Pre-Op, Phase One.

A psychologist friend of mine used to prescribe retail therapy for depression and cleaning therapy for anxiety. Not a bad drug, really, that latter one, and it has precious few dangerous side effects to be noted in the fine print or by that reassuring voice on the TV commercials.

(Side note: does anyone know where I can get the results for that study that showed that the Restless-Legs Syndrome drug can lead to strong gambling and sexual urges?)

Anyway, now that I have the surgery scheduled, I am trying to think about other things. But still: having more that 4 hours notice this time means that I can do some planning ahead, so that the whole thing does not catch me with loads of dirty laundry or no clean presentable pajamas or no food in the house. Here is where the cleaning therapy comes in: let's make this house spotless, shall we?

First we reorganize my study. Perhaps "reorganize" is the wrong word, because it suggests that the items in question had some organization in the first place, where in reality mostly they were only participating in the Piles System, which only proves viable in the short term, in my experience. Anyway, now books are sideways on shelves, instead of in stacks, except for those that I am actively reading: Jim Longenbach's Stone Cottage, Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England, Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, and Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity. (This list does not count the books in process that live in my bedroom, but trust me that I am not the sort to be reading only one book at a time. Or only four.)

And I have admitted to myself that the stuff I was writing back in August is on hold again for a while, so all the appropriate xeroxes and library books have been refiled. Sigh.

And some of the books that I rarely conult (such as my Turkish-English dictionary...) are upstairs in another bookcase.

Now my desk contains only the things I still need to do (articles to evaluate for journals, papers for conferences, files to process) and the old dining room table that we are going to sell is free of piles of books and old copies of The Chronicle of Higher Ed and all those things that tend to collect in one's workspace when we are not looking.

Given that I am manic-depressive about my clutter, this is a process that I have to go through from time to time, and by the time I have to do it, I want to do it. But this time was a little different, because I suspect it is also the first phase of my Pre-Op. I am also beginning to think about what I might need to have around for my recovery. Books are covered, as in addition to those in process now, I have an immense collection of books to read, so assuming that I can avoid enough pain meds to focus, I am all set there. More urgently, I am wondering if I might need some reward yarn, and whether to buy it before the surgery or wait until I have made it through (probably the latter, though I'll have to bribe a friend to take me to the yarn store).

Phase Two of the Pre-Op comes next weekend (I hope), because I decided finally to get a new bike. Although I have gotten a lot of mileage out of my old one, it is too big for me (what happens when you buy a used bike from a guy...) and so I rarely want to buy it. The new plan is to try diversifying my athletic pursuits in order to prevent (or at least minimize) further overuse injuries, and because I HATE RUNNING, cycling seems the better choice. So stay tuned for details and photos of the pretty new machine.

I'll have to end this here: I have more laundry and swiffing to do.....

Museums: cemeteries!

The Futurists and vandals among you might be interested in this little stunt.

Is it "Happy Birthday" or "Happy Thanksgiving"?

OK: it's official. In the latest installment of "My Shoulder Sucks: A Melodrama," I have a surgery scheduled for 20 November to fix the damned thing. Happy birthday to me. OR is it Happy Thanksgiving? It will fall smack in between, so why not both?

You might be wondering what exactly is wrong with my shoulder (I am too...). Apparently there is a tear in the labrum, and as I understand it, it is a SLAP lesion. (Read here about shoulder anatomy and labral tears.) This kind of tear will not fix itself; I have been trying to use physical therapy to strengthen the muscles around the shoulder, in hopes that that might take the pressure off the labrum and get rid of the pain.

But as I have thought more about this, and spoken with my PT, I realize that really it is not so much a question of whether surgery is needed, but when. So now it is scheduled.

I understand that while this is typically an outpatient surgery, I will be kept over one night, on IV antibiotics, to stave off a recurrence of the infection horror.

It is interesting: I can type this post without losing my mind in anxiety. That was not true on 21 September when my doctor first mentioned the prospect of surgery. This itself is progress.

Later that same day...

Wow. It turns out you can spend a lot of time goofing around on Ravelry--I mean, updating your projects, posting photos, etc. If you're on there, swing by and see my groovy stuff! I thought athletes were the most anal users of spreadsheet record keeping, but it turns out they have nothing on the knitters!

And you thought my posting has been scant thus far....

I got this message in my e-mail inbox today: "frecklegirl has invited you to Ravelry!"

Small victories.

On Thursday I was supposed to travel to New York for a meeting. Thanks to some nasty weather in the northeast, and resulting delayed flights, I cancelled my trip and went to swim practice instead.

So there.

And a good decision it turned out to be: we did a set that we have done many times called "Maintain Distance." First we swim for 5:10 and keep track of our distance. Then we rest for about 30 seconds. Then we swim again, this time for 5:05, and we try to swim as far or further than we did the first time. Then, after 30 more seconds of rest, we swim again, this time for 5 minutes, and try again to beat or maintain our previous distance. The main set for the practice is two rounds of this, with about 3 minutes in between.

I probably do not need to tell you that I did all of this kick. The first round I did kicking on my back with big fins, and the second round I did on my stomach with my little cup-shaped fins and snorkel.

As we were swimming the first round, I remembered that we had done this some time before during my all-kick period. When I got home, I looked in my workout journal and found it: 8 February. Apparently I did not blog that practice, but I see from my journal that on that night I did the first round with big fins and the second with no fins (Lord, help me!). My distances then were:

8 Feburary 2007
ROUND 1: 325 / <350>350 = 1025
[75 easy]
ROUND 2: <225>225 / >>225 = 675

11 October 2007
ROUND 1: <350>350 / 375 = 1075
[75 easy]
ROUND 2: 250 / 275 / 300 = 825

The information for round 2 is not really comparable, since I used different apparatus the two different times, but the info for round 1 is, and seeing a little improvement there is heartening, particularly since the first set of data is from before my surgery and period of laid-up-ness.

Empathy.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a student who has missed five out of fourteen classes. You might think that in that conversation I would tell said student that such absenteeism was unacceptable, that she should drop the class, that she should rethink her educational goals and what it takes to achieve them.

You would only be right about the last part, and even there it is not exactly what I said.

In fact, I was surprised when she missed the second day of class, because on the first day it was evident that she was one of the more engaged and adventuresome students I have had, and perhaps one of the most mature in this particular group. I thought it would be great to have her in class, and then when she missed the second day, and then the third day, I figured (and was disappointed) that she had decided to drop but had not gotten to a computer to do so.

But then I heard from her by e-mail. It turns out this student is an athlete, and in the first full week of school she sustained an injury which ended her season and required emergency surgery. (It turns out she has already had similar surgery several times, either on this particular knee or her other.) Then there were complications from the surgery (including, to my personal horror, one of her sutures getting infected) and she missed more days.

Now we get to the part of the term where she has to miss a number of classes because her team is traveling.

We had a long discussion about her options, and it was evident that none of them are really good ones. She said she felt she is "starting to be on the mend," and I thought, right: I thought that many times myself, and boy did I have a long way to go. She said that when she was on the serious drugs she could not even read at all, and man, did I know what that felt like. If she withdraws from the semester (which would allow her to get the other surgery she needs and perhaps actually heal), she will lose her sport scholarship, and that, of course, is how she pays for school. I could see and feel her pain and fear and uncertainty each time her eyes started to well up.

So it is her I was thinking about when I read this article that Magpie mentioned in a comment. I know that knees are not brains, and that bum legs are different from disorientation and headaches and constant dizziness and of course the longer term effects of concussion.

But still.

The thing that bothers me is someone keeps moving my chair.

Magpie got me thinking about They Might Be Giants, which is a happy thing on as beautiful an afternoon as this one.

And since I am now back from today's hour-and-fifteen-minutes of PT, I can really only type well with one arm. (Note to self: there was a little pain in some of the diagonal pullthroughs that I had to do, and also in exercises where I was lying on a table on my stomach and pulling up thumb first at the 9 o'clock position.)

So instead, I gift you with this. I was a little disappointing that nowhere in there did they give details about women's builds and sports, but I can guess that as a short squat one, I probably never would have been an Olympic swimmer. But what do you think?

In the spirit of full disclosure.

Well, maybe you know me better than to expect that, but still.

Scott wrote: "Last month when you wrote about swimming things seemed to be getting better. At this point let's just forget about the pool and aim to get the shoulder back to normal use. Perhaps later on you can start thinking about swimming. Best of luck."

Thanks, Scott, and thanks to the others who have left good wishes.

But I think I should tell you all that "swimming" is not really in my life right now. I do not want to stop being in the pool, because I need to do something to keep active (and to keep from tearing my own head off), so as far that's concerned, for the last month or so, Kicking is the new normal.

What would you rather do, than kicking up and down the pool?

Also, there is vertical kicking, on its own, with fins, holding a med ball or a dumbbell. Or hanging on the wall and kicking fast and slow at intervals while wearing little canvas sneakers. That is a load of laughs, especially when the little sneakers tear the skin off your feet!

Anyway, no swimming for me for now, at least not with my left arm. But don't forget the right arm! I am the queen of one-arm drills.

And kicking. I challenge any of you to a vertical-kicking contest.

What? They don't have those?

Oh.

Becoming.

I decided yesterday, while I was stretching cords above my head and watching a woman use a rolly chair to scoot circles around a room, that I need to write more. Lucky you!

Last Friday I saw my orthopaedist again. He said we would try physical therapy until November. Then if the shoulder is not better (are you tired of the shoulder stories yet? I am.), we consider (a) surgery or (b) quitting swimming.

So starting this week, I am putting everything I have into physical therapy. And after a month of only kicking, I am beginning in a gradual way to bring arm strokes with my left arm back into the pool.

This is my documentation. You don't have to read it, because frankly I would rather not write it. Heraclitus is telling me, though, that it is something I should do as I come to terms with the fact that The Whole Shoulder Thing is not something that happened, but something that is happening.

This has been my first week of restarted therapy. I saw my PT twice--Monday and Wednesday. On the days I do not work with him, I do the usual rotator-cuff and core exercises at home.

When I work with him, I:

* Try to hold my arm up and still while he pushes on it in different directions. This is to reteach the musculature and nerves how to be stable. (He asked me to imagine my shoulder as a clock. Some people, he said, especially people who have suffered a shoulder dislocation in the past, have instablity at, say, 6 o'clock or 3 o'clock. I have it 24 hours a day.) So far we have done this exercise while I lie flat on my back with my arm up at 90 degrees; with me on my back with my elbow on a pad and my forearm at 90 degrees; with me on my back with my arm at a different angle relative to my body, my elbow on a pad, and my forearm at 90 degrees; with me standing, holding my arm down, my forearm at 90 degrees, and in my hand the handle of an outstretched cable. He says I have very little strength in my shoulder. Our ultimate goal is to do these exercises with my arm raised above my head in a typical freestyle-swimming position.

* Do plank-position core exercises, facing down, and then on each side. These are painfully difficult to do right now, and it makes me realize how much core strength I have lost since I was in shape for nationals.

* Kneel on a pad and throw a weighted ball at a trampoline, and when I catch it, try to hold my core stable. I do this facing the tramp, and then with my side to it (both directions).

* Use stretch cords to make small presses with my hands above my head, at my sides, and then again at my sides but pulling backwards rather than forwards.

* Lie on my face and raise my arms above my head for 30 seconds, then rest for 30. (I do this exercise with my arms in a variety of positions.)

It is strange to be in a PT room with a bunch of other people. We each have our own maladies. One guy is doing strange things with his knees. Another perches on the rolly chair (it is more like a rolly stool) and uses his arms to move himself around the floor. One woman steps on and off a step. One man talks incessantly while he walks on a treadmill. We are all there try to bring our bodies back. Keep us in your thoughts.

Bow down before the Master of Love-Hate Relationships.

You Are a Red Crayon

Your world is colored with bright, vivid, wild colors. You have a deep, complex personality - and you are always expressing something about yourself. Bold and dominant, you are a natural leader. You have an energy that is intense... and sometimes overwhelming. Your reaction to everything tends to be strong. You are the master of love-hate relationships. Your color wheel opposite is green. Green people are way too mellow to understand what drives your energy.

What Color Crayon Are You?

(Hmmm. I always thought I was more mellow than this. Thanks to Magpie for the tip.)

Dear Madeleine L'Engle,

Thank you for writing all those books that I loved like I had never loved books before, and rarely have since.

Thank you for creating imaginary worlds that made me hurt because they were not real.

Thank you for permeating my mind with images that are still there.

Thank you for making me cry.

Thank you for convincing me that sometimes you can get to those worlds after all.

We'll miss you.

[FL]Insert header here.

In case you did not know, there are more interesting things you could do on a Friday afternoon than proofread the line numbers given in a Table of Emendations to the Copy-Text.

But the fact that I now know this may give some small indication of how bad real-life deadlines are kicking me in the ass right now.

So go forth and be grateful that for this week anyway, you are not me and my new collection of purple pencils.

Friday Random 10: It wasn't a rock, it was a rock lobster! Edition

Recent thinking about rock reminds me of this, which always seems a good way to end the week, especially one that has left me as exhausted as this one has.

But I believe that Timothy's question, "Is a definition of 'rock' that sticks us with bands like Bad Company as the exemplars of the form worth having?" points to a limitation in my musical tastes. I suppose that my definition of rock is outdated because after a certain point I started listening to far less rock than other things, hence leaving me unaware of the real developments there.

But today is not for contemplation, but simply for enumeration:

1. "Claire's Theme," Graeme Revell (Until the End of the World)
2. "Untitled," Kinky (Atlas)
3. "Air Giant," Transglobal Underground (Punjabi Lounge, disc 1)
4. "Maybe You'll Be There," Diana Krall (The Look of Love)
5. "Come, Gone" (alternate take), Sonny Rollins (Way Out West)
6. "Slippin' and Slidin'," Billy Preston (Billy's Bag)
7. "Japanese Folk Song [Kojo No Tsuki]," Thelonious Monk (Straight, No Chaser)
8. "Rock Lobster," The B-52s (The B-52s)
9. "Don Loope," Nortec Collective (Nacional Records Sampler 2006)
10. "Dru Me Negrita," Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban (Mambo Sinuendo)

Horton hears The Who.

So last night the PP and I decided to play cards, and whenever we play cards, we also play music, and so I asked him, "What would you like to hear?" And he said, "Bachman Turner Overdrive," and I said, "Hmmm, I am not sure that we have any Bachman Turner Overdrive," so he said, "Oh," so I said, "Does this mean you want Rock?" And he said, "Yes!"

I hustled to the computer and threw together what I thought might be a good Rock playlist and we started playing.

It was not too long, though, before we hit a song where PP said, "You know, this is not really rock. America is not rock." So I made a note about that and we played some more and then we hit some quiet Dire Straits and decided that was not really rock either. And then there was a Santana song that started out really quietly, and although it was getting ready to rock, it was not really rock. Neither was some of the Springsteen stuff from Nebraska (despite the fact that Bruce may be one of the PP's absolute favs.)

We started to think that rock--or at least the rock we wanted last night--was harder to define than we initially thought.

Here are our priliminary observations:

1. We could begin to define rock by using its touchstones: "Sharp Dressed Man," "Barracuda," "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," "Aqualung," "Heartbreaker," "Helter Skelter," "Dancing Days," "Won't Get Fooled Again."

2. Rock does tend to have strong guitars, it is true, but the PP insists that the beat is just as important.

3. A rock song frequently includes some kind of non-verbal or loosely verbal scream in it. (Example: the "YAH!" early in "Hungry Heart")

4. The title of the song might include the word "rock," as in "Rock and Roll All Night" or "We Will Rock You" but this does not include "Rock Around the Clock" as that is apparently a different kind of rock. The jury is still out on "Rock Lobster." Furthermore, although Falco claims that he would like for Amadeus to rock him, he does not really do so in a rock way. Ditto Michael Jackson's claims about rocking, with or without you. Simon and Garfunkel may be a rock, but they do not rock. Rocking the casbah does not equal rocking the boat. Conversely, Joe Walsh may be claiming to make Funk #49, but that is rock, my friends.

5. Mick makes rock. Not all rock must have rock, but you cannot have Mick without rock. Same thing with Link Wray (and his Raymen).

6. Rock does not usually have a heavily produced sound.

7. The PP's definition of Rock may be broader than mine. He puts the B-52's in there, and I think he wants Devo too, though I tend to think they are not rock.

What do you think? And how long can a band take to get ready to rock? (Think here about the beginning of "Detroit Rock City," because it takes about one minute and thirty seconds before the rocking starts, but then it really does rock.)

"See you on the other side."

One time I wrote that as a signature to an e-mail to a colleague who knows I have been editing this. He pointed out that given my present work, it was a rather ambiguous thing to say, and was I implying that he and/or I were heading to the spirit realms? No, I was just trying to think of something other than "Best" or "Ciao" or "Cheers" or "Bite me" to say at the end of a message.

But now I can never write it without thinking about what he said.

I am heading off today for a two-day retreat in the mountains, to get my head realligned before I return to the workaday world on Thursday. Not that I am not looking forward to seeing the shining faces in my classes, it's just all the other crap that I need to figure out how to think about in a more productive way.

So nothing from me for a few days. Enjoy your own selves.

Don't give up on your trees, boy.

So I was just listening to the CD that came with the June/July issue of The Believer and working on the fourth piece of the PP's Christmas sweater, and something occurred to me.

(But first a digression: the fifth track on the CD is "The Painter" by I'm From Barcelona. The liner notes note: "There are twenty-nine people in I'm From Barcelona. They're from Sweden, not Spain. In Sweden, twenty-nine people may sometimes be considered a small town." Anyway, the song starts, "I'm just a painter, I do my crappy art, but I see what's in your eyes and I know what's in your heart." I thought it went "I'm just a painter, I do my crappy yard," and I thought, well, yeah, if you're a painter you don't pay for someone to mow your grass and it probably does look like hell. So then when the refrain came around, I thought it was "Don't give up on your trees, boy" [actual lyrics = replace "trees" with "dreams": I like my version better], and I ultimately think this was a subliminal message to me from I'm From Barcelona, because we have a beautiful old tree in our front yard that is slowly dying, and we are trying to decide whether to spend circa $800 to try to save it or just give up now and spend the $2000 to have it taken down. I think we're leaning toward keeping it around for a few more years, thanks to the "message" from the boys actually from Sweden.)

Anyway, as I was knitting and listening to "Everybody's Down" by No Age, described by the Believer folks as "one of three loud duos on this compilation," I thought to myself, "This is not the music I would have chosen for knitting, and yet I am enjoying myself immensely.

So this brings me (finally) to my point, which is actually a question for you, both of my readers: do you have particular tunes that you think go particularly well with particular activities? And what happens when you diverge from your preferred tendencies?

Who are you calling short?

Take the book quiz! (via blogora)

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I piu' forti semo noi.

Niobe wants to know, "what city would you most like to spend a reasonably extended amount of time in?"

Roma, hands down. No question. Undoubtedly. There is not a close second.

In fact, I have tried my best to spend as much time there as possible, and I keep trying to find ways to spend even more.

And no, Tony, this is not all about Francesco Totti!

Have you ever walked around the Gianicolo park in the evening in the summer time? At the end of a hot day, when there are people milling around, puppet shows going on, ice cream for sale, and some of the most amazing views in the world? There is something about that evening light from that spot that makes that haze of the city go away, and even if you are exhausted from sightseeing or reading or writing or drinking wine, you just want to stand and stare.

How can you resist a city where almost every church you pass has something amazing in it--a pantokrater mosaic or a Caravaggio or a Bernini or spooky relics or a Michelangelo statue or frescoes by Filippino Lippi Raphael or just the overpowering Baroque architecture of the counter-reformation. Everywhere there are little bees or Monte di Paschi or keys or any number of other carved symbols associated with significant families that birthed numerous popes. There are little details like a trompe-l'oeil dome, or a dome made entirely of white carving or tiny swirled columns in cloisters, or Cosmati flooring. Fountains are filled with river gods or smiling suns or turtles or saints or mermen. In almost every piazza is an Egyptian obelisk stolen by the Caesars and then commandeered by some pope or another. Everything gets made, used, used again for something else.

I love riding the Roman busses, too, where you have to get your bus legs under you, in order not to be dumped into someone's lap, or crash into a signora and risk being chastised by all the other people on the bus. Attenzione alla signora! I am hungry to hear permesso spoken on a crowded bus in that wonderful romano accent.

I remember one time during a bus strike on a hot day in Rome. The strike ended at 6 p.m. sharp, so the busses running at that time were packed with people. I was sitting with a friend on a wall near the Fori Imperiali and one of those hilarious little mini-busses pulled up to a stop in front of us--packed, needless to say, which was even more hilarious because the bus was so tiny. "Permesso, permesso, permesso," my friend started saying, and we could not stop from laughing even though I expect if the people on the bus could have heard us, they would have pointed out how unfunny that was.

I love quirky Italianness, and the further south you get, the quirkier and stranger Italy gets, I think. Things in Torino or Milano or Verona or even Venezia just seem so much more logical than in Rome, where the price of stamps depends on which tabacchi you go to, traffic flows and halts according to invisible rhythms, frequently churches are closed for no reason, elevators are always guasto, bus routes frequently change, and no one blinks an eye. My favorite is an excellent restaurant near the Campo dei Fiori where (and I expect this only happens when you ask for the specials in Italian) the owner explained that there were gnocchi on the menu, "because today is Thursday." I suppose there are actual explanations for these things, but when you are there, and just trying to figure things out, it is mysterious.

(Mystery has lessened somewhat with the arrival of the Euro, if only because prices have so many fewer zeroes.)

The summer is insanely hot, and there are so few places that are air conditioned, that sweating, and being hot, and just moving a little slower become an inevitable part of life. Oh, and frequent showers. The library where I spent a lot of time had enormous windows that opened out on a garden. They were angled such that strong breezes would blow through, and they were scented of rosemary and lavendar.

When I worked in my own little studio room, I would almost always spend the morning writing in the dark, with my metal window shade pulled down against the sun, trying to move as little as possible, and wondering whether the industrial-strength hurricane-force ceiling fan was well installed.

And then, after a morning's work, when it is getting too hot to think clearly, I could wander around that city forever, finding remarkable ancient things, strange modern things, surprising advertisements, startling catcalls, not to mention millions of actual cats. Or sit for a while in a cafe and sweat while drinking a dense espresso, or go try another couple of flavors of gelato--or why not all of these, over time?

This is Radio Isis.

Not the most productive writing day today, so how about another mix instead? Unlike the last one, this one came together rather quickly.

What, is it Monday?

The usual place, the usual bunch.

After months of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, I have put a new mix up at Art of the Mix. If you would like a copy, let me know in the comments.

Nutritious + delicious.

The PP and I decided we need to be more thoughtful about what we eat. We have these discussions every couple of years or so: mostly we tend to have fairly healthy meals, especially when we eat in, but since we have moved, we have eaten out more, and more frequently at places that can be a bit rich, and sadly we are both getting waistlines to prove it.

The challenge, of course, since neither of us is crazy about cooking all the time, is finding ways to get nutritious meals made quickly--particularly on nights when we have had swim practice, and are ravenous and exhausted. Also, I am constantly searching for better meals to have at lunchtime, because Hot Pockets depress me.

So, half a bag of onions, a head of garlic, 1.33 pounds of ground turkey, a boatload of garam masala, numerous teaspoons of cumin seeds, a head of cabbage, 2 cans of chickpeas, half a bag of frozen peas, 1 cup of Darjeeling tea, 4 cardamom pods, a motherlode of okra, 3 cans of tunafish, 2 bay leaves, one bunch of cilantro and one of green onions, a cinnamon stick, 3 cups of rice, 6 jalapeno peppers, a fair bit of curry powder and turmeric and ground cumin and mustard seeds and sesame seeds and fennel seeds, and the juice of one lemon later, we had a damn fine Indian dinner composed of five dishes: turkey with peas, curried tuna, chickpeas cooked in tea, cabbage with fennel, okra masala + rice.

The best part? Several meals' worth of left-overs!

Be careful what you say.

Remember yesterday, when I said taht 3700 LCM was the longest practice I had done since surgery?

Ha!

Last night I stepped into the new coach's office before practice, just to tell him that I might modify the practice a little bit, because I was trying to be careful not to overdo things, but also to tell him how much I had enjoyed last night's workout.

"I don't think you need to worry about your shoulder tonight," he said, "because tonight we are doing a monster kick set."

Cool, I thought. I am used to a lot of kick.

But did I realize then that he meant (count them) 2300 meters of kick???!!!! No friends, I did not.

But that is what he meant, and that is what we did.

Here is the practice:
500 warm up (choice)
2300 kick with long fins (alternating easy/fast: 50/50, 100/50, 150/50, 200/50, 250/50, 300/50, 350/100, 400/100; the 400 was for time: I clocked 5:49)
1000 swim (2 rounds of 300 free swim @ 3:00 and then 4x50 stroke @1:10, 25 fast/25 easy)
300 cool-down
Total of 4100 LCM

Today I can hardly walk.

Friday Random 10: I understand that time is running out Edition

I am sorry to say that I finally finished the last Harry Potter book. Granted, I got a late start because I insist on ordering them from the UK to get all the "blimeys" and to avoid the problem of title mangling. And then since everyone else had already read it by the time I got my copy, and this is (after all) the last book, I felt no rush to finish. So I have been stringing it out, reading a few chapters there then just one chapter here and a few pages before bed--as if it were a normal book.

But now it is over. Or as Tim says, all over but the movies. Or as Magpie pointed out, we could all get a copy of Harry Potter and the Big Funnel or (my personal fav) Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students.

Can you tell it is Friday afternoon, that the brain has shut down, perhaps an hour or so in advance of the end of the work day?

So instead, because Tim reminded me of this too (yes, I do read other blogs...), Friday Random 10 for your sexy bod:
1. "Jump (for my love)," The Pointer Sisters
2. "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night," Prince, Sign O' the Times
3. "Universal Love," Trüby Trio, Elevator Music
4. "Aldeia de Okarimbé," Neguinho da Beija-Flor, Brazil Classics 2: O Samba
5. "En Geng Ska Han Greta" [One day he'll cry], Garmarna, Nordic Roots: A Northside Compilation
6. "Roger the Miller," Karan Casey, Songlines
7. "James Brownian Motion," The Evolution Control Committee
8. "Mexican Radio, Wall of Voodoo
9. "Cafe de Flore," Doctor Rockit, The Unnecessary History of Doctor Rockit
10. "Bush Killa," Paris, Sleeping with the Enemy

Intervals.

We have a new coach added to our team's staff. During the regular season, he will only coach one practice a week, but for now, while other coaches are away on summer vacations, he is our everyday coach. A few of us had said to him that we would love to get some interval practices in--something that neither of our other coaches tend to do.

I do not know about you, but if I do not have intervals, I tend to be a big slacker--take too much rest, get too much time between sets. This does not make me faster. Plus, it gives me too much time to think--too much time to psych myself out, convince myself I am tired and cannot do the next set.

But not last night!

The new coach was still getting a few kinks out--like everyone's speed (and we have a pretty big range)--but it was a good practice, and I found the intervals to be about right for me. The only problem was that it was a LOT of freestyle, and my shoulder did not like that. So on a few of the swims, I modified by alternating 50 FR with 50 BR, which felt better but made it harder to make the intervals (and wore me out!) .

This was also an interesting practice for me because I realized that I had no idea of my pace in long-course meters--since all the interval work I had done in the past had been in a short-course yards pool.

Anyway, here is the damage:
1200 warm-up (4x200 free @ 4:00 and then 4x100 kick @ 3:30)
700 swim (this was a 15 minute swim, where you take about 10 seconds rest after each 100, and try to get a sense of your pace. I was swimming 100 free at anywhere from 1:42 to 1:50, but for 5 of the 7 swims, I was at 1:44)
1000 swim ( 1x400 free @ 8:00, then 50 easy @ 1:10, then 2x250 free @ 5:00, then another 50 easy @1:10. I modified the 400 and the first 250 by swimming 50FR/50BR, and this left me hardly any rest, so I did the last 250 free, which helped a lot)
600 IM swim (3x200 IM @4:30: I had to do the FL drill here, because my shoulder was screaming, but I managed to hold about 4:00 swim time through the set, descending slightly)
200 cool-down
That's 3700 LCM total.

I was pretty proud of myself for finishing that practice. It was by far the most intensity I have done since my surgery, and one of the most consistently strong practices I have had this season. Besides, that is more meterage than I have swum in a long time with no fins.

So now let's see whether I make it through practice tonight....

We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.

I do not tend to put the things I have knitted on this blog. That is because to do so requires a big photographic expedition, followed by a description of what I have made, and the descriptions never do encompass the things, because the things are not really about the things in their thingness, but about the memory of their making, somehow wrapped into all the stitches.


I can look at this scarf and say, I remember what people were talking about while I knitted this gray section, and that it started raining outside during that purple, and before I knew it, as the daylight was fading into the evening time, there was pink. When I added the second ball of yarn, I could almost not contain myself from keeping knitting, and all around me were people who were expecting to eat dinner sometime, and, it turns out, I was supposed to make that dinner. I was thinking about Jasper Johns when I looked at those little flecks of contrasting green, and watching my cat want to devour the thing back at that point where blue turned back into rose.

And how can a picture, or a picture and details about needle size and pattern, contain that?



I have decided to call it the Heraclitus scarf, because the unbearable, unavoidable pleasure of making it is the intensity of the colors and their changes. Just when you think you could never leave the multi-flaked world of that green, you are thrust into a teal blue, with the knowledge that it is about to change into a rich blue like saturated skies, and then, before you know it, pale raspberry pink. How does a person handle that much flux? Does the pleasure of this yarn come from how many things it lets you see all at the same time, or from the knowledge that if you do not surrender yourself to it every single moment that you are knitting, you will miss something gorgeous? And how is it exactly that fibers find a way to contain that richness of color that I thought was reserved for mosaic tiles and the way they combine to make an overwhelming space of light and color?


[for the curious: made with Noro Iro yarn, 2 balls, on US size 11 needles]

le Zattere

Ian Williams, over at xtcian, asked this morning, "what place do you miss terribly right now, and can you link to a picture of it?"

Here is my picture:



For those of you unfamiliar with Venice, that's a shot from the Zattere, along Dorsoduro, looking at the Giudecca at the left and out towards the shipyards off in the distance.

I was there with a group of other people interested in some of what I am interested in, and we had gone out to Dorsoduro that afternoon because it was important to us and to what we were interested in.

Witness this, from Canto LXXXIII:

San Gregorio, San Trovaso
Old Ziovan raced at seventy after his glories
and came in long last
And the family eyes stayed the same Adriatic
for three generations (San Vio)
and was, I suppose, last month the Redentore as usual

Will I ever see the Giudecca again?
or the lights
against it, Ca' Foscari, Ca' Giustinian
or the Ca', as they say, of Desdemona
or the two towers where are the cypress no more
or the boats moored off le Zattere
or the north quai of the Sensaria DAKRUON DAKRUON*

[DAKRUON in Greek (and the second time it should be in Greek letters--don't know how to do that with blogger) means "weeping."]

Ezra Pound wrote that while he was penned up in a cage at Pisa, having been arrested for treason. The poems he wrote there catalogue his losses, and his feared losses, as if they are fending off the loss of his mind or the ultimate loss. Of that same cage he wrote in the same poem:

Nor man who has passed a month in the death cells
believes in cages for beasts

The afternoon we walked around Dorsoduro, looking at San Gregorio, San Trovaso, San Vio, it was raining. In fact, as we had taken the vaporetto from San Servolo back to San Zaccharia, we had watched the storm roll in from the Lido.


While we were waiting for another vap to go over to Dorsoduro, the god of waters had opened a can of rain on our heads, and we had huddled together at the vap station, on the boat, in a walkway, waiting for it to stop. We bought umbrellas from the guys who show up with bags of them when it rains--never was 2 euros better spent (though the umbrella will soon disintegrate). Finally we gave up, and wandered together through Dorsoduro in the rain, looking for traces of the man who had lived there, had made the place into poetry.

At the end of our tour, we came to le Zattere, and the rain stopped, and that famous evening Dorsoduro light gave us an illuminated glimpse of what we came for, the Redentore as usual:


Isn't it funny how one person's nostalgia, one person's loss, can so quickly become another's?

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.

I gather the needs of Osiris.

I have been reading through dead baby jokes, and amidst many wise words and thought-provoking posts, I came across this little whimsy that, granted, dates from several months back, so I am confident that the cool kids are all done with this game already. But not me! I have just discovered it!

Goes like this: You google "[your name] needs" and see what the first ten results are. Niobe notes that "If your name is very common, you'll want to skip over those results that are just other blogs playing the same game. If your name is very unusual, you may just be out of luck."

Not me!

Here are my results, edited (like google does) to eliminate repetition:

Perhaps Isis needs individuals who are strong and comfortable in both modes, not just one, and this is Her way of making them.

Isis needs your help.

Isis needs many prayers.

Isis needs to adjust.

Isis needs a good major Pharma partner ASAP.

Isis needs to be moar metal.

Isis needs to come off the telescope for the interchange.

Isis needs theses to maintain the sessions.

Isis needs to be revamped -- and soon.

Isis needs to wear the amulet--without it she's grounded.

(and finally, because this blog goes up to 11...)

The last thing Isis needs is for more trouble to come her way.

Amen, google!

I've still had it with the motherf*$%ing snakes!

You're Ireland!

Mystical and rain-soaked, you remain mysterious to many people, and this
makes you intriguing.  You also like a good night at the pub, though many are just as
worried that you will blow up the pub as drink your beverage of choice.  You're good
with words, remarkably lucky, and know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of eating a potato.
 You really don't like snakes.


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

What is it precisely that signals us that we are in a moment that is winding to a close? Something about the light, and the way it quietly fades in the afternoon, signalling you that finally, if you are going to keep reading, you should turn on a lamp? Or that slightly elevated spinning sound that happens before you eject a CD or a DVD? The soundtrack and credits rolling? People starting to pack up their things? Hurry up please, it's time?

And whatever that thing is, is it the thing that makes us want to hold on to some possession, forgetting that, as Crazy Aunt Purl so eloquently said today, "it's just a blanket, it's not a soul"? Do we grasp, then, at a familiar idea? Or spin a new world view to accommodate a change of heart? Or do we instead hammer away as if nothing has changed, as if this present state of things will endure always?

Even as we are aware that we are in this moment, we are already imagining its passing, desiring it, fearing it. Do we panic then because we see ourselves out there, in some unimaginable later moment, doing something we think we might do but that we cannot yet envision? Or is it because we know what we did last time, and please God let us not do that again?

What is it we want when we imagine this future us? What should we hope for? (Wait without hope, Eliot says, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.)

In these present moments, then, too often we scurry around, collecting, preserving, filing, trying to remember--staving off loss, because we imagine that this future us--wherever we are--will appreciate that, will remember us kindly, will forgive us. Or we decide that this is time we have been waiting for, to clean things out, chuck out the old xeroxes, cull our bookshelves, take a box to the used CD store, defragment all our drives (hard or otherwise). In this way, we tell ourselves, we will be unencumbered--our past will be more visible without these encrustations, and our future freer. We will have room to spread out, we say, with a slight laugh and a glance over our shoulder.

All this prevention, all this remorse--it is all a denial of desire. Or, "Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances."

What if instead I lay down the anxiety, and instead surrender? Put away the calendar, let a few things slip, cease taking pleasure at being called a model--instead just think about what each armstroke feels like, whether each hand is taking a handfull of water, whether there is rotation in the hips?

Stop planning: this is a time for relishing the feeling of today.

Run with the speed of gazelles...

You will soar as the falcon soars. . .

A while back, Americo commented, "I found your blog by accident. But I have to say, if that's you dressed up as Isis. NICE!!!"

Alas, no. That is JoAnna Cameron, in her get-up as ISIS! I guess Americo (and maybe others of you?) did not watch the Shazam and Isis Hour.

But this comment reminds me of a note that Tim sent recently, announcing the release of the entirety of The Secrets of Isis to DVD. Hot damn!

Something completely different.

Kudos to Scott, for ignoring the Foxy Asso, and going straight for the good stuff. He wrote: And now for something completely different. I stumbled across the 2nd place winner of 2006's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (for the worst unpublished opening sentence written in English during the year) and thought you might enjoy it. The winner was Stuart Vasepuru of Edinburgh, Scotland who won with the submission of

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

Is being an editor as exciting as it sounds?

Well, Scott, I am glad you asked!

First I should clarify, because I think I have been playing fast and loose with clarity. Sometimes I am an editor, and that can be distinctly unexciting. I am not really the kind of editor that appears in that story, but rather the kind who takes a text but some already acceptable person and makes it more available. The project that I was bemoaning here, here, here, here, here, and here will be published next March, so they say (though they misspelled my first name, dammit).
But other times I am more like Wordy Harry (not as hard-boiled, but still wordy as hell!), and this is one of those times. So, Scott, let me reframe your question to be, "Is being a writer as exciting as it sounds?"

Here is a profile of a fantastic writing day:
4:00 a.m. Wake up, go to the bathroom, try to go back to bed, count backwards in Italian, and finally find that I am not falling asleep because there are mad thoughts churning in my brain so I might as well get up.
4:15 a.m. Turn on the computer, wipe the sleep from the eyes, and try to get adjusted to the lights. Convince the cats that I did not get up to feed them.
4:30 a.m. Read other people's blogs for a while and see if anyone other than spam generators has sent me any e-mail.
5:00 a.m. Get down to work: this requires music of course, and what is better than Bach's Art of the Fugue or the new Vivaldi choral music I bought in Venice, or maybe Beethoven's Diabelli Variations or some late string quartets. The important thing here is that the music be complicated enough to engage the mathematical part of my brain and free up the creative and analytical parts to write.
6:00 a.m. Grunt approvingly at the PP as he brings me a giant cup of coffee.
7:45 a.m. Grunt at the PP as he leaves for work.
9:30 a.m. Realize I have not had breakfast, so go into the kitchen and make some and then stuff it down my maw and hurry back to my desk.
2:30 p.m. Can I be hungry again? Scrounge some lunch.
4:30 p.m. Realize I am getting dopey, so move away from the computer and read someone else's book for a change.
5:30 p.m. Greet the PP when he gets home from work and try to come back to planet earth.

Now you will notice that that timeline says very little about writing itself. That is because that part, the actual writing part, is a mystery. There is something that can happen then (on the good days), and if I let it happen it is almost a kind of ecstasy. Athletes out there would be tempted to call it being in the zone, and I suppose in a way it is, but the only sort of: there is a sense of letting one's work-a-day self go, letting worldly concerns go, and even (ideally!) letting anxieties and insecurities go, in order to let the words come. Come on, words! And bring some thoughts with you!

In this state I might fly from working through a translation of an essay to checking up on some information, to meandering through other parts of whatever I consulted to check that information, to going off on some random tangent, to coming back to the translation, to analyzing the essay I have translated, to making a surprising connection to that random tangent from earlier, to discovering that something I had thought was not going to matter matters tremendously, to realizing that the person in one part of my chapter is not the same one as another part, to figuring out how to rectify that problem, to launching into a massive description of something I had seen a few years ago in a site-visit, and on, and on.

Writing for me is about letting my mind spread out, about letting go of whether or not I am sure that what I am trying to do is going to work and just trusting it. It is about loving what I am studying, and loving what I am saying. Gertrude Stein says that the purpose of poetry is to find a way back to the “thrill” that names hold when first learned, now that “the name of that thing of that anything is no longer anything to thrill any one except children.” I do not write poetry, but even in the world of scholarly writing, we have to find our way back to that thrill--or else who would want to read what we write? Trusting your material and trusting yourself to be thrilling--what a leap of faith!

Before I know it, my desk is stacked perilously with opened books and there are piles of other books and xeroxes all over my study. Before I know it it is 5:30 at night and I do not know where I was all day.

Sometimes when the PP comes home at 5:30, I just cannot bring myself back to the modern moment. Sometimes I look at him like I looked around the house when I was first back from Italy, and had woken up from a nap, and was utterly confused to be in my own living room. Sometimes I have to ask him to repeat what he just said because it seems like he is speaking in a foreign language, or about people I have never met, or I have no idea what he does for a living. And luckily for me, he forgives me for this, because I am not always like this and he knows how much I love to write. This is one of many reasons we call him the Patient Partner.

So to come back to the question: is being a writer as exciting as it sounds? It is, Scott, one of the most exciting things I have ever experienced.

Enjoy the Silence.

My apologies for infrequent posts of late--but they are insincere, because I fear my behavior will not change immediately.

This is only partly because I am so depressed that everyone is dropping or being kicked out of the Tour de France. (This year makes 1998 look ho-hum!)

(Side note: the PP suggested the other night that we start our own cycling team. We deliberated a bit about who might be willing to sponsor us. Thanks to the like of Predictor Lotto and Barloworld [Barloworld? Are you serious???] our thoughts went quickly to the names of French and Italian companies that use English in their names. Like "Glove Planet," a shop in Rome [and I am not making that up, though I would like to be the first American to land there], and "Boy Diffusion," a shop in Albi, France. And an advertisement on Italian TV for "BIMBO BIMBO BIMBO SHOES!" [Additional note: Bimbo in Italian = baby, which is why sometimes you see cars with stickers reading "Bimbo a borda." MAN! Did I want to buy a stack of those to bring home with me, or what??] But it was the PP who cinched it, by saying "Foxy Asso."

[photo lifted from here.]

If you have never shopped for paper towels in an Italian supermercato, then you may never have encountered the Foxy Asso, but I tell you: it rocks. And now it is our sponsor. Team Foxy Asso. Wanna join?)

But back to the reasons for infrequent posting. Mostly it is because I am writing something else, and loving it. Yes, this is what I would call "work," but damn, I love my job.

So sometime in the not too distant I'll have something to say here--and maybe here or there I'll interject something briefly, just to keep you guessing--but until then, enjoy yourselves.

Sigh.

Oh dear.

Brother Vinokourov.

A friend recently commented that she was not sure who to root for in the Tour de France, in these post-Lance years. This was after Christophe Moreau had kind of dropped back, so even her Franco-philia would not provide the answer.

I had a look at the standings and came up with this list of options:

1. Big George H., although he is not set up to win, and I don't think Levi will either, although he may do OK.
2. Vinokourov and his scraped up knees, because Astana really did put the hurt down last night, and I think he could pull it together.
3. Poor Christophe Moreau, because he is French, but he seems to be out, too.
4. Rasmussen, if he does not waste away first, because there is nothing like a.... Oh never mind.
5. The Belgian Tom Boonen, because even after his wreck yesterday he kicked butt today, AND Belgium makes great beer.
6. Alberto Contador, because even though he is Spanish he rides for Discovery.
7. Andreas Kloeden, also Astana, who is supposed to be pulling Vino, but seems to be doing well in his own right.
8. Kim Kirchen because he is from Luxembourg, for God's sake.
9. Thor Hushovd because his first name is Thor.
10. A whole bunch of Spaniards.

But then this afternoon, as the PP and I sat down to watch today's time trial, I said to him, "I think from now on I am pulling for Alexandre Vinokourov." There were good reasons for that. First, I knew that he had been hurt in an early stage, and although I had not seen the big crash (I have since, since it provides such spectacular footage), I did watch a medic in the Astana team car replacing the bandages on both his knees the other night, and that was amazing. It turns out the man is riding with 60+ stitches in his body. As someone who recently had a few stitches in her shoulder, and who was mostly sitting around afterwards as a result, I can say, that is a shitload of stitches!

Second, his team is unbelievable. Did you see Astana put the hurt on the peloton during Thursday's stage? It was a flattish stage, and apparently there were serious crosswinds, which they took serious advantage of. I think at that moment, everyone in the peloton would have been happy never to see light blue again.

Third, he has the yellowist sunglasses in all of cycling.

Then there is this photo:


It comes from Vino's own website (taken by Tim de Waele) and it gives you some idea of all his bandages. But what I noticed right away, and what secured my choice to pull for him, was that little netting he is wearing on his right arm, to protect his elbow bandage. You see, during my little love affair with the PICC line, I had to keep the whole apparatus enclosed in this little mesh sheath, so that all the piping and so forth would not get stuck on stuff or get yanked out accidentally. In other words, I felt just a little connection to this Khazakh, even though I know that there is really no comparison between my fitness level and his. (Or my leg strength. Or my speed on a bike. Or, OK I'll stop there.)
So Vinokourov is now my man. His time trial today, through the streets around Albi, was pretty amazing, too, so I think that bodes well for my choice. (And did you notice that Astana had 3 of the top 4 riders?) Besides, watching someone have such a horrible crash, keep going, ride hard with his team once he is just the tiniest bit recovered, and then pull out such a performance today at Albi? Inspirational.

Go go Vino!

Butter.

You may recall that earlier in the summer, I did a little "coaching." This consisted of about seven hour-long clinics that the coaches from my swimteam put on for kids in the city's summer league swim program. My little niche was streamlines and breaststroke pullouts. In any given clinic, the kids were split into four groups, and each group got about fifteen minutes with each coach (or in my case, "coach").

The whole experience brought me right back to my swimming youth, since it was summer-league swimming that got me hooked on the sport. Unlike a lot of Masters swimmers, I was not really a year-round age-group swimmer (except for one year, and even that was only done in service of making me faster the next summer). At the time, I was not cut out for that much swimming in my life, but I always loved it when summer came around, and for months at a time I could live at Colony Pool.

[Isis taking full advantage of training equipment, c. 1988]

The kids you see on these teams were pretty much like any group of kids. There are some of them who cannot let pass any opportunity to grab another swimmer's leg, or mess with them while they are trying to work on their streamlines. There are some who never listen and then always ask, "What are we doing?" There are others who cannot get the hang of blowing out through their nose. There are the budding Jacques Cousteaux who try on each underwater pullout to break the world record for greatest distance traveled without breathing. There are those who hang on your every word because they want to be the best streamliner evar. And there are always those who really seem to have some skills, who might have a future in the sport.

[These are probably not the two who have a future in swimming....]

But my very favorite thing about summer-league kids (and this was true back in the 1980s, too), is that for some reason, unlike their USA Swimming counterparts, they do not call butterfly "fly"--they call it "butter." "Do we get to swim butter now?" they ask. "I can't swim butter," they warn me before I have even told them what we are doing.

It's a great image, isn't it, swimming butter?

Well, true to my summer-league roots, I can now announce (picture me jumping up and down) that last night I swam some butter. Our pool is temporary back in its short-course configuration (we are hosting the summer-league championships this weekend), so practice was in 25-yard format. We had an open warm-up, so I decided that this was the time for me to try to swim a little butterfly, since I did not have an entire 50-meter lane looming before me. (And let me tell you: nothing looks shorter than a 25-yard lane when you see it for the first time after long-course season. It felt pretty good! The recovery was not a problem at all, and I think that is an indication of how much my mobility has come back. I could definitely feel my diminished strength during the pull phase of the stroke, but still.

And because he always chooses to show up for these momentous occasions, my shoulder doctor was at the pool again, this time not swimming but there with his 11-year-old daughter, who was practicing with her summer-league team for this weekend's championships.

There is nothing like a Dane.

So the PP and I just spent the morning sitting on the couch. I was mostly knitting, starting around 7:30 a.m., and finishing up about 11:50. The PP had already been sitting there for half an hour when I joined him (which means I am making progress on my jetlag--I slept until 7:30--woohoo!). Several cups of coffee, an entire sleeve, and part of another project later, I laid my needles down, exhausted. What a morning!

But the really amazing part is that the reason we were sitting on the couch was to watch the crazy people competing in the Tour de France, who for that entire time were riding their bikes. Hard. In the Alps. I.e., Michael Rasmussen has better endurance on his bike than I do knitting.

Not that that makes me feel bad or anything.

Daydreaming.

17thman posted today about his region's top ten list, and that made me wonder if the Dixie Zone had posted theirs for the SCY and SCM seasons. They had the SCY and also last year's LCM, but no SCM (too short a season?) Then I was wondering whether any of the very few times I had for this year's season might have put me into the ranking. They had! Of course, this only seems to be so because Dara Torres and Sheila Taormina were not racing in the breaststroke events. Looking at the times in those lists makes me hungry: how much time could I drop, if I can get back in shape?

It was interesting being at the meet this weekend, but not swimming. I enjoyed it--and watching my training partners race--but I was sad, too, for the obvious reasons. That energized me to have good practices on Monday night and Tuesday morning--or as good as can be expected after two weeks (of eating Italian food and drinking Italian wine...) away, after the rocky spring I had.

I am starting to scope out meets for the fall. There is one in Asheville in mid-September that I think will be my first--just to see how things are going. My coach said, "Don't expect any world record performances!" Don't worry. I am thinking I will need to enter with nonce times, a bit slower than my actual recent times, so that I do not lose every heat I swim. The goal here is to gain a little confidence back, right? Then there is a meet in Columbia in early November (date not posted yet), and one in Atlanta in mid-November, and I expect the usual mid-December meet in Atlanta. By then, one of my blog-buddies might even be racing down south--how cool is that?

Forgive the Jet-lagged.

I know, I am not supposed to be using my computer when I wake up in the middle of the night, but after lying there for a while realizing a better way to start my new chapter, I had to get up and just do it. And after that, why, the computer is on, isn't it?

Does it happen to you, when you return home after a lot of travel, that when you wake up in the middle of the night you do not recognize your own room? Last night, my first night back, I was sure that for some reason I was sleeping in a bedroom in a palace. Perhaps this is partly a reflection on the size of my recent hotel rooms, but still.

Vow: tomorrow I will try harder to get over this jetlag. Granted, I stayed up until about 10 on Saturday night, after flying home. Then I woke up at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday (good morning! to my body it was 10:30 a.m.). Then the PP swam (count them) seven events in his second day of a swim meet (including the 400 IM and the 800 free--go PP!), and I worked as a timer. Did you know that standing on concrete with a stopwatch for 5 hours will really wipe you out?

So when he suggested an early "dinner" (i.e. at 4 p.m.), how could I refuse? But I should have, because by 6 p.m., when we were watching Shaolin Soccer on TV, I just could not make it any longer. After a few pages of my latest mystery novel, I was out.

To me it looked like the clock said 5:38 a.m., and I thought, Cool, I might as well get up. Too bad it really said 2:38. But as I said: I needed to do that writing.

Now it is done, and I'm going to take another stab at sleep. Perhaps later I will tell you something about Italy.

Nuovo post.

I have never used the Italian-language blogger before. In case you are curious, "preview" is "anteprima," and to see how your post looks on the actual web, hit "Visualizza blog."

But I did not come to this internet cafe to give you Italian lessons. I came to remind you how amazing it is at 6 p.m., when all the church bells in the city go off. Well, many of them. Then a few follow at 6:02, then at 6:05 there are more, then still a few hangers-on around 6:07. Did I say hangers-on? It is now 6:30 and a couple more are going. I had observed this in Roma, and I always took it to be lingua romana for "The sun has gone over the yard arm." Turns out it happens in Venezia, too, where you might be standing just a building and a narrow canal away from a campanile when it lets loose.

Glorious.

Equally glorious was the choral music in San Zanipolo this afternoon. (In case your Veneziano is getting rusty, that is Santi Giovanni e Paolo in standard Italian.) I went in there to see the way the light plays on the stone in the floor, illuminating the entire place with a warmish reflected glow, and the wall tombs carved by Pietro Lombardo. I had not expected to find a choir practicing: there were only four singers, and they were standing on a high balcony, just below the organ pipes. What a sound--and what a way to hear "Maria regina cielo....."

Time to hit "Pubblica post."

Ta ta. So long. Ciao. See ya.

Well, my friends, I must bid you (temporarily) adieu. I am off this afternoon to Italy for one of the most important conferences I will attend this year--and also my very favorite. Or, at least, the last time I attended it, two years ago in Rapallo (also Italy), it was awesome. This is one of those conferences that is not too big, but not to small, and there are some really good papers, but the whole atmosphere is pretty laid back. And what is the subject of the conference, you may ask? The entire thing is devoted to Ezra Pound, the subject of my current research.

The meetings all take place in Venice, which should be gorgeous, but also CROWDED. High season is not my favorite time to travel to major tourist destinations, but so it goes. I am sad to say that Tim's post today about work travel amidst leisure travelers hit it on the head. (But luckily where I am headed, decent coffee will not be in short supply.)

The itinerary is basically this: fly in and out of Milano (where I have never been, but where Futurism and Fascism both began--important to my book), travel to Venezia and spend 7 nights there, then go on a several-stop outing organized by the conference folks (to Verona, Sirmione [on Lake Garda], and Tirol0 [5 miles from Austria], for a mini-conference about Imagism in Pound's daughter's castle), then back to Milano for a couple of days to visit some of the major museums of modern art and design and track down the offices of Il Popolo d'Italia if I can--AND, if I am a very good girl, find a couple fabu Italian yarn stores.

So it seems I am prepared for the two weeks of travel: passport--check, conference paper--check, e-ticket confirmation--check, trenitalia e-ticket confirmation--check, contact solution--check, travel alarm--check, knitting--check. What more could I need? Oh yeah: a prayer that my suitcase makes it to Milano with me.

So have a great couple of weeks, everyone!

Let's face it.

I'm pooped.

I know: it is not an exciting thing to say, and the more smart-alecky among you will remember (much to my dismay) that I say this a lot. Well, too bad. I am saying it again.

I'm pooped.

Whew.

In the spirit of the archive, here are a few things that take it out of me:
1. Funerals.
2. Traveling to funerals.
3. Traveling too many places in too short a time.
4. Not learning.
5. Teaching swim clinics to little kids.
6. It does not matter whether they are cute and attentive or the picture of ADD: it is tiring to teach little kids.
7. Teaching generally, now that we are being honest.
8. The heat.
9. Wait, it's not the heat, it's the humidity.
10. Yes it is too: it is the heat and the humidity.
11. Teaching swim clinics to little kids in the heat. (No, not little kids in heat!)
12. That my shoulder still hurts. Not too bad, but just a little, and constantly.
12a. UPDATE (how could I forget?): Recent surgery. (Thanks, Scott!)
13. That I am about to take yet another trip, this one overseas.
14. See #3+4.
15. A too long to-do list.
16. Making too many plans.
17. Not having things planned well enough.
18. Shopping.
19. Swim practice, when there are too many people in the lanes.
20. Showering after swim practice, when there are too many people in the locker room.

Now that I am thinking about it, 20 does not usually = "a few." See what I mean?

Have I mentioned how tired I am?

Spoleto 5: Jojking and epic.

If you are not familiar with jojk (or yoik) singing from Finnish Samiland, then you might have been just as surprised as many of the folks in the audience at the Westminster Choir concert at Spoleto at the sound of Veljo Tormis's setting of "Raua needmine" from the Kalevala.

Let me back up.

The Westminster Choir gave two concerts in St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, and we saw the second one. The program was mostly contemporary music from the Scandinavian and Baltic (read: diacritical-rich) region of Europe: pieces by Alfrēds Kalņiš, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, Trond Kverno, Veljo Tormis, and (surprised?) Johannes Brahms. Mäntyjärvi's setting of "Ave Maria" was powerful, with the women's voices whispering prayers while the men sang. And Kverno's "Ave Maris Stella" seemed to gesture in sonically rich ways to chant traditions of early music. Beautiful stuff.

But it was Estonian composer Veljo Tormis' Raua needmine, or "Curse upon iron," was the real knock-out for me. He composed this piece in 1972 against the evils of war, and it was banned by the Soviet government. The piece opened with an abrupt "HWAET!" from the kamchatka, which was some kind of percussion instrument played with a large padded hammer. It scared the living daylights out of the people sitting in front of me, but trust me: it was one of the more suitable epic openings I have heard. Then a number of male voices began to jojk.

Saami folk music is called jojk and is a singing style where melody and verse are of equal importance. Jojk is improvised while singing and can express feelings of sorrow, hate or love. To sing jojk means deeply identifying yourself with someone or something.

Saami nåjd sang jojk and drummed to reach religious ecstasy. Consequently, the church looked on jojk as "the song of the Devil" and banned it well into the 1900s.

Today, Saami musicians still practice traditional jojk but with the accompaniment of instruments. Often their playing is flavored with influences from western music.

Jojk performed in a church! I first encountered this style of singing from Wimme Saari, who often records just as Wimme. His music has a striking combination of this very traditional form of singing with electronic music--and it is absolutely addictive.

All this to say: Tormis' setting of a piece of the Kalevala, usually considered the Finnish national epic, was fabulous. Listening to it, I started to understand in a way I had not before what it might have been like to listen to other epic poems--poems that gave people a sense of what it meant to be them. The words of "Curse upon iron" object to the metal as "You spiller of innocent blood!," telling the story of the ore's (mythic) origins, and how it is shaped by "the forge of death," "hammer[ing] anger into iron." It is epic at its best, and so modern (don't forget the Kalevala was compiled in the 19th century, and I am guessing this version may update it even further):

Brand-new and up-to-date technology,
The ultimate word in electronics
Ready to fly in any direction,
Stay undeflected on its course, hit the target
Paralyze, and knock out of action, obliterate,
Render helpless and defenseless,
Harm and hurt, cause unknowable loss,
And kill, kill with iron and with steel,
With chromium, titanium, uranium, plotonium,
And with a multitude of other elements.
Ohoy, villain! Evil iron!

If only my Beowulf students could have been there!

Back to working out.

17thman posted last night about returning to coached swimming:

It's been a few weeks since my last coached workout and boy did I miss it. I forgot what it feels like to be sore and tired after a good workout. I forgot how fun the chase of trying to catch up to another swimmer or staying ahead of another. Of course swimming at night gives me a buzz so even though my body is sore and wants sleep my mind is wide awake. I'll post more about the workout in a post in the morning.
It's good to be back!

I couldn't agree more.

Sprint set.

Last night at practice I was planning to get out early. It was my third swim in a row, my shoulder was feeling a little tired, I was feeling bombed from so much (relatively) swimming this week, and I have been trying to be careful about not overdoing it.

But as I was getting ready to get out, everyone was standing on the wall, and my coach said, "Put your fins on, my dear." I told him my little cup-shaped fins had been tearing up my toes, so he said try the big ones. They felt OK, so sure, count me in for the sprint set.

The idea was to swim 5 x 50 all out on a 5:00 interval. That meant we had time, after the 50 sprint, to swim about 150 cooldown and then still have over a minute rest before the next go-round. As you might guess, I am not quite ready for sprint swimming (especially after having already swum 1500 meters), and I was feeling solidarity with Joe, and I did my sprints as all kick, all on my back in streamline.

Here are my times:
Round 1 (fly kick) :35
Round 2 (free kick) :33
Round 3 (fly kick) :33
Round 4 (free kick) :32
Round 5 (free kick) :30.5

I managed not just to do my first sprint set in quite a number of months, but to descend! Of course, my times are nothing compared with Therese Alshammer in the 50 fly yesterday, and she was not wearing big fins. Or any fins. Ahem.

Total workout: 2500 LCM

Between Marx and Marzipan in the Dictionary.

So, I may be the last to discover this little tidbit, which was circulating around some knitters' blogs about a month ago. But I plead my illness!

Isis -- [noun]: A real life muppet. 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

So don't say I never told you so.

(Manah manah.)

R.I.P. Jay Evans Paul.

Born September 1915 in Brooklyn, NY. Deceased June 2007 in Newport News, VA.

And for the record, played a mean hands of cards. And finished my crackers after I licked the peanut butter off them. And never sounded anything by thrilled to hear my voice. And spent every moment he was allowed with his wife as she ailed from congestive heart failure, holding her hand, looking lovingly into her eyes.

Grandpa, I'll miss your voice, and your smile and laugh, and I am sorry I haven't managed to beat you in cards. Maybe next hand.

Spoleto 4: Dresser of curiosities

When Aurélia's Oratorio begins, there is a dresser on stage. Gradually, a hand emerges. Then a head, or later a leg. Or two arms at once that seem contortionist because they emerge from different drawers at remarkable angles. A hand pours wine into a glass held by another hand. A hand dresses a stocking over a foot--then adds a shoe. Amidst much opening and closing of drawers, two separate arms and two separate feet are visible--could they possibly be connected?

Perhaps this is less surprising once we know that the show draws its inspiration from medieval manuscript illuminations of inside-out and upside-down worlds.

The show goes on like that--well, like that if that can happen on stage curtains acting as trapezes or ladders, or if there is any likeness between a chest of drawers and a coat rack. There is a likeness: they both have become frightening alive, as has a coat and a pair of shoes, and the entire rigging of the stage curtains. Puppets watch a performance in a little puppet theatre, being put on by a human head. An old-fashioned chair-taxi (carried by a person at each end, the chair held to poles) enters stage right , but carried upside down. Soon a woman comes down from a "window" in the curtains and catches a ride--she is riding upside down. A man wrestles with a coat, and loses. A man pulls a spangly skirt upside down over his head and chest, holds a woman's shoes on his hands, and using those shoes and his own (on his feet of all places) he performs a beautiful ballroom dance (though there is literally nothing to see above either partner's waist). A man and a woman perform a remarkable dance of putting on and taking off the same coat, while gypsy jazz plays in the back. A woman opens a door in her voluminous hoop skirt to reveal a sort of hour glass, that seems to be consuming her legs and then her hips and then all of her and turning them into sand--which a man later collects with a dustban, dumps into a drawer, and the woman re-emerges. A woman with a whole in her middle enters a stage where a toy train is running on an elevated track, and using her own hole-y body, becomes a tunnel.

When you come out of the show, it is remarkable that the ground stays under your feet.

How then do you look at the woman in the pool the next day, swimming with a lithe body and a long braid of finally contained hair, and believe that she is affected by the elements as we are?

Being coached.

Last night I did the first real practice I have done since I returned to the water. By that I mean that the coach told me what to do, and I did it--instead of just swimming back and forth as best I could.

When I first came back to swimming, I did everything with long fins. Now I am doing almost everything with short fins. Butterfly is still very squirrelly, but the other three strokes I can do pretty well. Pain is light, as opposed to pretty strong when I first came back. And strokes and turns are starting to feel more normal again, although I know there is still some imbalance between my left and right sides.

I'll celebrate this progress by reporting in detail last night's workout. To those of you swimming regularly, it won't look like much, but to me it was a great victory.

Everything is LCM:
Warm-up: 1000 (200 swim, 200 swim, 200 kick, 200 kick, 200 drill) [short fins]
Kick set: 6 x 100 kick (50 easy, 25 build, 25 fast) [2 with long fins, 2 with short fins, 2 with no fins]
Recovery: 200 easy [short fins]
Swim/drill set: 8 x 50 (alternating swim-kick-swim by thirds of a length) [short fins]
Cool-down: 100 easy + stretching and therapy motions

(Not exactly) Spoleto 3: Tropical Storm Barry.

I knew we were at the coast when I realized that the TV in our hotel room defaults to The Weather Channel. Not that I am complaining: I have been known to be a Weather Channel fan. Blame it on growing up in Tidewater Virginia, I suppose, where I learned early the importance of constantly watching hurricane tracks and projected paths, just in case.

Not that my enduring attention to all things weather makes me prepared. For instance, even after a discussion with the PP about packing rain jackets, did I pack mine? (Do I really have to answer that question?) Luckily, a certain outdoor store became the store where I dropped the most money. We called it the store we visited every day, because the first time we bought sunscreen, the second time my (fabulous) new rain jacket, and the third time lots of brightly-colored ankle socks to wear with my sandals. I even spent more money there than at knit! (I must admit that this is partly because I have bought so much yarn elsewhere of late, and I was trying to be restrained....)

Anyway, the PP and I woke up the morning after our arrival to find ourselves socked in. If you have ever lived at the coast you know what I mean: about 98% humidity, no breeze, spitting rain, gray everywhere you look. We realized then that we needed to get that replacement raincoat right away, and hurricane expert Dr. Lyons confirmed our concern that the weather would only get worse. I never got that distinct low pressure headache that Yarngineer described (I have before, and yow they are intense), but as the day went on, the wind picked up.

We could not help but laugh, though, because the night before we had seen The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht number I had been eager to see ever since I heard Ute Lemper sing songs from it. (Do you know "Alabama Song," which was covered by The Doors? It is from this show.) Anyway, the opera has as a sizable plot device a hurricane, and so we had spent some time during the turn from Acts I to II (I think) watching the storm come in, destroy a city, and then barely miss the city of Mahagonny.

So as we watched the Weather Channel, with its little arrows, they looked for all the world like the arrows on the primitive maps in the show.

But Barry was no hurricane. I realized the difference between people used to coastal storms and those not in watching reactions to the storm. Should we evacuate? asked the PP.

All scoffing aside, the wind was pretty intense, not in a destroying buildings kind of way, but in a way that made umbrellas everywhere fear for their skeletal systems, and it did quite a job on one of the Spoleto banners hanging near our hotel. (That thing being whipped around was like gunfinre.) And we just got used to having the hems of our pants and skirts soaked.

At least now I have an awesome new raincoat.

Spoleto 2: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance.

When Shen Wei writes in his program materials that "I wasn't taught the arts separately, so I don't separate them in my work," he means it.

At first I took this to mean an intimate link between the music and the dance. I buy that: sometimes the music dictates the movement in a way that goes beyond mere choreography.

But he meant more than that, because a ways into the performance of Connect Transfer, it dawned on me (and maybe suddenly on the others in the audience, too) that the large white fabric laid over the stage was not just to allow a contrast with the dancers' costumes. It was a canvas, or a scroll.

The bulk of the movement in this performance was performed on the floor, but it did not look like tumbling so much as dancing horizontally. The movements were circular--not just in the sense of roundness of pattern but also of repetition. Yet this was not dervishness so much as fluidity--as often a gentle motion as a furious one.

When the dancer wearing a mitten dipped in black paint or ink started her pattern, the floor turned into an enormous scroll of running style calligraphy, made not by a brush but a body, or a body and a brush, or a body become a brush. When other dancers appeared with red and then blue and green and yellow and purple--sometimes on their mittens, others on socks or on their backs--the stage had become a brilliant jumble of significant nonsense, and all the while watching it appear on the page was like watching Jackson Pollock paint--if he could really dance.
Makes you rethink textuality.

And the music--written by Kevin Volans, Iannis Xenakis, György Lineti--was a knock out.

Spoleto 1: And that is the longing, and this is the book.

Will you work with me for a moment? I had intended to write a bit about the Spoleto Festival while the PP and I were in Charleston, but my access to teh internets was not what I had hoped. So, if you do not mind, I am going to pretend it is last week. Can you do that with me?

The first time that we ran into Philip Glass on the terrazza of the Holiday Inn (are you still working with me here?), I figured it was not really him, because given that his show, being an American premiere and all, was kind of the headliner for the festival, would he be staying at the Holiday Inn? And besides, everywhere you looked, there he was on a poster or a t-shirt or a coffee mug or another poster or a gigantic banner on Gaillard Auditorium.

See?

So the afternoon before we went to the first performance of Book of Longing, I assumed my eyes were tricking me when I saw him talking on his cellphone in a t-shirt and jeans, and kind of pacing around.

But then after we saw the show, and him on stage--and us in the front row (friends, it pays to think ahead)--then, when we saw him a couple days later, I knew it was him, and felt bad for poo-pooing the PP's sense that we had seen him.

And of course I thought about telling him that for reasons I still cannot quite get a handle on, his piece moved me to tears. Was it just Leonard Cohen lyrics? Or that wonderful relentlessness of his music? Or the intimacy of seeing the performers so close? Or the way the intimate "I" of the poetry shifted in and out of the bodies of tenor, bass-baritone, soprano, and mezzo? Or the weird disparity between the super-erotic lyrics and Leonard Cohen's own self-sketches (rendered into a multimodal array), very much about seeing his own face look old?

But I feel dumb saying such things to someone who obviously knows that his work is important, so I never go up to famous people.

Still, what I really wanted, absolutely desperately wanted to ask him was: What is it like to see your own face, stylized into a portrait made of thumbprints, and of about 30 years ago, plastered everywhere you look?