All bronchitis and no anything else fun makes Stacey a very dull girl.

I am slowly on the mend, but my big plan for the last week or so was to get the last of my plants in the ground, and it’s been painfully slow since I can only dig one or two holes before being felled by a coughing fit. However, as of this morning the very last plant is in the ground, much to my joy. Well, maybe one more rosebush at some point - but I’m still harboring faint hopes of nurturing the nearly-dead one back to life, so I won’t need to replace it.

I was supposed to start my new job this week, but HR was slow with the paperwork and letting me know I had to get a TB test, so we couldn’t get the TB test scheduled in time, so my start date got pushed back to next week. Oddly, last week I was depressed all week thinking that I’d have to work this week, but this week I am pretty content about starting next week. I’m not sure what difference the extra week made. Maybe it’s just the difference between starting my job while completely exhausted from coughing, and starting while being at least somewhat on the mend. At any rate, I start Monday, and I’m excited. Not so much about the first few days, which are all new-employee orientation, but eventually it ought to get challenging and exciting.

Other than new-job excitement (and the accompanying new-job clothes shopping, since I can’t wear jeans to work anymore), things proceed calmly around here. A parade of laryngitic singers and drummers have been coming through our basement attempting to record albums between coughs since everyone else in town is sick too, Dimitri has learned to hate and wiggle away from the insulin needle and I’m still trying to get his dosage right, and I am way too involved in watching my vegetable garden grow.

But things ought to get a lot more exciting next week, so I’m just enjoying the last of the peace and quiet. Or at least I was. I’m informed we’re going with some of Len’s coworkers to the Brazilian meat restaurant for dinner, so I’m not sure how peaceful or quiet that’s going to be.

Things That Let Me Know I Am Officially A Boring Adult, Travel Edition:

1) I’ve had a policy since college that when I travel, I allow myself to buy all the trashy magazines I want at the airport, since I don’t generally read them at other times. This used to mean that I always read Cosmopolitan on the plane (which was occasionally embarrassing if I was sitting next to a stodgy old guy), occasionally followed by a chaser of People or Jane or something. But the guilty pleasures I picked out yesterday to read at the airport while flying to New Jersey? Gourmet, Real Simple, House and Garden, and Pittsburgh Magazine. And I thoroughly enjoyed them all, cover to cover.

2) My parents sent the car service to get me from the airport, since they’d been knocking back mimosas all morning for my sister’s 21st birthday and didn’t feel up to driving. The service wound up sending me a stretch limo because it was at the airport anyway and they didn’t want to send it back empty. The driver told me to help myself to anything I wanted to drink. Did I get all excited about the possibility of getting drunk in a stretch limo on my way to visit my family? No. I got all excited because having the stretch meant that there was a nice ledge next to the window, so I could take out the little heirloom tomato seedlings I’d brought for my stepfather, and let them get some sun and get un-squished after their journey in my luggage.

I can hardly wait to see what pathetically boring adult things I will think to do on my return trip today. Maybe I’ll buy The Economist or something.

Earlier this afternoon, I was reading a biography of Alice Waters, and there was a quote from one of her vegetable suppliers, Bob Cannard, that struck a chord:

“You can read the whole plant. It’s right there before you, and if you pay attention to the nature of the bark and the quality of the leaves and the growth habits and all of the observable and smellable and tastable characteristics, you can see the past history of a plant.”

Nothing I’d usually find particularly memorable, except that last night, while staying in the guest room at my parents’ house, I had come across the notebook I kept in my early college years where I copied poems, quotations, and song lyrics that I liked, along with (god help us all) a few poems of my own.

I spent quite a while going through the book last night. It’s completely cringe-inducing, in many, many ways. The happy sunflower stickers I put on the inside covers. Many of the selected quotes, especially the song lyrics. (I mean, really - Jewel lyrics just aren’t as inspirational as I apparently though they were at the time.) My terrible poetry, certainly. Even the handwriting - it’s this very affected handwriting I forgot that I had trained myself into for a while, with typewriter-like as and quirky little es, and I am mildly embarrassed now at the amount of time I’m sure it took me to write out all this stuff in that stupid handwriting.

But the thing that surprised me, more than how embarrassing many of the choices are, is how I can still see myself in a lot of it. Certainly, much of it makes me want to go back and shake myself silly. And the things that moved me then are very much not the things that move me now. But I can still remember how it felt to be so moved by them then. I know who I was thinking of when I found a particular quotation that I thought expressed something about my feelings, and I remember the little thrill of recognition the first time I read Rilke’s You who never arrived.

When I came across the notebook and realized what it was, I’d intended to throw it away. But after reading through it, embarrassing as it is, I had to bring it home with me, because I found my history in it. I can recognize who I was and who I turned out to be somewhere amid all the silliness and affectation. It was oddly comforting.

Of course, now I am going to find a hiding place for it and never, ever let anyone else read it.

How I spend my Sunday nights:

Making bullshit offhand statements that have no basis in reality, like “Every video in this countdown is somehow about Amelia Earhart,” and then scrambling to defend them as Len tries to trip me up.  Even better: when the countdown is “Metal Mania” on VH1.  Sample statements from the last fifteen minutes of my life:

“Gene Simmons represents the fear that Amelia felt when her plane went down.  I mean, if you saw Gene coming toward you making this face, wouldn’t you ditch your plane?”

“The woman in bear furs with the spear represents Amelia’s warrior spirit.”

“I do not know what her hair looked like.  Neither do you.  Therefore it is entirely possible that she had a skullet, and thus this skullet represents her personal style.”

“The skanky woman in the thong represents…uh…Amelia Earheart’s ass.”

“The fog machine is symbolic of flying through clouds.”
Sadly, we are only an hour into the two-hour video countdown.  I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up, but Len seems determined to make me come up with a justification for every single video, so I will have to try.