Tuesday, February 22, 2005
The Morning After
I have been spending a lot more time than is my wont at the gym. My shoulders hurt; my arms hurt; my thighs hurt; my calves hurt; my hair hurts. But I keep going back; moreover, I want to go back. This feeling is wholly new to me: so strange, so unexpected. It smacks of discpline (or addiction, which, given my obsessive past is far more likely, actually). Could it be that after twenty-four years, I finally have crossed that imaginary line from awkward, feet-dragging child to an adult, swift and sure? Could this isolated string of events really be the harbinger, the dawning of a new era, like peppered atolls presaging the bold heft of a continent? Well, if the increasing ridiculousness of my sentences is any indication, no.
But wouldn't it be nice?
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Open Letter to AOL Instant Messenger
Please stop. Substituting letters for words is not cute, has never been cute, will never be cute, not even on candy hearts. Know that as a card-carrying member of the quasi-terrorist group, the Apostrophe Liberation Society, I will feel it my ordained duty to declare jihad against you and pointedly ignore anything you ask me to do in tweeny-rat-text-speak. This is called the cut direct. It is a powerful and sacred weapon much like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. You have been warned.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Luck of the Ceylanese
Generally speaking (or in French, which I prefer, pour la plupart) my life runs smoothly, swimmingly as a greased wheel, a meandering brook, and other bucolic imagery that conveys a sense of pre-modern simplicity and ease. Every once so often, however, something gets stuck, and everything goes horribly awry. This seems to be one of those weeks.
Consider Saturday night, when I, following Jonathan's snide insinuations that I would complain less about the cold if I discovered the salubrious effects of feet coverings called socks, slipped on the stairs carrying my laptop. I survived; Shakespeare (alas! my lost love!) did not.
The lovely people at Dell are replacing it for me, but my brief and all my notes and my painstakingly color-coded Outlook calendar are gone.
Or yesterday, when I left my house for my oral arguments at 6 pm, but didn't arrive at the courtroom until 7:10. It should have taken me fifteen minutes, twenty at the MAX, but I spent forty-five minutes wandering around in very high heels through dark, downtown DC looking for the courthouse, jumping over bushes, climbing onto ledges, tottering through the mud--
But as in all things, nothing is so useful in these times of tribulation as a sense of humor. Jonathan and I like to joke that I've absorbed some of Kevin's chaos factor. I'll let you know if I start breaking dishes...
Thursday, February 03, 2005
"Speak low if you speak love..."
This play has so many fond memories for me. Kim and I used to pace gravely through the hallways at school doffing an imaginary hat and murmuring "my white plume..." (Then we'd giggle because that's what twelve-year-olds do, but you get the picture; it had momentary gravitas, I swear.)
It was this play that taught me the thrilling accuracy of the mot juste, the courage of the independent literary mind, and grand, glorious love as told by language, as lived by language...
"And what is a kiss when all is done?
A rosy dot over the i of loving--"
Even today, if I am to be seduced, it is by words, by beauty and lyricism.