You should see the other guy

What's the first thing that pops into your mind when a minor catastrophe befalls you?  Is it "Well, there goes my plan for the morning?"

I woke up this morning a little before 7.  It was still dark outside.  I walked through the house, opening blinds, as I always do.  Our L-shaped living room/dining room combination has six windows; two windows on the short side of the L, and two sets of two each on the long side.  I always start on the short side and work my way around.   Our Christmas tree is in front of the piano, which sits between the two sets of windows, and there's not much clearance between the dining room table and the Christmas tree, which I squeeze between in order to open the last two sets of blinds and plug in the Christmas tree.

Inclined as I am to expect the worst-case scenario, I thought, as I do each morning, that I needed to be careful so that I wouldn't end up tangled in the cords, tripping and falling and taking the tree down with me.  That never happens, of course, and it didn't happen today, either.  What did happen is that I got tangled in another extension cord on the other side of the dining room table (where a computer, which my son is using for a stop-motion video project, was plugged in), and I tripped and fell down, hard, hitting my face on the slate tile in the foyer, just where it begins and the carpet ends.

I haven't fallen down hard in a very long time.  Maybe not since childhood.  I could feel my upper lip swelling and when I touched my face, I felt blood, so I panicked a little.  There was a moment or two when I just wasn't sure how much damage I had done.  It was still dark, and I didn't have glasses on or contact lenses in yet, and the whole thing was very disconcerting and disorienting.

When I sat up, I realized that the damage was relatively minor.  I had grabbed a chair on the way down, which probably saved me from making harder contact with the slate.  I scraped the skin off the bridge of my nose (that was the source of the blood) and slightly broke the skin on my upper lip, which is about twice its normal size now.  My teeth seem to be fine, but my cheek and forehead are bruised and a little scraped.  I have a few other bruises and sore spots, too, but nothing that won't heal in a day or so.

For a few moments after the initial shock, I was afraid that I might have a concussion. I recited the names of the Presidents in reverse order starting with Obama and ending with Roosevelt (TR), and then started on the Popes, beginning with Francis.  I could only remember as far back as Pius XI, but I'm not sure I'd have correctly remembered who preceded him with or without head trauma.  Meanwhile, my punctuation skills, as always, are excellent, and I can still type 90 WPM give or take.  My head still hurts a little, but I think that my brain is fine, or at least no more damaged than it normally is.

As for my initial reaction, I have still managed to complete most of the items on today's to-do list; if I can manage to avoid extension cords and other trip hazards for the next few days, then I should be back on track in no time.  If anyone tells me that I look like I was in a bar fight, I'll say "Maybe I was.  Maybe I was."

Come thou long-expected cookies

That's not blasphemous, is it?

Today is cookie-making day, and while the cookies are long-expected among a certain demographic in my household, the cookie-making is long-dreaded by the cookie baker.  I don't like to bake.  I don't mind cooking, but baking just fills me with despair.

OK, slight hyperbole.  Despair would be overstating the case.  Dismay is much better.  I plan for cookie-making day several weeks in advance, and when it finally dawns, I'm filled with dismay.  The despair comes when the cookies are baked and I'm left to consider the wreckage that was once my kitchen.  Flour sticks to black countertops like white on rice.  Or flour.  The countertops will be dusty until Valentine's Day, and I still haven't figured out how I'll dig the crusted cookie dough particles out of my keyboard.

The first batch is in the oven now, so I'm tempting fate.  I'm not sure that my multi-tasking skills are good enough that I can time cookies and blog at the same time, and the idea of having to throw away even one batch leaves me quaking with horror and dread.  So Merry Christmas.

Progress

21,000 words.  60,000 or so to go.

How to...

In almost any given situation, I will find a way to predict and then panic about the worst possible outcome.  Sometimes, this quality benefits me.  I'm constantly foreseeing dreadful traffic accidents; maybe that's why I never have one.  I also seldom run out of anything, ever.  When you wake up every morning bracing for a siege, then you're not likely to run low on canned goods, or bottled water, or toilet paper.

I subscribe to several daily-deal electronic book services, and every day, I receive emails listing the day's book deals.  Novels, biographies, history (and for some reason, Amish romance novels. Who knew?), and niche, fad-of-the-day books from two years ago are all offered for a dollar or two.  It occurred to me, but only for a moment, that a person with my tendency to borrow trouble at high rates of interest might want to think twice before buying a copy of The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook, but then I decided that it was high time that I learned how to fend off a shark attack, or how to survive a hang-glider emergency (My advice: Stay away from hang-gliders altogether.  That's for damn fools.)

Maybe I should start to read The New York Review of Books or something, because I didn't realize that The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook was a humor book.  It does offer actual advice on how to survive actual life-threatening situations, but at least half of the entries are ironic instructions on how to survive first-world emergencies like blind dates and job interviews.

So this is what I think.  Unless you're a genius, you should stick to one thing or another. A book that represents itself as a survival handbook should be nothing but a survival handbook.  A book that identifies itself as humorous must actually be funny.  Maybe the next edition (apparently, it's a series) should include a chapter on how to survive a coordinated terrorist attack on a major city.  Sadly, hashtags won't stop bullets or bomb blasts, and profile photos superimposed with semitransparent tricolores won't prevent the next one.   Vive la France. 

Truth to power

I started reading e-books in 2010, when I bought a Barnes & Noble Nook device.  I still like actual books, but I love the electronic format.  It's nice to be able to carry all of your books in one compact device.

Right now, I'm reading Alistair Cooke's  Memories of the Good and the Great,  which I purchased for $1.99 on an e-book daily deal site. I have vague childhood memories of Alistair Cooke as host of "Masterpiece Theater," and I knew that he was a writer, but that was the extent of my experience with him.  I bought the book based on the description (short essays about 20th-century figures whom Cooke had covered as a correspondent for the BBC), and had no expectations at all.

I'm surprised by how much I like the book.  The very short essays telescope in and out: A short discussion of the person's significance (the subjects include FDR, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, George Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Roosevelt, P.G. Wodehouse, etc., so they're all pretty significant) and then a close observation of a moment in the person's life or a particular characteristic or event.  Cooke met all of the subjects at some point during his career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and host of the TV series Omnibus, and although he clearly admired all of his subjects, the essays do not read as hagiographic.

A few months ago, more because I was avoiding other things than because of any burning desire to read it, I read  Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  Apart from the obvious similarities (both books contain biographical sketches of prominent people; Strachey covered the 19th century and Cooke the 20th) there's not much resemblance between the two books.  Cooke is an interesting contrast to Strachey, whose goal was to take his subjects down a peg or two.

Cooke approached his biographies with just the opposite in mind: He already saw his subjects as great and good and wanted his readers to see them the same way. In a possibly intentional metatextual comment on journalism, Cooke notes that many (if not most) Americans at the time of FDR's presidency never knew that he was unable to walk, and that even the Hearst organization, known for its hostility toward the New Deal and toward FDR personally, observed the taboo against mentioning his disability.   Cooke guessed that the almost 16-year embargo on reporting about FDR's physical condition wouldn't have lasted for a week today, that today being 1999, when his book was published.  Today as in 2015, it wouldn't last for five minutes.

Did the news organizations that didn't report or comment on FDR's obvious disability do a disservice to the truth?  Did people have a right to know that their President was in a wheelchair?  I don't know. I do know that I have no interest in the sort of spurious truth-telling that unmasks faults and shines a spotlight on blemishes, not for the sake of honesty, but for the sake of exposure.

Some people actually are great or good.  Nothing useful comes of breaking them down in print, making them smaller and more like the rest of us.    If unvarnished truth means unvarnished by flattery or a political agenda, then it might also mean unvarnished by kindness or sympathy for human failings.  I think I'd prefer hagiography.

Recipes for the gulag

As the person responsible for preparing and serving 95% of the food that my family consumes, I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the immediacy and relentlessness of the chore.  These people want to eat EVERY SINGLE DAY, several times per day.  It's exhausting.

If you ask most people who cook because they have to, and not because they want to, they will probably tell you that the actual cooking process is not so bad (and in fact, it can be rather pleasant at times.)  What's hard is the figuring out part: planning meals, securing ingredients, working planned menus and mealtimes around various schedule demands.  If someone showed up at my house every day and told me what to cook and when to cook it, and then handed me a bag filled with the necessary meal components, then I'd happily do the rest, even the cleaning-up part.  This hasn't happened yet, but hope springs eternal.  Someday...

My ever-sunny disposition and my persistently optimistic outlook don't stop me from being preoccupied (often) with plague, violent upheaval, complete social and political breakdown, and famine.  Especially famine.  At any given time in history, in some place in the world, people starve because there's no food, anywhere, and no hope of getting any.  Never mind unexpected deliveries of neatly packaged groceries with handy instructions; there's not so much as a slice of moldy bread or a wormy apple to be found, and people just literally die from hunger.

20th-century famines, so often manmade, are a particular preoccupation, as are the excesses of the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin (see previous paragraph re: sunny disposition/optimistic outlook.) When I'm not grieving for the purge victims, I'm worrying about the ones who starved during the Ukraine famine,  or the siege of Leningrad, or fill-in-the-blank Soviet hellhole.  Apparently, cannibalism was not uncommon in the Ukraine in 1933; meanwhile, in Leningrad during the siege, the rat problem was pretty well in hand.

It's dinner time again.  Thoughts of famine are a sure (though temporary) way to silence the internal complaint monologue about the fact that it's dinner time again.  It's helpful to imagine that you're cooking for the rat-hunting victims of the Leningrad siege, or for the unfortunate kulaks of Ukraine.  Sometimes, I imagine them sitting down to a meal with us, and marveling at the feast before them (This appears to work best when the meal involves potatoes, or bacon.  Not so much for salad or grilled salmon.)  I don't feel like cooking, because I never feel like cooking, but I feel like eating, and I feel lucky that thoughts of eating aren't limited to the abstract.  Bon appetit.

Progress

It's November 2, and I'm behind schedule.  If I'm to finish writing a 50,000-word novel in the next 28 days, I'll need to step up my production considerably. I had the best intentions, of course.  I think I heard something once about good intentions paving a road that leads to somewhere; I just can't remember where.

Today was a day off from school, and my sons had friends over.  I did actually start to work, but when you hear someone say "Wait--don't start doing the whip and the nae-nae until you have the spacesuit on," how can you not stop what you're doing to investigate? And that wasn't even the most entertaining thing I overheard today.

The bad news is that I only wrote about 200 words (not counting these words.)  The good news is that I had a scathingly brilliant idea that might really pull the whole thing together.  200 down and 49,800 to go.  Onward.

I dreamed a dream

I woke up at about 4:30 this morning with just one thought: "Hey!  I don't even HAVE a basement!"  This was such an enormous comfort that I fell immediately back to sleep for an hour or so; quite unusual, because a 4:30 wake-up usually means that I'm up for the day.

Some backtracking: I had awakened from a dreadfully vivid and realistic dream about a waterbug infestation in my basement.  They were everywhere, and I was paralyzed by indecision about what to do about them.  Panic and just refuse to ever enter the basement again? No, because in this dream, the kitchen happened to be in the (nonexistent) basement (and this made the infestation that much more horrible.)  Call an exterminator? Well yes, because I wanted to be rid of the bugs, but no, because I was afraid of the pesticides and I was embarrassed to invite an exterminator into my squalid, crawling home.  So I spent the entire dream entering the basement over and over, closing my eyes and turning on the light, and then opening my eyes always a moment too early to avoid the sight of the bugs scurrying for the cover of darkness.

(I realize now that this is at least my third post about bugs or insects, and readers might make the mistaken assumption that I have a particular interest in or particular fear of bugs.  Neither is true.  I have no interest in any bug or insect except to react as necessary to get them out of my way; and although I'm certainly not fond of any form of insect or bug life, I'm also not really that afraid of them.  I have more weird phobias than the DSM-IV even knows about, but I'm pretty bug-neutral.)

So, back to the dream.  My house, as I mentioned, was both vermin-infested and utterly wretched, to the point at which I'd have been ashamed to have anyone see it.  This is far from the case in actual real life.  My house is simple and not especially luxurious, but it's quite clean and pleasant.   Anyone's welcome to visit, any time.  Mi casa es su casa.  I also don't have any particular fear of or aversion to pesticides (although the smell of Raid nauseates me) so I don't know why my dreaming self was so afraid of the exterminator.

One thing about the person in the dream that I did recognize, all too clearly, was her panicked inability to make a decision and take action. I am often paralyzed by indecision about the most minor everyday things.  Decisions about what to wear, what to cook for dinner, what to do during the thirty minutes before I have to pick a kid up from school or an activity can and often do send me into a hair-pulling tailspin of anxiety.

Anyway, I woke up and have had a fairly productive day, more so than average.  I'm even less interested in dream analysis than I am in bugs, but perhaps that one served as a cautionary tale because I dithered a bit less than I usually do today.  Even a waterbug has its place, and they're welcome to settle in my imaginary basement.  Mi casa es su casa.

I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name

Dear Claire,

We are potstickers.  Aptly named, we stick to pots.  Show us a pot, and we'll stick to it with a tenacity that would put a bulldog with a bone to shame. None of us even finished elementary school, let alone a university degree in the English language, but we're smart enough to know what something called a "POT-STICKER"  plans to do. 

Here's the thing:  We didn't deceive you.  We didn't try to conceal our true nature.  With our name, we made our intentions quite clear.  So when you cook a bunch of us and then leave us in a big bowl while you go off to chop vegetables, it seems rather foolish (one might even say "asinine" or "idiotic") that you would then react with shocked and outraged chagrin when you find that we have, in fact, stuck to the pot.  The name is not symbolic in any way; nor is it an ironic, postmodern challenge to would-be deconstructionists.  Honestly, we are just not that sophisticated.  The name "potsticker" was meant to be interpreted in the most literal sense.  "Potsticker" = "That which sticks to the pot".

We apologize for any misunderstanding.  In future dealings with us, do try to remember that when confronted with a pot, any pot, we will stick to it with single-minded determination.  Barnacles will be scraped off the hull of a shipwreck more easily than we will be separated from the pot to which we stick.  It's called a raison d'etre.  Look it up, genius.

Yours sincerely,
The Potstickers
(we stick to pots)

Version control

There's this thing, see, called NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.  It starts on November 1 each year; the idea is that you should commit to writing every day during the month of November, and by the end of the month, you should have a 50,000-word novel, give or take.

November, first of all, is just a hideous month in which to try to do anything major.  I suppose that writing a book would fall under the heading of "Something Major."  It also falls under the headings of "What the Hell Am I Thinking?" "I Need My Damn Head Examined," and "Bad Ideas: Part Ten Million"  Since, however, easily half of the things that I have done in my life also fall under all these last three headings, I won't be deterred.  What could go wrong?

Perhaps, if you're reading this, you have looked at a calendar and correctly observed that it's not November just yet.  In un-typical fashion, I'm thinking ahead.   I started this project last year, on November 1, and ended up with many pages of draft material that in no way form anything resembling a novel, but which contain quite a few salvageable bits and pieces that I can work into this  year's magnum opus.  Silver linings are everywhere, and while I'm almost entirely lacking in focus and concentration, I do possess better-than-average organizational skills and an excellent memory.  So I can find, pretty quickly, the pages of dialogue and the street scene descriptions from early novel chapters from last year, and part of a story that I wrote for my last class at UMUC, all in different folders, each with several individual versions, and copy, paste, and rework the parts that will be useful for this latest attempt. 

Meanwhile, a POV change from first-person to semi-omniscient third-person has revolutionized the whole thing, and so now, I might have not only snappy dialogue, but an actual story, in which things actually happen.  If not, then at least I'll get to re-read some funny things that I wrote last year.  I should be ashamed of this, but I laugh uproariously at my own jokes.  I might or might not have a novel by the end of next month, but at least I'll be entertained by my funny funny self.  I really might need my head examined. 

I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me

We went to the KORUS festival last Saturday.  We're a hybrid family (Korean-American husband, Caucasian wife, mixed children) so we fit right in.  This particular festival, though, was far more US than KOR, and more weird than either.

The top-level parking deck at Tyson's Corner Center is first of all a less-than-festive venue for a festival, particularly on a hot day.  Almost all of the tents belonged to corporate or political sponsors; small-time electioneering ahead of the mid-terms was in full swing, and my sons collected stickers, pens, and shopping bags from council, register-of-wills, and judicial candidates.  We can't vote for any of them, of course; we live in Maryland.

The stage was occupied by a Korean girl rapper who was accompanied by a Black rapper and backing band.  I suppose that the Korean girl, who had a definite Iggy Azalea accent, would have been accused of appropriation had there been any other Black people or SJWs listening, but the audience was made up of 95% Koreans with a handful of Caucasians who were married to Koreans.  The rap was in English, and Christian-themed.  Both rappers claimed to be former thug lifers, almost lost to crack and the street, but now redeemed, having found the Lord.  I didn't fact-check them.  The audience regarded them with a mixture of puzzlement and curiosity.

We wandered around to see the other exhibitors, who were mostly food vendors.  My husband waited in line for bulgogi and kimchi, while I took my two-year-old nephew for frozen yogurt. He ignored the two halmonis who smiled and waved and made faces and tried their hardest to get a tiny smile or giggle from the Toddler of Nope.  He wasn't having any, and he ignored my advice to enjoy the female attention now when it's readily available.  He ate his yogurt and barely deigned to turn his head toward the ladies; when he did, he gave them no more than a baleful stare.

After an hour or so, we'd seen all of the exhibitors once and had just begun one last circuit to make sure that we hadn't missed anything.  Anyone in the audience who had thought that witnessing the rap performance had moved them into "Now I've Seen It All" territory had only to hang around for a few minutes, when they'd have heard a Korean version of  "Country Roads," made even better by a Korean dance team dressed in rhinestone-studded satin cowboy dresses.

My Korean husband, born in Seoul and raised in the close-in suburbs of Washington DC, has always claimed that he should have been a country boy. He's more urban than a subway pass, but that doesn't stop him from rhapsodizing about country living.  He'd bale his own hay, and he'd grow his own food, and he'd live off the grid, if only he were in the country.

"This is what I'm talking about," he said.  "See? My people know that I'm a country boy.  They're singing my song."  On a sun-beaten blacktop parking platform connecting one wing of a suburban mall to another, just off one of the most heavily traveled Capital Beltway exits, surrounded by high-density mixed-use development, which is surrounded by traditional suburban sprawl, an all-American Korean longs for the place where he belongs, which is apparently West Virginia.  Meanwhile, the heat reflecting off the blacktop beneath our feet and the relentless sun overhead were finally enough.  "Take me home," I said.

One of these things is not like the other

I'm reading one of those books of funny essays written by popular bloggers.  This one focuses mostly on modern suburban motherhood; the author is a renegade who just doesn't fit in with the Botoxed, superfit, Pinterest-pinning, organic/gluten-free, hypercompetitive, pumpkin-spice-latte supermoms who are apparently EVERYWHERE in the town where she lives, sharing homemade muffins and passive-aggression with the lesser mothers (like the author) who can barely manage to (Fill in the blank: put a meal on the table, comb their hair, shower, wear non-stretchy clothes, etc.)

It's funny, I suppose.  As a person who is inept at all crafts, hates (REALLY HATES) to bake, finds Pinterest ridiculous, and believes that pumpkin should be consumed only within the confines of a pie, I should probably feel a more robust sense of tribal affiliation with the author.  She's one of my people.  But although I know more than my share of the other type of suburban mother, I don't think I've ever noticed that any of them bake or decorate or overexercise or garden or push their children to excel for any reason other than that's what they want to do.  I don't recognize the smug, superior Mean-Girl mothers described semi-hilariously in this book, and I can't summon the appropriate resentment against their supposed tyranny over the rest of us.

There's a huge irony present in the very existence of this book, which is based on a blog that revolves around a similar theme, which is very popular with readers who often comment about their oppression at the perfectly manicured hands of the  bitchy queen bees in their own neighborhoods.  It's us against them, the author seems to assert: the slightly frumpy, just-holding-it-together mothers against the Little Miss Perfects, damn them.  But of course, we have the words on our side.  Most of the people who write or blog about the alleged raging Mommy Wars are in the former camp, and we can write stuff that makes us look cool and funny and down to earth, and that makes them look humorless and uptight and lacking in all decent human qualities.  Who's the mean girl in this scenario?

*****
I was watching Morning Joe this morning; just a short break from the All-Pope, All-the-Time programming that has constituted my only TV consumption this week.  Rick Perry was a guest.  I'm not very political anymore, and I don't have much of an opinion of Rick Perry one way or another.  Joe Scarborough finished the interview with Perry by sharing a story that Rick Santorum had told him.  Apparently, at a Republican debate (I missed a few words, so I don't know if this happened in 2012 or 2015), Santorum noticed that of all the candidates, only Perry wasn't taking notes throughout the debate.  Perry did, however, make a quick note when Santorum was speaking about his daughter Bella, who has Trisomy 18.  At the end of the debate, Santorum made a point of looking down at Perry's notes when the men were shaking hands, to see if he could see what Perry had written.  He had written three words: "Pray for Bella."

It was a touching story, and Perry didn't react to seeing Scarborough tell it on TV the way I'd have expected him to.  He was neither embarrassed nor piously smug.  It was just something that had happened.  Perry said that he remembered making the note, and that he still prays for Bella Santorum. He also prays for Barack Obama.

*****

There should be a better segue between those two stories, some neat metaphorical connection between the mommy blogger and the conservative Texas politician.  I'm not going to bother looking for it, though.  Ten years ago, I'd have been nodded my head in recognition at snarky portrayals of Mommier-than-thou types who apparently rule suburbia with iron fists.  I'd have also rolled my eyes at Republican politicians who claimed to pray for anything.   Maybe my politics have changed, but I think that it's a shift in something other than politics.  Us versus them in any context, which has always been unkind, now seems downright boring.  A Texas Republican could maybe teach me how to pray for my enemies.  A supermommy could maybe teach me how to make a nicer dinner.  It doesn't matter who's teaching; I have plenty to learn.

Shelter from the storm

I have these black Kork Ease sandals that I bought in, I think, 2013.  They're very comfortable.  Last summer, during a family trip to Korea, I wore them almost every day, for seven to ten miles of daily walking, often uphill (I climbed Seongsan Ilchubong in these shoes.)  Because I'd worn the sandals for most of the summer, too, my feet were accustomed to them, and I didn't have so much as a callus at the end of the trip.

This summer, I worked only from home for the first time, so even the Kork Ease were dressier than I needed for my daily routine of copy editing from my kitchen table and hanging around at the pool watching swim practice.  I wore them to church, and out here or there, but most of the time, I was in flip-flops.

We spent this weekend in Baltimore.  After seeing one of the craziest baseball games ever on Friday night (I looked it up; the Orioles' two grand slams in a single inning was not a first-ever feat, but it's only happened six times in modern baseball history), we spent Saturday walking and riding the Water Taxi around the waterfront, seeing sights and eating food.  My Fitbit recorded over 19,000 steps.

It was 6:15 or so when we returned to the hotel.  My feet were blistered raw in four places, and black from leather dye.  We were all damp and chilled and ragged from the rain.  After a swim in the hotel pool, though (I scrubbed my icky feet first), followed by a few minutes in the sauna, followed by a shower, we were all clean and dry and warm again.  Then we ate more food.

*****

Because I follow what the young people are doing on the social media, I have learned that college-age kids now advise people to "check their privilege."  If some juvenile social justice warrior told me to check my privilege, I think I'd suggest that she check her manners.  I do not think that word means what they think it means. 

Manners aside, though, I'm actually checking my privilege now. My relative privilege versus that of most of the world can be quantified by the word "shitload."  I enjoy a shitload of privileges.  When my children are hungry, I always have something to offer them, even if it's not exactly what the children want. ("There's nothing to eat in this house."  I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.)  Filth is a temporary and easily remedied condition.  Shelter from the storm is always within short walking distance. 

I think that I might have said something that afternoon about refusing to take another step until I had clean feet and dry clothes.  I'm sure that refugee women, on a hot and dusty road from Damascus or Asmara, also sometimes threaten to refuse to walk one more step in their dirty shoes or ragged clothes.  They keep going, though, and so would I if I had to.  I don't have to, though.  Most days, I don't have to. Privilege. 

Arachnophobia

That title, while relevant, is somewhat less than accurate, because I'm not particularly afraid of spiders (though I'm certainly not fond of them, either.)

So, this morning, I found what I'm pretty sure was a brown recluse spider in my kitchen sink.  I know that the brown recluse has the distinctive violin marking on its back, but I didn't have my glasses or contact lenses, having just awoken a few minutes earlier, and I certainly wasn't going to get close enough to it to examine and identify any pattern that might or might not have appeared on its back.

It looked up at me, calmly and expectantly.  It seemed to be waiting for me to offer it a cup of coffee, or maybe some orange juice and toast.  As I said, I'm not particularly afraid of spiders, and perhaps this one, accustomed to human encounters accompanied by shrieks of terror, mistakenly thought that my silence indicated welcome.

The thing was already in the sink, not far from the drain.  Problem solved, I thought.  Instead of the hoped-for coffee and Continental breakfast, the spider got the business end of the faucet hose.  Then, after a few minutes of the deluge, I turned on the garbage disposal, just for good measure.  I thought for a moment that I'd probably be remembered among the brown recluse community as a monster, a fiend so cruel and wanton that mere drowning of an innocent spider wasn't enough to satisfy me; I had to torture the poor dying thing, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, when 20 minutes or so later, I found a spider in my sink again.  Notice that I didn't say "another spider" because I'm not sure, in fact, if it WAS another spider, or the same one, tougher and more resilient than I could ever have imagined.  What doesn't kill a spider might make it stronger, I thought, so this time, I squashed it.  THEN I ran the water and turned on the disposal again.  I tried not to think too hard about either of two distinct possibilities:

1.  A new breed of bulletproof, kill-resistant, super spider that can withstand all extermination attempts
2. Spider infestation

No sightings since.  Maybe word of this morning's incident has spread, and the spider community is wisely avoiding my house of death.  Or maybe they're plotting revenge.  I'll find out soon enough

PS--I thought to accompany this post with a photo of a brown recluse, maybe with a funny caption ("Actually, do you have soy milk?  I'm lactose intolerant.") but if you've never done a Google image search for brown recluse spiders, then do yourself a favor and don't.  It's not the spiders, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all.  Necrotizing spider bites, however, are all different and each is more gut-wrenchingly disgusting than the last.  You can't unsee some things.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Today was a surprisingly productive day.  I crossed a larger-than-expected number of things off my unrealistically long to-do list, kept work on deadline, and serendipitously timed my swim to end at the very moment the thunder rumbled, prompting the lifeguard to whistle swimmers out of the pool.  Success on every front.

Not every day is like this, because I have the attention span of a fruit fly.  Yesterday, for example, I was working peacefully as clean clothes tumbled in the dryer. When the timer buzzed, I got up to fold the clothes, then I noticed some dirt on the family room floor, so I abandoned a t-shirt mid-fold and plugged in the vacuum cleaner.  As I vacuumed, I wondered what the family room would look like if I moved furniture piece A to spot B, and then furniture piece B into spot A.  It didn't work as well as I thought it would, so I moved the furniture back to where it had been.  Not, however, before vacuuming the spots where the pieces had been, and then moving a few other furniture items to vacuum underneath,

Back to work.  But wait, the clothes weren't folded!

The report that I was copyediting contained a discussion of a country whose fiscal position is untenable; however, that country continues to increase spending and cut taxes ahead of looming elections.  The day of reckoning will come, I suppose.  As I worked, I thought that I saw a metaphor for my life amid the talk of debt-to-GDP ratios and impending fiscal collapse.  I should have written it down, but at just that moment, I noticed some dirt on the kitchen floor.  The kitchen floor, once clean, made the countertops look pretty squalid by comparison.  By the time I had brought the countertops up to my standard, the metaphoric connection between my life and a South American economic disaster, which was already tenuous to begin with, had evaporated altogether.  All wasn't lost, though.  The laundry was done, the kitchen was pretty clean, and I met my deadline.  South America should be so lucky.

 

Transition

It's almost dark at 8:04 PM.  We have weeks of warm weather left, but only a few days before school starts and 10 days or so before the pool closes and summer, by my definition, is firmly and finally over.

I predicted months ago that I'd be sitting on the couch one late-August night, sadly wondering where the summer had gone, but I'm actually not as sad as I usually am.  After a week of vacation and another few days of little work, I'm ready for a return to a more structured schedule. I don't manage unstructured time very well.  I'll miss my kids, though.  I could reconcile myself to the end of summer if I didn't have to send them back to school.  As for homeschooling, see earlier reference to unstructured time.  Left solely in my educational care, my children would have read hundreds of novels and spent many hours swimming and playing music.  They would also be unable to count past ten.  I know my limits.

******

It's 8:45 AM now.  Today's really the last day of summer, REAL summer.  High school orientation is tomorrow morning at 7:45, which means that I need to wake a 14-year-old up at 6:45.  I'm always up early anyway, but being up myself and dragging sleepy teenagers out of their beds are two entirely different things.  School doesn't start in earnest until Monday, but once a kid enters a school building at 7:45 in the morning and returns home with reams of forms for me to sign, the spell is broken.   And now, it's time to work.

The personal is political

I suppose that should be modified somewhat; what's really true now is that everything is political.

A few days ago, I was on Facebook.  A Facebook friend (a person whom I've never met personally, but we connected at some point through blogging, I think) posted a sad lament about how she'd been forced to unfriend someone, an actual close personal friend, because the former friend had revealed a political opinion that the poster found offensive.

It's probably not all that remarkable that someone would drop a friend (remember, this was an actual friend, not just a social media connection) with whom she disagrees politically.  I think that happens all the time now.   What made this particular post stand out was the tone of genuine grief and anguish, and the person's deep conviction that she had been forced to drop this friend; that she had absolutely no choice but to end a treasured friendship because the friend holds distasteful political opinions.

I suppose there are situations in which it would be reasonable and even necessary to end a friendship or friendly acquaintanceship because of politics.  If you learn, for example, that your friendly and courteous neighbor or colleague, a person whom you once liked and respected and considered becoming better friends with, is actually a KKK member, or a Holocaust denier, or an ISIS recruiter, then you'd obviously want to end your association with that person immediately.  But how is it possible that a person with whom you've been close personal friends for many years is suddenly revealed to be a Nazi or a white supremacist or a terrorist?

The point, of course, is that the political offense that ended this particular friendship was probably of a much lesser magnitude.  There is a small, but vocal (and growing) cohort who genuinely believe that perfect conformity of thought and opinion on every social and political issue is not only desirable among friends, but necessary.  This group of people feel absolutely obligated to end friendships, cut off family members, and shun neighbors and acquaintances who don't adapt quickly and completely to new modes of thought on everything from gender theory to income inequality to the real or perceived privilege of one group of people over another.  Those people, who either cling to opinions that were not all that controversial 25 years ago, or who just aren't aware of how quickly and completely their friends' outlooks have changed, are not given the smallest amount of slack.  Once someone reveals herself to be slightly behind the curve socially or politically, she is cut off, cast out into outer darkness where there is, presumably, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Aside from the obvious cruelty of an approach to relationships that places politics and ideology over people, you have to also wonder about the futility of this approach.  If you're convinced that your understanding of humanity is the only reasonable and correct one, wouldn't you want to try to convert others?  Wouldn't you respond to perceived errors in thought or speech with persuasion rather than ostracism?  Something about flies and honey; I can't remember.  Maybe Frog or Toad would know.

Off-task

Well, that's no way to build an audience, is it?  After several weeks of stunning circulation figures (as many as 40 readers in a day!) production levels dropped to zero posts per week.  I shall have to account to my superiors for my lack of productivity.

Today has been something of an exercise in futility.  I've found that multi-tasking is far overrated; however, the habit of trying to do multiple things at once is so deeply ingrained that I can't break it now.  Just during the course of this post, I've clicked over to other tabs at least five times; I'm working on vacation-house searching (note: don't start looking for a beach house for August in June) and finishing a weekly newsletter.  Mild OCD and extreme ADD are not a good combination.  I'm always on task; it's usually just the wrong task.  Back to work.

Paved with good intentions

Isn't that how the road to hell is always described?

Yesterday, I was embroiled in a slight controversy, involving someone who said that she thought that I was trying to push her out of a job, when I thought that I had been helping her.  So much for the good intentions; they paved a one-way street to all-day minor-drama hell.  It all worked out; emails and texts were exchanged, and a long, emotional phone call put everything right.  

I think it did, anyway.  The other person said that she felt much better, and everyone else involved seemed relieved and satisfied at the resolution.  And I guess, after I washed off the tire tracks and then removed the clothespins that were holding me on to the clothesline where I had hung out to dry for a bit, that I felt better, too.  There's really no particular reason why I'd feel compelled to write about it in a veiled and mysterious manner the next day.  It's not like my feelings were hurt or anything.  

Fiction

I don't check my stats very often, because no one reads this bilge, except that apparently, a few people do.  24 pageviews in a day is nothing, of course, to real bloggers, but since my average is zero, it was pretty astonishing to see that 24 people had actually landed on this blog and possibly even read some of it.

Of course, I used to have readers.  I blogged regularly between 2007 and 2010, and lots of people used to read and comment.  Because of an unusual work situation, I had time to write and to read and comment at other people's blogs, which brought readers to my blog.  Then, in 2010 or so, I dropped off the face of the Internet for a while, not to return until late 2013.

Now I'm wondering if any of my literally dozens of readers noticed my rash threat to write a novel.  I'm not sure if I can live up to this or not.  I might need to be more careful about what I put in writing.

Every few days, give or take, I write the book

Who said that a talent for writing does not necessarily mean a talent for writing anything?  Everyone whoever sat at a keyboard, probably.  Reading novels is easy; writing them is not.

****

Never having attempted fiction, except for a short story that was required for my last college class, I'm finding that it requires a bent of mind that I probably don't have.  I like to write dialogue, but everything else is relentlessly hard.  Maybe I should try to write a dialogue-only novel (note to self: has this been done already? investigate) or maybe I should try to just adjust to the relentless hardness and continue with the one that I started.

****

It's been months since I wrote those paragraphs, and the novel has been set aside.  I like the voice of the main character (she reminds me of someone--who could it be?) but I can't figure out what to do with her.  I could:

1. Try to keep her in the situation she's in and see what happens.   That approach isn't working too well. 
2. Keep the character, but put her completely elsewhere.  I don't know where else she belongs, though, other than blue-collar Philadelphia circa 1986. 
3. Start all over.  New character, new setting, a completely new idea altogether. 

I think that I'll try 2 first.  If it doesn't work, and it won't, then onto Plan B, which in this case is Plan 3.  Tonight, though, I think I'll just go to sleep.  I'm too tired to write. 

You can't make some people happy

Those people being me, of course.  Just two days ago, I felt overwhelmed with work, not sure how I'd fit everything I needed to do this week into this actual week.  Just like that, though, some incoming work was delayed, and now I'm at a loss.

I learn something new every day, and one of the things that I'm just now learning about working from home as a contractor is to always have a back-up plan.  Not necessarily a back-up plan for making more money (although that, possibly, would not be a bad idea) but a plan for how to spend time set aside for work when the work fails to materialize.

A long to-do list, no matter how overwhelming, is pretty easy for me to manage.  Unscheduled blocks of time, however, are another matter altogether. In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape explains to Wormwood that his job as a demon is to take a person's soul and to give as little as possible in return.  The demon's goal is to make the victim realize, far too late, that he wasted his life doing neither what he should have been doing nor what he wanted to do.  This is what I'm afraid of, every time I have unscheduled, un-spoken-for time.

This too shall pass, and probably much faster than I want it to.  Meanwhile, I have more work coming in tomorrow, but I think that I need two lists: What to Do if the Work Comes in on Schedule and What to Do if it Doesn't.  Foiled again,Wormwood. Foiled again.

Mise en scene

Among the occupational fantasies that I occasionally have (A teacher!  I should be a teacher!  No, I should have been an actress, but it's too late now.  Maybe an accountant!  I'm OK at math, and I'm very detail-oriented, but I do bounce checks...), jobs involving food almost never appear.  I don't really mind cooking that much, but I do hate to plan menus.  I think that I lack food imagination, and this is why it's always so hard for me to figure out what to make for dinner for today or for the week.

My husband came shopping with me one day last week.  This is rare.  I was happy to have help carrying the bags, but even happier to have help with dinner ideas.  "What do you want me to make for dinner tonight?"  I asked as we walked through the store.

"Oh, whatever you want is fine," he said.

"Wrong answer,"  I said.  "I need specific ideas."

"I don't know.  Whatever you make is good.  I'm sure you'll think of something."

"Nope," I said.  "Try again.  Remember: SPECIFIC."

He sighed.  "OK, how about tacos?  And that shrimp thing you make sometimes.  Can you make that this week?"

The tacos and shrimp dish idea gave me an idea for a third dinner menu, and I left the store with the very satisfying knowledge that I had dinner menus planned and supplied for the next three days.

The next morning, planning for how to manage work, volunteer work, and kids' activities, while still getting halfway decent meals on the table, I thought of doing several days' worth of prep work all at once.  Having cleaned out the refrigerator during the previous week, I had a beautiful cabinet full of clean and well-organized containers with matching lids.  45 minutes later, I had a beautiful refrigerator shelf stacked with containers filled with chopped red and green pepper, diced onion, chunks of cantaloupe and watermelon, sliced tomatoes and avocados, and neat little fluffy broccoli heads.  So pretty, in fact, that I hated the thought of having to use any of it, because it was so nice to open my refrigerator and see something that I could proudly show to any visiting nutritionists or diet experts.  That happens all the time.

"Prep cook," I thought!  "The perfect job!  Just me in the kitchen with my exemplary hand-washing habits and my outstanding knife skills!"

Two days later, I had more onions to chop.  This time, I couldn't summon the project-related energy and excitement.  I was no longer an expert prep cook, presiding over a perfect mise en place.   I was another sucker stuck in the kitchen, wiping away onion tears.  So much for occupational fantasies.  I'll stick with what I know, and what I know is that I am very good at cleaning the house.  I could probably turn that into a business.

Pins and needles

I'm the opposite of a hoarder, almost to a fault.  Because clutter bothers me, I'm quick, sometimes far too quick, to purge, recycle, donate, trash, or otherwise dispose of things that don't appear useful at the moment.  This seldom gets me into trouble, but I do feel guilty (often) about having such a surfeit of stuff that it's necessary, or even possible, to get rid of things.  It's easy to forget that the world of plenty, in which an item broken or trashed can always be replaced, is not guaranteed to continue for any length of time.

My preoccupation with the gulag was preceded by a childhood preoccupation with the Holocaust (I was a sunny and upbeat child,for sure.)  In one of my favorite books, I Am Rosemarie, a Jewish female inmate at Westerbork is accused by an SS guard of having stolen three needles while sweeping the SS mess hall.  As punishment, he orders that the entire women's camp will go unfed for three days.  Another woman pleads with him: She will find and return three needles if he'll only allow them their very meager rations.


Three needles.  Big deal, right?  But even the barest necessities were in extremely short supply in wartime Europe, and the women of Westerbork have less than the barest necessities.  Stripped of almost all of their possessions, most of them have nothing but the clothes that cling in tatters to their bodies.  Maybe one woman, dragged from her bed at three in the morning, had the foresight to grab a needle and thread before she was thrown into the Gestapo wagon, but three?  Impossible.  And the commandant, knowing perfectly well that they'd have an easier time finding one needle in all of the haystacks in Europe than in the barracks at Westerbork, agrees, but he ups the ante: TEN needles.  If the women can find and bring him ten needles by the end of the day, he'll feed them.  If not, then the already dangerously malnourished camp will go without food for three days.

******

Just a few days ago, I found a needle with a little bit of thread on the floor.  I was vacuuming the family room, on the opposite end of the house from where I keep my sewing box.  I almost never sew.  An occasional ripped seam or missing button is about the limit of my skill and inclination to sew, and I didn't remember having done even that much within recent memory.  Still, there was the needle.

I have a whole box full of sewing stuff.  I also have a little travel sewing kit in my overnight bag.  If the Gestapo were to demand ten needles by the end of the day, I could give them 20 without even looking hard.  I was tempted to just throw this one away, rather than to walk ALL THE WAY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HOUSE to put the stray needle back in my sewing box.   I kept the needle, though, returning it to its proper place in the box.  I also kept the safety pins that I found on my son's dresser, carefully distributing them among my various purses (see? so many purses that I need to spread the safety pin wealth around.)  Those safety pins could be urgently needed one day, and I'll be prepared. 

*******

Miraculously, the women  managed to find ten needles, and a tiny piece of paper to pin them to.  They paid the bounty and were spared from starvation for a few more days.  I Am Rosemarie is a novel, but it was based on Marietta Moskin's actual wartime experience, and the needle story might have been true.  Who knows when pins and needles might make the difference between life and death?

I learn something new every day

1. For example, there's a reason why wooden spoons shouldn't go in the dishwasher. 
2. The heating element in a dishwasher gets very hot.  
3. Even wet wood will burn. 
4. I don't handle computer- or technology-related stress very well at all. 
5. Psych.  I already knew that. 
6. Seriously, I completely lose my already-tenuous grip on reason when my computer does something that I don't want it to do. 
7. Anyway, at least the house hasn't burned down. 
8. Yet. 

Open mouth, insert food

"No, not Spanish Fly.  Spanish RICE."

Sometimes, a conversation is funnier imagined than heard.

My children are 13 (almost 14) and 10 now.  I had to attend a meeting tonight, and my husband texted me at the last possible minute that he had been delayed at work.  I had already made dinner, with the idea that my husband and the boys could just warm it up after they got home from work and swim practice, respectively.

With my husband delayed, I had to let the kids know that they'd be on their own after practice, and that they could just warm up the food and eat by themselves.  I left written instructions: taco meat 30 to 45 seconds, Spanish rice 30 seconds, taco shells 10 to 15 seconds, no aluminum foil, lids, or spoons. .

45 minutes or so into my meeting, my phone rang.  My 10-year-old's first words were "Mom, do you remember how you wrote no aluminum foil and no lids?"

"Oh no," I thought. "Yes, I remember.  What happened?"

"Nothing, but we wanted to make sure that we're supposed to keep the rice and the meat in the bowls."

My fellow PTA board members had to wait a few minutes for me to regain my composure.  After I caught my breath and wiped the tears away, I explained.   The funniest thing was not the idea that I'd just narrowly escaped having a microwave full of uncontained meat and rice, but imagining the several minutes of earnest discussion that had probably taken place just before they called me.  Are you sure we're supposed to use the bowl?  I mean it says no aluminum foil and no lids, but it doesn't say to keep the stuff in the bowls, right?  What should we do?  Should we just try it?  Maybe we should just eat it cold.  Hold on, we should call her.  You call her.  No, you call her.  OK, I'll call her.

Maybe more detailed instructions next time. Bon appetit.

A list

Frog and Toad is, in many ways, the sum of all wisdom. If you're not familiar with the stories, you should remedy that right away. Cliff's Notes: Frog and Toad are a large, upbeat, energetic, optimistic frog and a small, dumpy, fearful, neurotic toad who are best friends. In almost every Frog/Toad scenario, I am Toad.

In one of my favorite Frog and Toad stories, "A List," Toad decides to make a list of everything he needs to do for the day. Beginning with "wake up," and proceeding through "eat breakfast," "brush teeth," and "get dressed," he lists every single thing that he needs to do. Toad is absolutely delighted with the simple ingenuity of his plan, which will allow him to efficiently plan his day and accomplish everything he wants to accomplish.

If it didn't get crossed off the list, then it didn't happen.

"Oh, that is very nice," says Frog, in typical kind and indulgent fashion, when Toad enthusiastically shares his list with his friend. Frog, of course, lives in the moment. It would never occur to Frog to waste time, and he would never have to worry about making a list to be sure that things get done. Frog just gets things done.

Frog invites Toad for a walk. Toad, consulting his list, notes with satisfaction that "take walk" is in fact one of his listed activities for the day, and the two happily set out for a walk.

It's a beautiful, sunny day in the woods, but it's windy, and the wind carries Toad's list away just as he's checking to see what to do after the walk. Toad, being Toad, panics. Frog, being Frog, reassures Toad and calmly and reasonably advises him to simply run and catch his list.

Wait for it.

Toad CAN'T run after his list of things to do, because running after his list of things to do isn't on his list of things to do. Frog runs after the list, but it's gone, lost forever.

******

I have learned a few things about myself, and one of them is that if I'm not held to account in one way or another, I'll postpone and procrastinate and forget about all of the hated minor chores that always seem to be hanging over my head. If I didn't make a list, no phone call would ever be returned, no email ever written, no bill ever paid. So I make lists; weekly lists and daily lists. But just like Toad, I don't just need the list to make sure that I'll do everything that needs doing. I need it to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes only with crossing an item off a to-do list.

Lists, in fact, have to be very specific. If I have two returns to make, then I list them separately. After all, I might only have enough time to get to one store on a particular day, and it would be just terrible to have completed a task, but then be unable to claim the reward of crossing it off the list, because it's only half-finished.  Worse still is to tackle a particularly irksome chore, and then gleefully run for my list, only to find that I FORGOT TO WRITE THAT THING DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE. OMG, it's too much to contemplate.

******

At the end of "A List," a despondent Toad sits for a few minutes doing nothing. He has lost his list. There's no hope of retrieving it, and so he can't do anything now, anything at all. But necessity is the mother of invention, and Toad doesn't live in the woods for nothing. He finds a stick, and writes "go to sleep" on the ground, and then promptly falls asleep. His day now completely crossed off, Toad is finally at peace

It's been a long, though productive work day. My weekly list grows longer by the day, but I was able to firmly cross out two things, and I feel hopeful about my crossing-off prospects for tomorrow, too.  Good night.

Should I stay or should I go

It's a beautiful day, and I just spent part of the afternoon catching up on work that fell behind schedule as a result of Friday's pain/Tylenol PM debacle, and now it's time to get out of the house for a bit.  It is Sunday, after all.

Maybe, though, I can just write something quickly and then go.  I had a great idea (well, I had an idea, anyway) during Mass this morning, but I can't remember what it was now.  I'm confident that the idea will return, because I do remember that it had something to do with one of my ongoing preoccupations; I just can't remember which of the many ongoing preoccupations it was.  I think that they revised the DSM because of me.

And just that quickly, I remembered what I was going to write about, but it will take too long to do today.  Preview: Frog and Toad.  Until tomorrow.

L'ete et l'hiver

I almost forgot to do this today.  52 minutes left of Saturday; just enough time to post something.  It will be brief because I'm very tired.

As much as I love summer, summer nights, especially summer nights that follow my favorite kind of sultry, humid day, have a quality that I don't like.  Artificial light seems much harsher on a summer night than on a winter night, and there always seems to be a lone mosquito buzzing around.  Maybe it's because I don't want to be inside that inside seems dreary and ugly.  This very room that I'm sitting in, which seems dingy and unwelcoming right now, is actually very cozy and pleasant on a winter night, or even on a cold, reluctant spring night.  The furniture and rug in this room seem more suited to winter.  Maybe I should redecorate each season.

Well, that was apropos of nothing.  Still, it's a paragraph on a page at 11:18 PM; now 42 minutes from the end of the day; a day on which I did manage to write something.  I don't hear any mosquitoes. Time for bed.

And what's the street name for this stuff?

I'm not cut out to be a drug user.

I woke up today with pain at the intersection of my neck and shoulder.  The pain grew worse throughout the morning, making it hard for me to turn my head, bend over, or really do anything at all other than sit still.  This not being a day on which sitting still is an option, I took a naproxen sodium, and then an hour or so later, took another one.  It didn't make the slightest difference.

Tylenol, I thought.  I can combine Tylenol with the NSAID and that should help.  I was out of Tylenol, unfortunately, so I ran to the store to buy some (and since when does CVS sell $50 face creams?  I digress, as usual.) Only after I arrived home (CVS is very close by, but there was no way that I was leaving the house again) did I realize that I had purchased Tylenol PM (or rather, a generic, CVS version.)  Desperate, I took two anyway, thinking that the sleep ingredient couldn't possibly be potent enough to make me really drowsy.

Wrong!  So wrong.  I wasn't drowsy at first, just verrrrrry slow.  I was watching myself type, and as I completed edits, I checked the clock and saw that I wasn't taking any longer than usual to correct this particular author's work.  I just felt as though my movements and thoughts and everything around me had been dropped into a vat of thick, viscous liquid.  Molasses, maybe?  A-ha!  I get that now; slow as molasses.

Finally, the urge to sleep became too overwhelming to ignore, so despite looming deadlines, I was forced to lie down for an hour.  I'm awake now, though groggy and dimwitted (more so than usual, I mean.)  Supreme irony #3,478: The sleep ingredient in Tylenol PM is actually exceedingly effective. My neck, though, still hurts like hell on fire.  

Wild Kingdom

(A short post while I wait for an answer to a work-related question, without which I can't proceed.)

I saw two things today; A dead deer, covered with flies; and a snake.  The snake was alive.  I'm only slightly more fond of deer than I am of snakes, so I didn't really mourn the former, but had the choice been mine, the deer would be frolicking around Rock Creek Park right now, and the snake would be deceased.

Actually, I'm not particularly fond of any animal in the wild.  I was raised in the city, and 16 years in the suburbs have not made me accustomed to everyday encounters with wild animals.  I don't count squirrels, of course, which are more urban than mass transit, but I still can't get used to the sight of foxes on my front lawn at 6 in the morning, and the deer around here are have become overly comfortable with humans.  When I first moved into this house, ten years ago, I'd walk my then-little children around the neighborhood; one walking beside me and the other in his stroller.  The deer were still timid then, and they'd turn tail and run as soon as we got within 20 feet or so.  Although I have no empirical evidence to this effect, I feel sure that they have become bolder with each passing year.  They stand their ground now as I pass, and more than once I've seen an aggressive expression on a deer's face.  Within a year, I'll be backing away from them with my head down; in five years, I'll probably be running.

"Running," of course, should be read as "walking pretty darn fast."  If you ever see me actually running, you'd better run too.  Don't ask questions, don't turn around to see what's going on, just run.  Save yourself.  There might be another snake coming after me, or the deer might finally have turned predator.  It's only a matter of time.

Avoidance

So  I figure if I just ignore them, my pile of paperwork will straighten itself out, and my list of phone calls will dial themselves.  This approach has always worked very well for me, very well indeed.

I'm reading Eminent Victorians right now.  It's almost 100 years old now (not my actual edition, which is electronic), published in 1918.   A paper copy of this book had been sitting on my bookshelf for many years, but when I saw a 99-cent electronic copy, I decided to actually read it.

Apparently,  a contemporary of Lytton Strachey condemned the book as mean-spirited and cruel. I wish I could remember the context; it wasn't a review (because even I don't sit around reading 97-year-old book reviews); perhaps it was in an article for one of my history or English classes.  I don't find it either mean-spirited or cruel, only a little presumptuous.  Strachey seems to have invented a form of writing that became very important in the seventies and eighties.  His sketches (especially of Florence Nightingale, the only woman covered) contain a slightly smug undertone, suggestive of the author's apparent belief that his superior modern viewpoint gave him an understanding of his subjects' psychology that they themselves lacked.  It's as if Gore Vidal or Gail Sheehy had written Vanity Fair profiles of Mother Teresa or Ronald Reagan or some other iconic target of literati scorn.

I suppose that this was the point of Eminent Victorians; to take four of the most important people in Victorian England (truthfully, though, I had only heard of Cardinal Manning and Florence Nightingale when I picked up the book; I assumed, incorrectly, that the Dr. Arnold was Matthew Arnold, and I had no idea who General Gordon was) and cut them down to size.  So although Strachey's short biographies don't even approach the level of meanness that Internet-bred 21st-century readers have become accustomed to, I suppose that the whole project and its determination to destroy idols and humble the mighty was rather mean in itself.

General Gordon awaits.  I'll decide, after I finish with him, what other reading will keep me away from bills, files, and phone calls.

Placeholder

I wrote a newsletter article today.  That counts.

Whirlwind

Once again in a moving car en route from a party, the third in two days. Anyone would think that I live in a nonstop social whirlwind,  but anyone would be wrong.  

Memorial Day weekend always marks a sea change. I'm naturally introverted and would be a downright recluse if I didn't have children.  I do have children,  though, and I live in the friendliest and most social of neighborhoods. Contrary to my own nature,  I'm one of the friendliest and most social among my neighbors, and summer is high time for parties,  cookouts, and get-togethers of every sort. We'll be all but a commune until Labor Day, and as much as I love it,  I'm not quite ready. I wish I had another week to steel myself.

The drama. "Steel myself" for three months of swimming, margaritas, and picnics. It's possible,  perhaps, that there are a few people here and there who have bigger problems than this.  This too shall pass, and I'll be sorry to see it go,  as always.  Onward.

The mother of invention

I was about to give up on writing for today. We're en route from one party to another, and won't be home until after midnight, but I'll be in the car for at least 30 minutes and I have a phone, so here we go.  A moving car (which I'm not driving) and the slightest of beer buzzes will not deter me in the least.

These young people. I didn't know that anyone other than Women's Studies grad students and Jezebel writers actually used the word "agency" to refer to anything other than the offices of temporary placement specialists and travel brokers, but apparently, it's quite common in conversational use at birthday parties for two-year-olds. And when they're not upset about lack of agency among cartoon princesses,  they're determined not to "gender" their children too early.  Needless to say, I exited that conversation as soon as reasonably possible.  Feminism and gender theory are one thing, but use of "gender" as a verb was a step too far. Civilization has already deteriorated enough,  thank you.

I think that I correctly punctuated a three-paragraph post on a phone, in a moving car, while somewhat less than sober. Let's not push our luck,  yes?  Until tomorrow.

I never learn

So I said that I'd do this every day, and to my surprise, another day followed upon the previous one, and here I am.

I think that Mother Teresa once said something about leaning to endure the trial of being unpleasing to yourself.  I could find out for sure, but I won't, because that's not the point.  The point is that I'm enduring this particular trial right now, and I have been enduring it in one form or another for my whole life.  It's no fun.  Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck and I feel bad about my whole body (my neck, however, is fine for now.)

When you're young, you can just hibernate for a day or so when you get a bad haircut, or your skin erupts, or you face some other appearance-related disaster.  You know you'll recover and look just fine again in a day or so.  At almost 50, though, I'm realizing that pretty days are no longer a dependable and regular occurrence and that even the OK days are few and far between.  (And I just had to spell-check myself on "occurrence", too--will the cruelties of age never relent?)

I'm not going to hibernate, as much as I'd like to (even on good days, my avoid-all-human-contact instinct is rather strong) so I'll have to do as Mother Teresa did and learn how to endure the trial.  And really, she looked just fine.

Tous les jours

It's been so long.  In yet another supreme irony, I am now paid actual money for my writing skills, and I hardly ever write anything.  I've given up my amateur status, I suppose.  I'm going to return once again to daily writing, and whatever ends up on this page will be published.  Well, not WHATEVER.  I'll correct misspellings and incorrect uses of the semicolon.*

On Sunday, I was on my couch watching the last episode of "Mad Men."  I'd summarily dismissed the DB Cooper theory, but the Coke theory had seemed plausible, even likely.  So I liked the ending, and I scoff at the ridiculous idea that it exposed Don as completely cynical.  If advertising is intrinsically cynical, then so is all of commerce and by extension, almost all human endeavor.

And that's all, apparently, that I have to say about that.  I miss "Mad Men" already, both the show in particular and the absorption in a story in general.  I'm sure there's some other serial drama that I could become attached to available on Netflix, but the contemporaneous shared experience would be lacking, and that's the best part.  Binge-watching has very little appeal for me; even if I could overcome my belief that it's wrong to binge on anything, I just wouldn't have the time.

Memorial Day Weekend: Two days until the pool opens, five days before swim team practice begins, and just over a month before I start to panic about the fast-approaching end of a long-awaited summer.  Hyphens: even better than semicolons.  Discuss among yourselves.

* As if either of these would ever happen in the first place.  So unlikely.  Still, anything is possible.

Things that I didn't feel like doing today, but did anyway

1. Got out of bed
2. Showered
3. Got dressed, in real clothes
4. Went to Mass
5. Cooked breakfast
6. Cleaned up breakfast
7. Went for a walk 
8. Came in from my walk
9. Cleaned my dirty kitchen counters
10. Cleaned my really dirty kitchen floor
11. Remained upright
12. Converted oxygen into carbon dioxide

A good day's work, all things considered.  

Gray Flannel Infinity Scarf

I'm the opposite of an early adopter.  When I jump on a bandwagon, it's already nearly empty, its former occupants having long since moved onto more current things.  I sent my first text message in 2009, which was also when I joined Facebook.  My sister gave me an infinity scarf for my birthday.  I'd ridiculed the silly things for three or four years, and then I tried one on and what do you know?  I liked it. I'd be right on trend now, if this was 2011.  Open-front cardigans are another current favorite; I bought my first one a few months ago, just in time for them to be over.

So that's why I'm now watching the first season of "Mad Men" (I am current, though, on "Portlandia".)  I'm all agog.  The period details are fun to look at, and I'm also interested in the social history aspect of the show, although I don't really know how accurate it is.  The sexism is so exaggerated that it's almost hard to take seriously. Not having been there, of course, I have to take pop-culture interpretations of everyday life in past eras on faith.  Maybe the sexism was just as bad as the show depicts.  On the other hand, most of the women at Sterling Cooper, if they had any interest in watching football with their husbands on Sundays, wouldn't have had to watch semi-nude dancing girls on the sidelines.  And can you imagine Joan Holloway or Betty Draper participating in "The Bachelor"? The Sexual Revolution: AWESOME for Women.

I digress.

I think that what interests me the most is the character of Don Draper as sort of a human wrecking ball and lightning rod in one.  Most of the characters are believable and complex on their own, but almost everything that happens to them is a result of their collision with Don; some of them pursue him and some of them are thrown up against him, but I can't think of a single character who isn't defined to some extent in relationship to Don Draper.

I'm not watching now; I gave up Netflix for Lent (I gave up crunchy snacks, sweets,and buttered bread, too; Netflix was to make sure that my sacrifice is about more than losing a few excess pounds; never mind the fact that I've given up sweets, crunchy snacks, and buttered bread for six weeks every year for the past four years, and I haven't lost an ounce as a result--damn middle age) so I need to catch up from about the mid-point of season 4.  My prediction is that Don's past will catch up with him and that he'll be tried as a deserter, but that he'll be saved by post-Vietnam popular disillusionment with American foreign policy--no jury will convict him.   Whatever happens, it will be nice to be current on pop culture, just for a change.  

(Almost) everything is awesome

I wrote about the Oscars one time, on my old blog.  Maybe 2008 or so. I've been at this for a long time. It occurs to me now that I should have taken notes last night, or that perhaps I should have live-blogged, but I didn't feel inspired, because the show was mostly uninspiring.  I'm so bored with tedious identity politics and delusions of truth-to-power.  Believe it or not, it doesn't take that much courage to speak out on race, LGBT rights, or gender equality, especially in a room full of movie stars.

I'm bored with unnatural physical perfection, because I can't separate a preternaturally youthful middle-aged body from what I imagine must go into achieving and maintaining it.  I'm bored with the tyranny of the red carpet.  But I love movies, and I always hold out the secret hope that someone will do something really crazy and daring, and so I always watch the Oscars.

Highlights:

• Everything is Awesome!  I'm NOT a fan of animated movies, and I have a particular dislike for Disney movies.  From Sleeping Beauty to Frozen, I hate almost all of them.  I went with my then 9-year-old son, his friend, and his friend's mother to see The Lego Movie last year, and I approached the whole enterprise with near-dread.  I expected a hybrid between a Lego commercial and the worst excesses of the Disney/Dreamworks animated movie cartel: dead mothers, wisecracking anthropomorphized animals, and knowing pop-culture references.  The Lego Movie is not only not crap; it's actually (wait for it) AWESOME, and the song is perfect.  My son and I are still outraged at the Academy's failure to recognize the movie as the best animated movie ever, but at least the song was nominated.  The performance by Tegan and Sara and The Lonely Island and who knows who else was delightfully frenetic, silly, and happy.  
• J.K. Simmons.  I haven't seen the movie, and I probably won't, but I love J.K. Simmons and his speech was charming because it reminded people that caring about distant causes and oppressed strangers is worthless if you neglect the people who are right in front of you. 
• LADY GAGA OMG!  Not one single thing that I didn't LOVE about this performance: her dress, her hair, her outspread tattooed arms, and that beautiful face and voice without a hint of irony, without a trace of condescension, with nothing but beauty and love for one of my favorite-ever movies and its music.  She put her heart and soul into that performance and I'm so happy to have seen it. And then JULIE ANDREWS!   Just ten minutes earlier, I'd been so bored with the whole show that I'd nearly chucked it and gone to bed, and thank God I didn't.  That was hands-down the best thing I've ever seen on any Oscar telecast, and I don't think I've missed one since 1983 or so. 

Not highlights: 

• Patricia Arquette.  I'm very happy she won; I was rooting for her.  I just cannot muster any outrage about underpaid movie actresses.  Speak out about the real suffering endured by real women in the world outside of Hollywood: young girls kidnapped by ISIS and Boko Haram, and Chinese women forced to abort their babies, and Honduran women who spend 24 hours a day fearing for the lives of their children.  Then I'll cheer like Meryl Streep.  
• NPH in his underwear.  I didn't understand it. 
• John Travolta. I hate to feel embarrassed on someone else's behalf. 

I'd have liked to see Michael Keaton win, although Eddie Redmayne was hard not to like.  As usual, I haven't seen any of the movies yet, but I hope to remedy that this weekend with either Boyhood or Birdman.  It will probably be another year before I write about pop culture again. 

Note to self:

"...the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.  It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides.  If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why?

"Rub your eyes and purify your heart--and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well.  Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be the last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!"

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago

Back in the USSR (second verse, same as the first)

Several years ago, I was preoccupied, in a probably unhealthy way, with the Soviet Union and specifically, Stalin's purges. I'd taken a class on 20th Century Europe, and from there, I read Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and then, just for contrast, Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary.

The biotech company where I used to work employed a number of Russian scientists, engineers, and technicians. Although they were a socially mixed group, which included Ph.D.-level senior scientists and considerably less-educated manufacturing technicians, the group ate lunch together nearly every day, drinking steaming tea from styrofoam cups, and eating cafeteria food supplemented with homemade Russian dishes brought by one or the other of the group's members, and then shared among them.

The Russians, true to stereotypical form, seldom smiled, and when they laughed, it was with  a touch of bitterness.  It was easy to make fun of them, and we did sometimes, calling them "the Politburo" or "the Supreme Soviet."  Individually, the Russians were all quite nice, though reserved.  I'm a friendly person, and I became friendly with several of the Russians, although I sometimes wondered if they felt secret, Russian disdain for my smiling American bonhomie.  "Americans," I imagined them sneering after I passed with a cheerful wave or hello, "why are they always smiling? Like eediot children."  At that point, I had only the vaguest understanding of Russian history, and I probably thought that Stalin, while not a particularly good guy, was at least not as bad as Hitler.

In Koba the Dread, which is subtitled Laughter and the 20 Million, Amis asks a simple question: why do we laugh at the gulags and the KGB but not at Auschwitz or the Gestapo? The book is very personal, part of what was apparently a long-running argument with his friend and antagonist Christopher Hitchens, who, like a lot of writers and artists and intellectuals from the early 20th century on, were willing to ignore or excuse the worst excesses of the Soviet political system because they believed that Russian communism was the best hope for a socially just world.  Some writers and artists continued to cling to that belief long after evidence to the contrary had become too overwhelming to ignore.

It was probably five years or so ago when I first read Koba the Dread, and my Stalin preoccupation eventually gave way to other, more immediate worries, but the idea of the purges has never stopped haunting me. Because I don't have enough trouble in life, I like to borrow it at high rates of interest, so I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now.  I bought a hardcover copy of it for one dollar at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it had been waiting on my shelf since November.

First of all, it's very good reading.  I'm 80 or so pages in, and although most of it, at this point, simply recounts details of arrests and sentences, each account is compelling and individual.  Stalin is supposed to have said something like "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."  He lost, though.  I can't help but imagine the individual people, each unique, whom these short accounts represent.  I don't know their names, but I know that they had names.  I imagine them, and think about them, especially the ones who vanished and whose exact fates don't seem to be known.  I guess they can't be statistics if I'm still thinking about them 80 years later.

*****

My sons and I were watching a rerun of "The King's Speech" last Saturday, which was the same day that I started on the book.  As the movie version of George V asked who, if not for the English, would stand between the "Nazi hordes and the proletarian abyss," I wondered how we would answer that question.  Was Charlie Hebdo the best we could do? Are blasphemy and obscenity the only reasonable responses to savagery?   I've seen the cartoons, and I'm not in any rush to claim shared identity with that publication or its creators, God rest their souls.  Je ne suis pas Charlie.  

*****

As I tell my friends and my children, I completely understand now why old people move to Florida. My tolerance for winter diminishes with each passing year, and every November, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I realize that I won't really be warm again until Memorial Day. Every night, I think, just for a minute, that maybe tonight I'll just sleep in my clothes.  It's that hard for me to face the thought of undressing in the cold. But I live in Maryland, in a house with central heat, and not in a wooden shack in Kolyma.

The chekists and the KGB always came at night.  I usually wake up sometime around 3 AM, and just before I fall back to sleep, I think about the nest of warmth that my body heat and the blankets have created, and how little I want to move from that spot at that moment.  When I think about it (almost every time), I pray for the people who were yanked from the warmth by the 3 AM pounding on the door, which led to the holding cell in the Lubyanka, and then to the freight rail car to the gold mines at Kolyma or the gypsum mines in Siberia.  God help them, and all of us.