Beautiful ugly

The muses work in labyrinthine ways, and creativity spirals in and yet out of itself like a nautilus.

I found a poem by Mark Doty that was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bete, which was in turn inspired by who knows what version of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.

He captures that nagging sense of unease over the Beast's transformation into the prince, even as we are all awaiting that pivot point, anxiously waiting to hear Beauty proclaim her love and thus enable the Beast to shed his so-called ugliness and prove himself worthy of her love (...but didn't he already do that?) No one remembers the prince, but the

"...heady onrush
of the transformation...

...the moments
disruptive and lush, before the breaking through

...not to the kingdom itself, where nothing happens,
but the approach to the kingdom:
everything, the coming to love."
(from La Belle et la Bete - read it here)

What do you think?

Kings and chaperones

Jon has been appointed to the prom committee at the school where he teaches. He had no say in the matter.

I couldn't help but laugh.

Then he said, "If I have to be a chaperone at this prom, you're keeping me company!"

And here I thought I had gotten out of going to the prom when I was in school.

Fourscore and seven years ago

Most of the time when you help someone with their research, you have no idea how much you've helped them. Sure, there's the smiles and "thank yous", bobs of the head and hand-shaking, but then the person you've helped (or so you hope) turns and walks away, and you never see them again.

But sometimes you gain a glimpse of your contribution to someone's research, however small or monumental (I'll never forget how I helped a visibly distraught person dealing with their cancer diagnosis--the mere act of showing this person where concrete information could be found soothed their trembling limbs and wiped the tears from their eyes).

I got this brilliant glimpse the other day when I saw this New York Times book review of Charles Bracelyn Flood's new book 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. I actually helped do a miniscule bit of research for this man, the library's resident historian, a year or two ago. It was something to do with searching for primary sources from Lincoln's times. I didn't think much of it at the time, just thought it was so cool to read articles written while Lincoln was alive. I make no claims here other than the astonishment of my proximity, however negligible, to this book.

If you're curious to see these articles, just go to the New York Times archives, which go all the way back to 1851.

Something wicked this way comes

Jon and I had the pleasure of watching Coraline in 3D, complete with goofy glasses and a theater full of squirmy kids. It's based on the book by the same name, written by Neil Gaiman, a famous fantasy author. I was never interested in his work until I picked up this book several years ago. Sinister and sometimes creepy, this modern day fairy tale (I mean here a fairy tale like the original fairy tales, not the Disneyfied ones) demonstrates the deep reserves of courage and determination we all have within us.

Reading Coraline, I began to understand for the first time what a fairy tale is. Life rarely goes the way you would like it to, and it's up to you to overcome the obstacles that come your way--sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don't. Fairy tales demonstrate this basic truth in a very dark, but ultimately inspiring way.

Why clone your pet?

This is an example of anthropormorphic taxidermy.

Yes, those are real felines.

I came across this at work while dealing with the journal "Victorian Literature and Culture" and noticing an article included in volume 35:2 (2007) titled "Anthropomorphic taxidermy and the death of nature: the curious case of Hermann Plocquet, Walter Potter, and Charles Waterton," by Michelle Henning. It's illustrated, too.

Working in a library is never boring.

No wonder kids are afraid of the dentist

I have very vague memories of my own experiences being drugged at the dentist. I remember the strange experience of coming to and still feeling as though I were dreaming and trying to communicate with my limbs through a fog thicker than cotton candy. All I remember of my surroundings are legs and arms supporting me and a voice at my ear, and a distant awe at a doorway flooded with light.
Looking at that description, it almost seems as if I had visited the tunnel of light.

Marring the books

I frequent used bookstores. A lot. I have a set of authors (Charles De Lint, Samantha Hunt, Brian McLaren, Frederick Buechner, R.S. Thomas, etc.) and subjects (theology, faery, goats, Regency England, Romania, etc.) that I'm always on the lookout for, and I just like looking at books.

One of the unique pleasures of acquiring used books is observing the occasional mark of the previous owner. Besides the typical name or birthday wish scribbled in the front of the book, sometimes you get to be privy to the inner recesses of that previous owner's mind as you read through the book and encounter his/her notes scrawled in the margins, usually accompanying the abstract art of lines and stars highlighting certain parts of the book that s/he found especially arresting. It's even more interesting when the notes and highlighted sections make no sense.

I just got a cheap paperback titled "Faery!" Whoever owned this book was a happy highlighter. On page 115, under the story The Seekers of Dreams, by Felix Marti-Ibanez, the words "vice versa" are underlined. On the page opposite, the sentence "I was afraid to quit the security of my prison" is underlined, with a careful circle around "I," with a tiny note to the left "& me?"

In other stories, phrases like these are underlined: "the faint glow of magic, like infant dragon fire," "one who had lived as long as the rivers and mountains, and possessed the knowledge of death for every day of it," "he loved her in desperation and silence," and "Chinese unicorn."

Our happy highlighter was also only too happy to add commas and dashes and semicolons, and even insert words here and there, as though the authors of the stories had been careless in their writing. In the first sentence of the story "Touk's house," by Robin McKinley: "There was a witch who had a garden," our self-made editor inserted "once" between 'was' and 'a' so that the sentence would read "There was once a witch who had a garden."

While this person did not indulge in too much marginalia, it was still amusing to see such liberal use of underlining, particularly in a collection of fantasy stories published in a cheap paperback.

Public libraries

Economic woes are affecting libraries, especially public libraries that rely on taxes and other sources of revenue to serve their regions.

Here's a sobering read: Country's oldest public library could close this year.

Obviously, I'm biased, being a librarian, but I find news of libraries being shuttered disheartening, especially as these are times when people utilize the library even more--not just for free entertainment in the form of books and DVDs--but for assistance in their job-hunting. Where else can you go for free access to computers where you can search for jobs, type up a resume, and learn new computer skills in an attempt to stay current with technology?

The problems of being the weaker sex

Last weekend I watched The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes, two of my favorite thespians.

I think a lot of girls will love the movie for its fashion and crazy hairdos--it's certainly interesting to see how the rich threw their money away. But it reminded me again of why I would never want to travel back in time (besides the knowledge that I would be considered quite dumb because of my hearing loss): women had very little say over their circumstances. They married, and tried to marry well, because that was often the only way to avoid poverty, even if they were born into well-to-do families. Love was usually not a consideration for the matchmakers, only strategic alliances and keeping the family name pure.

The more I learn about the history of marriage, the more I understand the prevalence of affairs among the aristocracy. If you marry a man who is only interested in producing a male heir, and continues his dalliances with his maids, and eventually takes up with your own best friend, in your own house (The Duchesss is based on the life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire), is it any wonder that you would fall in love with a man (Charles Grey) who actually appears to fancy you too?

What I found touching in the movie: Georgiana gives up Charles Grey to stay with her children (the Duke of Devonshire may have had no problems being a philanderer, but did not want it known that his wife was stepping out on him and told her she would never see her children again if she continued her dalliance with Mr. Grey).

Terror of all terrors

If I could write a poem like William Butler Yeat's "The Mother of God," I would die happy:

The Mother Of God
by William Butler Yeats

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart’s blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

Not because of the religious connections, though I don't deny they are there, but because of how the poem combines the sacred and mundane to make the experience more palpable. For another example of this juxtaposition, see my friend D.'s post on an experience he had while at Monemvasia in Greece.

I saw the White Witch's domain

Cabin fever drove us out of our apartment to Jon's folks in Lincoln County. The drive home was eye-opening. It was like driving through a war-zone, in some parts. Branches were scattered everywhere. Entire trees leaned over the roads, creating obstacle courses that the truck weaved around in its rumbly way. Ice clinked against the windows when the truck nudged ice-encrusted branches.

Some houses looked pretty, others were completely obscured by all the branches that had come down in the yard and on top of them--it looked like a winter jungle. We passed one house, a stately white manor house with black shutters, surrounded by trees groaning under the weight of ice and snow, but not one had surrendered yet. They no longer looked like trees, but statutes. Black trunks punctuated the startlingly white scene, interspersed with the cold glitter of ice, and the house itself looked ghostly, as if it was barely hanging on to its semblance. It made me think of the White Witch's lair (don't tell the owners that).

I told Jon, "It's like Narnia: always winter, never Christmas."

Before there were bookmobiles

My friend Abbi wrote about a unique take on the bookmobile: the biblioburro. This made me think in turn of Kentucky's version: the pack horse librarians.

These determined lady librarians and their horses delivered books and other materials to remote homes in eastern Kentucky between 1933 and 1943. Popular books included Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Robinson Crusoe, and popular magazines included National Geographic and Popular Mechanics. Demand for reading material outstripped the number of books available, so the librarians began clipping newspaper articles and recipes, and other odds and ends, to create scrapbooks to loan to the greedy readers. What I found especially moving: the patrons themselves started creating scrapbooks detailing their own recipes and family history and local stories so that these, too, could circulate among their fellow eastern Kentuckians.

The statistics from 1939 tell us that 30 packhorse libraries served 48,195 families on a monthly basis. The libraries had a total of 154,846 books which circulated 889,694 times. This is amazing, considering how remote eastern Kentucky was (and still is).

You can read more about Kentucky's pack librarians at KDLA's website: The "Book Women" of Eastern Kentucky: W.P.A.'s Pack Horse Librarians

A day in the life of ice

Once again we have been slammed by an ice storm, nearly on the scale of the one in 2003. Jon and I have been holed up in our apartment, enjoying electricity, and Pope is confused by this break in his routine, doing a random hop-skip here, a frenzied gallop into the other room, instead of his normal day-long naps.

I have not been to work since Monday, and will not be back until next Monday. They have already closed campus for the rest of the week. Jon has been off since the beginning of the week, and most likely will be off through the rest of the week.

A big tree branch fell in front of our house onto Jon's car. The funny thing is, we don't think the car is damaged, due to its inch-thick coat of ice.

This morning, we walked to Starbucks for coffee. It was raining, water pooling on top of already-icy roads and sidewalks, slowly freezing. We made the 1/2 mile trek there safely, sans any fall (not for lack of trying on the ice's part). We stayed there for an hour or so, enjoying the warmth, hot coffee, listening to other people chatter about the storm. The rain changed to snow--snowflakes as fat as your thumb tumbling out of the sky--and the temperature dropped noticeably. Believe me, though, it's much better walking in snow than rain.

All the trees along Ashland were drooping with the combined weight of ice and snow. Their heavy branches obstructed the sidewalk, and branches littered the road. We saw more than one homeowner standing in their front yard, staring stupidly at the masses of branches covering their yards or leaning against their houses. It is so white, our camera is confused.

We're starting to go a little stir-crazy in our small apartment. Jon has conquered half of Europe in his "Total War" computer game, or whatever it is. I have already read a book and started another one. The TV has been on non-stop, either for the news or House reruns.

This is one thing about Kentucky I have never grown accustomed to: this propensity for freezing rain and ice.

Circling over the earth

Satellites took some interesting images of the inauguration. The people look like ants. How funny, considering the magnitude of this event in human terms.

Manifesto for the hour

I hope people enjoyed my post about 21 random things, and I hope it makes you think about what you would write if you were tagged (and at least one person reading this has been-you know who you are). Lately, I've been feeling self-conscious about writing blog posts because they're usually about me (obviously). This makes for mostly one-sided conversation, with the exception of comments from mostly one person who lives on the other side of the world, and whose blog I follow and sometimes comment on. While I don't mind writing about myself (I started this blog as a way to let my parents know what's going on with me 8 hours south of them), sometimes I begin to wonder how self-centered I am becoming, how banal my topics, which in turn affects my inspiration. Which is why I have not been posting as much as I would like (my goal was to write at least a little something everyday).

But I hope to turn a new leaf today, in part because I need to keep writing. It keeps the senses sharp.

21 random things

I've been tagged by somebody on Facebook to write 21 random things about myself.

1. I can move my nostrils without moving my face.
2. One of my traditions with my dad is to go see a really bad action/adventure movie, in the hopes of finding one that will dethrone Anaconda as the worst movie ever made.
3. Once I saw the alpacas in the field in front of Maple Hill Manor, I knew I had found the place to have our wedding.
4. Making up for lost time, I devour all the fantasy young adult books I can find. (Yes, I have read Twilight, but, no I am not in love with Edward)
5. I can pronounce "Nicolae Ceausescu" properly, having been to Romania.
6. I dislocated my jaw while eating a baguette beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and my jaw has never healed properly-a constant reminder of my time in France (how awful, I know).
7. I know more about professional cycling, bikes, bike gear, training for the bike, than I ever thought I would, and I don't ride a bike (thanks to Ann Kazee for this!)
8. I have hiked over 30 miles in one weekend.
9. I have a blue t-shirt of my grandpa's that I've been wearing since I was 13 (it's worn quite soft, with a few holes at the collar), and it's one of my most valued possessions, in addition to his old sweater that I nabbed from my parents' shop
10. I've joined the genealogy craze, and I'm barely past one quarter of a century old.
11. Someday, I want to raise goats. Seriously.
12. I never realize how much I rely on lip-reading until I'm talking to people at night.
13. When I go home, I like to snoop through my grandma's stuff and hear her stories about them (she secretly enjoys my nosiness).
14. I couldn't get into Lord of the Rings the first time I tried reading it. Now it's one of my favorite books.
15. I love cheese--the more pungent, the better.
16. There was a time when I thought the Archie comics accurately represented school life.
17. I am an intense homebody, and seriously wish that I could apparate home frequently.
18. Some of my favorite movies include Pride & Prejudice and Die Hard.
19. I wear a machine that cost over $3,000. Besides collecting earwax, it maximizes what little hearing I have left.
20. Being married doesn't keep me from being a cat lady.
21. One of the simplest pleasures in life is sitting with a cup of coffee and reading a good book.

Some grave matters tonight

I've been going through some of my old writings tonight. Here's a poem I wrote while at Asbury (I was inspired by Anna Akhmatova's poem Cleopatra) :

"The Song of Cleopatra"

The asp
is my lover;
his fangs
the gates to paradise.

Outside
the sandy sea
stretches away;
I can almost hear
the ocean.

Inside
the stones
rise high and higher;
surely the ceiling
grazes the stars.

The smell of Death
is perfume.
I can hear him
around the corner.

The last of my lovers,
he is my match,
for even my allure
he can destroy,
with power greater
than my own.

(Asbury Review, Spring 2002)

Cheetah looking up - Cincinnati Zoo

Cheetah looking up - Cincinnati Zoo
Originally uploaded by ozimanndias8

This cheetah is looking right at me. I was mewing, and she responded. Their meows do not match their size--they sound like housecats!

I'm sure she thought I was another stupid person making noises at her, but at least she looked right at me. She ignored everybody else making a ruckus.

When I saw the photograph below in the March 2008 Smithsonian, a memory of a daydream was reawakened. I have it clipped and stuck in a journal. Isn't it strange how daydreams can be, sneaking up on you out of the blue, out of the years, fading away, and returning with the force of the tide? One of my strong memories, and ones that I look forward to making, are walks with my dog(s) (plural for the dogs that we have not yet gotten, but will--they are already named, too: Mitzpah and King George), so seeing this picture of a lady and her cheetah evoked not only my daydream of walking with wild things, but the more domestic memories of my old dog Bear. Daydream and memory fused.

Reader, I married him

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

According to this quiz I am not an obsessive-compulsive bookworm, though I think my family and friends would disagree. When the last Harry Potter book came out, I told Jon that I would not exist for the period of time that I was reading that book. He grinned and said, "Sure." I think that's one of the signs that I married well.
If "Settlin' In" is reading this, I am curious to know whether she picked up on the title of this post, given the book that she recently blogged about.

One point in time.

The library where I work invited the campus to watch the inauguration of Obama at the library throughout the day on Tuesday January 20th. The TVs in the lobby were tuned to NBC's coverage of the events, the babble of reporters mingling with the sound of students chattering as they entered the library. In the auditorium, the big screen was lit up with live coverage of the proceedings through CNET.

I ducked in a little before noon to watch Obama as he was sworn in and gave his inagugural speech. The seats were mostly full with students and faculty. The students snickered here and there when the closed-captioning on the screen misspelled words (I pitied the poor people writing the captioning since they were doing it live), so "Barak" sometimes showed up as "rock" or "hindu" was "due", while the faculty were quiet. The room became quite still when Yo-Yo Ma and other musicians performed John Williams' "Air and Simple Gifts" and I noticed for the first time in my life how achingly beautiful a cello sounds, melancholy and inspiring at the same time. We all clapped when Obama finished his oath, and I noticed that no one snickered when the closed-captioning mangled some of Obama's words.

This was a unique experience. We were not physically at the inauguration, yet the sense of community in that room was palpable. Together, we watched history unfold, knowing that we were active participants in the transition of presidential power.

Random observation

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amusing that James Bond, Billy Elliot, and Sabretooth are roughing it in the woods together in the movie Defiance?

Jon on bike

Jon on bike
Originally uploaded by ozimanndias8

Jon took this neat shot of himself on the bike.

Your very own Mr. Darcy

You can purchase the portrait of Mr. Darcy used in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

It's kind of like a high-art version of those heart-throb photos I used to tear out of those teeny-bopper magazines back in middle school.

Sand cat (maybe) - Cincinnati Zoo

Sand cat (maybe) - Cincinnati Zoo
Originally uploaded by ozimanndias8

Does this look like it belongs in the zoo?

To give you perspective, this cat is the same size as a housecat.

House-hunting

Jon and I looked at a house that has a butler's pantry. It was nestled in the hallway next to the kitchen, with glass-fronted cabinet doors, drawers with glass knobs, a small counter to set bowls of artfully placed fruit.

This house also had a dark wood banister that ended in a spiral at the bottom, a 9 ft. high foyer with a beautiful entryway, built-in fireplaces, retro bathrooms with subway tiles, and what appeared to have been the original kitchen stove (very cool in its retro-ness, but definitely something to replace).

We're enjoying this aspect of house-hunting, enjoying the pretty details of houses before setting our minds on all the negative features.

NO WANDERING

NO WANDERING
Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian

I have been guilty of "excessive wandering" through the library.

What on earth is this rule about? The only thing I can think of is bored teenagers or the steady stream of homeless folks in the library. But most of the ones I see usually just sit in a corner and read the newspaper or look out the window, enjoying the warmth and safety of the library.

In the library

I spent some time in the university library on the Saturday after all the students were gone, and the campus was virtually deserted. It was a strange experience walking the stacks, knowing I was probably the only person on the entire fourth floor of the library.

I walked between bookshelves and past bookshelves. I saw the sunlight stream through the arched windows of the fourth floor; it fell on vacant study tables. I paused in the history section, looking for Harry Caudill's Night comes to the Cumberlands and tarried there, distracted by the other books there. The silence was absolute, except for the shuffle of papers as I opened a book, a cough, the whisk of my pants as I walked.

The silence was absolute, but the volume of books filled that gap.

Something to do in your spare time

Do you have any idea the amount of strength it takes to dance like this? Especially the squatting kicks?

Jon and I tried last night. The results were hilarious, however horribly executed.

New Year's Resolutions

Read.

This is the only one I'm sure to keep.

It's always books

One of my few accomplishments for 2008 : I read over 100 books.

My number one favorite: The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt

Some other unexpected pleasures:
Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff
Passionate Nomad : the life of Freya Stark, by Jane Geniesse
Entering the Stone : On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, by Barbara Hurd
Rapture Ready : Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh
Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card

New favorite author:
Charles De Lint

Traveling to the ends of the earth

I took the Amtrak home to my folks for Christmas, for several reasons--caution and curiosity (an increasingly unreliable car and a simple desire to 'see what it's like').

The total amount of traveling that I did was almost double the amount it would have taken to just drive the eight hours home: 2 hours driving from Stanford, KY to Union Terminal in Cincinnati, OH; 10 hours on the Amtrak; 2 hours on the Union Pacific Northwest commuter train to Harvard, IL; almost 1 hour driving along Rte 173 to Rockford, IL. This does not include the number of hours spent waiting here and there. Suffice to say I left Stanford around 5 PM Friday night and got to Rockford around 3:30 PM on Saturday.

Would I have rather spent 8 hours driving in a car with nothing but my thoughts and vast cornfields to keep me company, or reading?

What I brought for reading material: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, Charles De Lint's The Ivory and the Horn; Laura Miller's The Magician's Nephew: a skeptic's adventurs in Narnia.

Christmas day

Kontakion

The virgin brings forth today
the Word Eternal
and the earth offers a cave
to the Unapproachable
Angels give glory with shepherds
and the magi journey with the star
when for our sakes was born as a new babe
He who is from eternity, God.

~St. Romanos

Encounters of a third kind

I am currently in a house with 6 cats, 2 dogs, and five other humans besides me.

The power struggles between the cats are interesting largely because they are so subtle. A stranger would think all the cats are getting along just fine, but they aren't looking close enough. True, each cat's doing his/her own thing--Pope's on the rug in the living room, Bea's on the table in the dining room, Callie's under the guest bed, Toby's dozing on the in-law's bed, Burt's on the chair in the basement, and Delta is sleeping in the closet downstairs--but they are missing those rare encounters where these seemingly laid-back animals display their ferocious, mostly hidden, natures.

When they move through the house, it's mostly uneventful, or so it seems. Except for the alert ears, the penetrating eyes, the deliberate cold shoulders, the twitching tails, one would think the cats are fine in each other's presence. But then an encounter happens, explosive, shocking, over as quick as it began: a yowl, a BAM-BAM-BAM of a paw against another cat's head, fur on end, fangs bared. Then something is decided (we humans don't know what the outcome was) and the cats return to their docile selves, ignoring each other, going their own way.

Who was the victor? Who gave way? We'll never know.

Popular reading on the internet

You can now search magazines through Google Book Search.

I came across this intriguing title from the June 1872 issue of Popular Science: "On the artificial production of stupidity in schools." And I thought this was a recent problem.

One of the cool things about google digitizing magazines is that it captures the entire magazine, not just the articles (something many expensive databases do not do). This might not seem so awesome today, but think about how curious it is to see ads from fifty, even one hundred years ago. Such primary source material gives you a unique perspective on history.

Read more about it here.

Design paradigm

Sometimes you can do everything you can possibly do, and it still isn't enough.

A student had a problem locating an online article at the library. It was in the 2004 issue of some random journal. A search of our online journal list pulls up this random journal...so it looks like we have it. But, there is a indication of the years we have access to, clearly delineated when the user clicks on random journal title. 2004 is not included in those years. Yet said student does not register this.

This is something that I have noticed while helping people, both at the public library and at the university. People do not seem to read what is on the screen in front of them. At first, I assumed this was just laziness on their part (students today tend to give up at the first obstacle they encounter in their searches). Then I started wondering whether there is something wrong with the design of the websites they are looking at: is the layout confusing, the text too weird, the colors off-putting? Does our online journal list fall into any of those categories?

Something to think about next year. I'm supposed to be on break.

One day

A few things I did today, on the last day of work for the year:

• Looked at Orlando, thinking about its usefulness to the library

• Ruthlessly cleaned out my email and organized to-do's

• Gathered signatures for a Christmas card

• Made faces at a co-worker's baby

• Ate tons of food at the annual Christmas party

• Worked on a library resources webpage

• Surfed flickr for interesting photos to include in above webpage

• Read some blogposts about libraries

• Ate a tangerine

Dancing through the countries

A strangely fascinating video of a guy and his travels. What a way to transcend borders. I dare my friend in Greece to do this at the Acropolis.

I stumbled across this in one of Time's Top Ten of Everything 2008

The silence of everyday things

I spent the day without my hearing aid, due to an infection that refused to be subdued. I think the last time I went without my hearing aid for a day was 8 or 10 years ago when my ear swelled shut, like a clam jealously guarding its treasure.

It was (and is) a curious experience. You would think that being nearly deaf like me, I would be accustomed to it. And I am, to the extent that I look forward to being swaddled in silence every night. But to be up and about, doing things, with a vociferous cat underfoot, and not hearing any of it, is strange. My brain begins to reach for the sounds that it feels should be there. The rustle of a shirt, the tapping of fingers against the keyboard, the hiss of water shooting out of the faucet, the cat chirping at the birds outside. I find myself rehearsing those sounds in my mind, and, like the person trying too hard to remember the face of a person she treasured, losing my grip on them the harder I try.

A reading list

The idea for this post came from "A Whole New Way with Memes" from the People's Republic of Mortimer.

This list was compiled in the U.K. by the BBC. The average adult has read only 6 of the books on the list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog. (This list in no way represents the top 100 books. It’s missing the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. For shame.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A home for the ages

One of the nice things about looking for houses is getting to indulge my curiosity about nooks and crannies--hidden spots of a house. Every older home I pass, I wonder what its attic or basement is like, where the secret places are--a window-seat, a spot beneath a stairwell, a door that leads to another door.

So when we stepped inside the house I told you about below, it was like walking into a candy store. Never mind that my practical self was already decided (is it unfortunate that my practicality and imagination can co-exist so easily?), I was entranced from the moment we stepped into the cavernous, light-flooded foyer. A grand staircase spiraled up on the left, a broad hallway stretched ahead, populated with numerous doors that opened into other rooms that opened into more rooms with more doors.

A huge chimney anchored the house--almost every room touched it, and the fireplaces dominated those rooms, decked out in gleaming wood finery. Quite breathtaking.

It was a home I would have loved growing up in (I can see my parents rolling their eyes).

Then Jon and I walked out the back door, the realtor locked up, and we turned our backs on it.

House hunting

Jon and I have tentatively started looking for houses.

One thing we have learned : pictures can be deceiving.

The house itself was quite all right, an older home built around a massive central chimney. Its neighbor, however, made Jon and me look at each other as we shared the same thought: No longer interested. The neighboring house was a dumpy building, overgrown with weeds, festooned with junk, and guarded by a fitful junkyard dog who barked whenever a leaf fell from a tree (which is another way of saying "nonstop"). The crowning glory of said house was a large confederate flag emblazoned with the words: "Heritage not hate."

Working anywhere

I worked from home today. It was rather boring, though I was able to watch TLC's What Not to Wear while eating lunch, and pick up around the house when I needed a break. Pope slept at my feet most of the time (now I can see why he goes on wild romps about the house when we're ready for bed).

I hate my car with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. It is becoming unpredictable at the worst possible time.

Zagorochoria

Zagorochoria
Originally uploaded by dwain

My friend in Greece has taken (and still is taking) absolutely astoundingly breathtaking pictures from his time in Greece.

I can't get over this one. My heart seizes, I hear the wind blowing, and my legs itch, wanting to explore this beautiful place.

The Book

If anyone at work doubts how much I love the Harry Potter books, they doubt no more starting today. The head of our department came by, holding The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and I gasped, clasping my hands in front of my chest.

Completely involuntary, somewhat embarrassing.

The way vampires talk

The Twilight craze has hit J.'s school. He overheard two girls discussing the Twilight movie.

One girl, not too keen on the books, asked "Why is the dialogue so corny? Why does Edward talk that way?"

And the other girl, a fanatic, replied,"Well, he just doesn't know any better. He's a vampire--he's not normal, so he doesn't know that's not the way people talk."

The excuse for vampires prone to corny language: they just don't know any better!

A normal morning

I think Jon learned something new about what it's like to live with a hard-of-hearing person.

Earlier this week, he accidentally locked himself out of the house one morning while going outside to warm his car up. As this was a workday, he needed to get inside pretty quick to get the rest of his stuff.

I was in the bathroom at this time, enjoying the warmth of our space heater while getting ready for work.

He started out by knocking on the door (which I didn't hear). Then ringing the doorbell (which I didn't notice). Then pounding on the door (which I didn't notice). Then furiously assaulting the door and doorbell (which I still didn't register). By this time, he realized that I was not coming to the door and that he would need to figure out another way to get in. So he climbed on top of the first floor back-porch, crawled up and over the roof of the house, and squeezed through a window into our front room.

When I say I didn't "notice" or "register" these frantic noises he was making, I mean that I did hear them, but that my brain (bless its heart, trying to process mumbo-jumbo) translated these various noises as: Pope galloping through the apartment (which he does often enough) and Jon gargling salt water (he had a cold at this time). How the doorbell could sound like gargles is beyond me, but that's just the closest match my brain could come up with.