Happy, happy, happy birthday wishes Iain Aitch!
The last time he showed up to visit he handed me a present and I pushed him at a room full of about one hundred strangers brandishing it and shouting Hey everyone! Look! Iain just published a new book! You should definitely buy it!
We’re always laughing too much to actually take a good picture, but I’m absolutely delighted he is my friend:
Yesterday started with a stroppy teenager screaming that I had ruined his life by moving here. I mildly replied It wasn’t my idea but of course, that response was not appreciated.
Then I urgently needed to print a draft but found that I could not do so from Word.
Q: When has Word ever worked for me?
A: Never.
Too bad my career is in, oh, publishing, huh? It is just so frivolous that I need to be able to handle and produce, well, documents…..
I did not repudiate January this year but I am extremely thankful the cursed month is almost over.
Oh, and, btw, guess what I miss most today in the Something I Never Appreciated category?
Free weekly alternative newspapers.
Of whatever varying quality.
I bruise easily – the slightest jolt leaves weltering marks – and I am also quite clumsy. This means that I generally look like I have been mixin’ it up even when I have mostly been sitting around reading books.
One of my local charming companions finds this hilarious and likes to grab whatever piece of flesh that can be reached and take a big bite chomp chomp chomp because it is apparently amusing to watch me trudge through annoying social situations with visible bite marks.
Um, thanks.
However, after a recent encounter, I realized that one of my scars had fallen prey to the attack. Not too surprising, since I have approximately three hundred between my waist and chin. However, the ‘normal’ behavior of scars more than twenty years old is just to, well, hang out. They sit there, flat and flaccid, without reproach or any other message to deliver.
This one turned red, then swelled up, and remained inflamed. For about ten days. Given that it is an area that has been hacked away three times because a malignant tumor persists in returning…. well.
I’m kind of passive aggressive about the whole skin cancer thing, but this reminded me that if it has been four and a half years since the last positive biopsy, it has been exactly that amount of time since my last check-up.
Shhh! Don’t tell! I’m supposed to go in every six months….
I just really, really hate visiting hospitals. And while I heart the NHS most sincerely, they provide an institutional aesthetic that I have trouble enduring since I was a sick kid in the 1970’s.
Wanna see visual evidence? Hallway, cancer ward, leading teaching hospital in the UK, 2008:
The first time I went back to Seattle as an adult I was riding around with Ariel and Inga before a reading at some bookstore or other and I was overwhelmed with sadness to be back in the scene of so many youthful misadventures.
Inga offered sexual favors to cheer me up, but I just closed my eyes and said I don’t think that would help.
Ten years later, I can’t imagine that anything else would have, but hey – I know both more and less now, compared to when I was twenty-eight.
Eventually of course I moved to Seattle, because I wanted to win the tormented game I have always played with my past. For the most part, it worked – though I would sometimes find myself on particular roads and have to pull over because it was hard to drive while sobbing.
Various Seattle friends are privy to the information that I’ll be in the states this spring and keep asking if I will visit, and the answer is: I don’t know.
During my brief residence in that city I was responsible for two houses, two cars, and three young children. I was entrenched in an intricate and vast community stretching between Portland, Olympia, and Seattle, and the complications of an extended family six miles away across the Sound. There was too much work to deal with, too many invitations, too much noise. I had a whole lot to accomplish and only a little bit of time available.
Now I live on the other side of the world. I have a boat, a bicycle, and half-share in one adolescent boy. I have no discernible ambitions, aspirations, goals, plans for the future, or even interest in any of the concepts implied. I haven’t been on a stage in years.
One of my more maniacal friends, hearing these stories, just shrugs and says At least you got a book out of it. True, but possibly more significant than he might think.
I’ve changed. I’m not the sick kid dying in the cold public hospital, or the reckless teenager stripping and dancing around in the fountains at the Science Center. I’m not the resolute youngster who refused to go back, or the adult who felt she had conquered the world by purchasing a house on top of Beacon Hill.
Since leaving I have spent about a month of each year in the city. Stupid, shitty things have happened alongside the wondrous and weird; that is the nature of the place.
I feel that I should go back this spring, and that I want to, but that does not mean that I can. It might be healthier to go somewhere new, or at least, somewhere I am less likely to meet ghosts.
Yesterday I received a letter notifying me that my kid has been selected to participate in an advanced reading group operating outside of school hours.
I was so furious I nearly tossed the letter on the fire. Then I remembered that I am a good mother and dutifully passed it on, asking what he wanted to do.
He read it with an expression close to my own, for roughly the same reasons.
Children are perfectly capable of understanding the dangers of elitism in a classroom, and the practice of breaking out achievement groups is just plain nasty.
Maybe people judged to be right in the middle have a fine time, but dwelling on either end of the spectrum is not fun. Even in a posh English school, there is social stigma associated with both under and over achieving.
Beyond that, the trend in education (here at least, can’t comment on elsewhere as my kids never attended proper stateside schools) is to use faddish popular literature rather than the canon.
Amongst various other texts, this means my son has been assigned The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
I have no opinion at all about the quality of the book, since my grown-up child told me that I was too sensitive to read tit. She was shocked that her (then eleven year old) sibling was given the book, because he, like me, is… sensitive.
The fact that a child has the cognitive ability to read at a high level does not mean that they can or should consume everything on offer.
I’m not proposing that books should be rejected because of controversial content – I am instead suggesting that quality should be the main criteria in selecting textbooks.
In principle teachers choose recent books to spark an interest. In practice, these works are often inferior to the favorites of earlier generations.
My kid is independently working his way through Alcott, Montgomery, Twain, Dickens, and Dumas. When he needs a little light entertainment he switches to Wilde or Wodehouse. Every single one of those authors offers challenging ideas. The opportunities to discuss the mechanics of literature, and debate social and cultural context, is tremendous.
Or how about going right back to basics, and teaching Shakespeare? Particularly in this town, there are abundant opportunities to attend performances and even hang out in the exact courtyard where the man staged his plays.
I could go on. Wanna visit the mill Chaucer was talking about? It is just past the Orchard in Grantchester. You know, that place where the Bloomsbury kids hung out. We’d have to cross the field where Augustus John pretended to live like a gypsy. On the way we would pass Byron’s Pool, so called because, you know, Lord Byron used to swim there.
Though all of that would involve walking twenty minutes or so through idyllic countryside. Without leaving town, we could see rooms once occupied by E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Laurence Stern, Samuel Coleridge, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, heck, even C.S. Lewis. Not to mention Douglas Adams. If you’re not careful you might literally get run over by Stephen Hawking.
This town offers, if nothing else, an abundance of history.
Yet the school entrusted with the intellectual development of my child is picking books off the Amazon bestseller lists. The predictable consequence? He has developed a sincere hatred of his English class.
So, no, he will not be attending the ‘special’ reading group. He has elected to go to science club instead.
My daughter showed me a website about so-called American Vagabonds.
I squinted at the pictures and replied Eh, I only know…. a couple of em.
She was shocked – whyever did I know such people?
I was shocked – has she forgotten her childhood?
It is true that I took her away from her homeland at age thirteen, so it must be hard to retain more than vague impressions of what it was like to be a kid. Certainly, neither child was aware that we were poor, because while we lived far below the poverty level, our life was rich with music and art and literature and friendship.
I refrained from pointing that out, or even delivering a lecture about the tautology of placing punks – who have access to a vast array of resources, including but not limited to community houses, infoshops, radio shows, zines, bartered medical care – in the same category as people who are homeless without choice.
See, sometimes I can curtail my caustic opinions!
The girl persisted with questions about riding the rails and was thrilled to realize that I know more than might be presumed about the topic. I ruthlessly squashed any hopes in that direction by pointing that an acquaintance had both legs chopped off pursuing such adventures. Not exactly romantic.
Of course her attention span does not sustain lengthy discussions (she says her brain feels like a LocoRoco game) so the next question was What is the creepiest example of someone flirting with you?
I replied Nobody flirts with me.
She stamped her foot and hollered SHUT UP! People flirt with you all day long!
I blinked in bewilderment. Not true! Give me an example!
She said I never hang out with you, so I don’t know! But you are just stupid to claim otherwise!
Shrug. So I’m still oblivious, even after advanced research and training. I really don’t notice much until people declare they are in love with me, a claim that can generally be analyzed as a passing fancy since they get over it within a year or two. Any other subtleties are beyond my comprehension.
This is certainly easier than getting tangled up with the misplaced desires of other people. Particularly in this town.
I went out to buy new music but purchased Jim Croce instead cause I’m a sap.
Then I dragged a recalcitrant young man to visit Carmelo, The Gentlemen’s Hairdresser, where I ordered a cut for my kid described as Y’know, like Brideshead Revisited, 30’s aristocrat crossed with 80’s pop star…. which amused the barber. Though not, it must be admitted, my son.
I was planning to read a newspaper, but the receptionist was quite unexpectedly watching the inauguration. We sat entranced, half listening to the heckling of the Italian hairdressers.
It was quite a thrilling way to experience the whole thing, actually!
I’m not feeling especially gloomy but my more obsessive traits pop up like a wack-a-mole game on days like this.
Right now that means I am listening to music that makes my kid act like his ears are bleeding, but hey, he is off recording his radio show! I can listen to whatever I like!
Too bad I can’t find what I really wanna hear: an early, unreleased, and presumably contraband copy of [band name suppressed to protect the guilty] without all the studio mixing that fixes the rough and charming bits.
Unfortunately I used to listen to it back in the days before I had my music on a computer (ooh, archaic!) so I guess it is an actual tactile possession lost in one of the moves.
Oh well.
I have lots of other dismal dirges to play!
Now that I’ve posted about my rather silly set of illnesses, I just feel mildly annoyed with myself for whining.
I have very little patience for “normal” problems, however you define the term. One of the larger societal obsessions is, of course, weight loss.
When I find myself trapped in some hideous situation where people talk about such things I tend to say in a bright shiny voice Have you heard of the best diet ever? I lost one third of my body weight in just under five weeks! The plan is easy. It is called cancer.
Of course, I was then hospitalized with malnutrition and force-fed before ending up back on the operating table undergoing surgeries that left me with massively debilitating internal scarring – but hey – I was thin!
Barely able to walk, mutilated beyond understanding, horrified by what I had just lived through, facing a lifetime of potential pain, I then had to endure “compliments” about my appearance.
Let us be clear: I looked awful.
Did anyone seriously believe Jobs when he claimed to be ok? We’ll ignore the ADA and ethical implications of the disclosure of health care status to prop up shares for now. I’m more interested in the fact that he just looks very ill, in a way that some people persist in describing as ‘fit.’
First my tummy rebelled in a way consistent with previous episodes of ulcers/gallbladder/adhesions/choose-your-own-adventure and I could no longer eat or drink much of anything. Then I caught a head cold, which of course I cannot treat because all available meds interfere with the set keeping me alive. That turned into a sinus infection, morphing into a complete loss of my voice for ten days. By the end of a month of dreary illness I was mainly existing on a steady diet of Tums and Ricola, and drifted into anemia. By then I mainly just wanted to curl up on a chaise lounge, fainting, one handed pressed to a weary brow.
Except I don’t own one. Plus the insomnia is never mitigated by anything so I was still creeping around twenty hours out of every day, albeit in a slightly cranky and loopy fashion.
I’m barely functional but accumulated chores dictate I will now proceed with a massive cleaning purge. In a country where it takes four hours to wash one load of clothes.
What a glamorous life I lead.
The church bells will start ringing at 7:15 tonight to celebrate the fact that Cambridge is 800 years old.