can I buy an indulgence?

I think it says something about my state of mind at this point (how in the world did I manage to get so far behind, so early in the semester?) that I saw an e-mail promoting Classroom Performance Systems, and misread it as Classroom Penance Systems.

Another scene

We're working in the shared study, where the LWI is putzing around online while the radio plays Semisonic and Matchbox 20 in the background.

LWI: We're going back to the 90's!

Me: I noticed! That's excellent.

LWI (after a puzzled pause): It's good for music. It's not so good for temperature.

So that's where they all went

Scene: The Left-Wing Intellectual and I are watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, just before they extinguish the torch. True to my pyromaniac nature (and my curiosity about the practical nature of things), I am pondering what kind of fuel they use to maintain such a bright and substantial flame without much smoke.

Me: I wonder what they burn in that thing?

The LWI: Dissidents!

Road Trip

We're getting ready to take a road trip, back to State Where I Grew Up. I know, I know, it's a dumb time to drive a thousand miles, but for all I know this is the last summer that gas will ever be below $10 a gallon, so we're going to do it while we can. We've driven substantially less over the last fifteen years than most people, so this shouldn't throw off our karmic balance too much. And besides, it's going to be an awesome road trip.

Here are just some of the reasons why I am all twitchy with glee:

1) It's our first road trip in the new car! With an mp3 jack and freezingly efficient air conditioning and comfortable seats and room for all our junk and more cupholders than any rational adult could ever need!

2) We're going to see my Piano Niece and her new husband, Tank. We missed their wedding while we were in Spain this summer, so this is our chance to see them as they cross the country towards their new home. (They're crossing the country horizontally, and we're going vertically, to meet up just in the middle. It's the Isosceles Triangle Road Trip.) They're great people and a perfect match, so I'm excited to welcome him into the family.

3) Piano Niece is my Studly Brother's kid, so this means we get to stay with Studly Brother! That alone will make this just about the Most Fun Thing We've Done All Year.

4) Ooo, and it only gets better. We have the magic ingredients to make a queimada, so one night will see us outside in the glowing green of a summer evening, surrounded by trees and fireflies, grouped around a bowl of flames flickering blue in the dusk. I don't think Piano and Tank will have too many demons to scare off just yet, but it seems like a good way to wish them off to a good start.

5) On the way, we get to visit Art Sister, who is always an inspiration to me. She's the one person in the world I can call pretty much anytime, with nothing to say, and we'll end up coming up with some Deep Philosophical Insights into ourselves and the universe. I always feel reassured and invigorated after I've spent time with her. (Hmm, that makes her sound too much like bath gel. New Extra-Foamy Art Sister: Soothing and Invigorating!)

6) Here's what I love about the State Where I Grew Up. There's a bed and breakfast on the way to Sibling Town where we've stayed the last couple of times we've driven that way. I emailed the owners to see if they had a room available for the night we're coming through. They wrote back immediately: "sorry, we're out of town then, but if you'd like to stay anyway, we'll hide a key for you; we just can't give you the breakfast part of the bed and breakfast." Keep in mind that they know us from all of two previous trips. But they're leaving us their house for the night. I love these people.

7) And then we're taking the long way home, to explore some new territory. I chose the route because the scenery should be substantially cooler and greener and hillier than where we live, which is basically furnace-blasted flat clay. It's going to be a good trip.

Vocabulary bleg

I'm working on a translation project, and I'm getting deeper and deeper into that zone where I understand perfectly well what the original means, but I'm having a hard time remembering what the appropriate words are in English. (Somehow the more languages I get into my head, the less I can correctly use any of them.)

So I turn to the blogosphere. First, an easy-ish one: in English, is a female marquis most appropriately called a "marquise" or a "marchioness"?

Second, there's a Portuguese word recolhimento, which describes a place that would take in women and give them a basic education and a place to live, usually until they were old enough to marry. Its name comes from the verb meaning "to gather," so it's a place that gathers people in. I can't for the life of me think of a corresponding term in English: it's not a poor-house, because the women weren't necessarily poor; it's not an orphanage, because they often had parents; it wasn't exactly a finishing school, because (at least to me) that suggests building on a previous education as well as preparation for entry into an elite world, which wasn't necessarily the case here. It was really a mix of all of these things, with a religious element (but it wasn't a convent, becasue they didn't take vows). Is there any word that would suggest this, or am I stuck writing a long awkward footnote to explain this term?

Thanks for any suggestions!

The power of positive thinking

I went to donate blood this afternoon, and as always, they do the little test first to make sure you have enough iron. Unfortunately the minimum requirement for blood donors is 12, and my blood only registered a 10.3. I was disappointed, because of course they do the iron test *after* half an hour of other questions like Have you recently played with typhoid-ridden rats? and Do you regularly inject yourself with other people's bodily fluids?, and besides, it frustrates me to not be able to give blood when I'm a perfectly healthy human being.

So the nice blood guy said "Well, we can try again on the other hand if you want... there's not much of a chance it will be different, but sometimes if your hands are cold it can register a bit low." So I said sure, what the heck, I have plenty more fingers. Besides, the second test was on my right arm, which is my tennis arm, so of course all the strong blood's going to be on that side. So we both started joking about focusing my iron and the power of positive thinking and so forth... until the little machine beeped, and the guy's eyes got huge, and he said "Um, I don't know what you did, but now you're at 13.7."

Cool, so now I can give blood. And just to be on the safe side I spent the rest of the day thinking World peace! World peace! World peace! just in case I have magical powers I was not previously aware of.

Anyway, all of that reminded me of a habit I used to have of making a wish at 11:11. If you're not familiar with this, it's sort of like wishing on stars, for the digital age - if you happen (and it must be by chance) to see a digital clock just when it shows the time 11:11, you can make a wish.

I don't know if this is part of the official 11:11 lore, but the habit I developed if I happened to catch that magic moment was to stare at the clock, not averting my gaze until it turned to 11:12, and focusing the entire time on my wish. For a long time I made a regular practice of this, and the best thing about it was that it taught me to always have a wish at the ready, so that I didn't waste big chunks of that precious minute trying to decide what to wish for.

And, interestingly enough, if you are frequently nudged to evaluate what things in your life you most want to wish for, that does wonders for helping you clarify what it is you really want.

A couple of years ago, What Now wrote a really lovely post along these lines (I'm so happy that I actually saved this reference); she wasn't talking about the 11:11 phenomenon, but she has a wonderful description (from her partner D.) of what she calls the background work of the brain: "Our brains are always engaged in background tasks; if we ask ourselves a particular question at least once every day, the brain starts to gather information on that question automatically throughout each day."

I think there's an awful lot that we do to train ourselves to think in particular ways. Squadratomagico just wrote about a couple she knows who have the habit of constantly denigrating everything around them, and I thought boy, do I know those people. They live in the same world I do, but they've trained themselves to pick out all the things they don't like about it. Others train themselves to look for any possible slight to themselves, any sign that they're not measuring up to the expectations of others; still others get in the habit of looking for opportunities. It's all in what you teach your brain to do. (Either What Now or PPB - unfortunately I didn't save this link, but I'll be happy to give credit if anyone remembers - once used the example of setting your computer password to be something you want to focus on, so that you're reminded of it every day. I loved that.)

I used to be in the habit of thinking about what I most wanted, which kept me attentive to the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of direction I wanted to head in. I've slipped on that lately, to the extent that when our dean recently asked me what my longer-term career plans were, I didn't have a very clear answer at the ready. I know what I want to do today, and this week, but with my life? Haven't had time to think about that lately.

But heck, if I can boost my blood iron, maybe I can be a little more conscious about steering my life too. I don't feel like I'm off track, particularly; I just don't know what my track is at the moment, and if I saw a clock turning 11:11, I'd waste a good part of that minute trying to figure out what to wish for. Time to get back in the habit.

What would you wish for?

Dancing

I saw this link at bsgirl, and it just made me all kinds of happy. Go look.

Where the hell is Matt? (2008 edition)

RBOC

I have a million posts I've written in my head, but haven't been at the computer long enough to write any... research is going full speed, interrupted by weekends out of town and away from the internets. So a quick set of RBOC to keep this blog from disappearing altogether.

* Uno de enero, dos de febrero... happy San Fermines! I've been out of the US on July 4 for several years, so I hardly even remember it anymore. But San Fermines are a blast. (this is what most of you are more likely to know as "the running of the bulls.") It, like pretty much everything else in Spain, has its own little catchy song, which will be stuck in my head for weeks.

* Spaniards are just beside themselves these days: the national team won the EuroCup, Pau Gasol made it to the NBA finals with the Lakers, Contador won the Giro de Italia and Valverde's leading in the Tour de France, and now Nadal at Wimbledon. Score!

* My sister-in-law is unfailingly awesome. My two brothers-in-law are both kind of jerks. We've just gotten back from a weekend trip together, and the LWI keeps saying "The one thing I know is that I am never, ever going to travel anywhere with my brothers again."

* As part of the weekend trip, we went to the city where my father-in-law went on his honeymoon 53 years ago. He remembered the neighborhood where they stayed, and we went past the hotel... which was still there, completely unchanged. We were afraid this would be a little too much for him (since my MIL died last summer) but he was really sweetly happy.

* I have a million photos to post, if I ever get around to it. They include pictures of my growing collection of T-Shirts That Say Completely Absurd Things in Mangled English.

* I'm ready to go home. I love being here, and there are a million things I know I'll miss as soon as we're back. But I've decided that I have a certain capacity for living with my in-laws, a reserve of flexibility and patience and the ability to be constantly around lots of people and to sleep about an hour a night less than I'm used to and to speak in another language, and that reserve lasts about seven weeks. It's not Spain itself that drains me; if the LWI and I take a few days off on our own, the reserve fills back up a bit. But by the eighth week I'm pretty frazzled, and I start acting like a four-year-old.

* Fortunately we're heading home on Thursday. I plan to sleep for about three days straight, and then you can expect to see me start whining about how I wish we were still here.

Nicer images

Okay, time to get that previous post out of my head and off the top of the blog. Songbird requested pictures of things in flower, and that's a much nicer image to focus on. I'm not a great photographer of flowers at all, but it's been a wet spring here and things are wildly in bloom everywhere, so here are a few humble examples.

Bougainvillea in somebody's driveway:



Charming Town has a little fruit and flower market in the main plaza on Thursday mornings. (Is that cheating, to take pictures of captive flowers rather than wild ones? Anyway, I love seeing so many colors piled together.)

And, nothing is more symbolic of springtime in Spain than the poppies in bloom; they're everywhere, along roadsides, in people's back yards, all the fields are full of them.

A little freaked out

Warning: this one's a bit disturbing. It feels weird even to write about, but it's occupying a little too much of my brain for the moment, so perhaps this will help get it out.

In honor of our ninth anniversary, the LWI and I took a few days to head out of the city and visit a lovely town a few hours from here, full of medieval churches and amazing landscapes. It was one of the best trips we've ever taken together, and I'll write about it soon (with pictures for Dale and Phantom and Songbird!) but at the moment all the good stuff has been rudely shoved out of my brain by the events of the last day.

The morning we left Charming Town, we'd arrived rather early at the train station, and were sitting on the deserted platform waiting for the next train to arrive. Finally we noticed that it was approaching, but it seemed to have stopped about 200 feet away from the station, and we could sort of see something on the tracks. We saw the conductor step down; he looked at the tracks, went back into the train, and then behind us we heard the station manager's phone ring. Definitely something odd going on. We thought, surely it's not a person who's fallen on the tracks or something? or an animal? Not an animal; the bit I could see looked like fabric or plastic. And certainly not a person; no one was screaming or running around as they would have done if a person had been hit by a train. Besides, since the train was just coming into the station, it wasn't going more than a few miles an hour, and there was no reason for anyone to try to cross the tracks at that particular point, only a wall on the other side.

We waited for a bit and then I decided to wander down the platform for a better look; more than anything it looked as though there was some construction material from the nearby highway, or a chunk of old tire, or something of that sort that maybe some prankster had thrown on the tracks.

And really, I wish I hadn't done that, because as I got closer the vague sort of lump came into clearer view, and then it waved its arm, and goddamnit it was a person halfway under the train. He was... well, you really don't want to know how he was, but suffice it to say that it took the emergency crews an hour to separate him from the train. (There never was any screaming or running around; the station authorities and emergency guys were brisk but silent, except for the wail of the ambulance when it pulled up to the station. I guess that's logical, and my own reaction was to be quiet and stunned, but the whole scene was very eerie and surreal.)

Astonishingly, they got him out alive, though I saw on the news later that he died shortly after arriving at the hospital. And now there are images in my head that I really really really wish were not there. Questions, too... he turned out to be an ordinary middle-aged bookstore owner, and no one has any idea why he stepped directly in front of a slow-moving train at 10 am on a sunny Saturday morning. For his sake, and mine, and everyone else's in Charming Town, I really wish that he hadn't.