Whatta Fiasco

If anyone tries to tell you that jumprope is easy, I’ve got a rope right here they can eat. Damn. Lo, these many (thirty!) years ago I was doing the teddy bears with the best of them. On Wednesday I finally started jumping without getting the rope tangled in my feet on every third skip. Today coach wants me to start skipping on one leg and other contortions. Man, oh man. It’s still fun.

Less fun is finding out this week that a friend who hadn’t been doing well for some time is now doing considerably worse. And I don’t see any way I can reasonably help without adversely affecting myself or my family. Advice, commiseration, and buck-up-old-pal speeches don’t go very far when the wolves are at the door. I sent them anyway, along with all the luck I could find amongst the lint in my trouser pockets. I’d send my friend a jumprope but I suspect that even lint-covered luck will be of more use.

What’s the good of a free evening if you can’t see a campy Hong Kong flick now and then. This Jonny To film, starring Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. I really wish it had been subtitled instead of dubbed. Even if it had just been in the original Cantonese with no subtitles it would have beeen better. This one’s all about the visuals and there are some pretty ones. Although it wasn’t the worst job ever and I was mostly used to it by about half way through the film. Flying motorcycles, gruesome beheadings, bleeding babes, runaway freight trains, out of control scientists, and babies in bird cages make for a light bit of fun.

What do you eat with a Hong Kong film? How about tandoori turkey meatloaf? The tandoori was a last minute inspiration but it worked out not badly.

And now the cat is slowly sidling up to me. She’s hoping no one notices, but every few minutes sh’s moved a little bit closer to me on the couch until she’s now right up against my leg.

I am being stalked by a word. The first word misspelled at the 76th annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee was… borborygmous. Maybe the third time is the charm. The moral of the story is that if you want to be a champion speller you should be reading books by crazy people like Umbert Eco.

I made it to the library last night and picked up some more books. Light weight stuff this time. Nabakov will need to wait a little longer. Instead I picked up (among other books) Triple Zeck: A Nero Wolfe Omnibus by Rex Stout. I didn’t try out the wireless hotspot last night. It was getting late, I still had to make myself some dinner, and I just didn’t feel like dragging my computer through the metal detector in order to spend a few minutes web surfing. Maybe this weekend.

What a stunningly beautiful day today. I decided to be sociable and walked with the crew over to Jake’s Barbeque for lunch. (What’s that big bright light in the sky?) Of course, it’s not Jake’s anymore. It’s now Danny Edwards’, but I’ll probably call it Jake’s until they close the place down. It’s still good food, even if there are strange men in beat up old seventies cruisers banging on their cars and pulling u-turns in the middle of the block. There was a little too much fat in my pork sandwich so I ate around it, but I got Fitz’s rootbeer in a bottle and that’s just as local to KC as barbeque. (It’s a little weak in the knees so far as my taste in rootbeer goes, but it went well with the barbeque.)

Three day weekends for me these days aren’t quite the relaxing time they ought to be. By yesterday morning I was starting to overdose on unemployed teenager. By yesterday evening I was mad enough to start passive-aggressively cleaning the house. Having a cleaner house is great but it felt childish and wrong even as I was doing it. So after I got the second load of clothes in the washer, I took a walk to the gas station to see if they had any of that low-fat banana milk, and to cool off and think about how I really wanted to deal with the situation.

How long has it been now? Ah, eighteen days as of today. That faint whistling noise you hear in the distance in the onrushing wall of reality. Maybe this time he won’t chose the most difficult route possible, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m not screaming either. (Venting a little now and then doesn’t count.)

When I got back from the store I turned off the television to reclaim some quiet space in the house. And then I explained to him why I had asked him to clean the top of the stove and what the consequences of his not doing so had been. That felt better. I still don’t have any confidence that he will remember this the next time. But I do have a little bit of hope.

Hey! My cute little public library now has a free wireless hotspot. My plans this evening got slightly rearranged by child care needs so maybe I’ll stop by and check it out. I need to return a couple of books (and snag some new ones.) Not that I need a wireless internet connection in my library. I’m also reminded that for every silver lining there’s a cloud. You see my cute little library is in danger of losing some funding because they spend a less than average amount of their budget on buying actual books. Is it really worth having all those computers and wireless access if it means spending on books is a low double digit percentage of the library budget? I am reminded that I know very little about the budget realities of running a public library. I am reminded that this public library is being run with my tax dollars. I may have some more reading to do and questions to ask.

Speaking of reading, I got curious (or bored) and toted up the number of pages I’ve read since the beginning of the year. It’s at something over eleven thousand pages, or just over seventy-five pages a day. That seems about right. Most weekdays I’m lucky to get an hour of reading in. On fencing practice days, it’s more like twenty to thirty minutes. (That’s printed material reading only.) Mind you, if it’s Kant and the Platypus, twenty minutes might only be four to six pages. Yeesh.

Oh, and while I was looking up references to the word aporia (found in K&P) online, I ran across this oddly humorous word, borborygmous. It was in with one of those build you vocabulary lists with lots of five and ten dollar words. This list was
notable in that it had a large number of words I run across on a semi-regular basis and quite a few more that looked positively useful. Borborygmous was one of the few that I couldn’t see any immediate use for. The very nuext day, four pages further along in K&P, there it is, smack dab in the middle of the page, used properly and complete with the humorous overtones. That Eco guy is just a riot. Googlewhack, but for how long?

Being the Friday before a holiday weekend, turnout for fencing practice was very light. Hubby was home not feeling well, and it was looking very much as if it was just coach and me. I did my warm up and coach said that he would give me a little lesson.

Knock me over with a feather. Coach has never directly offered me a lesson before. The closest he’s gotten is to step in and provide advice to someone else who was giving me a lesson. (Hubby or Ariadne.) While I was getting through my initial set of target exercises (poking at a target on the wall with my epee) one more fencer showed up. So I got my lesson and then the other fencer got the same lesson. Then coach left and we got a little bouting in before calling it a night.

Little lesson? Oh man. It wasn’t anything like the little lesson I was expecting from his initial offer. It was not a beginning lesson and not exactly an easy lesson, and while he wasn’t as hard on me as he would have been on others (and was on my fellow fencer) it was still a vote of confidence in me. I was properly appreciative and very happy.

This afternoon was a visit at the farm and more time with Ms. K. I got pee down the front of me while waiting for her bath water and milk urp down the back of me after we’d all eaten dinner. But when I changed her diaper later she hardly made a peep. It was a fun time. No, really. It was.

I am not here. (Is here at my desk? Is it on your computer screen? Wherever it is, by the time you read this, I’m not there.) If I write this in Greek is it Greek to you? (Souvlaki. Spanokopita. Ouzo. Ooopa! I do not know Greek. Perhaps we shall delay this exercise. For an indefinite period of time.) (Escamotage notwithstanding, Greek and French are far down my list of things I’m willing to work for. On a silver platter with flaming cheese (beside a mad hatter with shaking knees) I will take them but I will not work for them.)

My roach senses tingle and I detect a distinct lack of art museum fu in my recent past and my current present.

It’s six o’clock on a Friday evening before a three day holiday weekend and I am still sitting at my desk. This almost makes sense. That I am not the only one still here in the office makes much less sense.

Do you remember what it was like to read Eco’s The Name of the Rose? All those paragraphs and odd phrases of random languages tossed about like so much salad? How you could pick through the pieces finding interesting bits or just skim them like so much Tolkienesque elvish and still get the story just fine? (And if you haven’t read it, don’t be put off by that description; the skimming bit works just fine and the story is worth it. In fact, not understanding everything feels distinctly like an engineered part of the experience.) Well, his nonfiction is just as bad, only worse. My patience is finding its limits and I may just skip ahead the next twenty pages or so to go in search of the platypus.

Today was the second day I got my toll ticket dispensed to me by a machine instead of handed to me by a person. It’s terribly efficient and I never have to wait while it’s taking money from the other window, but it removes another slice of humanity from my daily routine.

I cooked up a batch of chicken thighs last night. I like to cook half a dozen or so at a time and then use them up in various ways over the course of the following week. As a final seasoning before popping them into the over, I reached into the cupboard to retrieve my bottle of sriracha sauce. It’s not the enormous bottle, just the large one. I bought it last summer and had made it about a third of the way through the bottle. I’m the only one in the house who uses it. Sometime in the last week and a half that bottle has gone from two-thirds full to nearly empty. I guess it’s time for me to buy some more, and maybe I’ll pick up an extra bottle or two for Max.

It really is a good hot sauce.

I have two words for the day; aporia and escamotage, both courtesy of Umberto Eco. If your unabridged dictionary is feeling lonely and neglected, Umberto is always there to help out and that’s before you even reach for that stack of foreign language dictionaries. My lack of German is appalling (in this context) but Babelfish makes it a tiny bit easier. I just wish it had a Latin to English option. Quite the oversight there.

Now I can go read all those Matrix Reloaded reviews I’ve been avoiding. And you can skip this one if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

Still here?

It was a fun movie but not as good as the first. The effects were big but had little heart. The fight choreography was slick without any clever sheen. The foley work was over done and pointless. The sound track wasn’t as good as the first movie’s. The time dilation effects were over used and insufficiently useful, serving mostly to frame how they cheaped out on texture rendering. The themes were laid on with a very heavy trowel.

One of my largest disappointments was that the plot twists were not twisty at all. Even while avoiding reviews I had heard consistently that I would want to see the movie a second time. It just wasn’t that complex a film and what complexity it had was largely telegraphed well in advance. Some basic familiarity with common mythologies will get you through most of it.

Remember that trowel? Here’s my summary of the movie: Control implies choice. Choice is an illusion. Seeing through an illusion requires knowledge. The only true knowledge is self knowledge. Which is why Neo must journey to the Underworld and meet the Prince of Lies in the guise of Merovingian (who is himself a lie) and get led by Persephone through the kitchen to find the key.

I loved that kitchen. Finally, a bit of underplayed humor that didn’t take itself so seriously, that last knock upside the head to remind you that they were in Hades. (The chef doing the flambe in the foreground as they run through?) It wasn’t until half an hour after the movie was over that I realized the Wachowski brothers had got me with a clever echo of one of the movie’s themes. Neo and company looked silly running through hell’s kitchen (if you can’t take the heat) but that wasn’t why I was laughing. I wasn’t laughing because they were running through a kitchen; I was laughing because I understood why they were running through a kitchen. Nicely done.

It is, of course, the Architect who is the true Prince of Lies and the one who most freely dispenses truth leading into a classic Lady or the Tiger set up. Do you believe him? Neo isn’t new, the Dreamer has lost his dream, and the oracle can’t see the future because it’s already happened. My guess is that the third movie will see the redemption of the machines, which are no more machines than the people are people.

I thought this analysis was pretty good reading, even if I don’t agree with all of it. Oh, and I think Agent Smith is the one who’s going to take out Bane in the third movie. But we’ll have to wait and see.

I’m feeling much better now. When I got up Friday morning I was still feeling queasy enough that the idea of driving was a complete non starter, so I called in sick for one more day. That was a good call. By late afternoon I was feeling much better. I got some cleaning done around the house, planted some tomato seedlings, ran a few errands and even got a good dose of reading time. Tried out my new jump rope and decided that even if driving was working, I wasn’t quite ready for fencing practice. Hubby also got word that Louise was planning on being in town and she didn’t know when but she might be bringing Lisa by the house.

The excess amounts of sleep and relaxation came in good stead comsindering the activity level for the rest of the weekend. Not that it was bad, most of it. After sleeping in Saturday morning, we went off to get some baby time with Ms. K and adult conversation time with her parents. Kernat and I made a good stab at decimating their spinach patch but we ran out of bag before we ran out of spinach patch. It was a good afternoon.

I went to bed early Saturday night but got woken up at around one in the morning to find out that Louise was on her way over. Oh joy. Yes, she dropped Lisa off at about one-thirty with no firm plans as to when or which day she’d be retrieving her. Lisa’s old room is filled to the brim with Max’s stuff and the office is currently recovering from the attack of an opinionated cat, so Lisa got to sleep on the couch. And then Max came toodling in at about two and I think I got back to sleep by three.

But we finally got to talk to Lisa again. She isn’t so thrilled about living in Nowhere. The public library is small. (I explained interlibrary loan to her.) There’s no mega book-movie-music store such as she’s used to. There are few of the amenities she’s used to. Her mom is talking about saving up enough money to move back to Larryville, but she still doesn’t have a job. It doesn’t sound as if there are plans for Lisa to go to school or get a job, but I could be mistaken.

Sunday was another sleeping in day, if not as late, followed by rousting people out, determining Max didn’t want to participate in our rousting, and then taking Lisa off to get some brunch. Out at the farm we used the fresh spinach to make spinach dip and some fresh spinach lasagna for a graduation party potluck. And Ms. K’s god-grandpa showed up with a non-pink, camoflage baby suit with booties (made by god-grandma) that was entirely too much fun and very much not pink. Kernat and I also got several of their flower beds weeded and seeded with flowers and herbs.

A down side to the weekend was that hubby and I spent quite a bit of time talking about our expections of and concerns about Max. He just isn’t getting it. Whatever it is. He hasn’t been doing much other than lazing around the house or going out with friends. He hasn’t offered to help with any housework but does leave dirty dishes and dirty clothes laying around. When I find something I object to, I point it out. Nicely. (But the list of things to object to is startlingly large.) But even that could be dealt with if he were making any progress. He isn’t.

Late Sunday afternoon hubby got a call from him while we were out. One of Max’s friends is renting a house in a college town about half way between here and Nowhere and is offering to let Max live there rent free. He’d be moving out in about two weeks. His friend seems to think that job prospects are better there than here. We still need to discuss details but it’s not a bad possibility for him. It’s not that I want to get rid of him, but a new set of circumstances and distance from all the parental units may be just what he needs to make some changes in his life. I hope so.

The graduation party was fun although we didn’t stay terribly late. Ran into lots of people I enjoy running into and met some new ones. The fresh spinach lasagna/tofu was a reasonable success. I still think it needs a little more refining (home made tomato sauce would do a lot for it) but it was quite edible. And people liked it. The garlic herb tofu all by itself has been a lovely find. More than one person mistook it for another cheese in the lasagna, which was exactly the sleight-of-hand I was attempting. Fresh spinach in a lasagna? Rocks the house. Fresh herbs added, plus the aforementioned ultimate tomato sauce, will make for a reaosnably healthy stealthy low-fat, low-salt, high taste dinner. Go go, tomato plants!