She's alive! (And Thanksgiving)

CJ Cregg the spider, from my previous post, is alive and well and has survived the cold snap we had recently. I saw her slender leg peeking out from behind my wing mirror today, and she had spun a beautiful new web.

I then drove at 50mph down the A3 to go and see my brother and destroyed it. I feel rather bad about that.

It's Thanksgiving over in America (I'd say 'today', but it's past midnight here in the UK, and it's still yesterday in America, so... never mind), and I'm not entirely clear what Thanksgiving is about beyond the fact that it's about giving thanks.

Thanks for my glorious, technicolour, surround sound life. Thanks for my Cowboy. Thanks for my friends and family. Thanks for my good health. Thanks for the amazing teachers out in the world. More on teachers later.

Thanks for cramming everything I have to do this month into three days. I appreciate that.

"Shove it up your ass, Toby."

I had this whole clever idea for a post I wanted to do. Bear with me on this one.

In the driver's side wing mirror of my car, there is a spider who has made a web between the door and the mirror for the last couple of months. Sometimes she will be in the web when I set off for a journey, until the vibrations send her scurrying back to her den behind the mirror itself, and sometimes she's securely stowed before I go anywhere.

She is a false widow spider, I discovered, when I caught her reflection in the mirror. They've had a lot of bad press this year, with a great deal of scaremongering and wars waged on them. False widow spiders have been around since I was a kid - I remember picking them up and letting them run around my hands before I developed a healthy, pathological phobia of spiders. I've never been bitten by one, to my knowledge - and I have been bitten by spiders before - and have never needed medical attention for a spider bite. Spiders keep bugs out of my house and don't tend to purposely ruin my life, so I do not advocate spider hate in any way.

To that end, I was planning to do a post on the false widow who lives in my wing mirror. For convenience, I gave her a name so that I could talk to her as I drove around town. I wanted a name that conjured up somebody strong, and superbly skilled, because the webs this spider weaves are truly beautiful. I needed a name that commanded a sense of intelligence and logic, because this spider has a more extensive knowledge of forces, cantilevers, tension and vibration than any structural engineer on the planet. I needed a name that suggested femininity without girlishness. She's a spider, after all (only the ladies spin webs that they live in for a prolonged amount of time, in any spider species), and she's probably not one to worry about what she's wearing.

I wanted so badly to get a picture of her so that I could show her to you, and spark off the post I really wanted to write - the post that said "Hey, don't be mean about spiders, they do a really good job and it's not always easy, some of those bugs are four times the size of the spider" and a post that also said "FYI, this is my most favourite person right now." But this spider, in her wisdom, has hidden from me for a few days. She emerged whilst I was in the countryside at the weekend and spun a brand new web ready for me to tear it to shreds at 70mph on the motorway, and I saw her briefly as she came out to look at the damage and retreat resignedly a moment later. I've not seen her since, and it's been rather cold. She may have died.

So no picture. Here's a picture of a false widow that I found on Google. It'll have to do. Don't hate on the false widows.

I named her CJ, after CJ Cregg from The West Wing. A woman who handles the press with deft poise, who comes back stronger after any hurdle she faces, who has climbed high in a workplace where men (often egotistical and brutish) strut about and throw their weight around while she quietly sets a trap or forms a plan. CJ fights for other women, takes a bite out of the men around her who often seem to underestimate her. The plight of people who are not as privileged as she is moves her to tears, more than once.

You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn't be allowed to say ‘shove it up your ass Toby.’ But since I'm not, shove it up your ass Toby.

- CJ
The West Wing 3.09 The Women of Qumar

I love how she cares about people she's never met, and how she uses every bit of her freedom to make a difference, even if it's just in a small way. She is sensitive and sharp, gentle and fierce. She is astounding. Very sadly, she is fictional.

Allison Janney, however, is not fictional, and I think she's a superb human being, beautiful and talented. I have quite the girl crush.

Downtime

Our broadband at the house was cut off for a while, due to some disorganisation and miscommunication, and as such I was limited to my 3G allowance on my phone (which rapidly ran out), and to trying to remember what I did before we had the internet.

It provided some downtime, and gave a kickstart to a few projects. I started packing up my possessions ready to move out of London. I've filled ten archive boxes with junk, and don't appear to have made any headway whatsoever.

I started writing again: I made a small dent in both the trashy romance I started a while ago, and a dent in the rewrite of my trashy fantasy novel which took me ten years to put down a complete draft.

I even picked up a book and read for a while. I often feel guilty about reading, as if I should only do it when I have nothing better to do, and certainly not in the daytime, and really the only acceptable place to read is in bed, and only then if there's nothing else that needs doing.

Reading has become an expensive luxury, not a commodity. I remember when I was younger, I would pull out the futon in my room into its chaise longue shape, sit under my reading light and plough through an entire Robert Jordan novel in a day or two (Aside: I never did finish the Wheel of Time series, I think I gave up caring).

These days, I can barely get through ten pages. I'm not sure why. It might be a lack of a suitable space in which to read, or that I always feel there is something more important that I should be doing. Of course, I am no longer a teenager who doesn't have to feed herself or pay rent, so there are a few more important distractions about than there used to be, but it would be good to re-establish a reading habit. The last book that I chewed through at a voracious pace was Lonesome Dove, which was more addictive than my Xbox at the time. I'm yet to find a book that sucks me in so well.

I have also watched a lot of The West Wing, as I have the DVD box set (stolen from my parents), and as a result I have a slight girl crush on CJ Cregg, who is probably the most inspiring, wonderful, powerful female character I've seen on TV since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the only situation in which Buffy would beat CJ would be in a vampire slaying competition (and even then I'm not sure).

I have upgraded myself to an iPhone 5s - it's white and shiny and has a fancy red leather cover because I don't trust myself not to drop it or try to hold it in my teeth and other foolish things to do with expensive equipment, and I've already put Siri to good use texting people while I'm driving. Siri is not good at understanding me yet, but he's trying. Mostly, I am enjoying the lack of delay between touching the screen and things happening. Good night, sweet iPhone 4, you have served me well, but your day is done.