zirconium

I did not have bovines on my mind at the start of the holiday weekend, but when Here & Now's segment on Hawaiian cowboys streamed from my car radio on my drive home from Bates Nursery, I figured I was being steer-ed both to borrow the book (Aloha Rodeo) from the library and acknowledge the moo-vement of the critters through multiple realms of my life, including my Thursday-Friday binge-read through a fistful of "Texas Cattleman's Club" Harlequins (I don't remember how the November 2014 boxed set landed in my queue, but I'm guessing the dude in a suit cuddling a cat for Sheltered by a Millionaire might've caught my eye). Even Duolingo is in on the theme:

Speaking of beaches, I thought about spending part of the weekend paddleboarding -- I haven't been on the water since Christmas Day -- but prudence and logistics won out: I didn't want to deal with probable crowds, I didn't feel up to getting my gear back in order (this week's timelog: 40+ hours within 4 days), I have a ton of housekeeping and homework to plow through, and neck rashes don't play well with sunscreen.

Plus, I'm singing in a (physically distanced) quartet a week from now, and the director made a point of asking participants to "use your awareness as we approach the start of July. Everyone has a different risk tolerance, and while you might personally feel confident and safe, your awareness and concern for your fellow singers and especially for [the workshop leader] is appreciated. Consider operating with a little more care for the 2 weeks before the clinic." As I updated my "things to defer until July 12" last night, I thought about how I take more care with my health when I have a significant performance on deck: I'm less inclined to take chances on iffy food, I become even more wary of contact with potential germ vectors, and I try to get enough sleep and water to look and sound my best. (On the other side of the coin, I'm so hyped up and keen to catch all the things during festivals that sleep too often gets shoved aside in favor of going to one more party and madly scribbling notes well past midnight.)

We've been playing with a new tool called MyChoralCoach, which has been offering entertainingly ruthless feedback:

I'm feeling good about my progress - the past two days, I've consistently hit the tritone jump I've been practicing (and often overshooting) the past two weeks. This week I'll concentrate on breath (timing and control), as well as singing my part against each of the other lines (e.g., playing only the bass line on the piano while I sing the alto, and then doing the same with tenor and soprano) to lock down my ability to carry it. (I'd be reliable enough if the clinic were happening today, but it's a great feeling when I can put in enough prep to level up from "enough" to four-ways-from-Sunday solid.)

It does mean saying "no" and "not yet" to other shinies, though. Add in the two new pages of dance caller homework that arrived today (on top of the one I've read but not yet worked through), and my odds of enjoying Stratford's King John while it's free dwindle to unlikely. Same with other performances and socials on offer. And, as I admitted to my publisher earlier today, "Writing's pretty much in the trunk (not just the back seat) for the near future -- work, health, dance, music, activism, and other priorities are more demanding/rewarding at the moment. But I also feel confident about it grabbing back the steering wheel within a few years. It has a history of doing that."

If, when I was a child or young adult, you had told me that I'd willingly spend holiday time studying Chinese and working in my yard over watching Shakespeare or devouring a biography or ogling Roger Rees in The Crossing, I would have rolled my eyes and dismissed you as a condescending what-do-you-know. But here we are. With the Mandarin, it helps that I'm close to reaching checkpoint 2 on Duolingo, it's not my mother trying to drill it into me, the boulder on my shoulder has become a somewhat lighter chip, and my expectations are super-low: It has never come naturally to me, and I won't invest the time to get fluent, but I'd like to acquire enough functionality to handle small talk with servers, relatives, and other people who tend to assume I already have the words in my head. It's telling that the two Duo lessons I've felt most comfortable with so far were "Food" and "Drink," and that I still understand "She drinks iced tea" six hours after reviewing it is further than I've ever gotten with this linguistic barrel of monkeys in past attempts.*

As for the yardwork: my allergies were so nasty as a kid that I pretty much woke up every morning with my eyes crusted shut. Moving to Chicago was a relief, I have access to better healthcare and medication than I did as a kid, and I don't have to contend with my parents' issues, such as their belief that I could overcome my clogged breathing passages with sheer discipline, or my mother's extreme fear of addiction (Mom. It's okay to give a dying man morphine, and I'm careful about how much diphenhydramine I'm taking now).** Getting fresh air has become a frequent go-to in my mental health toolbox, and weeding feeds the same instant-gratification circuit that Duolingo does -- it's visible results for low stakes, with some fun mixed in (cartoon characters, random sheep jokes, baby grasshoppers, fearless fireflies . . .), and when I screw up (sorry, little radish seedling that I didn't water in time), it doesn't feel like a big deal. (It's often not a big deal in other realms, but one can overcome only so much squashing-the-butterfly-alters-the-entire-trajectory-of-the-universe programming at a time.)

Also, Bates Nursery was giving away free flats of veggies yesterday, and so I brought home 32 tomato plants that need to go into dirt sooner than later. I had forgotten how much I like the scent of tomato leaves.

For dinner tonight, I made turkey-zucchini-mushroom wontons (fried and steamed) while listening to today's Splendid Table episode with Carla Hall, which included a guy from Alabama asking how to use MSG. Y'all, a lot about the 21st century is awful, but 2020 still beats 1980 and 1990 where I'm concerned. Also, there's enough compos back in my mentis that I greased the steamer correctly the first time around. (When I made bao last week, I spent five minutes coating a pan with mirin before realizing what was wrong.)

* A reason I enjoyed Jackie Lau's Pregnant by the Playboy: the hero discusses feeling lost in Cantonese class as a child, and how he's really bad at languages in general (a situation compounded by his brother Julian's mastery of Cantonese, Mandarin, French, Toisanese, and English, plus familiarity with Spanish, Japanese, and German). I feel ya, dude, especially when I remember being compared with family friends and classmates who were better at all the Good-Asian-Girl things. (The two things really separating me from the field were creative writing and activism, which were respectively unimpressive and alarming on my parents' GAG-meter. And it has just now occurred to me why I felt compelled to defend at length the teens who trolled the Tulsa rally when some criticism showed up in my in-box.) I'm never going to be wholly mellow about Mandarin in any case: I made a point of using an Amnesty International address label in my copy of Yong Ho's Beginner Chinese when I acquired it in 2011, and when it fell out today, I replaced it with a label featuring a cat (because my mom didn't like them, and I am that petty). That said, I thought a lot about my mom today, as I scrubbed kitchen light fixtures and put on a floppy hat to ward off the sun and wondered what she would be saying to my aunts about Hong Kong. Also, my Korean Tennessean cousin sent me metallic markers for my birthday, and I used one to practice writing the characters for "mother" and "also" across a worksheet.

** Some of it is tangled with generations-deep peasant frugality, and I regularly have to talk myself out of being pound-foolish. My grandmother left the box of band-aids alone even when she had unhealed wounds on her leg. My mom arguably waited too long to start treatment for cancer. I was going to wait until my annual to get the neck rash checked out, but the aloe, ice packs, and other DIY treatments aren't vanquishing it, so today I finally did the PhysicianNow thing -- which from what I can tell is fully covered by my insurance.