"Moby Dick is going to kill me!"

Originally from 2002, this essay is presented here because I think it's funny. Some copy editing and proofreading has occurred, although I noticed on readthrough that there's a typo that I now cannot find.

I have this list of Things I Really Ought To Have Read By Now. Great works of literature, institutions of popular culture, stories and characters we all know, allusions we all get, even if we haven't read the originals. Austen, Brontë, Chaucer. A Tale of Two Cities. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Odyssey. The stuff Great Books curricula and Warner Brothers cartoons are made of.

And every summer, I tackle a few. And here's my advice: Skip Moby Dick. Or if you feel you cannot skip it entirely, skip the first 200 pages or so. They're just not that important. Or if you really want to believe that it's a deep, symbolist novel that's really about the social struggle leading up to the American Civil War, go take some more drugs and read the Cliffs Notes.

First, here's what you'll miss, if you skip the first 200 pages. Ishmael is the narrator. He is like that shifty uncle no one likes to talk about, but who appears on the doorstep every 10 years or so, stays for a few months, and then leaves again for adventure and fortune, until adventure, fortune, and the generosity of other relatives are exhausted.

Ishmael has made his way to New England, intending to sign onto a whaling voyage, which entails sailing and hunting around the world, for a period of about three years. Most of the first 100 pages or so are spent in Boston commenting the darkness of the wood and the smokiness of the air in Ishmael's hotel. Here he meets Queequeg, with whom for reasons of space and economy, he ends up sharing a bed. Those hoping for a homoerotic, sailors-at-sea kind of interlude may be encouraged by Ishmael's copious descriptions of Queequeg's Savage Breast, his half-nakedness, and the supposed 'marriage' that occurs between. But alas, such people will be disappointed.

Advice: Skip Queequeg. Despite long lingering looks at his brown skin and tattoos, he does not embody any mysterious primal forces. He does not symbolize any unstated lusts either physical or vengeful. He's a harpooner, and whaling vessels need skilled harpooners. One might hope that he would occupy some Hideously Symbolic role in the story, or perform some Outrageously Meaningful act. He does not. This is left to one of the other harpooners. The closest he comes is when he builds himself a coffin, but it's mostly there to belabour the portents of death, rather than advance the story or symbolize anything.

Queequeg's primary activity in the story, besides being Savage and Naked, is being Pagan. Queequeg carries a little black idol whom he worships at regular intervals, at least in Boston. Much ink is spilled on this idol. Mostly on how black it is. Its primary purpose in the narrative is to provide something black for Ishmael to compare other things to--the night sky, the angry sea, the perilous storm, the skin of sundry harpooners and crewmen, and of course the odd mood or two. The whale, not being black, is not so compared. Nor is the lurid scar symbolizing Ahab's rage, nor his ivory leg symbolizing his vulnerability. So the idol mostly comes up at off-moments in the story.

Ishmael eventually signs on to the Pequod, Ahab's ship, for the full three-year hitch, for which he will receive something like one two-hundred-and-forty-seventh of one percent of the profits from the voyage. Ishmael's employers regard this as a ridiculously generous wage for a landlubber with no experience, so the reader is left to suppose it's quite a lot of money. On the other hand, it's an order of magnitude less than Ishmael spends the previous chapter planning to accept. One imagines Ishmael's relatives at this point hoping he goes overboard so they can have their guest room back for actual guests.

There are a few bits of reminiscence interspersed here and there, mostly as cultural background so you can understand how a whaling expedition is organized. There are also several remarkable essays, including Ishmael's three-chapter Taxonomy of Whales, which isn't based on any useful biological information, but on size, head shape, and quality of oil. There's also an aggravating (or perhaps charming) philosophical essay about whether or not whales are fish. According to Ishmael, they are. Noting that they bear live young, are warm blooded, and the bones that support their flippers and tail are long and jointed ke those of a mammalian hand or foot, they're fish. Apparently because the swim and have fins.

Advice: If you think this sort of thing is charming, and makes for a lively story, you spend a summer reading it and see if your friends are still speaking to you afterwards.

All of which is probably very meaningful in an encyclopedic account of whaling culture or a whaler-diarist's daily life. But Moby Dick is not presented as an anthropological treatise on whaling life in the 19th century. Rather, Ishmael appears to be sitting in a bar, telling the story in exchange for drinks. The story is interrupted at various times in the first third of the novel with side-anecdotes about the reactions of his various interlocutors, in bars around the world.

Advice: If you're ever in a bar telling a lively story in exchange for strangers buying you drinks, don't go on about your theory of whales, unless they're really drunk already.

So, around page 200 or so, the novel finally gets around to Ahab and the whale. Captain Ahab is an Aristotelean figure, in that his doom is a forgone conclusion due to his obsessive hatred of Moby Dick (the whale, although if he knew what kind of novel he was going to be wrapped up in...). In a previous expedition, Ahab was horribly maimed by Moby Dick. In addition to the fine ivory leg made from the jawbone of another slaughtered whale, Ahab has an awful scar on his face to remind him of the encounter. He appears, eventually, from wherever he was for the first several months of the journey, and begins to pace the decks, the brass tip of his artificial leg clicking ominously across the planks.

Early on, Ahab rouses his crew to the cause and places a symbolic gold coin in a hole he has worn in the deck of the vessel swivelling around on his ivory leg when not pacing. Or maybe he places it in a slot or something under the compass or the wheel or something. It's someplace people can go to gaze at it while they have interior monologues, which they seem to do a lot.
There are three other figures in the crew you need to know about.

The first is Young Pip, who is raised from poverty and made a gentleman by an anonymous benefactor. No wait, that's Great Expectations.

Advice: Don't get too attached to young Pip. Though he symbolizes youth and potential, if it were a WWII movie, he'd be that fresh, freckle-faced kid who gets blown up by a Nazi grenade in the first 10 minutes. He does make a rather mysterious, not to say confusing, return later as a ghost, the product of Ahab's growing dementia, but that's about all for Young Pip.

The second is Stubb, who symbolizes the human condition. He is the second mate, practical, experienced, wise, but taciturn. He observes, but does not judge. Much. He is primarily responsible for pointing out to us how obsessed Ahab is, in case we had forgotten, or how worried Starbuck, the first mate, is. He also, when actually hunting whales, is responsible for keeping up a constant, almost rap-like stream of exhortation to his crew which doesn't advance the story much because it doesn't consist of commands to do anything or observations about what's going on in the boat, but are more philosophical commentaries on how much danger they're in and how rich they're going to become, and how brave and strong everyone is. And how dead Young Pip is.

The third is Starbuck: he is regarded in literary circles as a Good Christian boy. He respects the whale as a creature created by God as he himself was created by God. And if God had not charged Starbuck with killing whales to make a Christian living, Starbuck would probably just as soon Live and Let Live, at least as far as whales are concerned.

Aside from inspiring aggressive coffee companies, Starbuck regards Ahab's obsession as dangerous to his ship and his crew. This causes Literary Tension between Captain Ahab and his first officer, and provides many opportunities for exploring each's perspectives via rhetorical devices like interior monologue. There doesn't seem to be a lot of conversation on Pequod.

I suppose the Starbuck-Ahab dyad reflects a contemporary moral dilemma between the dependence on the whale for its oil and the incredible cost, both to the whales and the whalers, of obtaining it, which or course reflects the modern moral dilemma between our dependence on natural resources and the results of our taking them. And I'm certain Melville meant for this relationship to reflect these things, because there's no other reason to add a hundred pages to a novel that is already too long by doing again and again and again and again.

Advice: If you want symbolic struggle between Man and Nature, go read Watership Down. At least the mammals aren't fish.

When not actively pursuing actual whales, much of the voyage is spent communicating with other whaling vessels. Given that this is pre-radio, this is done by bringing the two ships aside one another, someone is hoisted down to a boat, rows across to the other ship, and is hoisted up. These visits usually involve an exchange of information--where the whaling was good, what the weather was like, general news passed from one captain to another. Because of Ahab's obsession, these visits are usually reduced to some variation on the following theme:

Ahab: Have you seen Moby Dick?
Other: You mean that ghostly white whale?
Ahab: Yes, have you seen it?

To which the Other provides one of three possible responses:

1. I think so, but it was years ago and in an ocean thousands of miles from here.
2. No, but I heard from some other captain that some other captain he had spoken to had spotted him somewhere.
3. Isn't Moby Dick just an old wives tale, like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster?

None of these being particularly useful to Ahab, the encounter is usually cut short and Ahab retreats to brood.


About Moby Dick. Despite the novel's subtitle ("The White Whale"), Ishmael makes it clear early on that Moby Dick is not white. That is, most whales are gray or otherwise animal-coloured. A white whale would be ghostly, an apparition, something bigger than life, an elemental force worthy of legend and 500 pages of ponderous symbolism. Moby Dick has some white spots, particularly on its head, and is thus relatively easy to recognize, should you be unfortunate enough to be close enough to see. But there is nothing ghostly or mysterious about it. It does, for undergrads looking for something to write a term paper on, have a scar from Ahab's harpoon on its face. Discuss the symbolism of facial scars in Moby Dick.

But the point is that Melville takes pains early on to make it clear that Moby Dick really is a whale, not some elemental force, and that Ahab is a raving loon. Hence the point of the whole novel unravels. Ahab is a whaler, and whalers get mained and killed by whales all the time. Young Pip being the prime example. Sad, yes. Tragic, yes. Part of the price you pay for the wealth of whale oil, definitely. So if Ahab had been maimed my some run-of-the-mill, mongrel whale, there'd be nothing to get obsessed about. But Ahab was maimed by a normal whale, not by some supernatural Whale Force. You want Starbuck, as he holds his interior monologues on how dangerous Ahab's obsession is, to just give him a good dope slap across the back of his head and tell him to get over it. Which is precisely what someone should have done to me when I proposed to read Moby Dick just because I ought to have done by now.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel there's a moderately exciting episode involving an actual whale hunt. It is preceded by a long discussion of ropes and spools and things. During the actual hunt, the men are almost killed by the rope (attached to the harpoon, attached eventually to the whale). Then in the following chapter, Melville/Ishmael says, essentially, 'actually, the reason the flying rope was so dangerous is because there is a second harpoon attached to it that I forgot to tell you about.'
What the book needs is a good editor. Or a hot flame.

The last 30 pages or so are actually pretty exciting, comprising as they do a Great Three Day Chase when they're actually after Moby Dick. In the end, the ship sinks and everybody goes down, with a harpooner who isn't Queequeg hammering a flag to the tallest mast even as he is claimed by the unforgiving sea. Ishmael survives because at some point in the middle, he's thrown from his boat and is eventually rescued by a passing vessel. So how exactly he is able to relate how everybody gets killed isn't clear, since he's floating around somewhere else when it happens.

So to sum up:

• Melville is a frustrating story-teller, to say the least.
• Ishmael. He's not underdescribed or omniscient. He's a very specific guy in a very specific time and place.
• Ahab. He's an obsessed lunatic who should have been put off the ship by the crew early on.
• Starbuck. He worries a lot about whether he's going to make it back to his wife and child. If he had any heroic qualities he would have tossed Ahab overboard before everybody got killed.
• Everybody dies. This is required of tragedy. Well, Ishmael survives, but by the end you really wish he hadn't.
• It's not about 19th century whaling culture, since there's nothing normal or representative about the Pequod. There's no actual whaling culture in the novel that couldn't have been told in 400 fewer page with a better story.
• It's not about slavery and abolition and the turmoil leading up to the American Civil War. It's not an allegory for any instance of obsession and ruin, except insofar as any novel about obsession and ruin is an allegory for any actual obsession and ruin.

SLAP Get over it.

Privilege and redress, explained with D&D

For the last couple years, my entertainment obsession has been skewing toward watching people play D&D on the interwebs.  I’ve never played D&D, or any table-top role-playing games, really, because I’m basically a hermit and have no friends that I really want to spend hours with every week. Or the desire to commit to such a schedule, actually (where I have no problem arranging my life around watching other people do it, apparently).

I was also thinking about a smallish meltdown I saw recently, of a smallish kid playing a game, something not going quite her way and her crying ‘no fair’. I’ve actually seen this kind of thing with kids.  I’m fine with being upset when things don’t go your way. I have a little trouble with ‘no fair’. Which I realize to kid’s doesn’t mean ‘the game is stacked against me’ so much as ‘this didn’t go the way I wanted’.  Which got me started thinking about how you talk to kids about fairness, and empathy, and luck, and so on, and it came into the back of my head that I know there are people using D&D to teach and practice this kind of thing, especially with socially vulnerable kids, with ASD and so on.

But that got me thinking about other exchanges I’ve seen recently, about race and racism, wealth inequality, and all kinds of social ills, and that got me thinking about privilege.  And D&D provides a nice little analogy that I’m working out and am going to try to share here.

In D&D, your player-character has some base statistics: Strength, Constitution, Charisma, Intelligence, and so on.  At the start of the game you ‘roll’ you character, using dice to set up your base statistics.  So you roll a bunch of numbers and can distribute them among your statistics.  My character is a fighter so needs a ton of strength and constitution, so I’ll use my top two rolls for those stats, she needs less wisdom or charisma, so I’ll use the bottom stats for those. And so on.  A stat of 10 or 11 is ‘average for a human character’.  The stats govern a bunch of skills, like ‘athletics’ and ‘persuasion’.  If you have high strength, you get a bonus to ‘athletics checks’—in the game, you have to lift a boulder, or hold back a horde, or whatever, and you have to roll a die to see if you succeed or not, against some attribute or roll of your ‘opponent’. So let’s say you’re arm wrestling in a bar against another character.  You roll a 9 but your high Strength stat gives you a +3 bonus to that for a ‘check’ of 12.  Your opponent rolls an 12, but their low Strength gives them a -2 penalty to their check, so they have 10. You win.  But they might have rolled a 16, so even with their penalty and your superior Strength, they’d have won.

Certain ‘races’ (aha!), which in the D&D context and ‘human’ and ‘dwarf’ and ‘elf’ and so on,  and ‘classes’, which are ‘fighter’ and ‘thief’ and ‘wizard’ and so forth, have additional bonuses or penalties to certain kinds of checks, and certain items, spells and so on impose bonuses and penalties as well.  So, making stuff up because I don’t know D&D that well really, a dwarf might have a bonus to Strength-based checks, where an elf might have a penalty.  A warrior might have a bonus to Strength-based attacks, but a goblin might have a penalty. Plus or minus whatever their base rolled statistics provide them.

In D&D it is totally clear that some races, classes, or holding certain items or positions in society, come with certain advantages or disadvantages.  There’s also a game mechanic called ‘advantage’ (or ‘disadvantage’) that requires you to sometimes roll twice, and take the higher (or lower) roll for your check.  This is imposed by conditions (“you’ve been hit with a blindness spell, roll for attack with disadvantage”, “you are on your favored terrain, roll an acrobatics check with advantage” etc.

And no one is particularly disturbed when someone with an intrinsic disadvantage (e.g. a low charisma score) nonetheless gets ‘advantage’ on a charisma check because their opponent is drunk or something. And certainly no one is miffed if they roll high enough to just pass the check, with or without their individual bonuses or disadvantages.  Because that’s The Game. 

So here’s where the privilege thing comes in.  Sometimes in Real Life™, people for whatever reason have bonuses or penalties. Not a lot they can do about it.  Tall people have an advantage (for a lot of things) over short people. Strong people over weak people.  Healthy people over sick people.  Rich people over poor people.  And yes, that’s just The Game.  But think about this. Sometimes people have advantage or disadvantage, not because of their own stats or skills, or others, but just because of who they are.

So imagine you’re a sick person trying to get health insurance.  You can’t help being sick, but it’s going to cost you more than a healthy person.  That’s The Game.  (We can argue about The Game and its rules, but this is what we have.)  But in the interest of Fairness™, maybe we want everyone to have better health care, which means getting more people insurance.  So maybe in game, to keep everyone alive, we create a system where anyone who rolls below 6 on a health check gets another roll. They get advantage.

Is that giving them an unfair advantage over healthy people?  Is this taking anything away from healthy people?  Is this making it harder for healthy people? Or is it just addressing an intrinsic imbalance in the system for the benefit of everyone (since presumably not having to lug around a dead body in your party, or having to stop in the middle of every fight to waste healing spells and potions on them is in everybody’s interest)?

Female Humans® may be at a disadvantage for, for instance, salary rolls. They may have to do more (roll higher) to compensate, relative to Male Humans®.  Is this The Way Things Are™? Maybe.  Is this fair? Probably not.

Humans of Color™ may be at an intrinsic disadvantage, having to roll higher to avoid Suspicion™, Confrontation™, and Brutality™. Is it fair? Is it right? No.  So if we address it, are we penalizing anyone? Are we providing an unfair advantage, or are we attempting to address an intrinsic imbalance?

Humans of Ambiguous Gender and Color® may be particularly vulnerable to all sorts of things for all sorts of stupid reasons.  

This is not to say that individually, one may not have an astronomically high Charisma or Strength stat, or happen to roll high a bunch of times in a row.  But that doesn’t mean that they (and anyone else in their Class) didn’t start out with, or continue to experience, a disadvantage or an intrinsic penalty.  

So don’t point at the disadvantaged person who happened to roll two 20s on a check and say ‘well, obviously this Class of people don’t need and don’t deserve a small bonus ‘because’ it means it puts you at a disadvantage.  It doesn’t.  It just means your advantage isn’t as meaningful as it might be.

And people Don’t Like It™ when privileges they are used to having Just Because®, or maybe have never even thought about, are called into question.  But they may get up in arms if a disadvantage someone else experiences all the time gets redressed.  

Which is just silly.  

I am a patient person. It takes a lot to get me really angry

I am angry.

I am actually shaking with rage. I don’t know what I or anyone else is going to be able to do about it, but somebody better come up with something.  I have already escalated this up to the relevant manager.  I really should get my head, my Dean, and the relevant VP involved, but we’ll see.

I chose to go with optical scoring (mark-sense, or bubble sheets, depending on your background) for my ‘spring’ course, which consists of 17 sessions of 2 hours each. For the entire course.  Since that isn’t time to develop any useful skills, I decided to go with multiple choice, and as long as I was going multiple choice, I went optical scoring. 

In the past (with about 60 students) I have handed it my stack of things and gotten the phone call (or email) that things were ready by the time I got back to my office.  Not so this term.  Which I get is compressed. And it’s summer. And it’s no one’s job to sit around just waiting to put stacks of paper through a machine on the off chance someone will need it.  But at the worst of times, it shouldn’t take 48 hours to turn around a stack of papers.  Certainly not in the middle of a term.

But apparently that’s not how things are working now.  Twice now (of the 3 exams in my 17-session course with a measley 19 students in it), I have handed in my stack, and waited. And waited.  The first time I handed the things in on Tuesday morning and had to go down Thursday afternoon to check on things, since there was no notification that anything had been done.  I’m guessing that things actually did get done in 10 minutes, but for whatever reason nobody bothered to tell me about it.

Batch number two went in Wednesday morning. I didn’t have time on Friday to check up on them, and giving them the benefit of the doubt I waited to hear from them.  Until this afternoon, a full weekend after my students probably needed to see their grades if they were going to drop the course. Which I think they had to do by Friday.

I took a number, sat down, and waited for 20 minutes.  No one seemed to notice I was sitting there, let alone that I had a number.  I am a patient person, but this is ridiculous.  Fuming, I came back upstairs and wrote a very angry email detailing the situation. But then I couldn’t figure out who to send it to. I'm guessing these people know better than to put their org charts up so people can yell at them easily.

So I put in a service ticket.  Which laid out the sitatuation, and told them (at 4:10pm) that I didn’t think I needed to go down again, and someone can d*mn well bring my stack of papers up to my office before close of business.  No one did.

After which I initiated a chat, and got my old friend Josh, who is now my go-to guy down there, who went to look and sure enough, there was my stack of papers, sitting there, all ready to be picked up.  He checked the log and apparently someone emailed me something Wednesday morning (I’m guessing 10 minutes into the process) but it, like any earlier communications, did not go through.  He’s put in a ticket to see what the f*ck is going on. He has also escalated my original ticket to his manager.  

SOMEBODY better come up with an explanation as to what the F*CK is going on down there. FAST.  My last exam is on Wednesday, and if this doesn’t get cleared up, I’m going to have to stand in front of osmeone’s desk and do some actual yelling.  Maybe standing over them while they personally put my papers through the machine and hand the things back to me right then and there. 

And if some kind of vaguely satisfactory message is not waiting for me in the morning, believe me, people are going to be hearing about this.  My head and my dean, certainly.  If I can figure out which VP, them too.  I have so many better things that needed to be done this afternoon, including prepping for tomorrow’s class, than dealing with this CR*P.

So now, having gotten scores, figured out adjusted percentages, and put the whole thing into the LMS, now, almost two and a half hours later, I can maybe start getting to all the stuff I needed to do this afternoon.

I am still shaking.

Own Homership

12:30am, 2 May 2018
I own a home. Well, a condo, so a space in a cooperatively owned building. I moved in in July of 2015, so we’re going on three years now.

When I moved in, I took certain steps—fast, cheap, easy steps—to do something about light control and privacy, on the assumption that sometime when I wasn’t trying to move, or when I wasn’t broke, and had a little time to think about it, I would do something more permanent. So off Rob goes to Canadian Tire (Canada’s all purpose hardware/garden/kitchen/sports/automotive store) to buy tension rods and vaguely translucent shower curtains This solution served, mostly, until quite recently, when it turned out that vinyl shower curtains don’t like hanging in west-facing windows for three years. The one in my bedroom developed a crack, then a small hole. Well, someone is trying to tell me something.

Except I’m still basically broke, and trying hard to actually work productively prepping for a ‘summer term’ course that start on Monday among other things, so I don’t have a lot of spare time for mundane activities like laundry or cooking, let alone actually putting up curtains. I also am not sure, despite years of watching home improvement and design shows, that I know how to put up curtains. Slightly complicating the procedure, I do not at present own a working drill, or a sewing machine, or for that matter a working iron. I own several measuring tapes because a few weeks ago I got tired of never being able to find one and bought three fabric-style ones. Somewhere in this house there is a proper 15-meter jobber, and somewhere at work I think I 6-meter one, but I have no idea where exactly either is at the moment.

The good news is that at least psychologically I’ve been preparing for the day I get curtains. I’m pretty sure what color I want. I know I want blackout. So these in the second bedroom.
But hardware? Do I want to hang these loft style (with the rod going through tabs at the top, or from hooks, or clips? The IKEA ones have a fourth option, which is to run the rod through what amounts to hoops built into the top of the panel. The IKEA curtain rods are kind of limited, but silver, gray, or black finish? Do I need sheers, and therefore a double-curtain rod? Where does one place a curtain rod relative to a) the ceiling (or in my case the bulkhead, and b) the window frame?

Okay, I’ve worked out that last bit. The rod itself is supposed to be something on the order of 6-8 inches wider (that is 3-4 inches on either side) of the window frame. IKEA rods are pretty forgiving, in that the brackets go wherever they go, I presume into some kind of wall stud, and the rod just sits on them. Now, those years of home improvement and design shows tell me that there has to be a stud just on either side of the actual window. My problem is that I have 4-inch wide trim around my windows that I’m pretty sure are where the studs are, and so there’d be nothing immediately outside of them. So that means I need to be prepared with some kind of wall anchor. Which I am not confident about.

Now where the curtain rod goes depends partially on how the curtains are hung. So if I go with running the rod through the loopy things, I guess the very tippy top of the curtains can just brush the bulkhead. So I guess I should buy them, put the curtain rod through them, and just measure where their best placement is.

Nor am I entirely confident that I know how long they should be. I figure anywhere from ‘just covering the top of the baseboard’ to ‘almost touching the carpet’ will do, but I can’t tell how long that really is until I know how the curtains are hanging. Which means I probably have to figure out where to hang the rod, then hang the curtains, and measure, take the curtains down, and hem them.

This is problematic, not just because I’m freaking lazy, don’t currently own a drill, or anything I could hem curtains with, but because of one of my several ongoing ailments. Readers of this blog will recall that I had frozen shoulder in my right shoulder, which I’m happy to report has resolved and I have close to 100% of my movement back. The unfortunate thing is that my other shoulder has now gone, and which means raising my left arm too much higher than horizontal is pretty much impossible unless it’s Unless it’s straight forward, in which case I can get a little higher, depending on what I’m trying to do with my hand. But it ain’t fun.

So back to the bedroom curtain. As I was making my bed with freshly laundered sheets, I brushed up agains the brittle and falling apart shower curtain in my bedroom window and it disintegrated. Seriously, just fell apart. So there I am, 11pm or so, just wanting to make my bed and go to sleep, and I have to do something about my bedroom window dressing.

The only other curtain-like things in the house are a) the one in the second bedroom, which because I don’t often make contact with it is still intact but probably not in much better shape in any real sense;  b) the one in the second bathroom, which I suppose I could have pulled, but it’s beige and brown and anyway I’d just have to put it back when I was done, and c) a cheap vinyl shower curtain liner I bought as a backup to the one in the second bathroom. I opened up that once and realized it was seriously clear, which defeats the purpose of putting it in my bedroom window.

Ever the innovator, I decided to grab one of my old, rarely-if-ever-used-anymore, sheets. I tried a fitted sheet that for some reason didn’t fit on my bed anymore, but, well, it didn’t hang properly. So knowing that a flat sheet would be hard to get to stay up, I went with an old duvet cover. I could put the tension rod inside the duvet cover and get full coverage.

This tension rod isn’t spring loaded. It basically just unscrews to let you shorten or extend it, and screws to lock it at the length you choose. So you kind of have to be cagey putting it in because you have to get it tight enough to stay up because you can’t do much adjusting once you get it in place. So naturally at this point—apparently having not seen this far ahead—I discover I can’t grab hold of the curtain rod the the duvet cover to screw or unscrew it. I get the bright idea of climbing into the duvet cover with my curtain, but then I manage to jam the curtain rod so it won’t unscrew. (Just putting my hands around the curtrain rod and holding it and the duvet cover while the rest of me is outside the duvet cover is a non-starter, because I can’t hold the rod and the duvet cover over my head with my bad shoulder.)

Much comical hijinks ensue, what with climbing out of the duvet cover, getting the rod stuck in the duvet cover, stepping on the edge of the duvet cover, and so on. After about 15 minutes finally I get it to unscrew, get back into the duvet cover with it. It takes several tries to get it up because I’m in the duvet cover and can’t see what’s happening in the window frame. This isn’t comfortable at the best of times. Wrestling the whole thing cause serious pain, such that I had to stop and sit down a couple of times. Which means, of course, the curtain rod/duvet cover set up would move around weird so I’d have to wrestle it back into alignment so I could try again.

So an hour or so later, I have a workable temporary window cover. I hope it doesn’t have to last another three years, but I have a workshop on Thursday, a conference eon Friday and Saturday, and I start teaching my ‘Summer term’ course on Monday and I haven’t really made much headway into prepping that yet. So it won’t be until at least June probably, although some evening I may just bite the bullet and buy curtain panels and proper curtain rods and hardware. And a drill. And maybe some steam-a-seam and an iron.

In the time it took me to write this, it’s still up, so I’m hopeful it will at least last until morning. In part because I went in for my tire swap this morning and one of my summer tires was shot, so I needed to replace the two older ones, and they didn’t have any in. Which means I’m driving a loaner, which is kind of fun. Push button start (weird), rear-view camera (love), heated seats (shouldn’t have been necessary but actually today was nice). Only two doors, which means the door is heavy and long, so not great for my shoulder, or getting into the back seat, but whatevs. I don’t have to get back there. Which makes me want to update my car, but busy, sort of broke, and there’s more pressing matters, like bedroom curtains. (also the whole second bedroom, that that’s also another story.

Morning update: It’s still up, so it’s going to stay there until I get around to doing something about it, or it falls down again. Now, if anyone has any suggestions for the 8-foot sliding glass door assembly in the living room, let me know.