west of the moon

passing game.

We ended up at a basketball game, Monday afternoon.  High school, tournament play.  It sounded like it might be a good idea--I mean, really what else were we supposed to do with the afternoon?  Whenever we're visiting my parents, Matt keeps wondering what there is to do, like for fun, and I never have a good answer.  What did I do for fun in high school?  I don't even remember.  Went to people's houses, hung out and listened to music and gossiped, rented movies and ate cookies.  Went to diners, drank coffee until two in the morning, ate cheese fries and cinnamon toast.  Drove around, long aimless drives just to pass the time.  Hung around at bookstores or the mall, not to shop, just to have somewhere to go.  I don't know what we did, most of the time.

The basketball game was actually pretty good.  My uncle's the coach, and he's good, and his kids are good.  They won, but it was close--my uncle's team took an early lead, but lost ground steadily through the middle of the game, and lost the lead with thirty-five seconds to go.  They took it back with a three-pointer right before the buzzer, and everyone was on their feet and shouting.  The other team had a couple of really tall players.  The potential height differentials are just crazy in high school basketball to begin with, but when I say "really tall", I mean one kid was six-eight and the other was six-ten, and that's just not fair.  The six-ten kid didn't even seem to be that good a shooter, but he didn't have to be, he just needed to get near the basket and drop the ball in.  On my uncle's team, one of the best players was the shortest on the court, a stocky little guy who played with this kind of frightening intensity and made a lot of graceful three-point shots.   That kid, the shortish one, got injured near the end of the game, knocked down by an opponent and he landed badly on his elbow.  My uncle pulled him out of the game, sent someone else in, called for a trainer. 

It's such a sports-team thing to say, right, that the coach called in a trainer.  Except that the trainer, in this case, was someone's mother, a fortysomething woman with slightly frizzy hair pulled back in a hair clip with little jingle bells.  She wore a Christmas sweater, green and red with applique Santas and glittery bows, and she had long red nails, and she came over with an ice pack and a first aid kit and knelt in front of the injured player and very calmly and very professionally probed the tendons and muscles around his elbow.  The kid really should have sat out the rest of the game, but five minutes later he tossed the ice pack away and insisted he was fine, even though the elbow was obviously messing up his passing game.

There's not a lot of point to this story, not much by way of dramatic tension.  We went to a basketball game, it was fun.  That's about it.

suit up!

I have discovered, by the way, what hell is going to be like.  It will be an eternity of me in a dressing room at an upscale department store, trying on women's suits, while my mother patiently brings new options in and takes discarded ones away.  In this version of hell, which coincidentally bears a strong resemblance to my Thursday afternoon, my mother is being such an absolute angel, patient and supportive and kind, that I can't even in good faith take my frustration out on her.  And yet!  And yet I will, in hell, be forced to continue trying on suits.  Black ones, mostly, and grey ones, with pants in sizes that ought to be too big yet aren't, jackets with one button, jackets with three buttons, jackets with inexplicably white buttons, shirts that are bunchy around the shoulders, shirts through which my bra can be seen, burgundy camisoles that are almost right and yet far too somber, skirts that make my backside look like a shelf on which flowers could be displayed, plain white cotton dress shirts that for some reason cost two hundred dollars, completed suit outfits that make me look like a middle-aged undertaker, rose-pink woolen suits that make me look like I'm going to a costume party dressed as Jackie Kennedy.  As an added bonus, I will occasionally find The Perfect Suit, only to have the saleslady chastise me because the black skirt and the black jacket are, in fact, two different colors black, at which point I'm sent back in to the dressing room to start over. 

the morning after.

Cleaning up from the party was surprisingly easy.  I've still got dishes to wash, I'll probably finish washing the dishes shortly before I head out the door for the airport on Wednesday, but the rest of the cleanup was easy.  That was a little bit of a surprise.  Also a little bit of a surprise was the way that I needed all day yesterday to catch my energy back.  Saturday night was the first time in months that I didn't feel like a slightly-off-balance recluse-in-training; graduate school has not, as it turns out, actually robbed me of my personality.  Our lovely Christmas tree was appropriately admired, people drank champagne and ate fresh-baked cookies and appeared to be having a festive time.

Sunday morning, after the last party stragglers (guests who'd travelled too far to be sent home in their cars the night before) roused themselves from couch and futon, we headed out to breakfast.  It was raining all morning, a thick heavy downpour that's thoroughly uncharacteristic for this area; at the sound of thunder, we all stopped and looked around, stunned.  "Was that thunder?  We don't get thunder here.  How weird."  Intersections were flooded, and downtown we saw a scraggly-looking man in a threadbare coat crouched over a storm drain, trying to clear the flow by pulling out twigs and fallen leaves.  The staff was harried at breakfast; the bathrooms in the restaurant were flooded and the toilets wouldn't flush, but they had good strong coffee, and we talked a lot about the strange techie culture in the San Francisco area, and it was a good time. 

But now on Monday morning it's still grey and rainy, and I'm still tired, and I've just completed another job application, this one for a job that I think I'd love but it's going to be a hard sell.  (I always think that if I was able to sit down over coffee with someone on the search committee for these hard-sell kind of jobs I'd have a good shot at convincing them, but it's harder to put all that across in a cover letter.)  Need coffee, and a housekeeper, and another day or two before Christmas travel.  The coffee, at least, I can have.

oof.

Note to self: if you return to your vinyasa yoga class after an absence of nearly a year and a half, you have no right to be surprised that your wrists are not entirely up to the challenge.  (It is okay, though, to be a little surprised that the arches of your feet are taking this so hard.)

Strong women.

Friday night, I met Matt for dinner at the restaurant around the corner.  It's all red walls and stylish dangling lamps, foreign movie posters, cheap(ish) pasta and good wine and highly erratic service.  The staff greets us by name now, but still can't reliably get our orders right, and it's okay, in a way, because we're used to it.  Sometimes, like this week, Matt walks straight there from the train station after work, and I meet him there.  This time I headed over a little early, sat at the bar with a glass of wine and read for a while. 

One of the women at the restaurant stopped by to refill my water glass and asked what I was reading.  I showed her the cover, the cowgirl in the low-slung jeans.  "It's fantasy, set in Santa Cruz, sort of old gods and earthquakes coming to life."  And immediately I wish I'd described it better, I worry I made it sound boring, but she's smiling. 

"Is the author a woman?"

"Hmm?  No, he's not... he's a friend of mine, actually.  The hero of the book is a woman, though.  She's great."

"That's what I love about those kind of books," she says, nodding.   "Women can do a lot of more interesting things than in other kinds of books."

And, you know, I never thought about it that way. 

filling in the gaps.

I called my mother today, to try and get some addresses that are missing from my Christmas card list.  Most of the "family" section of the list is stable, address-wise, but there's been some motion in the younger generation, and my mother is always happy to help.

"Who do you need?"

"Cousin TJ."

"Oh, just send that to his mother's house, he's there most of the time."

"I thought he moved out, though?"  TJ graduated from college two years ago, started temping for a big pharma company and moved back in with his parents, but swore up and down that he'd get his own apartment as soon as he had a real (non-temp) job.  The job happened over the summer, and I remember cheering the news that he'd gotten that apartment.

"He did, but he's only there on weekends."

"He has an apartment that he doesn't live in?"

"It's too far away from work."

"He got a... wait, never mind, I don't want to know.  How about J, do you have her address?"  J was my best friend for years, growing up, her mother and my mother have been friends since they were teenagers.  We haven't been really close since high school, but we try.  Senior year, I helped throw her a baby shower, and she gave me a briefcase as a gift when I went off to college.  I sent a card when I missed her wedding last year, but she's moved since then, into a house her father helped her buy, and I don't have her new address. 

"It's around here somewhere..."

"Oh, and her husband.  Did she change her name when she got married?  What's her husband's name, anyway?"

My mother laughs a little, a sad laugh.  "Oh.  I don't know.  His name is... oh, honey, I'm sorry, I can't remember.  I try not to think about him."

"You don't even know her new last name?"

"I'm pretending he doesn't exist."

"That bad?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I'll just address the card to J, then, and not to her husband."  And hope it doesn't cause too much of a problem.  Turns out my mother doesn't have her address, but knows that the street name is the same as the last name of an old friend of my father's who died a few months ago.  She says I should ask him; I make a note to see if Google Phonebook can help.

"Last one.  Danielle and her husband."

"You don't have her address?"

"Not since she moved."  Danielle and I were childhood friends as well, again because her mother was friends with mine.  Her mother died when I was in college, after a long and ugly fight with cancer, and Danielle and my mother have been very close ever since.  I flew back home for her wedding a few years ago, a lovely glittery affair.  Her husband finished medical school last year, and they moved from Manhattan to Des Moines to set up his new practice.

"Did I tell you she's pregnant again?"

"Wow!  That's... three?" 

"Yes!"  My mother gives me the names of the first two children, so I can include them in the card.  That's two in three years, and now she's pregnant again.  "They're trying for a boy, she says, but if they have another daughter this time, she says they might just try again!  She sounds so happy.  She calls all the time, you know.  She asks me for recipes."

"You're a good source for recipes.  You've always been great with cooking."

"Well, it's hard, trying to feed a family that big.  I love that she calls me to ask for recipes, though."

"I ask you for recipes!"

"She's so cute, she writes everything down when I tell it to her."

It's an almost physical effort, not protesting, not saying that I write her recipes down too.  I have a notebook in the kitchen where I've written my mother's recipe for chicken soup, and for marinara sauce, and meatballs, cavatelli and broccoli, pot roast, potted chicken, apple pie.  There's no point to this.  It's not a competition, I don't need to fight Danielle for my mother's affection, there's no reason for this upswelling of jealousy and anger.  There's no need, or maybe there is, but either way there's no point.  It doesn't change anything.

Accessions.

Archivists are often my favorite people.  Well, there are exceptions--on one of my trips last year, I encountered an archivist at a Midwestern University That Shall Not Be Named who just left me nearly spitting incoherent in confusion, on account of his tendency to say things like "yeah, professors sometimes donate their papers, and we keep them around until the professor dies and then we throw them out, because really, who's ever going to care?"  But that's the rare exception.  In general, archivist are my favorite people and my best friends, and the archivist I worked with at UCLA this week was stellar.  In fact, she went far above and beyond--she opened the archives several hours early on Wednesday morning, so that I could be sure to finish my research without having to extend my trip an extra day.

That morning, while I was (slowly, carefully) paging through the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees for the college (1883-1899), she told me that she'd just had an idea for something I might want to see.  From somewhere in the back of the archives, this wonderful woman produced the Accessions Record for the college library.  It's a ledger book, a big one, probably a foot and a half tall, and it contains the record of all books purchased for the school library, back to its founding in 1883.  Every book is recorded on a separate line, with both the accession number and the catalogue number.  There's something wonderful about this, both as an artifact and as a process; some librarian was responsible for keeping this record, and for updating it--when books were lost or discarded, an annotation was made in the ledger. 

It turned out to be a great resource for me, because it helps me track which psychology books they purchased, and when.  It was also kind of an interesting read, though, just seeing the books that were bought for this teacher's college in the late nineteenth century.  A pretty thorough run of contemporary literature, for instance, and a lot of poetry, and more textbooks and scientific reference works than I'd have expected to be around, much less in common use at this kind of school.  It's a side of the academic world of the teacher's college that doesn't really come through in the course catalogs. 

Another process thing that caught my interest: I mentioned that I was reading the minutes of the Board of Trustees meetings.  They're typed pages, most of them carbons, lurid purple type on tea-colored paper.  They're a hundred and twenty years old at this point.  Somewhere back in the archive history, some (no doubt well-intentioned) archivist took the individual pages and pasted them to other sheets of paper.  I'm guessing that the goal was to stabilize them; I think they're on that flimsy onionskin paper, and the pages they're pasted to are good heavy paper stock.  But it reminds me of the flag preservation exhibit that I saw at the Smithsonian.  They've got the original star spangled banner, the actual flag that inspired the national anthem, and it's in bad shape.  It's frayed, and faded, and old, and at some point in the past, a well-meaning preservation team had the original flag sewed to a heavy sheet, in order to stabilize it. (Which is not to imply, for a second, that the minutes of the meetings of the Board of Trustees of the California State Normal School are on a par with the star-spangled banner for historical significance.  It's a process thing, not a content thing.  You understand.)  The archivist is in the middle of a project to upgrade these collections, putting things in plastic sleeves and making sure they've got acid-free paper for the document folders, but there's not a lot to be done about the fact that the pages have been pasted to sheets of paper that are themselves, by now, crumbling and yellowed. 

Infrastructure.

When I first came to graduate school, lo these many years ago, I was expecting a lot of things.  I was expecting the budget constraints, the inability to just go buy new shoes whenever I wanted.  I was expecting the long hours of work, the days buried in the basement of the library, and the slow decline of my ability to talk about anything other than my dissertation.  I was expecting all of that.

What I wasn't expecting, though, was that I would spend so much of my time crawling around on the floor, fiddling with extension cords.

(Some of the other graduate students and I noticed this morning that there was a problem with the electricity in our shared office space.  The overhead lights were on, and everything looked fine, but none of our laptops were getting power, and neither was the router that connects us to the internet.  It was a good ten minutes of un-plugging, re-plugging, testing and moving before we traced the problem back to one bad power strip and one dead wall outlet.)