kyria

It is a terrible thing, but I fear I'm becoming a bit of a diva about skate sharpening.

I just hauled my skates in to be resharpened, after my instructor confirmed that a "this feels wrong!" feeling about my right blade which I've been enduring for a year and a half really wasn't all in my head, and was also one of the reasons I have poor edge control on that foot. I decided to try a frequently-recommended neighborhood place legendary for both good sharpening and truculence - reasoning that the place I usually go had improved but hadn't solved the issue in three sharpenings - and after the crusty guy at the counter told me that there was nothing wrong and the skates didn't need sharpening, but, sigh, it was my money, he fixed the problem with the right blade...and caused a similar one on the previously-balanced left skate.

I've gone from having a one-foot glide that's rock-steady for nearly a full lap of the rink to one that fishtails barely the length of the neutral zone.

I want to cry, a little.

I don't see straight lines particularly well; I can't tell whether a blade's even or aligned properly until I'm on it. So now I have to go back, explain to the crusty guy that yes, my skates are sharp, and yes, he doesn't think they need anything, but no, the left blade isn't right, and yes, I want him to try again.

And I'm terrified that if I let him do them both (and he'll want to) he'll fix the left and screw up the right blade again.

But yesterday on my walk to work from the rink, a guy pulled up on his bike, said, "I saw your skates and thought you'd like to know..." and proceeded to give me a play-by-play of USA/CAN. So that was amusing.

As the 6th (7th?) Annual Hilariously Terrible Christmas Presents Competition reveals, while this year's presents were not particularly bad, all of them were wrong: presents meant for strangers, or hostesses. Things like:

• a tiger-striped scarf in purple, magenta, and mustard, which I dislike intensely but can appreciate that someone else would appreciate
• a salt shaker (?)
• a bag of almonds (??)
• a box of tea bags (???)
• a kevlar glove to wear while cooking - this one, I think, may be closest to hilariously terrible, because a) it is easily read as unwelcome commentary on my own scar tissue and therefore ability, and b) it was a present because my mother doesn't pay attention while she uses knives and chops her own fingers a lot...which is not actually related or relevant to point a, and c) it is ridiculous

Honestly, this makes me more sad and resigned than the years that the presents are - as the name suggests - hilariously terrible. At least then they're so appallingly bad that there's something entertaining about them.

omens asked me about hockey!

Oh, dear.

Part I. General Topics.

At its best, I've been known to say that hockey is the perfect combination of physics and aggression. I love its speed, I love the cause-and-effect, I love the way that good players can make things happen that my eyes aren't convinced are physically possible.

However, I also have no patience for a lot of the things that many other people say are necessary in the game. I don't like fighting, and I wouldn't miss it if it were gone. I don't find excessively chippy games exciting; I turn them off and walk away. I realize the market supports it, but at least the NHL level, I think the amount of money teams spend is rather appalling (I reserve more of my rage on that subject for schools that fund their athletics departments at the expense of everything else, but they're related complaints).

Hockey = yes! Injurious machismo = no!

So with THAT out of the way,

Part II. As Fan.

To be honest, my relationship with NHL hockey as a fan is strained right now. I joke that the lockout broke my hockey, and really, it kind of did: having nearly a year to be accustomed to a routine without it - followed by an abbreviated, sucky season, followed by summer, followed by a season that is slowly becoming slightly less sucky but that was actively painful to watch in October - means that I read a lot of hockey coverage, but I'm out of the habit of watching it frequently. And then when I do watch, somebody does something reprehensible like beating down a player who's not expecting it, and I have to get angry all over again.

I mean, I could be watching the Flyers right now! But I'm writing this, instead. (Compensation: the Blackhawks are not on my television! So it's not all bad.) [And editorial commentary, from the future: SKIPPING THAT GAME WAS A SUPER-GOOD DECISION.]

I keep missing their games this season, but I like having my moment of FYeah Title IX! and hanging out in a mostly-empty rink watching our women's team. For one thing, they're AWESOME, although my hero worship of their coach has been tempered a little bit by having too many friends who've had run ins with her. I suppose you don't coach at her level by being easy-going. /o\ Anyway, especially compared to our men's team - whose hockey sense is often best described as "muddled" or perhaps "misaligned" - I find their game elegant.

Part III. As Fangirl.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Then everybody got hurt and involuntarily retired and waived and traded. :(

Part IV. As Skater!

Ahahahahahaha. I'm a disaster with a puck. I'm not merely a liability; I'm pretty much playing for the other team.

Sometimes we joke that I want to grow up to be a ref. Then it would practically be my job to favor the opposition, right?

On the other hand, since I've learned all of my technique from figure skaters, I have fewer bad hockey habits to break than some of the people I skate with. I actually have (most of the time) a useful second push on my back crossover, for example, rather than the inefficient horse-pawing motion a lot of hockey players use. A few weeks ago I had my first experience of beating the rest of the hockey class down the length rink, backwards...and not by a little bit, either: by most of the defensive zone. It was a bit of a "Wait, what just happened?!? Why are all you slowpokes back there?" moment. \o/

Absolutely nobody in my department knows Marvel, and the X-Men have not achieved anything close to the level of cultural saturation I thought they had.

( Hello, my name is )

On the other hand, wear this around a bunch of academics, and they'll start trying to figure out whether you're dressed as a secret or a school of philosophy or a commentary on the essential unknowableness of another's being, so that's oddly hilarious to watch.

As ever, it's the film you're a bit ashamed of having checked out that has a cataloguing error you need to report to your colleagues. In my defense, Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy were on screen at THE VERY SAME TIME. Like I could resist that much pretty in one place. (It's a terrible movie; I can't honestly recommend that anyone else watch it, though if it weren't an action film it might have the potential to be interesting.)

In related news, I am getting closer and closer to the weekend when I'm going to give in and watch Atonement. I loathe that book; I think it relies on a cheap narrative trick, and I don't find it clever or appealing or a paean to creativity: I find it sociopathic. I do not expect to enjoy the experience.

The Conspirator, on the other hand, is pretty good.

*

Very glad to see that someone else wrote an irritated letter to the editor about the Monticello travel article best summarized as, "we skipped all the slavery exhibits, because what with the cool mansion, they didn't seem necessary, really." File under: spectacularly missing the point about plantation economies.

*

So, as anyone who hangs out with me on Twitter - or, really, anyone who hangs out with me at all - knows, last week the optometrist sent me off to buy reading glasses.

He also all but drew a frowny face on the patient instructions next to OVERDUE OPTHAMOLOGY APPOINTMENT ("oooooo, somebody's in trouble," said the receptionist), but that's a different story.

It's weird. I've had contacts since third grade, so it's incredibly disorienting to me to suddenly have a frame and reflections getting in my field of vision. I've also never been able to wear fashionable glasses, always excepting the lavender ones with hearts and rhinestones on the corners that were the height of elementary school style. (Don't tell me otherwise.) Let's put it this way: I stopped off to get the lenses in my spare glasses updated for the first time since high school, and said to the woman in the optical shop, "I'm assuming my lenses can't fit a lot of these frames; they're pretty coke-bottle," and she glanced at the prescription for approximately .01 second and said, "You don't have to tell me."

Anyway, the point of all that is that for the first time ever, I can buy glasses as accessories, without dropping hundreds of dollars on the lenses. I can try those cute oblong wire framed ones and pretend I'm a superhero disguised as a bureaucrat! I can switch to clunky black plastic ones, and pretend I'm a magical pixie dream girl! I can move them up and down on my nose, and stare at people over them, and absentmindedly take them off and tap the earpieces on my lips!

As a coworker says, glasses make very good props when you don't actually need them to see.

*

Like, I suspect, most people who spend a lot of time with anonymous manuscripts, I tend to assign personalities to their authors. I don't often come across "it is dark and this scriptorium is cold"-style marginalia, but I can't help reading hands as impatient, or scrupulously particular, nor can I resist making up stories up about what people were thinking as they went about their work.

A colleague who spent about a year with one of our collections eventually began referring to its creator as "Uncle," which seems to sum it up rather well.

*

And in conclusion, a lesson from 12th-century abbesses to you: in matters of business, just as in blackmail, EVERYTHING goes in writing.

I spent a week in the PNW not long ago, which means that once again I am crushingly, horrifyingly homesick for a place where I can't live.

Forgive me, for this afternoon I returned to my roots and purchased a plaid flannel shirt.

In retrospect, we should have known what was going to happen as soon as he said, "don't worry too much about what you're doing, just don't let me by you to get the shot."

A few seconds and two passes later...

"No, that was exactly the right play*," he said, while we were picking ourselves back up off the ice, "but, uh, we should probably switch to a safer drill now."

If there had been a thought bubble over my head, it would have read something like, "MY SPACE, and who the *#5#$@5& are you?!?" Which seems to translate in action to SKATE INTO HIM, NOW NOW NOW.

He didn't get the shot.

It makes perfect sense now that I think about it, but pads are a lot bouncier than I expected them to be - they remind me of the way a ladybug's wing casing looks, so I've always half imagined that they feel just as chitinous and unyielding. I'm told there are harder kinds, but he has the foam sort, which my hoodie and I appreciated very much while we were ricocheting off of them. No bruises bad enough to keep me awake!

And he didn't get the shot. Partly because he didn't barrel through me when he could have, because he's a nice guy, but whatever:

He didn't get the shot.

---

* spoken like a man in a checking league

And when I said all I wanted was Narnia AUs, it turns out that what I really meant was that I wanted Narnia itself.*

ETA: I blame Lev Grossman, and The Magicians/The Magician King for making me realize both that I *did* want a Narnia for adults, one that explored all the questions I knew were there just under the text, and also that his Narnia wasn't even close to being the one I was looking for.

It's an odd feeling, since I loved Narnia as a child - the Turkish delight (which I imagined was something like a candied lunch meat, a sort of magical honey ham), the treks through winter-turning-to-spring, the Maenads, madcap girls, horns and archery and magic and unicorns - and then I bounced so extremely hard off the books the last time I tried to reread them that I'm afraid to go back. There's the spotty world-building and all the practical questions I hadn't noticed as a child (in 100 years of winter, where did the food come from?), but mostly I can't unread the Lion. My thoughts on the subject of Aslan are essentially unprintable.

It's a wonder to me that any King or Queen, having grown to rule Narnia, returns to everyday England and ordinary childhood in any way whole. It doesn't take very much to convince me that the Pevensies, if they ever seemed to fit in again, were only pretending and marking the time.

This is probably where being able to read the books as parable of faith - to be more of a Lucy - would help a lot, but I don't identify with Lucy anymore. It would even reconcile me to Susan's disappearance, and let me make the argument that she's the most blessed: the one with enough faith to live Narnia-like in England, rather than clinging to the memory of another world. I can't read them that way, though; I'm not sure I want to.

But anyway, it will surprise absolutely no one who knows me that my viewpoint character is Edmund. Troubled, treasonous, ill-tempered Edmund, who's not growing up very well, but who becomes the Just anyway. I'll always love an administrator.

(Although truthfully I am probably Eustace, pre-dragon.)

It's funny - even typing this I keep having to stop while I try to make all of that childhood emotion find its way into sentences, but still leave room for my adult suspicion that Lewis was trying to write obliquely about injustices and cruelties - and nobility - he couldn't quite find the words in himself to describe.

If you say "Narnia" to me, what I imagine very first of all is still that first glimpse of Tumnus in the light from the lamp-post, with his tail looped tidily over his arm.

Find me the right wardrobe; I'm tired of Spare Oom.

* I do still want all the Narnia AUs (and not-AUs), especially if they're Golden Age and full of Edmund and Susan, so rec 'em if you've got 'em.

(Short Ride in a Fast Machine - I recommend not watching the animation - and John Adams on Short Ride in a Fast Machine: "He asked if I wanted to take a ride in his Lamborghini, and I did, and I wished I hadn't")

So the thing about the end-of-semester chamber music concerts is that they are long. I can understand why: groups work all semester on their pieces, and yes, somebody's going to want to play Trout, but in ordinary programming that would be half a recital all by itself. A few years ago I overheard a student's heartfelt bitching when a group had selected the Schubert String Quintet: "Sure, it's great, but that thing is FIFTY-FIVE FUCKING MINUTES LONG". The professor was a few rows behind me, muttering that they had to start making people pick shorter pieces.

They arrange the programs in order of ability, though, as a mercy to both players and audience, so if you can make it through the first half (that is, approximately an hour to an hour twenty of sometimes shaky intonation) you're usually rewarded by a quite competent 40 minutes and then a show-shopper of a closing piece. "Yes. Good," the professor said, in that flatly-delivered way people have when they really mean it. It's fun being at concerts where the music ends and the audience is so caught up that they respond by yelling. I nearly yelled, myself, and I never yell.

In skating news, I still am the (almost) flailiest in class - maybe even the flailiest, because I'm willing to fall over and she's not - but every so often I randomly startle myself by doing something without thinking about it. Of course, the immediate aftermath is that my brain checks in a few seconds later and freaks out: "Hey, did you happen to notice when we decided to start skating backwards, because I have to confess I missed it, what are you doing, feet???"

I also got this handy tip from one of the more experienced skaters: "Now try passing to me like there isn't an invisible wall between us that the puck needs to break through," he didn't actually say, but it's more-or-less what he meant.

Also, based on watching her a week or two ago while the Russian national team was on their exhibition swing through town, Anna Prugova plays almost exactly like Bobrovsky: she goes down so early and then stays so small. If one could say patronizing things to Olympic-caliber goalies without sounding like a complete ass, I would say this: "Honey, I don't know if you've noticed, but that net is four feet high."

And in conclusion, books, leaving out a few I didn't like very much, and a lot more that I don't have much to say about: an entire run of Ellis Peters' mid-century mysteries, the sort that, like Mary Stewart's thrillers of the same vintage, are not really that mysterious; a reread of The Amber Spyglass, which, sorry Milton, I still hate; a bunch of Kate Elliott doorstoppers; Three Men on the Bummel, entertaining chiefly for its descriptions of bicycle maintenance; Rivers of London - interesting urban fantasy, shaky on the dismount; The Privilege of the Sword - still like it, and Katherine is wonderful; Wildwood - Decemberists for the under-twelves, as expected, and cute, but I'm too old for it).

( The Ringed Castle; Checkmate / Dorothy Dunnett )

( Divas in the Convent / Craig Monson )

( Keeping the Castle / Patrice Kindl )

( Bitterblue / Kristin Cashore )

( Grave Mercy / Robin LaFevers )

( The Black Opera / Mary Gentle )

Anyway, something dawned on me the other day: I feel like me again, for the first time in...six months? seven?

However long it's been, this is kind of wonderful now. Hey, you. Long time no see; maybe try sticking around for a while.

Because I am bored yet can't slow my brain down, I'm looking through things I wrote and never posted. Discoveries include:

1. i have feelings about chris pronger okay.doc

I can only imagine that at this point the Internet responds, "We know, sweetheart, we know."

*

2. "It wasn't that the dog would ruin everything, necessarily; compared to a private museum's roaming Rottweiler, Satchmo was nothing, Satchmo was no problem. What Satchmo was, though, was enthusiastic."

So apparently I was starting an early-canon White Collar caper story. I wonder what would have happened in the rest of it?

*

3. (Is this because of the ships in Book IX? When you think about it, ships in epics get such raw deals: I'm glad that there are a few who escape.)

Those ships always get to me, okay?

Et sua quaeque
continuo puppes abrumpunt vincula ripis
delphinumque modo demersis aequora rostris
ima petunt. Hinc virgineae (mirabile monstrum)
quot prius aeratae steterant ad litora prorae
reddunt se totidem facies pontoque feruntur.
-Verg. A. 9.117-122

And let's not even talk about poor Argo.

*

4. "If he's being honest, Mike didn't mean to start something.

If he's being honest, he usually doesn't, mostly."

Aw, look, passive-aggressive people who aren't very good at communicating.

*

5. "Do you think we could have that tall gentleman come talk to our church group?"

I don't have the first clue what this is referring to. Folks sure do say some funny things, I guess.

*

6. "The next time you come to Montreal, you have to teach me how to be imperturbable. Geoffrey's perfecting a really quite disturbing froth around the incisors, which he trots out whenever our potential donors want to gossip about New Burbage; he says the secret's Alka-Selzer and impeccable timing (he'd tell you that he prefers to be the power behind the curtain, but you know how much he loves an audience).

The stage has not fallen in - thank you for the advice about cross-bracing the saggy bits."

And sometimes Anna writes to Nahum.

A superseded draft of a C6DVD card - at least, I think it was superseded? Maybe this made a final draft somewhere, but in my opinion, it's wavering in and out of Anna's voice. This file is a particularly confusing mess of notes and things I know made the final cut, and things that clearly didn't and shouldn't have, and even - o! horrible practice, do you students avoid it, or at least footnote extensively! - an entire copy-pasted section of somebody else's OP who someone had requested and I was trying to write (with permission). Uh. I really hope I wrote this. I'm 99% sure it's mine, and if it's not...oh heavens, tell me.

*

7. Holy crap, there's several hundred words of late-90s Pronger/Daigle hanging around in this folder.

See list item #1.

*

ETA: 8. Woah! Nearly six pages of White Collar OT3 seduction via refrigerator poetry. I remember talking about this; did I ever post any of it anywhere? (No, of course I didn't.)