Blather and a Poem

This backpacking training is exhausting, folks . . . I did so many flights of stairs yesterday and I've been running which is something I  haven't done since high school gym class. Between the exercise and my allergies (or rather the Benadryl I took for my allergies) and worrying about Pyramus' latest health issues (a urinary tract infection [probably], a worsening heart problem, and unexplained weight loss), I am one tired person. I'm also well on my way to being one broke person seeing as my cat is pretty much a pharmacy with fur. 

Which is all to say that I'm feeling a bit worn out. So in lieu of a coherent post please take this poem by Louise Glück:

Parable of the Hostages

The Greeks are sitting on the beach

wondering what to do when the war ends. No one

wants to go home, back

to that bony island; everyone wants a little more

of what there is in Troy, more

life on the edge, that sense of every day as being

packed with surprises. But how to explain this

to the ones at home to whom

fighting a war is a plausible

excuse for absence, whereas

exploring one’s capacity for diversion

is not. Well, this can be faced

later; these

are men of action, ready to leave

insight to the women and children.

Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased

by a new strength in their forearms, which seem

more golden than they did at home, some

begin to miss their families a little,

to miss their wives, to want to see

if the war has aged them. And a few grow

slightly uneasy: what if war

is just a male version of dressing up,

a game devised to avoid

profound spiritual questions? Ah,

but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun

calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s

loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.

There on the beach, discussing the various

timetables for getting home, no one believed

it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;

no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable

affliction of the human heart: how to divide

the world’s beauty into acceptable

and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,

how could the Greeks know

they were hostages already: who once

delays the journey is

already enthralled; how could they know

that of their small number

some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,

some by sleep, some by music?

It might be a little (ok, a lot) sad to spend Saturday night cleaning out your fridge, but I've got to tell you, I'm really enjoying looking at my clean, extremely organized, and rather empty fridge. I feel so accomplished.

Little Bits

I'm still infested but with my apartment all caulked up, my laundry all done and bagged, and everything as decluttered as I can get it without getting rid of my roommate's stuff I have more time to blog. A bit anyway. So here are a few things that have caught my attention over the recent busy time.

Every time I think Paul Gaustad couldn't be any more likable, he goes and does something like name checking Louis Grachos in an interview:

I mean, most of the hockey players who live in Buffalo can find nice things to say about the city--it's not hard--but most hockey players don't talk about how the director of the fabulous local art museum shows them around. Also, I don't like touching fish or worms either, so I find that totally endearing.

Also on a hockey note, I've been so busy and distracted that I didn't really notice just how lame the Mutinous Peons were. So I've done some full-scale revamping. I'd already traded Brad Boyes to Schnookie in exchange for Tomas Holmstrom (who promptly got injured). Today I got rid of Phillipe Boucher (clearly having a rough year), Dustin Byfuglien, Peter Mueller (who?), Dan Ellis (just bad), and Josh Harding (never, ever plays). They've been replaced with Teemu Selanne (can't believe he was available), Mikko Koivu, Jason Chimera, Mike Commodore, and Nikolai Khabibulin. Let's just hope this works better than real life NHL revamps do.

The fact that Pushing Daisies got canceled? So very not cool. (Also not cool, the fact that logger doesn't seem to let me make photos little anymore. It's totally annoying.)

I'm catching up on my True Blood watching. I don't think the show is particularly good but I like watching it anyway. I had to take a little break because I couldn't bear to watch things with all kind of bloodsucking for awhile there.

I have such late library books right now. I got them out before I understood the infestation and I haven't been able to renew a couple of them but I didn't want to return them if they possibly had bed bugs on them. I've got a way to decontaminate them now though, so they'll be going back shortly. So that's something to be grateful for anyway.

Hey there . . .

For reasons neither pleasant nor terribly interesting, your intrepid blogger has no time to post these days. Too bad, too, because I actually have some things I'd like to post about if only I could find the time. Or, more accurately/importantly, the energy. Hopefully soon.

Bowery and Houston

I was planning on going to three PEN World Voices things today like a good little wannabe-intellectual or whatever. But halfway through the first--which I disliked on its own merits but I'll post about that later--I realized that I've spent an awful lot of time sitting in a theater-type setting in the last few days. I know a lot of people do that but I'm kind of antsy in the best of situations and I had just come to the unpleasant realization that I was getting no more enjoyment from listening to that panel than I got from cleaning the litter box this morning. And one of my cats has rather bad aim so believe me when I tell you that litter box was nasty. So I decided that, given the fact that I have tickets to three talks tomorrow, it was probably best if I spent the rest of today doing other things. Which I have. So good for me, I guess.