..in case you were wondering.
See, the problem with making a decision to cut down on your blogging is that it makes the decision to actually blog much more difficult to make. For me, at least, it puts so much more weight on what to blog, because if something relatively unimportant strikes you as bloggable, but you’ve gone 2 days without blogging, you feel weird blogging the weird tidbit because it give the impression that you thought this was SO IMPORTANT YOU MUST BLOG FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWO DAYS….ABOUT THE BOOK ABOUT THE POPE’S CAT!
So you end up…not blogging. Which is fine, too.
And you forget about comments you’re supposed to approve and such. Which is probably not fine.
So, I’ll just do a round-up, and see if that lights the fire.
This week I’ve been:
*Shuttling Katie to play practice. A girl who lives right across the street is in the same play, but because of both these girls’ crazy schedules – they go to different schools, and three days out of the week, Katie has to stay at her school for debate prep until the very last minute, and this other girl has voice lessons and soccer practice and such…I think we’ve swung the carpool thing four times.
But that’s okay, because it’s not like the theater is in South Bend or something. It’s a ten minute drive. Not as nice as the approximately 90 seconds it took me to get Katie to rehearsals , just around the bend of Lake Morton for the sh0ws with the Pied Piper Players when we lived in Lakeland, which was ideal.
Well, only one more week of that, and then debate season kicks into high gear, which is not much work for me, unless it involves getting up at 4:30 am to get her to school for a bus traveling to West Lafayette or some other exotic place.
(BTW, she’s doing Lincoln-Douglas this year – a first, as well as extemp and Congress. She’s a little disappointed, I think, but she wanted to do something in the dramatic arena of speech, but her coach has convinced her (flattery will get you everywhere) that her brain and ability to think on her feet makes her very well suited for these events. We shall see.)
*Writing. Chapter 1 was 2500 words or so, but Chapter 2 has ballooned to 4500. Hmmm. Along with the writing goes much, much moral angst and unending discernment about the validity of even spending time on writing a novel, when the first one hasn’t been sold yet, and the fact that I can’t find “When I was bored, you wrote a novel for me” anywhere in Mt. 25.
*Going over spelling words and listening to a 2-year old bellow “Gimme a BUD Light!” Yes, it must be football season.
*Feeling great relief that I am no longer escorting said panicked 2-year old to the bathroom every ten minutes any more. It’s amazing how, once they get it – they get it. Yes, I’ve done this five times now. Can’t you tell?
*Fielding phone calls from two older fellows, mostly about job and car trouble. The two requests I fielded over the past two days were both preceded by “Are you near your computer?” words that in one case were followed by “Can you look up the symptoms of mono?” and the other by “Can you check the Colts injury report?” The results of both research efforts were met with relief.
*Exercising. I have been doing the Couch to 5K program, even though I was not exactly “couch” at the beginning. It’s great, though, for giving me the discipline I need, and if you’ve a mind to do it, definitely use these excellent podcasts, done by a guy out in California - a wonderful service, in which he times out the running/walking segments for you with only mildly annoying techno-type music, making it much, much easier, since you don’t have to keep time yourself. I’m on week five, and after much dread, actually made it through the 20-minute straight-run-with-no-walking this evening. Ten years ago or so, I actually ran in a 5k in Lakeland (Lake Morton was again involved). Yes, I finished. Not impressively, but I did. Moving up north and having two babies after 40 has taken its toll, though, but I think I’ve hit the point at which getting back to some sort of fighting shape doesn’t seem impossible any more.
*Celebrating the return of my BBC radio shows, after their summer break – Start the Week and In Our Time. Because the running only takes me once around Foster Park, and I like to go twice, which makes it almost 5-mile total trek, and nothing makes that brisk walk go down easier than 40 minutes on…antimatter!
*Ripping up carpet, which I find perversely enjoyable. Our house was built in 1940, and the floors are all hardwood. The upstairs floors are all finished, but only the hallway is downstairs, which strikes me as very strange – that in almost 70 years, no one got the urge to just sand and finish these floors? But they didn’t, and I’ve waited for way too long to get this done. I could say, “I don’t know why,” but I think finding places for the furniture and moving said furniture and then not living in the downstairs for a week would probably explain my sloth. The guys are scheduled to come in about a month, but I’ve started slowly preparing – moving books and bookcases downstairs, and today I took up the carpet in my study – I wanted to get it done before the trash guys came, and lo and behold I did. Not an idiotically simple tasks because what I thought was padding was actually an indoor-outdoor carpet that had – you guessed it – been glued to the floor. Oh, not all over, but in strips. And the underpadding to that was cheap and, I assume, old, and disintigrated into masses of black dust, which was a nasty mess for 9am Friday morning. I got it all, though – all but the patch under my desk, a desk which is not light, and which holds a computer I didn’t feel like disconnecting. So that can wait until closer to D-day.
*Reading Bridge of Sighs, which, I’m sorry to say, is not grabbing me. I’m enjoying it at a certain level, but so far I’m only halfway engaged with it. But…final judgment is reserved.
*Still reading God and the World, of course. I need to start posting excerpts.
*Watching The Office, but which is making a huge mistake with these hour-long episodes,which are padded and unfunny way too much of the time. Plus, they are getting way careless about their outdoor shots. Not that they care, probably, and not that we don’t all understand that this show is actually not shot in Scranton, PA, but still, when they’re driving around, and right in front is a series of rolling brown-beige hills topped with scrubby trees, and right to the left is a palm tree…Not Scranton.
*Watching Mad Men on AMC, and comparing notes on it with Nancy Nall. It’s better than most stuff on television, has some interesting storylines, but, I think, is hampered by the trembling immanence of “THE 60’s” at this point. You watch it – this show set in a 3rd-tier NYC ad agency in 1960, and the whole experience is too often overwhelmed by “Wow – things were so different then – and let us snort at the unenlightened as they smoke constantly and drink while they’re pregnant” and “Oh…THE 60’s are coming…watch out ladies!”
I was thinking today that it would be an interesting creative challenge to do a period piece suppressing that kind of hindsight. The awareness of what is coming is not an illegitimate choice, because the seeds of the future are planted in the past, but at the same time, as Nancy said, the girls all sitting around waiting for feminism to hit gets a little tired.
But I’m a bit intrigued by the central character’s mystery, really like the scenes with the creative guys at the agency, and think the subplot of Peggy, the secretary being slowly given her chance at copywriting in this very male world, is very interesting and well done so far – far more interesting than any well-worn treatments of sexual liberation, blah, blah, blah. The creator is Matthew Weiner, who was part of The Sopranos, and it shows in the story-telling and character development.
*On the Internet, reading about Episcopal problems, Benedict on St. Cyril, Benedict on Hope, more and various Protestant stuff and interesting places the TLM is popping up, motorsports at Belmont Abbey, discernment in Columbus, the Connecticut bishops on Plan B and the Papal Nuncio with famous Italian Politicians one of whom Whoopi Goldberg would do, as well as about various episcopal ordinations and installations, all of which is being covered very well in all kinds of places, and about some of which I even get first-hand reports.
And wondering why in the world the Archdiocese of New York permitted Carrie and Big’s wedding…to filmed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
I mean…if only because of what’s on her head, people. Please.
That has to be one of the ooogliest wedding outfits I have ever seen.
What about the Pope’s cat’s book????
Kathy, I agree with you — and in quite a few years of playing at weddings, I’ve seen a lot of weird things! What was the designer smoking!!! And Ms. parker looks like she’s saying to herself “to think I spent all those years at acting school so I could make an idiot of myself wearing dumb costumes like this one!”
“And wondering why in the world the Archdiocese of New York permitted Carrie and Big’s wedding…to filmed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”
Is there no refuge from the porny?
Where’s the Legion of Decency when you need it?
re:”Mad Men”.
Interesting observation. “That 70s show” and “Freaks and Geeks” suffered from the same kind of problems…
When well done, a “retro” setting can be fascinating, but “self-conscious” retro is just painful to watch.
Interesting….the differences between what comes to mind on the part of Catholic men & women on viewing Ms. Parker’s attire. What Kevin mentions as the Legion of Decency being needed in this case is exactly what any right-thinking Catholic male would think.
Amy–the ridiculous hat is the least of the problems! I presume you were saying this tongue-in-cheek? Why is it that women allow themselves to be exploited like Ms. Parker is doing? The amount of flesh shown along with the Madonna looking top to the dress is grotesque; this wedding dress brings decollete to a new low. Totally pornographic! It is SICK! Speaking as a priest, it is more & more difficult to keep the line drawn when new lows like this are perpetuated & foisted on a national audience. Good pastors don’t allow wedding dresses that are occasions of sin. This dress is not an occasion–it IS a sin! To allow THIS to be filmed in St. P.’s Cathedral …. is sacrilege! And it really wouldn’t matter if Ms. Parker & female cast were wearing the most modest, most becoming gowns–the fact that “Sex in the City” is allowed to be filmed at St. P’s is sacrilege! What message does this send to all young people–that it is ok to sleep around as much as one wants and to have sex as the ultimate goal in intimate relationships and then to have that BLESSED by a church wedding–God help us all! We are headed for perdition!
It was filmes in St. Patrick’s, I’m sure, to bring in money. Edward Egan cares for nothing but money.
RE: Young Katie and debating –
Is she doing Oxford/Cambridge format — that is, subject to Points of Information in the middle of her speech?
An account of a debate under such rules can be found at this link.
I love Mad Men, too, but don’t get that sense of foreboding that the ‘Sixties are about to break out.
I think that they have recalled the time well – and we know that the ‘Sixties are about to happen, but I don’t feel it from them. (I feel more the “we had a sense of purpose during the war, but what is the purpose now?” sort of thing.)
Maybe because I remember the era, although I was a kid. I remember the moms sitting around in a haze of smoke. (My mom died at 45 of heart disease and I have asthma to pay for it. So it seems pretty realistic to me.) I remember my mother saying “If I have to stay home with the kids one more minute, I’ll go crazy” but also explaining to me that when a woman married she took over her husband’s name and also his religion (she converted) and that his identity socially became her identity.
I also remember my high school principal telling us that where we went to college was the most important decision we would ever make because it was there “that you will probably meet the man you marry.” That was in 1972. A few years ago I ran into her and ribbed her for it. She adamantly denied she had ever said it, but yes, she had. (Who could make that up?)
What I want to see is somebody with an _institutional memory_. I know none of the young guys are likely to remember any women copywriters, unless they were old enough to have been 4-F during WWII. But surely the executives remember that there were tons of women copywriters in the 1920’s. It was the Depression that threw women back out of the workforce.
Murder Must Advertise is, of course, the greatest story ever written about an ad agency. Dorothy L. Sayers worked the Guinness account, and was behind the bizarre success of their parrot mascot.
Sorry to nitpick, but I think the Dorothy Sayers Guinness mascot was a toucan (or at least that’s what I’ve been telling my friends who, not having read any of the Dorothy Sayers books, tend to be massively unimpressed…). I may well be wrong, though.
The Carrie/Big story linked here referred to “the location for the day’s filming – New York’s famous St Patrick’s Cathedral” and the picture appears to be an outside shot. Do we know for sure that the inside of the Cathedral was used for filming? I don’t think they would need permission to film on the street.