Areas of Unrest

26 January 2001 - The Rabbit Died

QOTD: "A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence." - Bronder Matthews

Reading: Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Listening to: original cast recording of City of Angels

Alexander Graham Bell has a lot to answer for. I have spent most of the past two days at work on teleconferences. Much of that time I could hear static and paper rustling far better than I could hear the person who was actually speaking. The bigger problem is that a telecon calls for just a little too much of my attention to keep me from doing anything else, but not so much of my attention that I feel productive.

I probably should have stayed in Colorado (where I spent Monday through Wednesday) and attended in person, but I am still attempting to have a life despite work. As it is, it looks like I'll be traveling each of the next five weeks. Once we get through this phase of our program, things should ease up. In the meantime, I just console myself with grand and glorious plans for all my frequent flyer miles.

By the way, Colorado was extremely cold, although there was no additional snow. I've decided that I need to buy more pants suits, as my legs were unhappily cold in nylons. At the very least, I need to find something like wool tights. But my hands were toasty warm, largely because I have the greatest gloves in the known universe. They're made of deerskin and lined with rabbit fur. Bambi and Thumper both died to keep my hands warm - how much more politically incorrect can you get? Wait, don't answer that. I did refrain from buying the elephant leather boots in Zimbabwe. But elephants live in warm climates, so it's not as if the boots would do me any good in this case. Hmmmm, do they make fur mukluks that would look decent with a skirt?

Which reminds me - do today's kids know what the phrase "the rabbit died" used to mean? I don't think they've used rabbits for pregnancy tests in ages, but we do still talk about things like "dialing telephones" so the expression could still be in use. As I recall, the testing labs would inject rabbits with hormones from pregnant women, so the rabbits would produce antibodies against the hormones. The next time the rabbit was injected (with a blood sample from the woman being tested) an antigen-antibody reaction would be triggered, killing the rabbit, if the woman was pregnant. Which raises the whole question of honorable death among rabbits. If you were a rabbit, you might prefer dying for a pregnancy test to dying to make my hands warm. But surely either is a better death than the ignominy of dying so your foot could be a good luck token. (I just rememberd that, as a child, I had a lucky rabbit's foot. I have no idea what became of it, but I know that I never believed in it, because I always understood that it had been unlucky for the rabbit.)

As for my usual obsessions, I ate excellent ahi and garlic mashed potatoes at Full Moon Grill Monday night, but got mediocre takeout sushi on Tuesday night (from Sumida's and, no, I didn't plan for it to be mediocre - I just went somewhere convenient and hoped it would be decent). The problem was that my meeting ended late and I didn't have time to have a restaurant meal before watching Buffy.

I also have an obligatory celebrity death to report, namely that of Tommy Agee. He may not be a celebrity in your book, but he played for the Mets when I was growing up, including the famous 1969 season when they lost last place. I vaguely remember a game in which he stole home, but the obituary didn't mention that.

In other news, I can't believe the Bards concert is just over a week away. I've been working hard and it's paid off. I still need to do some fine tuning on one of the two stories, but I feel good about how everything went when we did our complete run-through. The balance of stories among us feels good and the flow seems to work well, too. I'm fascinated by how much the group helps all of us improve our stories. We have very different styles of working (and of telling), but we've managed to get beyond that and offer choices, instead of dictating solutions. I can't tell you how blessed I feel to have the Bards in my life.

I'm also intrigued by the way stories sometimes just pull themselves together. I'll be in the shower or driving or doing something else fairly mindless and I'll get a sudden flash about what a story needs. That happens to me so often that you'd think I'd have gotten used to it, but it surprises me every time. The power of the subconcious mind is pretty amazing.

Shameless Self-Promotion Department: Come see the Biona Bards in "Family Matters" on February 3rd, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at Tales By the Sea. The concert is at the Malibu United Methodist Church, 31028 Morning View Drive, across from Zuma Beach. Doors open at 7 p.m.. For reservations or information, call Ann at 310-457-2385.