Wake me when spring training starts

I hate it when the World Series isn't worth watching. But this may be the worst one in ... well, a lot longer than I've been watching the World Series.

The Yankees and the Marlins would be uninteresting, even if it weren't for the fact that we know the Cubs and the Red Sox aren't there.

It's he Marlins' victorious return, after buying themselvess championship rings with a team of players they were just borrowing from other teams for a year, so they could gloat at how quickly their lame expansion team made it big. The Yankees, who perennially buy themselves good teams, have lots of money and lots of wins but no soul.

I hope they're all happy. They stole our magic.

It doesn't matter if it's curse or coincidence or choking or Bartman's fault. This is what we're left with, and it sucks.

"I would like to bring Nefertiti to Pushkin on a troika ..."

Tonight an English professor introduced the writer of what she says is the best poem ever written.

I felt bad for her because she was so nervous that she seemed about to explode or something, but I was also excited that something could have such an effect on her.

My grammar professor, Janet, encouraged her class to go to this, by saying, "It is rare that a famous famous person comes to Morris." We chuckled in recognition and assent. "But this," she continued, is a famous famous person." This was not the first time the magnitude of his visit had been impressed upon me. I hadn't heard of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but then I hadn't heard of any Russian poets. I had never heard anyone read their own poetry, either. Janet also said that hearing poets read their own work can be an interesting experience; she says she heard a famous poet read so badly that the experience deadened his poetry for her, and she's also heard people whose poetry she found unremarkable read it in such a way that it came alive. I wondered what would happen to poems I'd never heard, by a poet I'd never heard of, who apparently has an adequate but not overwhelming grasp of the only language I speak.

He wore shiny teal pants and a shiny, pale yellow shirt. He had a friend with him, Bill Davidson, who I think is a professor of something or other at UW-Stevens Point, who read in English, sometimes accompanied by Yevgeny in Russian. The first thing he did was explain that it's hard to translate poetry from Russian into English, because you lose all the subtleties, the nuances of rhyme and meter and aliteration and such. Hearing him in his native language was in some ways more fun than hearing the versions I could understand, because his careful English and the warm familiarity of Davidson's Midwestern accent could hardly match up to the impassioned delivery of the original Russian. The English was always there, before, after, or intermingled with the Russian. I got the meaning from one and the emotion from the other.

I found the guy extremely cool; now I know why Janet encouraged us to go, and I might have a hint of an idea why Argie was going to expire from happiness and amazement.

He speaks Russian and English, he wants to bring Nefertiti to Pushkin, he's funny and serious, my split brain likes him.

Flowers and sex and love

"Orchids are the sexiset flower," Meryl Streep told Jenn and I tonight (Jenn hadn't seen Adaptation before, and I hadn't seen the second half of it since I bought the DVD). "The word 'orchid' comes from the Latin orchus, which means testicle."

"Oh, yeah, that's what I think of when I see it," Jenn said to the ghost orchid we saw on the screen.

"Yeah, really," I agreed. "It doesn't look like a testicle!"

"More like ... a vagina!"

"That does not look like a vagina!"

"Some of them do!" she asserted.

"Bah," was my witty reply.

Much later in the movie, Nicolas Cage said, "You are what you love. Not what loves you." So, after a small silence, I said quietly, "I am cherry Coke!" I almost felt bad, because I actually really liked that line the first time I saw the movie, but I'd just been sitting still too long and was starting to get silly.

"Yeah ... " Jenn said. "I'd be chocolate things. And chocolate stuff. Everything!"

"And pizza."

"And underwear! I'd be underwear."

"I'd be waffles."

"Belgian waffles ... with strawberries ... and syrup."

"And whipped cream!"

It took us a while to get to anything we love that isn't food. We are each several kinds of food, and one boy. We suppose we love one boy each, her Josh and my Matthew. We don't know if we want to be them, though. But we're both pretty sure that we don't want the other to be her respective boy. Maybe we'll just stick with loving food.