This week, everyone’s had trouble blogging, but that’s not why I’ve been quiet. On Monday, I lost interest in smoking during General Hospital – which I can’t explain – and simply didn’t smoke another cigarette. Sister #1, who shall remain pregnant for the foreseeable future, calls every day to offer positive reinforcement but it’s not necessary. On Tuesday nights, my girlfriends – some of whom lack a critical X chromasome – and Miss Sasha were a little shocked when I didn’t want a cigarette after they ate dinner. I can’t really explain this. All I can say is that it is so.

I *can* tell you how it feels. When I started gymnastics in the mid-seventies, girls didn’t dare start in the sport without years of ballet first. I had seven years of ballet before I began learning the basics of tumbling, so I can tell you this with certainty: when a person first tries to kick into a handstand, the body is young and rubbery and does not respond well to being upside-down. Gradually, the patient student learns to feel his or her own palms, the shoulders, the middle back, the hips, the knees, ankles and toes. Gradually, the student learns through kicking up many times against walls and falling down, or kicking up toward a spotter and slapping a shoulder that strength and a new sense of upside-down-ness grow. Time passes. Sometimes a student takes the body’s hints and moves forward. Sometimes not, and the student goes nowhere. Of the teenagers who take the hints of their bodies, some learn a secret – and it is a tremendous secret: the word ‘handstand’ is a misnomer. To stand upright, weight resting on one’s heels, is nothing. It’s ordinary, and there’s not really anything much to say about it. A handstand, however, is a contradiction in terms. A person doesn’t really stand on his or her hands so much as place the palms on the ground-most surface and push the whole body as straight and taut as the body can manage toward the toes, and if possible, past them an inch or so. It sounds crazy, but that’s what it is, and it you watch a really good athlete on the high bar or uneven bars, and try to feel where they’re putting their weight, you will see what I mean. It’s called amplitude and it’s only exotic if you’ve never studied gymnastics or wave function.

So there’s a gangly body, And it tries to be upside-down, which is a foreign sense of itself. And it reaches toward impossibly straight walls. And it resists the hands of persons knowledgeable in this endeavor. One day, the body kicks into handstand, and all the weight feels like it is stretched away from earth into the pointed toes, and the spotter, surprised, feels his hands instinctively note where the other, upside-down body is centered and balanced. That balance is now separate from the spotter in this moment, and the spotter moves his hands a centimeter, then another. The spotter knows first and now removes his hands. The student knows second: balance has been achieved. The body accepts inversion. The line away from earth is straight and perfect.

So. I have not smoked another cigarette in just about a week. It is not something I accomplished, really; I was simply there, and the time was right, I haven’t smoked a cigarette since last Monday, and I am stretched away from earth…

So the other day I was playing with my nephew the five-year-old engineer and realized: Oh. My. God! My triceps are flabby. I cannot believe my arms could be such fatty space aliens.

You have no way of knowing I was one of the young Title IX athletes – let’s say I was a few years behind the first girls – and that I vividly recall apologizing to boys for having muscular arms in the seventies when pretty girls had as much obvious musculature as rubber dolls. I lifted weights and did calisthenics while other girls studied Cosmo. At one point, I was doing about 250 military pushups a day in sets of 50. A chinning bar has always been installed in my bedroom doorways, and I used it. I opened my own pickle jars and expected to for the rest of my natural life.

Then I suffered an episode of Stupid and forgot to exercise for a few years while I was depressed and gained weight.

So after twenty years of twirling barbells and a few of “pass the marshmallows and kill me, please,” I had a bright idea, “Mamacita, get on the floor and see how many pushups you can still do.’ There was some stretching, some bending. I can stretch and bend. I got on my hands and feet (because girl pushups are for…girls…) and said, “One…and…a half…”

In the words of poet Boni Joi: “Humility helps.”

This afternoon, a woman I berated into getting an I-Turned-Forty-A Few-Years-Ago Mammogram mentioned she hesitated to take calcium. I stared at her. I hyperventilated a little. I’d just told her the whole faux-sad story about my lifelong-and-lost upper body strength when it became obvious that a dramatic gesture was necessary. I dropped to the floor to illustrate: ‘One…and…a half…” I got up. “We’re not children, lovey. Will you ask your pharmacist about the freaking calcium?”

This morning, I went to the orthodontist to get my braces tightened. Currently, my teeth ache, but that’s not the point. The orthodontist, who is either amused or extremely annoyed by anything I say or do, took one look at my braces and said, “What the hell have you been eating?”

I knew exactly what he meant. I’d been eating to build my blood count. “Beets,” I said, but I had misgivings. “When I ate beets and blueberries on the same day, I decided I should never do that again.”

“Jackpot,” he said.

This evening, my teeth are sore. It was difficult to eat dinner, by which I mean biting down felt like part of my skull might break off and make eating an engineering nightmare, and the fare was peas. Yeah, there’s just no way to…it’s not macho.

I haven’t had a cigarette since before my nap this afternoon. I nap. What, you don’t? Anyway, I could change my mind at any insomniac moment, but maybe not. I bought a bottle of wine because I wanted a bottle of gin, and if we have martinis we all want cigarettes and hookers – it’s a style thing, yes? I seldom drink on school nights, but I was trying to write. Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, was sleeping. The noise in my brain is turned up to a good rattling 11.

A new day might dawn, if only I weren’t at the pie counter in this Appalachian diner with Ernest Hemingway and Betty Buckley, and my order seems to be up…

This was a test post. You should not be alarmed. The test succeeded. The guys at the host company now call me by my first name, smile when I bat my eyelashes, pretend to understand what I’m talking about…Isn’t that what we all want from people we pay to admire us?

A good thing about the Blogosphere: many things happen in the outside world and bloggers tell readers all about these events. A bad thing: you can spend your week reading about a crappy candidate for U.S. Attorney General and by Friday you know more about him than you do about your mom. A week of being barely able to write permitted me plenty of reading time, and my brain is now full of stuff I’d like to scrub out with a wire brush. And bleach. Alberto Gonzales is now the blueberry stain on my cerebellum, and Condoleezza Rice is tomato paste on my frontal lobe, and just look at the gritty mess.

Invitations to Miss Sasha’s wedding went out this week. They’re crisp and to the point, belying the complete lunacy of the last month’s preparations. Someone under the mistaken impression that *anyone* will listen to me calls almost daily with an argument, or a grievance. Everyone wants to know what color I’ll be wearing. After all, I am the Mommy. Apparently everyone will be looking at me. If I had a buck for everytime someone said, “You CAN’T go shopping without ME!” I could pick up a shiny new pair of Doc Martens.

Yesterday, I read one of my essays on the tsunami relief efforts on the local college radio station that – depending on whom you believe – either *no one* listens to or *everyone* does. The stage fright was bad but not so bad I yakked in the booth. In fact, except for the part about people thinking I might mean what I say, doing radio sounds like a good idea, maybe. I think this now, from the security of the day job I seem to have been sentenced to but last night, holding my color-coded and numbered pages, I wondered if I were going to kick the bucket. My heart felt like it was going to burst through my sternum. I thought ‘Sweet fancy Moses, don’t let me become a Meatloaf song…’

Yeah. So that went well.

Since Friday, I’ve struggled with a connectivity problem at home. At first, I thought it was Blogger, because Blogger can be spiteful. Then I thought it was an equipment problem. Then maybe the ISP had singled me out for this particular shower of blessings. As of this morning, I just don’t know. I need a staff nerd.

It’s temporary, as all trials are. Still, I wish this one would reach its verdict and penalty phase.

I was thinking about the inauguration speech, and I realized finally what was bothering me. It was one oversized sestina, testosterone-bloated and pasteurized beyond recognition. Graduate students in literature remember the time they studied sestinas as “the semester I took up drinking.” From the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Enlarged Edition:

Sestina. The most complicated of the verse forms initiated by the troubadours. It is composed of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by an envoy of 3 lines, all of which are usually unrhymed. The function of the rhyme in the s[estina] is taken over by the recurrent pattern of end-words; the same 6 end-words occur in each stanza, but in a constantly shifting order which follows a fixed pattern.

If we let the letters A through F stand for the 6 end-words of a s[estina], we may schematize the recurrence patterns as follows:

Stanza

1: ABCDEF

2: FAEBDC

3: CFDABE

4: ECBFAD

5: DEACFB

6: BDFECA

envoy: ECA or ACE

Most commonly, the envoy or tornada, is further complicated by the fact that the remaining 3 end-words, BDF, must occur in the course of the lines, so that the 3-line envoy will contain all 6 recurrent words.

*************************************************************************

The definition goes on to explain who devised this form of torture so you know which of the troubadours it was you want to dig up, slap around and re-bury.

You can go look up a transcript of the inaugural speech or find it here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/20050120-1.html

…but before you do, imagine you’re an overeducated and overstuffed fool with a jingoist bent, and you’ve had all the fun you think you can get away with reusing the same words into oblivion. You can’t even hear yourself think for the way you’ve bent ‘oppression’ to mean ‘freedom’ and ‘plutocracy’ to mean ‘democracy.’ You’re bored, bored, bored. What can you do to add a little spice to your life? I got it. Take six words, plunk them down on a piece of paper and doodle in between. How about these six words:

freedom

liberty

tyranny

America

democracy

ideal

Now, you know that if you stick strictly to the sestina format, William Safire will be frowning at you before the second paragraph, so you add a few dull allusions and historically dumb patter. Maybe Safire’ll be distracted by Jenna’s inevitable and determined lipgloss application. Anyway, the thing’s already written, he’s retired and what’s he gonna do about it, hmm? He’s still sore about screwing up the inscription on the moon, anyhow. Let’s move on.

You’re a speechwriter determined to whack the pinata of Presidential speeches with the biggest stick you can find but you can’t stop giggling. Shoot, nobody in your demographic’s going to figure it out and those freaks in the Northeast are already slapping their foreheads everytime the Commander In Chief opens his mouth. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, boy…

Let us don mustaches and assume new identities. Let us try out French accents and join the Resistance. Please stand in profile under the streetlight so the angles of your lovely face appear and disappear. We cannot be seen together. Not in a time of war.

Let us meet on a corner in Prague and pretend to discuss the weather. Let us whisper through clenched teeth a few facts about Spain. There is freedom in the moment I am anxious for your safety when all I have to give is worry.

Let us close the dark curtains and dim the lights. Let us sing quietly as footfalls echo in the hallway. We smile when we are frghtened. We are waiting for explosions we know will come. There is no comfort like your trembling hand on my cheek.

Let us play at peace. Let us imagine what we will do when we can leave the house someday.

Let us remember we were never lovers and we never will be. Let us depart the way we came into shadows and smoke rings. If not for my fear, I would be nothing but longing. Your secret is not safe. I am missing a button.

This afternoon, I wrote an entry that evaporated – again – and the error message asked me what *I’d* done wrong. Had I done something exotic or different, I might buy that story.

As Mamie says, “Computers are trying to kill us.”

If I didn’t have constant automotive turmoil I’d have to find a new hobby. Monday night, I drove a modest five or six miles across the wilds of Piscataway in the bitter cold of a quiet early evening. Just about half way to my destination I noticed the temperature gauge was a little higher than I expected so I turned on the blower to vent some heat. That’s what you do in summer, right? About a mile later, I discovered sitting at red lights aggravated the situation, and a few hundred yard later at another light, the gauge topped out. I shut off the car while waiting to turn left. Now here’s the thing: as an old bat with memory loss in a suburban metropolis that can’t tear up and rework roads fast enough to suit trafficmeisters, I was reasonably sure I was on the right road, heading in the right direction, but *not* sure where to turn or how I would explain to AAA on a federal holiday if the car overheated and met its ignominious end on a deserted road, and would they please send someone before I froze to death?

When the light turned green, I turned the key. The car started without explosions or death rattles so I turned onto a road I thought probably used to lead to my destination but wasn’t so sure it still would. I knew that right or wrong, there was a gas station about half a mile ahead of me – or there used to be. Suddenly, the temperature gauge dropped all the way to the bottom and sort of floated back up to a normal temp for a freezing night and a car that was just warmed up. With that, I made straight for a parking space outside my friend’s apartment, and if I could’ve slapped my car across the face, I would have.

My friend had an appointment with an eye doctor some distance away, so we jumped in his less spiteful vehicle and drove off in the darkness. Some hours later, we returned, and despite nervous attempts at common sense thinking, I started the TataMobile and headed home. Just about the same time I thought the gauge was laughing at me I wondered if “Stand back, officer! My car is about to commit vehicular suicide” would be a good thing to say or my ticket to a lengthy stay in Orange Jumpsuit Land. Could I claim the Dennis Hopper Defense with a Chevy convertible if I refused to stop until my engine melted?

For the mechanic, it’s Day Two of the seige. He’s used to peculiar explanations. Last time I left a note with one of his teenage pumpjockeys: “After the addition of oil and wiper fluid, my car makes a noise like a swarm of angry bees. I’m developing a phobia.” When he called to tell me the car was fixed he said he was absolutely shocked when he started the car and moisture spraying a belt sounded EXACTLY like a swarm of angry bees, and the problem was fixed. This gives me hope that someday I may describe something to a medical professional and not feel I sound like Charlie Brown’s mother.

So. Cabbing it around town sounds so urbane. In reality, depending on which cab company one may find oneself in some very punk rock situations. For instance, if the driver stops the car to pick up the boyfriend he met in Rahway State and wants to take you to a second location, hand the driver cabfare and leap from the vehicle. I use the happy-go-lucky cab company that sends out cars with all sorts of dashboard lights flashing. Will I get home? Will I get to work? It’s more fun than betting the ponies.