Shakespeare and an examination of evil in the human heart.

Here's an interesting article on Shakespeare's examination of the human spirit and the nature of evil. Got this at my favorite go-to place on the Internet every day, Arts & Letters Daily.

I also recommend The Writer's Almanac.

P.

That check out clerk

I stopped at Walgreen's today to buy some Benadryl, since I'm going to be spending the next several days with Kij, and she has pets and I'm allergic to both cats and dogs. By the time the line had inched up to the counter, I was staring at the clerk in covert fascination. Wow.

It was difficult to say how old she was. Maybe fifty. I'd guess from the lines around her eyes and the really terrible condition of her teeth that she was a smoker. Her hair was dyed an unconvincing garish shade of orangish-red, was ratted and teased within an inch of its life, and held back from her face with some gaudy rhinestone clips. Aside from the caked-on foundation, she had thick blue eye shadow on and her eyebrows . . . well, I couldn't tell if she had just laid the blue eye shadow right over her eyebrows or had actually used a blue pencil to draw them in. She was wearing a maroon top (with a couple of kitschy-looking rhinestone pins on the lapel), but her lipstick was arrest-me red, which certainly clashed. But the strangest thing was that she also had on . . . well, it wasn't exactly a feather boa. It was a dingy whitesh-gray, as if she had taken a feather boa and wet it down and let it sit in an attic for fifty years and then put it on this morning. Maybe it was supposed to be some sort of funky scarf? Her fingernail polish was glitter silver.

I could not help but feel a strange sense of awe, at how hard she had worked--and probably how much money she had spent--to make herself look . . . well, so awful. Wouldn't that money have been better spent fixing her teeth?

I see people like that sometimes, people that dress in such a way that makes me think: Lord, please strike me dead with a bolt of lightening before I ever go out in public like that. Often it's older people, who are doing something ridiculous because they think it will make them look younger. Like old guys who try combing over ridiculously long lank wisps of hair to cover a bald spot. I wonder: does their taste deteriorate as they age? Can they not really see themselves clearly in the mirror any more? Or did they never have any taste to begin with?

I'll be getting on a plane at an ungodly hour tomorrow to go see Kij. Will update from Kansas.

My right hand (my dominant one, annoyingly) is in a brace because I'm suddenly having trouble with my ligaments again. I had injured this hand about three years ago, and it took about three months for it to heal. Now, suddenly, the problem has reappeared--I can hear my wrist bones grate against each other when I turn my wrist. Ouch! Ick! So I've put this carpal tunnel brace on to keep myself from turning it. Unfortunately, it's not as restrictive as the ligament brace I used three years ago, but that got lost in the vicissitudes of my life. If it's not better by the time I get back from Kansas, I'll have to go back to the Sports Medicine Clinic. I can still type and use my mouse, albeit clumsily.

Peg