concocted glimpse

Efforts I have worked on with students lately:

analyzing Plato’s metaphor of the sun • filling out a job app • citing a text, a la APA, about local lahars • strengthening the piecemealy brilliant body paragraphs of a character analysis of a man in The Handmaid’s Tale • finessing an admissions piece for Purdue • utilizing context and scanning to select from a simplified set of prosodic intonation patterns in reading a text out loud¹ • organizing an outline on a cause of the American Civil War • navigating an online dictionary

More again tomorrow.

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¹ Further reading: Prosodic planning while reading aloud: On-line examination of Japanese sentences. Tadahisa Kondo and Reiko Mazuka. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

I wish that the supermarket sold its raw meat in small quantities. I have only bought meat to prepare at home 4 times in the last year, including the Halloween hot dog, and never have I needed 1 lb.

I have a crush on my new shoes.

^ My Vibram FiveFingers “Sprint”

On Monday they arrived. On Tuesday they shod my feet to and from the grocery store and to and from the library. Today I took them for a run.

November scar inventory.

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“There’s the scar on my knee,” I pulled my knee up to my chest, “from when I flew off a bike at Rocket Park. I was even wearing pants. They ripped right open. And the one on my side from the accident when I was in fourth grade seeing how fast I could go on an exercise bike.” I ran a finger over my ribs like a stick on a picket fence, a mallet on a xylophone. “That one’s almost gone now.”

“Where’s the one on your wrist from again?”

“What one on my wrist?”

“The little one on your right wrist.” He ran his thumb ’round looking for it. “Maybe it’s gone now too.” He lifted my left wrist too to be sure.

We rested, nested, a moment. I remembered, twisted comfortably a little, held his wrist. “This one?”

A pause. “Yes, that one.”

The Last Farewell • Roger Whittaker

Fanny Power/Mabel Kelly/O’Carolan’s Concerto (medly) • James Galway and The Chieftains

Canadian Railroad Trilogy • Gordon Lightfoot

Peer Gynt: Arabian Dance • Edvard Grieg

~

The New Day • King’s Singers

Dance of the Cygnets • Tchaikovsky

Lady Moon • folk

The Numbers Rhumba • Raffi

~

Clancy’s Theme • Man from Snowy River soundtrack

She’s Leaving Home • The Beatles

Gymnopédie no. 1 • Erik Satie, orchestrated by Claude Debussy

Love Is In the Air • Strictly Ballroom soundtrack

~

Last January I customized an open source calendar to record my exercising. I have more than a whole year of bejeweled sweat recorded now. When I look back at the record I can read the patterns. A vacation. A race. A cold. A new PR.

^ A screenshot of this last January. Each red jewel is for a run. I have an empty Friday and an empty Sunday.

I live the story of all my jewels, but I live all my gaps. On the outside, on the monthly leaves of the calendar, the gaps are silent. A time when I didn’t, not a time when I did. On the outside, I’m a tree. If someone sawed me transversely in half, they’d see this pattern of jewels and gaps like so many telltale rings. They could only guess at the eccentric concentrics. “Look at this gap here,” they’d ask, “what happened? A drought? A fire? A sunny year?”

The other day while I was cooling down after my run I streamed by a bus stop where a waiting woman leaned against the bricks of the streetside apartments. She didn’t speak a lick of English. As I approached, she looked at me with a huge smile on her face, pointed at my legs, clapped her hands, patted her own thighs then gestured pointedly at mine again, and gave me a big thumbs up and made some noises that sounded like a soccer fan cheering.

I like to think she was telling me I have great legs.

Shorts, shirt, shoes. Bra, watch. I walked away from the lake, wound around thickets of dormant blackberries. Two deciduous trees, both with nests in them!, stood, naked sentinels, one on each side of the trail entrance. Readysetgo. I paced myself for distance. Mud spattered the backs of my calves. It was 8ºC. I wanted to gently flick the temperature over on its side, making this perfect running weather last infinitely.

Between the trail¹ and the lake² are houses³.

Between the trail and the houses are

trees†,

trees,

trees,

some with a trip-work of roots so close together that I always [these trail runs are long enough for always] think of the dike trees in The King’s Stilts.

Two houses behind the trees were doing laundry today using soap that smelled like my nephew’s straw-blond-berry head. I smelled how he “holds me” in my arms, his syntax still in creation, his soft little head ripe for kissing. Run, kiss, run, kiss, run.

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A diagram:

²~~~~~~~~~~

³[^]  [^]  [^]  [^]

†††‡†±††††‡††

¹_____________

←N

Once a stranger bought me a drink in a bar. A man. A lawyer. He had one leg, and a necklace with a turtle pendant [his totem, I learned].

It was hot August on a friend’s birthday. Because she’s a fanatic lindy-hopper, she had an ear to the ground for all the live jazz in the city, and the rendezvous was a bar in Belltown with a band to beat itself. It was the paper moon of the 30s over the cardboard sea of the 00s.

The place began to fill up, and a slightly sloshed man at a table not too far from us approached our party. The approach was unforgettable because, you know, the man had one leg. He used no prosthetic, and while he had a crutch he’d left it at his friends’ table. For a moment, it was awkward. That’s just a bar truth: the approach of drunk men of ambiguous intention makes things awkward, no matter how many legs they have. Leg Man asked one of our party if she’d dance with him. She declined by proffering the dancing skills of Birthday Girl, who swung the whole sitch around in a half-pretzel and accepted. And they danced—Birthday Girl lindied, and Leg Man hopped. It made his night. It made his fortnight. His moon became cheese, his sea a saltine. He bought us all two rounds.

Harriet the Spy is like Marcel Proust.

Harriet

She writes about people in her notebook. The people she writes about includes her friends. When they find what she has written about them [none of it cruel, and some of it things the people already know about themselves], the friendships explode. To save the ’ships from sinking, Harriet has to re-weave these truths; issue a retraction; say, in essence, I didn’t mean it.

Proust

He wrote about people in his novels. He disguised, but only barely, some of his friends in his yawning Swann songs. In his private writing, he arrived at the idea that friendship and interpersonal integrity and truth telling are incompatible. If friends knew the warty things we thought of each other, how long would we be able to sustain pleasant interactions? Not long, said he.

Writing finds truth. Harriet did mean what she wrote. When she said she didn’t mean it, did she mean “I agree with the exquisite dead guy; friendship and truth telling are riddled with incompatibilities”? Who can find themselves in our private notebooks and still want to be our friends? Who can let us tell all our stories? Who will tell us all of theirs? Did she mean “the most important story is that I care about you, and to tell this truth I will retract the other one”? And if she meant that, here is the question, apart from friendship battleship. Is truth telling—story telling—just plain riddled? Does writing one story kill another? Vishnu with one hand, Shiva with the other? Do some truths keep us from others?