I know a person. Said person has a very common name but it is through no fault of his own and it is not my beef with him. I called him Snivel-CommonName for a while secretly to myself, and now I just call him “Street,” because one can very easily walk all over him, take no exceptional notice of him, yet one has this underlying uneasy sense that through him terrible things can happen. Though in his case with the English language, not with fast-moving vehicles. You see, Street uses the wrong words. A lot. Street uses the wrong words in a way he thinks is poetic or perhaps artistically unkempt, but which is actually very stupid. You are never sure if he is genuinely unaware of what he’s saying, or if he’s being ignorant on purpose. This has been difficult to explain to people since there are some other things I don’t like about him so already I seem bias against, and when the crux of it all is linguistic you sound like a big snob in saying he uses the wrong words, and yet are unable to think of good examples when asked to do so. Until! Last week! When literature gave me the perfect example! Our Shakespeare class was discussing Much Ado About Nothing, and in revisiting the text it occurred to me that good old William must have himself known a Street, because he gave me the character of Dogberry. Dogberry mangles words and says things in a way just as disfiguring Street’s. Dogberry says “odorous” when he means “odious”. He says “discerns” when he means “concerns”. “Opinioned” instead of “pinioned”. “Reformed” instead of “informed”. It is more than a little irritating, to hear a person do this more or less in earnest, and even more so when you learn he is sort of aware of what he is doing. And now I have passages to flip to when I am on a tirade against him, or the IDEA of him more like, because really he isn’t SO bad, it’s what he does that I despise.
Starting this entry with a little ball of hate is not really what I meant to do, because in contrast to how much of my life has been lately, today has been lovely. And I guess the ball of hate wasn’t ALL hate, since the point was I Found Something Illuminating, which is usually a good thing. Though if it’s enabling my hate I’m not sure it’s so good. But it makes me feel less like a crazy misandrist and more like a normal egghead.
Saying “little ball of hate” just then reminded me of the pizza dough I made this morning. Because those were indeed little balls (the recipe is intended for individual pizzas, though I’m sure there is wisdom in keeping pizza dough parceled out into smaller doses and putting them in sandwich bags in the fridge,) though they weren’t quite balls of hate so much as they were balls of insatiable stickiness. I probably added an entire cup of flour in the countertop portion of the blending just to keep the damn stuff manageable. It was like trying to knead a hardy wood glue. Hopefully they turn out okay despite all the initial trouble, though my abilities with yeast are shaky and thus I am resigned to the possibility of it being scrambled eggs night.
HEY WHAT ABOUT THOSE GOOD THINGS
1. I had pair of goldfinches at my thistle feeder yesterday, and in fact they have come back several times since. It makes me giddy because it means I was right about my amateur eyeballing of my surroundings in thinking that this flat-yet-bushy farmland is a lot like my friend’s neighborhood in the Springs, and therefore should get more goldfinches than Mom does at her forest-esque foothills location. It’s great to be right, and it’s great to be right about happy sunny-colored birds.
2. Some clothing ordered from the USS Internets came today. It was clothing I had been anticipating for a LONG TIME because one was shipping from an eBay seller in China and had to wrestle with customs and also to be even remotely affordable needed to take about a month to get here, and the other was a sort of pricier-than-my-normal-range cashmere sweater, so the waiting came from amassing funds. So both came, both are worthwhile, huzzah for internet shopping.
3. I got to hear someone say, “only from up there would you see a mysterious rune-like cipher”.
4. Lovely food continues: you already know I am making pizza from scratch but did I mention brownies? And ravioli? And baked beans that I think even Anthony, Snubber of All Things Legume, may enjoy? All of these are happening, will be happening, or have recently happened in my kitchen.
4a. This foodening is not strictly coping-mechanism, though the brownies are a bit of let’s-make-Friday-okay, because Missy is switching departments and Friday is her last day with us. It’s really a great situation since she’s moving herself ahead and doing something that will be challenging but ultimately a much better fit for her, but of course for us it means we don’t get to see her as much. I am not as torn up about it as some of them are since Missy and I hang out somewhat regularly, but it still sucks in a petty sort of way and I spent a lot of time on Wednesday being supportive but also trying not to lump it in with STUFF THAT ROYALLY BLOWS list, because the damn thing is GROWING. So, brownies. During one of the more heated moments yesterday at one point I did get to feign total exasperation and shout “I’m calling the dairy!”
And then I did! Boy did I ever! A small town south of here survives by delivering fresh dairy products all over the front range, and since lately I have an accelerated need for decent eggs and milk and since I tire of the sub-par quality of the Safeway stuff and have been counting the days until the farmer’s markets start up again, I figured it was time. To have the milkman treat me right. It is surprisingly cheap to get this service and the gentleman I spoke with on the phone was very nice and chatty. I am apparently not even in the ’normal’ delivery range for my town but he said they’d add me to someone’s route which made me feel all special, and they’re delivering my box this weekend! And then next week I get milk and eggs! It’s all so sudden! And terrific.
5. There was a discussion earlier about how perfection is this commodity that realtors use as a selling point. The safe, homogenized, gated-community, picket fence sense of ‘perfection’. The guy saying this was frustrated with perfection, because in his mind (or just in the context of what he was saying) this was all perfection meant. But I couldn’t help but think of last night, when Anthony and I spent most of the evening lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling and the weird shapes of the underside of things, and how my head was kind of resting on a corner of the wall and we were kind of had our shoulders bunched up against each other, and how somehow that was so perfect in it’s own weird crumpled paper kind of way. There wasn’t wine or a movie, no fancy food (he’d just finished a bowl of ramen and I’d had yogurt and Ritz crackers for dinner) and no real structure to our conversation, it was just a nice moment that lasted for about three hours. And I think that’s the kind of perfection I’m after. Good human perfection. Accepting the hair and crumbs all over the floor as well as the simple happiness staring at ceiling shapes with someone gave me.
Here is a wonderful video Will Ferrell made
