Hovering over the SEND key

How all occasions do inform against me, hollers Hamlet in agonizing indecision, but he was merely contemplating violent revenge over his father's murder. He never had to contend with a recalcitrant refrigerator. 

It's not even my refrigerator! It's the fridge in our Center for Teaching Excellence, and it's suddenly not cool. Granted, nowhere around here is cool today--we're immersed in the kind of humid heat wave that wraps us in thick damp layers of sticky insulation and then squeezes hard so that we can hardly breathe, but indoors, everything is cool. 

Except the fridge. It's downright warm inside, even though the lights are on and it's still humming like a functioning refrigerator. All the cakes in the freezer have thawed, and don't even get me started about why we constantly have five to seven sheet cakes in the freezer. Our work/study student has been busy this morning distributing the cakes to other campus departments before they start to rot (the cakes--not the departments), although those grocery-store cakes are pumped so full of preservatives that I doubt that they'll ever rot. This morning I threw away the remains of a cake that had been sitting out on the table for at least two weeks. Not a sign of rot anywhere.

So anyway: I arrived on campus this morning in despair over the state of my summer writing projects but determined to make measurable progress, only to be derailed by a fridge willing to hum but not cool. I have submitted a ticket to the appropriate department, which wonders whether we can make do with a mini-fridge. Given the number of food-related events we host in the Center, no. We need a fridge! But I need to write! And somebody locked the door to the Writing Wednesday classroom! And I don't have the key! And I'm fielding texts and emails related to the difficulty of replacing a 17-year-old fridge on short notice! And I'm not getting anything done!

Well, I'm getting a few things done--mostly the kinds of things that made Hamlet wonder What is a man / if his chief good and market of his time / be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!

I need to put profound insights into winged words and send them off to journals to enlighten curious minds, but instead I'm haggling over refrigerators. This essay in this to-do folder, the one I've been fiddling with for two or possibly three summers, I've trimmed it down to a reasonable length, tightened the prose, eliminated excessive quotations, researched a journal that might be a good fit, written a cover letter, and attached the file to the email--why can't I go ahead and hit SEND and be done with it? I do not know / why I yet live to say 'This thing's to do', and yet my finger hovers over the mouse, unwilling to take the final step.

If Hamlet can work himself up into a froth of anger that leads to action, then maybe I can too. O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth, hollers Hamlet, but he says this in Act 4 of a five-act play, so he still has to wade through some stuff. 

I'll fetch the key. I'll deal with the fridge. I'll wrestle with a laptop that was allegedly fixed last week, although the fix required deleting all my browsing history, passwords, and settings. I'll send a student forth bearing cakes. And I swear, by all the poison poured into all the ears on all the stages on the planet, that before I leave campus today I'll hit that SEND key and boldly slash that task from my to-do list. 

The rest is silence.

A front-row seat for the summer show

It happens like clockwork every year: the minute the bottlebrush buckeye starts blooming,  hummingbird moths show up. Where do they hide the rest of the year? No idea, but suddenly, there they are.

I remember the first time I ever saw those chunky critters that looked like flying shrimp hovering among tall wildflowers near the parking area at Marie Desonier State Nature Preserve, where my daughter and I went on a hike during the weeks before she started her freshman year of college. I remember wondering what they were and how I might go about seeing them more often. Turns out all I needed to do was to plant a bottlebrush buckeye, which I did ten years ago, using money some people had given in memory of my mother.

They showed up this week after only a few of the buckeye's flowers had started blooming, but each day brings more blooms and so many pollinators that you can hear the buzzing before you see a single bee or butterfly or hummingbird. Today I ventured out in soul-crushing heat and humidity to find three zebra swallowtails fluttering around various areas of the bush, which seems too big to qualify as a bush anymore, towering high overhead and filling in a hefty chunk of yard. Two of the swallowtails got into some sort of skirmish until one flew off into the distance. I reminded them that it's a big bush with plenty of blooms to go around, but they weren't listening.

I'd like to go out and look again to see what else might show up, but it's stinking hot outside, with the sort of humidity that makes you want to plunge into a glacial pool. Instead, I'll wait until the sun goes down so I can watch the next big event: the firefly show, just outside our front window. There's no chance of getting any decent photos, so all I can do is sit here and watch.

Friday poetry challenge: No exit from Escher's stairs

This morning I turned a page in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker and saw myself--my job, my office, my life, plus a handy reply for the colleague who keeps begging me to please please please change my mind about retiring in December. 

It was already a better-than-average issue, featuring Simon Rich's delightful retelling of "The Pied Piper," Amanda Petrusich's gripping exploration of the power of grief, and Julian Lucas's long profile of Colson Whitehead, which made me even more eager to take delivery of his new novel. There's even a short story by Ben Lerner that didn't instantly repulse me--a real accomplishment.

But then in the middle of the not-horrible Lerner story I ran into Chris Gural's cartoon titled "M.C. Escher's Lab Rats" (view it here). Made my day, my week, maybe my year.

I suspect that I'm not the only academic who feels like one of those rats scrambling through an impossible Escher staircase that lures us toward some longed-for apotheosis only to flip us on our heads at the base of yet another set of steps. There's no way out, no way up, no way around, just an endless climb that can't be distinguished from descent, while everyone acts as if the futility is perfectly normal.

Well I need to get out of this rat race. I'm only staying on until December because of health insurance, and then I'm outta here. People keep asking why I want to retire or begging me to stay, which is flattering except I just can't. I could blame the wonky knee that makes standing in front of a class painful and, sometimes, dangerous, or I could blame ever-shifting college policies, enrollment issues, and rampant AI infestation, or I could mention a desire to spend more time with my grandkids while they still like me, but really it comes down to this: I'm tired of living as one of Escher's lab rats, especially when the maze has no end so there's no opportunity to find the cheese.

I don't know what happens when you combine doggerel with ekphrasis, but maybe it's time we found out:

Step up, step down,
go this way round
and through that door
that's on the floor--
up to the attic.
No one is static
but always moves
up well-worn grooves
in stairs that climb
to nowhere. I'm
a rat that wants
to leave the haunts
of Escher's stairs.
But exit--where?

It's not pretty, but if's Friday so it's time to sling some rhymes. Who's next?

Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Trying not to take this weather personally

Why do I struggle to sleep during a power outage? The house is quiet, eerily quiet, with a thick curtain of darkness blocking out the world, but my mind stays alert, aware that something is wrong: 

What time is it now? The juice is supposed to return around midnight. Sure feels like midnight, but how would I know? 

Thirsty. Where's that flashlight? Oops, can't run the water with the pump dead, and can't open the fridge lest the outage last longer than expected. Wait, here's a can of ginger ale on the counter. Would warm ginger ale help me sleep? What if it makes me want to pee? Can't flush the toilets with no power to the well pump. 

Why can't I sleep?

Next day I kept asking people at church what they thought of the storm and they all said "What storm?" Apparently it was highly localized, bringing sudden hail, rain, wind, and thunder to our small corner of the county while skirting the rest. By next morning crews had removed fallen trees and limbs from several areas of our road, but I saw little sign of damage elsewhere.

The storm lasted ten minutes at most but left us in the dark for six hours, much of which I spent wondering why I couldn't sleep. And then the power came on and we suddenly became aware of just how many little lights surround us every day, how many common noises provide the soundtrack of our lives. The clock came on, the fan started moving air around, and I soon settled into blissful sleep.  

Friday poetry challenge: Glassy-eyed wonder

When I chose the window seat, I did not expect it to become the Falling Window Seat, offering a front-row view of a smashing performance that caused diners to leap from their seats in astonishment or maybe terror. I'm pleased to report that no one was injured in the making of this spectacle, but the glass shattered spectacularly and the show, alas, could not go on.

I'd driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy at The James, and we'd arrived early enough to grab lunch at the hospital cafe. The Juneteenth holiday had thinned out the usual crowd, so we scored a table next to a window. But what was happening just outside our window? Thick coils of rope swaying like pendulums in the breeze, scattered tools and unrecognizable equipment, and one worker, a man in hard hat and yellow vest, leaned back and looked up over our heads as he held a rope taut, trying to steady something outside our angle of vision. Moderately interesting, we thought, but not much of a show.

And then BOOM!--Something big smashed down on the terrace. 

Inside the cafe, diners jumped from their seats and ran, some leaping away from the windows and some rushing toward them to get a better view. Suddenly the cafe was crowded with onlookers chattering in many languages, wondering whether they ought to call a doctor or flee for their lives.  

Meanwhile, the terrace outside was thronged with workers looking up at the building, looking down at the shards of shattered glass, looking inquisitively at the equipment they'd been using to try to raise a massive pane of glass into place. One man talked into a radio while others began to remove the suction cups from the glass lifter. A worker stood with hands on his hips, looking up and shaking his head. Anyone who had been standing nearby when the glass fell would have been studded with shrapnel.

Indoors, onlookers scanned the shards for blood, expressed relief at its absence. Outdoors, workers in sturdy boots walked around oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

It could have been a disaster--it certainly sounded like one. But instead it was a bit of terror and shock intruding into our lunch hour before we walked back into our ordinary lives, relieved that today we would not be a part of a story on the evening news. Another day, another near-death experience. Ho-hum.

But the beat goes on:

Bless this mess, this glass that passed

so close--but missed! I must insist:

let's raise a glass and wrest a gloss

from this distress. (The shards got tossed.)

Now who wants to try turning an unexpected interruption into a smash hit?

Bumper sticker befuddlement

I'm getting too old for this, I tell myself, though it's hard to define what this refers to. I'm definitely getting too old to decipher bumper stickers on passing cars, but if I'm so close that I can easily read the words but still can't fathom what they're trying to say, that's a different kind of problem. 

I understand what it means when a pickup truck the size of Nebraska has its backside plastered with the American flag with assault rifles replacing the stripes, and I know what it means when a vanity license plate spelling BEHEMOTH is attached to an SUV so bit it makes me wonder why no auto-makers have manufactured a car by that name. These signs communicate very clearly: I'm a big tough dude who may well be armed--stay out of my way. I am happy to oblige, and kudos for spelling behemoth correctly, but do you know how to pronounce it? 

But then I stand staring at a tiny colorful car sporting a pink bumper sticker that says I got a lobotomy at Claire's, which I kind of understand because the relentless pink glitteriness of Claire's boutiques could make anyone over the age of 12 feel lobotomized, but apparently there's a whole pop-culture thing about getting a lobotomy at Claire's, an online rabbit hole I don't intend to descend.

I'm definitely getting too old for some of the pop-culture references I encounter while out in public, but often I can't even tell if a bit of text is gesturing toward pop culture or simply being silly. We need more zombie baseball: pop culture reference or random words on a bumper sticker? If someone will explain to me what zombie baseball is, I can make an informed decision about whether we need more of it.

I need less confusion in my life and fewer opportunities for annoyance over inept advertising, an epidemic I can't seem to avoid. My ears hurt every time I hear a local radio ad telling me that electronic bikes has raised the bar, but at least the problem is easy to identify: somebody  (copywriter, editor, ad manager, business owner, whatever) can't grasp the concept of subject/verb agreement. I get that, though I worry about how all those people could hear they has without grimacing. 

What I don't get is how a whole host of people could have approved a radio ad for a local flooring company that keeps telling me We want you to be where your feet are. Grammatically correct, yes, but what does it mean? I generally am where my feet are because it was my feet that got me there, and if there's a way for me to be where my feet aren't--short of amputation--I'd like to hear about it. 

Or maybe they want me to lie on the ground hugging my feet? Assuming the fetal position is unlikely to put me in the proper frame of mind to buy flooring--or anything else. I'd like to let my feet take me to whoever wrote that ad and ask a simple question: What were you thinking?

But then maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's just noise intended to get attention or gesture toward some outside reference without making meaning at all. And that, I think, is what I'm getting too old for: maneuvering through a world where the gap between word and meaning sometimes seems unbridgeable.