you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

The next time anyone complains about People These Days Giving Their Children Terrible Names, I'm going to point out that in the family tree of my mother's father's old New England family, in addition to the Abijahs, the Amariah, and the Shubaels (all m.), Persises (or should that be Persides?), Parmelias (Parmeliae?), Zoella and Angenette (all f.), there's a Comfort, a Welcome (both m.), a Thankful, a Waitstill, and a Waity (all three f.).

(I actually like the name Persis a lot. Waity, not so much.)

Did you know that the Renaissance architect and mathematician wrote a Latin mock-panegyric of his dog? In Latin?

There's a friend of the family, NJ. Her father is apparently interested in Alberti. He's an architect, and I know he was working on Vitruvius, which would naturally lead to Alberti, I suppose. Anyway, NJ called tonight to say, "My dad really wants a translation of this. If he sends you a text, will you translate it? That will be great, thanks so much, bye."

So it's true that I have time, theoretically, right now (I'm certainly not overburdening myself with the stuff I need to do this summer). It might be fun to translate (satiric neo-Latin about dogs? sure why not!).

I shouldn't resent doing favors for people, either. But... I do resent it, always, when it's NJ. Because she does this ALL THE TIME to my family. When it was Vitruvius, earlier this year, she wanted my brother to measure himself and all of his friends and see whether the ratios of their limbs matched Vitruvius' ideal proportions (he ignored it). She's gotten my mother to do, essentially, pro bono editing for a couple of collections she's put together. There was very quickly a general putting down of feet with respect to childcare by all of us when she had kids and kind of assumed that we would be babysitters whenever she needed one, and that led to some friction. But seriously!

"My dad wants to read this thing of which a translation doesn't exist; will you do one for him?" I assume the text is pretty short, and it won't (I imagine) be a huge project. But it isn't a nothing kind of project. It isn't, for example, along the lines of lending a cup of sugar, or even doing a bit of internet searching to hunt something down for someone (I tried: I couldn't even find a Latin text of this thing). Or even collecting a neighbor's mail when she's out of town, or looking in on her cats every day. Those are normal favors that people do for each other. This feels bigger, and I resent that NJ never acknowledges that she is always asking for favors that are actually quite large.