Up early for yoga and working out. I go again to the Dupont Circle location of Washington Sports Clubs.

I use an old-fashioned barbell for curls instead of waiting for the curl machine and it sorta makes me understand the appeal of machines. Like when I’m using the curl machine, nobody can really tell how much weight I’m pulling, whereas with the barbell everybody can see how ridiculously small it is and that I’m only curling 35 pounds.

Then I use a strange hybrid machine for triceps, where you load free weights onto different bars for different sets. The first bar and set seems normal, but the second makes the tricep curl harder at the low point of the curl, and the third is heaviest at the beginning, at the high point. The machine has instructions noting that this differentiation makes for a more effective workout, working different fibers of the muscles on different sets. I’m dubious, but it was fun anyway to try.

Bedroom painting continues, with taping the trim and then the actual periwinkle paint going on today. We go back to Home Depot between coats to get another gallon, just in case. I install new electrical outlets and a new light switch, since the old ones have years of paint on them.

We’re up early as usual to go to yoga and the gym like we do on Saturday mornings. I decide to try the WSC located to the north of Dupont Circle. Dawn tells me it’s north of the Italian restaurant with the woman’s picture. So after dropping Dawn off for yoga, I go up Connecticut, past Anna Maria’s. And on the block just before the Washington Hilton, I see my gym.

Parking is marginally better than trying to park down below the circle. I find a spot on T Street across from the Hilton, pretty much directly across the street from the spot where Hinckley shot Reagan. From there it’s a quick half-block walk. And turns out I like this particular WSC a lot, like far far more than the one at Capitol Hill that I tried. They have this cool Nautilus Nitro Pec Fly machine that I thoroughly enjoy, although I’m still sore from it days later.

From there we go to Home Depot and buy railings for our stairway. The stair parts are sold in the same aisle as moldings, like chair or quarter round, and there they have a station with a backsaw where you cut the pieces to length. But the stair railing is something like 3 inches thick, so it’s going to take a while to cut. An employee wandering by offers to use the radial arm saw in the next aisle, and we eagerly accept. But we end up waiting for twenty minutes or so for another employee to finish cuts for other people, and then we finally give up and go back and use the hand saw.

I find some 2″ casters that I like for the Delta TS200 bench saw at home. It’s on a stand that seems like it’s always in the way of using the workbench, so I figure some casters will be a good idea. The casters have 5/16″ – 18 threaded stems, so I find washers and nuts in the hardware aisle. It’s only when we get home do I realize that I’ve left the casters themselves in the hardware aisle, so I’ve got some extra washers and nuts now.

It really bugs me that I’ve forgotten something like that, so I keep telling Dawn that I’m heading back to Home Depot first chance I get. She convinces me finally to order some locking casters online.

We have a really exhausting ballet rehearsal, but it’s good because Rosie’s pretty much got the whole piece choreographed for us now.

When we get home I nail up the other wall of the wainscot. It goes pretty well until I get to the last four pieces. I get too wrapped up in trying to fan them out a little, so that the last one that I’ve ripped narrower to fit at the end will fit nicely. So where before I’ve been nailing up one piece at a time, so that I know where the backing piece is, where to drive the nails, by these last few I’ve lost where that backing piece is and I end up driving the nails in too low. Dawn points this out to me, and I feel awful about it. Then I try nailing the last few up a little higher and I think I nailed too high this time. Aargh. So what I need to do is go back and get a string and stretch it from the end, where I can see where the backing piece is, down to where I also know that I got the nails right, in earlier pieces. But when I go to do that I’ve already unplugged the stapler/nail gun. So I just leave it for next weekend.

In email correspondence with Gordon and Paul, they both note that they mostly went with the picks in Entertainment Weekly, with minor variations.

Again this year we go to Dana & Lois’s house for the Oscar party. Gordon & Babs & Ally are there, along with Dana, Lois, Mark and some guy named Steve. We fill out our ballots, Dawn making all personal picks while I go with what buzz I’ve stolen from the Los Angeles Times, since we’ve seen exactly zero movies up for awards tonight. Dawn & I love Jon Stewart, so we really like him as host. The rest of the crowd are not fans, so they just think he’s so-so.

There are a lot of commercials for L’Oreal, with Andie MacDowell and Penélope Cruz. I keep waiting and waiting, and complaining bitterly, for Aishwarya Rai to appear, and finally she does, although there’s too much discussion and talk of the product and not enough Ash. Babs mentions that Ash is engaged, to whoever is the biggest male Bollywood star. I hadn’t heard this, and I wonder who it could be. She used to be sorta engaged to Salman Khan, but since she’s Hindu and he’s Mulsim, that would never happen. The biggest Bollywood star is probably Shahrukh Khan. But, again, probably Muslim. The only other name I can think of is Aamir Khan.[1]

I’m disappointed that out of all the clips they show of Brokeback Mountain, we never see the lovers kiss. The clips from the rest of the movies are fairly dull, although I do now want to see Good Night and Good Luck and Crash.

At the end of the night, I’ve got 20 out of 25 right, and Gordon and I tie for first place in the pool. Dawn is disgusted with me for not having any picks of my own and just going with the LA Times.[2] Even Ally has seen more of the movies than I have. I tell everyone that it’s like I’m eight years old again, not having seen any of the movies and having trouble staying up way past my bedtime. The show ends at a civilized 11:30 or so, but we have to drive back home to the city, so it’s after midnight by the time we crawl into bed.

[1] Research the next day reveals that Ash may, or may not, be engaged to Abhishek Bachchan. While he has finally started demonstrating some star wattage after a number of years in the business, I don’t know if he could yet be called the biggest male star. He is more famous, of course, for being the son of the biggest star of them all, the king of all time, the most famous man in the world, Amitabh Bachchan. And, apparently, the three Khans are all already married. But, turns out, Salman Khan has two wives.

[2] The next morning I find my notes of my research on Friday for my Oscar picks. I realize that, because of the way the first page of my printout breaks, I screwed up my vote for best foreign language picture. I was supposed to have gone with Tsotsi, and Tsotsi did indeed win. And I had thought the LAT’s clear choice was Paul Giamatti for supporting actor, but a closer look clearly shows that Giamatti and George Clooney had tied in the critics’ picks. I would totally have gone with Clooney had I realized that at the time. That’s two more that I should have gotten. (I screwed up a third one, just plain mis-marking cinematography for Batman Begins rather than Brokeback Mountain. But Memoirs of a Geisha won, so I would’ve been wrong anyway.)

Had a good workout today. I’m doing the overhead press (at XPressLine station 5) a lot more these days, along with the Cybex fly machine, trying to combine more things at once, rather than using the more focussed Cybex curl and the tricep machines. I still do the StairMaster for 22 minutes. I’ve been searching for something that will do abs and lower back without hurting my back at the same time, but I’m still not satisfied with anything so far.

At my gym, Washington Sports Club, they have a little video screen on each cardio machine, where you can plug in your headphones and watch TV or the music videos. I usually try and find like Turner Classic Movies or American Movie Classics, with some old cowboy movie or noir or something like that.

The showers at the Connecticut Avenue club are nicer than the ones at 20th & M, but I for some reason prefer the ones at 20th & M. Maybe it’s because they’re fully tiled rather than plastic, although the tiled showers are fully enclosed and pretty dark compared to the more open plastic ones.

Either way the showers are pretty small. So I turn the shower on and get wet and then turn the shower off to soap up, so that I can turn this way and that and work up a good lather without being under the stream of the water, since there’s no place to get away from the water, it being so small. I hate touching my arm or back to the tile or the shower curtain, though. It’s cold and clammy and I shiver if I do it.

Finished the book, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. The final story is the longest, and the most devastating.

It’s even kinda hard to determine who the displaced person is in the story. On its face it refers to the refugee himself, the Pole, Mr. Guizac. But Mrs. Shortley certainly becomes displaced by events. The owner, Mrs. McIntyre ultimately becomes displaced. But, generally, let’s go with the title referring to the character who himself is called in the story the displaced person.

Although I love love loved the conversation where Mrs. Shortley is explaining to the guys what exactly a displaced person is, e.g., someone with nowhere to go, and I don’t know maybe it’s Sulk who points out that the displaced person is here, on the farm, which technically is in fact somewhere.

Mr. Guizac also is definitely the most overtly Christ-like figure in the stories, near as I can remember. The priest says that Mr. Guizac has arrived to redeem them. Later it’s either Mrs. Shortley or Mrs. McIntyre who declares that Christ was a displaced person.

The ending is, like A Good Man is Hard to Find, fairly obvious and logical in coming, and however much you’d like it not to happen, how much you really want to stop it, or maybe just stop reading to stop it, it happens quickly and brutally.

I remember when I was a kid, in like first and second grade, how we used to have two holidays in February. First Washington’s birthday and then Lincoln’s. We’d make construction paper cutout silhouettes, of Washington and Lincoln and ourselves.

Of all the stories in this Flannery O’Connor book that I’m reading, this has to have been the most powerful one I’ve read. There’s a couple left in the book now to go, but boy did this one pack a wallop.

Maybe it’s the title, but I don’t know. I’m not sure how to really take the use of the word nigger in all the stories. I generally disapprove, and generally instantly dislike whoever uses the term. O’Connor makes it a little easier when she makes so many of the characters dislikable anyway.

But The Artificial Nigger starts out making Mr. Head such a grand, fine character — The moonlight waits for his permission to enter and cast a dignifying light on everything. The chair is attentive and awaits his order. His trousers are like the garment of some great man. O’Connor describes him physically thus:

Sixty years had not dulled his responses; his physical reactions, like his moral ones, were guided by his will and strong character, and these could be seen plainly in his features.

and

His eyes were alert but quiet, and in the miraculous moonlight they had a look of composure and of ancient wisdom as if they belonged to one of the great guides of men. He might have been Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God’s light to fly to the side of Tobias.

She introduces him to us in the most glowing terms. He has moral will, a strong character, ancient wisdom. So it’s really much harder then to dislike him. I think I even began the story with the understanding that the title referred to him, that he was African-American and would be later the victim of the inevitable O’Connor-esqe tragedy. But then when he points out the black man to the unfortunate Nelson, and refers to him, the man, as a nigger, then all is different.

So maybe that’s part of O’Connors trickery, when the story turns out to be a journey, and about Mr. Head’s fall from grace. We feel that fall better, we internalize it better, because we’ve been set up to admire him from the beginning. Mr. Head loses his way, he loses our sympathy and Nelson’s sympathy, and then he loses his very humanity when he profoundly and disgustingly denies his kinship to Nelson. Like Peter denying Christ.

But then they re-establish their kinship, and Mr. Head regains his humanity, over the small statue, the titular statue.

“An artificial nigger!” Nelson repeated in Mr. Head’s exact tone.

The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets.

Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy.

So, um, yeah, great. I’m supposed to be pleased then that they can again establish their great bond together in their racism? This is a happy ending? Why does it have to be racism that bonds them? Is this O’Connor’s way of being snarky toward her own southern heritage, or towards non-Catholic southerners?

But then maybe the racism is the point. It itself is their sin. And O’Connor goes all out in the end, explaining the horror of sin and the serenity of mercy with astonishing power and beauty.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought him self a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no Sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

And then the train pull away from them, disappearing “like a frightened serpent into the woods.” Like the serpent from the Garden, of course. Only this time defeated. They have received mercy and temptation leaves them alone. And Nelson declares that he will never return to Atlanta, to the place of their fall from grace.

We go to Safeway on Saturday morning, just like we do on many Saturday mornings. Ah, but today there’s a snowstorm a-comin’. Everybody is at the store today.

It’s funny actually. The aisles aren’t especially crowded. It’s just that the lines for the registers are ridiculously long. I make a special stop in the magazine aisle, grabbing National Geographic, Esquire, Consumer Reports and Fine Homebuilding, and I grab a Star for Dawn. We should have brought our books.

I end up only reading Fine Homebuilding. It’s from Taunton Press, same as Fine Woodworking, to which I subscribe. I’ve never really looked at Fine Homebuilding before, figuring it’s way out of my league. Like I figure it’s more about restoring fine antique homes rather than just old row houses like we’ve got. But it’s surprisingly accessible and enjoyable. Hey, there’s a graphic on the differences among oilstones, waterstones, diamond stones and ceramic stones. That’s right up my alley.

Unfortunately all the copies are incorrectly glued and are all falling apart. Otherwise I would have bought one. I’ll have to see if Borders nearby at work carries it. Although I did just renew my subscription to Fine Woodworking and just newly subscribed to Popular Woodworking. Don’t know if the budget will allow another magazine.

Still reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find and other stories.

The second story is The River, about a child, variously named Harry and Bevel, who, fairly neglected by his parents, spends the day being sat by a Mrs. Connin. She takes him to her home (where he steals a valuable antique children’s book about Jesus) then down to the river, where the Reverend Bevel Summers baptizes him. Later Harry returns to the river by himself and drowns himself searching for the Kingdom of Jesus, before the cancerous Mr. Paradise was likely about to molest him.

Next up is The Life You Save May Be Your Own, in which the one-armed Mr. Shiftlet arrives at the home of Lucynell Carter and her developmentally challenged adult daughter Lucynell Carter. Mrs. Carter convinces Mr. Shiftlet to marry the younger Lucynell, whom Mr. Shiftlet then abandons at a diner and makes off with Mrs. Carter’s car.

Remember in the title story, where the unpleasant people ended up being brutally murdered.
I think maybe these stories are supposed to be funny? They don’t seem at all funny when I’m reading them. But summing them up like this, all these damaged people coming to ignominious ends, it all seems really black, really somehow over the top darkly humorous.

Next is the least horrifying so far, A Stroke of Good Fortune, in which Ruby comes to the realization (horrifying to her, at least), while climbing the stairs to her fourth floor walkup, that she is pregnant. Then, in A Temple of the Holy Ghost, the twelve year old girl and her two visiting fourteen year old cousins puzzle over the mysterious transgendered person in the freak show at the fair.

I finished that story on the Metro, then turned to the next story and closed the book quietly and nonchalantly. I was somewhat dismayed, unable to read The Artificial Nigger in public.

In The Princess Bride, Prince Humperdinck makes a pronouncement regarding the pursuit of Princess Buttercup and Wesley/Dread Pirate Roberts. “Unless I am wrong,” he says, followed by a parenthetical,”and I am never wrong,” and then something about the the fire swamp.

I think about that sometimes, when I’m trying to figure something out. I really admire his confidence, but there’s also a slight gesture towards humility. Granted it’s only a nod, a conceit that only makes him more of an arrogant bastard. But it’s a charming gesture.

My version is different but, oddly, paradoxically, no less arrogant. “Unless I am wrong,” I say, “and I am always wrong,” and then I go on to say what I think something is or means or is going to happen.

So, unless I am wrong, and I am always wrong, deconstruction is taking a text, noting the underlying questions that the text is purporting to answer, and then determining that the questions themselves are incoherent.

I’m not sure how this is useful though.

I read an interesting tidbit in the Washington Post yesterday morning:

In the past 20 years, football has sharply widened its lead over baseball as America’s favorite professional sport, according to a Harris Poll in December. Fans choose football over baseball, basketball and auto racing combined, the poll found.

Huh. I don’t know what it means, more than what it says, when “fans choose football.” Meaning fans choose football as their favorite sport, is what I would guess. What it means in terms of team revenue or league revenue or television audience or player salaries, is still left quite undefined.

I know that I like football, certainly more than basketball or auto racing, neither of which I like or follow or can or will even watch. Auto racing? Good grief.

I used to watch baseball, a little, some, at least more than I do now, but have never followed a team much. I actually live only a couple blocks from a Major League Baseball stadium now, but only went once to (not) see a game that got rained out.

But I don’t even especially follow football, just watch it with Dawn. I like watching it, but will live if we miss a game.

Dawn makes fun of me for calling the game as I watch it, of my need to comment on every play, as if I actually knew what I was talking about. I think I get that from my mother. I always enjoyed watching football with her, and we sort of chatted to each other and with each other via comments around and about what was going on in the game.

Back again to the Kennedy Center for ballet, this time ABT doing Romeo & Juliet. For our night we get Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky. An interesting dynamic is that they are married in real life.

Dawn complains about Mercutio, saying he doesn’t stand out much from, and thus might as well be, Benvolio. She raves about the orchestra. I’m generally a Julie Kent or Gillian Murphy kind of guy, but I sure love Irina tonight.

Dawn tells me that apparently Juliet is something of a signature role for Alessandra Ferri, who is totally my favorite babe on the ABT website. Dawn says she doesn’t travel much, so I knew we wouldn’t be seeing her in Washington. Dawn also notes that the picture I’m so in love with is pretty old. I see now in her bio that Alessandra Ferri joined ABT as a principal dancer twenty-one years ago, which puts her age to be about 90 or so.

It also strikes me as pretty funny, adapting Shakespeare, considered the greatest writer in the English language, with the adaptation being completely devoid of words altogether.

Friday is always fondue and movie night.

We often have trouble finding the fondue at Safeway. I mean, we know where it is, but we often find our Safeway is out of stock. Safeway actually has their own brand of fondue, and we like it just fine. Sometimes they’ll have this Tiger brand, and that’s okay too. Safeway’s country and gorganzola versions we don’t like.

We tried making the fondue ourselves from scratch once, with gruyère and emmental, but it was pretty runny.

We do make the bread from scratch though. Well, as much as baking bread in a bread machine is considered making bread from scratch. I’ve done it so many times now (every Thursday, with few exceptions, for the last couple of years) that I know it by heart: 1.5 tbl sugar, 1 tsp salt, 250 ml water, 1 tbl olive oil, 3.25 cups bread flour, 1.25 tsp yeast. Set for 1.5 lb French setting and let ‘er rip.

When I was a kid we used to have fondue twice a year. This was in the seventies, when apparently fondue was all the rage in the suburbs. We got to choose whatever we wanted for dinner on our birthdays, and my brother and I always chose fondue. So I like to remember that my family had fondue every March 15 and May 27 throughout the seventies.

But back then we’d have meat fondue (Fondue Bourguignonne) as opposed to the cheese fondue (Fondue Neuchâteloise) that Dawn and I have now. For cheese fondue you just dip the bread in and then take it out, but the meat you’d have to let cook for a while. I remember we’d each have two fondue forks, and everybody’s would get crossed in the fondue pot. You had to coordinate with everyone else.

What a social meal it was really. Perfect for a birthday dinner.

Was looking for something to read night before crawling into bed and spotted Dawn’s edition of Flannery O’Connor. I’d read the title story before, but that’s all I’ve ever read of O’Connor. And I didn’t remember it much, so I brought it into bed with me.

My goodness. That story is just pure meanness.

You kinda like Grandmother at first even if she is a worry wart. I mean, the two grandchildren are little twits and hey what are the chances of meeting the Misfit anyway? But then she’s all hey look at the little nigger child there on the side of the road. (Whoa! That word! And aparently I’m going to have to get used to it, reading this book.) And then and then it’s all her fault that they get off on the dirt road looking for the house that isn’t even there, and then she’s the one who scares the cat and causes the accident.

And then she’s the one who recognizes the Misfit, who then allows that it really would have been better for everyone if she hadn’t. So then there’s the awful and agonizingly drawn out marching into the woods two by two. And the Misfit’s summation of Christ’s raising of the dead:

If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can — by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.

No pleasure but meanness, he says.

My goodness.

I remembered the story a little better after I read it. I know that’s kind of “well, duh,” but I guess I mean I sorta remembered thinking about it after I read it years ago. I don’t know why but it made me think of St. Paul. I think maybe I had some sort of confusion between Diogenes and Paul. Something between Diogenes carrying the lamp looking for an honest man (a good man?) and St. Paul being blinded by the light on the way to Damascus.

Maybe some sort of confusion between Diogenes and Damascus? Or the two stories both involving some kind of light? Who knows. It doesn’t really make any sense, I guess.

What strikes me now is how unpleasant the whole story is. How mean the whole story is. And how crazy fucked up the Misfit is, but he does express a kernel of truth about Christianity in his crazy fucked up way.

If what happened in the Gospels really did happen, as we Catholics (including Flannery O’Connor) believe, then that changes everything. And logically, if it all didn’t happen, then what’s the point really?

My brother is a veteran of the Gulf War, so he’s by definition a veteran of a foreign war. But he refuses to join the VFW because they make you take an oath where you swear to, among other things, a belief in God. And he can’t do that.

I don’t think that he believes that there definitely isn’t a God, but he can’t swear that he believes that there is either. But he’s against abortion and stealing and murder and whatnot. And I wonder, where does that come from? Where does morality fit into a world without God?

I can understand as well I suppose the social contract version then, but Rob doesn’t really speak in those terms. He’s really a right and wrong, black and white kind of guy. Or like another man famously said, “I don’t do nuance.”

So back to morality. Morality without God. How does that work?

Dawn and I are back to the Kennedy Center for the ballet, week two of three weeks in a row. You’ll remember how we both really didn’t like last week’s National Ballet of Canada doing Swan Lake.

This week is a program of up and comers from all sorts of places. Protégés: The International Ballet Academy Festival. The kids are from the schools at The Royal Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, New National Theatre Tokyo, Paris Opera Ballet,Royal Danish Ballet, Kirov Ballet.

They’re incredible. It’s funny to be able to tell the difference between them and professional adult dancers, but they’re amazing and young and way better than I could ever hope to be.

So they ended the episode with Eric returning, but no explanation as to why Jaye is touched by her objets. Which is where it all has to end, episode and season and series.

The only 2 clues I can think offa the top of my head is, one, early on Jaye asks a pile of animals if they are God or Satan. Her conclusion is a heartbreaking, “Oh, God, I’m a crazy person.” Two is from the next-to-last episode, where she refuses a request from Dr. Ron’s monkey until he (the monkey) tells her why they talk to her. The answer is a maddening, “Because you listen.”

So, narratively the end is all warm and fuzzy and happy and satisfying, because it ties up the love story with a happy ending. Otherwise, though, never to know any more as to why they talked to her.

(I know. It’s just a TV show. But it was art. It was touching.)

And, finally, after 13 episodes, after 2 years, I’m the next morning in the shower when it hits me, “it” being something of a minor note but something I should have noticed a whole lot sooner. Jaye’s parents are Darrin and Karen, and her siblings are Aaron and Sharon. Again, a minor note, just something to emphasize her apart-ness, her estrangement from her family. I just hadn’t ever put it together before.

Friday night is always fondue and movie night. We’re just about to sit down and eat and watch the last episode of Wonder Falls.

My understanding is that the series has some sort of ending, wraps up somehow. I’ve been very pleased with it, even if I hate Heidi and wonder why Eric can’t see her for the evil shrew she is.

But I expected somehow Jaye and Eric not to end up together, since that would seem to tie up the season too well and leave nothing for a second season, which of course they never did get, but still.

So how can they end it all, without ending it all?

We shall see.

I went to the dentist today. I always pray a constant stream of Hail Mary’s in the dentist chair.

Typical Saturday for us.

Up at seven. Dawn makes breakfast omelette while I feed the kitties. Then out the door by 8:30, Dawn to her yoga class and me to the gym. Back home not long after eleven. Pasta for lunch.

Then walk through Lincoln Park, as in file photo above. That statue is, shall we say, somewhat paternalistic, condescending even. Anyway.

Work on the house. Beer-thirty at 3:30. Bit more work.

Then off to early dinner at Aroma on Nineteenth Street. From there to the Kennedy Center for the National Ballet of Canada’s presentation of Swan Lake. Dawn and I both really dislike it.

Then home to bed.

So, having finished The Accident, I picked up my worn copy of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I tried yet again to get all the way through the interminable Robert Hass introduction. Failed.

But did re-read one of my favorite favorite poems, not just favorite Rilke but one of my favorites of any poet:

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Vintage International Edition, March 1989
ISBN 0-679-72201-7

I finished The Accident yesterday. I wish I had liked it more, as I wish I had liked Dawn more. Night is easily the best of the three, its simple narrative much more powerful and affecting than the self-conscious philosophical arguments that dominate the other two.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing at all in the other two. Dawn is amazing in its own way, especially after I didn’t believe throughout the entire book that Elisha would go through with it.

And there’s absolutely no denying the power of the scene with the French prostitute in The Accident, although her screaming at him that he’s a madman when he declares her a saint just didn’t ring true for me. Maybe it was the translation? I don’t know. I understood the power of the scene more than I felt like it was a true scene.

I hurt my back in December, then hurt my hand in January. Today marks my return to Jessica’s intermediate ballet class as St. Mark’s Dance Studio in Capitol Hill.

Dawn goes straight from work to class, while I go home first and get the car. Going home first also gives me a chance to change clothes at home rather than at the studio. They don’t have a dressing room for men, only women, so I have to change in the men’s room downstairs. I’d rather change at home.

Got my hair cut today too.

Took two tries today. As in, I had to clear it out and start over again after a disastrous first attempt. The thirty-four minutes noted above represents the second attempt only.

The first try was before work. This one now took half my lunch hour.

Sudoku is evil that way.