The Egoist's Miscellany

I caught bronchitis within two hours of the beginning of my Christmas vacation. I'd thought my body was past being able to do anything with any level of excellence, but it showed me that when push comes to shove, it can put my nose to the grindstone and produce something really spectacular.

I was given a hair clip for Christmas, and the giver pointed out that it could be used to hold chunks of hair out of the way while blow drying other chunks with a round brush. I'd lost my enthusiasm for that subject. Then I felt badly because she'd gone out of her way to purchase this very useful gift for me, and it's not her fault that the Death of Flannery comes for me with a blow dryer, so I ought to just use it. I devoted 30 to 40 minutes of my morning to the subject yesterday, and it did look great for about five minutes, which really worried me. Like Mendel's pea plants, too much change causes me to revert to type, i.e. my 10-year-old belief that bathing is a waste of time since one just gets dirty again anyhow. Luckily my hair looked just the same as ever within an hour, so I have an excuse for not pushing my luck.

I found myself in the kitchen today thinking of Solzhenitsyn and humming, "I've got your love to keep me warm."

I produced 21 thank you notes in an hour and a half this morning, and not all of them used the formula "Thank you for X I love it and you."

Super Model

Today as I drove back from the bank, I reflected happily (but with a sober recognition that this could lead to strange new places) that I was now a high-maintenance woman. I’ve been wearing makeup (eye makeup because face makeup makes me suffocate) almost every day for ages, and I totally plucked my eyebrows a few weeks ago. Not totally in terms of no eyebrows left, but in terms of I almost totally tidied them up—I put off finishing them for tomorrow, which fortunately hasn’t come yet. But the pièce de résistance was that I blew dry my hair using a round brush this morning.

Now the beauty industry has tragically suppressed the fact, but 87.3% of women younger than 40 who have died of old age have done so while blow drying their hair. (All blow driers have a “Warning” tag to this effect, but the real danger is hidden under the highly unlikely possibility of dropping the thing in water). I’ve never been the kind of person who takes unwarranted risks (unless it involves jettisoning all aspects of my life and moving across the country), so I’ve taken this warning to heart. When I feel myself within time’s bending sickle's compass come, I click the Machine of Danger off and head out into the rain, secure in the knowledge that I’m not going to be any the worse off for a few more pints of water in my hair.

But today I really amazed myself, and almost expected to be wearing pointy shoes and haute couture by the time I got out of the van. My boss failed to notice right off, though, and I started to wonder if I’d wasted my ten minutes. I pointed out how beautiful my hair was (to help her along), and explained.

“Ah, yes, I see you dried the front and not the back."

“What?!” Outraged at this base slander, I reached back to exhibit the silky softness but found my enemies had substituted chunks of damp hair.

Oh well, I don’t like dating rock stars anyhow.

Dont Cha

I just spent a couple of days with my brother. At one point he told a hilarious subway tale (initially observed by a friend), but he prefaced it by saying that this friend's stories were always unable to be beaten. But them's fightin' words, so we may have a spate of stories from my time commuting on the Seattle public bus. I felt a little sad over the scant opportunities I have for gathering such stories now. However, I've been good lately, so God felt it was time to reward me. The blessing sat on the seat in front of me on the train ride home.

She caught my attention by emitting deep-throated groans at irregular intervals. At first I was concerned for her well-being, but then realized that the groans were somehow influenced by the music we were all listening to (she evidently felt that the ipod was intended for communal use, and had it set to an appropriate volume, after a brief interruption at the insistence of the conductor). In the end I figured out that the noises were her involuntary and uninhibitedly sensual response to the music, which let all of us know she was One Hot Mama. She didn't seem to feel that this image needed to be restricted on a need-to-know basis, so we all got it full in the face.*

She had a channel-surfing approach to listening to music, being not so big on finishing any particular song as she was on returning frequently to it and then singing along with the chorus ("She used to be the sweeeetest girl/She used to be the sweetest girl Ev-AH!") The first leg of the trip was spent with the Inland Northwester wrestling with the tricky subject of Northeast public transportation etiquette. The girl exuded more attitude than sexuality so I opted for not asking her to return the device to the volume the conductor had requested.

Her cellphone screen saver (held up high, so it was easily seen from the seat behind her in accordance with her Share Me With Everyone policy) was of a cartoon elf, from the perspective more generally seen by a toilet than by me. Then we returned to the music sampler.

But then we headed into the express portion of the trip, and I grew desperate. As the conductor walked down the aisle one last time, I caught his eye, smiled, and pointed to the seat in front of me. He kindly went back and asked the lady to turn her music off. She stared blankly, so he repeated himself a couple of times, finally slipping in, "music isn't allowed if it disturbs others." Seizing the important point, she interrupted to say, "Some-body comp-LAIN-in?" The conductor returned to his purer theme, and after the same amount of time had passed as before her initial response, she turned her music off.

I spent the rest of the trip debating my immortal soul over which was the wrong side of the tracks (for the most part they are indistinguishable) in blessed silence.

*Whereas the response I'm hoping for from passersby is a combination of "My, isn't she clean" and "Hellooooooo Mild-Mannered."

Jesse Tree Pictures

List of Jesse Tree Symbols (in roughly chronological order, from creation to the birth of Christ.)

Week I
Sunday: Introduction (Isa. 11:1-10)
Monday: God—Creation
Tuesday: Adam and Eve—The First Sin
Wednesday: Noah—The Flood
Thursday; Abraham—The Promise
Friday: Isaac—Offering of Isaac
Saturday: Jacob—Ladder to Heaven

Week II
Sunday: Joseph—God's Providence
Monday: Moses—God's Leadership
Tuesday: Israelites—Passover Lamb
Wednesday: Exodus—Pillars of Fire and Cloud
Thursday: God—Giving the Torah at Sinai
Friday: The Ark of the Covenant—Prefigurement of Mary
Saturday: Joshua—The Fall of Jericho

Week III
Sunday: Gideon—Unlikely Heroes
Monday: Samuel—The Beginning of the Kingdom
Tuesday: David—A Shepherd for the People
Wednesday: Elijah—Threat of False Gods
Thursday: Jonah—Doing God's Will
Friday: Judith—Faith in Action
Saturday: Isaiah—The Call to Holiness

Week IV
Sunday: Jeremiah—The Exile
Monday: Habakkuk—Waiting and Watching

Dec. 19: John the Baptist
Dec. 20: Mary
Dec. 21: Zechariah and Elizabeth
Dec. 22: Joseph
Dec. 23: The Magi
Dec. 24: Jesus
Dec. 25: The Christ

Okay then.

Today we were in the studio audience of "Emeril Live." It was kind of interesting to see how these things work. Among other things, there is a professional rabble-rouser who tells depressingly slick jokes to try and get the audience all revved up. The commercial breaks are very very long, and the band plays a crucial role in getting the audience through them. At no point did I feel like the person jollying up the crowd found any actual enjoyment in the presence of the great unwashed.

The food looked okay, most of it being of the Triple Bypass variety. Emeril used ham hocks, but didn't explain how to serve them (I just cooked one and ended up throwing it away after a half-hearted attempt to decide which parts were edible—of course most of the good stuff had already cooked into the soup.) I didn't sample the food (which was a relief), but somehow the whole experience served up a super-sized portion of existential ennui.

Jesse Tree

Two years ago I came across a friend frantically shaping ornaments out of Sculpey. I immediately found out enough about the project to be waist-deep in it, and it was only after I'd finished that I realized the question of "whether this was worthwhile" could be asked and may even be assumed by others to have been answered in the affirmative. The project was a Protestant/internet take on the medieval Tree of Jesse. The medieval form is a genealogy of Christ, but the modern form is more of a summary of salvation history from creation to Christ. One makes an ornament for each day in Advent (it turns out that felt is a more common media than Sculpey, which just proves the existence of Fate, as I never would have taken a second look at stupid chunks of felt.) There are lists of suggested symbols, and EWTN provides a Catholic version (though not enough entries for the entire season).

I had so much fun that Stalin would have started World War III just to be able to stop me, and I am relying on my impenetrable blogger anonymity to protect me from the Al-Qaeda's fatwa. My only regret is that I couldn't include ninjas. The ornaments have now been liberally coated with Sculpey varnish—in the vivid world which is my imagination, this will not only make them shiny, but also protect them from breaking when they are accidentally thrown across the room. And although reality and this world may not overlap as frequently as my friends and well-wishers might desire, I have never been unhappy with it, and I expect great things of the shiny unbreakableness. When the ornaments dry, and when I feel like the great effort required, I will take pictures and post them so people can guess over which is my favorite (and where the ninjas would have been most at home). Done.

Part 1

J owns a CD of "Pink Love Songs." The cover shows a highly colored sunset. They range from the cloyingly sweet to the outright disturbing (“Sometimes I want to break you, and drive you to your knees!”) They are all undeniably pink. Most of them make me wonder how our culture could have gotten to such a state that these are the kind of words that fall out when people want to talk about love without using their minds.

At the moment, Frankie Valli’s star is ascendant (but not Oh What a Night, which exercises an unfortunate fascination over me), and under his influence I have frequently found the words “Let’s never listen to anything but Pink Love Songs” in my mouth and about to escape. (Go Mr. Positive! Express the exact same feelings while avoiding harmful negative energy!) Luckily, no one has the staying power of Kenny Rogers, and a series of inoculations in the form of three years listening to the soft rock station in grade school has given me lifelong immunity to him. (He is also troubling, though. Why would I want to be loved by a man in such a way that he'd be the last to admit my faults? I don't see how that would bring me closer to Christ. Why would I want a man who'd turn his back on his best friend and wouldn't ever think of anything but me? Think how boring the conversation would be after the novelty wore off:
"Honey, can you think of an alternate proof for the Pythagorean Theorem?"
"Well, darling, I just can't get my mind off you."
"Get the heck away from me, you non-Euclidean freak.")

To be continued when I feel like it and when J finds Pink Love Songs so I can include the play list.