling up the carpets, but since I've been promising to re-do the floors for four years now, she probably didn't believe me. Either she didn't believe me, and she's going to have a heart attack when she sees the dining room tonight, or she's been worrying about it all day, and will end up being pleasantly surprised in the end. It could go either way. Since I can't e-mail her, I guess I'd better call her before I leave for practice to warn her.
Some parts of the job were tougher than I thought they would be, some parts were easier. I'm not sure if the hard parts were hard just because pulling up carpets is intrinsically difficult, or because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Probably a little of both. This was one of those days I wished my parents lived just down the street. I really needed a hive tool, but I don't even know where you could buy one in Bloomington. Overall, the floor is in pretty good condition. It just needs refinished, and I'm so tired and dirty right now, I think I may hire someone to do that job instead of doing it myself. Plus, I've been feeling pretty butch all day, and lately I've been wondering if that's necessarily a good thing, so maybe I should hire someone else.
My best advice to aspiring home-improvers: always wear your safety goggles. If I hadn't been wearing my glasses today, I would be minus one eye right now. As it is, I have something of a shiner. Next time I'll definitely bring the safety glasses in from the garage, too.
2:11 PM
I really hate it when my e-mail is down. Don't these people realize I actually use my e-mail for things other than just screwing off?
9:24 AM
Thursday, October 10, 2002
Every time I walk into the living room, Catherine is watching that damned public access channel that shows all the pictures of the animals who need to be adopted from the animal shelter. That's so not fair.
9:31 PM
Catherine's bud, Helen Horowitz, was in town tonight to lecture on her book, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. Well-organized presentation, interesting topic, good speaker. Maybe I'll even read the book! But I doubt it, that would seriously cut into my trashy lesbian novel reading time.
I'm not a frequent attendee of lectures on campus. It's not that I don't like lectures, it's that I abhor question/answer sessions. I would have made a lousy academic, I never really wanted to stand up and discuss my work in public. One on one over coffee cake, fine. In front of a bunch of strangers asking stupid questions? No, thanks. And no one really asks questions about the presentation. It's all: "I'm studying this, and I know this, this and this. What do you think of that?" It's all about, "My topic is A, make your topic relate to it," usually couched in five minutes of name-dropping.
9:24 PM
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10:01 AM
Thanks for the orange juice.
8:15 AM
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
I would just like to say, I love the employees at the Bloomington post offices. It doesn't matter which one, downtown or Woodbridge. They're always nice, cheerful, helpful, and ready to mail anything I want to mail. This morning I walked up to the counter with a handful of stuff and said something like, "Uh....I don't suppose you have, like, a priority mail box this would all fit in, do you?" The guy behind the counter probably hears that question 10 times an hour, and you'd think he'd roll his eyes and say, "You know, in the good old days, people wrapped up their packages *before* they left home," but he didn't. And they never do. They are always just happy people, even during Christmas or at the end of the school year when all the international students are mailing their clothes, books and living room couches home.
I really love Hoosiers. That's not a myopic observation, I'm not overlooking their politics, and I steer well clear of "Redneck Corner" in the Ivy Tech parking lot. I know there are a lot of problems here. But, wow, it is so nice to have the Hoosier-y ladies check out your groceries, or take your tuition check, or ring up your meal ticket. Diane hates them, she thinks they need to get over calling everyone "honey," "sweetie," or "dear," but I find their warmth a reliable tonic for depression. They're not patronizing, they're not exactly sexist, they're just being motherly and taking care of you, and that's fine with me.
10:44 AM
Tuesday, October 08, 2002
I'm sitting at my desk typing up notes on the differences between three-tab shingles and architectural shingles (my god, how did I get this job?), and looking at the cutest little magenta paw prints. They are stamped on a card a friend sent to me, and they make me smile every time I catch a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye.
If there is one good thing that has come out of the past couple of weeks, it's that I've been given the opportunity to recognize that the people I've decided to include in my life are all pretty nice. I'm very unlikely to actually say how I feel out loud, so none of my friends will ever hear it from me, but I'm really, really grateful for their friendship and support, especially over the past several days.
9:14 PM
Every week for the past five weeks, on either a Tuesday or a Thursday, I have written out a hot-headed rant in my journal about how much I hate my architectural design students. Well, maybe "hate" is the wrong word: "despise" would be a lot closer. I usually end up deleting the entry, it makes me feel better just to type it out, but I'm getting really tired of this whole cycle.
I have reminded them and reminded them that the preliminary floor plans were due today at 1:00 sharp. I have given them *plenty* of time in class to work on the plans. I reminded them multiple times that they needed to turn in the house floor plans, and also their current garage floor plans (in addition to the garage plans I had already handed back so I could look at the notes I wrote the first time around). The due date has been on the syllabus, and I have been diligently informing them that the plans were due *at the begining of class* because last time they tried to give me this sad song about how they didn't know that (which is a lie, because all the classes in our department have the same policy).
At one o'clock, not even my one good student had a floor plan printed. Of the six, only one had the garage plan that I had handed back. Unfortunately, she didn't have any of the rest of the assignment to hand me with it. It sounds like not a big deal, I should go ahead and let them print in class, but printing (plotting) is noisy and time-consuming. And I wanted to lecture on roof layouts, but I knew if I did, they would all just sit there and work on their floor plans (or surf the web) while I talked. So I ended up buckling and letting them print in class. I could have just failed them all, but what good would that have done?
Plus, all of them had forgotten they had a quiz today, and I guess I'm a little evil, but I'm going to enjoy flunking them all but the good student. After I gave them the quiz (one student didn't even finish it, he sat there with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up around his face until I finally called time, it was like talking to a Jawa, for chrissakes), the good student immediately printed out the 1st, 2nd and garage floor plan. She obviously is sick with something, so I felt a little bad for including her in my disdain, at least she had the work done if not printed. Only one other student turned in a floor plan, and it was barely started. The rest either didn't respond to me at all, or gave me excuses ("I couldn't find my disk," "I know I saved it but it's not here").
So...four out of six people flunk the assignment. What's the point of being in the class if you're just going to blow it off? My one particularly insolent student didn't even bother to pretend he was working in class, he just sat there and talked to his neighbor, then left when I stepped out into the hall to get a drink of water. Why doesn't he just drop? I think his friend would be an okay student, but he needs to show some backbone and quit letting insolence boy drag him down.
It's just so incredibly disappointing. This should be a fun class, they've got an opportunity to design an entire house from the ground up, and learn everything I can teach them about the process. And even if I'm not the best communicator, I have a lot to teach them on this particular topic. But I tell you, I'm sick of trying to do it.
2:44 PM
You are so totally, totally nuts. Totally!
This morning, I was seriously contemplating running a 5K race at 1:00 p.m. (two Sundays from now), and going to play hockey at 2:00. That's just sick.
In other news, in my pursuit of soothing music, I've moved on from Decado Uno to Siempre. I completely cannot figure out the chimney situation on this house, and it's starting to get on my nerves. I might have to start listening to some freaky New Age nothingness music if this gets much more frustrating.
Addendum: Predictably, I was making it a lot harder than it needed to be. I could have slept in instead of fussing over that stupid model!
9:51 AM
Monday, October 07, 2002
I am such a millennial gal. I want to call Catherine to tell her she needn't get a cab, I can pick her up after class. So, what do I do? I pull out my palm pilot so I can look up her number so I can use my cell phone to call her cell phone.
Well, that's an exaggeration. I'm using my office phone to call her cell phone. But still, the possibility is there. I'm such a loser.
8:45 PM
Slang (Russkii)/Alois, Riegl/Descriptive Geometry
Goya/AutoCAD Fall 2002 Advanced
2:44 PM
Two groups guaranteed to help you relax your shoulders so you can work: Manu and Editus, both from Costa Rica.
Manu Recuerdos and Editus Decado Uno are about the only albums I can handle when I'm stressed. When I'm feeling better, Aterciopelados (the Goza Poderoso release) spins pretty much endlessly in the CD player on my computer. It's a good CD, but probably it gets more play time than it should because I'm too damn lazy to look for a substitute.
2:09 PM
Humans have invented a number of useful things. Peanut butter, for instance (thanks, GWC). The best thing they've invented to date, however, has to be vanishing scent Ben Gay.
7:42 AM
Sunday, October 06, 2002
Dude. Write about something positive for a change, okay?
I started my hockey LTS lessons today, and I have to say, it was fantastic. Only three students, with three instructors. One instructor took the younger student off to do some beginning stuff, and the other two instructors stayed with Brandon and me and ran us through some drills and shooting practice. It was really fun, a great workout, and nice to be challenged by some high level skaters. Brandon and I are at about the same skating level, so when we played 2-on-2 the teams were even, 1 instructor and 1 student on each side. It was tons more fun than my own team practice, and it reminded me that I actually like hockey.
I've been kind of doubting the whole hockey thing lately, not because of how I'm playing or anything like that, but I'm just tired of team politics. Everything is a power struggle. And practice is a little high pressure because I'm always trying to be as good as I can be so the coach will let me play with the purple team. This is really not the way to have fun. Today was great, no pressure, just working hard and playing hard. I can hardly wait to go back next Sunday. It's been forever since I actually looked forward to getting on the ice.
I felt a little bad because Catherine was doing a volunteer thing with the Monroe County Humane Association today, and I couldn't go because of hockey. I swear I will go next time. She had a good day, I was wondering how it would go, being around all the animals, etc., but it seems she had fun. Well, there was a moment when she was talking to the woman from Wayport Kennel and she found out that the kennel provides cremation services for our vet clinic. I'm amazed, but Catherine actually asked the woman if she had Lucy this week, and she did. So, Catherine starts crying and I'm thinking, "Why did you even ask?" but I guess the woman was really nice and that made Catherine feel better in the end, knowing that everyone from the vet to the crematory manager was nice. Ugh.
I've decided to quit being so damned selfish and let Catherine get a kitten. It is SO like me to avoid everything and everyone that might end up hurting me in the end, and wouldn't it be nice to just give up this behavior? We're going to wait until I can get the carpets pulled up in the living room and dining room, and I hope to start doing that next weekend if I can get caught up in work/school. Then we'll see. She wants a b/w one or another orange one. I just want a healthy one.
10:03 PM
Hm. I didn't do anything constructive this weekend, which means I'm still behind in everything that I need to get done. I fell behind in everything last week, and I was supposed to catch up on Friday and today, but that didn't happen. I didn't correct papers, I didn't do my own homework, I didn't prep for my classes tomorrow. I only started doing this practical work today, and "today" just isn't enough time, particularly if you break "today" in half with a two-hour ice session.
Well, and it wouldn't matter if I had all the time in the world, would it, because once again I've forgotten a significant text book and folder at work, and the building isn't accessible on Sundays. Okay, two significant text books. Where has my mind gone? What this means is tomorrow between 10:00 and 1:00, I get to figure out how to write a quiz on floor framing, finish my descriptive geometry (it usually takes me an hour a problem, and I have at least two, so the math's not looking good at this point), and write a lecture on wall framing. Both framing books are in the office at work, as is my descriptive geometry book. Could I be any more of a dork?
The stupid thing is, if I had just applied myself even just a little bit on Friday, I wouldn't be in this fix, but no, I sat around and read all day. I need to learn that "I don't feel like it" is not a good excuse because it only ends up causing me to panic in the long run.
This is not a good way to begin the week in which I was going to start cutting myself some slack. I've been in a long cycle of self-chastisement, feeling inadequate, wondering why I even bother because I can't do anything up to my own standards, and I've decided that's got to stop. I'm doing fine, I'm managing, and that's good enough. But when I start out the week already feeling desperately behind, I forget I'm supposed to be nice to myself.
9:53 PM
Saturday, October 05, 2002
Oh, but I did kind of feel sorry for the guy trying to sell us the phone. I don't think he's ever had such a glum customer. "I'm selling my soul to Satan," was heard more than once this afternoon. He kept trying to upsell the calling plans, and pointed out if we used the phones on a daily basis, with the plan we wanted, we'd only have 11 minutes of prime time talking available a day. And only 1000 nightime/weekend minutes a month. And I finally said, "You know what? I'm not going to actually use the phone, and quite honestly, I don't like anyone enough to talk to them for 1000 minutes in a year, much less a month. Just give us the cheapest thing you've got." I think it freaked him out a little bit. But it's true. We don't use our regular phone (except as a modem line), so why would I use such an inconvenient appliance as a cell phone?
8:50 PM
I am incredibly ashamed to note down here that I now own a cell phone. I hate them for so many reasons, not the least of which is that people who walk around with cell phones attached to their ears are basically excusing themselves from any sort of civil interaction with those around them. I swore up and down I was not going to get a cell phone. Never. Ever.
The trouble is, I spend a lot of time on the road by myself, especially during hockey season. I drive to Indy twice a week, and then there are the longer trips to Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, Windsor, Toronto. Now that our car is getting older, I don't feel so confident in its ability to get me where I'm going, and I don't want to be stranded at night by the side of the road with no means of communication.
I know I've done perfectly well up to this point without one, but last spring, when those two Hoosier skinheads tried to run us off the road, we had no way to call for help. The ability to call 911 would have resolved the situation pretty quickly, I think. Yesterday, I would have loved to be able to talk to the police on one line and Catherine on the other, but I didn't have the means to do both. And now I do.
Well, and Catherine got a cell phone, too, so we're total sell outs. But a couple weeks ago, we had a miscommunication of sorts, and Catherine was stranded on campus with no money at 10:00 p.m., and no way to get hold of me or a taxi. Things like that can be taken care of by planning ahead, but sometimes things just don't go according to plan, and I don't want her walking through the campus at night, I want her to call me so I can come get her. Truly, she doesn't think clearly when nervous or upset, and although there were a couple practical solutions to her being stranded, she was too distressed to think things through. I would hate to have something bad happen to her simply because I stood on my principles and refused to let her get a cell phone, all the while knowing that if I don't make it easy for her, she won't be able to get herself home if she's in a panic.
So, I apologize. I apologize for all those godawful, bird-killing cell phone towers ruining the landscape. I apologize for participating in one of the worst kinds of consumerism. I swear I will not walk around talking to anybody in public, I swear it will not ring in the classroom, I swear it stays in the glove box or my bag unless it's an emergency. I swear you'll never even know I have one.
8:46 PM
Wow, I slept for an hour or so, and feel a lot better. During our afternoon of running errands (dropping of the bird feeders at the wild bird store for their autumn cleaning, getting new watch bands/batteries), we stopped to watch the IU women's field hockey game. And I actually nodded off during the first half--how can anyone fall asleep at a sporting event, I'd like to know.
The game was interesting, but it's probably one of the few sports about which I know nothing. It's a real rarity in that I've never even played it. It's not as opaque as cricket, but still I felt really removed from the action. I had no idea what any of the whistles meant.
8:33 PM
Ugh...felt rotten when I got up this morning, but decided to to the run, anyway. It was a good decision, it's always a smart idea to remind yourself that no matter how hard your life is, someone else's life is always harder.
Today was the Jill Behrman Run for the Endzone. The race was started, as it always is, by the Behrman family. Always good to see them, always good to be reminded how they deal with adversity with grace. So, even though I wasn't exactly chipper this a.m., I was glad I pulled myself out of bed to go to the run.
I lined up pretty far back in the pack so I wouldn't have to worry about a fast pace at the outset. This race is run (overall) at a quicker pace than the Hoosiers Outrun Cancer race, more college students in the pack. The race was led off by a cycling team in honor of Jill, which was nice, as they stayed around to cheer everyone on.
Given what a lousy week I've had, how little I've slept, and how little I trained this week, I ran pretty decently. Cut about 1:07 off last week's time, which still isn't great, but I'll take it. Once I started running, I felt a lot better, and felt good through the whole race, up to the last 200 feet or so. Then I thought I was going to pass out. I was totally dizzy and fighting against vomiting. I didn't want to stop so close to the line, but I also didn't want to do a Suzy Favor Hamilton and crash and burn along the side of the track.
Sometimes I am amazed at what I can force my body to do. I finished the race and walked off the dizziness/nausea, and by the time Catherine finished (she was walking), I was completely recovered. Several hours later, I'm about to go take a nap, but other than that, I feel pretty good.
5:26 PM
Friday, October 04, 2002
Is there a reason my life should go from bad to worse? Times like these make me think that maybe there is a god, and he's standing in front of me thumping his middle finger against my breast bone, saying, "I knew I could make you cry, you little baby." There is a god, and he sounds just like my oldest brother.
No sleep. Well, some sleep, eventually, but I woke up at 5:30, crying before I even had time to properly take a breath and open my eyes. Maybe I was crying in my sleep, I don't know. I can't even describe how awful the whole experience was, and I'm not going to get over it any time soon.
This afternoon I finally went back to bed for a few minutes, I needed some rest before practice. I know I slept for at least fifteen minutes, but then the phone rang. This almost indecipherable voice said, "Uhhhhh...Susan?" There was a lot of noise in the background, and in my haze I automatically assumed it was Dave from Lowe's calling about our cabinets. But I said, "What?" because I didn't really understand what he was saying.
"Is this Susan--" and he mispronounced my last name (as does everybody), and then spelled it, and in that moment I remembered that this guy has called our house before. Last weekend, or the one before that, Catherine answered the phone and she described it in exactly the same way--some guy, hard to understand with all the background noise, and he started the conversation with "Uhhhh, Susan?" He hung up when she said no. She had thought at first it was Dave from Lowe's, too, but obviously it wasn't.
Anyway, for some reason I suddenly also realized it wasn't Dave from Lowe's, but I still wasn't awake enough to think, "Hang up the phone!" I just said, "No," as if I could deny that was my last name when I had clearly already let him know he had the right first name. He spelled the name again, and I said, no, he has the wrong number.
"This is your high school buddy, Joey Smith," he said. Well, there was no Joey Smith in my high school, and even if there was, that would have been 2000 miles away, right? And he asked me, what was my last name, then? "What makes you think I'd tell you that?" I asked, and looking back, it amazes me I'm trying to have a conversation with this guy at all, I know better than that. But I'm sleep-deprived.
Why would I tell him that? "Because I have your address and I'm coming over." He said something else, but I hung up on him and didn't catch it. And then I freaked out. I'm in bed, my clothes are on the floor where I'd dropped them, and what am I supposed to do now?
The only thing I could think to do was call Catherine, and then just as she picks up, I remember the back door is hanging open because Jack was running in and out. I tell Catherine to hang on, grab a shirt, lock and slam the back door, and then babble it all out to her. What should I do? I obviously can't go to the neighbors, they would not exactly provide a safe haven.
Catherine calls the police. I get dressed, remember my shoes are on the back porch because they had mud on them, and do I open the back door and grab them, or put on some other pair of shoes, which seems like a stupid thing to worry about, but none of my shoes have insoles because I take them out and throw them away, because I wear orthotics and if I have to run from some whacko, wouldn't it be nice to have my orthotics or at the very least insoles? Obviously, I'm completely panicked.
So then what? I wait. And wait. The only weapon I have is a hockey stick. And a butcher knife, but I don't want to get a knife out in case Jack jumps up and hurts himself on it. So I have a hockey stick.
How completely stupid it is to spend 45 minutes in your kitchen gripping a hockey stick because some whacko picked your name at random out of a phone book for some fun and games? Except it wasn't exactly random, I'm sure it was the same guy as before. Maybe he has a list of names he picks out and he just keeps at them until he scares the crap out of some poor woman.
I was pretty glad to see that cop on my front porch. He said he'd add our house to the patrol list. I'm not sure how seriously he took the whole thing, and looking back, I guess I did over-react (but god, how vulnerable a woman feels when she's naked and alone and threatened), but he did say that I shouldn't hesitate to call 911 should any strangers show up at our house, or even if we see someone passing by who looks suspicious.
Buddy, I wanted to say, look around you. My entire neighborhood is suspicious. Strange men walk through my yard every day. Which one is the rapist?
Not a very pleasant way to wake up from a nap. This has been one long, horrid week, and I really need some sleep, but the wind is rattling the window panes, and I'm still jumpy, and damnit, I wish that god guy would stop trying to crack my sternum.
10:46 PM
Thursday, October 03, 2002
Haacke, Hans/Spring 2002
Renaissance Arch/Wolfflin, Heinrich
Libraries L.A./Ren. Arch.
Koreanday Fax Receipts/Magazine Photos/Office
Greece/Survey-Ancient-Pollini-Articles
Kristeva, Julia/Survey-Medieval-Malone-Articles
Victor Borge/Greek Revival
Kendrick, Walter (Horror)/Pokemon
Palazzos/Voksmarche
Chomsky/Sports
London-Victorian Architecture/Annual Register
Rockets/Gombrich, E.
Death of Woman Wang/Motel Architecture
Roman Baths
Bynum, Carolyn
Opium Trade - China
Nationalism & Art
ILL Slips
Canaletto
Bonatz, Paul
Bowlt, John
Braque
Classicism (Germany)
Connoisseurship
Clark, T.J.
Cobb, Henry N.
Brueghel
Armory Show
Photography & Women
Gordon, Donald "Iconography" Horror-German Express.
Landscape Architecture
Rhoads, George
Reconstruction
FA121g Larsen - Martin
Revolution, Russian
Japan
Illuminated Manuscripts
Tudor Fall '94
Tickner, Lisa
Clendinnen, Inge
Marx
Nietzsche
Achebe, Chinua
Bosch
Speer
Jenny Holzer
West, Benjamin
Sawchuck, George
Sloan, John
Rusha, Ed
19th c.
Solomon-Godeau Photography
von Goethe
David
Twitchell, James (Horror)
Goya
Religious Denominations
Romadin, Mikhail
Serra, Richard
Scharoun, Hans
St. Denis
Russian Arch - Pre-Rev.
Primitivism
Salome
Warhol, Andy
Gehry, Frank
Hopper, Edward
Han Dynasty
Geertgen tot Sint Jans'
Gaugin
Freed, James I.
Italian
Russian Grammar (Vajda)
Greenberg, Clement
France
Focillon, Henri
Feminist Critique
Social Reaslism
Wang Yani
Syllabi
Lesko, Diane-Ensor
Lacan
Misc.
10:13 PM
I don't know his name, I think of him as "electronics boy." He was standing in the door of Wendy's office when I went to make copies for class. As I approached, I heard Wendy say something. I couldn't make out the words, but I registered a tone of protest. Coming around the corner, I heard electronics boy say, "I'm not saying I would do it, I'm just saying I can see a black man swinging from a tree."
I decided I could make my copies later. I know I heard the remark out of context, but I can't think of any context that would make it at all an appropriate thing to say.
2:33 PM
Lucy curled up between our pillows last night, and stayed there even after Catherine got up to take a shower. Unusual. She's very quiet and still. When I woke up, at first I thought she was already gone, she was so motionless. I had to shake her three times to wake her up, and then I felt awful when she did open her eyes, because I disturbed what might have been a deep and peaceful slumber. Part of me didn't really want her to wake up, it would have been so much easier for her just to go in her sleep, but I guess we don't get to take the easy way out this time. When I left for work this morning, she was still on the bed. I wish I could tell what she was thinking, I wish I could ask her if it was time, but I can't. I hate having to decide for her.
I know my mom was trying to make me feel better last night, but it just made it worse, talking about Gus. He's been gone for 11 years, and I'm still not over it. She started saying that she wished they'd taken him in a year earlier, that they were being selfish making him live that last year, and I just got all upset thinking about poor Gussy being in more pain than he had to be in, and it made it all worse. I know Catherine would like a dog, but I just don't even like dogs anymore. I only like Gus.
I feel like I've been doing nothing but crying for two days. Wake up, cry, go to bed, cry. Teach my class, go back to the office, cry. Get in my car, cry. This whole last year has been one long cycle of me falling apart, managing to pull it back together, then falling apart all over again. I'm weary and wish it would all just come to a end.
9:29 AM
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
Hi,
Dr. Koch just called--he thinks Lucy probably has a tumor, although he can't be sure
without a biopsy of the bone. He said that the fact that 2 different antibiotics
didn't help is a good sign that it isn't a gum problem (also the fact that the
cortisone didn't help at all). He said her gums actually look worse than they did
before. If we go ahead with the biopsy and find out it isn't a tumor, they can try
a different antibiotic, but I asked Dr. Koch for his opinion, and he said he thought
it was more likely to be a tumor than not. He also said the procedure is really
invasive and that it might be hard to stop the bleeding from the wound since she
keeps sneezing so much. I said that we had already talked about letting her go to
end her suffering, and I think he agrees that it is probably the best thing at this
point. Would it be OK with you if I schedule it for this evening? It's pretty
awful to think about, but I just don't think she's enjoying life much at this point.
Sorry Honey--I love you.
1:09 PM
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