June 13, 2001

a little bard

The Guy cooks too well. I can now wear his jeans. This is Bad.

"I'm getting fat," I whined. "You can't cook anymore. I'm going to start eating better. Healthier."

"What does that mean, 'healthier'?" my coworkers asked. The married ones yelled, "Are you crazy? He cooks for you, and you're asking him to stop? What's wrong with you?"

The Guy, who is JGE*, hummed sympathetically at me over the phone and cooked me vegetables last night. Healthy stuff. "You're a lot of Woman," he agreed, "and I don't want you to be uncomfortable. If you feel like my cooking is making you into more Woman--"

I cackled at him. Got to love a guy who's tactful enough not to use any of the danger words: Fat, Pudgy, Plump, Jiggly....

*JGE: "Just Gay Enough." The Guy came up with that in cooperation with his maniac cohorts. Two of them in a room are bad enough; three of them together make gravity flow backwards. They're like the Doppler Effect on crack. 'JGE' means that a man is sensitive, considerate, intelligent, and perceptive enough to be gay, but isn't.

Addendum: We found out on Saturday that this is not a good way to compliment a guy you've just met. Men tend to misunderstand.

Talking about Tara's wedding would take far more time than I have at the moment, so I'll do something about that later. There are two things I'd like to say, however. One is that the bridesmaid dress was actually quite decent, and once I get it shortened a little, it'll make a great dress for simply goin out during the day. I could even wear it to work, and get commented on for not wearing something with legs.

The second thing is that Tara is presently on a ten week honeymoon around the South Pacific, and I hate her. The two are related. It's not like I arbitrarily decided to nurture a deep seed of resentment into full-blown rage. It pretty much started with her email from Vanuatu, where she wrote -- let me see -- aha. "We didn't get to do much there: eat, sleep, get blown about by the wind and rained on, eat some more.... But Tahiti before that was marvelous. Everything there was perfect."

Just shoot me now. If that isn't an invitation to rabid, insane jealousy, I don't know what is. I think I'm a fair person. If someone comes up to me and says, "I'm going on vacation and it'll suck because I'm going to Minnesota in the middle of winter," I'm going to be encouraging and cheerful, and wish her the very best. I'll ask for postcards, promise to think of her often, and wish her bon voyage.

Vanuatu, however. New Caledonia, however. Tahiti and Auckland and Bali, however. Please. I'll admit that she might have some cause to enjoy herself, seeing as how she's just gotten married and all, but show a little decorum. Show a little consideration. Ten weeks is just showing off, is what I say. Display some shred of good taste and send me a plane ticket.

I borrowed this book, sed & awk, from one of the transfers into my group. It's an O'Reilly book, and the O'Reilly books invariably have some completely random picture of unrelated animals on the cover. I've never understood why. My Linux in a Nutshell book has a picture of a decapitated horse -- the top half, not the bottom -- and the sed & awk book happens to have a picture of two strange (are these marmots?) bipedal not-quite-monkey things sitting on the title. One of them is staring at me. The other one looks like he's about to brain his buddy. One little fist is raised and ready. Maybe it's a picture of human evolution in action?

It doesn't matter.

At Tara's wedding, standing in the reception line being superfluous, I met two people who happened to have tickets to Ashland they wanted to get rid of. "Tara said that you might be interested," the male half of the two said, diffidently.

Would I!

Four tickets in the fourth weekend of June, a two-day jaunt to Ashland, Oregon, to visit the Shakespeare festival. We'll take in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and "The Tempest." I'll get to go swimming, and maybe sit in a sauna, and my sister and her boyfriend tell me that there're hot springs located not so far away. I've taken three days off of work, so I'll have a glorious five days of rest and relaxation.

It didn't occur to me until much later -- last week, in fact -- that I haven't really seen either of these plays in a long, long time, and that I've never ever read "The Merry Wives" in its entirety. I burbled to my friend about going to the Shakespeare Festival, and she asked me about the stories.

I didn't know for sure. So I made it up.

"There's this guy named Prospero on a deserted island, see, and he has this kid named Ferdinand Falstaff who's really got the hots for pretty much any girl that he sees...."

"I thought you said it was a deserted island," she objected.

"Well, they're fake women, that Ariel makes."

"...and isn't Ferdinand a bull?"

I ignored her and forged on. "Aaaaanyway, there's this really smart woman named Miranda, and she's Prospero's daughter, and she can tell Ferdinand's just trying to get into her pants, see, so what they do is that she and her buddies play this trick on him..."

"Wait a second."

"--so she and Caliban and this butler guy, they pretend they're going to meet him out in the woods--"

"Wait. Wait. Hold up."

"--and then they meet him there," I continued, speaking louder to drown her out, "and tie him up, and there's a big storm and he gets wet, and they all go home and live happily ever after."

"Shut up a second."

I shut up.

She furrowed her brow. "Didn't you say that Prospero was Ferdinand's father?"

I thought back and cautiously ventured, "I might have."

"And didn't you say that Miranda was Prospero's daughter?"

"Yeeeeees?"

She twiddled her forefingers together and pointed them at opposite elbows. "So, like, isn't that sort of, you know, incest?"

I gave it some consideration, and then produced: "They're not related by blood. Miranda's adopted."

"Oh." She fell silent again.

Then she said, "I could swear I've seen a movie about this."

I went back later and checked the play. Turns out I was wrong. Miranda wasn't adopted.