i don't yet hate my neck

Beautiful women of a certain age run the risk of being called "well-preserved."  Well-preserved!  Can you think of a more atrocious form of praise?  Like any woman whose wrinkles have formed in all the right places, or whose face has been chemically smoothed and surgically ironed straight, is some sort of Damien Hirst installation, soaked in formaldehyde.  An aging document that has been carefully stored in a climate-controlled, low-humidity, museum-quality environment, protected from the elements and all the dangers of living.  A precious object that has somehow survived the centuries without entirely falling apart.

When I'm pushing sixty, seventy - heck, eighty - I don't want anybody looking at me with the clinical eyes of a taxidermist, checking to see if all the seams line up and the cracks aren't showing too clearly.  I don't want them to dare think the words "well-preserved." No, I want them to admire the sharp wit hiding in the creases of my eyelids and think to themselves that all the doe-eyed ingenues of the world couldn't compete.  I want young men to tuck their attraction to me away where they keep all their dark secrets; I want them not to understand it.  I don't want anybody to whisper that I'm "remarkably..." anything "for my age."  I want them to think it to themselves in astonishment, ashamed at their surprise, silent in their admiration.  I want to be all glory, nothing faded about it.  I want to make people doubt whether they are in the prime of their years after all.  I want to have nothing whatsoever in common with an old jar of jam or a salted piece of meat.

I was trying to read the NYT's review of Mary Gordon's new novel and couldn't make it past the second paragraph.  Words, man.  Sometimes they're like landmines that blow up in my face and throw me terribly off track.  A handful of letters and a hyphen and boom...

the fog

"Look at the fog."

"I'm looking."  The fog was not yellow, but a flat, opaque gray that looked more dry than wet.  It crept slowly along the wall, teasing around a corner, never rising above their knees.

"Does it look like a cat to you?"

He paused.  "Yeah.  Yeah, I guess it kind of does."

"Isn't it weird to think that T.S. Eliot did that to us? Even now?"

"What?"

"T.S. Eliot.  The reason the fog looks like a cat."

"Baby, I'm not even sure who T.S. Eliot is.  I'm pretty sure it's not his fault the fog looks like a cat."

She stared at the fog, sinuous, serpentine, not feline in the slightest.  "I don't know," she said.  "I think we don't get to pick what we see when we look at things.  I think everything that came before means we -"

"It probably looks like an otter, too.  And a puppy.  Come on, it's cold."

"And when I look at you -"

He turned to leave, and the fog wrapped itself around his ankles, and her mind made a sudden leap.

developing other interests

The article: about John McEnroe's new tennis academy

The quote:  "He said that they play too much tennis when they would be better off working harder in shorter periods of time and developing other interests, including different sports."

Love it.  Tennis students playing too much tennis.  Cut back and get good at other things as well.  Is the notorious Chinese gymnast-coaching strategy a counterargument?  

life, photoshopped

i want to live in a soft-focus world, all sepia-colored, blurred in all the right places, the sun perpetually glowing somewhere out of sight.  i want the kind of face with the eyes glowing bright, color shining like joy defined to CMYK values, hue and saturation amped so my pale skin recedes and my eyes catch everybody else's.  i want perfect skin in quirky-cropped portraits.  but i want it to seem so real, authentic, natural, images that make your belly clinch with wistfulness.  i want polaroids, off-center, with the taste of authenticity woven in with the chemicals and the paper.

Shake, shake.

desaturated shots of me laughing with a background of a place you've never been, vague enough to make you long to go.  hair blowing in a breeze.  eyes knowing over the edge of a coffee cup, my body bending as I lean into the frame from a world outside - a rich and beautiful, soft-focus, hazy-edge, perpetually young world where it's clear I live, yes, all the time, only occasionally stepping into this neat rectangle so you can glimpse my life in its hazy, carefully-carelessly-composed and lightly edited glory.

click, click.

animal encounters

Last night jenny and I were driving through the darkness and we glimpsed a tail - an enormous tail, bushy as a squirrel's, far bigger than a beaver's.  It looked like a brown skunk tail, if skunks came that big, and in brown, but I've never seen a skunk that moved that fast.  I'm not used to my neighborhood containing mysteries that scuttle away like that.

Today as I was biking home a vulture descended from the sky right before me, black wings filling my vision and startling me nearly off my bike.  I think its wingspan was as wide as I am tall.  I was never good at the bird IDs, but it wasn't a turkey vulture - the head was an unsettling white (cf: Moby Dick, chapter 42) instead of red.  It watched me as I rode past, like an omen centuries out of place.

The other week I asked William: Are we primates?  A silly thing to forget, I know.  Yes, he said, not laughing at me.  Definitely primates.  I touched my fingers to my thumb and listened to him talk.

what gender do your ads think you are?

I 100% ought to be asleep right now, but THIS IS INTERESTING!

Click here: www.google.com/ads/preferences/view (via Ta-Nehisi Coates - the follow-up to his nail-on-the-head commentary on Condaleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and babies)

If your cookies are on, at that handy link you will find the general categories of sites that Google has been creepily watching you visit.

That's mostly pretty boring, because you presumably knew this already - if you are shocked to find what sort of things you do on the internet, that's your own problem - but look a little lower!  Check out that bottom item and its explanation -

"Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men."

What is it, do you think?  The coupons?  The humanities reference sites?  The wildlife?  (That's adorable baby videos, by the way).  The Business and Industrial - Chemicals might be throwing them off (I think that came from a digression after searching for "melamine") but then I've also got cooking and bed and bath.... Really, I can only assume that my minor obsession with webcomics is marking me as masculine.

Is this an assumption - an obviously wrong assumption - based on data?  I should hope so, since they're Google... man, I'd love to see that data.  And I would really love to know just how many people they've got wrong.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

— The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837.