Res ipsa loquitur

How you wound me! You've already forgotten our monthlong walking tour of the Mediterranean, our brief and pointless flirtations with good-looking Greeks, the way we caught fish with our bare hands and cooked them over an open fire, how we found the drowned city of Ys and then sank it again before anyone else could be seduced by the call of the sirens through its watery moonlit streets ...

Well, real life (upon which a pox) is going to make it impossible for me to plan anything till July anyway, so all you've done is denied me the opportunity of saying, "Nope, can't make it."

But hi anyway! (waves vaguely eastward, or is it northward?)

Eep! The whole time we were gone, I was oddly afraid my house was on fire and I didn't know about it. (My novel is drafted but untyped, in three little spiral notebooks, and before we left I put them in the fireproof lockbox.)

It would be weird to watch a house burning on your camera phone, though.

Re HP ... [sigh] I don't know. HBP really wrecked my enthusiasm for the universe, because it spoiled my denial re the Likely Fate of the Snape. I'm not even reading HP any more. I had a big Harry/Snape epic in the planning stages, which will almost certainly never get written; I had a Snape/Lupin partly written, which I will probably post the sex scenes of and then toss the rest. The one story I'll probably get around to finishing sometime is a Harry/Snape/Lupin pornfest, which is just too porny to abandon.

It's sad. Do you know that when I look at my site statistics to see what searches bring new people to my website, the most common ones are people looking for porn involving Ron and/or Hermione? I wish I could write them some! But I've just lost enthusiasm for the whole universe somehow.

We just got Best Light Recipes. Now, we need light recipes, because the spouse has very high cholesterol, so I've been happy with it. If you don't need to cook light, I don't know.

Here are the things I've made so far:

Reduced-fat vinaigrette: Very good, but way more trouble than the original, on account of all the mincing of shallots involved.

Reduced-fat blueberry muffins: Noticeably not as good as the full-fat kind, but still pretty good.

Soy-glazed salmon over rice: fabulous, totally wonderful, an immediate addition to our regular dinner rotation.

Vegetarian stir-fry recipes: These are complicated and kind of hard to use, because of their method -- pick some vegetables from List A, and some from List B, and some from List C, and a sauce from List D ... I made one with the lemon sauce and didn't like it at all. But other sauces may be fine.

Oh, Evanston -- it's been so many years since I've been there! I used to love cheddar-broccoli soup at Yesterdays, which is long gone; I used to love the old movies at the short-run theater, which is long gone. There was a Middle Eastern restaurant way up north on Dempster, which I could only get to if someone else drove, since I didn't have a car and it was too far to walk; don't remember the name, but the Baba Ghanoush was to die for. Platypus Books was lovely. The Mexican Shop was lovely; I got a purple dress with a square collar which got lost somewhere along the way, but for a while I wore it every single week.

There was a little offshoot of the lake on campus which was generally called the Lagoon, lots of fun to walk around. Honestly, I don't remember campus well at all, which is odd considering how much time I used to spend walking around it.

Hm, law and peanut butter. Seems to me there ought to be a joke in that, but I can't find it. (By 'real' peanut butter, do they mean fresh-ground? It's very good. An entirely different food from processed peanut butter.)

I don't know if I have a favorite poem, per se, but I'm fond enough of Marilyn Hacker's "Mother" to have it memorized.

No one is 'woman' to another
Woman. Except her mother.

As for fictional moments ... Samuel Delany is tough going, but I find a lot of his scenes coming back to me as metaphors for ... something or other. There's a scene at the end of Dhalgren where the narrator meets an astronaut in a bar and says, "Tell me something about the moon that no one else knows." The astronaut says, "I told the press everything important." The narrator says, "I don't mean important. I mean -- OK, look at the last bottle on the shelf. See how the level of the raised bottom of the bottle is just above the level of the liquid? That's not important. But no one would know it unless they'd been here."

That sounds like fun! I'm hoping we'll get to spend a lot of time in the city, though for complicated reasons of family politics, this is still a big question mark, alas. But I remain hopeful!

Wow. Sounds marvelous. Is this in the house or outside?

Unfortunately my fingers smell like garlic, which is a smell that I would prefer would stay in the kitchen.

I like all the usual smells -- wet dirt, fresh rain, coffee brewing. Tomato and marigold plants have their own special acidic smell. The fleeting smell of violets. Oh, honeysuckle, which I smelled last week for the first time in ages; it doesn't grow up here. Limes. Canteloupe. Crayons.

Random's good. It was kind of a random post; why shouldn't the comments be random too?

Best thing about fandom? It's like a big huge brainstorming session, a million ideas all careening off each other, like the best-ever conversation that when it's over, everyone's smarter.

Worst thing about fandom? It's like being 14 again. Slam books, cliques, feuds, juvenile primate behavior of all sorts.

What do I want to achieve in life? I want to always be wondering, and coming to understand.

And you?

Huh. I have a journalism degree; neither technical nor academic.

Of all the things I learned in journalism school, the one that impresses people the most is that I can take notes without looking at the page.

Religious and spiritual texts ... I wish I had something marvelous to recommend. I like the text from Micah that summarizes human responsibility as: "Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God." I like in Psalm 131 where it says, "I still my soul and make it quiet/like a child in its mother's arms/my soul is quieted within me." And once I read -- I think this was in a fantasy novel, actually, with a goddess religion -- a description of human life that I found very moving: "We're all in Her lap." (I like that a lot better than the usual way of speaking that says we're all in God's hands.)

Oh, wow -- thanks so much! I'm so glad you've enjoyed it.

I wish I could explain why I suddenly lost enthusiasm for HP, but I don't really understand it myself. It happened when I read HBP, and that can't be a coincidence, but I still can't quite explain it. I liked HBP as well as any of the other books (except Prisoner of Azkaban, which remains my favorite).

I suspect it has to do with losing the necessary level of denial about what's going to happen to Snape.

I love your description of learning Latin! When the spouse and I first met, in college, he was taking a Spanish poetry class. He understood Spanish but didn't know how to translate poetry; I had some Latin but no Spanish, but my Latin classes had taught me a lot about reading poetry in other languages. So we used to translate Spanish poetry in tandem -- I'd go, "OK, this is the verb, and it's in third person present tense but I don't know what it means," and he'd go, "It rises, he rises, she rises ..." It was fun.

I once heard a famour director talk about how he can't just lean back to enjoy a movie -- he's always questioning the director's choices, analysing the lighting, and thinking of how he'd do it, if it was his movie.

There was a period when I was writing for a newspaper and my brother was working at a print shop. One day when we were both visiting my parents, I picked up the newspaper and said, "That's a terrible headline," and he took it out of my hand and said, "And the registration on that photo is awful," and my mother said, "Doesn't anybody just read a newspaper?"

It sometimes requires a conscious effort to remind myself that I'm a reader and not a beta, but usually only at the beginning; by the time I've read a couple of pages, either I'm involved in the narrative or I've given up on the story altogether.

Hm -- that's tricky!

How about the way the air feels and smells just as the first drops of rain fall?

I adore tulips, though they're apparently kind of a pain in the neck as bulbs go -- tend to taper off and stop blooming after a few years, unlike daffodils, which just spread and go wild.

I like ferns, too, and those odd soft-spiky little succulents that my mother calls hen-and-chicks. And I love Siberian iris, but I don't like the bearded ones -- too showy, too psychedelic-looking.

We have a stainless-steel sink, and rubbing my fingers on that does take away some of the garlic smell, but I think I'm just resigned to smelling a little bit like garlic all the time.

Thanks!

Thank you!

Thanks!