beyond the pale

UPDATE, SUNDAY 10-15: Okay. It’s back. For now. !?#@?%!?!

Um, if you’re seeing what I’m seeing — the blog is having problems. Again. Sorry. Getting tired of this, really tired.

Flipping open the book for today’s random entry.

Okay. Ready?

Today’s place to see before you die IS:

LA SAGRADA FAMILIA
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

To finish or not to finish? The enormous Sagrada Familia remains the incomplete, roofless masterpiece of the eccentric genius Antoni Gaudi. The Catalan architect, a national hero, was run over and killed by a tram in 1926 before he could complete his most bizarre, controversial creation. The most famous proponent of modernismo (the Catalan avant-garde style, unique to the region, that flourished from 1890 to 1920), Gaudi put Barcelona on the architectural map. La Sagrada Familia is his most emblematic and idiosyncratic work, Art Nouveau with a twist.

Gaudi tapped into the same playful Catalan spirit one sees in the work of Picasso, Miro, and Dali, and more often than not avoided straight lines in favor of flowing, organic forms. He created a number of other surreal works, such as Parc Guell, Casa Batllo, and several private homes. But the fantasist is best known for La Sagrada Familia, a melted sand castle frozen in mid-creation. Only the crypt, apse, and facade were completed before his death. Gaudi himself is buried in the crypt, where a museum displays scale models showing how he envisioned the church. Authorities say it may not be completed until well into the 21st century — if ever. WHAT: site. WHERE: Placa de la Sagrada Familia. COST: admission.

This one is fascinating to me. Please check out those links above. The Casa Batllo link is a little bratty — I mean, it gave me a hard time — but once I got past all the preliminaries and SAW what he made, I was just agape. Truly unlike anything I’ve seen. (Also — tip to myself. Sometimes, Tracey, clicking on the French flag means the page WILL BE IN FRENCH and you didn’t pay attention in college French because the professor insisted on calling you Simone — “becawzz Traaayceeee eeezn’t Fraaawnch” and because she looked like a mole. Merci, Professor Wind in the Willows.)

So … I didn’t know a thing about this architect until flipping to this page in the book and now I can’t stop clicking on these images. Oh, listen to me. What a jerk. Like because I’ve clicked on a bunch of pictures I’m now some kind of Gaudi expert. PLEASE get a grip on yourself, Tracey. Anyway ….. More here. And here.

His style is so odd, so free, so like stuff you dream, so “I’m just gonna do whatever I want.” It’s weird and amazing.

Okay. Now I REALLY wanna see this stuff in person. Who’s coming with me?

Hey — fellow blogger and blogfriend Nightfly has gone and gotten himself engaged!!

So head on over to his place and offer some hearty congratulations, will you?

Oh, and also?

Please be sure to pile on some words of wisdom and unsolicited advice, too. Because that will be fun. AND because I don’t want to be the only one who offered words of wis — I mean, um, unsolicited advice.

AND because — I can’t delete it NOW, peeps!!

So GO, quick like a bunny, to The Nightfly and be cheerily obnoxious, PLEASE.

I’m short on time this week …. annnnd getting ready for the move to the new blog, so please bear with me. It’s looking like the move will happen within the next week. When it’s all ready, I’ll put up a link here so you can come on over and visit me in my new digs, if you’d like. I mean, you’re all invited!

So my days here at “Worship Naked” are coming to a close, and I’m a little sad about that, but I’m really happy with the way things are shaping up over at the new place with the new name!

All change takes some adjustment, but I hope — once we get past that squeaky awkward newness phase — you’ll all like it and feel comfortable there, too.

So, I’ll put the coffee on and get it all purtied up for you. And even if you’re not crazy about it, you have to promise not to threaten me with gun violence, mmkay?

Let’s say you have a friend who’s soon going to be adopting a bouncing baby boy. Nice, huh?

And now let’s also say that they’re naming that bouncing baby boy ….. Tor.

What do you do?

Now I, personally, do this:

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
GGGGODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY??????
UMMMM…AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

But, I’m just curious ….. (and we seem to be on a name theme, lately) …..

Do you
Would you
Could you
Have you ever

SAID anything to a friend on the verge of this kind of blatant child abuse????

For your email! Subject: optimism wetsuit

I was dismayed, however, that your missive contained absolutely NO information on how someone like me, a woman trapped in a ropeless well of non-optimism, might procure this useful-sounding garment. Someone like me, a woman bushwacking her way through a dense jungle of non-optimism, could truly use this article that you chose merely to hint at. For someone advertising an item as happy and hopeful as an “optimism wetsuit,” this seems needlessly cruel.

Ethan, you disappoint me. I don’t think you know what optimism is.

And be careful. Those optimism wetsuits can cause some nasty chafing.

I’ve been reading “Cold Comfort Farm” by Stella Gibbons. And Missy tagged me — several days ago, actually, with a book meme. So these two things go together, you see.

I’m supposed to:

1) Turn to page 123 of a book I’m reading.

Okay. Done.

2) And find the 5th sentence.

Wait a sec. Done.

3) Oh, and post it here. Okay. Here ’tis:

Her voice had a breathless, broken quality that suggested the fluty sexless timbre of a choir-boy’s notes (only choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost.)

Oh, I am in love with Stella Gibbons!

I fell in love with the movie Cold Comfort Farm several years ago, blabbed about it incessantly to anyone who’d listen, had one male friend, I remember, rent the movie and then complain about it to me, saying, “It was funnier watching you act it out,” thought slightly less of said male friend forever afterwards, and promptly put the movie into my regular rotation of Movies That Never Fail to Cheer Me, Tracey, Up.

I mean, look. You have Kate Beckinsale before repeated surgeries gave her all those sharp angles. She’s so lovely in this: soft and round and real. It was actually my first exposure to her and when I saw her in something a few years later — I don’t remember what — she was just so sparse and geometrical. I do remember gasping, though, and whispering to My Beloved, “Is that Kate Beckinsale from Cold Comfort Farm??” and then seconds later, “What have they DONE to her??” She was “cut” to look more like a star. And I guess it worked, but I SO prefer her earlier incarnation. Everything about it. Her pudgy nose. Her curvy shape. Her acting, even.

She plays Flora Poste, a young lady who “likes to make things tidy.” After the death of her parents, she receives offers of various appalling living arrangements from various appalling relatives. She chooses Cold Comfort Farm, where the situation with her relatives there — the Starkadders — sounds at least “interesting and appalling.”

So the sensible, cool-headed Flora marches headlong into the dung heap of eccentricity and backwardness that is her extended family at Cold Comfort Farm. They’re a rotting mess and she likes things tidy. Naturally, it’s the perfect project.

I mean, there’s poor old Adam, who cletters (um, washes) the dishes with a twig.

There’s Elfine, who wanders about the countryside in her green cloak like “a Pharisee of the woods.”

There’s Cousin Judith, gloomily obsessed with her son Seth — who’s only obsessed with the talkies.

There’s Cousin Amos (hilariously played by Ian McKellan in the movie), a preacher at The Church of the Quivering Brethren, who preaches hellfire, hellfire — nothing to cool that burnin’! — with the cheery reminder, “THERE’LL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL!!”

And then there’s Aunt Ada Doom, the wizened matriarch of this grim and smelly clan, who stays in her room — has for years and years — forever proclaiming she “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when she was a child. Um, 70 years ago, gammie. But still, she holds them all in thrall because of it.

So, you see, there’s a LOT to tidy up here.

This is all rambly, I know. But I’m gonna post an excerpt here from the book — because I am in love with Stella Gibbons, now. Her writing. The humor. Her descriptions. This excerpt — if you’re paying attention, just gets funnier and funnier. I keep rereading it — all because of the love I now have for a dead woman.

This is our first glimpse inside the head of Aunt Ada Doom (ellipses are the author’s, asterisks mine — my cuts are small, really just a couple sentences where she catalogs the entire family, name by name. I didn’t feel like typing it.):

Aunt Ada Doom sat in her room upstairs …. alone.

There was something almost symbolic in her solitude. She was the core, the matrix, the focusing point of the house …. and she was, like all cores, utterly alone. You never heard of two cores to a thing, did you? Well, then. Yet all the wandering waves of desire, passion, jealousy, lust, that throbbed through the house converged, web-like, upon her core-solitude. She felt herself to be a core …. and utterly, irrevocably alone.

The weakening winds of spring fawned against the old house. The old woman’s thoughts cowered in the hot room where she sat in solitude ….. She would not see her niece …. Keep her away ….

Make some excuse. Shut her out. She had been here a month and you had not seen her. She thought it strange, did she? She dropped hints that she would like to see you. You did not want to see her. You felt … you felt some strange emotion at the thought of her. You would not see her. Your thoughts wound slowly round the room like beasts rubbing against the drowsy walls. And outside the walls the winds rubbed like drowsy beasts. Half-way between the inside and outside walls, winds and thoughts were both drowsy. How enervating was the warm wind of the coming spring ….

When you were very small — so small that the lightest puff of breeze blew your little crinoline skirt over your head — you had seen something nasty in the woodshed.

You’d never forgotten it.

You’d never spoken of it to Mamma — but you’d remembered all your life.

That was what had made you …. different. That — what you had seen in the tool-shed — had mad your marriage a prolonged nightmare to you.

Somehow you had never bothered about what it had been like for your husband ….

That was shy you had brought your children into the world with loathing. Even now, when you were seventy-nine, you could never see a bicycle go past your bedroom window without a sick plunge at the apex of your stomach … in the bicycle shed you’d seen it, something nasty, when you were very small.

That was shy you stayed here in this room. You had been here for twenty years, ever since Judith had married and he husband had come to live on the farm. You had run away from the huge, terrifying world outside these four walls against which your thought rubbed themselves like drowsy yaks. Yes, that was what they were like. Yaks. Exactly like yaks.

Outside in the world there were potting-sheds where nasty things could happen. But nothing could happen here. You saw to that. None of your grandchildren might leave the farm. **** None of them must go out into the great dirty world where there were cowsheds in which nasty things could happen and be seen by little girls.

You had them all. You curved your old wrinkled hand into a brown shell, and laughed to yourself. You held them like that … in the hollow of your hand, as the Lord held Israel. None of them had any money except what you gave them. ***You had your heel on them all. They were your washpot, and you had cast your shoe out over them.

**** How like yaks were your drowsy thought, slowly winding round in the dim air of your quiet room. The winter landscape, breaking under spring’s pressure, beat urgently against the panes.

So you sat there, living from meal to meal (Monday, pork; Tuesday, beef; Wednesday, toad-in-the-hole; Thursday, mutton; Friday, veal; Saturday, curry; Sunday, cutlets). Sometimes …. you were so old …. how could you know? …. you dropped soup on yourself …. you whimpered …. Once Judith brought up the kidneys for your breakfast and they were too hot and they burned your tongue …. Day slipped into day, season into season, year into year. And you sat here, alone. You …. Cold Comfort Farm.

Sometimes Urk came to see you, the second child of your sister’s man by marriage, and told you that the farm was rotting away.

No matter. There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.

My head exploded last night.

It was the simultaneous, national broadcasts of both of my generally much-maligned San Diego sports teams — the Padres and the Chargers — that did it. I kept clicking back and forth between them like a crazy person. None of this docile, civilized, “record-one-while-watching-the-other,” 21st century jazz. NO! I had to know RIGHT then! I prefer my disappointments in floods, not trickles, thank you! I HAD TO KNOW RIGHT THEN!

So there I sat.

Clicking madly.

Breathing heavily.

My Beloved …. um, ignoring me. His head buried so far in a book that his head WAS the book. Oh, he was watching the game, but I’m pretty sure he was using the book to shield himself from having to watch me, too. Clever fellow. Because mostly, I scream and howl and flail about during these things:

“Look! LOOK!! LaDainian! LA. DAIN. EEE. AN!! Look at ‘im go!! Yeah! YEAH! YEEEAAAH!!”

(And then come the random vowel noises like: “OOOOOOOOOO!!” and “AAAAAAAAAAAA!!” and “EEEEEEEEEEE!!”

Sickening, really.

So the Padres? Eh, they choked. No surprise there.

But the Chargers? Well, all they did was beat the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers — frankly stomping on them in the second half!

Um, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

And then my head exploded.

All right. I’m tired of “Tracey.” I’ve never liked it, actually. It has no music, no rhythm, no substance.

“Tracey. Traa-ceey. Traaaaa-ceeeeeey. Lord. What a dippy name.

Ohhh! The tragedy of a life consigned to silliness and fecklessness by virtue of the cotton candy weight of one’s name! If you’re reading this and you’re name is Tracey, too, you KNOW what I mean.

“Traaaaaaa-ceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!”

I once asked my mom what other names were discussed when she was pregnant with me, so that I could pout later about who I might have been.

“Oh, well. Let’s see. Your father wanted Tanya ….”

bleeeaaaahhhhh ….

“…. and I wanted Stacey …..”

… ugh! bigger bleeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh ….

“….. so Tracey was a compromise.”

So I guess I should be happy, right? I mean, had they gone the other way, I could’ve ended up as Stanya.

Back in the days when we thought we could get pregnant, my mom would volunteer name choices. Sometimes, she’d list them on random pieces of paper and hand them to me. Or sometimes, she’d choose to discuss them in very public venues. Like Bed, Bath and Beyond about 10 years ago.

“I’ve thought of more names for you.”

I turned away, becoming utterly entralled with a smiley face shower curtain.

“Uh-huh,” I muttered. She kept going. She always DOES.

“How about Chardonnay?”

“WHAT??”

“Chardonnay. And if you have twins — there’s twins in the family, you know (I did) — you can name the other one Chablis.”

“Mom, are you joking? Is this a joke?” I turned back to look at her face. She just smiled and blinked at me.

“No, I’m serious. They’re different!”

“Mom ….. they’re wines. Those are names of wines. You HATE wine and alcohol and all people who drink. Why would you saddle your grandchildren with big ol’ boozy names like that?” I went overboard for effect. “Plus, I’m pretty sure that freak Kathie Lee Gifford named her yappy little dogs Chardonnay and Chablis. And what if one’s a BOY? Are you gonna be all, “GO, CHABLIS!!” at his football games? No. NO.”

A woman standing nearby glanced at me with pity. Then she wisely moved away.

“She’s not a freak.”

“What??”

“Kathie Lee Gifford. She’s not a freak.”

“Okay, Mom. Whatever. But those are dog names. NO.”

We wandered around in silence. She pouted and drooped. Thick air. Uncomfortable. Oh, look. A non-skid shower mat. Fascinating. Oh, a toothbrush holder. I need one of those. Ten minutes go by, with us meandering apart. I thought the subject was dropped. But she crept up behind me.

“Okay. What about Teal?”

“Teal?”

“Yeah!”

“Mom. It’s a color.”

“So?”

“Okaay. Lemme ask you: is it a boy’s name or a girl’s name?”

“Well, you wouldn’t name a boy ‘Teal’, Tracey.”

(Yeah, Tracey. Duh.)

“It’s a girl’s name. It’s pretty. And different.”

“Yeah, Mom. It’s different. You’re right about that.”

“I think colors make nice names.”

“Okaay. Well …. then I like Taupe. Taupe is Teal’s brother. Taupe. Teal and Taupe.”

She rolled her eyes at me, spoke crisply.

“Tracey, you don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“I’m being serious. I like Taupe.”

She stomped off to the bedding section. I looked for pillows to scream into. Another woman close by rolled up with her stroller, whispering and chuckling.

“I’m sorry. Did I just hear your mom say she liked the name Teal?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Uh-huh.” I looked down at her baby. “Just curious …. what’s your baby’s name?”

“Emily.”

I gasped in mock shock.

“What?? Not Teal?”

“Um … no. Just Emily.” She turned to wheel away, scrunched her forehead. “Well, good luck.”

And off she went with her normal baby named Emily.

Seconds later and Mom was back. Round 3. Pouty, defensive. But, still, undaunted.

“Okay. I know one. How about Waverly?”

“Waverly?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you get that off a box of crackers?”

“Crackers? What crackers?”

“Mom, you know what crackers. You always have them in the house. Those ones in the green box? That break apart? It’s a cracker, Mom. A cracker.”

And suddenly, I lost it. I heard myself overenunciating the word “cracker” and I was gone. “Craaac–kerrrr.”

I couldn’t help it. I was crying with laughter. I sneaked a swipe at my face with a bath towel.

Mom was not amused. She was dead serious with these names involving wines and crackers and such. Seemed to me all that was missing was a nice, soft cheese.

“Well, I’m just trying to help,” she sulked.

“Okay, Mom. I know. I know. I’ll think about it,” I lied.

“No, you won’t.”

“Okay. You’re right. I won’t.”

And those were my mom’s name suggestions many years after I became Tracey, so I really need to keep this whole name thing in perspective, I guess. I mean, I could have been TEAL! OR CHABLIS! OR GOD KNOWS WHAT OTHER RANDOM WORD STRUCK HER FANCY!

Still, it’s just so strange to me that something so entwined with your identity is not chosen by you, it’s chosen by people whose tastes you may ending up laughing at years later. Of course, people can legally change their first names and I could have done that long ago, I suppose, and then been forever disowned by my Mom for doing so.

When my sister was pregnant with Piper, she told me the names they were considering. They knew it was a girl and she wanted Piper and he wanted “Jensen.” But Piper is a Piper. She is not a Jensen. Piper is the right name for that girl. It’s perfect. I don’t know if she’ll feel that way when she grows up, but right now, she seems to really love her name. It just suits her.

Sometimes people get exactly the name that suits them. They grow into that name and the fit is perfect, no gaps or tightness or weird puckers. Just a seamless meshing of persona and name.

But sometimes, they don’t. It’s too tight. The wrong color. (Like Teal.) They feel they’re not at their best walking around, wearing that name.

Like me.

So what to do about this? Well, ask My Beloved, of course. Put him on the spot. He LOVES stuff like that!

“Okay. Pretend my name is not Tracey. Give me a different name. What is it?”

Dread, people. A look FULL of dread. And divorce.

Finally, he said:

“Okay. Kate.”

“Why Kate?

“It’s regal and simple.”

“Okay. That’s nice …”

“Or Lucy.”

“Lucy? Why Lucy?”

“I like Lucy. It’s funny.”

Sooo …… is this “Kate” …. (well, nothing simple about that hair — we’ve discussed this fright wig already)

And this “Lucy”??

All righty. There you have it: I AM LUCY KATE!

Now …. do any of YOU feel you were given a raw deal when it comes to your name and, if so, what would you change it to?

Share, please.