I've got a few things on my mind, in no random order:
The Incident in the Bathroom
This might be a little...well, not to every one's liking, but it IS true, and, I apparently think, worth noting, because here it is: I was in the bathroom at work today, replacing the weekly newsletter (which I write, and which we put in plastic plexi holders in the stalls as a way of getting information out - hey, I will do what it takes). I went into the second stall, which, as every women at my work knows, tends to clog; they come and "fix" it and it clogs again. So I wasn't surprised to see something...solid....in there. I instinctively reached down to just flush straightaway- I mean, sometimes you have to be big about these things and do what's necessary.
However, right as I did so, I was startled - absolutely shocked, in fact - to see the largest human stool I have ever seen. It was the size of a human forearm. It was incredible. The toilet flushed, but the items (there were several, and one was really notable) would not go down. It was impacted - nothing would move. I flushed again. It was jammed. This immense stool was jamming the toilet.
I happen to manage the office team, which oversees the building, so rather than do nothing - as the last person must have done - I went out and told the appropriate person. I knew I needed to tell her what the problem was - was it overflowing, stuck with toilet paper, or what.
As delicately as I could, I explained; she said, "I'll call" and printed a sign to put on the door. A minute later, I was in there, putting up the rest of the newsletters, and I heard her move the door as she put the sign on. "Oh my God!" she said. "I saw it. Oh my God."
I mean, really. What else *can* you say? I don't tell this story to be gross, but to illustrate something hard to put into words. I had never thought about stool size in that way before - AND I was in the *women's* bathroom! I can imagine a Samoan, or Sumo wrestler, or some huge linebacker... maybe...maybe those men could produce this. But this came from a woman...possibly, probably someone I know. I could not imagine it.
And that was the point, really - I had never even thought about it. I had NOT imagined it. I never think about things like that, really; I am not scatalogically minded. I prefer to focus my imagination on things more rarefied, more uplifting. But it really shook me out of my little world. It was symbolic of all those surprising things that I neve expected to see because I didn't even know they could exist, but were just there, possible, all the time. It was a weird way to be reminded that even the things I feel I know about, I might not. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The Dead Garden
On Jan 2nd - the day I submit that no one likes - my last day of a 10-day vacation - I tackled the garden, which has been sorely neglected in the last couple months. Too cold or wet to garden, and no time during the holidays. But I had bulbs that needed planting (my first experiment with bulbs) and ground that needed leveling. Herbs needed trimming and concrete needed weeding (boy, grass can grow anywhere). So I tackled it, and after all the weeding and stuff I knew how to do, I tried to trim back some plants, mostly herbs. And for many of them, I could not tell if they were alive or dead.
Everything looked bad. Dried out sticks. Some plants had leaves, but some, like the lemon verbena, had very few or none. Dead, they look. But last year, the verbena looked dead and I didn't do anything to it, but then it came back to life quite abundantly this summer - except it looked like it would have done even better if I had cut it back more. I'm afraid to overdo it and kill something, but when I was finally radical with my sick rose that has looked shitty for years, it bloomed.
So now I don't know what to do. I feel like Mr. Orange from Reservoir Dogs - I don't know who's alive, and who's not (well, I am paraphrasing). What do you do when dead things don't look dead, or things look fine but die if you don't cut them back? How to act when you don't know if your actions are killing something or saving it? I try to get information but all books talk about is being instinctive: "You will know, the plant will tell you." Sure, except what if it tells me by dying?
I saw a video about lavender and they were explicit about radically cutting it down in the late winter or early spring, and I didn't because it looked fine, and then in the middle of summer, when everything was just lush, it died suddenly without explanation. I can only assume it was because I did NOT cut it back back when I should have. I failed to tough-ly love my herbs.
I can't wait for spring...when I find out what I am tending skillfully and what I am accidentally killing right now. When the bush/plant is full, I cut away what looks dead, and when it all looks dead, I cut just SOME away, and hedge my bets. We'll see.
Those Wild Victorians
I'm reading the 1873 novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hardy. I like Hardy except when he veers off into too much "authentic" unintelligible thick country dialects written phonetically and very annoying. In this novel, his third, he doesn't do it too much. I'm enjoying it. However, there is an aspect of the plot that I find...well, I don't know what to make of it. It's just this sticking point that confuses me. I have to briefly explain the plot in order to make it clear, so here it is:
Young parson's daughter, innocent and sheltered, respectable country family, no mother. Girl meets young architect apprentice come to see about improvements to the parish house, falls in love (mostly because he's the first educated man she's ever spent any amount of time with). He's socially inferior and father forbids them to marry. They elope to London but she freaks and calls it off last minute; they return to the country, she never mentions ANY thing about it to dad.
Guy goes off to India to make his name/fortune, Dad gets remarried and step-mom's distant relative (also, coincidentally, a friend of the FIRST guy) comes for a visit. Girls falls for HIM instead, never mentions the first lover (they used that term more loosely then) nor the failed elopement - but, tragically, it turns out that this NEW guy is fantastically specifically attracted to her supposed freshness and untouched innocence. During the course of their love, she asked about prior lovers on his part, hoping he'll say, oh, I've had a bunch - or some - or ONE - so she can say, me too and come clean.
But he says no. Now, let me be clear - in these Victorian novels, *kissing* is a super big deal. Sometimes, if you kissed someone, it was like proposing. A girl could be "ruined" by kissing. But still, this is for the women. In reality and in most novels as well, it is assumed or sometimes downright implied that the men were experienced, sleeping with whores or lower-class women - actresses, dancers and shopgirls. Men were not supposed to be virgins, although in the high, delicate Victorian novels, they seem to be as delicate, practically, as the girls. But THIS guy, in this book - he confesses to his beloved girl that, despite the fact that he is 32, not only has he never been engaged before, he's never wooed anyone and CERTAINLY has never kissed anyone before!
Really? REALLY? Is Hardy fucking with us? I have to assume so since he cannot be serious, right? Am I supposed to believe this allegedly straight, semi-dashing, intelligent normal guy - he's a critic, a known writer, a respectable man about town - who lived in London in the 1860's did not even *kiss* a girl in his 32 years? I cannot believe he means me to believe it.
But the novel goes on...it all comes out, eventually, through a silly of contrived plot twists, that she *did* have lovers, two different men who kissed her, love letters, a failed elopement, and - and this is the most damning thing of all, the last straw, the final nail in her coffin - she went to London and returned the next day, unmarried. In other words, overnight. In other words, they had sex. Although there were NO other additional clues in the plot that actual sex happened except that fact that the second lover is totally disgusted and upset by that one fact above all.
And that's weird. Why all this attention on her having sex when he didn't even kiss anyone? It seems unlikely. Out of balance. Too disparate. How could two such different ideas of sex/dating overlap? If it's wildly scandalous to kiss someone, how did you ever get a women to have sex with you before marriage? I don't know what to make of it. It's sort of the crux of the whole book. I keep thinking I am missing something.
On another note, I see on Wikipedia that this novel is where the term "cliffhanger" came from. The story was serialized (very common in those days) and there is indeed a scene where the guy is literally hanging off a cliff. She rescues him by tearing her clothes (petticoat) into a rope. It's a VERY silly and unlikely moment, but it's quite suspenseful anyway. I had to read ahead.
Well, those are my thoughts these days.
I'm reading the 1873 novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes" by Thomas Hardy. I like Hardy except when he veers off into too much "authentic" unintelligible thick country dialects written phonetically and very annoying. In this novel, his third, he doesn't do it too much. I'm enjoying it. However, there is an aspect of the plot that I find...well, I don't know what to make of it. It's just this sticking point that confuses me. I have to briefly explain the plot in order to make it clear, so here it is:
Young parson's daughter, innocent and sheltered, respectable country family, no mother. Girl meets young architect apprentice come to see about improvements to the parish house, falls in love (mostly because he's the first educated man she's ever spent any amount of time with). He's socially inferior and father forbids them to marry. They elope to London but she freaks and calls it off last minute; they return to the country, she never mentions ANY thing about it to dad.
Guy goes off to India to make his name/fortune, Dad gets remarried and step-mom's distant relative (also, coincidentally, a friend of the FIRST guy) comes for a visit. Girls falls for HIM instead, never mentions the first lover (they used that term more loosely then) nor the failed elopement - but, tragically, it turns out that this NEW guy is fantastically specifically attracted to her supposed freshness and untouched innocence. During the course of their love, she asked about prior lovers on his part, hoping he'll say, oh, I've had a bunch - or some - or ONE - so she can say, me too and come clean.
But he says no. Now, let me be clear - in these Victorian novels, *kissing* is a super big deal. Sometimes, if you kissed someone, it was like proposing. A girl could be "ruined" by kissing. But still, this is for the women. In reality and in most novels as well, it is assumed or sometimes downright implied that the men were experienced, sleeping with whores or lower-class women - actresses, dancers and shopgirls. Men were not supposed to be virgins, although in the high, delicate Victorian novels, they seem to be as delicate, practically, as the girls. But THIS guy, in this book - he confesses to his beloved girl that, despite the fact that he is 32, not only has he never been engaged before, he's never wooed anyone and CERTAINLY has never kissed anyone before!
Really? REALLY? Is Hardy fucking with us? I have to assume so since he cannot be serious, right? Am I supposed to believe this allegedly straight, semi-dashing, intelligent normal guy - he's a critic, a known writer, a respectable man about town - who lived in London in the 1860's did not even *kiss* a girl in his 32 years? I cannot believe he means me to believe it.
But the novel goes on...it all comes out, eventually, through a silly of contrived plot twists, that she *did* have lovers, two different men who kissed her, love letters, a failed elopement, and - and this is the most damning thing of all, the last straw, the final nail in her coffin - she went to London and returned the next day, unmarried. In other words, overnight. In other words, they had sex. Although there were NO other additional clues in the plot that actual sex happened except that fact that the second lover is totally disgusted and upset by that one fact above all.
And that's weird. Why all this attention on her having sex when he didn't even kiss anyone? It seems unlikely. Out of balance. Too disparate. How could two such different ideas of sex/dating overlap? If it's wildly scandalous to kiss someone, how did you ever get a women to have sex with you before marriage? I don't know what to make of it. It's sort of the crux of the whole book. I keep thinking I am missing something.
On another note, I see on Wikipedia that this novel is where the term "cliffhanger" came from. The story was serialized (very common in those days) and there is indeed a scene where the guy is literally hanging off a cliff. She rescues him by tearing her clothes (petticoat) into a rope. It's a VERY silly and unlikely moment, but it's quite suspenseful anyway. I had to read ahead.
Well, those are my thoughts these days.
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