Tohu Bohu

A question occurs to me today on which I would like to survey my Gentle Readers (and their friends and associates and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts). On a day when you feel lousy, but have to go to work anyway—let me clarify and stipulate a bit here. By work, I’m essentially thinking about a day in public that you can’t easily get out of, whether it is paid work or attending classes or the church rummage sale that you volunteered for or whatever. And by lousy, let’s say something like the migraine, or a toothache, or I suppose menstrual cramps. Let’s take contagion out of it, because this isn’t about when to call in sick and go back to bed, but the kind of thing that you know is going to make you miserable all the day long, without preventing you from actually fulfilling your responsibility.

So. On a day like that, do you (1) crawl into whatever clothes are near the bed and comfortable and meet minimum requirements, putting as little of your miniscule supply of energy into the process as you can get away with, or (B) put on that special shirt (or dress or whatever) and put extra effort into your morning grooming, figuring that you need the extra energy over the day that you will get from knowing you look bitchen?

I’m wondering if this is a highly gendered thing, statistically, what with women growing up with more faith in the power of clothing, or whether it isn’t, because it has more to do with optimism and pessimism and so on. Or whether women are more likely to conserve energy, as on the whole they must have far more days like this than men do.

Your Humble Blogger is of the second set, the ones who dress up to ease the pain. But then, that doesn’t stop it from being highly gendered the other way, as I could just be an outlier (this charge of effeminacy is new to me, he said, arching his eyebrow). What’s your strategy?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

So. I happened to pick up this interminable list of food questions from fauxklore’s lj, and I wound up answering all of them. The thing is, I am not in any way a foodie. I suspect that the list of questions is more interesting for somebody who thinks about food more often (and more variously); to the extent that mine is interesting at all, it is interesting because my answers are so boring. If you know what I mean. Because I don’t cook very often, or very well, or eat at a variety of restaurants, my answers to these questions highlight the paucity of my gustatory imagination. Which, I hope, makes them worth reading.

1. What’s the last thing you ate? A brownie. One of my co-workers brought in brownies and I had to be polite, didn’t I?
2. What’s your favorite cheese? Gouda. It’s gouda and it’s gouda for you!
3. What’s your favorite fish? I like salmon a lot. I’ve had wonderful swordfish, and that was probably the best fish dish I’ve had, but salmon is very likely to be tasty.
4. What’s your favorite fruit? Apple.
5. When, if ever, did you start liking olives? If I remember correctly, it was just about the time that hell froze over.
6. When, if ever, did you start liking beer? I don’t like beer. I did start drinking cider when I was in England and looking for something to drink in a pub, and I discovered that I really like cider, so I drink a lot of that. This summer, late in the summer, I drank a lot of that lemonade-flavored beer as well.
7. When, if ever, did you start liking shellfish? I don’t remember not liking shrimp, but I ate it only very rarely growing up. I discovered that I like scallops around, oh, 1994 or 1995 or so? I had lobster for the first time around then as well, and discovered that I liked it OK, although it wasn’t worth the effort.
8. What was the best thing your parent/s used to make? My mother’s famous candied yams. I have the recipe (not really a recipe, more of an instruction manual) and it’s my bring-along dish for festive occasions.
9. What’s the native specialty of your home town? Phoenix, Arizona? Specialty dish? Er, um. I know! Cactus jelly!
10. What’s your comfort food? Potato chips. Although it is probably worth mentioning that the absence of tea means the absence of comfort, so to that extent, the answer is tea.
11. What’s your favorite type of chocolate? Probably good hot chocolate, very rich.
12. How do you like your steak? Cut from a lamb or a pig.
13. How do you like your burger? My Best Reader combines ground meats, including lamb and turkey and pork, in some mystic combination, with breadcrumbs and spices and egg and whatnot. So good. But of course they need to be well-cooked.
14. How do you like your eggs? In a sandwich: English muffin, egg and sausage. Or swimming-pool eggs, where you fry the egg in the hole in a slice of bread. Either way, they have to be over hard (or at least fairly hard) or it doesn’t work.
15. How do you like your potatoes? Sliced very thin and fried crispy. Or mushed into a slurry with salt and whatever the hell else is in a Pringle and molded into that Pringle shape.
16. How do you take your coffee? Right over to my Best Reader.
17. How do you take your tea? Often.
18. What’s your favorite mug? The mug I drink from the most often is a lightweight grey travel mug. It used to have a logo on it from an educational institution that employed me, but the shield has worn off and the lettering has nearly worn off. It now says EDY RNM. I also have two mugs that I drink from at home (alternately, not simultaneously) that were a gift from my father-in-law from Las Vegas New York. But my favorite mug is the mug I got from the Alumni Office of my alma mater that has the school logo and the words ‘I was mugged by the Alumni Office’. But there’s a story there.
19. What’s your cookie of choice? Chocolate chip. Medium size, medium soft. No nuts. Second choice would be a really chewy molasses cookie.
20. What’s your ideal breakfast? A great big cup of really good hot tea. An excellent newspaper. My Best Reader (not to eat, to converse with). Probably an egg sandwich, with sausage or bacon.
21. What’s your ideal sandwich? Now I’m thinking about an egg sandwich, and it sounds pretty darn good to me. With really crisp bacon? Mmm. Other than that, good maple ham and provolone and brown mustard on ciabatta, pressed hot.
22. What’s your ideal pizza (topping and base)? Thick crust (Sicilian), sweet garlicky sauce, lots of cheese, pepperoni. But I’m happy with a plain cheese pizza.
23. What’s your ideal pie (sweet or savory)? Apple. Just out of curiosity, would Boston Cream Pie count in this category, or is it a cake?
24. What’s your ideal salad? Chicken Caesar, with lots of parmesan shavings and small crunchy croutons.
25. What food do you always like to have in the fridge? Cold cuts and baby carrots. Also, I keep water chilled in the fridge.
26. What food do you always like to have in the freezer? Ice cream, frozen veggies, sausage of some kind (hot dog, kielbasa, breakfast sausage, chicken-apple), bad frozen pizza.
27. What food do you always like to have in the cupboard? Noodles, tomato sauce, potato chips. Also wine, but that’s a different cupboard.
28. What spices can you not live without? I could probably live without the whole rack, if I had to. But if I don’t have oregano, pepper and garlic, it’s hard for me to cook with the rest of the rack.
29. What sauces can you not live without? Is mustard a sauce? What about honey? Otherwise, if there were no barbecue sauce in the world, I would be all sad and stuff.
30. Where do you buy most of your food? Well, my Best Reader buys most of our food, mostly at the nearest supermarket, a Shaw’s. That’s probably where I buy more food than anywhere else, although I also shop at the corner market (called Hall’s Market), the A&P, a kosher market and the CostCo.
31. How often do you go food shopping? Probably between us we make a stop three times a week. Maybe more.
32. What’s the most you’ve spent on a single food item? I have no idea. We did buy one of those Box O’Meat deals this summer, but that’s not a single food item. A leg of lamb?
33. What’s the most expensive piece of kitchen equipment you own? Not counting the range and the fridge? We have one of those sandwich presses; that’s probably the most expensive. We have some lovely knives that would probably be expensive, but we didn’t pay for them.
34. What’s the last piece of equipment you bought for your kitchen? A fine mesh strainer. And there’s a story there, too.
35. What piece of kitchen equipment could you not live without? Well, if I didn’t have a refrigerator, it would be pretty tough. Other than that, there’s no single thing that I can think of in the absence of which I couldn’t make do with something else. Even a teapot.
36. How many times a week/month do you cook from raw ingredients? It depends on what is meant, here, but I’m going to say three times a week. I’m counting lunches and breakfasts and I’m counting some things as cooking from raw ingredients that probably shouldn’t count. My Best Reader, on the other hand, cooks from raw ingredients at least half-a-dozen times a week by any definition, and probably a dozen by mine. Not counting baking.
37. What’s the last thing you cooked from raw ingredients? This is a good example of what I was talking about. I made tortilla pizza with store-bought tortillas and a tomato sauce my Best Reader made with store-bought sausage and a can of tomato sauce and a jar of pre-minced garlic and some other stuff. Is that cooking from raw ingredients? Probably not. If you don’t count that, I made a fry-up recently with potato, egg, cheese and ham. You don’t count that, either? Man, you are tough.
38. What’s your favorite thing to make for yourself? You know that fry-up thing? That’s probably it. In terms of enjoying the making part.
39. What meats have you eaten besides cow, pig, chicken and turkey?
Lamb, venison, goat, alligator, buffalo, rattlesnake. Fowls: definitely duck and goose, and ostrich and I’m pretty sure I’ve had game bird, although I can’t remember what: quail or squab or something.
40. What’s the last time you ate something that had fallen on the floor? 11:40 am.
41. What’s the last time you ate something you’d picked in the wild? Does a commercial apple orchard count as the wild? If not, I may never have eaten anything picked in the wild. I don’t particularly like berries, which are the only things I remember being with people picking wild and eating. I have sipped honeysuckle from the vine, though.
42. Place the following cuisines in order of preference (greatest to least): Indian, Chinese, Italian, Thai, French, sushi. Although I get a yen for Chinese the most often of those, but I like Indian more when I do eat it.
43. Place the following boozes in order of preference (greatest to least): Vodka, rum, brandy, whiskey, gin, tequila. This is mostly based on one or two tastes. I don’t drink strong liquor straight, and I don’t drink mixed drinks very often, either. I may not have had any of those boozes (not counting things cooked with them) in a year or more.
44. Place the following flavors in order of preference (greatest to least): Garlic, lime, ginger, basil, aniseed. The middle three are close enough together that I could put them in any order.
45. Place the following fruits in order of preference (greatest to least): Apple, orange, banana, pineapple, watermelon, cherry. A big drop-off after pineapple.
46. Bread and spread: Just bread and spread? Hm. Crusty Italian and butter. Although a baguette and gouda would be better, if you are big-category in spreads.
47. What’s your fast food restaurant of choice, and what do you usually order? First would be a local pizza joint, two slices of pepperoni. If I can’t locate one, or the local pizza is inedible, a Quizno’s chicken sandwich.
48. What are three of the best dining-out experiences you’ve had?OK, here is the difference between me and a foodie. My best dining-out experiences have been about the conversation and the company, not the food. I’ve eaten good food, I’ve eaten things that made me say wow this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but I don’t have any memory of it after a few months. So. Three great dining-out experiences. A few years ago, on (or nearly on) my Best Reader’s birthday, we ate in a little restaurant in Boston’s North End called l’Osteria. There was soup with tortellini, and I believe I had a citrusy chicken dish of some kind, and we chatted and had a lovely time, and then went to the New Garden to watch the Beanpot finals. That’s one. Another could be eating at Goat Hill Pizza with my Best Reader and two other Gentle Readers (long before there was a Tohu Bohu) at a sort of all-you-can-eat night where it was a sort of pizza dim sum experience, and we ate so much we staggered back to the bus to ride home in replete silence. Although generally I think a great dining-out experience shouldn’t involve so much regret afterward. And a third one could be—can I count the time we bought an éclair the size of my fucking head from a cart in Camden Town? Or how’s this for what YHB is really like: one of my best dining-out experiences was the first time that the guys at Pinocchio’s saw me come in the door on a busy day, I held up two fingers, and when I got to the front of the line two slices of pepperoni were on the counter waiting.
49. What’s your choice of tipple at the end of a long day? Port wine.
50. Favorite cookbook/s? I don’t have one. I’m very fond of the stuff my Best Reader makes out of the Wooden Spoon Bread Book, though.
51. Got any favorite food blogs? No. I did read Sarahparah’s Cook and Nifty Wench blog for a while, but I guess it’s defunct, now.
52. What’s the next thing you’ll eat? Does tea count? No? Then I don’t know. I mean, I could make it easy by declaring that I will eat a piece of chocolate, and then doing it, but that doesn’t seem right. No, my Best Reader is preparing some sort of dinner, thank goodness, and I have no idea whatsoever what it might be. If I had to guess… fish?

I wrote most of this yesterday afternoon; the next thing I ate turned out to be the aforementioned lamburgers, some very grainy whole grain grain grain bread (which was technically the first thing I ate, as I had a bite after the blessing), some squash and a very tasty carrot dish with butter, brown sugar and ginger. And a glass of wine. So I should append to this note about me not being a foodie that I eat very well indeed, actually.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a few hours now, it’ll be Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year. May you all be inscribed in the Book of Life, Gentle Readers, for a good year, and a healthy year, and a sweet year. We could use one, couldn’t we?

It’s just beginning to be autumn here in central Connecticut. The trees are mostly green in my leafy town, so the dozen or so that have begun to show fall colors stand out. One on Prospect with a lot of red, one on Arnoldale all orange, and the ones over by the athletic center are all yellow. Mostly, though, it’s green, green, green—but not for long.

The days are getting shorter, too. We’ve passed the equinox; we passed below twelve hours of daylight last week. By Hallowe’en it’ll be down to ten and a half hours or so, and then we’ll be back on standard time and the sun will be down at quarter to five. The workday is still ending in daylight, but not for long.

Perhaps that’s why this Rosh Hashanah feels to YHB more like the winding up of the old year than the opening of the new one. The image that we play with for this holiday of the Book of Life (on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed) doesn’t usually deal with last year’s volume. We’re getting to the last few words, I imagine, of whatever was written for us this last year. Was it a sweet year? A healthy year?

We do, traditionally, look back on the year, for the purpose of arguing our case before the Heavenly Judge, and we run around apologizing to everybody for whatever harms we may have occasioned, for our sins to each other of omission and commission. We forgive each other, more or less sincerely, hoping to be forgiven ourselves, more or less sincerely. That whole human forgiveness thing has to come first, before Divine forgiveness, both in traditional rabbinic teaching and modern psychological understanding. But that backwards look is largely unconnected to the Book. We don’t submit a subpoena to have the Book admitted in evidence. Perhaps because we feel it wouldn’t on the whole do our cause much good.

Anyway.

Gentle Readers, I do hope you forgive me for my various failings, both as Vardibidian and (as many of you know me) in the Real World.

I suppose this would be a good holiday season to talk about the traditional Mishnaic financial structure, under which it is absolutely forbidden to charge interest on loans, and similarly forbidden to lend money (or lease real property) for longer than seven years. Such rules, even if routinely broken as we can assume them to be, would clearly have prevented the modern world entirely, not just its sudden dissolution this month.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

According to Presidential Proclamation and in accordance with the law, today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day and the start of Constitution Week, the one week out of fifty-two where our government abides by the restrictions of the Constitution.

No, that’s not right.

What should YHB and y’all do to celebrate the Constitution today? This Tohu Bohu is not legally obligated to hold an educational program, since we aren’t currently receiving federal funds. And once again, Sen. Byrd, making Constitution Day mandatory is missing the point badly, badly.

We could sing the Preamble. That’s always nice. I did my Top Five provisions a few years ago, and I don’t know that they’ve changed in the interim. Gentle Readers in the Bay State can enjoy the results of yesterday’s primary elections; there was a lovely sticker-shock victory for Carl Sciortino and Dianne Wilkerson appears to have lost her primary, which I find shocking. Elections have consequences, which is good to keep in mind, right?

Or we could promote the general welfare. The thing is, without a formal declaration of war, there’s no rank higher than general available, and even in wartime, a general can only be promoted to a different kind of general.

Maybe I’ll just go find a busker and give him my James Madison dollar.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, and August was a lousy month for this Tohu Bohu, wasn’t it? I wrote 34 entries, if I counted correctly, and y’all contributed only 26 comments (plus nine of YHB’s comments in response). That’s a low for comments, at least for the last couple of years. I blame myself. And Matt Hulan.

Anyway, my show now being over (I will have at least one more post about the show, probably today or tomorrow), and the year having started (the academic year, that is, the one that dominates my life and I’m guessing the lives of several of y’all), and the campaign having at last begun for realsies (huzzah), I am hoping for more active conversation here.

Although I’m low on inspiration. So. I’m opening up this Tohu Bohu for y’all to give me ideas on what to write about, that y’all will converse about. The election? Presidential and Legislative? More about music? More about the library? Hungarian jokes? Rants about items in the daily news?

OK, to get y’all used to commenting again, here’s a direct question for you: Do you read lefty blogs? Specifically, do you read (a) Eschaton, (2) Talking Point Memo (looking at the front/headlines), (iii) TAPped? I have been assuming that any of y’all who have any interest in politics read those blogs, and so not commenting on things that are covered there, unless I strongly disagree with what appears to be the agreed take by those commenters. Should that be my continuing policy? Or should I pass along observations I agree with, to expose y’all to the highlights of Left Blogovia?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

So. This past weekend, Your Humble Blogger completed the run of Pygmalion and had a birthday. Closing night was the eve of what I’ve come to think of as my first thirty-ninth birthday. This confluence (and, um, some alcoholic intake) led me to brood over endings and passings. I’m not going to be doing another show with that gang, and I’m not going to be in my mid-thirties anymore, either.

The gang are pretty terrific. This is my third show with the same director and stage manager, and four castmates have joined me in all three of them, another one in two of the three. All good people. And the actors who I met for this show were good people, too; they were the sort of people I would want to be in three shows with. And it’s possible, if unlikely, that I will be in a show with one of them again someday, or even two. But not more than that. I am not driving sixty miles to rehearsals again; that was crazy.

Before doing those three shows, I had stopped doing theater for about ten years. I left college with the idea of becoming a professional actor; I soon discovered that I didn’t actually want to be a professional actor. I still enjoyed theater, though, and for a few years, I did shows at the community theater level. I found that level frustrating. Many people who do community theater are more interested in socializing with their friends in the group than in working on a show, which infuriated YHB, who still attempted to maintain a professional attitude (vaddevah I thought dat meant). The production values were often terrible, not only because of a shoestring budget but because nobody cared about the lights, or the sound, or the stage management. I didn’t have a whole lot of fun.

When I walked in to auditions for The Man Who Came to Dinner, I had determined that I wouldn’t make myself angry about professionalism. If I had a good time, and we put on a decent show, that would be fine. In fact, we put on a terrific show, and although the cast wasn’t in the least professional, we had a good time and worked hard. So I did another show, with most of the same people, and it was great. Since I was a lead this time, it was more work for me, but enjoyable work, and we had a terrific time and put on a good show in the end. Then I moved from Western Connecticut to Greater Hartford, and welcomed the Youngest Member, and took another couple of years off theater. And then our director told me she was doing Pygmalion, and my Best Reader said that technically, it wasn’t actually impossible. And once again, I worked hard and had a good time, and the show was good. But I also spent three hours a day in the car, and I missed dinner with my family four days a week for two months, not to mention the kids’ bedtime, and my Best Reader lost two months of work on her book because she was single-parenting while I was driving. So that won’t happen again.

I keep coming back to the definition of middle-age that I came across recently: it’s the time of life when people stop thinking about the future in terms of what they will be able to do, and start thinking about the future in terms of what they won’t be able to do. There’s youth, of course, when every year or two there’s some new thing you are admitted to: middle-school, movies on your own, driving, dating, voting, draft age, credit cards, car rental, drinking, sex, a real job, your own apartment, marriage, home ownership, promotion, parenthood. At thirty-five, you are qualified to be President of the United States, and that’s the last one until you start getting discounts. Your Humble Blogger is thirty-nine at last; there's the house, the children, a job, my Best Reader’s career. I’ve got a wonderful life; I am clam-happy. And middle-aged.

Do I want to go and visit family across the country? I can do that, thank the Divine, as long as I budget for it, and arrange it so that the Perfect Non-Reader doesn’t miss too much school. And of course I can’t just crash on somebody’s sofa anymore, because of my back (and my knee), so I need to either stay with somebody who has a guest room or take a hotel room, and there has to be enough room for the Perfect Non-Reader, and somewhere for the Youngest Member, too, and if we all share a room, nobody’s going to get much sleep, and you know? The hell with it.

That’s what I mean by middle-aged. It’s not chronological, it’s a combination of life’s circumstances and frame of mind. And I’m in it.

The important thing is to remember that I am in the middle-aged frame of mind because I've got so many wonderful things. I don’t want to be eighteen anymore, or twenty-three or even thirty. I want to have what I’ve got: a family, a home town, a settled life, immovables, habits, comforts. That’s not a bad thing.

And while the knee hurts a lot, and the back is always vulnerable, and the extra forehead limits my choice of hairstyle, the stamina is just about where it should be at this point, I’m still at the point where the physical plant problems are an inconvenience, rather than a barrier or a burden, something to keep in mind rather than something that can’t be ignored. So that’s all right, d’y’see?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, here’s an odd question: Joshua Keating over at FP Passport notes that “this election now features both a Hawaiian and an Alaskan”. I know it’s considered a good thing for a Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate to have two or even three home states, but is it a good thing for us regular joes?

I have voted as a resident of five states. Sequentially, yes. I grew up in Arizona, and voted absentee as an Arizona resident during my college years in Pennsylvania. After college, I lived for three years in California, then for ten in Massachusetts, then a year and a half in Virginia, and now I’ve been in Connecticut for three years. Is that right? Three years? Well, anyway. I still think of myself as an Arizonan, and I think of myself as a Nutmegger now as well, but although I do still feel a connection to Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts and Virginia, I certainly don’t think of them as home states.

Do any of you think of yourselves as having two home states? Or three?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger watched almost all of last cycle’s Democratic Convention, and blogged a lot of it, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I particularly enjoyed blogging the not-ready-for-prime-time stuff. And I would enjoy watching and blogging again this year: this evening will be a dozen or so Representatives with whom I am mostly unfamiliar, the Attorney General of Illinois, Sen. Klobuchar, some union folk, eventually Sens. Harkin and McCaskill, and of course Michelle Obama. And I will watch some of it, I hope. But not much.

Part of that is simply the time zone thing. Today’s action starts at three in the afternoon, Mountain Time, which is five in Connecticut, not a good hour for focusing on the live stream . The two or three hours that follow are also bad; I could have the stream on, but I will be eating dinner with my family (a very important thing, which I have missed far too often this summer), and then playing with my children and getting them to bed. I can’t say I know for sure when Ms. Obama will speak, but the schedule calls for her to be the last speech, likely at around ten o’clock our time. I may watch, or I may turn in early; I am still catching up on lost sleep from being in a show.

Anyway, I will probably make the odd comment or two, but I’m afraid that for full convention blogging you will have to look elsewhere. Or do it yourself! I’ll open this Tohu Bohu to guest posts on the convention, or you can comment on these posts. Help a brother out, Gentle Readers.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at the OUP blog, which is a strange thing, they feature some advice for insomniacs from Overcoming Insomnia, by Jack D. Edinger and Colleen E. Carney. Now, YHB is an insomniac, and some of the advice seems like it might be worth trying, but I had to point out this bit.

While in bed, you should avoid doing things that you do when you are awake. Do not read, watch TV, eat, study, use the phone, or do other things that require you to be awake while you are in bed. …Sexual activity is the only exception to this rule.

Hunh? I mean, yes, I get the concept that if you comfortably read in bed (or watch TV, or write in your journal) then it is harder to tell your body that you’re in bed damn it, and that it is time to sleep. I understand that, and even if I’m a bit skeptical, I see why it makes sense as advice. But if you are training your insomnia that BED=SLEEP, then why make the exception for sex? I mean, surely if you, for instance, said that the only two things you do in bed are read and sleep, then, well, the light’s off, and your body is largely shutting down and relaxing, and even if your mind is in the mood to read, well, as I say, I understand the advice, but hell! If the only two things you do in the bed are sleep and WHOOOOOHOOO, then isn’t your body going to get a bit confused? I mean, I would be. Frankly, if you are going to make an exception for sex, then you may as well order pizza and put on tap shoes, because BED doesn’t equal SLEEP anymore.

In fact, reading the advice, I would be inclined to think that for an insomniac (and it should be clear that this advice is for insomniacs only) the advice to keep a bed that is only for sleeping, and to take your sexual activity to another bed (or wherever) would be more persuasive. Yes, yes, sexual activity can make a fellow sleepy, but I’m guessing most insomniacs will try that method long before they start buying clinical workbooks. When you get to the book-buying stage, you are willing to try keeping another bed for screwing. Winston Churchill (it is said) would change beds when he couldn’t sleep, and in the morning he was sober and she was still ugly. Or something.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger spent the weekend at a wedding and the surrounding events. The people getting married are Gentle Readers (and occasional commenters) at this Tohu Bohu; one overlapped with me at college and is therefore an Old College Buddy within the meaning of the act, while the other is a year younger and does not so qualify, although she and I (and my Best Reader) have several subjects of interest in common, things like, oh, Scripture, heresies and how to beat college students without leaving external marks. I am fond of these two, and it’s always nice for me when people of whom I am fond marry each other, making for happiness that increases by squares. Well, some people would call us all squares, but that’s neither here nor there.

Much of the weekend was spent with Old College Buddies and their spouses, some of whom are also Old College Buddies. There was also a large contingent of what one might call Younger College Buddies, that is, persons who went to college with people who went to college with people who went to college with YHB. Our social set has (or at least has had) some mechanisms for strengthening such links; there were people there from the class of seventy-cough and from the class of ought-sneeze. Well, and the early one is an outlier, but there were multiple representatives from the class of eighty-wheeze. And, not coincidentally, I suspect that at one point the majority of Gentle Readers here were in one room.

While YHB spent much of the weekend enjoying thinking about the Wedding (which was lovely and moving) and much of the weekend chasing after the Youngest Member (who was lovely and moving rather quickly), much of the weekend was also spent thinking about an Old High School Buddy who died earlier this week. This is a woman with whom I spent many happy hours in the High School theater world, and those of you who have done that know how pleasant such friendships can be. I have not seen her in twenty years and more, and will not now see her until the endtime, if ever. There is no longer a chance to catch up. This week I found out that she has three children and a loving husband; she won’t know how my life turned out, where I find my happiness.

It was a deliberate choice I made, after high school, cutting myself off from the friends I had made. I left town to go to college elsewhere, and felt that I would be happier, perhaps that I would be more free, severing those ties. And, frankly, keeping them was hard work, and to me hard work is something I prefer to leave to other people, who are so much better at it. So my Old High School buddies—the ones I ate lunch with five times a week, the ones I played cards with in Physics class, the ones I led at speech tournaments, the ones I rehearsed with and played with, the ones I bullshitted with and the ones I sang tipsy songs with, the one I went to Prom with and the one I asked to marry me, the one whose car had no air conditioning and the one who drove like a maniac, the one who was terrific with a pool cue and the one who could tap dance, the one I carried over my shoulder and the one I fell over on—were part of my past and not my present, and I have no idea what happened to any of them, except one that was particularly dogged about staying in touch.

Well, and another, who happens to have a blog, but we went to different high schools, so we are not technically Old High School Buddies. From good old Washington High School, home of the Rams, it’s just one fellow, and we average one telephone call a year.

Which is all fine. I have regrets about the decision, but I don’t know that it was the wrong one at the time, nor do I fool myself that the other decision, the one to keep in touch with some or most of the old gang, would have been without emotional cost. If I did try to fool myself that way, I would be reminded by events like this past weekend, where I am thrown back in to contact with people I know, or used to know, in social situations much like those we used to enjoy. And I like these people—let me be clear about this, I do like these people, without exception, my Old College Buddies, this is not a case where we are socializing now because of that connection but didn’t like each other at college or anything like that—and enjoy their company, and yet it is very difficult. It takes me a long time, some hours at least, before I can ease back into the old rhythms of conversation, and it takes me even longer to ease into new rhythms of new conversations.

Those are the ones that I really fully enjoyed. People talking about their current lives, their current thoughts and concerns and pleasures, the universes they perceive and how all of those universes match and how they don’t. Much of that was “talking shop”, the various academics talking about their departments and their students, because many of us who were impressionable at the same time were impressed in the same way, so many of us went down that long and winding road. And then, those of us with children (not as many as one might imagine) spent time talking about the universe those of us with children inhabit, with its dangers and frustrations and delights. But as I come home to central Connecticut, what seems to be sticking with me is not the facts or views of those people but just the sudden, almost revealed knowledge that I like these people, that they are not just of my past but of my present, and that they can be part of my future as well, not as I say without the cost of a good bit of awkwardness, even of hard work (dare I say it), but to the advantage of a stronger and deeper sense of myself.

And, eventually, when one of us is again struck down, suddenly or slowly, perhaps with a sense of grief unencumbered (or less encumbered) by that alienation from my own past.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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Your Humble Blogger, as there is no particular reason for Gentle Readers to know, is a man with a moustache.

—Darling, there’s a man at the door with a moustache.
—Tell him I’ve already got one.
Boom Boom

I started growing a moustache as soon as I could, or in truth a few months sooner. I never looked forward to shaving; I looked forward to not shaving. Sadly, the beard thing never happened. In addition to coming in patchy, a moustache suits my face, a beard does not. I did grow a goatee—an echt goatee, not one of those imperials that are called goatees these days (although as a descriptivist, I am obliged to concede that since nobody other than YHB has worn what I would call a goatee in decades, and since the word is actually used by actual English speakers to refer to any beard (with or without a moustache) that doesn’t connect to the sidewhiskers, communication requires that the things called goatees are goatees, curse them all)—where was I? Oh, yes, I grew a goatee for a few months, for comic effect, but as it neither looked particularly good nor improved my morning ablutions, I gave up and shaved it off. My beard comes in dark and impressive down my throat, which is exactly where it should not be.

But the purpose of this note is not to gripe about my facial-hair situation, except to the extent that its purpose is to gripe about my facial-hair situation, as will be seen. You see, I am a man with a moustache. I like having a moustache, I think of myself as having a moustache, and for twenty years or so, the only times I have shaved my upper lip have been for the stage. As I shaved my upper lip on Friday morning.

The first set of publicity photos are set for Wednesday, so there was a terminus for the moustache, and my experience is that it is wise to give the raw skin a few days sunlight and air before starting with the greasepaint. Well, pancake. Nobody actually uses greasepaint anymore. And spirit gum; my mad Hrungarian has whiskers, as Shaw requires. Not the fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers I think would be perfect for him, but I really don’t have time to deal with fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers as I make the eight-minute change to Rich Alfie. Particularly as our Dear Director is trying to pick up the pace everywhere, so I may have only a seven-minute change…

It’s Whiskers that’s the problem. Alfie could have a moustache, but Whiskers must have a moustache, and therefore Alfie must not have a moustache, for the purposes of differentiating the two. And as it’s difficult for an actor with a moustache to play a character without a moustache (at least on stage), YHB must shave the lip for six weeks or so. Which is all right. Of all the inconveniences I have inflicted on myself to be in this show, the shaving ranks very low. Even counting washing out the washbasin.

However, it has been dispiriting how few people have noticed the change. My Best Reader noticed, of course, as did (eventually) a G.R. who was houseguest at the time. My Perfect Non-Reader when prodded, felt sure that I had shaved it off the previous day or even earlier. Co-workers failed to notice, or at least to comment, although many of my co-workers won’t see me until Monday. I had lengthy conversations with four of my Perfect Non-Reader’s friends’ parents, and short ones with two more, and none of them seemed to notice. Of the couple next door, the fellow gave me the business about it but his wife did not (although that doesn’t mean he noticed first). It seems in the mirror to be a radical change in appearance. If it isn’t, if it’s not something that people notice is missing, then maybe YHB is not, after all, a man with a moustache, just a man who happens to have a moustache?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

I should presumably be writing a nice Fourth-of-July note to put into the hopper for tomorrow, but I don’t have any ideas at the moment. If some idea strikes me, I may be able to post, but it will be a bit of a hassle, and it will be easy to post on Saturday (Chukat, Judges 11:1−33), so I probably will wait, and that whatever the idea is, it will have fled.

I could also write up a State of the Blog post, such as I used to do, month to month, but my notes are in a little thumb drive which I think is in the pocket of the waistcoat I was wearing yesterday. I hope that’s where it is. I could go through the trouble again of finding out that I had thirty-odd posts in June and ninety-odd comments, which is up five from May but down from thirty-glob posts in June of 2007. Or something. Frankly, that would be a hassle, too.

Is this a theme of hassle-avoidance? Perhaps it is. I have plenty of hassle in my life at present. Good hassle, but then this Tohu Bohu is good hassle, and it’s still hassle. At least I’m not behind on my Book Reports anymore, until I finish the one I’m nearly done with now.

Well, anyway. Have a happy Fourth of July. I hope you all, Gentle Readers, have just the right amount of hassle—not so little that you are absent from your family, friends and hobbies, but not so much that you are with them only to gripe and grouse. Enjoy the Independence of America.

Oh, and I’ll pass along an observation from a citizen of South Africa, resident in this country the last few years, who adores the Fourth of July. She points out that South Africa does not have any great national celebration day, splitting its national holidays between Reconciliation Day, Human Rights Day, Freedom Day and other such stupid (to use her word) holidays, most of which aren’t really celebrated by all the various ethnic, language and political groups. Which makes sense: the days largely commemorate the victory of one group over another within the country. In this nation of ours, the Fourth of July commemorates our Declaration of Independence, and aside from any resident Englishmen (or Welshmen, I suppose, if they feel that way about it) it wasn’t a victory over anybody here. Which may be nice to think about, as you watch the rockets’ red glare, and the cherry bombs, bursting, in air.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The final question Matt Hulan asked in his interview was this:

You analyze faith, and more specifically the literature of the faith of your fathers, more than most people I know. Have you any ambition to become a rabbi? Have you ever had such an ambition?

Short answer: No. Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooo!

OK, proper answer: I like to spend time reading and discussing Scripture. If being a rabbi meant that people would pay me to sit around and read and discuss Scripture, I would be tempted. There are other parts of the job I would be willing to take on as well; I would happily write and deliver sermons (although not ones that would suit the congregation at any shul big enough to pay a rabbi), and would be willing to lead services, both by overseeing the contributions of congregants and by standing up on the bimah myself. The amount of fund-raising a rabbi has to do would be unpleasant for me, but I suspect it’s unpleasant for nearly all rabbis. Still, it’s starting to look less appealing as a job. Then there’s the administration of the congregation, the synagogue, the school. Sitting on committees. Finding volunteers. And then there are the pastoral duties: visiting the sick, comforting the perplexed, advising the cranky. No, not a job I would enjoy. And the hours suck, too.

There’s another thing, which is probably the most interesting, at least from the point of view of anyone who isn’t fascinated by my own taste in working conditions. I’m not a very observant Jew. I like to attend services. I love to study Scripture. I want to keep learning about how different Jews adopt and adapt different practices. But I don’t keep the commandments. Many of them I don’t keep because I don’t believe that keeping them is important to my relationships with the Divine and with my fellow Jews. I eat pork. I eat shellfish. I mix milk and meat. I mix wool and cotton. I am married to an Episcopalian, and I think that’s a Good Thing. I regularly violate certain sexual prohibitions, and I think that’s a Good Thing, too. Most Jews in America also violate dietary and sexual prohibitions, and many of them also believe that those dietary and sexual prohibitions are better broken, but—they want their rabbis to appear to follow them, and to publicly endorse them. Furthermore, there are a lot of such restrictions that I’m a bit ambivalent about, and people don’t want ambivalent rabbis. There are a lot of things that I would vaguely like to do (pray daily with t’fillin, for instance), that frankly, I can’t be arsed to, and people don’t want rabbis who are too lazy to pray. Which is quite right; I myself don’t want a rabbi as lazy as I am. Particularly not if it’s me.

So, no. I’ve never given any serious thought to becoming a rabbi. If I had more of a facility with languages, I’d consider learning Hebrew and then perhaps taking some classes, either at a Rabbinical school or (more likely) at a local university. I wouldn’t consider it very seriously, though; I’m a terrible student, and my desire to avoid taking classes is great. If I do go back to taking classes, it will be for something that will get me a job I want to have and keep and actually perform, not something that would utterly fail to get me a job which, if I were to somehow get it, would make me and my employers miserable.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the good things about doing an interview the way I’m doing it is that I can interpret the questions however I like. F’r’ex, when Matt Hulan asks What is it about Elvis Costello?, rather than answering What is it about Elvis Costello that makes him such an asshole?, I can answer What is it about Elvis Costello that makes him so important to YHB personally? If you would like to try such interpretations for your own set of five questions, simply leave a twenty-pound note between the end of chapter two (The Detection of Leaks) and the beginning of chapter three (Checking the Thoroughness of Mixing) of any nearby copy of Radio Isotopes: A New Tool for Industry, by Sidney Jefferson. Or type a note in the comments, if that’s easier for you. Now, on to Elvis Costello.

Gentle Readers will no doubt be shocked to learn that Your Humble Blogger was a nerdy kid. Glasses, asthma, bad skin, special classes for the gifted, social ineptness, poor hand-eye co-ordination, ostracization, the whole bang shoot. And, of course, the rage, envy and self-loathing that is the birthright of the nerd, or at least of the male nerd (I suspect the female feels much the same, only worse). By the time I was in seventh or eighth grade, Elvis Costello was the outlet for those emotions. I listened to My Aim Is True over and over. A big old platter, on an enormous Hi-Fi system, usually alone in the house in the afternoon, or, if my mother were home, perhaps in my sister’s room on her more modern turntable. “Allison”, “Watching the Detectives” and “Mystery Dance” expressed the adolescent inferiority/superiority complex with an eloquence I could not, and with a frankness I could not reach, either. Particularly, this was a rock star who not only had glasses and pigeon toes but sang about a sexual life that existed primarily in twisted fantasies, where fulfillment wasn’t as easily imagined as revenge.

It’s cool now, I promise.

You know what? I’m going to go through the album song-by-song, just to bring back the ugly past:

• Welcome to the Working Week: in my teens, this was a song about a boy whose girlfriend becomes famous, for some reason, and inadequate to the glossy life of a starlet’s boyfriend, and demoted to a sort of assistant/dogsbody. I don’t exactly know where all this came from, but that’s what I got.


• Miracle Man: This, for me, was the song of a man who is losing his struggle with his urges. He’s got a crazy crush on a girl who sees him as just a friend; she teases him casually and he usually pretends not to care, but he’s reaching the breaking point.


• No Dancing: This is a fellow who finally makes it to his girlfriend’s house, expecting to get lucky, but his clumsy advances are such a turn-off that she dumps him. Shudder.


• Blame It On Cain: Just a crazy outsider rant. But fun.


• Alison: Classic dark, jealous threat.


• Sneaky Feelings: The boy in this one prefers his fantasies to the possible realities.
  
• (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes: Another unrequited love story, but with perhaps the Best Ever line: I said “I’m so happy I could die”/She said “Drop dead” then left with another guy. This is the inevitable result of transitory happiness for this frame of mind. Or, perhaps, when anyone is fourteen.


• Less Than Zero: Er, about fascism. Worth bringing up the other point, which is that Elvis Costello songs were not just about sexual longing and inferiority, they were about sexual longing and inferiory expressed in erudite terms. You know, for nerds.


• Mystery Dance: In this song, the boy is not only clumsy, but actually ignorant of the mechanics of sex, for extra humiliation.


• Pay It Back: Here, the boy is putting up a hard front, until the line Until the lights went out, I didn’t know what to do/If I could fool myself, then maybe I’d fool you too, which brings us back to the previous song’s humiliation.


• I’m Not Angry: Oh, yes he is. And jealous. Another is-she-really-going-out-with-him song.


• Waiting for the End of the World: This song is more the aloof nerd, the one who is just better than the circumjacent yahoos, and a little bit afraid of them, too.


• Watching the Detectives: Although it isn’t clear whether the boy in this song is only fantasizing about kidnapping the object of his pathetic crush or whether he has done it, it’s still creepy. Wonderfully creepy.

I think that’s the whole album that I had on vinyl. I could probably sing the whole thing through, word for word, right now (except for the mondegreens, since the album came without a lyrics sheet, and I learned the words off the Singing Dictionary much later and the intellectual knowledge hasn’t replaced the muscle memory of singing the wrong words), and—and this is really important—hum most of the bass lines and guitar solos and tap out the drum parts on a table top. Because in addition to the whole emotional thing, these are really good songs. The lyrics are witty, and funny in places, and powerful, and the tunes are catchy, memorable and enjoyable.

And then there are the other nineteen albums. Mr. Costello (or Mr. MacManus, to use his proper name) has put out a lot of great music, over my entire adult life. He was the first recording artist that I ever sought out information on when a new album was coming out to go and buy it as soon as it was available. Back when they were on big black plates, you know. Actually, the first album I bought on CD I bought was Imperial Bedroom, to replace the cassette that was worn out, and besides cut off partway through “Town Cryer”. That was, coincidentally or not, the first CD I damaged and had to replace. Ah, well. I walked four miles to buy Spike on the first day it was out. Well, it’s more accurate to say that I wandered around Philadelphia lost for an hour until I blundered my way to the Tower Records on South Street, but I was headed there to buy Spike. I have grown less obsessed over time (as I have grown more complacent with my own life), and I haven’t got around to getting the new album, yet. Plus, over the last ten years or so, I’ve started to resent him for being an asshole. But whenever I hear a new album, I want to like it, because that first one was so important to me, way back when.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

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In this third response to five questions from Matt Hulan (don’t forget, you can claim your five questions from Your Humble Blogger by shouting “It ain’t rocket psychiatry!” into a metal pail, or by asking nicely. Or why not go to the source?), Your Humble Blogger was given a choice of recounting the sweetest story of either the birth of the Youngest Member, the birth of my Perfect Non-Reader, or the story of how I met my Best Reader. The first two are properly my Best Reader’s stories to tell—that is, I was there and all, but if I leave out all the medical details that are properly hers to decide to reveal or not, there isn’t much to the story at all. Those who really want to know might enjoy the blog of the Punitive Sibling.

The story of how my Best Reader and I met, though, is an excellent story, and definitely worth telling. This is my story of it, of course, and will differ in some particulars from hers.

It begins with my arrival at college. Well, no, I tell a lie, it begins with the next day; people traveling a long way were allowed to arrive the night before the dorms officially opened, and I got in late (particularly with a three-hour time difference) and tired and pretty much collapsed into bed. I met my roommate the next day. We got along very well; Cigus Vanni, erstwhile Swarthmore Dean and Jeopardy! champ, had done quite a good job of putting us together. We fell out, later, which happens a lot, but I imagine we were both fairly difficult roommates, and we did OK.

And now I’ll go back even further, to explain that I am one of those people that is simultaneously extroverted and shy. When I am feeling comfortable, I enjoy “working a room”, but toss me in a room full of people I don’t know, and unless I’ve got some sort of structure or scheme for getting comfortable, I’m likely to stand off to one side and never meet anyone. In high school, it had taken me a long time to achieve a sort of comfort with my classmates. I never became popular, in any sense, but I became high-profile, which suited me as well; I rarely went into a room full of people I didn’t know, and often went into rooms full of people who knew me and were happy to see me. Or so it seemed to me, I suppose they may not have been. Anyway, when I arrived at a campus I had never seen before, and at which I knew no-one whatsoever, I was determined that rather than stand off to one side and never meet anyone, I would face the matter bravely and meet as many people as possible in that first orientation week, and get it the hell over with.

I managed to convince my roommate to go in with me on this, as it’s easier to be socially brave with two than one, particularly since we had hit it off very well on that first day. So we happened on a maneuver that worked well for us: we would walk up to clusters of other lost-looking freshman and introduce, not ourselves, but each other. Hello, I would say, this is J---. Or the other way around. We met a lot of people that way, both people we became friends with and others that we didn’t. I should add that our college class was around 300 people or so; what with all the orientation activities, it wasn’t that hard to meet a high percentage of them in a few days.

One of those orientation activities was the Mugging, which I believe still occurs. The Alumni Office begins their relationship with us alums-to-be by giving us each a mug that says I was mugged by the Alumni Office, and hosts an afternoon party. That year, the Mugging was on the lawn in front of Parrish Hall. My roommate and I were walking around together, as we were in the habit of doing already, and I saw a woman sitting on the steps of Parrish Hall all by herself. We went over to her, one of us introduced the other, and we started chatting. She turned out to be quite nice. In fact, within, oh, five minutes or so, we were fast friends, and have remained so (brief quarrels notwithstanding) for twenty-one years come September.

And that’s the story.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, Your Humble Blogger is being dragged off to Fathers’ Day frivolity. In principle, I am against Fathers’ Day as a Hallmark Holiday that encourages consumerism and whatnot, but in practice, I find I’m growing fond of it.

So, as I just have a moment, I propose a Fathers’ Day poll for Gentle Readers, those who are fathers, those who have fathers, those who think they have heard of this father thing somewhere:

Struvvelpeter or Punch and Judy?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Just as a matter of curiosity, do any of y’all know why the American abbreviation for air-conditioning is A/C with a slash? It would be bizarre to see air/conditioning, but we expect A/C, and I use that more naturally than I use A.C. or AC. Wikipedia’s entry on the slash reminds me that b/w, i/o and O/O are also abbreviations that introduce the slash mark where there was none before. What’s up w/dat?

Also, just to check: YHB uses air conditioning solely to refer to cooling, that is, making a car or room less warm, and uses heating to refer to making it warmer. A unit designed to condition air (vaddevah dat means) without changing its temperature would be a ventilator, or a humidifier or dehumidifier, if that were it’s main purpose, or an air filter (or filtration system if I were feeling office-speak-y). Or, you know, a fan. But an A/C unit is for cooling, right? Or is this not the common use?

In part, I’m curious because my Prius appears to use air conditioning to mean the whole process of fan and filter and heat and cool. The button is marked climate, but the dash says A/C on if the heater is working. This seems wrong to me. Does it seem wrong to y’all?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger is in the process of answering five questions from GR Matt Hulan. To no-one’s surprise, the answers will be long, and have little to do with the questions. Any Gentle Reader who wants a turn on the grill should let me know; the requirement is that you respond to the questions and then offer your own skills as an Inquisitor to all and sundry.

So, the first two questions, were, essentially, when you blog about reading books in the blink of a proverbial, do you cheat or are you Just That Fast? And how do you do it? The first answer was that I cheat. The second is that I am Just That Fast.

Well, and not quite That Fast, but quite fast enough. I had never timed myself, but to answer your question, I decided to experiment. For my first time trial, I picked up a often-read book, The Chosen, an old paperback copy, and opened it at random. It was the first time that Reuven meets Reb Saunders: the evening service to end Shabbat, and the lecture with the two mistakes, one for Danny and one for Reuven. A wonderful bit. I started on page 108, and I stopped on page 134, at the end of the lecture (but before we go upstairs with Reb Saunders and the boys). It took eight minutes. At 26 pages for 8 minutes, I get something like eighteen and a half seconds per page. The book is 270 pages long; call it 90 minutes total for the book? A nice long bath. It seems a bit fast to me, actually; I suspect it would take more like two hours. The next trial was with a novel I am reading for the first time, People of the Book, a hardback. I started on page 281 and stopped on page 297, after eleven minutes. Call it thirty-seven seconds a page. Four hours for the whole book, assuming a constant rate (which wouldn’t happen). Last trial: I read eight pages of Isaiah Berlin’s “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century” in Four Essays on Liberty, which took eleven minutes. Which I thought was a pretty good clip. At that rate, it would take me an hour or so just to finish that essay, and five hours to finish the book. Which is preposterous, not only because I doubt I could read the essay for an hour without stopping, but because I clocked myself on the first eight pages, which are introductory in nature and require very little going back to check what I’m reading now against what I thought I read in the last bit.

Anyway, is that fast? I suspect it is. I don’t really have a sense of it. If there are, say 350 words on a page of the novel (are there? I have no idea), I’m reading something like 600 words a minute for new stuff. TSOR tells me the average is 250 or so; so I evidently read at least twice the average speed. So I read quickly. I’m not a speed reader, but I do read very quickly.

How do I do it? I have no idea. I have no particular training in it, other than years and years and years spent reading. I do have what I think of as a quick mind. I type fairly quickly (around 50wpm, 12,000 kph 10-Key). My memory works very quickly indeed, when it works at all, which is very often, actually. I’m not a terribly deep thinker, or a creative one, but I am pretty quick. Growing up with quick siblings encouraged that quickness, at least in conversation. So in general, I think I read quickly because I think quickly.

I also must have trained myself to read quickly, simply to read as much as possible. In particular, I remember trying to finish books (or at least a chapter) before having to go to bed. Now, I hated to go to bed (I was an insomniac from an early age, worse luck), so some of that may have been staving off bedtime. I have a distinct memory of having two minutes (or some such) before my bedtime, and asking if I could read for that interval, being granted permission, and then being discovered on the sofa with my book half-an-hour or more later. But it wasn’t all a delaying tactic. I was also one of those flashlight-under-the-blanket readers, trying to finish the book before I got caught. I suspect some of my techniques for reading quickly, such as they are, I developed when I was seven or so, and trying to get to a stopping place before I had to stop.

One result of reading as quickly as I do is that if I am attempting to analyze a speech (remember when I used to do that?), I find it frustrating to slow down and listen to it delivered. I read transcripts rather than listening to or watching debates. Often, if Left Blogovia is abuzz about some video or other, I will find a transcript if I can, and if I can’t, sometimes I’ll just give it a miss altogether. The broadband breakthrough, the prevalence of YouTube and other video clips, and the wide availability of analysis on-line is cool, but I appreciate the theory and then go back to my text. Just a preference on my part.

Which I guess brings up one more thing to mention about my reading speed, which is that for a long time I thought that because I read faster than other people, I was smarter than other people. This is an easy mistake, but a problematic one. It’s more so because, since I both read faster and spend more time reading than many other people, and because of my trick memory I retain more of what I read than most other people, I have a greater store of information in my head than most people. Most of the information is useless trivia, true, but people are easily impressed by useless trivia. And I am, too, of course. I spent most of my teenage years impressed with my store of useless trivia, and I can’t honestly claim to be totally over it, even now. Still, I am not that smart. I’m OK, I have my strengths, and certainly it’s good to have a nice big memory store, but my ration of good ideas to bad ones is, frankly, not what I would want it to be. Which is a good thing to keep in mind, when I brag about my hundred books a year.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It having been a while since Your Humble Blogger was last beaten with a meme stick, Your Humble Blogger signed on to 5 Questions from Matt Hulan. The way this works is simple:

Anyone who wants me to interview them leaves a comment on this note so indicating. I come up with five questions. That person posts the questions answers on their own blog, should they be embloggened, or should they be disembloggened for whatever reason posts the answers as a further comment in this Tohu Bohu. In addition to the answers, however, the interviewee must agree to become the interviewer in turn, offering (as YHB is now) to ask five questions of anyone so inclined, and they’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum, to the world’s end, amen.

Having asked Matt for five of the best, I promptly forgot all about it, but he reminded me, so without further ado, or with only a trifle of further ado, really barely worthy of the name ado at all, when you think about it, herewith the five:

1. You seem to read extraordinarily quickly, even by my standards. I’ve been known to read a novel in the space of a day, even an afternoon, but you’ve mentioned reading a novel in the space of a bath. Do you cheat, or are you Just That Fast?
2. Assuming that the answer to #1 is that you cheat, how do you cheat? Assuming that the answer to #1 is that you’re Just That Fast, what is your page rate, and how did you come to develop such speed?
3. Choose the sweetest of these three story options and tell it:
   
   • The story of how you met Your Best Reader
   • The story of Your Perfect Non-Reader’s birth
   • The story of the Youngest Member’s birth
4. What is it about Elvis Costello?
5. You analyze faith, and more specifically the literature of the faith of your fathers, more than most people I know. Have you any ambition to become a rabbi? Have you ever had such an ambition?

And the answer to the first question is—wait for it—no, really, this isn’t hard to guess, shall we all say it together? It’s more complicated than that. First of all, I take really long baths. Seriously. Forty-five minutes is a quick bath for me; an hour and a quarter is a decent soak. I likes to submerge me into hot water. So, there’s that. Then my description of my reading habits is misleading. I do take books into the tub, but I rarely finish them in one bath. More usually, a Bathtub Book will be started as I commence to bathe, and then put aside at the end of the tub to be picked up at bedtime, or such later time as I have for reading. Usually bedtime, for those books. For a Dick Francis, for instance, or a Lois McMaster Bujold, I will read for, say, an hour or so in the tub, then another half-hour or more in bed, and then again at bedtime the next day, and then perhaps a stolen chunk of time in the morning— let's call it three hours altogether. Not much more. A long book may wind up in more than one bath, a few days apart. And I don’t mention how long it takes me to finish books, particularly when it does take me a long time. I’ve been reading Aubrey’s Brief Lives in bits and kibbles for months, now. It took me at least three months to complete The Story is True. I had to renew The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare from ILL, and then had to essentially skim the last chapter because I ran out of time, and I still turned it in a day late. So this image of me frequently picking up a nice thick book, settling into the tub, and emerging clean and shampooed and finished with the book a half-hour later is false.

Also, I cheat. With rereads, I will on occasion skip bits of description or paragraphs of narration that I mostly remember. I am a very lazy reader. I don’t skip full pages, but I will let my eyes pass lightly along clumps of verbiage until I get to the next interesting bit. I also cheat because I have a trick memory, so when I have read a book before, I often know it very well on the second time through, and so can read it very fast indeed, essentially skimming over the bits that I don’t feel like slowing down for. I also cheat by reading books that are not very dense, books that are plot-heavy and description-light. And books written for teenagers and tweens, I read a lot of those, too. All of that contributes to my hundred books a year or so.

I suppose that’s the answer to the second question, as well, except that, because it’s more complicated than that, there’s another answer, which is that I really am Just That Fast at reading. And I’ll talk about that in the next note. In the meantime, any Gentle Readers who want to answer five questions from YHB, and who are willing to ask five to any passer-by who passes, er, by, should request five from me, and I will do my best to provoke and inspire. Gannet (and Duck, who doesn’t comment much these days, if she still reads) may take a second bite at the apple, should they so desire; after all, questions are free.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a nightmare last night.

In my dream, I had been a political prisoner. I don’t think that I dreamed the imprisonment itself, or if I did, I don’t remember it. Thank the Divine. The part of the dream I do remember is my attempt to adjust back to freedom. Or, rather, the attempt by my friends and family to help me adjust. I had clearly been abused while in prison, and had somehow betrayed other people by giving information. In reality, of course, I have no information that would have interested my captors, but then, that presumably would have only made things worse.

Physically, I was very weak. I walked slowly, and leaned on support when it was available. My appetite was bad enough to be a source of concern for my family, and in fact a source of conflict, as I stubbornly refused to eat. I was also emotionally weak, for want of a better description. I wept frequently, and silently. I cowered at loud noises. I spoke very quietly; clearly I had been conditioned not to raise my voice.

In the dream, I was at a gathering, perhaps a college reunion, because a lot of my old college were there, along with (as happens in dreams) people I knew from other parts of my life. It was in a sort of resort camp in a wooded, hilly area, with a stream and a waterfall, and trails though tall trees. I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of the area, weeping at it, and being unable to stop weeping. I also remember seeing, at a distance, other people surrounded by their friends and family, and knowing that they, too, were released prisoners, and wondering if I had been responsible for their imprisonment.

Mostly, I remember the terrible feeling of shame, combined with (or perhaps caused by) my terrible weakness. My family and friends clearly sympathized; nobody blamed me, or (as far as I remember, now that I’m awake) talked about the years in prison at all. There was, I think, a conversation about the political change that had led to freeing the political prisoners, but I don’t remember any details.

Anyway, it was just a dream.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger recently read Potter on Supermanship, and the idea expressed in the work at Yeovil of being one-up or one-down has stuck with me. It’s amazing how big a role one-up-ness plays in our lives.

Some of it is spending a fair amount of time with young children, five to seven years old or so, for whom one-up-ness is hugely important. If a five-year-old can catch out an adult saying lunch when what is meant is breakfast, well, that’s a five-year-old that is one-up on an adult, and how often does that happen?

Actually, it happens all the time, at least to me. Sometimes it is deliberate. My primary method for entertaining such children is making easily catchable mistakes, such as substituting the word moose for whatever nouns in a sentence can be inferred. Such hilarity! Ah, well.

Children, of course, are so rarely one-up on adults that I find it easy to forgive them their glee in such one-up-ness as they can temporarily grasp. Well, and children are naturally one-up in games and sports, in that an adult’s victory over a child makes the adult one-down among his adult peers. But in life, in choices of dinner entrees and schools and entertainment, of bedtime and clothing and hairstyle, in leisure activities and chores and family time, children are so utterly and thoroughly one-down that the temporary (and often fictional) one-down-ness of adults is understandably savored.

It’s less appealing in adults.

No, no, let’s be clear: there is a difference between winning and being one-up. Just as an adult who scores off a six-year old goalie is one-down, so is the winner or loser of a contest often irrelevant to one-up-ness. Winning can be appealing in an adult, as can exulting in victory. Gloating, not so much.

But just as the work at the Institute moved from Gamesmanship to Lifeitselfmanship, one-up-ness and one-down-ness infiltrates much more of our lives than games. In fact, I find it much easier to forgive a friend who gloats over victory at Fluxx or Word-O-Rama than to forgive one who gloats at a victory in grammar or argument. Nor is it entirely, or even mostly a matter of simple victories of that kind. No, most one-up-ness (as the work of the Institute makes clear) is a matter of off-hand remark, in-joke, snark, primness or vulgarity, self-righteousness or self-pity, put-downs and put-offs and put-asides.

If it helps, here are some thoughts on the topic: It’s OK to be wrong. When somebody corrects you, you win, because you have improved your knowledge and the other person has not. It’s OK for other people to be wrong, even on the internet. If somebody assumes you know something that you don’t know, they made the mistake. But don’t let them feel one-down, because that’s not nice.

It’s OK to be on the outside. It’s OK to like popular music; it’s OK if other people don’t like the unpopular music that you like. Same with movies. And books. And art. And people. Other people’s ignorance of your favorite people, art, books, movies and music is neither a criticism of your taste nor a character flaw. They can continue in their ignorance without being one-down, or they can gain exposure without anyone else going one-up.

Everybody—everybody—is born one-up. If anybody’s one-up-ness makes you one-down, then keep in mind that there are more of them than there are of you.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve noticed that my Perfect Non-Reader, when she attempts to catch a ball, by instinct brings her hand up and out toward the ball, rather than moving her hand with the ball as it comes to her. This is one reason why such attempts so rarely succeed. Another reason is that her body and head generally flinch away from the ball, and then she also closes her eyes fairly often as well. Not really very good at catch, my Perfect Non-Reader, but she reads well and does arithmetic like a champion.

I tried to explain about moving your hand with the ball as it comes to you. I may have been successful at imparting the concept. I was certainly unsuccessful at improving her rate of success.

I don’t think I ever had a real problem catching a ball that was thrown right to me. I have horrible depth perception, though, so a ball thrown on an arc from any distance is a mystery to me. I was a terrible outfielder in Little League, and am still a terrible outfielder when I make the rare attempt. I have soft(ish) hands, but I have trouble getting to the ball. And I’m slow and have a lousy arm.

My arm isn’t quite as lousy as it was when I was a kid, though, largely because when I was in high school I finally figured out follow-through. Mostly as applied to bowling, but I was able to see how it worked more generally, which improved my throwing, batting, and pool playing as well. I’m not sure how I managed to get to sixteen or so without getting follow-through, but then, I expected myself to be lousy at sports, so I attributed my lousiness at sports to my asthma, nearsightedness and, I’m afraid, my verbal and mathematical ability (as if it was a trade-off, and people who were good at sports had to be slow-witted, which was observably untrue—some people are slow and some are quick, some are bright and others dim, some are big and others small, and some people are quick and bright and big, and some people are slow and dim and small, and even the slow, dim small ones have a spark of the Divine fire, but try telling that to me when I was ten years old, if you want to waste your time travel). And to be sure a good deal of my lousiness at sports was due to my asthma, nearsightedness and meager size, but some was due to my not learning how best to use what height, eyesight and wind I had.

I don’t think much of the theory of multiple intelligences as cognitive science, but it does seem to be a good source of vocabulary for talking about people being different, one to another. Whether kinesthetic intelligence is an actual thing or not, I imagine it’s clear when I say I am kinesthetically stupid; my body does not, on the whole, do exactly what I want it to. I can’t draw a straight line, for instance, nor kick a ball with any real aim, nor navigate through a room without bumping into the furniture three or four times out of ten. But just because I read quickly and easily, I don’t think it takes any great wit to be able to read, and just because other people are dextrous and strong doesn’t mean I can’t catch a ball that’s thrown at me. And, in fact, in my teenage years, I learned to juggle, spending hours and hours and hours throwing a ball from one hand to the other until it usually went where I wanted it to.

I don’t care if my Perfect Non-Reader learns to juggle. I would like her to overcome her kinesthetic stupidity to the extent of being able to catch and throw, and sometimes hit a ball with a bat. Mostly, I don’t want her to believe, as I did, that her kinesthetic handicap prevents her from reaching that level, because it doesn’t, unless she lets it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger was thinking about writing a note extolling Daylight Savings Time, but it turns out that I wrote that note a long time ago. So that’s that.

Still, while I was looking for that note (which I had only the vaguest memory of writing), I noticed that this will be only the fifth time Your Humble Blogger has used the word daylight in a note on this Tohu Bohu. Once I described when somebody saw me in daylight (after seeing me under stage lights), once about cricket, once describing a (fictional) robbery, and now twice discussing Daylight Savings.

Clearly I do not use enough daylight. Whatever am I saving it for?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It is five years today since My Gracious Host made the annou