The other day, I was unloading a 12-pack of diet Coke cans into my refrigerator, and about halfway through the package pulled out one that felt… wrong.  I couldn’t have told you why at first; something about it just wasn’t right.  I froze, can in hand, hand halfway to the refrigerator shelf, trying to figure it out.  Was the can mushy?  No.  Bulging?  No.  Dented?  No.

It was light.

Lighter than the rest, by about a third.  And if you turned it over, it made more of a sloshing noise than any other the other cans.  I assume that what’s happened is just that the can-filler failed to fully fill the can, but there’s nonetheless, if you’ll forgive the pun, something uncanny about it.  I put the light can on my countertop, and keep picking it up every time I pass by, checking to make sure that I wasn’t just mistaken, that the can is really less than full.

I’m not sure why this has me so unnerved.  It has something to do with the failure of the machinery involved, which isn’t supposed to fail.  But beyond that, there’s a nagging sense that if the machinery can fail to fill the can, it could also fail to prevent something else from getting into the can, something that shouldn’t be in the can at all.  And right behind that is the thought that perhaps my can isn’t two-thirds full, but fully full, just with Something Else.

So part of me is wondering if I’ll ever work up the nerve to open the can and find out.  And part of me just doesn’t want to know, thanks.

A few days ago, I came within a couple of inches of hitting a pedestrian.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s one way to get out of the office before dark:  have the power go out.  The Claremont Colleges are on one of those reduced-cost power dealies (I think that’s the technical term), whereby we have to shut off the power in the event of rolling blackouts, but pay a vastly reduced price per kilowatt-hour when the juice is flowing.  Since the colleges got all generator’d up, this has not been a problem; as I noted this time last week, we generally move pretty seamlessly to backup power, and so don’t even notice the downtime.

Today, not so much.  Apparently something exploded at approximately 2.30 this afternoon, a few blocks down from my office building, near where a bunch of construction is being done.  As of 6.30 this evening, when it got too dim to continue working in the office, the power had not yet been restored.

So the good news is I’m home early.  And I got to walk home through one of the weirdest SoCal September evenings I’ve ever seen:  the sky was positively yellow, with dark clouds up above, and the sunset striking them from underneath.  The only reasons I know they were clouds and not, for instance, the smoke that has blanketed this area during the last two years at this time, is that there were these weird drops of water falling from them at random intervals (not many, but some, nonetheless), and a ginormous rainbow arrayed against them.  Aside from that, the skies were positively apocalyptic.

Now that I think about it, though, this is the second Monday in a row that some fluke has kicked out the power in this area.  And weren’t there those completely unexpected rolling blackouts just a couple of weeks before that?  Is there something going on here that we ought to know about?

I’ve given to the Red Cross, and to Catholic Charities USA.

I’ve given minor (mostly moral) support to a student here who has organized fundraising here on campus.

I’ve made an open offer of help to our administration, as they admit and enroll students from affected colleges and universities for the fall semester.

I’ve made several proposals to my department for things we might do, ranging from bringing a displaced writer to the college for a several-week residency to organizing next year’s literary series around New Orleans writers.

I’ve thought, and I’ve written, and I’ve tried to consider what else I can do.

But it’s hard not to feel like it’s such a drop in the bucket, so to speak, and that it can never be enough.

I have this genius plan, whereby I get up super early every morning this semester, do the requisite teeth-brushing and contact-lens-in-putting, and then plop myself down in front of the computer for at least one hour, and conceivably two, of working on my own writing—and nothing else—between the hours of 6 and 8.  This is to be followed, many days, by running or some other exercise form, and then by getting ready and toddling off to the office.

Read the rest of this entry »

Djever find yourself wondering exactly how the penny got into your garbage disposal?

During the time that R. was in Washington—the most recent time, that is, the last ten months he spent on active duty there—we had a running gag over the phone and via email in which I would tell him, among other things, that “those kitties is too sad if you don’t come home.” You have to hear that said in an appropriately goofy, within-a-couple-only voice, the kind that’s endlessly amusing to the couple involved, but that’s utterly unfunny, and in fact pretty embarrassing, when used with anyone outside the pair.  The upshot of the gag was, basically, don’t come home on my account—I would never be so selfish as to ask you to do something like that—but the cats really need you here.

The funny thing about it now is that I thought I was kidding.  I was miserable with R. gone, that I knew.  But the cats—well, the cats were traumatized for a whole variety of reasons—the move to the new condo, the new-construction smells of the new condo, the location of the new condo near the railroad tracks and the noises that produces, the intrusion into the new condo of various construction people, bringing all kinds of smells and noises in with them.  After all, they say that cats are much more place-centered than they are people-centered, and so any behavioral disruptions seemed to me to be pegged to their new home.  And behavioral disruptions there were:  little Alice has been even more skittish than usual, and super-needy, and Henry has taken on this whole alpha-male routine, hissing and swatting at anyone new who comes in, aggressively defending his territory from all intruders.

It had gotten to a pretty upsetting point of late; I took the cats to the vet for check-ups and dental work, and the veterinary assistant was ashen when she returned them to me, saying that the two of them had had a “bit of a tiff” when she put them back in the carrier, and that Henry had been “a little mean” to most of the people in the office.  Despairing a bit, I asked her advice, and she steered me toward some kitty pheromones that might help soothe any anxiety he was feeling, as that anxiety might be the root of the aggression.  I said I’d give it a shot.

Less than 24 hours later, R. came home.  In the car on the way from the airport, I told him about the vet, and about Henry’s anxiousness and aggression, basically trying to prepare him in case he was on the receiving end of this behavior.  The two of them had had several go-rounds when R. first moved in, and it took weeks of R. being the sole provider of food and treats for Henry to begin to figure out which side his bread was buttered on.

We walked in the door, however, and Henry walked slowly up to R.—not the speedy, nervous, checking-out of the intruder I’ve seen for the last several months—and when R. bent down and offered Henry his hand, he sniffed it in a friendly fashion.  Within an hour, R. was petting Henry, and their relationship was right back where it had been back in October.  Most amazingly, two of my former students came over yesterday, and while Henry was a little nervous with them around, he was very well-behaved, on the whole.  And Alice—Alice is always sweet, but she’s often been frantic with a need to be petted over the last several months.  For the last several days, she’s been calm, too.

It could well be the kitty pheromones.  But I’m pretty convinced that it’s R., that those kitties really were too sad if he didn’t come home.

Which is to say nothing of me.  Everything’s been positively rosy and glowing in Claremont since his return.  And we’re heading to Hawaii tomorrow morning, so the forecast for the next ten days looks great.

All things considered, the red-eye went quite well.  R. has thanked me repeatedly for flying “all night” to come out here to see him, which is extremely sweet but a little befuddling to my poor scrambled brain, because what it feels like more than anything else is that there was no night.  I just kinda skipped the night, and leapt right into more day.

I boarded my first flight at about 12.30 am Thursday morning, and landed in Houston three hours later, at 5.40 am.  Since I was still awake before boarding the flight, it was evening in Ontario, and then because I was up and walking around, and people were showing up, and I was drinking coffee, it was morning in Houston.  There was a little night on the plane, but there was by no means all of it.

I’m not generally able to sleep on planes, but I was able to doze, at least, on both flights, which had the benefit of making them seem pretty fast, and also made it possible for me not to be a complete wreck (only about half of one) on arriving at DCA.  R. and I had some lunch, and then I came back to the apartment, and he went back to work, and I had the deepest, hardest nap I may ever have had, a nap that only ended because he came home and woke me up.

I also slept all night last night.  And just woke up from another sleep-of-the-dead nap this morning.

The interesting thing about all of this sleeping is that I’m having insanely vivid, seriously wacky dreams.  Loud dreams.  In technicolor.  The kind of dreams that make it difficult to get awake again afterward.  And nearly all of them have had some element of one of my recurring dreams—the elevator that moves in directions other than the vertical, the house with extra rooms, and there’s another such motif than’s escaping me right now—but have built on that recurring element in weird ways.

For instance, in the nap I just woke up from, I dreamed that I was visiting my father, and remembered all those extra rooms, and decided to go visit them.  And one of them looked so much like the archetypal extra room from my recurrent dreams that—at a point when I usually think, “wow, this is just like those recurrent dreams I have; I didn’t know that this really existed!”—this time I thought “oh man—this is one of those recurrent dreams, isn’t it?” And, having realized that it was a dream, I dreamed that I woke up, right there in R.’s bed, where I actually was, and that he and I got up and went about our day, including going out in the car to run some errands.  That our day began to include increasingly wacky stuff, like a very threatening guy on the side of the road forcibly cleaning people’s windshields and then standing in front of their cars and refusing to move until they paid him, and then, a bit further down the road, a bunch of dressed-up chimpanzees posing in cars and on motorcycles for some kind of photo shoot, didn’t faze me in the least.  It wasn’t until R. actually woke me up that I had any inkling I’d still been asleep.

I’m hoping that this is all post-red eye reaction, the sleep centers of my brain making up for lost time.  Because it’s just a bit odd, otherwise.

Two parts:

1.  You’re about to move house, and you’re dying to be in your new digs.  You’re lucky enough to have access to the new place a full week before you really have to be out of the old place, so you figure you’ll schlep some stuff over a carload at a time and get it moved in.  What stuff do you schlep to the new place first?

2.  There are now five days remaining before the movers show up, and you’ve got massive amounts of crap to pack, so much that it feels a bit overwhelming.  Where do you begin?  What do you pack first?

I’m not exactly sure what the answers will tell you—perhaps it’s something akin to, but different from, the house-on-fire-what-do-you-grab scenario.  Nonetheless, I’m curious.  My answers a bit later.  (Packing, in the meantime.)

Something about the day after the fourth-of-July holiday makes me start contemplating musical renditions of Americanness. It’s not just the Sousa being piped into my local Walgreens as I’m trying to get my prescriptions refilled. It’s not just the patriotism-lite of Lee Greenwood’s ubiquitous “God Bless the U.S.A.,” as admirably explored by Michael Bérubé:

…the song’s version of patriotism is completely contentless. Two verses and three choruses, and Mr. Greenwood couldn’t find a single reason to love the U.S.A.? Yeah, yeah, I know, pride, pride, freedom, freedom: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” But free to do what? To fire employees without cause, thanks to the at-will employment doctrine? To abolish the estate tax? To hold up a sign saying that Matthew Shepherd got what he deserved? Or to protest foolish wars, march for civil rights, and support the right of kids with Down syndrome to be educated in regular classrooms where they can go to visit Fort Robideau with their nondisabled peers? “God Bless the U.S.A.” doesn’t say, and that’s what makes it such a perfect emblem of a certain kind of right-wing contentless patriotism, the kind of patriotism that supports the troops by flying flags from cars while supporting a President who leads the troops off to needless slaughter and then cuts their veterans’ benefits. Had Greenwood said anything about that freedom– “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free of all taxes on my estate of $36 million,” or “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free to fight for the right to register Mississippi’s black voters in the face of murderous right-wing opposition”– one imagines that his song would be a good deal less popular.

My own issues with fourth-of-July music have definitely got something to do with all that. But it’s also, alas, wrapped around what I think to be a series of memories whose wires have gotten all crossed in my brain. First, the Chicago song, “Saturday in the Park,” where I think it was the fourth of July. (In fact, now that I think about it, every day in that park seems to be the fourth of July!) Then, from approximately the same period, me flipping through my parents’ album collection, in which I know they had some 5th Dimension. (I know, this makes no sense whatsoever, but bear with me.) Then, from a little later in my childhood, the altogether astonishing Fifth of Beethoven, which may or may not be implicated in this mess.

What’s got me off on this rather appalling trip down my parents’ musical memory lane is that I could almost swear that they had some album called “5th of July.” All my searching has only turned up the Lanford Wilson play, so I’m almost certainly conflating the 5th Dimension and the Chicago song, schmooing in the title of the “Fifth of Beethoven,” and somehow producing an album about the day after the fireworks. Which almost certainly doesn’t exist. But I obsess about it this time every year, and if somebody could give me definitive proof one way or the other, I could put those processing cycles to much better use.

Like trying to decide whether granite countertops or Zodiaq are the way to go.