Yesterday

Alien



That alien landscape has no explanation that I know of. Here is a close up of the ground:



That photo is too small to show that the ground--an acre or so (?)--is covered with broken and melted glass from thousands and thousands of glass bottles. (You can click on it to see a larger photo, if you want to look at larger bits of broken glass.) Why are there piles of broken glass there? Where did the glass come from? Who knows?

Yesterday's

Yesterday after Ellen's service, I went lunch with Dave then to study with my niece for her chemistry exam. We met at the coffee shop where we usually meet and we studied for about seven hours, with a couple of breaks in there for food and to talk about things mostly related to family and setting boundaries with family. My niece is still young, yes, but she has taken on the responsibilities of an adult so I try very hard to treat her like an adult even when she wants to be treated like a child. (Adults who expect or want to be treated like children make me crazy. They seem mostly to do it as a way to avoid the consequences of "adult" actions by feigning some kind of childlike innocence. So maybe it's actually the feigned innocence that kills me. I always think everyone past the age of about eight is feigning innocence. There is no such thing as true innocence past that age. After that age, innocence turns to manipulation or stupidity. Innocence has a shelf life, or maybe a half life. That's what I think.)

(No, I don't really think that. I suspect it, but I know it couldn't possibly be true. Could it? You tell me.)

My niece is very nice, very respectful, but sometimes when she defends being nice to people who she should not be so nice to, she makes me want to boot her over the nearest fence. I know, it's a curse for women, this feeling that we have to be nice to everyone. That we have to smile even when we don't want to. It's a curse and she's not found a way to break the curse yet and it makes me crazy because I don't just see the smiling, I see that she's smiling when she has reason to not smile.

I'm not going to go into specifics about that because that would be breaking some confidences, but it's very frustrating to me. It's easier to focus on chemistry and trying to explain Rutherford's gold foil experiments and what they meant to the understanding of the structure of atoms. It's easier to talk about physical versus chemical properties, which are sometimes black and white and sometimes very gray. It's easier to talk about what electrolytes are and why some electrolytes are weak and why some electrolytes are strong.

My job--chemistry tutor--is simple and I want to keep it that way.

Yesterday while I was waiting for my niece to show up, I wrote. I've been writing, offline, fiction. I have a goal to finish a novel by the time I'm thirty-nine. (Don't ask why I didn't just round it up to forty.) I write on paper with a Sharpie pen because when I use a word processor, I'm reminded of that Truman Capote line where he criticized Jack Kerouac's work by saying, "That's not writing, that's typing." Kerouac supposedly wrote on a typewriter with a roll of paper that he just cranked through continuously. (I once had a writing teacher say, "It kinda reads like that, too.") I mean, have you ever tried to read On The Road? Kerouac was the hipsters' Charles Dickens: unreadable dreck that certain people get all nostalgic for.

I don't know where that paragraph was going, so I'm just going to let it go.

Going?

Dave and I went back to the gym this morning after several weeks of not going. The universe rewarded me almost immediately by having my Gym Boyfriend walk in right behind us. I mean, like, just a few steps behind me and Dave. Thank you, universe. I really do like to see the Gym Boyfriend even though the initial flush of infatuation has worn off. (Maybe instead of being my imaginary Gym Boyfriend, he can now just be my imaginary Gym Friend. Because I hate talking to people at the gym. I love talking about people at the gym, but to them? Not so much.)

We did a leg workout and the briefest bit of cardio and then we went for a walk with Kelly First. (That walk is the source of the alien landscape photos above.) It was a glorious afternoon. Two days ago, we had rain and snow(!), and this was the sky today.


Thank you, global warming!

I got a bit too much sun.

Surf Much?

A couple of days ago, I netflix'd the most amazing documentary, Surfwise (<--trailer). Or, you can meet the family:

Surfwise - Family Intro
Uploaded by magnolia_pictures

It's an amazing documentary and you should see it if you get the chance.