Quote of the day

"If Americans are so repulsed by gay sex, perhaps the solution is to just allow gays to marry and have kids. After all, everyone knows that parents of young children have no time for sex."—Gersh Kuntzman, Newsweek, Aug. 11.

"Abby-someone. Abby Normal."

Well, I could've told you this: Harvard faces shortage of "normal" brains. (In their brain bank, not in their faculty and student body; or at least, the article only addresses the brain bank.) Apparently people who donate brains (post-mortem, of course) usually send them the "diseased" ones (and I'm quoting from the article, so don't yell at me for being politically incorrect): the ones with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and the like. But they (Harvard, not the brains) also need so-called "normal" ones—both to compare and contrast, and also to see if the brains of people who, in life, didn't exhibit abnormal brain symptoms, have the potential for abnormalities, which would indicate things like the age of onset of various diseases and possible ways to screen for them.



I'm not saying it's not a problem for the researchers; I just find the headline very amusing. "Harvard faces a shortage of 'normal' brains. Of course! No normal person wants to go there..."



(Me? Yale '97, Trumbull College. And Harvard, in the immortal words of the Yale Precision Marching Band, sucks dead goats.)

Alarming art history fact of the day

The Venus de Milo was discovered in Florence in 1820 in a pile of marbles destined for a lime kiln. J.: "So basically some worker happened to look down and said 'Hey, this one looks nice, let's keep it'?" Me: "Apparently." J.: "So they could've burned her arms the week before."



Yikes. Never mind the burning of the Library of Alexandria...how much Greek and Roman marble statuary was incinerated without a thought, without malice, as just another heap of raw material for a furnace?

I grow old, I grow old...*

Today a teenage girl called me "ma'am." Oh, man, do I feel old.



*I do have the bottoms of my trousers rolled, but that's only because my pants are too long.

Weighty matters

J. and I have both lost quite a bit of weight in the past few months—he through exercise and a diet of non-processed foods (which leaves out just about everything with fat and salt), and I mainly through being uninterested in eating. But we've recently both reached the dreaded Diet Plateau, and this morning, he said, "I've figured it out":

I've figured out why it's so hard to lose weight after a certain point. This is your body's life savings. You've scrounged up all the change that was in the couch, you've gone through all the old pants to find the dollar bills that went through the wash, you've taken all the jars of pennies to the bank, and now you're looking at the 401K. And your body's saying, "You want me to give it up? Yeah, buddy. Make me."

In case anyone was wondering

Still here.



"Life. Don't talk to me about life."—Marvin the Paranoid Android, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Zhaba story

A message from a Russian reader about "zhaba" being "toad" in Russian reminded me that I'd a) taken out the blurb in my sidebar about the literal meaning of "zhaba," and b) never posted the longer "what it means to me" story. So here goes.



First, the literal meaning: "zhaba" is "frog" or "toad" in various Eastern European languages; when I encounted it in Ukrainian, the translation in my dictionary was "frog."



Second, my meaning: For my senior project in college, I translated a film scenario by a Ukrainian director. (Ukrainian is the non-English language I know best, although I haven't used it for a while.) There was a line in which one of the characters was having an attack of angina, and it used the word "zhaba." I came up with what I thought was a pretty nice translation, although I don't specifically remember what it was, about how he felt "like he was choking on a frog." Then I took it to my advisor, and she told me that "zhaba" can also just mean "an attack of angina." Humph. So much for my metaphor. Okay, I thought, but I'm going to get frogs into this translation somehow!



Months went by; days before the project was due, as I was racing through the translation of the climactic battle scene, I came across the line "The bombs going off sounded like huge frogs croaking in a marsh." In the margin of my notebook I wrote "FROGS!" in great big letters, and underlined it a few times; I was ridiculously happy about it. I finished the project in three solid days of no sleep—typed up the translation, wrote the introduction, added the footnotes, annotated the bibliography—and just before I took it to the printer, exhausted and bordering on hallucinatory, I added the title page, concluding it with the Cyrillic character for "zh" and the words "Copyright 1997 Zhaba Productions."



When I woke up the next day, I was able to think more clearly about why I'd had that urge to put "zhaba" on the title page. It had come to symbolize all the things that go on in the background of creating a work of art—the notes for a novel, the sketches for a painting, the preproduction of a film, the rehearsals and the near-chaotic backstage activities of a play—that the audience or viewer or reader never notices, maybe never even knows about, but that are important, meaningful, even vital to the artist.



I don't know if I'm much of an artist; I'm not making any claims for how good my work is; but good or not, it's always been there. All my life I've written stories and novels, performed and composed and conducted music, acted and written and directed theater, even made a few forays into filmmaking and graphic design. And the things that linger aren't the performances or the finished works, but everything that went into them: the research, the "I can't do this" panics, the "good God this will work!" triumphs, clashing with some personalities and unexpectedly finding friendships with others. They've become a part of me; they've shaped me. And I've been fortunate enough to find a symbol, or at least a signifier, to enfold it and hold it in my mind: Zhaba.



Or if you prefer Cyrillic: