Right now

Last night I simultaneously added and checked off "skinny dip in Lake Washington" to my list of things to do before I die. It was
"cold dark deep and absolutely clear," and very wonderful. I also went on a jog with a friend's dog that was great until the dog collapsed from overheating (but then she went in the lake and was fine), helped other friends move into a really great house, and made mango lassi "ice cream."

Now I must must must do laundry and clean up around here. Why does everything feel weird right now?

Adventures in the city

Dog-sitting, Helping-moving, Sailing-instructing, Biking, Bar-crawling, Poetry-teaching, Business-mentor-seeking, Librarian-consulting, Fancy-new-phone-buying, Potlucking, Getting-out-of-the-city, Not-enough-working, Everything-rolling-along-in-a-way-that-resembles-life. Today I was almost brought to tears by a 3-legged cat who appeared to be lost (but wasn't). A phrase I often think of is, "a door opens and you walk through it."

Star-struck?

Today I discovered that one of my students is the son of a famous intellectual. It came up in a weird way: in a report on a reading he attended, my student mentioned that the author had cited but misrepresented the famous intellectual's most famous work. Since it's rare for any of my students to be aware of the work of any famous intellectuals, let alone able to evaluate representations of it, this stuck out to me as interesting. Then my eye jumped to the last name at the top of the paper which, I suddenly realized, was the same as that of the famous intellectual. I thought . . . hmmm. So I asked the student about it in his conference today and he said, sheepishly and cutely, "he's my dad." I'm not sure how to feel about it. I've never taught the progeny of famous intellectuals before.

(I will tell you who it is, but obviously I'm not going to make it google-able.)

I did two interesting things today

One, I went for a half-hour long run on the track at the gym . . . barefoot!It's part of my campaign to get stronger, better ankles. It actually felt pretty normal, and I don't think it slowed me down or made me more tired. I'm curious about what it will feel like tomorrow.

Then during sailing class my prescription sunglasses fell off my head into the water while I was rigging my boat. So I sailed blind all afternoon and then at the end of the class I had to dive to the soggy disgusting bottom of the lake in order to retrieve them. It was unpleasant but doable. Have I mentioned that I love summer?

My vet said that based on recent research she has started recommending that people make indoor cats work for their food more. So I just made a little contraption out of a tupperware container with holes cut in the top that requires Kitcat to bat his kibble into position below the only hole big enough for his head. Right now he is kind of cautiously stalking it, but I know he is going to LOVE it.

Cat in the light of day

Well, Kitcat got a clean bill of health from my regular vet and today's visit was way more pleasant than last night. It's funny that the thing I always didn't like about my regular vet is that she didn't seem to realize how good and special and beautiful and sweet a cat Kitcat is. But today she was full of love for him, and she told me that she likes adult cats better than kittens and enjoys watching them grow up into who they're going to be.

The experience last night made me realize, in terms of human health care, how totally inhumane a health care system is that makes people pay piecemeal for their own medical treatment. It's traumatic enough when you're dealing with animals but in a reasonable society no person would ever have to get on the phone trying to get a loan for a lifesaving procedure.

In other news, I think I totally have a crush on Sonia Sotomayor. I maybe kind of wish I'd tried to become a judge instead of an underemployed poet. Hearing her calmly parse words in the face of the blatant (and racist) misrepresentations of nincompoop Jeff Sessions is inspiring.

Cat Woes

This evening I got home from doing some work and noticed that my cat had become distressed. As I tried to figure out what he could have eaten that was making him sick, I discovered a corner of a door jamb that he had gnawed off. Chunks of plaster on the floor, insulation tufting out. So I took him to the late nite emergency vet and after almost four hours and $248 he is more or less back to his old self, though I'm supposed to keep getting his lead levels checked throughout the week. Also, alarmingly, he keeps returning to the now cleaned and blocked off scene of the crime.

I hate going to the vet. It just seems like such a rip off. It's not that I begrudge paying for actual care, but the only thing they actually did for Kitcat was to give him some subcutaneous fluid to rehydrate him; but it was $95 for the "exam" and what that basically consisted of was a $75 call to poison control, who, of course, didn't really know anything and just advised taking lots of expensive precautions. I shudder to think what tomorrow will cost--and, of course, I'm still also worried that Kitcat is not as much improved as he seems.

The vet trip was particularly stressful because the waiting room was occupied the whole time by a young couple who had just moved to Seattle and whose dog had also had an unwholesome snack of some kind. The woman spent hours on the phone begging her father to co-sign a loan to cover the several thousand dollar surgery that the vet was waiting for approval to start performing. She was weeping and incoherent; her boyfriend looked more and more miserable every time she forgot what she was asking for and said "we'll pay you back." I could kind of feel for the father too--she kept saying "we'll have jobs," and $4,000 is a lot to spend if your job is in the future tense--but the situation was pretty awful.

The Hot Shop

After a hard spring term and no break before a hectic start to summer, I've been feeling like it's important for the "likes fun" part of myself to perform a little coup d'etat against the "feels guilty if not working" part, which has been getting awfully comfortable in power. So while I did do some work this weekend, I also did a lot of things that were not productive in terms of meeting any immediate goal but that turned out to be an important reminder that there's more to life than grading the next set of papers.

Including: walking a dog, sailing a boat, receiving a free burrito, chatting at a bar with the wryly reticent son of a famous author and his talkative wife, going to see Shakespeare in the park with a big group of gay Mormons, and, today, going to the totally awesome Museum of Glass in Tacoma where we spent a long time watching a bunch of guys working with blowtorches and a 2000 degree oven on what, after a lot of rolling, wrestling, cradling in a frying pan filled with water, caressing with a wet newspaper, and direct application of flames turned into what looked like a mad chemist's super-vial. We also saw a talk by the awesomely-named Preston Singletary, who makes versions of traditional Northwest native art out of glass. They are conceptually interesting as well as gorgeous (based on the slides--we got distracted by the "hot shop" and the museum closed before we got to the exhibit).



The whole experience made me remember what I think is hard for writers to really feel, the "it's just cool" aspect of art. Glassblowing, though I often don't like the results aesthetically, is, from a craft standpoint, obviously and inarguably cool. Some of what I found interesting: a lot of the artistry is clearly motivated by technical challenges (both the limitations they impose and the imperative to transcend them). The process is inherently collaborative and literally can't be done alone. We watched the hot shop guys try to put a little topknot on their vial three different ways before one finally stuck and was not too uneven, and my friend who is a glassblower said that "you always have to have a Plan B."

There's a lesson there I'm going to think about. In the hot shop I also got an idea for a poem, and I'm also going to think about trying to remember what that was.

What Ankles Know

I've been thinking recently about proprioception--the body's ability to know where it is in space. I only recently learned about this as a distinct attribute, and, as a naturally klutzy person, I feel particularly able to appreciate how amazing it is that the body can coordinate with itself and its environment--even as prone-to-spillingly as mine does.

The New York Times has an article today about how ankle injuries are correlated with poor balance and the most interesting point it makes, I think, is that after an injury the nerves that allow your ankles to know where they are, where the ground is, where the rest of your body is, and how everything is moving--or whatever information you need to be able to balance on two little toothpicks like we do--that part of the healing process is that these nerves need to be retrained. (The article suggests doing this by standing on one foot while brushing your teeth.)

This is interesting to me because I've had some ankle problems recently, and have noticed that just in the past year or so I can no longer jump in and out of boats the way I used to. Or scramble over rocks. I've described the feeling as "not trusting" my ankles, but really the article gets at it more precisely; it's not really a confidence issue or that I don't trust my ankles, in the sense that I consciously expect them to fail me (I don't), but that they themselves seem no longer to know what they're doing. Since my goatlike springiness and confidence on rocks and boats has always been one of my few and prized physical abilities, I am pleased that I might be able to get it back while brushing my teeth.

I was also thinking about proprioception and boats because as I was sailing a Laser yesterday I was marveling at how much more gracefully I can move around that little boat than I can do almost anything else. I'm still klutzy compared to other people who know how to sail, but it is an odd but extremely enjoyable sensation to do easily what you know intellectually to be an awkward movement. I was having a really good time and realizing that that was a big part of why.

Proud

Today I changed a tire for the first time! Yesterday I tried and the lug nuts just wouldn't budge, but today I decided to jump on them, and they cranked right off. The rest was actually really easy. Still, I feel like I've become a different category of person now: a Person Who Can Fix a Flat. Just call me if you need me.

I'm continuing my genre fiction odyssey, and can report that John Le Carre's "The Night Manager" is awesome at first but ultimately kind of unsatisfying. I never thought that grad school would really change my relationship with reading but it actually has made me more reluctant to read anything literary outside of "work." It's unfortunate, but still, even if it's a mystery or or whatever, having a novel that I'm reading makes life so much better. I should start another one, stat.

Now this is weird . . .

I'm writing an assignment prompt for my students about attending a poetry reading and, as usual, I searched google images for an illustration for the assignment sheet. As I often do, I used a bland search term literally describing the gist of the assignment, in this case "poetry reading." High up on the second page of results, I saw this:

And even though it was random and a tiny thumbnail, I thought, hey, that looks familiar, could it be . . . ? And I clicked on it. And it was!

It is, or at least it appears to be, a photo of one of the trailer park poetry readings back in Irvine, back when there was a trailer park, and there were poetry readings in it. Those were good old days.

The weird thing is that this photo was on a Minnesota arts blog. Huh?