Daily Blague

A quiet night for me. Kathleen is finishing up a big project and won't be home until very late. Then she'll fly to Washington first thing tomorrow, returning to New York for a meeting at four. Then more finishing up tomorrow night. And maybe Thursday night, too. Next week, after the matter is taken care of, I'm going to see that she gets plenty of rest. To the extent that I'm allowed to.

Don't miss the comment posted by my sister, Carol, this afternoon, to my note about March of the Penguins. She might as well be quoting my mother, who liked to accuse me to tearing the wings off of flies for fun. I prefer "analyze" to "dissect," but they both mean pretty much the same thing etymologically: "break down." As a rule, however, I don't analyze things that I don't like. (Except, occasionally these days, for the Bush Administration.) No sooner had I written to Carol to this effect than I chanced upon kottke.org and found a piece about the Chanel/Lagerfeld show at the Met. Jason Kottke wrote pretty much what I'd have written, if I'd thought that the show was worth writing about. The shopwindow presentation struck me as either cruel or misconceived; either way, viewers were forced to jockey for a close look in order to read the labels and know what they were looking at. And that's all I'm going to say, because I don't want to appear to be having my cake and eating it, too.

Another nice lady wrote to me privately yesterday to complain about the Penguins piece. A flurry of email ensued and we were soon laughing; plus, I got to see a picture of a truly beautiful white Norwegian Forest cat. If you disagree with me, please say so. And if you want to write to me privately, that's fine, too, although I'll invariably suggest that you post your letter as a comment.

Team Vacation follow up: I thought that I had found a place for all forty of the reserved small document boxes in the hall closet. Good thing, because there was no room for more. Then I discovered that one of the two larger boxes that we'd held onto for moving china to the apartment was not empty. I was so tired when I made this discovery on Sunday that I felt as though someone had clubbed me with a baseball bat. For a few minutes, I simply could not go on. To make it worse, I blamed Kathleen for depositing the small boxes in the large one and thus taking them out of view, when in fact this was something that I had done. Kathleen's take on Team Vacation, by the way, is that it proves that we're really committed to each other. I agree, but I've been feeling too often lately that I ought to be committed.

In addition to my French lesson this afternoon, I went to have my teeth cleaned. They'd been giving me some mild discomfort, and this was disconcerting. My last appointment had been scheduled for some time very close to 9/11, and I forgot all about it, and just forgot about dentistry, too, until these waves of remote ache. I was in terror throughout the entire cleaning, wondering what gruesome announcements would follow. But the blow never came. I was told that the X-rays didn't show any problems, and that the pain that I'd felt was consistent with delayed cleaning. What a hypochondriac I am! Here I had dirty teeth, and I was afraid of root canal!