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.

spring good-byes

And so I start my first bit of writing after months of silence by talking about death. 'Tis the season, and all that; more people seem to die during the spring and summer months than I ever remember during winter and autumn. Maybe it's just that it's more noticeable during the spring. We expect people to die -- old people to die -- during the winter months. It's sort of their season. Maybe that's it. Old people own the winter, middle-aged people the autumn, newly budded grown-ups the summer, and children the spring. Taxes have only April. Death has the rest of the year.

In April, right around the time that other people were cursing about taxes and I was filing for a big fat refund from the Federal Government, I finally caught up to a lifelong dream and signed up for Aikido. There was a Dojo around the corner, as it happened; beginner classes started a little before six, and advanced classes started at seven. Assuming I was able to find a breathing space at work, I could hop on my bike and pedal two blocks away, where the Aikido Dojo took up a tiny warehouse bordering the lot of the hockey rink where my company plays its league. After classes I could skip next door, where I could catch the game -- the Company is now second in its league, and quite impressive, really, now that they've stopped falling down so much -- or ride back to the gym at work, where I could shower and then catch up on anything that had happened during my absence.

It's hard taking up a new sport. It's hard fitting into any new environment. Aikido doesn't really believe in separating levels of classes; everybody proceeds at his or her own pace, which means that one is always in a class with people much better and much more practiced than one is. This is good, from a learningstandpoint. In theory, one doesn't have an ego to get in the way of the learning, anyway.

What little ego I did have, fortunately, was easily quashed by laughing at my own mistakes; there were plenty of those, and the complete strangers I was training with were all encouraging. One boy in particular was friendly, and grinned his way through training with me; I learned that his name was Corey, that he went to school in the area, and that he'd come from a different Dojo, originally. He was fourteen years old, and he regularly kicked my butt.

It got to be quite a joke with my friends. "So, did the fourteen-year old kick your ass again?" I didn't mind. It's a non-competitive sport, Aikido, and I learned a lot from this boy; we laughed together whilewe trained, making a little bubble of hilarity in the middle of serious-faced practitioners. Talking on the mat is not really encouraged, which makes it harder to get to know people and make friends. Corey and I would chat after practices in the parking lot, while he waited for his dad. "I'm bruised and broken," I sniffled after one day in the Dojo, answering to his usual, "How do you feel?"

"I feel like I've been reduced to my basic atomic components and spit out." I told him, reproachfully. He was the one who had done most of the reducing. "I'm too old for this."

"As long as you had fun," Corey said, happily. We grinned at each other like co-conspirators. We always had fun. That was the point.

He was one of the reasons I kept going back to Aikido; I would glance at the mat when I walked into the Dojo and see him warming up. Somewhere inside my chest, a little smile would curl, and I'd look forward to being able to practice with a smiling, open face meeting mine. The top of my head reached his chin, just about. He'd give me pointers as we practiced throws.

"You have to draw your partner into your shoulder by the back of the head, see?" He'd demonstrate, and suddenly I would be hugged into his shoulder with a face full of sleeve. From somewhere around his armpit, I would crack some joke -- "Corey, aren't you a bit young for me?" -- and he would giggle, and twitch, and before I knew it, I'd be staring at the ceiling and he'd be a lot taller.

He attempted to teach me how to tie my belt, around a uniform that used to belong to my father. There's room for two of me in that thing.

"If you wrap it around twice, and then thread it through here--"

"I tried that," I lied, because I couldn't figure out how to untie the belt after what I'd done to it in the dressing room. "It didn't work."

"--and tie the knot here," he plowed on, unheeding.

"I think I broke a nail. I could use toothpicks or something. Staple it together through the front?"

"...it should stay together. And then you tie it one last time, to make it a square knot." He finished, triumphant, and looked at my belt, which looked exactly the same. His face fell.

"I'll try it next time," I promised him. "Look. There's a hole in your knee."

I came in to the Dojo on Monday after training with him on Wednesday. His picture was on the shelf beneath the small shrine dedicated to the founder of Aikido; the teacher put us through a meditation exercise,"in honor of Corey, who left us last Thursday." Her eyes were bright and artificially shiny; she smiled around them. For half an hour, I darted surreptitious glances at the picture, thinking it would change. I waded through the class, pillowed by shock and a horrible urge to scoff.

Don't be ridiculous. He's only fourteen. I just saw him on Wednesday, and he was fine. He and his dad almost ran me over in their SUV. He waved at me through the windowshield and laughed.

I would have liked to see him become a man. He had a gift for sunshine. "I can see the future," I told him on Wednesday, as he taught me how to use a thumb to make a partner go in circles. "You'll have your ow n Dojo, and you'll be Master Corey."

No more chats in the parking lot. No more giggles over my overlarge gi. No more cheek-bursting grins towering over me from the ceiling.

I would have liked to see him become a man.