Spread

Also, learned the term “Tebowing.”

Spent a lot a lot of time on the road this weekend. So four times, I drove through Epoufette, the little town right next to the Cut River Bridge (my favorite bridge in the continental U.P.). Their new city-limits sign denotes the general store, diner, and motel (there can't be thirty people living within dog-sledding distance) as "A Place of Rest." Maybe it's because Halloween's so close, but it seemed a little ominous to me. I'm not ready to reach a resting place. (Wikipedia tells me that's a literal translation of the French name, but still, I'd use a looser paraphrase in the chamber of commerce literature. Like, put your feet up and have a burger, not, this is the end of the road, folks.)

Ah, otherwise, the weekend was nice. I dragged Noni around to visit with people who don't think of me as an annoying mother always asking how school was, and we got lots of sweet cousin-time with Gigi and Is. Put both my gas foot and my clutch foot up and watched the Lions kick Denver ass. Got a start catching up on homework. Sunday night etcetera. The house feels lonely, but the cats – bookends on either side of me as I type this – seem to be trying their best to make me not notice.

Weird gym etiquette.

I don't weigh myself often; I know when my pants feel tight, or when a sweater fits better than it did last time I wore it. But sometimes I do, maybe just because the scale at the gym is all big and official-looking in the corner of the locker room and it calls to me. But here's the thing. Every time I step onto it, the big weight at the bottom is set at 100 lbs. I weigh myself and slide the heavy marker right back where I found it, I'm guessing out of politeness to the skinny girls. And I think everybody does this. I've seen the people there: sure, lots of them are college kids, 120 lbs, perfect. But there's plenty of people in that locker room who weigh more than the next step up from that, and yet I never find the scale set any other way. And it's not like people just move the weight all the way to the left, as if to clear it out, to say "none of your beeswax, next person." We all just keep it where we're trained it's supposed to be.

Maybe next time, I'll slide it all the way over to 200 lbs (250? whatever the right-most slot is) and leave it there. How much better would the next person feel if they could step on and move the weight to the left instead? I'm considering it community service.

Jane, you strange and almost unearthly thing.

G-Lu refers to places outside of Escanaba as other worlds. "Do you have McDonalds in your world?" she asked me in the car yesterday. But maybe I'm underestimating to think she's actually referring to geography. Because I like the idea of phrasing things that way when you're getting to know somebody: "Is there a library in your world? Is there a hole-in-the-wall breakfast diner? Is there Lifetime Movie Network?"

Last night, there were no batteries in my world. Which meant my remote went dead and I couldn't pause Jane Eyre on Netflix and finish my work. I'm sure I'll be regretting that later, when I'm feeling not yet ready for my week, but in the moment I went with it and shut my computer and just watched.

Upon seeing…

…the copious racks of lacy fancy bras at Kohl's toady, four-year-old Georgia said, "Those are clothes for mommies and daddies." I suppose in a way they are.

Paper of color then?

Went to the supply closet at school, and found myself second in line and asked the grad student in front of me, "There any colored paper in there?" Because I need some to divide the sections of my report. He said, "That's racist."

Or maybe the paper?

My internet was out yesterday morning, and it turns out I have no idea what my morning routine is without playing my turn in Scrabble and checking out the news on Twitter. It takes me all of five minutes to get ready to leave the house, so I was suddenly up way too early, even for an 8:30 meeting. What did I used to do in the morning, pre-internet? Like read a book or something? No idea.

Let me tell you about me.

I got feedback on my application for promotion, and the whole report needs to be re-imagined. While this is a big job, it's really not anything traumatic – it's not like anybody thinks I'm not magitastic at my job, but it *is* like I need to do a better job of bragging about that on paper for the powers that be who don't know me. Which I hate. So today, I've been trying to better put into words what makes me so fucking important. This is hard.

But I am proud of one editorial choice I made today, which was to switch the whole document from Times New Roman to a sans serif font. What I'm saying about myself suddenly looks so much more official.

Not at all here and now.

Several of my fiction students this term are workshopping chapters from their fantasy novels. So often, when I read student-fantasy, I'm left wondering just when and where these stories take place. Sure, there's the urban fantasy, which takes place now-ish but where fairies live next door. But most of it has some sort of vaguely medieval feel, and yet not. (And yeah – sometimes they like to spend the first 200 pages establishing the intricacies of the when and the where, which tires me out.) So I got brave and asked one of the writers last night – out of curiosity more than anything – if it was even a fair question to ask *when* a fantasy story takes place. She said she thought of her story's setting as "during the time of the dinosaurs but on another planet." And suddenly I felt better about not having been able to suss that out all on my own.

Oops, forget that Qwickster idea.

I take it Netflix has no buddy or girlfriend to run business decisions by over dinner? They just (I suspect, drunkenly) send out emails announcing new ideas and then see where the chips fall and what kind of take-back or apology might need sending later? They are spazolina.

Not that I'm giving up on them. I watch way more than my $8/month share of their streaming programming. I just get embarrassed for them every time I see their name in my inbox.

Not quite, girlie.

Reading essays. Student is writing about the underground railroad, led by, she thinks, Uma Thurman. I'm going to be happy all morning because of that one.

What would a stranger stealing my TV think?

The two things recorded on my DVR right now? Glee and Hostel, and I don't know that I feel in the mood to watch singing or torture. What to do.

Not what she meant.

I guess this is not my story to tell, but I can't help it. Imagine you went to a club meeting, and the icebreaker question was "What's your favorite candy?" and the girl next to you says "Skoal." You'd think, "Um, didn't DARE come talk to your class in third grade? Chew isn't candy." But always keep an open mind because she probably meant, "Skor," the Swedish chocolate-covered toffee bar.

(Ok, just looked it up, and it's made by Hershey's so, not so much Swedish. But "skor" *is* Swedish for "shoes," which is just want I want my candy bars named after. Confused.)

But my favorite part of the whole thing is that I didn't hear this story as an example of anybody using the wrong word. The "she" at hand just said, "They asked our favorite candy and I said Skoal." So nobody at the meeting said, "Wha-huh?" Nope. They all must have though thought, "Okay, nice to meet you, weird girl. Can I get you a bottle to spit in?"

Did they think I was lying about not liking the beach?

Last night, I completed a "what hair color is best for you" quiz online. It was pretty mindless – was I practical or fun-loving, would I vacation in a city or on the beach, is my ideal significant other funny or protective. Pretty sure I was going to get the answer "brown." But instead, my results were this: "You answered 0 of 0 correctly!"

No dogs were harmed in the writing of this post, or before.

When I hike in the woods on the other side of Wright Street, I have to walk across this metal bridge over the Dead River. The spaces between the metal parts you walk on are pretty big, not big enough for a person's foot to slip through, but I've seen a lot of dogs unhappy and nervous about having to cross it. Today, I went over as the same time two old people and four old dogs were coming back across it the other way. The bigger dogs were fine with the bridge, and everyone was going slow enough they weren't tripped up. But the old woman had a little dog in her arms, and it's the little dogs, with their little feet, who have the most trouble. I've seen plenty of people pick their dogs up and carry them across.

So I pet the big dogs and keep going, and the old woman says to the old man, "Cooper likes to walk on the plank." And I'm thinking about how it really would be nice for the dogs if there was a plank of something solid they could cross on, but when I turn around to see what she's talking about, she's lowered her little terrier onto the very edge of the bridge! This is not what I'd call a plank, though it is the widest piece of metal there. But it's also twisted and rusty, and the sides of the bridge don't have many vertical supports, so she's just set down her dog right where it's going to fall into the river. And I'm just petrified this dog is going to slip over the side while she's still holding its leash and its neck will break.

I'm pretty likely to mind my own beeswax with most things, but in this case I was worried enough to stop and consider butting in. Thankfully, the old man told her Cooper didn't like that after all, and she picked him back up. I started walking again, but kept peeking back until they all made it to the other side.

That's the end of the story in which I did nothing, but nothing bad happened anyway. That I know of. So I don't even know why I typed this whole thing up, except maybe to tell you that I took a different trail today and found a beaver dam. That part was cool.