Bad karma

After a relentlessly awful week where I was always a step behind myself and working from early morning to late at night, I finally made it to the weekend. But it hasn't lived up to expectations so far.

I should admit first that I have a three day weekend - no classes on Friday - which makes me luckier than most people; except that in reality much of the weekend is filled with nagging anxiety about the things that need to be done before Monday, or with the doing of those things.

Yesterday, Friday, I cleaned all day. Last weekend I got back from a conference in Utah on Sunday evening and tipped the contents of my case over my bedroom floor, which was already in a state of advanced degradation after the previous week of teaching and writing. It got worse and worse as the week went on, so that by Thursday it felt as if I was walking over a particularly well-populated stretch of seabed, with miscellaneous seaweeds wrapping themselves around my ankles, carpet sharks nipping at my toes, and well-camouflaged but unfortunately fragile shellfish crunching underfoot. Something had to be done. I didn't expect it to take quite so many hours, though.

Today my alarm woke me at 7, and I had the by now familiar wave of anxiety followed by immense relief at the realisation that it was the weekend. The relief is shortlived at the moment, though, with so many things waiting to be done.

Still, I had some coffee and then went out for a run, and afterwards went to a pilates class - trying to make up for a week of physical inactivity in a day. Then I decided to go to the Mercury Cafe for brunch. I'd never been there, but I'd passed it on runs and have read about it on Happy Cow. I liked it - the interior makes the best of having no windows by having strings of little lights and interesting decor, and if like me you are sick to death of the monotonous sunny glare of Colorado it is nice to find yourself inside an enchanted cave.

The food was pretty good, I'd say. Only, I had huevos rancheros, the dish I can never resist on a menu in the way that my mother can never resist steak and kidney pie. She is almost always disappointed by it, as I am with my huevos. The problem for me is that I always want it to be what I had at the Stockyard Cafe in Bozeman, Montana before I had ever heard of huevos rancheros. It was called huevos gringos, and was (as far as I remember) black beans and eggs sandwiched between flour tortillas and covered in salsa and cheese. It was the first time that I could see a point to a cooked breakfast. It's the cold salsa that makes the difference. Every time my huevos rancheros arrives and is smothered in some kind of hot chile I realise it isn't what I was hoping for.

And there was (typically) far too much. I ate half of it, and then packed the other half into a little box to take home. I don't want to take my food home! I want to eat the whole thing and perhaps feel that I had just a little more than I needed. I don't want to eat more than I needed and then still have half a plate left. What to do? I can't bear the waste of leaving it and having it thrown out. But who wants to face breakfast again later in the day? I carried it dutifully around town, and then when I was almost home a couple of men asked me if I could help them out with something to eat, and I handed it over to them. Presumably they meant, can you give us some money? And maybe this is where my bad karma began today; but as I see it, if they really needed the food then they have something that was burdensome to me; and if they really meant, can you give us some money so that we can go across to one of those dodgy stores on Colfax and buy some cheap beer, then they can throw my breakfast away and we are none of us really any worse off than before.

But here is the real bad karma story:

I went out in the late afternoon and got my car, came back and picked up my mountains of dirty washing, and drove down to the coin laundry on 11th. It's opposite Wild Oats, so I can do my heavy shopping at the same time. Once it was all done and I was ready to go home, I tried to pull out of the rather cramped parking lot, and as I did so I heard a slight sound as I was swinging around the back bumper of the black car next to me. It was so slight, though, I didn't think much of it - either I'd driven over something scrunchy, or I'd just touched lightly on my neighbour's bumper. On the way home I wondered more and more about it, though, and once back I looked at my front bumper and found it scratched and with faint lines of black... so, being the infuriatingly (to me) morally upright and honest person my parents have saddled me with being, I got back in the car and drove back to the laundry to see if I could find the person and apologize and offer to pay for it. He'd gone, though. I hung around in front of the place grading papers for half an hour or so hoping he'd come back and free me from my evening's burden of guilt; but he never did. I had to ring Uncle Eric to get him to try to make me feel better about it.

Earlier in the day I had a text message from someone I haven't been in touch with for some time now. She said she hoped all was well, since she had had "the same dramatic dream" about me two nights in a row. I almost hesitated to get into my car earlier, but did it in part because I thought I would lose respect for myself if I let this kind of Ides of March nonsense influence my actions at all. Let it be noted now that even if I die tonight I would still call it coincidence; and that if something worse had happened earlier, then it would either have been coincidence or an accident brought on by jumpiness because of the message itself. Supposed prescience can cause all sorts of things it predicts, I think.

So, how can I so easily dismiss prescience, but not karma? For me karma isn't something supernatural - it is an entirely practical matter. If I left that parking lot, and the owner of the car came back a moment later and noticed that scratches had just appeared across his bumper and that the person who did it didn't bother to stop and apologize, then I think it would be reasonable for him to be angry about it, and I am responsible for causing just a little more anger to be released into the world. Like the old thing about a butterfly flapping its wings causing a storm thousands of miles away, it seems to me that just that small amount of anger could, in the end, contribute to wars or genocide...

OK, it probably won't. But I'm sorry, anonymous person in black car!

Making the weekend lived

I know I have no time to write this - 21:15 on a Sunday, an as yet unprepared lecture to give at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and a paper that had to be written a week and two days ago... but not to let the weekend go by as if never lived:

Yesterday I was on a bus with a woman who was talking to herself in sign language.

It reminded me of being on a ship in Japan in a big tatami room with a large number of people, among which was a group of deaf people with their hearing children. At night the children ran riot while their parents slept soundly, until someone else took the initiative and told them to be quiet. But I particularly remember a small girl falling over during the day and then making a completely silent crying face to her parents.

In the last three days I have done much essential shopping - alarm clocks, toilet brushes, shoes, that kind of thing. And I have ascertained finally that the blank stares I meet with any time I ask to be directed to the cotton wool is not because of my pronunciation, but because the term doesn't exist here. If you think about it, it must sound rather strange if you've never heard it before.

I also discovered the difficulty of asking to be directed to the other cheese counter in King Soopers. They have, for some reason, the bog-standard American cheese at one end of the supermarket, and the things you might consider eating at the other end. If you haven't thought it out in advance, then when the man asks you, "What kind of cheese are you looking for?" it is difficult to find a reply that people around won't find offensive: "Something edible." "Something that doesn't taste like plastic and glow bright orange." Cheddar, Muenster, Swiss, Provolone... perhaps someone American can tell me the difference, since to me the only discernible one is the colour. Oh, and then there is "American" which in my thankfully limited experience is reminiscent of the semi-digested milk someone's baby once threw up on me, only orange again.

When you think about it, it's amazing that I should have reached this age and only been thrown up on by a baby once.

I also found acceptable tissues at last. As recommended, the source is Target. They have those small almost cubic boxes in single plain colours: burgundy, navy, and Regency green (my term - I have no idea what that shade is really called). Now I am prepared to catch horrible colds in winter and not be made to feel worse by the sight of nasty floral tissue boxes.

Antiseptic Blue

So this is what happens when you finally find a tissue box that is just marginally acceptable. The tissues inside turn out to be a blue colour which is reminiscent of hospital walls. Well, I have been led to understand that there are more attractive options at Target, and I am off now to investigate.

Defamiliarization

Earlier on, I was in a coffee shop (having got my moving expenses today, and such a thing being once more possible) reading the beginning of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (Benjamin Sher's translation, from Dalkey Archive Press). Talking of "automatization," the process by which things become so familiar as to be unconscious (defamiliarization, or "enstrangement" as the translator would have it, thus being the way in which art brings the object back to conscious experience), he quotes Tolstoy's diary:

"As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been."

Presumably the experience is familiar to everyone. As well as the things I forget immediately, there are whole days which sink into oblivion. Don't we write blogs, diaries, letters, or tell our days to someone else in order to make time "lived"? These last few days might as well never have been for me - I've had nothing to say.

I then read on to Shklovsky's comment following the quotation, as follows:

"And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of wax."

I like the suggestion of automatization as an infestation of destructive moths here, but I was particularly drawn to the last item. "Our fear of wax" was so unexpected, and yet in the instant of reading made so much sense. I could see at once the chilling verisimilitude of waxworks, and the waxen appearance of the dead.

Then I looked back at the passage and found that I had transposed an 'x' from a word in the following line, and that it really said "our fear of war."

Shklovsky had just been talking of fragmentary hearings, misunderstandings, and slips of the tongue, too. Misreadings, I'd say, can have an unintentional defamiliarizing effect all of their own, and the possibilities add cathedrals of space to what we read.

Packaging

I have just succeeded in buying a box of tissues. This may seem a trivial achievement to the rest of you, but it often takes me weeks. I go into store after store and am so put off by the floral patterns and nasty shades of pastel that I leave empty-handed.

Why is tissue packaging so uniformly bad? A box of tissues has to become part of my furnishings for several weeks. Shouldn't I be able to get one in a colour that I like? If I was in Japan and said this, someone would rush to buy or make me a tissue box cover. It would almost certainly come with frills and lace, however, and would lose the one advantage that the bare box has - that I can throw it away guilt-free once it is empty.

I would like solid blocks of primary colours, I think, or boxes pretending to be other things: swiss cheese, an apartment building, a green felt hill with fuzzy sheep you could move around.