I slept on the couch last night. No, I wasn’t in trouble with Brent or anything. I was just restless and my stomach was a little upset and I felt a little panicky. When Cricket decided to bark at the darkness out back at midnight, I gave up trying to stay in the nice warm bed and dragged my pillow down to the couch with me, where I pulled a blanket over me. Cricket settled in behind my knees and I slept more peacefully from that point on.

I woke up past my usual wake-up time, but it is still dark at 5, just like it is at 4. Waking up to a view of a lighted Christmas tree is pretty darn nice.

I used to sleep on a couch all the time. My little house didn’t have a bedroom for me. I was bothered much more by the lack of a closet than the lack of a bed, to be honest. This made people look at me funny. But sleeping on the couch is almost cozier than the bed, more like a treat, a camp-out, a sleepover. There isn’t a lot of room. That’s okay because it ends up working like swaddling a baby, calming me down and holding me still.

I could go curl up there again, if I didn’t have to go to work and all.

Over the weekend, I “convinced” Brent and T.R. to go see The Blind Side with me. They love me and they didn’t mind that much, so it wasn’t hard. I had read the book a while back because Brent saw it and thought I would like it, which I did.

Caveats: I adore sports movies, I love stories in which nothing turns into something, and I believe in miracles.

Go see this movie. It is happy and sad and wonderful. And Brent and T. liked it, too. The characters are well-drawn, the story is compelling and mostly true, and there is not too much football if you don’t happen to love watching large men hit each other. There are many funny bits, including some that look likely to stick in my allusion set.

The slightly creepy underside of the story is downplayed in the film and possibly rightly so, not only because of the needs of the film as a medium, but also because that underside pales compared to the miracle. And when I talk about the miracle, I’m not talking about the fact that Michael Oher, a kid from the projects, now plays for the Ravens, but about the family that grew out of a practical application of faith and a willingness to do the work right in front of a person’s nose.

What a challenge to the rest of us.

Parental warning: the movie opens with footage of Joe Theismann’s career-ending injury, which is gross. I saw it on television when it happened and I chose not to watch it again in the film. The scenes in the projects involve drugs and violence. There is on-field violence as well. Racial slurs and nasty heckling.

I got to buy an American Girl doll at last. Cameron, Brent’s niece and now mine, said she wanted one that looked like her for Christmas.

Back before the company was sold to Mattel, I got their catalog in the mail and called my mom, who had also received one. I asked her whether she’d buy me one if I were still a little girl. She said of course she would, and she would get one for the grown-up me if I really wanted it. That’s one of the things I love about my mom. I didn’t get one because I didn’t really need one, but I’ve always loved poring over the catalog, imagining.

As much time as I spend in the childlike space, as much as I love playing with all the kids of my acquaintance, not to mention the ones I have myself, the little girl part of me gets neglected. I am the only fairy princess I know, even though I’ve gone stealth. No one around here dresses up in long dresses, wishes for a tiara, or secretly desires a parasol.

Buying the doll is the second recent reminder of that part of me. One of my friends was saying that she put out her doll house because she has room in her new house for it. The little girls who came for Thanksgiving had a great time playing in it. My doll house is in storage because it is too big, because it needs to be refurbished, and because no one but me loves it.

It’s not a problem, exactly, just a place where I have a sadness, a lack. It’s nice to fill that place from time to time. I hope Cameron keeps liking dolls for years to come.

My body has a different idea about what a day off is for than my mind. This might be because I’ve made my body go to work sick all week. It’s bad to piss off the body.

While the evil cold is pretty much better, it has left me with headaches and fatigue and the sense that my face could fill with snot at any moment. I took Excedrin and a nap for the first two symptoms, but that last one is sneaky. I put on a second sweatshirt and had some cocoa to try to lull it into sleepiness with the warmth. For the moment, it is working.

My mind, on the other hand, reminds me of all the looming deadlines. It says this is no time to be sleeping. It highlights the things undone in every glance. Look: dust. Look: blank space where those chapters should be. Look: unread mail. I feel like my body and my mind are siblings fighting in the back seat over territory, making the whole ride truly unpleasant. I want to pull over and slam down the armrest in the middle of the seat (do any cars even have those anymore?) and ground them both. Somehow I don’t think that will work.

Instead, I’ll take both body and mind on a walk with my friend. I’ll come home and feed the body something healthy and then let the mind fill some pages. And maybe by tomorrow they’ll be ready to work together again. Except it won’t be my day off anymore. Argh.

While I was in Arizona, something was bothering me. I wasn’t sure what it was. The land didn’t look right. I realized: no trees. Not that the entire state is tree-free, just that a lot of it tends toward shrubs and cactus. Near water, there are trees, sometimes even tall ones, but mostly the trees are gaunt and wizened, determined rather than flourishing.

I missed them.

The sky, however, is bigger there. Mountains ring the horizon. There is plenty of space. I begin to understand the people who collect bones—they are used to what is structural and essential. What is green, what is lush, what is rounded and full is transitory and illusory.

Then yesterday I was walking in Berkeley, in my old neighborhood, and I saw my favorite tree. It is, I think, a Chinese pistachio. At this time of year, its leaves flame. Not all at once. They shade from green through yellow and orange to brilliant red. It may be transitory, but I need it anyway.

Road trips are a spiritual practice. Not only is there the usual priority-revealing packing process in which I discover, again, that books outrank pretty much everything except my toothbrush, but also there is the gradual emptying of the mind. Sometimes I even learn to overcome fears, like this trip when I actually drove Hagrid the truck (the kids and I named him because he is “too big to be allowed.”).

During the many parts of the trip when I was not driving, I was responsible for the driver-entertaining conversation. I can and do piffle for hours. We drove for more hours than I can piffle. Which meant that I was finally able to think clearly, without all the usual clutter.

And here is what I learned. (Disclaimer: all lightbulbs are my own, and you may find them extremely dim, ordinary, and un-illuminating. This is why I like you—you know more than I do.) I have a big challenge ahead of me. Right now I am at the border between manageable and unmanageable. The time and energy my new job takes are just enough to require strategies I haven’t used for a while. And I don’t want to.

I don’t want my life to be about pure survival. I don’t want efficiency to be my god. I don’t want every moment scheduled for maximum effectiveness. Too much math.

Yes, I will remember that cooking ahead on the weekend works better so I don’t resort to pizza delivery every time I’m tired. Yes, I will make and use lists. Yes, I will put out my clothes the night before. But I will be in charge of the techniques, not the other way around. I will refuse to go at top speed all the time. I will remember that it’s life, not just a bunch of tasks.

As soon as I figure out how.

A few updates for today.

1. My ambitious project to make gift bags for all gifts went moderately well. I made gift bags for about half and everything else gets the paper treatment. If I plan well, I can make enough next year to do pretty much everything. I always forget how much time the Full Martha takes and if there is one thing I don’t have right now, it’s lots of extra time.

2. T.R.’s book has 15,531 words in it. I’m working on chapter 13, I think, unless I slipped over into chapter 14. I am less panicked about finishing the story right now than I am about doing the art to make it complete, laying it out, printing it, and binding it.

3. Desk watch continues. Maybe I’ll have one after Thanksgiving. I continue to add office supplies to my problems and it seems to be working.

4. After work today, I have to pack my clothes and such for the road trip. Brent already put all my mom and dad’s storage boxes in the truck. We have our hostess gifts. I have my folks’ Christmas presents and my mom’s birthday present ready. Must buy Thanksgiving cards on the way to work or be vaporized on arrival Chez Maman et Papa.

5. Crashed at 6:30 last night, up at 4. Still tired.

6. Thanks, lovely friends, for being my lovely friends. I am grateful for you all the time, but you really do top the list of my blessings and I’ll seize the holiday moment to tell you.

As usual, I got up at 4. Since I’ve been awake, I have been wrestling with temptation. I didn’t realize it until just this minute, however.

I’m tired. It’s pretty much my constant state. This does not make me stand out among humans of my acquaintance, who also seem to be tired all the time. It’s still annoying.

And the little tuggings of addiction come right about now. They say: you know, a Big Gulp would make you feel better. They say: more sleep is just not happening for you. You’ve already had your eight hours and here you are, still tired. They say: caffeine, sugar, sugar, caffeine, tasty bubbling, and a red straw.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I may resist. I may not. But I’m really annoyed that there is such a struggle.

I get to go shopping for books today. It doesn’t matter that they’re not books for me. Books! New ones! All full of potential! Glossy dust jackets or uncreased paperback spines!

Syd’s birthday and Christmas are coming. He wants books. I am a happy mom. (But too lazy to look up links for all the stuff that follows.)

I know I want to get him the Greens cookbook. I know I want to get him some Dickens, but I’m not sure which one. I haven’t read them all, by any stretch. I disliked A Tale of Two Cities when last I read it, but it took three trips through Great Expectations, two compulsory and one voluntary, for me to grow up enough to like it. Maybe David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby. I loved Bleak House, and I found it an interesting thing to reread Jane Eyre soon after. Opinions welcome on the subject.

I’m sure there will be books that jump out at me and say: This one! Syd will love me! This frees me from too much advance planning.

I also know I need to get the next book after The Lightning Thief for T. and me to read out loud. (He plans to give me further book in the series for Christmas. I am lucky!)

The trick is to get out of the bookstore without buying anything just for myself. And then finding some more time to read.

The cosmic swirl is bringing me bits and pieces about ambition. Perhaps I am supposed to assemble them. I hope the bits are like Legos, so I can create my own work of art from them rather than like a jigsaw—missing pieces, things have to go in the right place, ack!

I’m reading The Red and the Black, which most of my friends in high school read back then in French. I had scheduling difficulty, so I had independent study. I have my mom’s hand-me-down copy from what I presume was a course in the European novel based on other books I have permanently borrowed from her, unless she was allowed to read in English while getting her French minor. Julien Sorel is all about ambition. He’s also annoying. I don’t know how things will turn out for him, but I almost don’t care. Ambition has either warped his character or it is his character and neither option seems good.

The lectionary for today was another one of those readings about the disciples missing the point. They’re always on about rank, about who’s the greatest, who gets to sit where. Jesus tells them to give it a rest (Janet’s vernacular paraphrase…).

Not much positive there. But. Isn’t the drive to do well and to do good a kind of ambition?

Maybe it’s wanting a hierarchy that’s the problem, not ambition, not excellence. More to think about.

I finished reading the Sunday Chronicle today over breakfast. My head is now a jumble of thigh-high boots, stuffed turkeys, and Robert Louis Stevenson. However, I also read a series of related articles about technology and its effects on our relationships.

Many experts were quoted. One opined that we’re creating “acquired” attention deficit problems with the brevity of Twitter posts. Several decried the need to be always connected to our devices. The usual tales of ineffective multitasking laced it all together.

It felt empty. The articles were not poorly written or poorly constructed. They were just cursory and heartless. Neither “side” of the debate had enough room there to expand their views. In short, the articles seemed to suffer from a kind of ADD themselves.

So. I will not quote any experts. I will not claim to be an expert. But, from my heart, I will say: it depends.

I love Facebook because it lets me catch glimpses of people, little snapshots of life that do, in fact, keep me connected to people I know in real life. On the other hand, I found myself writing a long email to a dear friend because the Facebook posts, while useful, didn’t allow for the kind of personal, in-depth communication I wanted to have.

I love email because it reduces my need to call people on the phone. I hate calling people on the phone. Even people I love dearly. I love that email comes at a time convenient to the recipient: no one is awakened in the middle of the night by an incoming email the way that a person can be panicked into wakefulness by a ringing phone.

I may be the world’s slowest text-message-sender, but I appreciate what I get out of it anyway. It’s a much less intrusive way, for example, to tell Syd I’m ready to pick him up than either calling him or physically walking over and disrupting his conversation with his friends. I like that I can get an answer to a simple question with a glance.

Online games just don’t appeal to me. For one thing, I can’t stand the repetitive music and/or sound effects. I’m sure there’s a control for that, since there is one for bosom-bouncing, but that’s not the point. Just not my thing. But T. loves them. His play seems to enhance his friendships, through online chat while playing and through cooperative play when he’s with his friends, and as a bonding conversation topic other times. I do have a few commonsense rules around his usage: He has to go outside and run around at least once a day; homework has to be done or at least scheduled; he has to deal with basic hygiene issues.

The goal, really, is connection. Sometimes a quick connection is enough. Sometimes I need to connect more deeply. That’s what seeing friends is for.

I am now officially out of time to write and probably have exceeded the patience of any remaining readers.

You can IM me your thoughts…

It has been the kind of day on which I find myself staring at the computer screen at 4:07 trying to find something resembling a full and complete thought in my head. No luck. So instead I offer the following collection of partial thoughts.

1. Sometimes busyness cures heartbreak. My morning started with one of those emails that make me call into question my ability to be an adequate parent, maybe even to be an adequate human being. The sheer volume of tasks at work today calmed that down.

2. Last night at writing, we began a conversation about information as a form of currency in relationships, about trust, betrayal, and culture, and about floor coverings. The interactions between those things are surprisingly rich, at least in the kinds of stories they generate.

3. I used to assert that world peace could be achieved by each person on the planet committing to do his or her own dishes. I may have been wrong. Ample parking might be the key.

4. I am suffering from curiosity about calendars. I haven’t had time to do any surfing to find answers. T. and I got into a discussion the other day about leap year. I set up a Google calendar for myself at work today. It talks to my Outlook calendar. I’m almost out of the Dali calendar for the year that’s on the side of the fridge and next year we’ll be using the free calendar I got for renewing Syd’s New Yorker subscription. And none of those calendars can replace the two most important ones in my life: the one in my head and the paper one I carry in my purse.

Tomorrow might be a good day for finishing thoughts. Unless it isn’t.

It isn’t fair to feel behind already. It’s only 6:28 as I’m typing this. I’ve been up since 4. I’ll be going until late evening. I need to remember that it isn’t a race and that I’m allowed to take actual time to do things.

Not always the easiest task for me.

Part of it is that I don’t like chaos too much. I want to hurry though getting it in order so I can breathe and pretend I’m in control for a while. Part of it is the compulsion to cross things off my list. That’s a dangerous thing. It does make me do things, but it also feeds into my goody-two-shoes, look-at-me, teacher’s pet self. I can easily become addicted to gold stars. Or, looked at another way, I can transform into one of those rats frantically pushing levers because surely the treat will come eventually.

I need to find out whether I can be effective without the panic element, if, when I give up the worry, I do not magically transform into a complete slacker who never gets out of bed. I need to approach the day with a sense of space and patience.

Good luck with that.

I am old-fashioned. Or, if you prefer, a Luddite. I know how things used to work and it bugs me when they don’t anymore. Not all things. But bookstores, which should be Luddite by their very nature—that whole dead tree thing is so last century now that a person can find just about anything on the Internet or download it to a Kindle or Nook or whatever (which really doesn’t explain the continued sales of blank books, but I suppose there will always be 13-year-old girls who need to write unfortunate poetry in purple ink with little hearts dotting all the i’s.), shouldn’t change. When I go to the bookstore looking for a particular book, I expect to go to the appropriate section and find it by author.

This is too much to ask.

T.R. is reading a fairly dreadful series of books called Guardians of Ga’Hoole. They’re far too easy for him. The stories are so non-engaging to me that I don’t feel the need to read the parts I miss when he reads along without me. I have now missed two entire books in the series this way. On the other hand, I read brain candy, too, so if he likes them, I can live with that.

While T. was recuperating from his root canal, he read the fourth and fifth books of the series, finishing off the ones he already owned. I am a nice mommy sometimes, just to keep the kids surprised when I slide into Meanest Mom in the Entire Universe territory. I went to the library with him last night to try to find the next one, but it wasn’t in. Then I went to the bookstore today and got the next five in the series to give him as a surprise when I pick him up.

The thing is, it took way too long to find the books. I have mostly figured out what books get filed in “Independent Reader” and which rank as “Young Adult,” which is good, since in the particular bookstore I visited, those sections are on different floors, presumably to prevent the sullen teenagers from accidentally browsing the religious books in the next aisle over from the Independent Readers or to keep them away from the upstairs café or something. I went along the aisles to the L section. No Lasky. No next Ga’Hoole book.

In case I had been wrong about where the book might possibly be located in the store (sometimes these things are inscrutable and what I really want is a bookstore that has a section called Books Janet Will Like or even Books Janet Came In Intending to Buy), I checked the computer which said that the book I was looking for should probably be in the store in the section I had already searched. At this point, I was starting to get grumpy.

I tracked down an actual human being who was shelving books, presumably having mastered the psychic skills necessary in learning which sections books belong in and explained my problem. It turns out that series books, which, really, seems like just about everything in the Independent Reader section anymore, are sometimes but not always shelved in alphabetical order by the title of the series. I found them under G.

In part to avoid this problem in the future and in part because one trip to the bookstore is better than five and far less dangerous, I then decided to buy as many as I could of the series at once. There was no eleventh book on the shelf, so I have now batched it with the final two for another future trip when I will already know how to find it.

At which time, they will have moved all the books around again.

So in my rich fantasy life, a day off would include a lot of relaxation, maybe some reading, and, if I got really wild and crazy, a massage, something like that.

Here in the real world, this is how I spent my Veteran’s Day. I got up at 4:45, which, sadly, counts as sleeping in. I did my daily journaling and prayers and my blog post. After breakfast, I took Cricket for a long walk with my friend YY, getting home about 9.

While I was out, Rick had dropped off T.R. Rick had told me the day before that T. seemed to have a broken tooth and asked what the deal was with my dental insurance. I had no clue, not having ever used it, but I sent email and made calls and figured it out and got T. an appointment for 11:45.

Then I went grocery shopping. It could have been more streamlined if I weren’t picky, but grocery shopping means a trip to the meat market, the natural grocery for organic produce, and the regular grocery store for the rest of the stuff.

I took T. to lunch before the dentist, on the theory that whatever happened there would probably make eating less pleasant. That was a good move on my part because it turned out that what he had was not a broken tooth, but one that had been half eaten away by plain old decay. I am not an expert on dental procedures; I have exactly one filling, which I got maybe five years ago. T.R. needed a root canal. And, as other people may have already guessed, he will be getting a crown. He gets to have a filling in another molar when he goes back for the temporary crown, too. Several hours and $1300 later, we left the dentist’s office somewhat traumatized. I at least did not have numbness and the prospect of future pain.

Chlorine can kill most ills. We went to the pool for an hour or so to calm our qi or reset our chakras or burnish our auras or just plain calm down. The only bad side effect of chlorine is that it induces massive sleepiness. I crashed out for an hour or so, but T. took an epic nap, only waking up at nine last night to slurp soup and go back to bed.

In between things, I mended a couple of pairs of pants and did a little knitting.

T. is not going to school today. Brent will be in charge of dispensing Advil at appropriate intervals and with luck, T. will do the homework he slept through the time for yesterday. I will go to work, where I will worry in the back of my head.

On the bright side, I am still breathing. Gold star for me.

I wandered around the office supply store a while yesterday for work. I like to think about where things that are not paper and printer cartridges might be rather than asking. It’s kind of a test. Does my logic run the same way as the store’s logic? How many tries will it take to find the letter openers? (I eventually had to cave in and ask about the letter openers. They were on the aisle where I was distracted by the very idea that there are binder clips patterned like leopards. In other words, the letter opener was hidden by another office supply’s camouflage.)

I came in going full speed ahead. I’m full of new-broomness and also slightly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tasks ahead of me. But then the supplies worked their magic. I’ve said before and firmly believe that what is being sold there is the idea of order. I need the idea of order. It may be fictive. It may not be achievable with a label maker and colored file folders and binders. However, browsing and buying soothed me, slowed down my heart rate, reminded me that it’s not just about working fast, but about working well.

I think I might want to pick up some miracle tape, too.

p.s. The title is a play on Wallace Stevens's poem "The Idea of Order at Key West," which you literature nerds out there already knew.

This is probably cheating, but I’m doing it anyway. Last night, when Roia and I met to write, the magic envelope produced the word basement. We each generated a list of images/memories to go with the word, detouring to see if another word provided something better (it was responsibility, which was easier to make a list for, but personally, I wasn’t emotionally prepared to dive into any of the potential stories that came up). Then we picked one each and wrote for a good chunk of time. We’re supposed to time it, but I can either write or look at my watch; guess which one is more important to me.

So, here is what I wrote. It’s not finished. I may or may not finish it later.

***

Pencil Sharpener

In dreams, houses are supposed to represent the self and thus the basement, like Spot, embodies the id, or in a more Jungian jungle, the unconscious. Maybe, maybe not. But the pencil sharpener in my basement could instantly transport me into childhood.

The sharpener came with the house, screwed to the fir framing long enough ago that the rusty screws split the wood just enough to give the act of pencil sharpening a precarious wobble, not significant enough for the pencil to be in real danger, but enough that the act seemed brave, the work of someone deft, fearless, and bold.

It was the old-fashioned kind I remember from the classrooms at Oak Street School: Mrs. Peck, Mrs. Carlson, Mrs. Hill, Mrs. Skillman, Mrs. Kelly all had them. Even Mr. Scorolla, the only man among the teachers, frightening in his three-piece suited majesty, presumably had one in his room full of impossibly large and terrifying sixth graders. On the outside, it [the sharpener… antecedents get confusing when the goal is to keep moving the pen…] looked like a somewhat flattened egg, maybe a turtle egg with a shell that could conceivably be pressed between heavy tomes so that the two opposite sides became smooth planes between the ovoid curves of the rest of the structure.

One side, the right side (poor lefties in those days before the electric pencil sharpener with the central hole—first the indignity of green rubber handles on their awkward scissors and then the bafflement of maneuvering the mechanism necessary to allow for writing in that awkward [I should delete this word since I just used it and I go on to use more adjectives anyway], looped over, crouched, and laborious way), the handle protruded, the grip fluted and free-spinning around the shiny metal core. The other side, toothed like an escaped wheel from a Spirograph, displayed its graduated circles, ready to accommodate the chubby red pencils of first grade as well as the slender number 2 wands of those mature enough to attempt cursive. Both sides fascinated in their own mechanical brilliance, the startling perfection of their forms, but even more glory hid within.

The way the appliance actually sharpened pencils was by grinding the wood away between two ropes of steel, two threaded cylinders, two meshing helices of inorganic origin, two tectonic plates rubbing shoulders around the inconvenient girth of the pencil. That gnashing, that grinding, that dusty, fine-pointed ritual! What words could I write with the freshly burnished graphite tip of the pencil tapering into infinity! No mere calculation or concatenation of syllables could overcome a pencil so honed. I could scoff at the serried rows of bubbles on any standardized test.

To say nothing of the smell…

Home again, home again, jiggety jig. The air here is different. My skin felt chapped and dry while I was away, and now that I’m home it feels relieved. I walked to the beach this morning and even though it was chilly, I felt warmer than I have in a week. And the temperatures are less extreme from inside to outside here at home. I reunited with my usual breakfast in my usual bowl (organic free range eggs soft boiled over 7-grain toast) and didn’t have to pay $12 for the privilege.

Of course, I’m already on my third load of laundry and I have about a million household tasks that need immediate attention, like, say, groceries, but the feel of the place settles in around me and makes me happy.

Naturally, I won’t be home most of the day. It’s my first day at the new job, a long-ish day for a part-timer, and my brain will be full to bursting by the end. At which time, I will go meet my lovely writing buddies. But again, a return to people who nourish me, who stretch me and comfort me.

Home is good.

One of the things I find easier to do while I’m away from home is exercise. Over the weekend, it took the form of walking all over Washington, but this week I’ve been using the hotel gym. Conveniently, it is located on the very same floor as my room.

Monday I ran on some sort of semi-elliptical trainer thing. I did not die, but I didn’t want to do it again, either. Tuesday was treadmill and weights, plus hours of swimming with Opal. Yesterday I did stationary bike and yoga and the same today. Tomorrow I should probably do weights again with whatever cardio I choose.

Somehow I need to transfer this habit home with me. Although I think the secret is pretty obvious: go first thing. At home, I write when I first get up, which is good for that whole using the power of the unconscious thing, but I think it’s time to try to put a healthy body around my sane(ish) mind.

It’ll work.

I like aquariums. I suppose it is part of the fish tank effect that the all-knowing They describe: fish soothe me. Some of it is the color and sound of water, some the slow weaving of the fish, some the flow of water plants. However, I managed to go to the aquarium here in Baltimore without seeing very many fish at all.

Opal and I went together. Both of Opal’s parents were busy with the conference that Brent came here to attend. We spent a couple of hours in the morning in the hotel pool until near-starvation convinced Opal that leaving the pool would not be a complete tragedy, particularly since I promised we could go in again in the afternoon. Revived by lunch, she consented to visit the aquarium first.

I am not a fan of meta-experiences, but the first thing we did at the aquarium was to sit through the “4-D” film. We were poked in the back, misted with water, and assaulted with strobe lights. Both of us liked the bubbles that floated down on us, but personally, I could have forgone them if it meant that I could skip the poking, too. Sea snakes swam at us through our 3-D glasses, waves crashed, spears pointed. I think there might have been some content, but what it was escaped me because I was distracted by all the stuff, not to mention the screaming of the ten gazillion elementary students who shared the theater with us. I’d give it a miss next time.

The dolphin show, on the other hand, was lovely. There was obvious affection between the dolphins and their trainers. The dolphins seemed healthy and playful, doing some of their show behaviors for fun even before the show began. Opal was captivated by the dolphins who liked to spin in the water just like she does. She doesn’t find it as amusing as I do when the dolphins splash the people who willingly sit in the splash zone seats, perhaps because she doesn’t understand the consensual nature of the transaction; she doesn’t want to be splashed, so how could anyone else actually seek it out? I saw behaviors I’ve never seen before, dolphins playing catch with trainers and dolphins leaping over exercise balls in the water.

Opal looked a little faded by the end of the show, but I persuaded her to go see the jellies with me. She in turn persuaded me that she’d have more fun if she had a snack first, which seemed like a good deal for both of us. I can watch jellies for hours because I find their movements so graceful, but I was content with a quick look, since Opal wanted to hurry back to swim.

In the gift shop on the way out, one of those water toys that are challenging to pick up because they slide through your hand burst all over Opal. The nice man behind the counter says it happens all the time, which makes me wonder why they continue to stock them. Opal was more glittery than before and definitely wet, so we wrapped her up in my scarf and we headed back to the hotel to get wet on purpose instead.