Duck Tales

Apparently my life is for the birds right now, as that seems to be all I'm writing about (besides Jason). Today I was escorted down my street by an eider duck.

It is more or less pouring this morning. I had just set out for work when I noticed something with what appeared to be considerably more heft than a leaf, flapping about in the puddles in the street. As I approached, I could tell by its silhouette that it was a duck. There are mallards that sometimes live across the street from me; they moved out this summer when their pseudo-pond dried up, but it's probably back now, so maybe they are, too, though I though mallards flew south? Anyway, I assumed this guy was one of them as he spread his wings.

He seemed to be having a little trouble achieving lift-off, and also seemed to have an aversion to the side of the road, and so instead he flapped along, very close to the ground, right in front of my car, as if daring me to exceed the speed limit. As if I would ever exceed . . . oh never mind.

He landed a couple hundred yards down the street, and there the lighting was better and I could see that he was, in fact, an eider duck. I'm not sure I've seen one of those in the wild before. I was afraid, though, that he wasn't going to move and I was going to end up either thwarted in my commute, or seeing a dead eider duck in the wild. Or on the road, to be more precise.

He took off again and led me down the street a little further, and then finally flew a little higher and disappeared over a house. When I got to work, Office-Assistant-MaryAnn said, "Another day of duck-weather!" She had no idea . . .

Scary, Isn't It?

My friend the Item said that this might be the blogpost to get people commenting on my blog (actually on my blog and not on facebook) again. And he only heard the first part of it.

For the last five to seven years, my recurring dreams (when not about math or Starbucks) have involved one or some combination of the following themes:

1. being back in London or India (although the dream versions are usually fairly unrecognizable)
2. riding public transportation somewhere and missing the connexion and either having to get on another conveyance than the intended one, being stuck where I didn't want to be, or having to walk
3. hanging out with a big group of people, only one of whom I ever actually know (and that only in the dream, usually), at some sort of potentially sketchy meeting or event, and wanting desperately to leave early.

I suppose it wouldn't take a moderately creative person very long to come up with some hypotheses as to what my subconscious is saying through these themes. Besides that, I can usually figure out pretty readily where certain specific elements in my dreams (even the non-recurring ones) have come from in my day to day existence. But about two or three weeks ago, I had a dream which combined all three of the above themes and yet I'm still clueless as to where it came from.

This, roughly, is what happened in it:

I was back in London, with a friend of mine, and we were going to go out with a big group of other people for some other friend's birthday. I didn't know the Other Friend very well, but this Friend of Mine said I was more than welcome to come along, and it would be fun . . . and I'm pretty sure she was wanting to try to set me up with somebody. (I don't think I ever found out who, though.)

So we got on the Tube and went to this bar where everyone was meeting first to have a drink. And then we were apparently going to get on the Tube again to go to some other restaurant in a completely different part of the city for dinner, but we missed the train. Turns out, in this particular dream, there were these independent train drivers who could somehow just drive trains whenever and wherever, kind of like taxis, so we found this guy and paid him and got on his train. Just as we were approaching our destination, I happened to notice a severed human head--maybe two--on the railroad tracks. I kind of thought I must have imagined it, or maybe it was some kind of really realistic and creepy Hallowe'en decoration . . . so I didn't say anything.

We went to the restaurant and then got back on the train and started heading back. But as we were going, I began seeing more and more severed heads. It was frightening--even moreso when somehow one of us divined that it was our train driver who had severed them, and he was waiting to cut off our heads, too. In fact, there he was--coming at us with an enormous hatchet. (Can hatchets be enormous? Are they by definition small? I don't know. Hatchet sounds better to me right now.)

Somehow we managed to get off the train and get to the rest of the birthday party which had now converged on someone's house, but those of us who had been on that particular train knew according to the unspoken rules of the dream that our demon train-driver was going to hunt us down for our heads, so we spent the rest of the evening . . . and the dream . . . looking for weapons with which to pummel him to death. Someone told me to go find a baseball bat, and someone else would lure him and lull him into a false sense of security at which point it would be my job to bludgeon him. "I don't know," I said. "I don't think I can bludgeon anybody. Can I lull him instead?" At that point, or some other point shortly thereafter, I woke up. You can imagine both my amusement and consternation at having discovered such disturbing contents of my subconscious.

This week, I had a frightening dream of a totally different kind, although I have very little idea what it was about. I was driving home from work (that really should be all I need to say, but I'll keep going) and I was really really sleepy. I really didn't want to pull over, and the roads were busy so I wasn't really sure where I could have pulled over, and so I just concentrated on keeping my eyelids open and persevered. (Don't yell at me.) I was almost home, and suddenly I said to Oscar, "Well, I'm glad I ended up with the doggie."

At that moment, I mentally snapped to attention. I had had my eyes open the whole time. I had been very aware that I was driving and should not allow myself to drift off. It wasn't one of those scenarios where you drive the whole commute without really paying attention to it and you wonder how you got from point A to point B, really. I was very aware of where I was the entire time. However, some part of my brain had evidently sneaked off to have a dream anyway, and there was some sort of bargain at the end, during which I ended up with "the doggie."

So I'm asking you. Which of those two dreams was more scary? Hmmmm?

What's in a Name?

I should be researching for a term paper. Or if I'm not researching, I should be sleeping. But I haven't blogged much, and I haven't read anyone's blog lately, either, and . . . this is clearly important. Watch.

There's a house around the corner on my way to work where they sell vegetables and rabbits all summer. Yesterday, while driving by, the rabbit hutches caught my eye and I thought, "I wonder if I should get a rabbit and housetrain it sometime." Dear Friend Paulina has a rabbit named Tivoli. I have not met her (the rabbit), but she sounds adorable.

When I got to work there was an email from Miss Annie, asking if anyone wanted an abandoned domesticated rabbit which had been found in the woods and is evidently litter trained. Weird.

I didn't answer the email, because hopefully someone else will. I'm not sure how Oscar would deal with a rival animal that wasn't a dog, and besides, on the rare occasion I can't take him with me somewhere, it's sometimes tough to find dogsitters. How would I find a dog-and-rabbit sitter? Besides, when I actually can take Oscar with me, what would I do? Bring the rabbit along, too? I don't think they make car harnesses for rabbits. (It would be kind of fun to say I'm taking my dog and bunny show on the road, though.)

Anyway, this morning I was thinking about this and about my looming term paper while I was drying my hair, and I decided that if I were to lose my senses completely and get a rabbit, and I was still taking grad classes, I would have to name the rabbit Turabian. Then I started thinking of all the other names I would like to give to animals for fun.

Like, I have this penchant for ancient Assyrian names. I think they mostly sound like cats. Tiglath-Pileser, for example. Also, last week I went and heard They Might Be Giants on Earth Day and they sang, "The Mesopotamians," and for almost a week now, the soundtrack in my head has been singing, "We're the Mesopotameeeans--Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashubanipal and Gilgamehhhsh . . . " I think you could name cats those names, too. If I ever got a hamster (which I don't think I ever would), I might like to name him Sennacherib, for a joke. 'Cause it kind of sounds like you're talking about snacks--and hamsters are snack-size.

Did I mention I should be in bed right now?

Decide

I live about 12 miles away from where I work, which isn't all that far, I guess, really, but because of everything that is between Home and Church, it is very rare for me to get to work in less than half an hour. And then there's this five-minute block of time when, if I hit it just wrong, I end up behind all the school buses and all the other commuters such that if I would have left six minutes later, I probably would've gotten to work sooner.

Can you tell that happened to me today? Fortunately, I wasn't in a tearing hurry or anything. As I was not hurrying, and at the first intersection which is where all the cars get in front of me in the first place, this car . . . got in front of me. On the license plate was one word: Decide.

First I did that thing you do, you know, when you're an evangelical, and tried to figure out if there was some major life decision I was supposed to be making right then, and this was God's way of speaking to me through somebody's vanity plate.

I guess there are some things I could be deciding right now, but I honestly don't think the timing's right, and if I had taken that license plate too seriously, I would be making snap decisions which would probably have deleterious effects in the future. (Ooh--cool. I spelled deleterious right! I'm pretty sure I've never used it in a written sentence. And maybe not in a spoken one, either.)

So after convincing myself that it wasn't a personal message to me, I started wondering what it meant. Why would someone put the word Decide on their license plate? What are they trying to achieve? What kind of person puts a word like that on the back of their car with no explanation?

I actually have a whole bunch of ideas about this, and am now planning on putting some such person in a novel (if I ever get another idea for a novel besides the one I'm trying to get an agent for, which I think might be a lost cause). Look, I called it, okay?

All the same, it would be kind of fun to make a game out of it, too, and you could tell me what kind of character does this. I know, it's pure speculation, and I don't know anything really about the actual person who did this, but . . . that just means we aren't really talking about them. It's not character defamation because we're just imagining. And besides, I think if I were the type of person to put the word Decide on my license plate, I would also be the type of person who, if I somehow managed to stumble across this blog, would be pretty amused to see what kind of person people thought I might be. But you know . . . maybe I'm just making that up.

(You can post comments directly on this blog, and not, if you are a Facebook follower, on my Facebook wall. Please and thank you?)

Bits and Bobs

Okay, so maybe there's something in my head. Lots of little bits of things floating around that haven't got much of a category, so here, let me splat them out like confetti in this blog. (Except that one rarely looks at individual pieces of confetti, does one? Well, you're looking now! Party on.)

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"Pantry" is a cute word. It sounds little and prim and, I don't know--Beatrix Potter or something. I was wondering how it derived and was thinking of things like pots and pans, but it turns out (says Online Etymology Dictionary) that it's got to do with "pan," the Latin for bread. I should've known that.

The thing I can't figure out is what the "t" is doing in there. I would have thought it would have been "pannery" or something.

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Have I mentioned before how I hate when people say "orientate" instead of "orient"? Yes. Of course I have, because I really, really hate it. So I was reading The Alchemyst by Michael Scott (not that great, in my opinion, if you were wondering, which you might have been since you're reading this, but entertaining enough for me to have finished it) and at least three times in the book, he uses the word "disorientate" or "disorientated" . . . and gets away with it. But not with me! Oh no.

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My mom has loaned me (for a long time!) a set of work-out videos, and it makes me chuckle and roll my eyes pretty much every time when in one of them, the instructor, who has been taking her victims through a brief cardio segment, says, "We're almost near the end!"

Did she mean to do that? Was she being ironic? "I know you're getting tired and you wish we were close to being done, but we're not--we're almost close! Bwahahahaha!" Somehow I kind of doubt it, but it would be pretty awesome if that's what she meant.

Then again, today I got a letter from my new literary agent (yep--that's what I said! More on that . . . sometime) in which she said the rating my manuscript had gotten from the critique editor was very good and "almost rare." I'm familiar with "most rare," though it's a kind of archaic way of expressing oneself. But I don't think I even know what "almost rare" even means. It's okay, though. I liked everything her letter said, and if she's going to help me sell another book, I'll start figuring out ways to use the phrase "almost rare" every day if I have to!

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This is not a linguistic observation, but it is an observation: you can tell times are tough when people start putting signs in their front yards advertising the sale of two side-by-side graveyard plots. Someone on my commute to work has the bottom half of a screen door (the non-screen part) leaning up against their mailbox advertising this sale item.

I'm trying to figure out what they're planning to do about dying. Just not do it? Or maybe they're hoping Jesus will come back first but in the meantime they'd like to make a little money off someone who doesn't believe He's going to? Or maybe they've decided on cremation and floating off in the breeze somewhere.

I'm just not sure how to feel about this.

The Edge of a Precipice

You would think I would be all "Ireland this," and "Ireland that," and I dare say I'll get to that point . . . sometime back on the other side of the Atlantic. But for now, we're going to talk about other stuff.

Someday, when I'm ancient and long-ago menopaused, so that no one about whom I could possibly be alluding even remembers me, let alone thinks I'm talking about him, I'm going to write a book about the role of sexuality in evangelism. Of course, it might not make much of a book. I can tell you the conclusion right here: it doesn't help anything. At least until recently, any overt or covert heterosexual attraction between me and any guy I've ever tried to talk to about Jesus has not led either to dating or to conversion. I do wonder sometimes, though, if God allows that dynamic so that people who might never get prayed for otherwise, get someone praying for them for a while. (When I'm feeling less positive about this, I think cynically that God's purpose for my life is "bait.") At the very least, it paves the way for unexpected conversations.

Like, one time I was returning to London after a visit to the States, and there was this striking man on my flight. We caught each other's eye, and then, during a stop in Frankfurt (yes . . . I had to fly through Frankfurt to get to London), ended up conversing a little bit. He was Turkish, and a doctor. (Well, he might not have been a doctor, I suppose, but he said he was.) My relationship with Jesus is usually the first thing I tell attractive men about me. In this case, I think that information might have come right after telling him I had learnt to make kisir and borek a few weeks before. Turkish Doctor, trying to be tolerant, no doubt, did not try to argue with me about my Jesus-fanaticism, but he did hint something along the lines of people being like trees--how they grow and change and don't look the same when they're finished as they did when they've started.

I had just recently gone through the tolerance-challenging, grace-building upheaval of my life, and so I could agree with this, except that I would have said that that had only drawn me closer to Jesus instead of making me branch out farther. And after Turkish Doctor and I had got on our respective and divergent planes, it occurred to me that what I really could have said was that he was right about the tree, except that the thing is, it's still always a tree.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago on a walk when I passed this tree. I pass it every time I walk in that direction, but I had never looked up at it before. This time I did, and it struck me just how astounding it was. It's enormous and beautiful and serene. I thought about how a tree's root system is supposed to be as extensive underground as its branch system is above-ground. I know something about this tree's root system already (see fifth photo down in this link). It has kind of "eaten" the rocks in the stone wall above which it grows, and I could imagine the rest of its roots extending back into the yard behind it. It is kind of awe-inspiring. Who knows what it's gripping, under the grass, under the rocks, under the road. It would need that, because like I said, it's a massive tree, and it's growing right on the edge of a mini-precipice. I don't know how big or how old it was when they dug out the land to make the road this tree is on, but it's still growing straight and strong and rooted.

I couldn't help wondering, though, what would happen if there were a really big storm. I suspect it has already weathered really big storms, and like the house on the rock, this tree is rooted in the rock and it's still standing. But the last few weeks I feel like I've been standing on the brink of a precipice, too. Maybe a bigger one than the one than the hop between yard and street. I feel like, thanks to God, I'm pretty well-rooted. But it's still scary on the edge like this. I have to trust in the Rock to hold me and not let the big winds blow me over.

For Future Use

If I ever decide to write a novel about the city in which I work, I would like to incorporate the following sentence:

It was spring, and the tax-help businesses in Webster Square were proliferating again, like mushrooms after several days of rain.

I'm not sure exactly in what context I would use this, but it just sort of came to me this evening as I was driving home from work . . .

Odds and Ends

Ex-Roommate-Sarah and her fiance Stephen are getting married this weekend. Congratulations to them!

I used to have this really cool ring made out of silver and mother-of-pearl, and shaped like a flower. It is now missing. I try not to become distraught over things, but I really did like this ring. Anyone seen it?

Today as I was driving home, I saw an SUV with a decal saying "Family" in very fancy lettering on the back window. Apart from the fact that an SUV would say "Family," and in a rather bling-ish style font at that, is funny--I almost couldn't read the first letter, and thought it said, "scamily." Then I thought that "scammily" might be a good new adjective. Then I thought that you could create some really great doggerel (if that's not an oxymoron, which of course it is) by rhyming "family" and "scammily." But I couldn't. If you're up to the challenge, go for it. Just make sure you post it in the comments here.

Oh. And. I find it bizarre that I live in the northeastern part of the United States and it's been 90 degrees all week, even though September is almost over. That, I think, is a very odd end, indeed.

(Sorry. I know. It wasn't funny. You didn't even know it was supposed to be funny until I started apologising. But look--I'm done now, see?)

What IS This World Coming To?

And all that.

Could somebody please tell me--is there such a place as "Cheaspeake"? No. I did not say "Chesapeake."
Today, as you can see above, I received a piece of mail from a company in Nebraska, which naturally sends its mail from Virginia. It would appear, however, that the postal service in Virginia needs a spell-check. How is it that the United States Postal Service can't even spell its place-names correctly for a metered stamp?

Unless, of course, "Cheaspeake" is an acceptable alternate spelling? 'Cause I googled it just in case, and I actually came up with some stuff. Can anyone elucidate?

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

I don't know that there are any Mulberry Streets between here and my place of employment. But I keep seeing things that strike me as odd or funny in transit these days, and the name seems to be a good one for the Tales of the Daily Commute matrix.

Today, on said commute, I ended up spending part of it behind a Carvel ice cream truck. (Not the kind from which a vendor sells ice cream cones, but one which presumably transports their ice cream and ice cream cakes.) It was an appropriately cheery-looking truck, entirely plastered over with photos of ice cream cakes, decorated with various congratulatory sayings.

The most eye-catching one from my vantage point said, "Happy 1st Lost Tooth!"

I was first struck by the originality of this. If you can convince someone to buy a whole cake instead of putting a quarter under their kid's pillow, you're golden. But so might the teeth be after a while. I couldn't help but find something ironically sinister about the whole enterprise. This greeting was being displayed on an ice cream cake. Ice cream. Cake. It felt like the subtext should be, "You might as well celebrate now, because you'll be losing a lot more teeth if you keep eating cakes like this one!"

Just as long as no one tries to put the cake under a pillow . . .