Pretending to Dance

Today was a ballet day (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9–10 a.m.), so I didn’t walk. That shouldn’t stop me from thinking, but my thoughts in my ballet class tend to run along the lines of “What in the world am I doing here?”

During the summer, when high school and college students sometimes join our adult women’s class, the absurdity of my position is further impressed on me. When I started taking classes 20-odd years ago, I was in my early forties—still a bit long in the tooth for a beginner class but at least still relatively flexible. I gradually improved for the first ten years or so and then, in my fifties, when I began to get arthritic and stiff, lost all that I’d gained and more. Now a fat old lady of 63, I avoid looking in the mirror and try to concentrate on feeling like I’m dancing. It’s still exercise, and the esthetic of it appeals to me more than tai chi or yoga or (shudder!) aerobics, and to the extent that I can do it at all, it helps with my balance and coordination. Moreover, the instructor, who has aged along with the rest of us, now devotes a good bit of the class to stretching, so it’s probably worthwhile. And it certainly heightens our appreciation for what real dancers do.

I won’t be walking tomorrow, either, as we’re flying to Portland, Oregon, for our son’s wedding Saturday. I will certainly have some thoughts about that, and I may post them as I go, or I may be silent until our return next week. Time will tell.

How Not to Read a Book

It would be absurd to say that I was born a copy editor, but the genes certainly seem to run in the family. My mother was an English teacher before she married and always wrote and spoke very carefully, my daughter is a gifted proofreader, and even my son, though lackadaisical in his own writing, notices errors in published works.

This ability is a mixed blessing, of course. When the one error on a written or printed page is the first thing that jumps out at you, especially if you can’t resist correcting it, you don’t always have a lot of friends, and “reading for pleasure” can sometimes be downright painful. But copy editors perform a useful service (though there seem to be fewer and fewer of them doing it, judging from the published books I read), and every writer should be grateful for the help they can provide.

I was reminded of this (as I often am) this morning by seeing the moon, a few days shy of its last quarter, high in the sky as I was walking. According to the moonrise/moonset table for my location available from the U.S. Naval Observatory, the moon rose last night at 10:56 and will set this morning at 10:13. Anyone who wrote a book and set a scene on the evening of June 22, 2008, under a full moon would obviously be mistaken. Although a copy editor is supposed to check on such things and alert the author, both of them know that few readers will notice or care. But if you make the moon full tonight and then make it full again two weeks from tonight, some reader probably will notice that anomaly.

Protecting authors from that sort of blunder is part of what a good copy editor should do, which is why it’s often difficult for a copy editor to render an opinion on the book in general. “Well, what did you think of it?” is a question I dread, for I often have no overall impression, just a collection of “things that need to be fixed.”

Errors in chronology can be among the most difficult to deal with. If the author has been vague about dates, these will not usually be an issue, but if there are even a few specific dates to hang events on, then every other event in the book must be evaluated in relation to those set points. I think perhaps the worst problem I ever encountered was with two children whose ages, it was clear from later context, were supposed to be separated by a year or two. Yet careful reading and calculating the timing of events showed that they had to have been born about three months apart—to the same woman!

Errors of fact should be easier to avoid. The Internet has made research so easy that there is no excuse for misspelling a brand name, attributing a quotation to the wrong person, or introducing anachronisms. The same writer who created the prodigiously fecund mother also had one of his characters flying a company Learjet—in 1960. Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia, “The original Learjet 23 [the first model] was a six- to eight-seater and first flew on October 7, 1963, with the first production model being delivered in October 1964.” I suggested the Grumman Gulfstream I, a turboprop model that was a popular corporate aircraft during the required period.

The hardest part of being a proofreader/copy editor, however, is the knowledge that all your friends will gleefully gloat over any mistake you make—and these are inevitable. Because an immutable fact—and the reason even the best writer needs a proofreader—is that it is impossible to proofread your own work (because you know what you intended to say, and so that’s what you read, regardless of what’s on the page). I say this in advance, knowing that, according to whatever corollary of Murphy’s Law governs such things, any piece of writing that points out others’ errors is bound to contain an error of its own.

Sunrise, Sunset

I hit the street at least half an hour later than usual this morning. A monstrous (but very welcome) thunderstorm woke me in the wee hours (sometime after 4 a.m.), and I went back to sleep hoping in vain that it might still be raining at 6. Alas! no, and when I finally got up around 7, I had to hustle.

It was pleasantly cool (low 70s F.), and, though it was a bit muggy, at least the streets hadn’t started to steam. Luckily the cloud cover hadn’t entirely broken up, so my route was still mostly shady even though the sun had gotten quite high. As I dodged the occasional puddle or blown-down limb and kept a wary eye on the sun as it fought through the clouds, I thought about sunrises and sunsets and a little-remarked phenomenon regarding them.

This year the summer solstice fell on June 20, the earliest date since 1896. As can be seen from the charts on this Web page, the date (on average, balanced by leap years) will continue to shift back until 2100. In general the backward progression is arrested every hundred years, since a century year is not a leap year, but 2000, being a century year divisible by 400, was a leap year, so the progression continued. An interesting factoid but not the one I was thinking about.

No, what interests me is that, although the days do start getting shorter after the summer solstice and longer after the winter solstice, the change in length affects sunrise and sunset unevenly. I first noticed this with regard to the winter solstice. You might expect that the sun would begin to rise earlier each morning after the solstice, but in fact it does not. On the contrary, it actually rises later for as much as a month afterward (the phenomenon is more pronounced the closer you are to the equator). For example, at my latitude, the sun rose at 6:44 on December 22, 2007. It continued to rise later until January 15, when it rose at 6:50. It did not rise as early as 6:44 again until January 30, and it was February 1 before it rose at 6:43. The day is instead lengthening at the other end. Similarly, after the summer solstice, sunrise times do start getting later, but sunsets are also later till well into July, though the disparity is not nearly as pronounced in the summer.

A blog about nothing?

A few months ago I finally got around to installing Office 2007. Although I’m still using Word 2003 for most of my work, I’m trying to get up to speed with Word 2007 for a variety of reasons, not least of which is to be able to continue helping Word users, which includes updating the articles at my Word FAQ site.

One of the new features in Word 2007 that intrigues me is the ability to post to a blog site. It occurred to me that writing a blog might give me an opportunity to use Word 2007 more. I investigated the setup at WordPress and was impressed, but could I really find any excuse for adding to the blog pollution already on the Web? In my online research on various topics I’d run across plenty of blogs that seemed to be just as unfocused as my Google search terms, but it seemed to me that the best blogs have some sort of unifying theme, and I couldn’t imagine what that might be.

The answer came to me, as such answers often do, while I was walking. Barring early-morning appointments or inclement weather, and aside from the two days a week that I have ballet classes, I walk two miles a day. During those walks (on a more-or-less invariable route), I have ample opportunity for rumination, and I often come up with thoughts I might be inclined to share. So I thought I’d start this WalkThoughts blog to record my thoughts on the Topic of the Day, whatever that might be.

Today I got to thinking about Heaven. There was an article in this morning’s Religion section about whether or not dogs go to Heaven, or whether there’s a Heaven for dogs, or whatever. Not being a dog owner, I don’t have an opinion on that, but I was thinking about how Heaven (or whatever sort of afterlife, if any, you believe in) wouldn’t be very heavenly without your favorite pet, if you’re that way inclined. On the other hand, however, some people’s idea of Heaven might be a place where they’re not bothered by other people’s pets. I’ll leave you to think about that.

Where I went from that, though, was thinking about what people would do in Heaven. I imagine some people might think it would be great not to have to do anything, but surely that would get old pretty quickly. It’s futile to speculate about an uncertain afterlife, however, and I realized that where I was going with this was to think about retirement and how people deal with it.

People who’ve worked hard all their lives may very well think that the best thing about retirement is not having to work any more. Or not having to get up at a certain time. Or not having to be answerable to a boss. Whatever. But that soon gets old, too.

And so will they if they don’t have meaningful work to do. I think man was meant to do work. Of course, as the saying goes, it’s not work if you enjoy it. Some people are lucky enough to do enjoyable work during their careers; others find enjoyable “work” in an avocation. But there’s no quicker route to feeling old and useless than to stop doing any kind of work at all. This is not usually an issue for women, especially those whose careers have been in the home. We all know that “women’s work is never done.” They’re mostly used to being underappreciated, too.

But the most vital key to retirement, it seems to me, is to have something to fill your time that is not only intrinsically enjoyable and rewarding but also appreciated by others. We all need to be needed, and it is when we stop feeling needed that we start dying.