Weekend Jauntings
Jan. 27th, 2003 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanSlew laundry and dishes on Saturday. Eric arrived around six, looking very brisk after having taken the bus rather than bicycling as is his custom of an afternoon, and asked me if I would prefer him to shovel the front walk -- the amount of snow was measly and mingy but still annoying to pedestrians, and there was certainly enough of it to squeak underfoot -- or help cook. With comparatively little dithering I chose the shovelling.
He did the front walk and porch, including the little walk from public sidewalk to street, which I always want to skimp on. Then he cut up the carrots and onions and washed and cut up the peapods. We had a version of Indonesian-Style Rice Noodles in Cocoanut Sauce. Mostly different vegetables from those called for in the actual recipe, and I had to use lemon-balm tea because of a lack of lemon grass. It was fairly soothing and tasty, however. Eric and I ended up eating all the leftovers we had brought back to his place before we even went to bed.
The semester has started, and Eric had a pile of journal papers to read for his historiography seminar. He always reads me the good bits of whatever he's engaged in, but I'd forgotten that the intellectual demands are greater when he's actually in school, as a rule anyway. It wasn't any of the essays themselves that almost did me in, but an essay in one of his own books that his homework reminded him of. This essay dealt with the -- well, phooey, I've forgotten the adjective: surprising, unexpected, ineffable, miraculous -- effectiveness of mathematics in modelling physics. It's still seeping into my head, very slowly. I don't actually learn best from hearing material, but I seem to pick up enough of it to have a conversation. Eventually. It's the brick wall. I can see through it in time.
In between bouts of being educated rather above my grade level (this is not a complaint, it's one of the lovely things about hanging around with Eric), I read VAST, which I am finding far more engaging on a visceral level than Linda Nagata's other books. I admire her writing a lot, but it's not in my natural idiom; this is true of language, character, theme, everything. I don't know if VAST is different or if I'm just picking up enough of the local accent to go on with.
I didn't sleep very well, which at least meant that when Toliman chose to bite my knee, my elbow, and my shoulder as an indication either that he had put some paper in his water bowl or that he was hungry, I was already awake. I was still startled, though. Later on he put on his other persona and purred and snuggled and purred some more.
Eric made us some coffee, and then we went over to Acadia, toting our reading matter, and had more coffee and lunch. It was a very good day to be there -- cold but sunny. It's an odd space, with very high ceilings and walls made indiscriminately of brick and cement block, and the usual motley clutter of coffee-house furniture. I had a comfortable sofa-thingy to sit on, and kept looking up from my book to watch all the people drinking their coffee and writing and reading and flirting with the young woman behind the counter. Eric read to me from his essays, commenting both on their content and on one amazing passage dotted with repetitions of "it," where the antecedent turned out, grammatically, to be "The fact that." We discussed better ways to have written that. I was reluctant to go, but at four o'clock I packed up my book. We agreed that it was very pleasing that I liked hearing bits of his papers, and he said it was good not to have to explain things like racemic molecules to me. Ha. I always knew that sf fans made the best lovers, and now I are one.
I was sad going home, as almost always. David greeted me with the news that he was about to turn off part of the downstairs water so he could work on the drippy faucet in the bathroom. "Oh, well, then," I said, "I guess I can't possibly do any laundry or dishes right now." "Oh, well," he said, furrowing his brow exaggeratedly, "I don't think I'm turning off THAT water." This cheered me up. Raphael was not in evidence yet, but I gave Minou his morning medication rather late and said hello to Ari and Beryl and looked at my email. Elise and I tried to arrange to get together, but I had gotten home too late. We're going to try for a bit later this week. By the time Raphael appeared and gave me a lovely smile and an affectionate or sarcastic, I actually can't recall, remark, I felt back at home again.
T.S. Eliot had made a mysterious appearance in one of Eric's journal articles, in a way that appeared to imply that he had attended the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. I looked him up and discovered that, as I thought, he had done no such thing; when I called and told Eric he said he figured the schooling in common that the writer of the article was talking about probably was at the Sorbonne. I told him that the entry said that Eliot had "pursued a doctoral thesis" but not that he had gotten a degree. The thesis was on F.H. Bradley, whom I knew of as the brother of A.C. Bradley, the great if derided Shakespearean scholar. Eric had heard of F.H., and remembered his biases correctly. This collusion of our knowledge pleased us inordinately.
Raphael and I are now contemporary with "Buffy." I still think perhaps the people doing financial aid stuff at the U would benefit from changing jobs with the current writers, but I am less annoyed.
I did book-glaring but not writing. I read VAST. It's rather refreshing to really enjoy a book without thinking, "I wish I could do that!"
Pamela
He did the front walk and porch, including the little walk from public sidewalk to street, which I always want to skimp on. Then he cut up the carrots and onions and washed and cut up the peapods. We had a version of Indonesian-Style Rice Noodles in Cocoanut Sauce. Mostly different vegetables from those called for in the actual recipe, and I had to use lemon-balm tea because of a lack of lemon grass. It was fairly soothing and tasty, however. Eric and I ended up eating all the leftovers we had brought back to his place before we even went to bed.
The semester has started, and Eric had a pile of journal papers to read for his historiography seminar. He always reads me the good bits of whatever he's engaged in, but I'd forgotten that the intellectual demands are greater when he's actually in school, as a rule anyway. It wasn't any of the essays themselves that almost did me in, but an essay in one of his own books that his homework reminded him of. This essay dealt with the -- well, phooey, I've forgotten the adjective: surprising, unexpected, ineffable, miraculous -- effectiveness of mathematics in modelling physics. It's still seeping into my head, very slowly. I don't actually learn best from hearing material, but I seem to pick up enough of it to have a conversation. Eventually. It's the brick wall. I can see through it in time.
In between bouts of being educated rather above my grade level (this is not a complaint, it's one of the lovely things about hanging around with Eric), I read VAST, which I am finding far more engaging on a visceral level than Linda Nagata's other books. I admire her writing a lot, but it's not in my natural idiom; this is true of language, character, theme, everything. I don't know if VAST is different or if I'm just picking up enough of the local accent to go on with.
I didn't sleep very well, which at least meant that when Toliman chose to bite my knee, my elbow, and my shoulder as an indication either that he had put some paper in his water bowl or that he was hungry, I was already awake. I was still startled, though. Later on he put on his other persona and purred and snuggled and purred some more.
Eric made us some coffee, and then we went over to Acadia, toting our reading matter, and had more coffee and lunch. It was a very good day to be there -- cold but sunny. It's an odd space, with very high ceilings and walls made indiscriminately of brick and cement block, and the usual motley clutter of coffee-house furniture. I had a comfortable sofa-thingy to sit on, and kept looking up from my book to watch all the people drinking their coffee and writing and reading and flirting with the young woman behind the counter. Eric read to me from his essays, commenting both on their content and on one amazing passage dotted with repetitions of "it," where the antecedent turned out, grammatically, to be "The fact that." We discussed better ways to have written that. I was reluctant to go, but at four o'clock I packed up my book. We agreed that it was very pleasing that I liked hearing bits of his papers, and he said it was good not to have to explain things like racemic molecules to me. Ha. I always knew that sf fans made the best lovers, and now I are one.
I was sad going home, as almost always. David greeted me with the news that he was about to turn off part of the downstairs water so he could work on the drippy faucet in the bathroom. "Oh, well, then," I said, "I guess I can't possibly do any laundry or dishes right now." "Oh, well," he said, furrowing his brow exaggeratedly, "I don't think I'm turning off THAT water." This cheered me up. Raphael was not in evidence yet, but I gave Minou his morning medication rather late and said hello to Ari and Beryl and looked at my email. Elise and I tried to arrange to get together, but I had gotten home too late. We're going to try for a bit later this week. By the time Raphael appeared and gave me a lovely smile and an affectionate or sarcastic, I actually can't recall, remark, I felt back at home again.
T.S. Eliot had made a mysterious appearance in one of Eric's journal articles, in a way that appeared to imply that he had attended the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. I looked him up and discovered that, as I thought, he had done no such thing; when I called and told Eric he said he figured the schooling in common that the writer of the article was talking about probably was at the Sorbonne. I told him that the entry said that Eliot had "pursued a doctoral thesis" but not that he had gotten a degree. The thesis was on F.H. Bradley, whom I knew of as the brother of A.C. Bradley, the great if derided Shakespearean scholar. Eric had heard of F.H., and remembered his biases correctly. This collusion of our knowledge pleased us inordinately.
Raphael and I are now contemporary with "Buffy." I still think perhaps the people doing financial aid stuff at the U would benefit from changing jobs with the current writers, but I am less annoyed.
I did book-glaring but not writing. I read VAST. It's rather refreshing to really enjoy a book without thinking, "I wish I could do that!"
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-29 03:43 pm (UTC)B
no subject
Date: 2003-01-31 07:37 pm (UTC)(Sorry, eub! *waving* I am only an egg. I don't know what B's excuse is, but I'm sure it's ingenious.)
Pamela