Once while sitting in the Tri-Cities airport in northeastern Tennessee, a guy walked by me and handed me a book.

If you’re wondering, the Tri-Cities are Johnson City, Kingsport, and Bristol (which is half in Virginia and half in Tennessee). This area is the center of what is sometimes called “The Lost State of Franklin.” The State of Franklin lasted for four years in the 1780s, but was never recognized by the Congress. North Carolina, which claimed sovereignty over the counties involved at the time, won the war of rhetoric over the controversy. Obviously, since there is a North Carolina and there isn’t a Franklin.

The Tri-Cities airport claims “You can get anywhere from here” and then lists the cities to which you can fly from it. Apropos of my worry about “forever” the other day, “anywhere” includes: Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, and Orlando. So now you know.

The Tri-Cities themselves won the “All-America City” award in 1999. Also up that year, Fresno. I know where the hookers hang out in Fresno, so that you can go check with them about how proud they were to be a finalist.

2005 winners include:
1. Canoga Park, CA (which is not a city, it’s part of Los Angeles, but then come to think of it, Tri-Cities isn’t exactly a city either. Still, I live in L.A. and I’ve been to Canoga Park. Eh.)
2. Seward, Alaska (I’ve been there, liked it a lot. There was bingo on Thursday nights at the VFW).
3. Georgetown County, SC (I’ve been there too, it’s pretty and very historical. You’ll get grits with your meal, but don’t take the boat to what Honey and I call “Biting Fly Island.” If your experience is like ours on BFI, you’ll be trapped for four hours and your underwear will get wet).

2005 finalists (but losers) include:
Athens, GA (indy music/UGA=weak)
Park City, UT (film/skiing=weak)
Golden, CO (beer=weak actually this one is true, Coors beer is weak)

It does seem you have to put in your AAC dues, many finalists become winner the following year. And then once they win, the can use the logo which in turn “reinvigorates a community’s sense of civic pride.”

Has this entry gotten away from me? Oh, right. Small things.

Anyway, it was one of those “small stuff” kind of books, though this was pre-Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. It was one of those books, though. The guy who gave it to me said I looked smart (nice) and that I should read this (don’t tell me what to do) and then walked away (nice ass–actually I don’t remember how his ass was, but I do remember he was a bouncy walker).

It was an odd encounter and I threw the book away later. Still, I sometimes wonder what small things I would appreciate now that I don’t because I didn’t read the book.

Here are some small things that I do like now (no implied order):

* How raising my bike seat today made me ride better and harder and more efficiently. Smooth.

* Speaking of the bike, my cool Pearl Izumi pittard carbon gloves.

* The squishy fresco lizard my mother brought my niece from Spain. My niece didn’t like it and now it sits on my desk.

* The lizard’s friends, the teeny devil ducks. My Honey and I split the six-pack of teeny devil ducks. I have orange, blue and green, which means she must have red, yellow and purple. Is that right? I also like that she and I each have half of them. And I like when people notice them.

* That my office has a view.

* How soft Biscuit’s muzzle is.

* The amount of white on Halo (set off really nicely by the orange and black). It’s just right to me aesthetically.

* Hugging my honey in the morning. This morning she put my glasses on top of my head so I could get closer.

* Chipotle (the flavor and the restaurant)

* The way shops at the beach smell. Like rafts, I think.

* Cool days.

That’s enough for now. I’m off to the lost state of Franklin. Actually, I have to write a letter to all incoming students in my program for approval by the Integrated Communication Committee. They may live in the lost state of Franklin. Or not. But they may live in Canoga Park!

My therapist thinks it’s stupid that I told people I know about my blog. She’s not given to strong opinions generally, but she was firm in her expression of this one. It makes sense that she thinks that from a therapistic point of view. She thinks the blog has the potential to be a good release for my emotions and that in telling people I know about it, I will censor myself. She even suggested that I start another one.

This one is enough, I think. It makes me feel guilty just sitting around being static when there are not new posties.

Still, I see her therapistic point. She, like any good therapist, is my advocate even in my ongoing war against myself. That’s what I pay her for and trust her to do. And she’s certainly right that I censor myself here. See my previous post about truth for more discussion of that issue.

All of this is not to say I told everyone about my blog. My mother, for example=unaware. Ditto the rest of my natal family. I told AD about it, but she’s had the good sense (or lack of interest) not to ask about it.

Still, the blog thing is weird. You put yourself out there in a way that is at once distancing and intimate. I read Dooce’s blog and really like her way of presenting herself. I don’t, however, presume I know her or am her friend. She just posted about some thing she’s going to in Austin and how people (by which she means her fans) can meet her at a coffee shop. How odd, I thought, to reveal intimacies, have people “know” you in that way, and then agree to meet them. When you know nothing about them. People who didn’t live nearby seemed disappointed when she announced it, many of them suggesting other venues for meets and greets.

Fame is fame, I suppose. I know a former minor actress who had a stalker. The biggest role she had was as the third name in a big digit sequel (5 or 6, I forget which) to a horror/slasher movie. We find in others what we want to find.

None of this is to suggest I’m famous (I’m not), but that because my blog is read mostly by people I know, it functions differently than it would if it were read by strangers, Then I could emote in anonymity. Not so in spork world.

So, no rant today, just some musings about the lack of ranting.

And a couple of made up words.

When I get home every night before my honey, Biscuit celebrates by running around the yard. I call it her “dogabration” and sing a version of Celebration (yes, by Kool and the Gang). They’re not very clever alternative lyrics, but she takes such joy in my coming home that it seems worthy of a song.

The problem with Biscuit, of course, is that those moments of joy are so fundamentally brief relative to the moments where she really can’t contain her base-self. Honey calls her “all id,” which is right. See cat, chase cat. Want cat poop, eat cat poop. See sock, eat sock. She’s not stupid–she just has no filter.

Which can be my problem too, though in a very different way.

Since I’ve not been able to correct the no-filter problem in my life, I sometimes despair of doing it in Biscuit’s life.

In the meantime, at least there’s the dogabaration in which we “dogabrate and have a good time. So bring your Biscuits and your Halos too, we’re going to dogabrate and party with you.” Join us sometime.

So I had these baseball tickets for the World Baseball Classic at Angel stadium next week. I bought a strip (as they say in the biz). I had tickets for Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Honey and I are going Sunday and I had sold (face value, no service charge) the Tuesday tickets to a wacky woman who works in the Dean’s office. I was going to go on Thursday, but IHE business takes me to our nation’s capital next week. I asked around to see if anyone wanted them at work. No takers.

I then thought I’d just give them away on craigslist. I like the free section and I don’t want to sell tickets to a stranger. Weird thing.

So I post them on craigslist. I described them and asked people to send me their name and address. I said the first e-mail with an address that made it to my mailbox would get them. I check an hour later and found 21 e-mails.

A lot of people asked me to e-mail them back. Some left their phone numbers. Others left pleas about how their dad loved baseball. One sent a picture of a child and no other information.

One said that he had been she had been trying to get tickets to the WBC “since forever.” I resisted the temptation to e-mail her back with the www.mlb.com link. There are tickets available for $12 each in the same section as mine (I just checked). And forever could only be since, say, last fall when the WBC was announced. I had always thought of it as longer.

It’s sort of the angels dancing on the head of a pin. If the answer is one, I’ll be as dissapointed as I am now knowing that forever is less than six months.

One person replied to the follow-up where I said the tickets were gone asking if they were still available. Um, no.

A couple of people wanted to make sure they were “contacting the right guy” before they gave their address. Now, I understand hesitating about givine one’s address out on one level. On the other hand, I offered the things for free.

I got some phone numbers and an offer to come pick them up.

Several people thanked me for offering them.

The “winner” (she was the third to get her e-mail in, but the first to include her address) wanted to take her six year old kid. I hope they have a great time (and that she’s telling the truth). And to the people who tried, sorry I couldn’t help you all and thanks to those who were kind.

I may give something away again soon. I liked it.

I miss Kirby Puckett already. Happy baseball season.

We thought a corner house was good. We were wrong. Our fence gets tagged, our “strip” between the sidewalk and the street is a dumping ground for sofas. Our big Oleander bush holds many treasures not our own. Today’s haul==an old director’s chair, a lamp shade, and a really old radio. Plus some random piece of electrical equipment.

Our neighbor came over to tell me that he saw the kids who tagged the fence (second time this week). I thanked him and sat down to fill out the second request for graffiti removal I’ve done in 96 hours. When I called about the sofa that someone dumped, the lady said, “you called in January.”

“This is a new one.”

We both sighed.

The Dean arranged CPR training for the “team” today. By which she meant the main faculty people in each unit and the office manager in each unit. I decided I couldn’t go with just OM and made AD come too. AD was willing. It was one of those things. There were some funny moments, like when the OM of another unit asked if we should strip people before we performed CPR. And when I pointed out that the “do not try to put organs back into the body cavity” advice was just good common sense. As was the notion that just born babies are slippery and you might drop them.

They had those CPR dummies and I somehow managed (thank goodness) to get out of crawling around on the floor. If anyone has a heart attack lying on a table, I’m your woman. It was good actually because my left knee doesn’t like me. I did feel like a weak sister, given that the Dean did it on the floor and she has at least 15 years on me. Still. Collapse on the table. Go ahead.

The whole thing gave me a headache and a neck ache. Which just shows how unable I am to function right now. It was effectively a “free” day and I couldn’t deal with the freedom. Somebody chain me to my computer!

The room the training was in is one of the nicer rooms on campus, big and bright with excellent equipment. But the chairs that room has. Sigh. They’re rigid narrow little assholes. They don’t twist, they don’t recline. And by the end of the day I couldn’t look side to side at all.

These kinds of things make me contemplate the random. Like how many earrings AD has in her ear (as I stare over her head) while my neck still works. Why I can’t stop looking at the Dean. Why the Assistant Dean wants to try out the portable defibrillator (aka the AED) so much.

That’s not him in the picture and we didn’t learn how to use one, but he was really glad when the trainer mentioned they could be bought at COSTCO. For $1500. So, if you’re going to have a heart problem here at my IHE, do it in the Associate Dean’s office. He really wants to say, “CLEAR!”

I’ll get a certificate. I will not drop the babies, I will not use the AED, I will not try to shove your organs back into you.

But if you’re gonna die, do it up high. Ok? Ok.

After some heavy blogtries, I want to change it up and make a confession that could change how people think about me. I love lesbian romance. I mean I heart it. I do have some standards and I will try to outline them for you now.

Some background: me=ubergeek who used to get in trouble as a child for reading after I was supposed to have gone to bed. Came out to myself without a particular woman in the picture. Started going down to feminist bookstore in D.C. It was way easier walking in there than into the GL bookstore. I just tried to find the name of it and it seems to have gone away like the one here in L.A. The one in D.C. was called Lammas and closed (as best I can tell) in 2000 and the L.A. store, called Sisterhood closed in 1999. Thanks Borders!

So anyway, I would go down to Lammas and buy novels. Naiad was the big lesbian publisher in those days. At the time Naiad published two books a month as did Seal Press. (Both Seal and Naiad have since gone out-of-business–I didn’t mean for this to be a theme). They weren’t good books. Really, I promise. While I am not the most thoughtful reader of fiction the world has ever produced, I can tell the difference between crap and not crap. These books were crap.

Here’s how they’d go. Woman X is alone in (you choose) a cabin, a casino, a spaceship. She meets Woman Y and there’s an energy that she can’t explain. They argue, maybe someone is killed, maybe the hyperdrive for interplanetary exploration goes out. There’s lots of tension. They then have sex. Woman X is blown away. She doesn’t know what to do. She runs away from the situation. She has an epiphany. She finds woman Y. They reconcile and have sex again. The book ends and they live happily ever after.

See how appealing that is?

Well, it is to me. I go in and out of liking this stuff but I’m back in it now. (I was in a funk about the end of the Willow Tara thing on Buffy for a couple of years). I dragged my honey to see Imagine Me and You and then provoked a fight about it when she kept worrying about whether the flower shops Woman Y (see above) owned in the movie would close because they had sex on the roses or because she kept running out to find Woman X.

I didn’t care. I like regular romance well enough, but I’ll deal with just about any version of this story I can find.

What I don’t like: anthologies, especially “real-life” anthologies, stories that end badly, “horror” versions of the above (though scifi and mystery versions are great).

What I do like: less build-up, more romance. And if it’s a movie or a t.v. show, lots of good passionate romantic kissing and cuddling. If it’s a book, I like a things a little (NOT a lot) more explicit.

I am currently reading (in between weekly New Yorkers, monthly Outsides, and the L.A. Times) a book called Colder Than Ice. One thing you should know about this kind of lesbian novel is that there is one thing you can count on besides the plot outlined above. It will have a REALLY bad cover. Not Harlequin cheesy, just badly and amateurly done. This one, published by an imprint I’ve never heard of called Quest Books, looks like this:

Nice huh? The plot is the basic one outlined above, with Allie, the archaeologist, as Woman X and Michaela, the psychologist, as Woman Y. The setting: an archaeological dig in … Antarctica. Of course. I’m about halfway through. No sex yet, but I can feel it coming. They’re stuck in a blizzard alone, all all alone, in a snow pod of some sort. They’re in danger. And together at last.

These novels are oversized (inevitably)and run about $18 today. They were $12 in the heady D.C. days.

I could analyze why I like these things so much, but my therapist and I have more pressing matters to attend to and, in some sense, I don’t care.

My honey brought me flowers and a balloon after I accused her of not being romantic after not liking Imagine Me and You. I may try to get her to watch Saving Face but I’m worried that it’s not going to be romantic enough for me. I have a friend who loves romance of any type so much that her knees wiggle when she thinks about it. It’s nice. She’ll probably like that I like this stuff. I don’t know if she knows.

Anybody want Colder Than Ice when I’m done?

One of my academic interests is festivals. It’s an odd thing really, as the great festivals are very Catholic and I am not. I’ve been to Carnivale in Venice and behaved badly. I was drunk and young, but it was not my shining moment. I also went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans pre-Katrina and have felt very wistful about New Orleans as I read and watch the coverage of this year’s event. This despite the fact that my Mardi Gras experience was very lonely in the way that festivals can be incredibly isolating for an outsider. It probably didn’t help that I experienced MG without any mind-alteration. But I wasn’t as young or as stupid then.

My experience with “real” festival has been very corporal, really. I remember the dizzy drunk sensation of Venice, the pounding headache of New Orleans, getting my period in the middle of the Palio, surrounded by 100,000 people with no way out.

As I said, it’s an odd thing, I think, that I’m so interested in festival from a scholarly point of view. I’m not one to let go and my indulgences (to some degree) are a thing of the past. Certainly my alcohol indulgences. I like the tropes of festival and the structure of it fascinates me. The experience of it requires more self-release than I’m willing to give over to as I wallow around in the back end of my 30s.

Carnivale and Mardi Gras are two versions of the same festival, of course. The pre-Lenten celebration before the repentance of Lent. Easter is late this year, so Mardi Gras is late. It should come in the coldness of February in my mind, not the bright promise of March. As a kid in a Protestant household, I didn’t spend much time thinking about what I needed to “give up.” I knew that the liturgical season had changed, because my mom wore a different stole over her robe (she’s a minister).

In case you’re wondering; most Sundays Presbyterians wear green stoles–Lent is purple, Easter is white, Advent is purple, Christmas is white, Pentecost is Red. There are other days that are white, and a couple where red is an option (from the worship FAQ on the PCUSA web site). As a kid, I liked it when the colors changed. Now, of course, as an adult (and a folklorist), I recognize the power of color in theological symbolism. Red days are loaded in ways that green days can never be. And purple now makes me think of change while white makes me think of promise.

I don’t go to church much, but I think a lot about the nature of religion in my life and in others’ lives. I often (and this will probably upset some folks, so be ready ok?) find myself in the company of friends who eschew faith and bash it heartily. I understand why, especially given our current political leaders’ screwed up positions on the nature of belief in the public arena and the scary way in which most people in my adopted state manifest their beliefs… Still, I listen to their harsh words and worry about my silence and the way it implies approval of their attitudes. That’s too mild a description really, but I’ll let it go at that.

I was in a meeting last week and a colleague of mine (a guy I don’t like a lot but have some respect for) said to me “if we are judged in the hereafter I want to have done the right thing here.” I was startled. Liberal academic don’t say things like that in public meetings. And yet I found myself (in a meeting about strategic planning of all things) wondering about what it means to be a good person. My honey believes (and she is as moral a person as I know) that what we do in the here and now is all there is. I’m not sure that’s true. She’s very forgiving of my doubts. This weekend we talked some about my criticism of people who have trouble reconciling faith and their sexual identity. She was more right than I was, as is so often the case.

So, here on Ash Wednesday, what do I have to say?

One, that I am glad to have not overindulged yesterday, though I liked looking at the festival pictures (as usual).

Two, that I’m glad I didn’t have to have a filet-o-fish with my Catholic co-workers.

Three, that I forgive myself for excesses in Carnivale in 1988.

Four, that I may no longer NOT say anything when faith gets bashed. Fair warning #2

Five, that I still don’t KNOW what will happen in the hereafter, but I’m hoping that there will be one.

Six, that I hope the hereafter feels and looks like it should (which is nothing like what festival has felt like in my life, at least).

Seven, that promise of better things (whether they take the form of Easter or not) be with all those I love and with those who need it–which is pretty much everybody, I guess.

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