It's the Emerald City, not the 'Paris of the Gobi'

Well, thank God: we are back to rainy and 60 degrees, so everyone can stop complaining about the sweltering heat and go back to 'Sixty-three? In August? Where did our summer go?'

And while looking for information on replacing the antique dome-light bulb in the beleaguered hatchback, I came across this poignant story of another vintage Mazda owner's travails. Dave Fox, also of Seattle, and a travel writer for our own Rick Steves, battled his crappy car's possessed horn rather than undiscriminating robbers. It is a sad and touching story, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

--Or at least the refusal of crappy cars to go gently into that good night.

Seattle Heatwave Sees Temps Above 65!

Today, which is really still Sunday, despite the timestamp, is the end of our 'heat wave' in Seattle. There were 'heat advisories' in effect for a couple days, to help people cope emotionally with the fact that they were perspiring in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle may not have good weather, but it has fairly consistent weather. It is usually mild, and it is usually grey. After two years of living here, the new resident develops a 20-to-30-degrees-F comfort range, temperatures on either side of which routinely cause physical symptoms and spiritual crises. Here, the ideal is around 60 degrees, but most citizens can bear without great difficulty temperatures dipping to as low as 50 or soaring into the slightly-above-70 range. Below 45 is Positively Arctic; anything above 72 is Paralyzingly Torporific.

When it snows here, the Boy Scouts can't meet, the seniors can't get transportation to cribbage, the Lutherans can't have pancake breakfasts, no one goes to the Nordstrom Blowout Shoe Sale, everybody's Christmas bazaar gets put off till May, and people abandon their cars by the side of the road. Those who don't give up drive one mile an hour up steep inclines and then slide back down backwards, taking out all the other intrepid SUV-driving explorers with them.

But they very, very rarely have 'snow days' in Valdez, and people living in Phoenix or Fresno somehow manage to eat tomatoes, get haircuts, and read books even if the temperatures are routinely above a punishing 75 degrees. Here, we complain when the weather is monotonous, and then we complain more loudly when it deviates. What an odd little town. I will admit that I, too, perspired yesterday and was perplexed for a second, but I was reading in bed under two down comforters at the time, so my confusion was quickly put to right.

'I think fish is nice, but then I think rain is wet,

so who am I to judge?' saith the sage Douglas Adams, and

if I believed in the existence of rain boots and umbrellas any more than I believed in shorts and 'flip flops,' I would marry these. ('These' being Kamik 'Chance.')

I would do so of course in bridal lengha choli. But not - I can't stress this enough - not while wearing the boots. In fact, I can't think of any occasion on which I would wear the boots. But a part of me deep inside would want to. Sometimes. After we were married, at least.

If there were anything to be said for rain boots, these boots definitely would be able to say it.

Don't Be Silly, Toto! Scarecrows Don't Talk!

In other news, the Kansas State University Wind Erosion Laboratory was blown away by a tornado in a sort of punctuated-equilibrium moment in architectural evolution.

Here in Seattle, we had a bit of sun, actually. All sorts of poppies are out. They look a lot better with sun on them. More real, really, more like flowers and less like Georgia O'Keefe is going to spring out from behind one and harm me with her eyebrows.

'You Can Be Active with the Activists,

Or sleep in with the sleepers, While you're waiting for the great leap forward.' In this photo I look like I'm rather more than simply one of Mr. Bragg's activists in the song; I look like I'm just waiting for the brass section and the Red Lanterns Shining to show up so I can orchestrate the revolution myself.

(Through my nostrils, apparently, but that's neither here nor there.)




Yes, this was taken on that one sunny day we had that one time. That was great. There was, like, sun. It was, like, out.

Anyway, I like this photo because it looks like I'm leading some or other great march forward into what is clearly a socialist future. It's very stirring. If it were a conservative future I would have been shot head on, be seated with my ankles crossed above some sensible-but-discernible heels, and have an A-line skirt, some 'nude'-tinted hose with reinforced toes, and a couple well-behaved children at my bosom reading along with me the noble deeds of our noble forefathers or, when 'conservative' meant something rather different than it does now, perhaps pointing out the titillating bits in the Constitution. Certainly there would be no mention of public transportation in the background.

But Mochi Doesn't Wear Loincloths!

I have only two things to say.

One is: 'Diplomacy is not synonymous with talking,' and the other is:

Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
61° F | 47° F 16° C | 8° C	61° F | 49° F 16° C | 9° C	61° F | 49° F 16° C | 9° C	63° F | 50° F 17° C | 10° C	63° F | 50° F 17° C | 10° C
Mostly Cloudy	Mostly Cloudy	Rain Showers 70% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 50% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation

Diplomacy ≠ Talking? Diplomacy ≥ Talking? Diplomacy < Talking?

Alright, children, bubble tea is not synonymous with tapioca; religion is not synonymous with faith; politics is not synonymous with guanxi; and cole slaw in Kotzebue is not synonymous with Matanuska Valley cabbage. But I would expect to encounter a fair bit of the latter in any of these cases should I find myself confronted with the former.

I understand (perhaps) (in the most gracious reading) that what Ms. Rice meant to say was something like 'Diplomacy is not coextensive with talking,' mixed with a more minatory something akin to 'We have reconceived the notion of diplomacy such that a range of things from threats to preemptive strikes can now be put in the overlappy middle bit of a Diplomacy/War Wenn diagram.' She just didn't think Americans would understand 'coextensive,' 'reconceived,' or 'Wenn diagram.'

And more power to her: we don't. But I assume the esteemed Secretary did fairly well on her GRE, and even if it were more years ago than her youthful looks would imply, putting that zingy soundbite in the lamentable form she chose makes one want to ask, 'If not synonyms, then what are they? You've juxtaposed them; it seems you've counterposed them. Now tell us the nature of their relationship, if it is not one of synonyms. Diplomacy is to Talking as _________ is to what, Ms. Rice?'

To help her and us out, here are some choices of sample GRE analogy questions from this site.

COLOR: SPECTRUM::

a. tone: scale
b. sound: waves
c. verse: poem
d. dimension: space
e. cell: organism

HEADLONG:FORETHOUGHT::

a. barefaced: shame
b. mealymouth: talent
c. heartbroken: emotion
d. levelheaded: resolve
e. singlehanded: ambition

SEDATIVE: DROWSINESS::

a. epidemic: contagiousness
b. vaccine: virus
c. laxative: drug
d. anesthetic: numbness
e. therapy: psychosis

I don't want to sound unduly cynical, but I suspect Ms. Rice is hinting that for the departing administration it may be that

diplomacy: talking :: gladiator: kagami mochi.

This is where I live.

It really is this beautiful here! Frightening!

It Goes On...

This is from the Weather Underground. I wanted to go down today after work and take pictures of the rhododendrons and bonsai at the rhododendron and bonsai gardens in Federal Way. (That's a city, not a manner of doing things, in this state.) But there is no sun. There was what we call here a 'sunbreak,' perhaps even two, but not enough to justify my trek.

5-Day Forecast for ZIP Code 98117

Customize Your Icons!

Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday	Monday
56° F | 43° F 13° C | 6° C	63° F | 45° F 17° C | 7° C	59° F | 45° F 15° C | 7° C	56° F | 45° F 13° C | 7° C	58° F | 45° F 14° C | 7° C
Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation	Partly Cloudy	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 30% chance of precipitation	Chance of Rain 20% chance of precipitation
Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly	Hourly
Tomorrow is forecast to be Warmer than today.

I love many things about Seattle. And I think that, despite our thousands of new cookie-cutter condo developments and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments that could just as easily be in Anaheim or Shanghai, there still remains much here to set it apart from other cities of similar size, latitude, demographics, etc. And all you hear about our rainfall is not true: we don't get an extraordinary amount. We are 50-something, I think, in US cities: all the leaders are in the Southeastern United States. What we do get is months upon months of unremitting gloom. It's not especially cold here, either, particularly considering that we're almost in Canada. But what our snuggle with the 49th Parallel does mean is that our winter days are as brief as they should be at this latitude. When you add in the fact that we get none of those glorious brisk sunny days most other people get intermittently through the winter, you are faced with the reality that our lot is a bunch of short dark days: even when the sun is out, it's not, and then it's back to complete darkness at half-past-four or something.

What also have is a lot of bars, and a lot of suicides. But then spring comes, and there is a riot of color everywhere, including every conceivable and comforting shade of green. The streets are lined with cherry blossoms, and rhododendron bushes and trees bloom from white to purple in yards everywhere. By the time the two months of summer are upon us, no one in the Puget Sound region cooks a single meal inside, and it takes triple the time to get anywhere, as all the bridges are up and down constantly to allow for the the thousands of sailboats, accompanied by canoes, kayaks, bowriders, converted liveaboard tugs, dinghies, trawlers on hiatus, and the lamentable cigarette boats to pass under in hoardes. White legs that would shame Dublin are everywhere, not a play is produced or a concert offered, and tourists are the only people eating in restaurants. The failed suicides of February are out at Greenlake in preposterously colored clingy clothes, thirty pounds lighter, completely sober, and practicing asanas with the emotional stability and optimism of any Self-Actualized Man worth his mudra.

It's a shocking way of life.

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot

Temperatures throughout the Seattle-Tacoma area are expected to stay above freezing in most parts tonight! (Not unlike today,) snow tomorrow will likely be confined to elevations above 300 feet.

So far, the 'tomorrow' part of that has subjected us only to grey skies. The clouds, at least, don't seem to have that gamboge backlighting that usually heralds imminent snow. But we'll see - I'm not trusting anyone these days in the atmospheric-sciences realm, least of all the atmosphere itself.

The Tulips Are Lying. And Where Are My Sorels?

It snowed today. Honestly.

As you faithful reader(s) know(s), I cannot do math. Because I cannot do math I live by rounding. Sometimes I round up and sometimes I round down: this allows me to believe that 'everything evens out' in some theoretical Final Reckoning I won't understand in the slightest. Even if today's specific roundings include only one upward with bills and one downward with mileage, I content myself with the belief that in the near future I will do the opposite and things will therefore again attain equilibrium.

I tell you this because it means that in the realm of rounding, and therefore in the realm I inhabit, today is early April, and that means that it is snowing, in Seattle, in early April. It is, moreover, predicted to continue for days. Apparently, I was one of the few who arrived home safely, so I poured the last glass of Quinta do Et Cetera and congratulated myself on my prescience for not yet having put away the foul-weather drinks and clothes. I have no idea what the tulip-trees and daffodils are thinking, but I cannot express how deeply I want winter to end.

The Cheek of Day

A trip to traffic court is not unlike a trip to the airport before a flight. There is the careful selection of clothing for the event, the long drive early in the morning, the mental wrestling over which book to bring, and the inability to sleep the night before from nerves. Such was my morning this morning.

As for the outfit, my wardrobe is overrun by neutrals at the moment, so I did as I have been lately and went with Eight Layers of Beige. Even the silk long-john shirt underneath it all was beige, as were the wool tights. On the bottom, I opted for jeans, imagining that in Seattle anything more would seem overly calculating. And no one wants to seem overly calculating to a traffic judge. As for the book, it was an odd choice, since I would not normally bring a novel when the interruptions to its reading would not be of my own choosing but imposed from outside, but since this novel has its own built-in interruptions I think it was just as reasonable a choice as nonfiction: Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. And I wore slim brown tasseled loafers, since I seem to be having a difficult time keeping my balance in flats and can use the practice.

I had to be there, faraway, at 8:30. Obviously, the commute would involve rush-hour traffic, so I figured that doubling estimated driving time and adding .5 more on top would be the best idea, since no one wants to seem late, either, to a traffic judge. I don't actually know how long it would normally take me to get there, since I don't 'actually' 'normally' get there at all. I only have the ticket from driving to go look at a piece of furniture (which I had the strength not to buy, even though I felt awful for wasting the old lady's time) and getting so confused that I was driving very slowly and poorly on the same stretch of road more than once and not availing myself at all times of all available signaling devices as I tried to figure out where it was the GPS was trying to get me to go, and whether it was more correct this time than the last. I gave the trip 2 1/2 hours, since it seemed like it would normally take about one. This would allow for traffic, for getting to alternate routes if traffic were not moving at all, and for getting lost and righting myself at least once.

It wasn't hard to be ready at six since I had not been asleep yet. I wrote down the directions from Google and entered the address in the GPS, as well, my customary practice. If one fails, I still have the other, since my mind is of no help in such situations.

The traffic was not bad. In fact, it was hardly traffic. And all along the way I was accompanied by a truly astonishing sunrise on my left with views of the snowy Cascade Mountains and Mt. Rainier glowing pink. The whole experience was so lovely and refreshing and energizing I even got into the fast lane for a while. Then I thought, Who'm I kidding? and merged right. But even then, though, I was going over the speed limit and got where I was going with an awful lot of time to spare, especially considering the hour of the morning.

The court building was easy to find (well, with GPS it was easy to find) and was right in the middle of what seemed an enormous nine-pointed star of strip malls. It being seven AM, they were no more open than the courthouse was, and it was too cold to sit in the car and read. The only place open seemed to be the Denny's back by the highway, but I hate pancakes as well as beef-barley soup. My only salvation for wasting time seemed to be the 24-hour Walgreen's drugstore. Since I need to find a new lipstick strategy, anyway, it was a welcome diversion.

My lipstick problem is thus: this summer I was very brown. In the past, I have kept a little bit of glow over winter by popping into a tanning salon sporadically. I started the practice on the advice of a friend who suggested it just as a way to get a blast of powerful heat and relayed that I could even put on a sunblock and use it for nothing other than raising my core (reptilian) temperature. That way I would have no need of difficult, tense, and accusatory conversations with myself over being vain.

I didn't bother with the sunblock, though, because I could never remember it. And, frankly, it was amusing to me to see me looking bronzed and rugged in January.

However.

This winter I have been warmer than usual. Maybe I have simply been more careful, or perhaps I have actually gained a bit of insulating fat; I don't know to what I should attribute this shocking and promising change. Quite separate from that issue, however, I have also wanted to see just how pallid I can get, how I look as a study in etiolated Victorian Yankeedom, and especially if the freckles on my cheeks will fade away. Toward the end of last summer they had sort-of, well, massed, in a terrifically unbecoming way, such that my cheeks tended to look darker than the other bits, and giving me a somewhat 'ruddy' character, even though they, and I, weren't actually red.

Well, now I am not ruddy, genuinely or merely apparently, thank God, but my lipsticks are either too red or too brown for this new, wan self. The pallor makes the brown ones appear too orange, and the gorgeous 1940s/50s reds look better in photos from the 1940s and 50s than they do on me, here, now. I have any number of taupe selections, too, which I think suit me fine, but between the beige outfit, the beige eyeshadow, the beige nails, the beige lipstick, and my incredibly small size, I would be nearly imperceptible and end up dying, unnoticed in a corner booth, of starvation waiting for service at some overpriced wine bar or noodle house.

So berry it is.

They have a slight jolt of color, signifying that I am, in fact, there, and that these are my lips - but not enough to overpower the other elements. I bought two lipsticks and their nail polishes, and I think they look quite nice, but I feel sad in swearing off red clothing until July, when I can again wear lipstick and nail color that don't clash with my complexion.

And, as a final note, I wasn't supposed to be in court at all. I am not sure what I did, and even less solid on what I failed to do, but whatever I thought I mailed in did not, it seems, get to where it might have under ideal circumstances.

I guess I'm paying that ticket after all.

And it still was a lovely, lovely drive. And had I not gone, I never would have, in all my life, seen a sign that said:

Auto Sheepskin
Shoe Repair
Mink Blankets

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...

Never Mind

Let me apologize to all cats and cat owners everywhere. My Umbrian friend informed me that the cat was suffering from the weather, just as a dog would do, and so it wasn't him, or me, but God. And now that the monsoon has stopped and the floodwaters are nearly cresting, and blocked roads will at some point be opened and electricity will conceivably be restored to some, he is once more resting blithely, and thus exceedingly cute again and not trying to eat my eyeballs. Apologies for any confusion.