Can you believe I’ve gone over a year without parking tickets?  Considering I live and work in locations with pesky “street sweeping” days, I think this is a real feat, requiring vigilance the first and second Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of every month, April through November.  No meter tickets, either!

Did you hear the choirs of angels singing ca. 5:59 p.m.?  This was why:

Now completed (by me).  I thought that by page 981 (not counting the 100-or-so pages of footnotes) I would know something more about the characters and storylines.  I can’t say I do.  It wasn’t a bad way to spend months of my reading life, but it also doesn’t quite seem worth the effort I expended…  I get that DFW is smart and entertaining and tricky.  But as a story I can’t say I loved it.  I wanted to love it, too.  Sigh.

When did my exercise aversion begin?  I’m thinking elementary school.  My feet point outward, and I am a terrible runner, and this didn’t go unnoticed by my fellow first-graders.  As a sensitive kid, it got to me.  P.E. was always a dreaded subject.  I was terrible at most aspects of the Presidential Fitness Test.  Luckily I was good at school all the while, so I just sort of focused on that.

I got into walking for a while.  Like long-distance walking, which feels good, but isn’t that challenging anymore.  And a couple summers ago there was the hiking phase, which was really fun and challenging, but hard to sustain past summer.  Occasionally I sign up for a one-month “beginners” course at a yoga studio.  I go for the month and then quit.  I tell myself I can do it at home, but never do.  I feel good about exercising when I’m in the habit of doing it (however rarely that is).  It’s just a matter of getting there.

Even as an undergrad I avoided the gym at DU.  Mostly because I compared myself to the other people there — people who were in better shape than I was, plus there was this element of feeling bad about myself and also judging people around me.  I told myself that if I really wanted to exercise, I would do it on my own, at home or outside, without the aid of equipment.  It’s a nice idea, but one that doesn’t really work for me (yet?).

So last week I signed up for a membership at the gym at work.  It’s cheap for employees.  I think I could have saved a couple of bucks at a 24-hour Fitness, but I literally work steps away from this one, and the convenience of it is unbeatable.  Of course I didn’t use said membership for the first ten days…  I guess I had to think about it more, or something?  Apparently merely paying for it isn’t motivational enough.

Another perk to being staff is that we get three free sessions with a trainer.  Not one to give up something free, I signed up.  The girl I’m working with is pretty fantastic — into nutrition and holistic stuff.  It’s one of those roles (personal training) where you (I, anyway) expect to encounter someone totally fake, so it’s nice to find someone real and frank and funny (I feel the same way about my hairdresser).  But yesterday OMG did she kick my ass!  With these little tiny weights! And little tiny exercises!

Anyway.  I’m sore today.  But being sore feels good.

Even though the creepy factor is high, I really liked this article in the New York Times about innocent city voyeurism…  I love that part of cities — sort of but not really knowing strangers, the bits of others’ lives that lightly graze your own.  It’s lonely sometimes, but then so is living in a small town.  Mostly it’s fascinating.

Today I cataloged a drawing by Gustaf Fjaestad called The Boy Who Sees with His Heart.  A detail is on the cover of this book:

The actual work is irregularly shaped and set into a really pretty wooden frame.  It was commissioned by the Swedish Association for the Blind, and I think it’s so lovely.  I also cataloged an image from the 2007 Venice Biennale guide, which is titled “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind.”  These two titles (of the book and of the painting) got me thinking about where we place our abstract feelings.  Thoughts are in our heads, love is in our hearts.  It’s much more romantic not to place everything in the head.  I’m thinking that we miss out on a lot by doing that.  I’m pretty guilty of paying too much attention to my head, and not enough to my gut or my nose or my eyes or my heart.

I feel full.  I feel like I’ve felt full for days and days, even though I distinctly remember being stomach-growling-hungry today at 11, yesterday at 4, etc., etc.  Ugh.

Also: sluggish.  And in a fog.  Just sort of bleh.  And I have three pimples around my mouth like punishment for eating fries or something.  Plus it’s one of those holidays where I have to work but the mail doesn’t come.  And that makes me feel like I should say something about being thankful for my freedom.  I don’t know how to say that.  It’s hard to be genuinely thankful for something you’ve always had, isn’t it?  It’s hard to even imagine what a lack of it would be, or, if there is a freedom-enslavement continuum, what each shade looks like.  Is “enslavement” even the opposite?  Or, rather, the only opposite?

On the plane back from Portland a few weeks ago I didn’t check in ahead of time, and was rewarded with the back row.  There was the usual seating fiasco that we can now expect on full flights when people carry on their bags — wrong seats, double booking, split up families, etc., etc.  I thought for a while that my row partner and I had the row to ourselves, which almost makes up for the fact that the rear row seats don’t recline, when the attendant seated another guy in the empty middle seat.  “Thanks for switching seats.  I’ll get your free TV set up after takeoff.”

He had “Jacqueline” tattooed on his arm and looked about 22.  His eyes were a shade of blue-green I’ve come to think of as sad because that’s pretty much the color my eyes turn if I cry a lot.  We took off, he got his TV, but it turned out the sound didn’t work.  He told me he would have gotten the TV for free anyway because he was military, but he didn’t like to insist on it.  He was in the army, had just been home for a few weeks, and was headed back — where, I didn’t ask.  I traded him my aisle seat with working sound for his middle seat (I was just planning to sleep).  I thought about how little I think about the military, how disconnected I am from it, where he was going, what he had seen and might see.  There’s a lot I don’t understand about the world.

I’ve taken to keeping a tiara in my car.  You know, just in case (thanks, Paul).

Mark Bittman, in an interview with Time Out New York:

Question: “What would you say is the most important skill to develop in the kitchen?

Answer: “The ability to go in there and start. I am the least impressive cook you will ever see. I am completely without knife skills, I screw things up all the time. When I’m in the kitchen I’m not obsessively trying to create the perfect dish; I’m trying to put dinner on the table. Comparing yourself to the people who cook on television is like comparing yourself to Andre Agassi. If you can drive you can cook.”

I think I’ll print this and put it on my kitchen wall.  Or, better yet, take up embroidery and stitch it, and then hang it up.  This is precisely what I need to hear.  I love you, Mark Bittman (and you, too, Christopher, for the link).

xoxoxo,

Leslie

On the list for today:

• Sale at my favorite Cherry Creek North store
• Personal statement writing for grad school applications
• Also: no freaking out about grad school applications and/or the cost of the programs.  It will all be okay/I can worry about it later
• RAAP hotline shift
• Cleaning
• Making dinner for someone (given my lack of skill/confidence in the kitchen, it is ridiculous that I ever attempt to do this, but I think it will be okay).  Oh, and this is the plan.  Tried and true with Melissa in Portland.

First: More Love of Blogs…

Maybe it’s because I’m largely into art and information, maybe it’s geeky, or maybe it’s just human, but I think Information is Beautiful is great!  Author and visualizer David McCandless uses the blog to present his own infographics as well as other “infographic morsels” he finds.  Here’s a recent favorite:

Take that, news media!  I think what I love about these is that, while anyone can make a graph of pretty much anything he or she wants, graphs are usually made to support whatever viewpoint is in the article they accompany, glossing over or completely ignoring the bigger picture.  McCandless puts things in perspective, places things in their broader context, and tells us to stop freaking out about the freaking HPV vaccine and start focusing on our driving.  Or something like that.

He recently asked people to draw their souls and send them in (no diabolical intentions — note that these are merely representations of souls, not actual souls — soul surrogates, if you will).  I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of that project.  Here’s mine (it was a sad day, and I spilled coffee on it):

Okay.  Shop, Write, Clean, Cook.  Happy Saturday.

This woman is going to be famous.  Allie Pohl, who I know as a graduate student in DU’s eMAD MFA program (how’s that for acronyms?), has created these lovely lady charms.  She doesn’t have a name for them quite yet (and is taking suggestions) is calling them Ideal Woman Necklaces, but at work we’ve nicknamed them “crotch necklaces,” and they’re modeled after Barbie’s midsection.  Allie’s work examines femininity and the female “ideal” in a way that is at once beautiful and dripping with satire (check out her Ideal Woman series for a great example — porcelain figurines with strategically-grown chia sprouts).  Her jewelry line launches tonight at the grand opening of Illiterate,  82 S. Broadway, as part of the much-anticipated Where the Wild Things Art show:

I haven’t ever read one of his books in full, but I’ve seen George Lakoff quoted a lot, especially in library science literature, in terms of categorizing things and creating metaphors (most recently in Ambient Findability).  Apparently lawyers like him too, and he’s speaking (as a “political communications expert” — who knew?) at DU’s Sturm College of Law on Monday at 4:15.  Kind of a big deal.

Looking forward to this almost makes up for missing my #1 Geek Crush, Lawrence Lessig, at the Educause conference this morning.  Almost.