Temporarily Assigned to Planet Earth

I'm exhausted. Today was the neighborhood yard sale. I made 87 bucks and change turning some of my stuff into somebody else's problem. I didn't get rid of all of it--I carried a few things back inside and took 3 boxes of video tapes to the thrift shop. The "Architectural Digests" are on their way to the senior center, and a young girl whose teacher is a photography buff walked away with an armload of "Doubletakes"; the rest of the magazines are down at the curb waiting for the recycling truck.

At 6:30 this morning I heard the unmistakable fwap-fwap-fwap of a helicopter flying low overhead, and I was overjoyed. I knew the county was going to be spraying this area again this year, and I hoped they'd come sooner than they did last year. Last year's infestation of gypsy moth caterpillars was truly disgusting, and by the time the county sprayed they'd decimated some of my shrubbery. This year's infestation isn't as bad, but still gross, and just yesterday I noticed a couple of bushes that had been munched on. For the most part, though, the county was on top of it this time around.

So I kept the dog in until the helicopter was long gone, and it was about an hour later that I started hauling stuff out onto the driveway for the sale. At around noon, when I started bringing the few unsold items back into the house, I noticed that everything was liberally sprinkled with tiny spots, as though a fine mist had settled everywhere and dried. I was puzzled for several minutes, until I realized it was the Bt--Bacillus Thuringiensis--the stuff they sprayed to kill the gypsy moths. Evidently the stuff is sprayed in such a fine mist that it takes hours to settle to the ground. So I, my dog, my house, are all contaminated in a big way by Bt, a bacterium similar enough to anthrax to be commonly used as an anthrax simulant in laboratory tests, haha, good times.

Nah, I'm not worried. Saint and I have healthy immune systems. Anyway, Bt is unavoidable; it's part of the "bio background" that we live in. It's a jungle out there.

At some time in the distant past a tsunami of paper broke over my house, filled it to the rafters, and then receded, leaving behind pools that filled every nook and cranny. Pools of bank statements, canceled checks, tax forms, pay stubs, insurance policies, disclaimers, declarations, bills and "This Is Not A Bill" notices. Owner's manuals, installation guides, guarantees. Magazines.

I commence, today, to rake out the muck. Some of the magazines will be boxed and offered, free, at the neighborhood yard sale next Saturday, just in case some fool comes along who doesn't think he owns enough magazines, or who thinks he'll have time to read them all someday--the fantasy that has kept me from dumping a collection of "American Scholar" quarterlies that dates back fifteen years. "Architectural Digest"--a gift subscription from my mother--will fill a box, every issue of "Doubletake" will fill another, and "American Indian" a third. Come one, come all.

I've begun another round of shuffling and reorganizing large amounts of stuff. As always, this involves hauling bags of clothes to the thrift shop, deciding what to sell at the upcoming neighborhood yard sale, and trying to find more space to store books. There are already 17 boxes of books stored under the stairs, and another 6 boxes in the junk room. (The junk room is aka "the workout room" because the only useful thing in it is a treadmill--it's where we put everything that has nowhere else to go.)

I've decided to turn a room that's currently used as a study into a guest bedroom. It's a small room, but, having a closet, is officially a bedroom; it just hasn't had a bed in it since we moved into this house in December of '91. I have relatives coming to stay next month, and I was one bedroom short of putting everyone up comfortably. As it is, Michael will be sleeping on the sofa in the family room, loaning his room to my brother and sister-in-law. I already have one guest bedroom--my mother sleeps there when she visits. A second-cousin whom we hope to coerce into coming will sleep in the soon-to-be-second-guest-bedroom. Both of the guest bedrooms are small, and both will have daybeds. This house was built in 1950, when houses were "cozy" compared to today's grandiose scale.

The problem with turning the study into a bedroom is that two of the walls are currently lined with bookcases. I should have room for the books in the family room if I clear all the magazines and videotapes out of the built-in bookcases, I think. So, the first step will be to buy boxes at Staples. On the way over to Staples I'll stop by the thrift store and drop off seven large shopping bags full of clothes. It's amazing how much stuff you accumulate when you live in a place for sixteen years.

Happy Birthday Saint!

I've just spent four days sitting in meetings in which a succession of engineers, biologists, and chemists spoke. During all but one of those presentations a few experts in the audience paid attention while the rest of us fought to stay awake and wondered how many of our finite number of heartbeats were being wasted on this.

And then... and then, on the last day, the next-to-last speaker was a Teacher; he had the gift. And the audience was spell-bound, and we were like my god-- I understand him, and we looked at each other wide-eyed and knew we were all thinking the same thing.

As paranoid as I am about writing about my work, I have to tell you who he is: he's Dr. Vince Ortiz, a prof at Auburn University. Earlier in the week we'd all introduced ourselves and he realized how many of us weren't chemists, and he, he alone, decided to amend his presentation on the fly by using a white board to supplement the material on his powerpoint slides, to explain what he was doing for us non-chemists. He wasn't really animated; he didn't even smile. He used his hands a bit, but mostly he just spoke slowly, explaining things in simple terms.

He talked about Schrödinger's Equation and how he was attempting to solve it computationally, and he talked about harmonic oscillators and hyper-surfaces and infinite sets of basis functions, and we were like why oh why couldn't he have been my chemistry professor in college and we all came away a whole lot smarter and knowing we'd witnessed something rare and wonderful.

Only one speaker followed him. As this hapless fellow walked to the front of the conference room, someone in the group said "You're in trouble now that we all understand this stuff," and we all laughed.

It's been a long time since I've had a long enough layover to get a meal between flights. TGIFriday's "Dragon Chicken" isn't too bad and I'm on my second glass of wine. The sauce is too sweet but as I said, I'm on my second glass of wine so what the hell. Unfortunately the long layover means I'll be getting home at around 1am. I decided yesterday to fly home tonight rather than wait til tomorrow morning, when I'd've had to drag myself out of bed at 4am to catch an early flight.

Oh, I was in Albuquerque this morning, by the way. For a week of meetings that ended at noon today. The weather was beautiful all week, as it almost always is. During previous stays in Albuquerque I've chosen a hotel close to the airport, but not this time. I couldn't get a room near the airport at a reasonable rate (meaning the per diem rate I'll be reimbursed for no matter what I actually pay), so I ended up staying in the city, and I'm very glad I did.

Finally, on this trip, I learned my way around Albuquerque. I learned the layout of the city after having been here maybe a dozen times over the past four years. I discovered a Whole Foods Market at the corner of Indian School and Carlisle, and in the future I plan to stay at the Residence Inn that's just off Carlisle, just north of I-40. The rooms all have kitchens and I hate eating alone in restaurants, most times.

Yeah, I finally got my bearings in Albuquerque. I-40 runs east and west, I-25 north and south. Carlisle, San Mateo, Louisiana, all run north and south. Central runs east and west. I have a good sense of direction, and once I'd mapped the city out in my mind I could get pretty much anywhere I wanted to go, because the layout of the city is so simple. It's like New York that way, although New York is simpler yet. It's unlike Washington D.C., which is a nightmare that I can still get lost in, no problem.

I was there night before last, at the end of a long day. Home again at last, having rounded out my stay in Arizona with a couple of Harry Potter movies and take-out from Olive Garden.

Before I left Arizona I spent an afternoon walking around downtown Prescott, that is to say, circumambulating the courthouse, which defines the center of town. I was amazed to see that Kendall's, the burger-joint/ice-cream-parlor where I worked as a cashier/fountain-girl when I was eighteen, is still there, and the sign hasn't changed:

And standing on the lawn in front of the courthouse, I captured Kendall's in the background and Bucky O'Neill in the foreground, on his horse:

Sorry about the quality of this picture. Trust me, the statue is of a cowboy on a horse. He's there in all weather, but he doesn't care, because he's stoned. Get it? I remember laughing hysterically at that line when I was 17. Comedy gold. Which reminds me that many of my memories of the time I spent in Prescott involve passing a joint around.

Snow Buddies. That's right--Snow Buddies. That's what it's come to. I've given up on adult titles after subjecting my mother to Mulholland Dr. last night. I hated it too. I suppose the critics loved it (who ARE these people?) but it's just hubris for a film maker to come up with a story that makes no sense, throw in some lesbian sex, and expect us to love it. Bah. Chic Hollywood hip crap. I HATE stories that make no sense.

So, after Snow Buddies we watched Miracle Dogs. My mother cried.

My mother and I watched Manhattan last night, and it occured to me that if writing, directing, and acting in a movie makes it a vanity piece, then just about every movie Woody Allen has made has been a vanity piece. If an actor wants to do more than act, wants to create something original, or to take on a theme the major studios won't buy, does that make it a vanity piece? I did a bit of googling and was happy to find this snip of a review of Maze from the New York Observer: "...The best kind of independent filmmaking to shame the somnolent mainstream...." Thank you very much. So it's "independent filmmaking" not a "vanity piece". What distinguishes the one from the other?

Off topic--
I've had this blog for about 4 and a half years and have only once written about a dream. Mike is the only person whose dreams I like to hear about; I find it annoying and tedious when anyone else starts in with "I had the craziest dream last night..." But I want to record a dream I had in the wee hours of the morning because I don't want to forget it, and there's nowhere else I record dreams since I stopped keeping a pen-and-paper journal. There were fairies in my dream last night. Fairies. Five of them. They were about 10 inches high and had wings, but they didn't look misty or ethereal as they do in fantasy art; they were solid. They wore clothing that was highly decorative but neither wispy nor sheer. It was fairly form-fitting but not tight or revealing; you wouldn't want sleeves or what-have-you flapping around as you flew, would you? The leader was a female with short hair, and she spoke to me. She said "You are the one. Do what it takes." I have no idea what that means. I had a semi-lucid moment in which I thought "Oh my god, fairies! Now I know they really exist."

The fairy moment was embedded in a dream in which my late husband and I were trying to install water pipes in the ceiling of an apartment so we could cultivate a garden or something. Neither of us had a clue as to how to proceed. Typical. He was being his usual self-absorbed, difficult self. No sentimentality taints my memory of him in my dreams.

I’m still staying with my mother in Prescott, Arizona. Yesterday I went to a combination bookstore/video-rental place where my brother and I rent DVDs whenever either of us is here. It’s a big place, about half books, half DVDs. I’d guess they have tens of thousands of DVDs for rent, just one copy of most of the titles, stacked on shelves like books in a library. Whenever I go in there my mind goes blank. I spent more than an hour reading titles yesterday, finally choosing four movies I hadn’t seen, not having much hope for any of them.

The first one I watched was Maze, which I chose because it stars Rob Morrow. I didn’t expect much from it—the only thing I’d read about it was a bit of Hollywood snark that labeled it a “vanity piece” because Morrow also co-wrote and co-directed it. It’s about an artist, Lyle Maze, who has learned to cope with a nearly-intolerable case of Tourette Syndrome and an associated obsessive compulsive disorder. Maze is neither helpless nor self-pitying—he’s professionally successful and respected. He has a couple of friends, but he’s written off the possibility of a relationship.

Rob Morrow nailed the role. I’m trying to be objective here—I like him—but I’ve seen a lot of the stuff he’s done and this is the best. You can tell he’s studied TS, and he doesn’t hold back when acting out the symptoms. Some scenes are hard to watch—particularly when he’s stressed, when walking down the street or making a phone call can be a nearly impossible task. The emotional effect is slightly mitigated by the knowledge that he chooses, on a day-to-day basis, to live with his symptoms rather than take medication that he fears will dull his mind and his art.

The movie has brought back some painful childhood memories that I haven’t thought about for decades. It’s something I never talk about--something long buried and forgotten: I had a tic disorder as a child. Tourette’s is on one extreme end of a spectrum of tic disorders; mine was closer to the other end, involving facial tics without any vocalization, but it was bad enough. My parents knew nothing of tic disorders or TS or any of the rest of it—they simply called it “nervous twitching.” Like Maze’s father, mine hated it and believed I could stop if I really tried. It would have been bad enough had I been a boy, but a girl! My father told me no boys would ever want to date me if I didn’t stop twitching. I “outgrew” it, although it would be more accurate to say that sometime during college I became able to control it. According to the Wikipedia article this is typical.

In both of the math departments in which I studied—undergraduate and graduate—there were professors who “twitched,” and I now believe mathematicians are prone to this and a mixed bag of other disorders. Based on my own experience, one doesn’t decide to become a mathematician: one is born with a mind that plays with numbers as toys during hours of boredom spent sitting in a first-grade classroom. Such a mind can be Rube Goldbergian and doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. In first and second grade I discovered simple rules of number theory and devised proofs. The rules were correct, the proofs valid. It was simple stuff, but I had only addition and subtraction to work with.

That was a digression—sorry. Obviously TS doesn’t only afflict mathematicians. I see from the Wikipedia article that many “notable individuals” in all walks of life have had it. Wikipedia says TS is inherited, but no one else in my family has ever had a tic disorder and my son never had one, so I dunno. Anyway, the movie is worth seeing.