anthropometaphors

I’ve heard it used as a catchall phrase to describe gastrointestinal upset ranging from kitty flatulence to sightings of <insert disgusting visual here> in the loo. As a result of hearing the high-brow bathroom humor of science geeks, my natural curiosity has sprung and I’ve found myself learning the details about celiac disease,

This is what I’ve found: celiac disease (CD) is an autoimmune disease in which the mucosal lining of the small intestine reacts to glutens found in wheat, rye and barley by producing a toxin that damages cells involved in nutrient absorption. What that means for a sufferer of CD is a suite of unpleasant abdominal symptoms after consuming gluten-containing food, and risk of long-term conditions associated with malnutrition – such as anemia, fatigue, vitamin deficiencies and behavioral symptoms.

While celiac disease may have been considered a hypochondriac’s condition in the past, EU scientists have data suggesting a possible genetic location for disease predisposition.  With the ever-increasing availability of genetic information, maybe it’s time to spit into a tube and get my genotype.  While I’m at it, can I learn my predisposition toward this particular stinker of a subject?

I woke up at 6am on a Sunday morning and decided to roll with it. I got out of bed, drank a glass of water, opened all the windows in the apartment and listened to birds and wind.

As I lounged on the loveseat, watching the sky fade from pink to orange, two cats approached me with what I interpreted as curiosity. It was a chance encounter, indeed. Gwendel waddled toward his food bowl, where he eyed me for several minutes, crying his death rattle. When he either understood I wasn’t going to feed him – or simply tired of waiting – he slowly padded down the long hallway and pulled himself back into bed. Arlis sat at my feet through Gwendel’s antics, quietly watching the scene with her long tail tucked precisely around her front paws. When Gwendel left, she looked up at me and with a single “Meowl!” indicated she wanted a pet on the head.

And so the morning began, with Arlis by my side as I sipped a fresh cuppa (imported, for shame!) coffee. It’s almost too cheesy to say we stretched our morning yogas together, but we did. I draw the line with the cat parallels at hygiene; I prefer a warm shower. So while we parted ways for bath time, Arlis accompanied me through my toilette at the new vanity station I set up in the bedroom, checking emails in the office and even sweeping the hardwoods.

Interspersed throughout our morning romp was playtime. With Gwendel, playtime never worked. The simplest of toys freaked him out and he showed no interest in the third dimension. He remains happy to eat a full bowl of chow, trot into a soft, dark corner and sleep for up to 23 hours a day. Everytime is playtime with Arlis. Sweeping the house is clearly a battle of Good versus Evil, as she peers around corners waiting for the best moment to sprint into the clearing and triumphantly defeat the pile of dustbunnies and lintballs. Even so, she needs structured playtime, a prescribed minimum of 15 minutes twice a day.

Playtime isn’t just for Arlis, it turns out. Setting up a mandatory twice-daily play date with The Kitty Noodle* may be better for me than the cats. Like going to the gym every day, even on those days I really don’t want to, having a structured physical and mental break from my adult responsibilities keeps me happier and perhaps healthier. It sure helps Arlis and I get along, anyway.

*A dowel rod with a 3′ length of rubber hosing secured to one end. This noodle wand is cat magic around here. Even Gwendel gets in on some of the action, in the off moments when he forgets the noodle isn’t the vicious beast of his nightmares laying in wait to devour his food (and then him).

First: color palettes.  I’ve begun playing with COLOURlovers, a palette-generating and -sharing site.  So far I’ve only (preliminarily) finalized one palette – that of the office, which I’ve named “Happy To Work”.  Here she is:

One mod I’d like to see on COLOURlovers is percent scaling in the palette visualization.  For example, the work desk, and primary focal point in the room, will be color 2 or 3 (numbered 1-5 from left to right).  The two bookcases are set back and will be softer as color 5.  Color 1, which I consider the loudest, will be an accent color, used to color the bulletin board mounted on the wall above the work desk and on the wallpaper lining the inside of the blue bookcases.  Corrected for color scaling, the bar thicknesses on the above palette would represent the relative contribution each color will make in the finalized room.

I have a more elaborate palette in progress for the lounge, as the area is an open space including the kitchen and sitting area.  The warm, earthy tones in the kitchen (gold, rust, and copper slate stones; cherry hardwood floors and cabinets; a marigold accent wall) are going to be cooled down with the addition of particular shades of gray and blue throughout.  I’ll update this post with the CL palette in a bit.

I find it challenging to select fiction, and more challenging to complete the works I select! As far as the first challenge goes, Green Apple Books in the Richmond makes my life loads easier. The store is a new and used bookstore, meaning I can take two boxes of completed books in to sell and walk out with a half dozen new-to-me books in exchange. On my most recent trip, one of the books I left the store with was Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish.

I don’t recall how I came to select the book, perhaps by the museum-quality paintings of fish adorning the cover? Or by the slight confusion as to whether the book was fiction, memoir, biography or something else entirely? It could very well have been on an “Employee Pick!” rack, I really can’t remember.

Once I returned home from the bookstore, I proceeded to sort and organize the new additions into my minimal library. The availability of a spare shelf in the bookcase was put to use as a “To Read” staging area, where I arranged books much like a syllabus for a comparative literature course. With strategy and forethought I considered how themes from several works could interact; spacing some texts apart while bunching others close together to create a particular, desired effect. [It just so happens the spines of all the books on my "To Read" shelf are some shade of either yellow or blue. However, I'm not reading too much into that.] Another perk to such an arrangement is the carelessness it will allow me, now the initial setup has been completed. When I complete a book I may simply grab the next in line. No need to ponder – and potentially become derailed by – a next step, I continue to read, undisturbed by the transition to a new work.

the "To Read" staging area

So this month, after finishing up with April’s Harper’s and this quarter’s Granta, it was Gould’s Book of Fish that was next in queue. This novel about a penal convict turned fish painter, William Buelow Gould, is remarkable, although dripping as it occasionally does with the grotesque. While I’m just beyond the midway point, I will venture to say I’ve managed to stay on board as the story has successfully maneuvered through several unexpected turns. I’ve begun to hear wisdom in Gould’s sorrowful ruminations; timely prognostications in the guise of fables, diary entries and fish paintings:

And when I finished the painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish.

Life is a mystery, Old Gould used say, quoteing yet another Dutch painter, & love the mystery within the mystery.

But with the fish gone, what joyful leap & splash would signal where these circles now began?