Random Stuff Saturday:

First off: the heat. Dear heat, could you please possibly consider going away? I mean, I know it's August, but you've been here since, like, May. And maybe when you go, send a little rain while you're at it.

I really think we should see other people. It's not you, it's me. I'm just not ready for this kind of long-term relationship right now.

I was thinking this morning of the line out of the Shakespeare sonnet: "Summer's lease hath all too short a date." Well, obviously Shakespeare didn't live in southern Oklahoma. Summer's overstayed its welcome and I'm hoping it'll get evicted soon.

Seriously. If my life were a novel, the summer heat would have to be an extra character. The heat is kind of like that guy at the party, who is still telling stories at 3 am, even when the hosts have already put on their pajamas and robes and are standing there, pointedly looking at their watches and yawning.

we have had "heat advisories" regularly. I think this one, they're just going to extend until October.

Now I see why there were so many "Southern Gothic" novels written in the years before prevalent air conditioning: heat brings out the crazy. It brings out the cranky. All those parts of your personality you normally keep hidden beneath your super ego and your years of manners-training? Well, they leak out when it's this hot for this long.

People stop being polite and start being "real"*

I made my weekly wal-mart run yesterday afternoon. I know whereof I speak.

(*Well, that's MTV's claim. I would argue "real" doesn't equate to acting as badly towards others as you possibly can.)

The heat also seems to suck a lot of the pleasure out of things for me. I had briefly contemplated making a trip to Sherman (after I got done with the morning's research) for a few essential-but-not-available-in-town items I was getting low on. But, meh. It's hot. And it would have been super-crowded by people. And I hate that parking-what-feels-like-miles-away and walking up to the store, feeling a growing dread, knowing that there will be arguing families and poorly supervised children and just everyone being crabby from The Hot.

Cooking, also. I had half-thought of digging through my "Small Batch Baking" book and making some kind of nice sweet-muffins or something to have with dinner, but, eh. I'm not even sure what I want for dinner. I'm half tempted to go and get some kind of carryout - I want something meaty and substantial after having been essentially vegetarian for two weeks, but I also don't have the energy to cook.

*****

Fought off the temptation to order some of Elann's Pure Alpaca in the "Thistle" color. I love the color, and I loved the idea of employing it in some kind of cabled sweater. But I have so much stuff ahead now. And my house insurance is coming due. They've raised it again, and they claim my house is worth something that I severely doubt I could actually get for it if I sold it. (But I guess that's good; if something terrible happens to my house, hopefully I will get more money to acquire a new house).

Besides, if my fears come true and The Heat never leaves, I won't ever be able to wear wool ever again, let alone alpaca.

but I'm still tempted. I could totally see making the new cabled hoodie out of Knitscene from it.

******

I'm reading a book called something like "Endless Forms Most Beautiful." It's about evo-devo, which is a new branch of evolutionary science that looks heavily at developmental patterns and changes in the genes that control the largescale patterns in development. Right now, I'm reading the section where he generally talks about development. And you know? It's odd to read about the development of the mammalian forelimb, and then look and my hand, and then realize that in the late summer and into the fall of 1968, all the stuff I'm reading about was happening to me.

*****

I'm still thinking about the phenomenon of popularity, and who gets popular, and who gets asked to, say, contribute an essay for a magazine, and who doesn't. I don't know why I'm so hung up on it except for the fact that I was one of the unpopular kids growing up and I never understood what it was that made someone popular: was it money? was it confidence? was it just some random thing that happens in first or second grade, and then you're popular? Or is it something else? Could it be pheromones? Could there be "loser" pheromones and "popular" pheromones?

I don't know. Realistically speaking, I wouldn't want to be super-super popular because it would be sort of embarrassing to have many of my students reading my blog, where I put a lot of my innermost thoughts. But, you know? It would be nice to be interviewed sometime or something.

I guess I just get to feeling a little lonesome and invisible. It's hard when there's no Stitch and Bitch near you, and when even the quilting group in town meets at a time when I'm in class. It would be so lovely to be able to meet with like-minded people for a couple hours each month and just share what we're working on.

******

I was thinking about phrases I cannot stand the other day.

One of them is "Don't get mad, but..." (Or actually, almost any phrase that ends in "but" before you're given bad news/criticism). It's almost as if the person is telegraphing, "This is going to aggravate you but I've claimed Pax, and you can't get mad in good conscience now."

Very often too in my life the phrase has been used as a mask for destructive criticism or outright meddling, trying to paint it up to look like "I'm really trying to help you here."


I also hate, with the heat of a thousand blazing suns, the question, "Are you okay with that?" when there's some kind of occurrence that you have no choice in the matter of. When I was in grad school I had this officemate. I liked her in many ways except she was one of those oozy people who was always feeling others' pain and the like. And you know? For me, sometimes I just need someone to look at me, shake their head, and go "Buck up." It makes it worse if they go all sheepeyed on me and tell me how sorry they are in a goopy voice.

Anyway, I had a couple of Major Life Changes happen during that time, and every time she'd come at me with "Are you okay with this?" And it alternately puzzled and infuriated me: what choice did I have BUT to be okay with it? It wasn't like I'd gotten a plate of burned food in a restaurant that I could send back?

I mean, intellectually I understand the concept of not-being-okay with things that are beyond one's control to change...but for me, the only thing that works is to maybe mourn the lost possibility (or whatever) for a little while, and then shrug and go, "eh, live and learn." Because extended not-being-okay is a kind of paralysis and it's a hella lot easier to just find some new project to sop up your excess attention rather than DWELLING.

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My book club book this month is "Their Eyes Were Watching God." I had a terrible time getting into it - that rural Floridian dialect, written out on the page, was initially painful to try to read - but now I'm nearly done. I don't know how I feel about the book. I think I liked it better than my clubmates based on what a few have said. But still, it's another one of those books where there are people who make choices that I could kind of see far off as being bad choices, and that always kind of, I don't know, aggravates me. But I am kind of into the feminist theme of the book, that Janie was happier out in the bush as a farmer than she was in the town, even though everyone who looked at her thought it was a step down in life, because in the bush she was more of an equal and didn't have to conform to some societal role of being the "little woman".

funny..I deleted a part of this post where I was once again whinging about being Barbie's Weird Single Friend. But you know...I do have to say I'm thankful that I live in a time when it's only regarded as Weird for a woman my age to not-be married. (Still? I wish there were more people in my particular circumstances around. I love my friends' babies but there's only so much talk of rolling over and first words I can deal with).