mental tesserae

a little dose of fashion absurdity

2011-12-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Once grading season ends I hope to find more time to write. I've decided there's little in my life crueler than the following combination of facts: 1) I have a million things I want to write about, 2) I just don't have the time right now, and 3) I've been spending hours and hours of my precious time lately editing / grading / suffering through poor writing. No fair.

I do have to post a new entry in my growing collection of Absurd Memento Mori Clothing Items for Children. (You can see other examples here and here.) This may be my favorite one yet.

It calls to mind the bit about starving pandas in the children's book I mentioned a long time ago. I have since seen other editions of that book, by the way, and they fixed the panda page so it's more cheerful. Now we just need to work on the twisted shirt designers who thought it was cute to do the skull and crossbones treatment on our endangered little fuzzy friend here.

Shopping Cart Ethics 2.0

2011-10-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

Both these conundrums are from my trip to the grocery store this week. I honestly want to hear what you, gentle readers, think about these issues. I’m torn.

1. When you pull a gallon of milk out of the dairy cooler, do you look for the one with the latest date? I do. I figure I’m the consumer, I’m paying for this milk, I get to choose whichever one I want, even if it means reaching into the back of the milk line-up to get the date furthest away. But I always feel a bit strange, even guilty, about this. I mean, it’s not like we run the risk of ever passing the expiration date, at the rate we go through milk in our house (when Ethan is around we average a gallon a day; when Ethan was gone to scout camp this summer, I only made one trip to the store for milk that week. Spooky!).

I suspect the milk all tastes the same, regardless of the date stamp. Shouldn’t I just pick a milk that has the closest date and leave the newer one for the nice old lady behind me who lives alone and is somewhat lactose intolerant but always keeps a gallon milk in her fridge to serve with cookies when the grandkids visit, which is only once in a while, so the milk tends to get old before it’s all gone, but she’s on a tight social security check budget and won’t be able to buy another one until the day after it expires and even then only if it smells bad? (And yes, this old lady haunts my grocery trips; I worry about her every time. She's probably not even nice.)

2. Grapes were on sale this week. The lady next to me picked a green grape from a bunch and popped it in her mouth. Then she sampled a purple grape. I don’t think I even noted which kind she ended up choosing, surprised as I was with her snacking. I was not audacious enough to follow her lead. I bought some of each just to be safe.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I really do hate it when I bring home a big bag of grapes and they are all disappointingly sour. What a waste. I suppose I could take them back to the store, but who has that kind of time? It seems only fair to be able to know what you’re paying for in advance. Then again, we don’t get to peel the oranges first, so they’re always a gamble. (Same goes for melons; all the thumping and sniffing and navel pressing in the world can’t guarantee a good one). Isn't boldly partaking of the unknown part of the produce department quest? Isn't it kind of cheating to peek?

And more to the ethical point, isn’t it dishonest to eat food you aren’t paying for? If you’re going to be eating the groceries, maybe they should weigh you on your way into the store and again on your way out and make you pay the difference? (You thought airport security was invasive!)

So. Advice anyone? (Please?)

The Spiral Jetty, take 4

2011-09-28T18:53:00.001-07:00

The sunflowers are new. I swear they were not here the last three times I made the trip. Now they’re everywhere, a small-faced variety but perky and bright yellow, as if planted along the roads to welcome visitors and compensate for the long ride and parched landscape. Everything seems different this time, especially the last 16-mile stretch of unpaved road. It should beat at you through the washboard sections and loosen your fillings. It should take an eternity to crawl and bounce through the last mile, the gauntlet of basalt boulders, extracted giants’ teeth. But Box Elder County has leveled it all, hauled out some kind of insanely tough earth-moving equipment to slice through the rocks, built up a road bed and covered it in pea-gravel. I can’t explain why I’m disappointed by this. I should be grateful. But it seems that the trek is diminished by the added degree of comfort. It’s as if someone at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela installed escalators up the steps, the ones you’re supposed to take on your knees.

The students don’t know they are missing anything. They’re likely pleased that the trip has taken 2 hours 25 minutes as opposed to the 3 hours I promised them. As our two rented vans near Rozel Point, we can see the Great Salt Lake in full sun. It sparkles like the surface of a sugar egg. This part, at least, has not changed.

The newly leveled road cuts gently across the slope of the hill and ends in a parking lot (!) (what next, a gift shop?). I have never seen this many people here at once. This explains part of my disappointment. Once you make the pilgrimage less daunting, everyone will come. Not that I begrudge them the chance to visit the jetty. But how serious are they, really? Do they—these pampered tourists in sedans—care about the jetty like those who were willing to eat dust and slam their heads on the roofs of high-clearance vehicles for its sake?

My students pour out of the vans. There are eighteen in our group this time. I suggest we hike the hill first to get a good view. From the top we see the pink water and, in the distance, the baffling section where it scallops from pink to blue for no reason. From the shore, the Spiral Jetty curls in a counter-clockwise direction, slowly receding under the surface. The rocks that cut above the water hit against the small ripples of current and form jet trails. The jetty looks like it is plowing along through the lake, moving south.

We scramble down the hill (I note that there is an unmistakable trail—or more to the point, two or three trails to choose from—that were not here last time, and then I decide to stop grinding my teeth about the increased traffic. It’s not like the jetty belongs to me). The students change their shoes, a few keep on their flip flops (ya gotta love these kids) despite my previous warnings that the water level was high this year and they’d need swim trunks and good shoes to make it to the center of the spiral. I pull out my secret weapon: my husband’s fishing waders. They reach all the way up my legs and I tuck the straps into my belt. I’m prepared. I know the routine. I’ve walked the spiral before. I’ve been checking the lake levels online for weeks.

Note to arrogant self: fishing waders prove effective as long as you keep the tops above the water. If you were to, say, slip on a rock because the path you are following is nothing but a walkway of slippery, mostly submerged rocks, and you begin to fall and make the split-second decision (and a wise one) to put all your ebbing sense of balance into holding your expensive camera above your head rather than catch yourself, it is likely that as you lie horizontal in the water with one arm perpendicular—camera aloft—like a pyrrhic victory salute, the boots will in fact fill with water, your jeans will be saturated, and when you rise, you will be forced to carry gallons of extra lake water with you as you attempt to schlump, schlump, schlump, all dignity gone, around the spiral.

The students are good sports and despite the deep water and perilous rocks (soon they’ll have the ankle scrapes to prove it) they trudge around the coils to the center where they pose and laugh and congratulate themselves. The water is thick and rose colored. One student says it’s like wading through Kool-Aid. I could not have ordered a more glorious sky. It’s bright blue and dry-brushed with a few lines of pure white clouds. It was worth sacrificing myself for the camera to take these pictures.

We emerge from the lake, all coated in a thin layer of salt, the hair on our arms frosted with a crystalized mist. My jeans are starting to stiffen. I peel the boots off and dump them out. I tip and pour and the water just keeps coming; the moment is like something out of a cartoon.

The water level made it challenging this year, but I’m smug about the fact that of all the visitors who overlapped with our group at the jetty, we were the only ones who actually walked the spiral. This makes up for the crowd and the parking lot and the conditioned road. The others saw the jetty. We did the jetty. I think it’s a work of art that cannot be fully appreciated from a distance, just like it can’t be bought or sold or hung on a gallery wall in front of a velvet bench; it has to be experienced. I love that it’s never the same experience twice. And I love that it takes effort to get there and I love that to finish the trip you have to walk (or wade or schlump) your way to the center of the spiral. I think most art is a gift. But the jetty? This one you have to earn.

chickens

2011-09-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve written about Gabie on this blog many times. But believe me when I say I have failed to do justice to his single most defining characteristic: his intensity. By intensity I mean an abundant mix of stubbornness, obsessiveness and pathos. When Gabie puts his mind to something, he’s a bulldog who has latched on and will not let go. He’s the one-noted cricket. He’s a cow with its cud. He’s a horsefly who…well, you get the idea. And it doesn’t sound nice when I put it in those terms, but seriously, you have no idea how far he can take things. His persistence makes you want to pull your hair out and laugh with exhaustion at the same time.

The hard part is that I never know what’s going to set him off. Will it be the bear he saw at Yellowstone that will spark a month of obsessive ramblings about bears? (No) Or will it be the wolf he did not see at Yellowstone that launches a holy crusade against the endangerment of wolves, heartbreaking cries all the way home from Yellowstone about how we have to go back next week to see the wolves (and if not Yellowstone, then—once he has read cover to cover the book about wolves we bought to pacify him—Alaska, Montana, and various Canadian provinces), rants against cattle ranchers, and eternal enmity for all authors who have unjustly vilified wolves for centuries (Yes, oh save us, yes).

This week, he has moved on to chickens. Monday morning, I suggested that since we had eggs for breakfast, we should visit our neighbors’ chickens for a field trip. (I’ve been homeschooling Gabie; a short fieldtrip seemed like a great writing prompt for his journal-writing time.) And I’ll confess here that I have been wanting to see our neighbors’ chickens for a long time. And also I would really like to have chickens of our own. And, okay, I’ve begged Ken to let me get chickens for years. But we got a dog instead, which is nowhere near a chicken, but that’s another story.

Anyway, we saw the chickens. Two of them. Super cute, as far as chicken cuteness goes. They clucked softly. They staccatoed around. They even had two eggs waiting for us: one perfectly smooth, the shade of chocolate milk, the other speckled. But if I could go back in time, I would tell Julie of the past to, at all costs, avoid making any statements to my neighbor—in Gabie’s presence—to the effect of “We’ve talked about someday getting chickens ourselves” or “This setup doesn’t look that complicated. Maybe we can really do it.” And I would certainly tackle to the grass the Julie who, on her way home pointed out to Gabie that we have a chunk of unused space in our side yard that, with a bit of work and a new fence, would fit a chicken pen rather nicely. To any sane observer, these were the comments of a dreamer who knows that the chances of finally getting chickens are pretty remote. To Gabriel, they were promissory notes. He went from eating an egg for breakfast to guaranteed chicken ownership in under an hour.

For the next three days, every time I have turned around, Gabie has been on my computer with sixteen different tabs open to mypetchicken.com. As of this morning, he has 1) selected the chicks we will order (two Barred Plymouth Rocks and an Easter Egg Bantam), 2) surveyed every member of the household numerous times about their preferences on egg colors, 3) calculated the price of 4 chicks ($23.25) and all the equipment (heating lamps, etc) we will need to raise them (all written up on a sticky note which he affixed to my desk), 4) planned the chicken coop structure in detail, begged his father numerous times to build it and even offered to build it himself, and most importantly 5) talked of NOTHING ELSE for the past 72 hours. You may think I exaggerate, but I have witnesses. Go ahead. Ask Gabie’s siblings or father when we will be getting our chickens and you’ll see their heads explode.

To say Gabie has a one-track mind is putting it mildly. In the course of a day, while the world is spinning around him and every other person in his life has passed from one task to another and had handfuls of conversations regarding a myriad of topics, Gabie has suspended these chickens—and nothing else—on a rotating pedestal in his head. He’ll pop into any conversation with a chicken-related remark. Actual examples of dialogue:

“Gabie, find your socks. We have to go.”
“Hey mom?”
“What?”
“What do you think we should make the fence out of?”

Also:

“Gabie, do you want jam or honey with the peanut butter?”
“Hey mom?”
“Yes?”
“On Easter, can we give them extra food since it’s like their holiday? I heard if chickens are happy, they’ll be more likely to lay eggs.”

And when I’m working at my computer:

“Hey mom?”
Heavy sigh. “Yes, Gabriel?”
“We’ll need to get the red heat lamp because the baby chicks will be able to sleep better… And if you notice they are huddled in a pile, that means they are too cold and if they’re spread all over, they are too hot.”

Plus random interjections at the dinner table like: “Would October 6 be good day for us to have the chickens arrive?”

Or, when I told him that *in the distant future, when we might possibly, if we’re lucky, get around to ordering chickens* we’d only get three and he wanted to know what we’d do with the fourth chick since the minimum order at mypetchicken.com was four and I told him maybe my friend Meg could use another chicken, I got questions for the next hour like: “How good of a friend is this Meg?...Could you call her today?”

And this one today while I’m driving McKay to his clarinet lesson:

“Hey mom? One thing I’ve noticed is their combs function on the same principle as a canid’s pointy ears. They shed heat. They’ve have adapted this way.”

I could type dozens of such non sequiturs and still fall short of the Gabie effect. His is the persistence of those rivers that wear down mountains or plateaus over the course of centuries. He’s the Grand Canyon of chicken lovers. It got so bad Monday night that Ken banned him from saying the word chicken for the rest of the day. (That evening during family night, Gabie played the martyr: “Yeah, I have something to say for family council, but I’m not allowed to say the “c” word anymore, so I can’t tell you.”) The next morning he picked up again talking about nothing but kickens, which he explained started with a “k” so it didn’t count.

Now before you conclude that I lack sympathy for the poor child, I have to clarify that I would like nothing more than to make Gabie happy 24/7. He’s an amazing child and I adore him. I even want chickens. But the problem is that we don’t have the money right now to buy them or the time to build the fence to accommodate them. This is where the pathos comes in. As excited as Gabie gets about his latest obsession, he gets equally devastated when he cannot realize it immediately. Last night he was moping around tossing out phrases like, “Do you ever feel that your life is not worth living?” And, when he heard for the tenth time that we weren’t going to build a chicken coup and order chicks right this second, he says, “You know what this is like? It’s like getting news that you’ve gotten a $2,000 payment, and then an hour later, you get a message saying, “Oh, we made a miscalculation. It’s only $2. Sorry.” Or maybe it’s like you’ve been looking for a job for a long time and someone says, we like you, we’d like to hire you and then they say, we changed our minds…we like this other guy better!”

So I worry that he’s on the brink of serious damage to his poor 9-year-old psyche from the depths of his emotional swings. I worry that when he grows up he’ll hurt himself while steering his Greenpeace boat between the harpoon and the whale. I worry that someday he’ll fall in love hard and do irrational things (I once had a coworker in Pennsylvania who fell for a con-woman; nothing we could say to him about how she was obviously lying to him with her various stories of being kidnapped in New York and needing ransom money swayed his affections; by the time he woke up, he had lost his entire life savings, his home and finally his job). I worry simply that Gabie is sad more than any child should be because he takes things so personally and we (meaning I) don’t have the patience to give him all that he needs.

The paintings running through my mind as I worry about the psychology of obsession (and try not to think about chickens anymore) are the Monomaniac series by Gericault. This was the 19th century and doctors were, for the first time, exploring different types of insanity. Gericault’s friend, Dr. Georget did studies in madhouses of people with certain acute sensitivities, people who had fixated on one thing to the point of total meltdown. Gericault painted these patients with honesty, but also with an aim for showing how their psychoses were supposedly written in their features and expressions. You decide if he succeeded.

This is his Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy.

And Man with Delusions of Military Command.

It seems to me that these patients are all staring off the edge of the canvas; they never look directly at us. They’ve been frozen forever in time in the midst the exact kind of intense focus that has destroyed all their periphery vision or logic or sanity.

Not that Gabie has gone this far or needs a shrink yet. I’m just saying he has this scary personality trait. I even hope that his tenacity (from tenere, “to hold” and related to “tenet,” a thing held to be true) will serve him well someday. He’ll be the teenager who refuses to go with the flow. He’ll be the ultra-loyal husband. If he does end up as a doctor (and lately he wants to be a doctor AND work for the National Park Service as a wolf specialist AND own a bunch of chickens) he’ll be an intensely focused doctor, which sounds like a good thing. My goal is to help him see the value of balance. And help him understand that life rarely delivers instant gratification and it wouldn’t hurt to develop some patience.

And then I need to work on my own tendency to obsess about my children and hover over them and worry about their every move like a mother hen.

Yellowstone

2011-08-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

And then, after dinner, she pulled out the giant box of slides from her family's recent trip to Yellowstone and for the next two hours it was just one fuzzy bison shot after another.

"And as you can see from their delighted faces in this photo," she said while slowly pressing the button to advance the next slide, "the kids had a terrific time."

But seriously, our Yellowstone trip was wonderful. The scenery surreal. The kids amazingly happy campers (when they weren't really sick of having their pictures taken). Here's the summary, by the numbers...

Amount of times I thought We should really do this more often: at least a dozen (which is saying something, considering there was not a good-night's sleep to be found in the entire five-days.)

Number of times Nora begged us to adopt her cousin Rachel as a sister: I lost track. Cousins are the greatest thing evah.

Number of grizzly bears in this photo: one. Can you find him without a pair of binoculars and a huge traffic jam and ranger pulled over to alert you to his presence? We never would have.

We had better luck with the smaller, rodent-family wildlife. Percentage of her own lunch that Nora actually ate the day we set up our picnic in the middle of a pot gut colony: 25%

And we had the best luck in our favorite hunt of all, spotting the Prius in its natural habitat, the National Park. Total number of Prii we counted in Yellowstone and Grand Teton: 68.

Number of photos I took just like this one of colorful bacterial muck that if it had been growing in my home would have gotten the bleach treatment pronto: three dozen.

Waterfalls viewed: at least 10. (Number of times I made my kids pose with their backs to the waterfalls: do I have to count?)

Number of mosquitoes in Yellowstone: a gazillion. Amount of carcinogenic DEET I exposed myself and my children to over the week: toxic levels. Amount of mosquito bites I got in Yellowstone park: zero. Amount of mosquito bites I got while taking this photo in a gorgeous alpine meadow as we paused for a few minutes from our drive over the Bear Tooth Highway in Montana: five.

Number of computer games played, movies watched or episodes of Avatar consumed by my kids all week: zero.

Times I made Ethan pose against orange backdrops the day he wore his funky tie-dyed shirt: "ah Mom! Again?"

Number of teeth lost by Gabie while eating sandwiches: one. Amount of "woe is me!...look I'm still bleeding" mileage gained by said loss of tooth from said child: nearly a full day's worth.

Amount of time we spent slowed or parked in traffic in Yellowstone (usually at the mercy of bison wandering on the road, the big oafs): ...

... : less than the amount of time spent in the presence of sublime forces of nature.

Number of times where I held my breath at the surreal scenery in front of me or laughed out loud as Ethan narrated his own personal wildlife documentary plus amount of times I found it hard to believe I had ever resisted coming: enough that it might be easier for Ken to talk me into next year's camping trip.

Semiotics

2011-08-13T06:51:00.064-07:00

Details and photos from our lovely Yellowstone trip to follow in another post. But in the meantime, some semi-deep thoughts.

Thanks to Semiotic theory, I can no longer take for granted the relationship between the meaning of things and how that meaning is being conveyed. In other words, I can't just assume the vehicle of language is only about getting me where I want to go. We all have to stop and look closely at the vehicle itself. Monster truck or Porche? It makes a difference.

Just a couple of examples because, yeah, none of us have the time for a real lecture today:

I told my students in class the other day that Magritte's Treason of Images was the first time an artist had inserted words right into his painting. The more I've thought about it, the more I was wrong (sorry guys). Maybe Magritte's piece has been treated as revolutionary because it's the first painting to really throw down the semiotic gauntlet* and make us question our assumption about the relationship between art, language and reality (and pipes, I guess). But he was not the first to use words to convey meaning along with imagery.

*I'm wondering what a semiotic gauntlet looks like. Twisted and symbolic and really hard to understand? Definitely French.

This kind of Annunciation scene comes to mind:

I love that it's not possible to say "Hail Mary" etc. without an elaborate banner to go with it. The Angel Gabriel drives a Mercedes.

And a counter example:

I saw this sign on a pole in my neighborhood last week. Now the intended message is, I can only assume, "call me and I'll get you out from under your mortgage quickly." But the real message is another story entirely. Seriously, would you trust your home, your money, your credit rating to some strange dude who scribbled his phone number on a piece of cardstock and tied it illegally to a stop sign? (And then, I think, he drove away in a beat-up Geo Metro with a missing tail light.)

necks

2011-08-11T09:31:00.001-07:00

It really is unfortunate that my week has been outrageously busy with school issues (my class winding down, the kids’ winding up) because I’ve been meaning to write about necks. This seemed timely when I hurt my neck on Sunday. But now here we are on Thursday with my neck finally feeling better and the topic just seems stale.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in years of (sporadic) blogging it’s this: if there really is a blog police, they are far too understaffed and overworked to swoop down on my little blog and say, “Hey, Miss Julie Q....if that is your real name...the neck business is old news. You’re not allowed to write about it.”

Thus, in defiance of the blog police, a post about necks, my own and other more famous ones through art.

When I tweaked my neck on Sunday, I was almost amused by the truly bizarre coincidence that I had just barely, earlier that morning, learned how to say “stiffnecked” in Greek. Stiffnecked in Greek, if you care to know (and I do encourage you to slip this into casual conversations), is sklerotrachelos. It sounds like a dinosaur, I know, but it makes a whole lot of sense when you break the word in half and see sklero (hard) and trachelos (neck). Sklerotrachelos occurs only once in the New Testament, in Acts chapter 7 which was part of the readings for the Gospel Doctrine lesson I had been preparing on Sunday morning. What are the odds that I would then have cause to whine about my stiffneck in bilingual fashion for the next few days?

Ken says I’m the only one he knows who is capable of seriously injuring her neck while taking a shower. He knows me well and you might also recall that I once broke my foot in multiple places while making bread. So the shower/neck thing? Not a big surprise. And I don’t want you to think I slipped in dramatic fashion and fell in the shower to acquire this injury because that would be entirely too rational. I was merely lifting my arms to wash my hair when a spasm shot through my neck for no earthly reason whatsoever other than the fact that I am getting old and my body is betraying me one component at a time. For days after this shower, I walked around like an escaped whack-a-mole mole. It even hurt to tip my head back far enough to swallow.

Thank goodness I’m feeling better today and I can find the humor again in the strangeness of it all. I also can see two advantages to this injury.

1. I have now been able to fulfill a lifelong dream of using the words tweak and spasm in the same blog post. I like tweak and spasm because they make terrific, awkward-sounding onomatopoeias. I also think if you tweaked the word spasm and took away its only vowel, it would take a mouth-spsm to say it which would make it all the more onomatopoeia-esque.

2. I now have an only-slightly stale excuse to discuss famous necks in art. I once posted about second toes. Maybe this will become a running blog meme for me. Bodypart Thursdays, we can call it.

I was first introduced to the neck of Marie de’ Medici in a biology book. Marie was the queen of France and the proud owner of a very thick neck. I say proud because Marie made it fashionable to sport thick necks and all the ladies of the court wanted one.

Unfortunately, Marie was in my Biology text because it seems her neck was likely swollen by a goiter caused by the deficiency of iodine.

On to another unfortunate French queen: Marie Antoinette. This portrait of Marie and her children by Vigee Lebrun was especially unlucky. Marie wanted this painting to save her much maligned reputation by showing her as a doting mother. Sadly, one of her children, Princess Sophie, had been painted in the cradle but had to be painted out when she died. The absence of jewelry around Marie’s famously long and beautiful Austrian neck was especially important given her involvement in a certain affair of the diamond necklace. The painting failed to save Marie’s public image and had to be removed from its place of prominence at that year’s Salon, the year being 1789 (queue tolling of bells).

So of course, the story ends with Marie on her way to the guillotine not long after for the removal of head from said neck, where she was sketched by J.L. David, who in addition to being the most famous artist in France was a member of the revolutionary National Convention who had voted for the Queen’s execution.

No proper list of famous necks in art would be complete without Parmigianino’s Madonna of the long neck. The title says it all. We could wonder about what Parmigianino had in mind when he stretched Mary’s neck to extremes, but it’s more fun to compare her with other similarly necked beauties.

Botticelli’s Venus (indeed the very neck and pose filched by Parmigianino).

One of El Greco’s many ethereal Madonnas.

Uma

And...Barbie (how odd that her neck is out of proportion since the rest of her body has such natural anatomy)

Francis Bacon said, "There is no excellent beauty which hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Those of us with ordinary necks might wish for more strangeness. I remember the scene in the movie version of Sense and Sensibility where Marianne sees Willoughby’s new fiancé, Miss Grey. And even though, like Marianne, we only see Miss Grey from a distance across a crowded ballroom, I’m thinking, who cares about her £50,000 a year, what a neck! How could even Kate Winslet possibly compete? Imagine the casting call for Miss Grey’s role. “No you won’t have any lines so don’t bother reading anything. Just tilt your head back please and look imperious.”

Of course if, like me, you’re left feeling less elegant than all these swanlike beauties, you can always take comfort in the opinion of Steve Martin: “I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”

good grief

2011-08-04T20:54:00.004-07:00

I saw this shirt at Savers today and just had to share it as a follow-up to yesterday's post.

Memento mori meets girly-girl fashion.

Shopping Cart Ethics 1.0

2011-08-03T19:36:00.006-07:00

For years I’ve wanted to start a regular segment on my blog called Shopping Cart Ethics where I would cover topics like this: “You’ve arrived at the grocery store and you start backing a shopping cart away from the cart line-up when you realize it has a bum wheel. You can a) exchange it for another cart, leaving the lame cart for the next shopper or b) keep the lame cart and push it through the whole store because if you don’t take it, someone else will have to and you feel strangely responsible, as if the timing of you walking into the store at the very moment this cart was available mandates that you take your turn. Discuss.

Unfortunately, the ideas for this segment usually occur to me at inopportune moments (i.e. naturally while shopping) so I tend to mentally pocket them. Even more unfortunately, the pockets in my brain have many holes and thus any ideas poured into the tops flow out the bottoms like sand out the back of a de-icing truck. To cope, I’ve taken to storing pictures on my cell phone of shopping-related ethical issues. And yes, bewildered Shopko employee, this is why you saw me engaged in an impromptu photo shoot in the boys’ clothes department the other day. Thank you for not fetching your manager. You thought I was odd, I know. But there are odder things than me out there in the world of consumer culture. Case in point, the pajamas you were selling in your store.

Where do we begin? I can only assume pajama manufacturers personally know children who would enjoy crawling into these pajamas before slipping between the sheets for a night of pleasant dreams. But I’m having difficulty picturing these children. Do they poison neighborhood cats before church? Or maybe these kids just have no idea what a skull and crossbones represent. Perhaps they’re thinking “pirates” and nothing more. And they’re thinking the kind of pirates who attend birthday parties with fake eye-patches and go around saying arrr! a lot, not the pirates who fly the Jolly Roger to let their victims know they take no prisoners alive.

What I’m thinking is “why would I want to bundle my child in memento mori imagery before tucking them into bed?” Do I need another reminder that life is precious, my children may not outlive me and we are all, in the words of Samuel Beckett, born astride a grave?

Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life, 1630

Memento mori symbols show up constantly in art, especially after the 17th century when it became positively trendy in Northern Europe to crowd paintings with skulls, hourglasses, burned out candles and cut flowers as reminders of the frailty of life and our limited allotment of time on this earth.

You can see where the Grateful Dead have latched onto this image, bringing the memento mori theme into the 20th century in true 20th century fashion: by turning it into a marketable graphic design.

Just for the record, I also wouldn’t hang a Grateful Dead poster above my child’s bed.

So I found these pajamas to be slightly disturbing and worth discussing in a tone of consternation to launch Shopping Cart Ethics episode 1.0. If you are keeping track, I have conveniently forgotten to check my own blog archives for any signs of hypocrisy. Fortunately, in times like these, my holey mental pockets allow me to continue feeling holier than others.

Baaaaa........ck

2011-08-02T14:38:00.005-07:00

I miss my blog -- what’s left of it.

It's a good thing blogs (and hopefully blog friends) don't disappear if abandoned for months at a time. I'm terribly flakey when it comes to maintaining things, even if they are things that matter to me.

It's a good thing my husband takes care of the cars. And the garden. And the bills.

It's also a good thing I only have houseplants that can go weeks between waterings. Of course, this is because any houseplants I've ever owned that were incapable of surviving this kind of neglect have been thinned from the herd through natural selection, but who wants needy houseplants?

I really have no excuse for my long absence. Except maybe that writing for an audience (even if that audience has dwindled to one: hi mom!) is not easy for me. I tend to take it all way too seriously. I tend to take life way too seriously most of the time, which is why I need my kids. They hardly ever take me seriously. They also remind me that nothing is really as big a deal as I think it is....even posting my personal thoughts in such a way that anyone can stumble across them on their way to searching for a great recipe for cream horns (And I have to say it's odd that my cream horn post is by far the most popular thing I have written to date. It's odd because this is not a food blog and I am not a chef. I have made cream horns exactly twice in my entire life because they are such a serious pain to make. I can only assume my version of the cream horns ranks high on google because I'm the only one amateurish enough to think it's spelled "cream" rather than "crème.") And she's off on a tangent already. It's like she was never gone.

What I really wanted to say was I have some great art worth posting today. Nora is a brilliant artist (and I don't mean brilliant for a five year old, I mean brilliant like Picasso as a five year old). As proof, I offer you her latest piece, at least seven minutes in the making, graphite on folded paper, a fusion of minimalist treatment of space and subtle rendering of natural forms. She calls it "sheep." I call it pure genius. Those ears slay me.

nature

2010-10-05T08:49:00.006-07:00

I'm currently reading this book...

...which argues that kids today are suffering from nature-deprivation disorder and parents have been frightened from letting their children roam free in wild places and climb trees.

My children, just for the record, do not suffer from this disorder. This is almost entirely thanks to their father, who takes them out camping and boating and hiking and biking and does his part to nature-surplus them all the time, even when I stay home to grade papers.

I do feel that Nora has gotten too much screen time lately and doesn't get enough outdoor time (and, honestly, when I take her to the park, she's climbing on plastic and rubber-coated metal surrounded by bark chips, so that hardly counts). So when Ken suggested on his day off yesterday that we drive the Nebo loop with Nora, I went along and we three had a lovely time. My daughter, for the record, may be a pink princess in some (annoying, say her brothers) ways, but it's comforting to know she can also run up a trail and play in the leaves and get nice and dirty just like my boys did at her age. Plus, as you can see, her outfit blends in so nicely with the foliage that it's clear that she's a born nature gal.

And just in case there was any doubt about our attachment to the great outdoors, we all went back and did the Nebo drive again last night with the boys for family night and took the same hike we had discovered in the morning--up to a hidden grotto. Thanks to outrageously bad traffic (what's with Southbound I-15 lately?!) by the time we got to the cave and waterfall, it was almost totally dark. But, thankfully, Nora had her Sleeping Beauty flashlight with her to save the day. Princess Power and Mother Nature. What a great combination.

And then this morning, Nature reared her ugly head, or more accurately, her ugly swollen, black, hourglass-tattooed belly, as I was getting into my car. This lovely lady (yes, it's a black widow and doesn't she look pregnant to you?) was hanging two feet away from my face as I opened the garage door.

Maybe I am a little frightened about letting my kids roam free in the wild. Now I'm even frightened about letting them roam free in the garage.

just for the record

2010-09-17T19:19:00.002-07:00

I finished Ramadan. I did not finish the Qur'an.

I gained a lot of knowledge and some useful insights into Islam. I lost 5 pounds.

It is easier to go all day with no food than it is to pray 5 times a day.

I would make a lousy Muslim. I think I'm a better Mormon for having done this.

Food tastes better in the light.

Day whatever

2010-09-08T05:33:00.004-07:00

Still here. Still observing Ramadan, although I will admit I'm glad this is the last week. They say you're supposed to be sad when Ramadan is over. Sad is not what I anticipate feeling. I must be doing it wrong.

I've been sick with a nasty cold for days which adds a whole degree of difficulty to the process. I'm sure I've broken the letter of the law a couple of times with ibuprofen in the middle of the day or cough drops lozenged right before heading to class not to mention all the phlegm that's been sliding down my throat. But I'm trying my best to follow the rules. The spirit of the law is, I'll admit, secondary. It's easier by far to avoid the sins of commission than to not omit all the things I'm omitting. I haven't done many good deeds lately unless you count feeding my family the occasional warm meal. I've been going back to bed after my pre-dawn breakfast rather than staying up to pray and meditate in the dark. I'm also way behind in the Qur'an. I should be nearly finished but I'm about half way through. Not to complain, but it would be easier if there were a plot.

Since fall semester started, I've been busy with preparing lectures and dealing with last minute emergencies (What? All of my books weren't ordered? No problem. My honors TA can't work for me until everybody jumps through a few more hoops? How high? I have misplaced my thumb drive with absolutely everything on it, including all my exams. Been there done that about a dozen times since I started using thumb drives, the nasty, slippery little things).

My kids are all starting school and riding their various emotional hurricanes. At least once a day, one of them washes up next to me, all soggy and windblown and bruised from the latest blast of national disaster proportions. Each of them needs a healthy, sympathetic, focused mother with unlimited mental and emotional resources. Instead they are stuck with me, the Michael "Brownie" Brown of personal hurricane relief.

If there were advice in the Qur'an about how to make friends in Junior High (McKay) so you could stop sitting by yourself every day for lunch, I'd be all over it. Or how to get to sleep (Gabie) when you're totally not tired even though it's 10pm because you just scratched your leg and it's bleeding and you're convinced it's pretty serious and the blood loss might make you pass out which would be a good thing because then you'd get some sleep, but you're so worried about it that you can't close your eyes just in case..... Or how to survive a schedule (Ethan) that's nearly as busy as your crazy mother's, with a bunch of hard high school classes, a college math class, marching band 3 days a week, not to mention a guilt-inducing church leadership calling that you fear you're not living up to and since you survive on air and goldfish crackers, now you've caught the cold of death that has slowly been working its way through the family and you went to bed last night with a fever and a sense of impending doom. Or how to deal with the fact (Nora) that you only need ONE friend in preschool because she's the girl who also likes to play dressup and you want to sit by Mallory every second of school and sometimes -- oh the horror! -- you are asked to sit by one of the other 15 children in the class instead.

Sadly for my children, I am not the font of wisdom. I am not the font of anything. Except maybe Kleenex and a deep sense of genuine, if somewhat distracted, compassion.

prayer

2010-08-30T04:18:00.004-07:00

One thing I regret about the way I've taught about Islam in my classes over the past several years is the superficial comparison I've made between Islamic and Mormon approaches to prayer. Typically, I point out that faithful Muslims pray 5 times a day and look! if you count up our regular prayers (morning, evening and the three meals) you also get 5. This is incredibly shallow and the number 5 is really about the only similarity between the two.

As I've seen the phrase over and over in the Qur'an, Muslim's perform their prayers. This strikes me as different from praying. I asked Luda from Syria about this distinction and while her English is very good, she seemed a bit confused by my question. "We pray", she said. "Every prayer begins with a recitation of the Qur'an." (She has several suras memorized by heart). She then proceeded to show me, on the floor of Kristin's living room, how every position of every part of the body, from the fingers to the toes, matters in the prayer pose. She knelt down with the tops of her feet on the floor, facing inward, her palms down and then she touched her forehead to the ground. It's not just kneeling. It's a full-body prayer. Luda compared it to Yoga, and then apologized in case this was not appropriate, but being a recent fan of Yoga, I like the comparison. In both, the goal is to align your body and mind--both halves of the soul, according to Mormon doctrine--in pursuit of the same purpose.

So why not pray with your whole body, humbling yourself before God physically as well as emotionally? Sure, there are times when Mormons kneel to pray, but it's not as often as maybe it should be. And we pray all the time, but maybe our prayers are not as intense as they should be. Everything about Islam, including the name, stresses submission to God. Their daily prayers are not offered at the convenience of the pray-er but at exact, prescribed moments determined by the motion of the sun (which is determined by God). The prostrations are a constant reminder of this submission. To me, this is simultaneously marvelous and frightening. LDS doctrine puts tremendous focus on personal agency, personal revelation and conscience. To relinquish so much of it multiple times daily would be a radical offering indeed.

The other major difference I've noted is that Muslims pray for personal blessings, but only after praising God through the recitation of the Qur'an. The words of their prayers are far more focused on God than on themselves. The one repeated with every prayer is the opening sura:

In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, The Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. Master of the Day of Judgement
To you we worship and to you we turn to in help. Show us the straight path, The path of those whom Thou hast favoured; Not the (path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.

These lines remind me of the opening of the Lord's prayer "Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This is nothing like the kinds of prayers I typically offer, which are less about praising God than thanking him for my personal blessings and asking for more. I've been painfully conscious this month of how many times I use the words "I" and "me" in prayer. My prayers are very ego-centric. Even when I'm asking for blessings upon my family and my friends, they are still "my" family and "my" friends. There's not nearly enough "thy will be done" language.

So, while I don't want to relinquish my right to pray when I feel the urge to pray and face whatever direction I choose and formulate the content of my own conversations with God, I do see the value of prostration, at least in a metaphorical sense. There's room for more praise. And there's certainly room for more submission of my own will.

why do they call it a fast when it's going by so slowly?

2010-08-25T07:35:00.005-07:00

You know you've been fasting a while when you start having dreams about feeling guilty for eating carrots.

I'm nearing the halfway point of Ramadan and starting to get a bit burned out. I'm sick of being hungry; that's part of it. But I'm also tired of feeling antisocial. It's no fun eating by myself. And when I get up in the dark to eat an early breakfast I feel like sneaky binger. The one welcome exception was Monday evening, when my friend Kristin (who has lived in various middle-eastern countries and speaks Arabic) invited me to iftar with her family and her Muslim friend Luda from Syria. Iftar is the traditional meal to break fast and is usually celebrated by feasting with family and friends. (Unless you're a wacky Mormon usurping the Muslim holiday and then you usually celebrate it by eating cold leftovers alone at the kitchen table.)

Kristin had slaved all day to make some delicious Arabic dishes and Luda brought homemade Syrian food as well (sorry I didn't write down the names of the dishes; I was too busy eating). Ever the generous guest, I ran to the supermarket and bought a package of dates.

It was a privilege to meet Luda and I took advantage of the opportunity and asked her a good portion of my list of questions about the Muslim faith. I suspect I'll write about some of our conversation later. She was a lovely woman, very Western in appearance, but obviously committed to her religion even though she is essentially isolated in Utah Valley and prays at home by herself rather than attending the small local mosque.

One thing Luda said has me even more discouraged. When I admitted that I've been drinking water during the day (because I'm still running or walking 4 miles almost every day and I know I would suffer from serious headaches if I didn't drink any water) she said, "Oh, water is the most important part of the fast." So not only am I a total poser. I'm also a total cheater.

Kristin also told me it's a well-known fact that people gain weight during Ramadan. This has to be a cruel joke. Please tell me it's because they are indulging for hours after sunset (which I'm not doing), not because they are totally throwing their metabolisms out of whack by starving themselves all day and then eating right before bed (which I am doing). If I gained weight after feeling this hungry all the time, that would just be too harsh.

But I can say that I do feel, for the first time in many months, like I have some self-control when it comes to food. That's a cool thing. And I enjoy sitting in the dark of the pre-dawn mornings meditation/praying/listening to my own heartbeat. This is a rare gift. And food really does better when you have to wait for it for 15 hours. Even carrots.

washing hands

2010-08-20T03:09:00.002-07:00

Photo: McKay washing in the fountain outside Cordova's Mosque in Spain.

One thing I'm NOT doing along the way in this Ramadan experience (but I respect, nonetheless) is washing before my prayers. It says in the 5th sura of the Qur'an:

O ye who believe! when ye prepare for prayer, wash your faces, and your hands to the elbows; Rub your heads and your feet to the ankles.

I like the idea of setting prayer apart as a sacred act by washing in preparation. It seems as if you were about to have an audience with royalty, which of course, you are. If I knew the whole Wudu ritual and could perform it without sacrilege, I'd try. But I sense it's one of the many things that belong so specifically to the Muslim religion that I'd be wrong to borrow it for my own curiosity. I do like the symbolism though of clean hands. It's all over in the Old Testament but I never thought to take it quite so literally.

fasting and feasting

2010-08-16T08:40:00.004-07:00

Day five and I'm surprised by the fact that fasting isn't that difficult. I mean it's not easy to go all day without eating, but I think it's easier than, say, eating ONLY ONE really good chocolate chip cookie. There's something about total abstinence that takes the pressure off.

That said, by 8:30ish (it gets earlier each day according to the sunset) I'm ready for a big pile of food. I suspect with all I eat in the evening and the breakfast I sneak in before dawn I'm not reducing total caloric intake by much. It's not an ideal diet plan. But that's not my motive anyway. I do feel a strong sense of accomplishment that I've kept to the schedule thus far. I've had plenty of temptations, including a full weekend at the cabin with my fabulous family (my parents and 7 of my 8 siblings and their families) which typically means good food and abundant snacking. Thankfully my family was very supportive and there's nothing like 31 witnesses to keep you honest.

I'm also surprised by what I'm finding in the Qur'an. I have the book divided into 30 equal portions, one for each day of Ramadan. I read with two pens: a black one for underlining things I like and a red one for underlining things that don't jive with my personal beliefs. I'm into the fifth sura now and of the hundreds of verses I've read, there are only a handful that I felt compelled to underline in red. Why does this surprise me? I don't know. I guess I forgot that most religions have, at their core, the same fundamental principles: obey God, avoid hypocrisy, be kind to others, and keep your promises. The Qur'an is, thus far, largely devoted to these ideas and to predicting rewards for the believers (paradisaical gardens with rivers beneath them and pure spouses) and the unbelievers (the scorchings of hell). My strongest personal objection is merely that there is such a theme of division between these two groups. Many many verses are about the seemingly clear-cut differences between the faithful and the blasphemers. I suppose my own scriptures are no different. I just wouldn't mind spending more time admitting that we are all inherently good and deeply flawed at the same time, that we all struggle with demons and wish to be angels, that some days we believe and some days we doubt.

I sense a trend to my musings today. It's night: I can feast. It's day: I must fast. Some people are sinners and will pay dearly. Some are believers (Mormon equivalent: righteous saints) and will be rewarded. The avoidance of ambiguity makes all manner of things easier. It's moderation that's hard.

Dawn

2010-08-12T08:34:00.002-07:00

(Arabic writing from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain)

Day one of Ramadan and I can already tell that the hardest part isn't going to be the fasting. It's going to be sleep deprivation. Of course, I say this before I've actually felt a single hunger pang, but I'm already tired and it's only 10 am.

I got up at 4:30 am for Suhoor, the meal before the first prayer of the day (which begins at 4:43 in my time zone and marks the beginning of the fast). I underestimated the time it would take to make oatmeal and so I was wolfing it down while it was still too hot and I didn't get to finish it off before my time ran out. I'm already having these manic conversations with myself about the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. It seems extreme to run a spiritual exercise by the seconds on a clock, but at the same time, if I start making excuses and fudging the numbers, where do I draw the line? If I don't follow the rules, soon I'll be arguing that the fast doesn't start until the sun actually rises and then it will be when I can actually SEE the sun and before long, I'll be saying I can just close my eyes and eat whatever I want.

It's only day one, mind you. I sense some internal battles in my future.

One thing I can say is that it's peaceful at 4:30 in the morning. The house seems perfectly quiet when I sit down to pray and then I begin hearing, one by one, the layers of sound that float across the dark air around me: the hum of the refrigerator, the vibrations of a thin stream of cars passing on the highway a mile away, a train honking at the crossing more than two miles away, my intestines gurgling around the oatmeal. My eyes have adjusted and there's a gray glow coming in from the streetlight outside. I enjoy being the only one awake in this hazy envelope of space and time. I would enjoy it more if I weren't aware that I will pay the price later in the day when I have to function on substantially less than my required 7 hours of sleep. But in the meantime, I can enjoy the moment and think about the millions of real Muslims out there who had to get up even earlier to make it to a mosque for their first prayer. I'm just in my pajamas in my living room.

I realize now that one of the layers of sound I hear is the ticking of the clock in the kitchen. It seems incredibly loud, in fact, and I can't believe I have tuned it out. It's not something I ever notice during the day. There's something about this early morning strangeness that makes time thicker and more precious than usual. Maybe that's part of the point to this exercise. The seconds do matter. They've always mattered but now that they mark the borders between dark and light and between food passing my lips or staying in the bowl, they have power over me instead of the other way around.

Ramadan, a Mormon seeker's version

2010-08-10T09:52:00.002-07:00

I’ll begin with the fact that my kids think I’m crazy, my husband is worried about me not eating dinner with the family, and my parents (when they read this) are likely to fear I’m becoming even more radical than my normal level of radical. On my part, I’ll admit to some trepidation. If anyone were to ask me why I plan to celebrate Ramadan this year, I’d have to pause for a while to collect my thoughts before answering. That isn’t to say that I don’t have a good reason. It’s more like I have a whole pile of reasons, none of which seems logical or convincing or likely to satisfy anyone who thinks it’s inappropriate for a Mormon to participate in a pillar of the Islamic religion. I’m writing this, I suppose, to explain myself to myself and anyone else who questions my motives or my sanity.

Why I’m celebrating Ramadan

For several years, I have included a short lecture about Islam in my Humanities 201 class. I do this with full disclosure of my own Western bias and my limited knowledge of the deeper aspects of the religion. I do it in an attempt to show another perspective on the Middle Ages, to balance out our reading of the Song of Roland (which portrays Muslims as polytheist pagans and heroicizes their slaughter), and to reveal to my classes of predominantly Mormon students that there more similarities than differences between the two religions. I enjoy watching their surprise at this discovery. Every time I teach my students about Ramadan, I have wondered what it’s really like to fast for a month. I’m simply curious to know how difficult it is and what kinds of rewards it brings.

I finally bought a Qur’an (or at least an English translation of it) last Christmas. In the basement of the university library, next to the rows of computers where elderly LDS patrons squint at genealogy records, I have plundered the stacks of books on Islam (ironically located right next to the books on Judaism, a kind of peaceful coexistence only possible in the abstract world of the written word). Ramadan this year is an excuse for me to read the whole Qur’an, study my pile of books about Muhammad, and try to gain a more personal understanding of Islamic beliefs.

According to what I have read, the blessings of Ramadan include forgiveness of sins, greater power through prayer, internal peace, and more strength to resist temptation. The phrase I've read dozens of times now is “The gates of paradise are opened, the gates of hell are closed, and the devils are in chains." I could use all of these openings, closings and chainings right now.

One of the benefits of Ramadan is an increase in self-discipline and self-control. I don’t want to belittle the sacredness of the rite by treating it as a diet plan, but I am in need of more self-control, especially where food is concerned. I’ve heard some people dismiss Ramadan as an easy way to fast because you can eat whatever you want in the middle of the night. But how could avoiding food and drink between dawn and sunset for 30 days be anything but a genuine test of will power?

During Ramadan, Muslims strive to better themselves and fill their hearts with charity and empathy for others. They try to be more generous, more friendly, more anxious to serve the poor and needy. In addition to gaining control over what passes into their mouths, they control over what passes out of their mouths by banning gossip, backbiting, and spreading of rumors. I struggle with these weaknesses. Blame it on my years of analyzing art and literature, but whatever part of my brain it is that makes you a good critical thinker, that part of my brain is over-exercised. As in Rambo. It is hard for me to resist criticizing others, and (not that I need a holiday to make me do better) it seems appropriate for me to set some new goals and have a noble reason to hold my tongue.

And maybe this should have been listed first, but I’m seeking a spiritual benefit as well. Those who faithfully follow the prescriptions of Ramadan are promised taqwa, which I’ve seen translated variously as fear of God, God-consciousness or piety. No Dad, I’m not converting to Islam (could any feminist do this?) but I know that there are many paths to God. I haven’t yet exhausted the Mormon path (could I ever?) but I am interested in what truths I can find in the Qur’an and what I can discover about my relationship to God by subverting the will of the flesh and dedicating more time in my life to religious study and prayer. Couldn’t I get these things from within my own religion? Sure. Am I conflicted as to why I feel the need to borrow a piece of someone else’s religion to gain the clarity and insight I should be working harder to find in my own? Absolutely.

As a caveat, I know there are plenty who would say God will not accept my offering, seeing as it comes from a non-Muslim usurping a Muslim religious tradition. I readily acknowledge my status as an outsider. For that matter, for various reasons I’ve mostly felt like an outsider in Mormon circles my whole life. It’s a role I’m familiar with. My only regret is that I’m doing this alone. A significant aspect of Ramadan is the sense of community created by a group of people sacrificing together and celebrating together. There will be no public feasts in my version of Ramadan. No trips to the mosque for late night prayers. I might rope a few of my family members into eating some dates and Haleem with me, and my Arabic-speaking sister has promised to teach me a few phrases, but mostly I plan to do this solo. This may be the most un-Islamic aspect of my pseudo-Islamic Ramadan. So here’s an open invitation to anyone who wants to join me in all or in part on my strange quest for enlightenment, compassion and the ability to resist the lure of baked goods during daylight hours.

Bathroom break

2010-07-31T07:44:00.010-07:00

One of the things I love most about travel and the main reason I wanted to get my kids to Spain is the way it broadens your understanding of the whole human race. If you always stay in one place, it’s easy to think that there’s only one way of doing things: the way you’ve always done them. But once you travel to a foreign country, you get to see that in other parts of the world, there are millions of people who eat totally different foods (and are accustomed to a totally different olive oil to potato ratio), they swim in a different language sea, they have different attitudes about public transportation or footwear or the amount of major appliances you can miniaturize and squeeze into a kitchen the size of an average pantry back home. In other words, there’s more than one way to flush a toilet.

And that’s literally what we learned in Spain. I saw so many different ways to flush a toilet on our trip it became a running joke. Each time we’d stay somewhere new or have to ask a waiter for directions to “Los Servicios” I’d play "Okay friends, how do you flush this toilet?’” I began taking my camera in with me to public restrooms. I can only assume this caused a fair amount of confusion to people in the stalls next to me. Can you imagine it? The flush followed by a short pause and then a sudden flash of light.

Yes, I became somewhat of a toilet tourist, a restroom reporter, a john junkie.

So here’s one of the recuerdos I brought home from Spain: my little collection of toilet photos. I'm just being realistic. While traveling, it seems we spent an inordinate amount of time searching for bathrooms, waiting in line for bathrooms, using bathrooms, and then talking about the odd discoveries we made in said bathrooms. It seemed appropriate to chronicle that part of the experience.

Here's a fairly standard little number from the Madrid Airport. The flusher is the large button half-way up the wall, which--when nearly every other toilet you've ever flushed in your life has a fairly innocuous little lever on the side of the tank--seemed ultra fancy and dramatic (does it summon airport security? will an alarm sound? am I launching a nuclear weapon?).

This one's from our apartment in Madrid. The flusher is a button you push on the top of the tank, which makes it easy to find. But take a look at a detail shot...

...the mystery being: what exactly is the difference between a "sun flush" and a "moon flush?"

Just when you get complacent and start thinking, "Hey, I can handle this one because I have cleverly deduced there's a button on the back of the tank" you find that the button simply will NOT be pushed. You press it multiple times and nothing happens. You're feeling like a stupid tourist, helpless in the bathroom, completely flummoxed by a plumbing fixture, wishing there were such a thing as a World-Wide Toilet Translation Phone App. You're about to call for backup when you think to pull on the knob instead of pushing it and thankfully discover that all it takes is a gentle upward tug to do the job. Sheesh. You have failed another IQ test.

This may have been the fanciest flusher I saw. Another "launcher" on the wall in a restaurant near Madrid's Plaza Mayor. But this time there are two rectangle panels and as far as my highly professional journalistic sleuthing could determine (i.e. multiple flushings) both panels seemed to accomplish the same thing. I still haven't figured this one out. Clearly I was not the only confused one because in the empty stall next to mine, one of the rectangles was permanently indented and water was swooshing down the drain, spinning furiously in some kind of eternal flush mode .

I encountered this no-nonsense, utilitarian job at the Reina Sophia art museum, a rather appropriate setting considering the fixture's totally post-modern exposure of the sign/signifier relationship. Here's the plumbing that takes you from flusher to things in need of flushing. No need to wrap things up in the illusion of detachment.

Okay, this one is from the Palacio Real and yes, I know we've seen the missile launcher variety before, but I wonder if you're noticing a trend here... Have you seen how every bathroom comes equipped with a huge garbage can? These are not your discrete letter-boxes attached to the side of the stall wall for your occasional convenience. No m'am, they are heavy-duty, tight-lidded garbage cans large enough to swallow small children. And if you think you've guessed their purpose you're only half right because they're not just in the ladies' bathrooms.

The large garbage can phenomenon led to no small amount of conjecture on our part, especially when we encountered signs like this one that--in addition to indicating that any use of the toilet is explicitly banned--seemed to strengthen our suspicions that we were not supposed to be flushing anything, including toilet paper, down the pipes.

Ahem. Moving on...

While playing "How do you flush this toilet?" I encountered a few truly baffling challenges such as this one. It took me several minutes to finally decide that the only recourse was to plunge my hand into the tank and pull on random pieces of plastic until flushing resulted. Much handwashing ensued.

At our Pension in Barcelona, it took a full-scale search around the toilet and up and down the walls to discover the pull chain hanging from the ceiling (we had to train Gabie to step up on the toilet to reach it). Also, you know you're in Spain when the bathroom is so narrow that you have to turn sideways and inhale to squeeze your way down to the toilet, BUT naturally there's room for a bidet.
In Granada, outside the lovely monastery we visited, there's a bathroom where for the first time, the mystery was not how to flush the toilet. Instead, the mystery was...can you find it?...where on earth have they hidden the toilet paper? In fact, not only was there no toilet paper, there was no dispenser on which to ever hang toilet paper. To get toilet paper, you had to buy it from the tiny, scowling, wrinkled old lady whom you passed on the way into the bathroom and only fully appreciated on your way out. Thankfully, I always enter bathrooms fully prepared (just the basics: extra tissue, pen and paper for taking notes, camera equipment...) so I didn't have to pay the lady for toilet paper. But I really, really wish I had plucked up the courage to ask if I could pay her to pose for a picture. She was a true cultural gem.

Thus ends our tour of Spanish toilets. And again, my point was that it's refreshing to see that sometimes there are a hundred different ways to accomplish a task and none of them are wrong and all of them get the job done eventually. I think my kids learned this lesson in Spain. They learned to open their minds to new ideas, learned to welcome different perspectives, learned to be a little less ethnocentric. They learned that we're all unique and not everything has to be done the American way.

Thank goodness.

Day Five - Birthday

2010-07-06T07:58:00.008-07:00

If I were to create a recipe for the perfect birthday, it would have to include the following: 1) wake up in Spain (and already you'd know that it's one of those recipes, the ones with totally unreasonable ingredients, like fresh fennel or grouse or Egyptian limes), 2) wander around for a few hours in a world-class art museum, 3) do at least one thing that feels completely surreal, 4) eat something delicious, and 5) spend the whole day with people you love.

So that was my birthday this year. I can't remember a better one. And I'm getting to that stage in life where I dread getting older, so it feels good to think back on a birthday and experience happy thoughts rather than a tightening in my chest.

We spent the morning at what is now my favorite of the three great art museums of Madrid: The Thyssen-Bornemisza. Sure, Lady Prado flaunts all those masterpieces. And Queen Sophia has her Ultra-Famous Guernica. But in her four floors, their less-assuming sister Thyssen covers the whole history of art with the most beautifully eclectic collection I've ever seen. From glowing wooden triptychs to hip modern canvases, it's all there. My favorites were the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, of course. I can't get enough of Matisse and Van Gogh.

Berthe Morisot's Psyche (at the Thyssen)
Someday I'll write about this painting!!!

The pleasant surprise of the visit was the temporary exhibition called "Monet and Abstraction." It was a stunning collection of Monet's paintings interwoven with abstract works by Turner, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Krasner, etc (the whole concept being to show Monet's influence on later movements). We knew it would be beautiful, but I was truly in rapture through every room. We even turned one corner and found ourselves facing two Jackson Pollocks. I had not expected that at all, but to see them mixed in with Monet made total sense. My boys were awesome through the whole museum (and Ken is totally used to my slow museum pace so he was patient and helped keep the boys within sight). McKay later listed it as one of his favorite places in Spain.

After lunch, we visited (along with my sisters Teri and Anne and my brother Jim and their families) some old haunts. The first and second times I lived in Spain (when I was about 4 and 9 years old) we spent a lot of time at a "Residencia."

This was where the students in the BYU group lived and ate and studied. My family lived in apartments not far away, but we hung out at the Residencia plenty. It has changed, of course, and no longer belongs to BYU (which still makes me cringe because they should never have let this property go!) but it was a surreal feeling....stepping into the past a bit by walking on familiar but not familiar ground. The place is now subdivided into a bank and an engineering firm. They have changed just about everything except the basic structure of the building. But I could picture my brother Steve and I rolling our oranges down the marble stairs so they would be all mushy by the bottom and we could suck the juice out of them. Teri and I reminisced about walking around to the back kitchen door to ask the cooks for the feet off the chickens so we could turn them into animated claws. We remembered the little chapel tucked under the bottom of the building and the slick part of the back landing where we could slide. It's a little sad to see only traces of a building that holds such a permanent lease in my memories. And I'm worried now that the new images of the place, all fresh and repopulated, will taint the old ones. Maybe it's better just to stay away. But I couldn't resist. I've dreamed about going back to Spain for more than 20 years. And in my dreams, I often am walking down that street, looking for those columns, turning back the clock.

Anne (and her husband and the most adorable baby on the planet) went with me and Ken and the boys to see our old apartment (where we lived on our third trip to Spain when I was 15). It's in Moratalaz, if that means anything to you, but when I lived there, I knew it by its metro stop. I knew everything by its Metro stop. My mental map of Madrid is entirely based on the colors of various lines and their station names. After all these years, I remembered that we lived on the Purple line (lower right hand corner of the map) and the Vinaterros stop. However, I confess that without a quick phone call to my Mom, a little google-earth research on my brother Jim's cell phone and Anne's amazing homing skills (my heck, she was only 6 years old when we lived there but she remembered better than I did which apartment was ours) we would never have found it.

The place has gone down hill a bit (Ken's comment: "I didn't know you grew up in the hood"). There's more graffiti than I remember. The planters are a bit weedier, the buildings not as well maintained. But it was a kick to see it again. Our old doorman--Juan Carlos--is still there after all these years and he recognized us and even remembered our apartment number. I'm hoping this is because we made a good impression, not because we were a crazy, huge American family living in an otherwise ordinary Spanish neighborhood.

We ate chocolate-covered donuts from the Tienda where we always used to buy treats. I walked around to the side of the building where my old High School was (and still is).

I won't launch into all the details here, but just imagine if you were a year ahead in math in the US and then you went to a new school where everyone was two years ahead. And, oh yeah, everything, including all the math terms, are in a foreign language that you are still struggling to master and your teacher talks a hundred miles an hour and the numbers don't even look the same because ones have a long tail like sevens and sevens are crossed and commas are decimal points and...well you get the idea. I looked up at the bars on those windows and flashed back to the times I sat inside, staring up at those bars, wishing the class were over and feeling utterly, utterly stupid. I did have some good friends in that school, though. I wish we had keep in touch. The flow of correspondence trickled down to nothing within several months of my departure.

The last thing we did that evening was visit an old friend of the family. Fé is a Spanish grandma with infinite charm and warmth. She has hosted BYU students in her home for many years, starting with my older sisters Teri and Kathy back in 1985. And the first thing she showed us when we arrived was her book of Americans, a scrapbook filled with photos of my sisters (and their families, including me, although I had never met Fé before) and every other person from the US she has embraced in her generous life. What a delightful lady. She fed us dinner. In fact, had it waiting for hours (because we were late), spread out on a table squeezed into a corner of her typically tiny apartment. And you have never had a Spanish tortilla until you've tasted these. My gosh! Salty and slightly gooey with egg and fried potatoes. I've tried these at home a dozen times, but they don't even come close to Fé's. In fact, my boys--who have never liked my tortillas--were snarfing them down and saying "Mom, you should really try to make these some time."

We chatted with Fé for a couple of hours (my Spanish was improving!) and then rode home on the Metro. Yes, I meant to say "home." How funny that Madrid had already started to feel like home again. Shows you how strong those memories are...how deep an impression Madrid made on my little girl heart.

Day Four - more bliss in Madrid

2010-06-22T05:30:00.012-07:00

Back in real time (late June, Utah) I start teaching classes again today so I may not get as much detail into these travelogues as I wish. This is good news for everyone since I fear my rambling gets boring. I plan to rely more on the journal of odd notes I took on the trip. It's a bit raw and disorganized but maybe better than the over-processed stuff.

I wake up early, way before anyone else in my family, as I do every day of the trip. When I'm home, if I wake up early, I just crave more sleep, but in Spain, every second is like the finest gelato you've ever tasted--you can't imagine wasting even a drop before it melts.

In Madrid, we're on the top floor of a five-story apartment building and we have two balcony patios (which turn out to be very handy when we start washing laundry later). I walk out on the upper patio and watch the sky lighten. There are clay and stucco roofs all around me -- flat layers and different levels of terraces for every apartment building. The balconies have pots of geraniums and the occasional string of laundry. The swallows are crazy around here -- hundreds of them, sweeping in masses and spiraling above the roofs, eating bugs I assume. They are noisy! Like giant crickets chirping in thick swaths across the sky.

Below on the narrow cobblestone street, a few people walk by, motorcycles and tiny cars work their way down the street. A dog is peeing on a stone berm and then, instinctually, he tries to scratch and kick his hind legs against the cobblestones as if burying his pee in the dirt that isn't there.

I can smell baking bread and diesel fumes.

When the kids are all up, dressed and fed, we walk to Retiro park to catch the "Madrid Vision" bus. This is an incredibly touristy thing to do and my sister (who planned the whole trip, bless her stressed-out little heart) was a genius for arranging it. Really, the tourist bus a great way to see the whole city, all its plazas, incredible architecture, crowds, traffic. It takes a while for us all to work our way up to the top of the double decker bus where we can see well, so once we finally get up there, we have to stay on the bus or lose our seats. We ride around the loop a second time, then get off near the Palacio Real.

McKay on the Bus (say goodbye to that hat; it was McKay's favorite and it's the only casualty of the trip. I still can't figure out at which point it got lost)

We eat lunch at a Turkish restaurant. If I'm not mistaken, this is the only time we eat anywhere that wouldn't qualify as "Spanish Food." We have instituted a strict ban on anything remotely American. I eat a salad that tastes amazing after days and days of bread and meat.

We tour the Palacio Real, which by the way was the former residence of the monarchy and is one of the many places on our trip where they forbid the use of cameras, even without flash. This is irritating and manipulative (we suspect they want to boost sales of their books and postcards) but as we have already had one encounter with a snotty guard (who was ticked that our group has smuggled in deadly baby carriers and diaper bags, even though we got permission at the front gate to bring them) so I obey the rules and take no photos. I wish I had broken the rules. Now I can only say things like: Wow! Opulent! Over-the-top! and Regal. If I can track down the guidebook that I bought (see? It works) maybe I could scan in some pictures.

The Palacio Real is simply another symbol of the overwhelming wealth the royals had during Spain's Golden Age. They had so much money, they really didn't know what to do with it other than commission rooms made entirely of Oriental porcelain. Or surround themselves with nude portraits of themselves as heroes of mythology.

Gabie, who ever since his introduction to Percy Jackson has been infatuated with everything Greek or mythical, is in heaven. He recognizes many of the figures painted on the ceilings. Hercules seems to be a favorite of the Spanish Kings. We see him (and his various labors) many times today.

The armory is surreal. The Spanish kings treated these suits and shields and swords like ceremonial relics--all inscribed with scenes from mythology and elaborate decoration--each a work of art. And they were for war?! It shows you how today's trillion-dollar Military Industrial Complex is just a modern version of an ancient industry: preparation for battle.

What seems funny to me is that the ornamentation does not make the armor more effective in battle; it just makes the wearer more convinced he is powerful, worthy of victory, bestowed by God with special authority to lead and fight. It reminds me of all those lines in Homer's Iliad about Achilles' shield. He describes in detail the sculpted scenes of a city at war and a city at peace (and the peaceful one gets more attention) but in the end, it's just a weapon. These kings had to bend over backwards (or at least their craftsmen did) to justify and ceremonialize their love of war. It's almost like a huge, elaborate distraction from the truth that war is about blood and gore and loss of life. If you can make your armor pretty enough and tie your actions to Hercules and Poseidon, you won't have to worry so much about the troubling consequences of conflict.

End of rant :)

Outside the armory, we see a couple of peacocks resting in the ledge of a window. Appropriate symbols of royalty and not a "No Photos!" sign to be found. Finally.

Teri takes the kids to the park next door and the adults walk through the pharmacy (shelf after shelf of porcelain containers with a million odd ingredients, whale sperm being our favorite). We sit down in the park for a while and watch the kids play. They have made some Spanish friends already (who needs language skills?).

We walk to the Plaza Mayor and on our way wander through a fancy market place. The hanging legs of jamon are pretty typical. I just wish I could also convey the terrific smell of the market: eau de dangling meat, baked goods, fish and more fish.

At the Plaza Mayor, my sister Anne buys me an early birthday present: churros y chocolate for my family. I'm having one of those moments again where I can't believe I'm here. It seems too perfect, like a movie set, the scene where the heroine sits with a whole group of relatives out in the most famous of all famous Madrid plazas and dips her crispy, sugary churro into a cup of thick chocolate.

Then some of the kids start chasing pigeons which infuriates Gabie, protector of all creatures great and small, and the spell is broken. I do take one of my favorite photos from the trip.

Do you think they pose here behind the statue on purpose? I just love the symmetry of the three horses' rear ends.

Some of my family head off to the airport to pick up Anne's husband Scott. Some of us head to the Plaza del Sol (where we see the zero kilometer mark that indicates the center of Spain). Then into the Corte Ingles, which when I lived in Madrid as a teenager was one of my favorite places. Corte Ingles is the largest chain of stores in Spain; they are EVERYWHERE. And the one in Sol is huge--8 stories of everything you could possibly want, from groceries to camping gear. We pick up some food: fruit, eggs, bread, magdalenas, Danup, Nocilla, Natillas, fresh milk (not easy to come by). These are the best food prices we've seen yet so we load up. The only flaw in this plan is that we then we get to carry all our bags back to the bus stop, onto the bus, and up the block to our apartment. Exhausting, but worth it for just a taste of that natillas.

Day Three, in which I become a food blogger

2010-06-18T05:16:00.012-07:00

I woke up early and ventured out with McKay to find something for breakfast in Barcelona. No luck. The Ramblas, which the previous night was flowing with thousands of people, was totally deserted. The stores were all closed and the only living souls out were either cleaning the streets or making deliveries. I asked a few people for suggestions on where I could find some food and they each gave me the same look: Dumb tourist, don't you know where you are? Spaniards are not early risers!

We made do with leftover bagels (I knew we saved them for a reason) and two apples I had been hauling around in my backpack since Salt Lake. Note to self: buy breakfast food when you're out and about with the rest of the townsfolk at 10pm the night before. We caught our fourth plane in four days (enough already!) and headed to Madrid. On the plane, I made a list of foods I had to eat before we left Spain. These are mostly memory foods, things I loved as a kid.

Magdalenas
Danup (very runny drinkable yogurt)
Bread (real Spanish Pan)
Good cheese (Manchego!)
Fanta Limón
Natillas!!
Arroz con leche
Paella (of course, though I never liked the seafood kind)
Tortillas (the Spanish kind with potatoes and eggs)
Pechugo de pollo (breaded chicken)
Churros y chocolate (the thick kind that's like pudding)
Sugus candy
Gummi candy
Nocilla (pronounced no-THEE-uh, a chocolate and hazelnut spread)
Tofe Nata
Horchata (almond drink)
Ensaladia (potato salad)
Real White Chocolate

I'm happy to announce that by the end of the two weeks, we had consumed every one of these foods (plus lots of other yummy things besides). My conclusion on several of them (including paella, pechugo de pollo, arroz con leche, and ensaladia) is that my Mom--whom we ironically left behind in the U.S.--still makes the best Spanish food I've ever tasted).

We settled into our Madrid apartments (I'll have to write about these in detail later; they were fantastic and perfectly located within walking distance of the "Gold Triangle of Spanish Art"). We met up with more of our group (My brother Jim, his wife Julia and daughter. My sister Anne and her baby. My brother Thom, his wife Robin and their 3 boys).

These are the kids (so far; we'll gain a few more in a couple of days when my brother Steve's family arrives).

Then we hit the Reina Sophia, the first of the three world-class art museums in Madrid (thus the Golden "Triangle"). The most famous resident of the Reina Sophia (and essentially the reason this museum was built) is, of course, Picasso's Guernica.

Seeing Guernica in person for the first time was definitely a highlight of the trip for me. No, I didn't cry. But I was in a sincere state of art-lover's ecstasy for a while. The thing is HUGE. Even bigger than I had assumed from all the pictures I've seen. Sure, I knew it was 11 feet tall and nearly 26 feet wide, but these dimensions don't sink in until you see it looming on the wall in front of you. Some of the figures, even the partially-severed ones, are far bigger than lifesized. I know this because I could compare them with the guards standing soberly on either side of the canvas. Four more guards strolled around the room reminding people to put away their cameras and step back from the painting if they were even within 3 feet of it; I've never seen security like this in ANY museum. It speaks to the volatile history of this painting and its power as a political symbol. I teach all of this in my classes but what a privilege it was to see it in person.

We wandered through the Reina Sophia for at least another hour as a group until the kids had really had enough. Some of the adults (thank you!) took the kids to Retiro park so the rest of us could see more art. I have to confess, as much as I enjoy Dali and Miró and Picasso, once you've seen Guernica, everything else in that museum is a step down.

My second favorite painting was probably Antonio Saura's Shout (1959). I have certainly had days like this, haven't you?

I especially loved the detail of the shouting person's fist dripping paint down the canvas like blood.

We met up with the kids in the park just in time to see a spectacular sunset. I cursed myself for not following through with my goal to become a fantastic photographer (or at least understand how to use half the features on my fancy camera) before the trip. This is my best shot. Sorry.

I did snap one more picture on our walk back to the apartments, one that captures the flavor of Madrid (and all big Spanish cities) quite well, don't you think? Tiny cars, even tinier parking spaces. I mean, how's this guy ever going to get out?

Ken and I and the boys ate dinner on our own at a little restaurant called Los Rotos. Gabie was so infatuated with everything about this place that he saved the placemat and taped it into his journal. We ate pan (of course) croquetas (blah), patatas (meh), Gaspacho (the best we had in all of Spain), Fried chicken strips with a honey sauce (delicious!) and, since Ken was brave, a scrambled egg dish called Pistos with all kinds of mystery foods in it that was quite good. The second time we ate here on our last day in Spain I think we decided that one of the mystery foods was eggplant. I think one of the others was some kind of fish. Yeah, I make a great food blogger, don't I?

We ate dinner, by the way, at 10pm. This is pretty standard for Spaniards and became a regular routine for us as well. It doesn't really get dark until after 9pm and who wants to eat early when there's so much to see?

Spain, Day Two –The day that never ends. . .

2010-06-16T06:17:00.022-07:00

At this rate, it may be Christmas before I catch up on our trip. But in my defense, this was by far the LONGEST day of the whole thing. You'll see why...

We spend the night with Toni at her home on Long Island. We wake early and eat Real New York Bagels for breakfast. We spend a while hanging out with a Real New York Family (Toni’s husband and kids) then pack up our backpacks and head back into the Real New York City. The kids marvel at everything: the traffic, the buildings, the traffic, the miniature villages beside the freeway that turn out to be cemeteries, the traffic...

In New York, we walk around for a while like the tourists we are and visit Rockefeller Center and Times Square. We watch Toni light a candle in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a lovely ritual that marks each of my trips into Manhattan with my Catholic friend. Eventually, we make our way to Central Park where the kids eat pizza and climb the rocks and trees; they are finally in their element.

Central Park is definitely the highlight of the city for my boys. I do love how, if you get deep enough into the center of the park and can’t see the buildings poking out above the trees, you can almost forget that you’re in the middle of a sprawling metropolis. We walk past a little-league baseball game that strikes me as funny. Can you imagine playing your regular, scheduled baseball games in CENTRAL PARK? It’s just such an ordinary thing in an extraordinary place. I think each game would be worthy of a full-scale camera crew, or at least an accompanying Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack.

Toni drives us back to the airport where we begin the process of visiting the Dude with the Closet to pick up our luggage (whew! still there) and checking through security. We reach the first gate and meet a Real New York Nasty Airport Security Officer. She takes our passports, and one by one goes through them, saying, “This passport is NOT valid…this passport is NOT valid…this passport is NOT valid…” My heart sinks. This is it. I knew some big catastrophe would keep us from getting to Spain!

The she tells us in a very condescending tone that we have neglected to sign our passports (which she seems positively delighted to have been the first to discover). My heck! Does she revel in giving people heart attacks or what? We sign them right away. Then we find a line as far away from the This Passport is Not Valid lady as possible.

We wait for three hours at the airport (because aside from neglecting to sign our passports, we are obedient travelers and we have followed instructions and arrived half a day before our actual flight leaves). We eventually run into Teri (my sister) and her son Sawyer who are taking the same flight to Barcelona. Or at least we think it’s going to Barcelona. What no one at Iberia Airlines has actually told us (and what it says NOWHERE on any of our ticket info) is that the flight will land in Madrid, we will be asked to switch planes, wait around some more, and then fly to Barcelona. By the time we get there 9 hours later, we are exhausted. None of us, including the kids, have really slept much on the flight. How can you sleep? They provide you with pillows and blankets but then interrupt constantly with various announcements, pings, movies, and 4 separate trips of the meal/beverage carts. By the time we land, the sheen has rubbed off the novelty of air travel, even for the boys.

Okay, Barcelona in three works: impressive, expensive and exhausting.

We take a bus to the Plaza that shall not be named (because I can’t remember it), find our Hostal and check in.

A word here about the Spanish floor numbering system. They skip the ground floor. This means if the nice lady running your Hostal says she’s just up on the 2nd floor, you can expect to drag your suitcases up THREE flights of steps. (This also means when you get to see the Mormon temple on your last day in Madrid and you run into the Temple President and his wife and they kindly invite you up to their apartment on the 7th floor of the building next door—thankfully in an elevator—you will be looking out the window from 8 stories up and you will be pretty much eye level with Angel Moroni, which is very cool).

The Hostal is cramped and old and consists of a few bedrooms with shared bathroom, but it’s clean and quaint and, oh yeah, IT’S IN SPAIN! so everyone is totally thrilled. It’s also in a great location, right off the Ramblas, which is the most famous tree-lined street in Barcelona. (This is the view from our window).

We take a stroll, check out the shops and street performers (you see them all over Spain; they paint themselves in metallic colors and sit perfectly still like statues until you drop a coin in their bucket; then they move slowly, like they’ve been wound up with a key, until they wind down again and freeze. It’s worth the coins to watch and far better than the beggars who you also see all over Spain but they don’t do anything but look pitiful).

We eat our first bag of Magdalenas with Danup (because we're finally IN SPAIN! and these are tasty Spanish foods I've missed for 25 years) and make our way to the waterfront. There’s a monument to Christopher Columbus there but the kids are far more interested in the carp who are competing for crumbs with the seagulls. (This is major motif in my Spain pictures: everywhere we went, the kids made a beeline for the water).

We take the subway (another cool first for the kids, not cheap at 2 Euros a person, but worth it because we're tired.

We ride to the neighborhood of the Sagrada Familia cathedral (which costs over 100 Euros for us, but is worth it and the main reason we made this whole side trip to Barcelona).

Sagrada Familia is impossible to photograph, as all good cathedrals are. It’s outrageously tall, outrageously disorganized and resembles something you’d make if you had a beach full of runny sand and a hundred years of free time. We pay extra for the audio tours and wander around the interior (under construction since 1882) and the exterior (also under construction since 1882). This building is a world wonder. The best part is our tour of the East towers (for which we also pay extra to ride up the elevator). Here’s a photo of our little group near the top.

Please note that, yes, most of us are wearing the same clothes we had on in NYC. We have now been awake for nearly 30 straight hours. We have heard that the best way to fight jet lag is just to push your way through the first day with no napping. Then your body will adjust to the new time zone. This is great advice (and I confess, actually works) but at this point we can hardly keep our eyes open. Every time we sit down on a bench we all begin to nod off and tip over onto each other’s shoulders. We form little heaps of bodies against the wall just inside the cathedral door and on the wall in front of the cathedral.

After the cathedral we eat. We walk many, many blocks to the Casa Batlló by Antonio Gaudi.

It is stunning and crazy and another 100 Euros to enter. All my kids probably remember is the various surfaces they plopped down on to rest as we wandered through the tour like zombies with audio guides.

We ride the Metro again (cha ching) to Montjuïc to watch the famous fountains. (And if you’re noticing, by the way that these words do not seem like Spanish, it’s because they aren’t; the first language of Barcelona is Catalan. To the Catalonians, this is a source of great pride. To a sleep-deprived traveler who owns a sister who speaks fluent Spainish, this is a rude, ethnocentric, politically radical, and entirely inconsiderate tradition.)

The fountains are fantastic, though I must note that the music is mostly American Pop. Where’s your Catalan pride now you Barcelonians?

The fountains don't even start until 9pm. Gabie doesn't make it that long. He clearly has reached his melting point.

We don't even make it through the whole fountain show. We're just way too tired. We vow to visit the Bellagio soon to make up for it and then ride the Metro one more time back to our Hostal and fall into bed around 11pm. We have survived a marathon of 34 hours without sleep. But guess what? We’re in Spain! No wait, we’re in Catalonia. Soon we’ll be in Spain!

Spain, day one – On the surreality of travel

2010-06-12T06:55:00.006-07:00

“It’s too good to be true!” Gabie says as we load into the van and again as we pull up to the airport curb and again as we wait at the gate to board the plane. He’s been looking forward to this imaginary thing called “Our Trip to Spain” for months. I’ve been looking forward to it for years and must agree with him. It is too good to be true. I keep waiting for something catastrophic to drop between us and the trip. But here we are, the first to board the plane (how nice that they let travelers with children go first; I vow to always travel with children). The boys are fascinated with everything about this flight. The sizes of each plane they can see from the giant windows in the waiting lounge, the baggage-loading process, the ramp, the seats, the lights, the air circulation, the screens on the back of the chairs, it’s all unfamiliar and thus completely thrilling. They have all flown before but don’t remember much (especially Gabie, who was in utero the last time and he keeps insisting that flying while in mom’s belly totally does not count).

Flying is surreal, even to me. Sure I’ve had the physics of thrust/lift/drag explained to me multiple times but as far as I’m concerned it still must take magic/faith/catchy show tunes to get this oversized Chitty Chitty Bang Bang into the air. I can see the water and freeways and the skyscrapers as we take off and bank over Salt Lake City. It always seems foreign from this perspective. Not so to Gabie, who presses his whole face up against the oval window and announces, “Wow, it looks exactly like Google Earth from here!”

It’s a good thing the kids find the novelty of flight so attractive because we’ll be flying in 6 planes total before we’re through. We land at JFK mid afternoon and have to take an airport train from one terminal to another. We have already planned to stretch out our layover in New York to 24 hours so we can visit my friend Toni and see the city. This means storing our luggage at the airport. I have done the research and know there is a place for this. I have pictured a big counter with loads of shelves, something classy and official-looking, like a department store layaway office except with signs clearly stating "JFK Baggage Storage." In fact, it takes us forever to find the right place, and by right place I mean the barely marked hall where we get to leave our bags with a skinny Hispanic guy in jeans and a t-shirt who stands in the doorway of a walk-in closet. There are maybe 20 or 30 other suitcases crammed in there besides our own. I had forgotten how New York City is a crazy blend of How High can you Go? and How Much More can you Possibly Squeeze into One Spot?

Toni picks us up outside the airport and drives us into Manhattan. Toni was my roommate for two years at BYU. She has always been beautiful and petite—she falls somewhere in the middle of my kids in height—but has the energy and tenaciousness of the mother and nurse and Italian-blooded Catholic BYU graduate that she is. She talks like a New Yorker. She drives like a New Yorker. She has a red minivan which she weaves expertly though traffic, one hand on the steering wheel and one on the horn (it’s not a myth). We find a parking place near Battery Park (and anyone who’s ever been in NYC can appreciate the elaborate back story behind the simple phrase “find a parking place” but I’ll leave it to your imagination because I have better things to talk about). It’s a Friday evening and there is surprisingly little going on in the park. We wander. We snap photos of the Statue of Liberty from a distance and a sign on the grass that makes us laugh.

What, precisely constitutes “No Active Recreation” we wonder. Tossing a frisbie? Rolling on the grass? If you accidentally start walking too fast do security guards rise out of the bushes to take your blood pressure?

We make our way to Wall Street and the site of the World Trade Center which is nearly impossible to access. It is full of cranes and fences and concrete foundations and much evidence of construction but little hope of completion any time soon. It’s like a wound left deliberately open to delay healing.

Whenever I visit either place (and I’ve done this 4 or 5 times now with each) I can’t help but compare walking in Manhattan to hiking in the valleys of Bryce Canyon National Park. In both, you’re down inside slot canyons, surrounded by impossibly tall, beautiful formations. True, one is formed by nature and the other by man, but the feeling is the same to me. The way the wind squeezes between the cross streets is the same. The way you find yourself craning your neck to look up is the same. The way all the light is on top and the shadows and sounds fall to the bottom in unpredictable angles is the same. It’s like you’ve found yourself on another planet entirely.

Which brings me to compare both (in what I hope is not too annoying of an interruption here) to a De Chirico painting I studied in grad school. In the painting, the walls of two tall buildings form a narrow canary yellow street that cuts diagonally down the middle of the scene and leads to something open and bright and totally unknown just around the corner. The buildings almost overlap each other as they recede into the distance, but not quite, leaving a gap where a figure casts a shadow in our direction. All the odd shadows, the open doors to what looks like an abandoned circus cart, the arcades that retreat at different speeds, the geometry that seems precise until you look closely and then it’s totally improbable and broken like cracked lenses, it all creates a sense of claustrophobia. But it’s not a creepy kind of claustrophobia. It’s a good mystery, albeit one that you’ll never get to solve. In short, it’s a typical Surrealist painting.

Part of the strangeness of New York City is that you just can’t take it all in. You’re in this corridor of space and you know these crowded streets go on for miles in every direction and these tall buildings are full of millions of people with millions of distinct lives. You’re trying to soak it in but you know you’re catching the tiniest clue of an enormous mystery. I guess it’s all about perspective. Linear perspective for sure. But also the sense that our personal viewpoints severely limit us. It’s why flying (or Google Earth-ing) can be so fun: we don’t know how things look from above until we get up there and then it all seems so foreign. And isn’t this why we travel? We are taking this trip to Spain to show our kids a totally different part of the world. It’s important for them to hear another language, to eat new foods, to see another side of history. We want to expose them to a huge variety of new things but we also want them to understand what a tiny piece of the world they have known up to this point.

We eat “real” New York Pizza (according to Toni) at a joint named Dave’s and walk up Church street for at least 10 blocks, finally catching a taxi (another new experience for the kids, and yes, all 6 of us squeeze into one taxi with poor Toni practically squatting on the floor, good thing she’s petite) uptown to the Empire State Building. Here we all enjoy another lesson in perspective.

And here the comparison to Bryce Canyon ends because everything from that height screams “manmade and proud of it.” There are no trees or landforms. The rivers are only distinguishable by the gaps they make in the carpet of lights and the bridges that span across them like chains wrapped around darkness. Millions of people below us. Millions of tiny glowing lives. I’m resorting one last time to the term surreal because it simply does not seem possible to be up this high and in this mythical city and on the first leg of a trip that has been a fantasy for so long. Surreal: adj. over or above reality. The height is dizzying but the view is worth the climb.

You know you’ve been in Spain for the last two weeks if…

2010-06-09T06:52:00.002-07:00

You wake up at 4am Utah time and wish you were half as tired as you were last night at 8pm when your body thought it was 4am Madrid time.

Having vowed to maintain the European habit of walking everywhere, you decide to walk to the supermarket, reusable bags in hand, to buy a few things for the day. This is a brilliant plan right up until you have to walk back home with a jumbo pack of chicken, two bags of grapes, one bag of carrots, a head of lettuce, one cucumber, one carton of strawberries, a large container of yogurt, a dozen eggs, and (what were you thinking?) two gallons of milk. You understand for the first time exactly why Spaniards do not share your family’s addiction to fresh milk.

On your walk from the store, you are downright intimidated by all the giant cars and trucks on the road. Were they always this HUGE?

Your daughter, whom you left home with her grandparents for the last two weeks, keeps referring to you as “grandma-I-mean-mom.” You hope this wears off soon as you already have a serious guilt-complex about the desertion.

Your son spends his first morning home in the sandbox digging a Metro system, complete with accompanying schematic map of the various train lines, color-coded and linked by a central hub. (This is Gabie, of course, and he has named his system the “Getro”).

You spend your first day home doing laundry and you find yourself sniffing everything as you put it into the washer, trying to store up the last whiffs of Spain before wiping them out with Cheer and fabric softener. Most of the clothes have that musty, moist smell of the Gypsy caves where you slept for two days in Granada, but every once in a while, you catch the Madrid scent—an unmistakable mix of cigarette smoke, diesel fumes, fish, olive oil, urine, and lemon cologne—a scent that you love and recognized the instant you stepped into the city again after not having visited for 25 years.

You resolve not to get so emotional about your laundry.

You fry up some pechugo de pollo for dinner and use at least a cup and a half of olive oil in the pan.

You eat said dinner at 8pm and this seems rather early for a Spanish meal which often starts around 10 and lasts for over an hour. But your kids are so tired they are tipping off their chairs.

You agree with Gabie when he says “I wish we could live in Spain, but just stay in our own house.” You’re happy to be back in your own bed, with your own stuff, in a house with an energy-inefficient clothes dryer and giant water heater and toilets that are no mystery to flush (more on this later). But you’re also a bit depressed to be back in the land of big cars, sensible shoes, beige carpet, and boring cheeses. You promise Gabie (who cried on the flight home because he was afraid we would never again visit Spain and never again taste the nectar of the gods that is Natillas) that you will go back. Somehow. You’re not sure how this is going to happen and you realize that this trip was 10 years in the making and you know you’ll be paying it off for at least a year. But somehow you’ll have to do it again.

hiatus

2010-05-20T08:06:00.003-07:00

It's never too late in life to learn how to spell hiatus. Good thing, because I'm taking a short one (about two weeks).

It's all for a very worthy cause. I promise to have lots to write about when I volver.

¡Adiós!

A very pink post

2010-05-11T07:40:00.010-07:00

Guess who had a birthday this week?

I'll give you a hint. Which of my children do you think would appreciate a cake the color of Pepto-Bismol topped with a Strawberry Shortcake doll (a Shortcake-cake if you will, or as Ethan dubbed it, a Shortcake²).

That would be Nora, of course.

She loved the cake, the presents, and all the extra attention that went with her birthday. Not that this girl is ever starved for attention, mind you. She's pretty much the center of everyone's universe wherever she is, but it had been a somewhat difficult week, so she deserved some pampering.

Tuesday, she rode her bike into the road and just about got hit by a car. No. It wasn't a car. It was--naturally--a giant suped-up black monster truck with, I swear, bone-crushing teeth on the front and a smoking, forked tail trailing off the back. Nora was WAY less worried about this near-death experience than her mother, so I took away her bike. Only then did she start to cry. Unmoved, I told her firmly, "You're grounded from your bike and maybe in a few days you can ride it again, if you're lucky!" This was quite a blow to Nora the bike-a-holic who typically spends two hours a day riding back and forth on our sidewalks. Five whole minutes passed before she came up to me and, with equal parts sweetness and utter confidence, said, "I think I'm lucky now, Mom. Can I be lucky?"

Wednesday, she was playing with the boys (stairs=cliff, carpet=lava; typical goofy kid stuff) when she fell on her arm and really hurt herself. The rest of the night she cried every time anyone touched her. She wouldn't move her arm and let it hang limply at her side, a wounded wing. I figured I'd take her to the doctor if she was still in pain the next day. Sure enough, she woke up early, wailing from her bed. Her arm was still obviously hurt so I took her into the doctor, and as I drove to the office, I pictured the rest of the morning: poking, prodding, x-rays, broken bones, plaster cast, tears, more tears (poor thing).

After a few minutes of looking at Nora's arm and asking her to move it (no way!), Doctor W. took her hand, twisted her wrist slightly, bent her elbow and popped her arm back into place. It was only a dislocated elbow. What medical magic! What a relief! What an internal debate ensued in my head when Doctor W. kept calling it "nursemaid's elbow."

me: You know why it's called that, don't you? It's the kind of injury that happens when a frustrated babysitter yanks on a child's arm.

also me: Yeah, I knew that. But that's not what happened.

me: Sure. But he doesn't know that. He probably thinks you did it. I swear each time he says "nursemaid's elbow" he looks at you for your reaction.

also me: That's totally your imagination. He doesn't think I caused the injury...Does he?

me: I'm just sayin... Shouldn't you better mention again that you weren't even in the room when she got hurt?

getting defensive me: I already told him that three times. Now he's going to think I'm trying to hard to explain how I wasn't there. Or maybe he'll wonder why I wasn't there. Maybe he thinks I should have been there and that if I'm not abusive, at least I'm neglectful.

me: Hey, he's typing something into his laptop. What's he typing? Do you think he's posting a message to DCFS right now?

totally paranoid me: It's a good thing we dressed Nora nicely before coming here and combed her hair for once. At least they can see I take good care of her.

me: Or maybe they'll think she's dressed too cute. You're at the doctors for heaven's sake, not a church social. New shoes? Braided hair? You're obviously hiding something.

both me's: Aaaaarrrrggggghhh.

Anyway.

Doctor W. wanted to make sure she was okay before we left so he brought in a sucker and held it in front of Nora's hurt arm, "If you can grab this with your left arm, you can have it." Nora, still holding her arm at her side just in case, refused to grab it. Then Doctor W. tried the same thing with a pack of princess stickers. That did the trick. Man, I'm grateful to have a smart physician. All those years of medical school plus that extra class in Princess Psychology do pay off.

So Nora's fine. She's perfect. She's learning how to fold her thumb across her hand to show people that she's now FOUR years old.

I also keep finding those darn stickers on odd objects all over the house. I guess it's about time we got ourselves a princess phone.

Zen and the art of art

2010-05-05T10:09:00.006-07:00

Gabie has a hard time concentrating during prayers. To be fair, he’s a typical 8 year old and he has a hard time concentrating in general (with the notable exception of when he’s reading a Percy Jackson book and then he sits spellbound on the couch for so long I have to locate him and check his breathing because the house seems too quiet). But it’s a special kind of torture for Gabie to close his eyes, keep them closed, and DO NOTHING but listen to someone else pray. At the dinner table last night, Gabie dutifully folded his arms and, as I said the blessing, he slouched down in his chair and began slurping the juice out of the cup of fruit he had deliberately arranged at the edge of his plate within neck-stretching distance. After the prayer, I made him demonstrate proper Prayer Behavior for one minute before he could eat. Even worse, I forced him to squirm through a mini-lecture on how prayer is a holy act of talking to God and—using an analogy I hoped he'd appreciate—I suggested if a Greek hero had insulted Athena by slurping his food while talking to her, he’d be in big trouble.

Maybe I was a bit hard on Gabie. I mean who doesn’t find it hard to focus sometimes? Especially when we’re basically praying for the same things over and over with little variation? One prayer, to Gabie, is much like another, but this fruit cup in front of him…this is something entirely new, and syrupy and seriously in need of tasting.

Coming off the tails of a semester in which I had to multitask every moment to fit it all in, I’m finding new joy in focusing on one thing at a time. What a concept! Sometimes it’s hard to set aside distractions and think about only the task at hand (admits She of the iPod Addiction) but when I’m able to do it, I feel far more peaceful. I admire Zen philosophy for its emphasis on mindfulness. Everything we do, no matter how mundane or repetitive, deserves thought and care. As Zen master Dogen said, when you’re washing the rice, wash the rice.

Or maybe, since I don’t wash my rice, if you’re making the bread, make the bread. And maybe it's a joke trying to be totally single-minded with a Gabie by your side offering assistance and advice, but I made whole wheat bread this week for the first time in months and it was a true pleasure. I enjoyed the whole process especially the part where we ground the wheat and got to smell the warm, fine dust that rose from the drawer each time I pulled it open to peek at the little mounds of flour forming under the stone millwheels. Gabie helped me load everything into the mixer and flip the switch to knead it (I’d like to say we went all Zen and kneaded it by hand for several minutes, but sorry, the Bosch just makes it too easy). Gabie checked back every couple of minutes between chapters to ask “Is it dough yet?” And then we shaped five big loaves and Gabie made his own mini loaf, which still sits on the counter, two days later, in its pristine condition, wrapped in plastic, like an offering to the gods of bread and childhood, too beautiful and precious to be consumed.

I think my love-affair with art can at least partly be explained by its ability (its demand, really) to make me focus. A good painting forces my attention. It expands my experience by temporarily limiting my vision. (Jasper Johns’ famous paintings of targets take this point to an extreme) And what is art, anyway, if not a process of narrowing the scope of life in a way that asks us to look very carefully at a privileged moment, or a face, or a pattern? It’s not just painting that does this. Theater frames a couple of hours’ worth of cause and effect on a stage, well-lit, boxed-in and elevated for our consideration. Literature puts it all in a book that must be held close enough to the eyes to block out everything else happening on either side. I can relate to Gabie’s single-mindedness about his books because I grew up in a large, noisy household and I developed early the skill of tuning everything out with a good book. But paintings especially make me focus. And not to put too spiritual a point on it, I think the correlation between the evolution of framed altarpieces and framed canvases was no accident. Art museums are pseudo-sacred spaces. Don’t you think they’re even church-like sometimes? The quiet voices. The meditative staring. Lots of people with their arms folded.

I’m beginning to worry about my students and wonder how many of them are really capable of this kind of focus. I’m having more and more trouble with them playing with cell phones in class. I can swallow the fact that my lectures are not captivating enough to demand their full attention, but really, it’s not even me I want them to pay attention to. It’s Van Gogh and Vermeer and the ancient Greeks who carved the faces of their gods into marble. But some of my students just can’t do it. They can’t go a full hour without sending a text or checking their mail. It’s downright painful for them. How can I teach them about art when they’re only half-listening or half-looking? There’s almost nothing you can learn about art with half your mind. The artists who created the pieces we study put their whole souls into their work; they were notoriously fixated, even to the point of sacrificing their health and, in more than a few cases, their sanity. The least we owe them is a few minutes of our undivided attention. Maybe I need to make my classroom more Zen like. I’m seriously thinking about taking a bowl of rice the first day to wash in front of the classroom just to prove a point.

How does one wash rice anyway?

The Blackberry

2010-05-01T05:47:00.012-07:00

When I got my Blackberry cell phone back in November, it was by far, the nicest phone I've ever had. I don't use cell phones much. I don't text. I rarely call people (I think it took me a whole month to figure out how to make an outgoing call). People don't call me. I get more wrong numbers than actual friends or family calling me. I use the nifty connection to the internet (for which I pay an exorbitant fee), on average, once a month. So, you may ask, why did I buy a Blackberry?

Well, besides the fact that it makes me feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm a professional, I bought it for the calendar. After one black week in November, in which I forgot to pick up McKay (and his entire car pool, thus making one of them miss his scout trip to the Bean Museum, something I still feel guilty about), forgot Gabie's scouts entirely, missed an important meeting at BYU, and committed about a dozen other acts of flakyness, I vowed to get a phone that would help me be more organized. And the one feature that won me over in the Blackberry was its calendar system. Now, when I'm about to forget something important, the most obnoxious alert tone ever goes off for about 3 solid minutes. This is hard to ignore. It has saved my life several times since November. It's hard living a busy life and micromanaging the busy lives of my children at the same time. I'll take all the techno help I can get.

Plus it's really shiny.

Oh yeah, and it also has a pretty nice camera. I know this because I have used it to take a grand total of three pictures thus far.

Let me mention that buying my Blackberry was an agonizing decision as most decisions are for me. I debated various phones for over a month, visited my local cell phone store so many times I knew the employees' names, their phone preferences, their wives' names and their kids' favorite TV characters. I tested out a bunch of phones. I researched all the features. I fumed over the fascist dictate that you must commit to a data plan if you want a phone with a half-decent calendar function. Anyway, in the end, I bought the Blackberry and then promptly suffered buyer's remorse, which wore off about 2 months later.

I haven't named my Blackberry yet. I hear this is customary. Names I'm considering: Halle, Chuck, Wendell.

One night only a couple of days after buying the phone and signing two years of my life away to a dastardly, extortionate service plan, I was in bed, listening to music on my phone with my headphones. I had turned on my electric blanket and had it pulled up to my neck because I was chilly. I was trying to figure out the volume button on my phone when suddenly something flashed and the music stopped. I jumped out of bed, totally panicked. When I looked at the phone, this is what had happened to the screen.

You can imagine my horror. I knew I had fried the phone. It must have been the electric blanket. I was absolutely sick.

I tried pushing all the buttons to see if just the screen was burned but nothing happened. I pushed the buttons on the sides of the phone and suddenly the image of doom disappeared and the regular screen came back. This was when I realized that somehow I had just taken a picture of the edge of my electric blanket. I hadn't fried my phone after all. Being a new Blackberry owner, I have to ask: is it unusual to shed tears of joy over an electronic device?

Photo number two needs little explanation. I drove past this sign for a month before finally pulling over to take a picture.

Poor Hugh.

I'll just say about the photo I took last night that whoever designed the chairs at Coneys clearly never had a child, never met a child and maybe even never WAS a child. Can't you just see exactly where this is going?

Let me clarify that it was NOT one of my own kids who stuck his fingers into the holes and had them so securely wedged that no amount of Pam sprayed by employees, ice rubbed on the fingers, nor twisting, pulling, or yanking by parents, police or the paramedics who eventually arrived could free the poor child. A cop finally pulled the chair seat off its frame (whacking himself pretty badly in the nose in the process). Last we saw them, the family was loading the boy, seat still attached, into a van to drive to the emergency room.

I just had to take a picture of the scene of the crime. See how my Blackberry comes in handy?

No product placement bribes were accepted in the making of this post.

Don't mind the gap

2010-04-24T07:53:00.002-07:00

So here’s the story on where I’ve been lately. Midway through Fall semester, I got a phone call from a highly respected professor in my college. He asked me—totally out of the blue—to take over a class for him Winter semester. And this was no ordinary class. It was a course this professor had created, along with another colleague, more than 30 years ago, as an Honors Colloquium. Together, they had developed this class into a veritable institution, a cornerstone of the honors program, one of the most famous classes on campus. This was a really big deal.

I had to ask him more than once if he was serious. Did he know who he was talking to? Was he sure he had dialed the right number? He insisted that he was, he did and he was. Still to this day, I’m not sure why he asked me, of all people, but I accepted and I knew from the beginning it would be a wonderful, daunting, intimidating, thrilling assignment. Ha. What an understatement.

Sure, I knew it would be a stressful semester since I had already committed to teaching two large Humanities classes, not to mention my usual family time and church responsibilities. But even I was surprised by the magnitude of the job. I have seriously spent every spare moment from October through April preparing for lectures, researching, making powerpoints, previewing films for the lab portion of the class or grading an even taller stack of papers than usual. I have gained weight. I have lost hair. I have destroyed my teeth (3 fillings yesterday, 2 more cracked teeth to fix) from all the grinding I apparently do in my sleep. My kids have begun to wonder if life will ever return to the normal chaos they now look back on fondly as the “golden age” before mom became permanently attached to the office chair.

The really amazing thing is that the class pulled me out of a formidable stretch of depression, gave me a much-needed sense of purpose, and filled up the dangerous open spaces that otherwise serve as collecting pools for ruminations and self-pity. Learning new stuff gives me great pleasure and I have learned more new stuff in the past few months than at any other time in my life. (Which means I am even more aware of my vast ignorance than I was before because that’s what learning does to me; isn’t it great?). With a surprising degree of depth, I have loved this class and the students who suffered through the semester with me. I don’t exaggerate when I say that the experience has changed me as a person. I can’t begin to describe the class in a blog post, but I’ll just say that it’s a class about war and peace and how we can understand the former and create more of the latter. Even that description falls short. I’m sure the things I learned will be creeping into blog posts for years to come, especially since it looks like I’ll be teaching the class again in the future.

But back to the dangerous open spaces point. I was worried, upfront, that I’d be neglecting my husband and kids for a few months, which as it turned out, was a fairly accurate concern. My absence (physical, often mental, and sometimes emotional) left gaps in the fabric of my home.

But surprisingly, I’ve witnessed a manifestation of the principle that “nature abhors a vacuum.” My busy-ness has forced the kids (and Ken) to fill in the gaps. Ethan has stepped up and helped more with the younger kids (even starting a “Nora school” to teach her the writing skills I’ve been putting off). McKay decided some blessed day several weeks ago, that he wanted to get straight A’s and I haven’t had to remind him a single time this semester to do his homework. (No kidding!) Gabie, always desperate for attention and stimulation, has discovered a passion for reading, which I must say, has been a blessing from the gods of Mount Olympus themselves. (Gabie is currently on his fourth time through the Percy Jackson series). Nora, well, I can’t put a happy face on all the videos Nora has watched in the last few months. She deserves better from me and I’m going to make it up to her. But she has learned to be more independent, which is a good thing. She can play happily by herself now for long stretches of time. She’s also spent more quality time with her dad. And Ken has been a saint. He’s had to fill in the “mommy spaces” by sacrificing much of his own free time. He has read more to the kids. Cooked more. Cleaned more. Taken all the kids off to fly kites or watch movies or play in the sand dunes while I worked on school stuff. Since we don’t see as much of each other during the week, we’ve made date night a top priority, even if it meant leaving the kids for a couple of hours to go shopping together.

So, while I don’t plan to repeat this kind of stressful semester ever again, I have learned that, if you’ve got good relationships to begin with, families are resilient. Kids will surprise you. Husbands can step in and save the day.

The connection to art that comes to mind involves Picasso’s cubist works. He showed (especially in the early, analytical phase) how space is never really empty. There are no true voids. Whether a canvas is crowded with objects or fairly simple, every inch of it has content and substance. The intervals between things and surrounding things are as important as the things themselves. We like to think that, in the shipping crate that is our life, we have this vacuous, meaningless “free time” floating in-between and around all the important scheduled events and responsibilities, but honestly, don’t we fill up that time with various kinds of packing material? And what if it turns out, when the container arrives at its destination, the packing material was just as important as the claimed contents?

If not stressing about class, I would have been writing or reading or reading about writing. I would have been making fancier meals and more homemade bread. I would have been saying yes to more demands on my time outside the home. I would have been, frankly, wasting time watching movies or surfing the internet, the moral equivalent of bubble wrap. As Ken reminds me, I’m not always rational when it comes to time-management. But this stressful semester has forced me to make better choices and focus my priorities. It has also forced my kids to waste less of their time and listen to their own consciences because their mother, who used to think she had to hold everything together with her pestering and nagging and reminding, was temporarily out of the picture. They all expanded—grew up a bit—to fill in the gaps.

For the sake of my family, my marriage and my sanity, I’m glad the semester is almost over, but I also hope to maintain the feeling that every second is precious. And if choose to spend those seconds just hanging out with my kids doing “nothing,” at least I’ve learned how lucky I am to have that luxury.

Coming soon to this space

2010-04-19T05:49:00.002-07:00

This week I'm finishing up the most insanely stressful semester of my life. No kidding. You know how every once in a while you have one of those super busy days where you don't have two extra minutes to rub together and you'd forget to breathe if your body didn't force you to? Well, I've just had 4 months of those. And it's been great, in an "at risk of losing my mind, good thing my poor children are learning to be FAR more independent, I need a trip to Europe when this is all over" kind of way. I'll have to write all about it. But in the meantime, I still have one last stack of papers to read, then one more final to inflict, and 150 exams to grade. Then I'll be fit as a fiddle and ready to blog. I just wanted to send out a bit of warning to my loyal reader(s) (however dwindled that group may be). Mom, ya still there?. I'll be back soon. Promise.

Nora-ism 1.0

2009-10-17T09:55:00.003-07:00

Last night I needed to watch the film Henry V because I am considering it for the film lab part of a course I'll be teaching next semester (a course, by the way, that is consuming my every waking thought and explains the neglect of my blog and every other non-essential element of my life right now).

Nora was the only one home with me at the time and I assumed she would fall asleep in the first few minutes, so I sat her next to me with her pillow and blanket and we watched it together. Not only did she not fall asleep, but she was mesmerized through the whole thing and when she wasn't glued to the screen she was asking me questions (mostly "Where's Prince Harry? He's cute." and "Is that the princess?" Leave it to Nora to turn a Shakespearean war play into a fairy tale). I did my best to distract her during the battle scenes because I'm not a totally insensitive mother. But really, I never would have guessed she would stick by me through the whole thing. Especially since I'm sure she understood about zero percent of the dialogue.

This morning, the first thing Nora said to me when she got up was, "Mama, next time I don't want to watch one of your movies."

"Why not?" I said.

"Cause I'm just a little girl."

Gypsy-hood

2009-09-17T11:12:00.008-07:00

It’s the pose my son Ethan makes when we have run out of "good" cereals and he's imploring me to buy something better (i.e. something with the word Frosted on the package). It’s the look I see in the eyes of a student who comes to visit me—for the first time—the week grades are due. It’s the tone Gabie adopts when he wants to get out of cleaning the bathroom because the chore is the plague of his 7-year-old life. It’s the feeling I experience often, when I find myself at the mercy of strangers because I lack enough knowledge to solve my own problems. It’s the state of absolute supplication at the heart of a painting I saw last week on campus (here’s the exhibit link). The painting is mostly about Gypsy beggars and a little bit about the rest of us.

In Burgess’ painting Licensing the Beggars in Spain, a laundry pile of Gypsies lines up in front of a magistrate to beg. They beg for the very right to beg. If they gain the magistrate’s favor, he will grant them each a license to beg on the streets of Sevilla, where the will kneel, once again, at the mercy of passersby willing to give them food or money. The sympathetic-looking magistrate sits calmly in his high-backed chair, his legs crossed casually over a small patch of rug. He holds a pen in one hand and a license in the other, but really, he holds the lives of the Gypsies in his hands and he knows it. The Gypsies know it too. The old man in front bows his head, clutches a crucifix and touches a wrinkled hand to his chest in a gesture of deference. A stumbling cliché, he wears ratty clothing, leans on a crutch for support and bends a crippled leg behind him. Even his dog (my favorite detail) has perfected the begging routine. The most pitiful of the group is the young girl to the side of the blind Gypsy. She wears a haunting expression. She tucks her chin and points her morose, oversized eyes straight at the man with all the power. She holds her tambourine as if it’s a shield over her chest, a sign of her vulnerability and a reminder of the paucity, the emptiness, the lack that brings them all here.

When I lived in Spain many years ago, our apartment overlooked a large undeveloped field of dirt hills and pits full of discarded building materials. Spread out all over this field, in clusters of tin and cardboard shacks, was a Gypsy camp. At the time, I didn’t understand the history of the Gypsies (or Gitanos as the Spaniards call them) or the reasons for their low social status. I had no idea why they suffered oppression and indigence. I was just afraid of them. To me, they were panhandlers. They were thieves. They were stealers of naughty children (or so my brothers told me when I was being naughty). They were very different from the Spanish culture all around them in their language, their dress, their customs. It wasn’t until the Fourth of July that year—when my brother Steve and I lit sparklers and celebrated our displaced national holiday by dancing and singing in the field below our apartment—that I saw a few Gypsies watching us and I realized we had something in common. We were both crazy foreigners. But my family would be going back home to the U.S. soon. The Gypsies had no real home. They had been treated as crazy foreigners for hundreds of years.

The other thing I have in common with the Gypsies is that I often find myself, by virtue of things I lack, totally at the mercy of forces I don’t understand and can’t control. Forces that have the power to squash me like a bug, should they choose. Forces that often refuse to listen to my appeals. Forces that control essential parts of my life, like my ability to teach or communicate, or write. I’m talking about the sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel forces of technology.

The more I rely on technology, the more it toys with me and screws up my life. My votive offerings to the e-gods must displease them (not enough wailing? maybe I’m charring the wrong kind of extension cords?) because I continually face frustrating messes when my computer at home or the media tech podiums in my classrooms fail to do even basic functions like read email, play a video clip, or—as was the case the first three class periods this semester—allow me to OPEN anything. This sends me to the brink of insanity and despair on a regular basis. I hate that I don’t know enough about computers to save myself. And it’s not that I’m a Luddite. I once was the “go to guy” in my office for all things computer-related. But this was back when it was possible that a few DOS commands and a good memory for WordPerfect function keys could make you look like a genius. The high-tech world has long since passed me by and I have long since plummeted to total techno dorkitude.

So last week I was having problems accessing my email. I tried to fix the problems myself; I made things worse. I tried to get assistance from the folks at MSN; they responded with, of course, emails I couldn’t access. I considered calling one of my three brilliant brothers who make their livings as computer nerds, but I really hate doing that. I hate it for the same reason I don’t call my other brother who’s a nurse each time someone in my family gets sick. If I started bugging them with my problems, I would be bugging them every single day, probably multiple times a day, for the rest of my life.

Luckily, I work for a university who hires dedicated Computer Support Reps (CSRs) for each department. I arranged to take my laptop in for them to fix, even though—and I was reminded of this several times—it’s not a university laptop and they technically weren’t supposed to touch it so they were doing me a huge favor and I let them know I really, really appreciated it and this was about the point where I began thinking of the Burgess painting because I felt like a beggar even though I was twice the age of these CSRs and had earned twice their degrees, but possessed—and this was all that mattered—a fraction of their computer expertise. I begged for an exception to their rules because I use my laptop for everything teaching-related and the lovely iMac assigned to me by the university never gives me any grief which could be because I use it only once a week and the other six days, it sits there on my desk, a very ergonomic, very pricey, very hibernating piece of office decor.

So my illicit laptop and I spent over an hour at the mercy of a CSR who was nice and obviously knew a lot about computers and could multi-task three phone calls, carry on a conversation with a coworker, hum along with the music playing in the background, and fiddle with my computer all at once. He was clearly fluent in Tech-ish, a language in which I know the equivalent of the following tourist phrases: “How much for the postcard please?” and “Thank you point me to the American Consulate.” The CSR cleaned up my superfluous files, he looked for ways to increase my processor speed, he fixed the toolbar Nora had flipped around six months ago but I hadn’t known how to reset, he downloaded a slew of updates. And he was friendly the entire time he failed to solve my problem and, in fact, still friendly when he accidentally deleted my entire suite of Microsoft programs and couldn’t reload them because it wasn’t a university laptop (aargh!) and even more friendly when he sent me on my way with a “Good luck finding the 5-year-old disks for those programs and I’ll just write this ticket up as ‘resolved’ unless you call us back.”

My classroom computer was a whole other issue and I finally gave up hope that the tech podium would ever cooperate (since the IT guys were very patient but every time they tried to recreate my problems, there were no problems and it became clear to me that the technology gods just have it in for me) so I switched my classes next door where so far the podium has worked beautifully—knock on polycarbonate—and the only thing I have to contend with is the big blue letter “J” someone has written in the middle of the white pull-down screen in permanent ink that will apparently feature in every video clip and slide I show this semester like a graffiti watermark.

Still free of the distracting nuisance of easily-accessed-email, I’ve had a few days to wax philosophical about things and I have come up with the following: When I find myself banging my head, or my tambourine if I have one handy, against the keyboard, it is only a reminder that life is full of opportunities for greater humility. This is not a bad thing. We all have to depend upon each other. Now I await help from higher-leveled CSRs who have promised to load some new software on my undocumented laptop when it becomes available for purchase “in a few weeks.” In the meantime, I’ll muddle through. If I knew everything and could solve all my own problems, I’d develop hubris and then the gods would have to punish me anyway because I've read my Greek tragedies and haven't forgotten that when Oedipus thought he knew everything, that’s when his hard drive crashed.

I also can’t leave the Burgess painting behind without pointing out the obvious religious metaphor. Aren’t we all a bit blind and lame and homeless? How often do we beg forgiveness of each other and of God for our mistakes and infirmities? Probably not often enough, but in this sense we are spiritual Gypsies. We lack the knowledge and power to save ourselves. In the painting, a statue of the Virgin Mary stands in a niche behind the line of beggars, her hands crossed over her heart. For many (and especially my Spanish friends), she is an intercessor, one who directs our pleas to a higher power. Mary doesn’t play as large a role in my own religion, but she is still a beautiful symbol of compassion, mercy and grace. We need all these things, all of the time. And how do we know we need these things unless we’re continuously brought to the floor?

Walls

2009-09-07T15:31:00.011-07:00

Most art historians agree that Goya’s black paintings reflect the bitterness, anxiety, and depression of the artist’s later years, the years following an illness that left him totally deaf, the years following the Napoleonic wars where he witnessed unspeakable acts of human cruelty, the years after his self-imposed exile to a villa outside of Madrid. Goya painted the walls of his home with violent and bizarre images. They are called his black paintings both because he used dark colors and because he used dark topics (a coven of witches, the three Fates, Saturn devouring his son, etc). They are a haunting bunch of pictures, especially considering the artist surrounded himself with them every day of the four years he lived in that villa. How could Goya not have been pushed deeper into his own paranoia and depression by these walls?

My current problem is that I believe what you have on your walls not only reflects who you are, but also affects who you are. I think the pictures and photographs you see every day and even the wall colors that serve as a backdrop to your interior life can influence your moods and your behavior. This belief causes me great angst whenever I have to pick out paint for rooms in my home. What if I go for the daring red I'm thinking about for the office and it causes me to be angry every morning when I go in there at 5 am to write? (Will I write really angry essays? Stay tuned.) What if the fact that the family room walls don't match the carpet continues to gnaw away at me until I suffer panic attacks every time I walk down the steps? What if that ultra-bright green I let Ethan pick for his room begins to makes him physically ill? It’s almost too much for my decision-phobic personality to handle. And in the last three months, we’ve had to paint five different rooms, plus a stairwell and we’re still debating the color of the office and eventually Nora’s room. Does it surprise anyone that I’m really, really sick of thinking about my walls?

Here’s a tour of our villa thus far. No black paintings. Just very pretty colors. We ought to be oozing cheerfulness by now.

This is the family room. The photo doesn't do the walls justice. My sister Suzie did a lovely glazing over an old-world style texture. Nora is demonstrating how our carpet has so much nap that you can leave great designs in it if you run in circles. The boys have discovered you can rub carpet angels into it too.

This is Ethan's room. He wanted bright green. He got bright green. But not until we had tried several different shades and treatments because I will sometimes have to at least step foot in there and I'm sorry but I don't feel like spending time inside a ripe avocado. There are parts of his room that have (if you count the primer) seven coats of paint on them.

This room is shared by McKay and Gabie. I contemplated pulling a Goya and painting a mural of the two men fighting with clubs (because McKay and Gabie simply do not get along) but we're going for the slightly manipulative, peaceful blue. The boys picked the colors and Suzie did a magic treatment called "scumbling" which means you shut her into the room at 10 pm with three brushes and two buckets of paint (and one iPod) and when she leaves at 6 in the morning, she'll have produced walls that look like you should be posing family portraits in front of them. She's amazing.

My favorite color downstairs is actually the "faded seafoam" we did in the laundry room but since Ken is still in the middle of putting shelves in there, I'll save that photo for later. The bathroom is going to be (gasp!) white because maybe there's such a thing as too much color in one 700 square foot section of house. Maybe.

Nora wants purple walls. Yesterday we moved her into the boys' old room which still has a train painted around three of the walls. Suzie and I painted it 10 years ago and I hate to cover it but I suppose we don't want Nora growing up with wanderlust because she wakes up every morning with train cars barreling past her head.

So the writer goes to the Rabbi...

2009-09-02T05:51:00.004-07:00

I had no idea I needed a summer sabbatical from my blog. Honest. But apparently I did. And now that my kids are back in school, I feel like writing again. It’s not that I haven’t thought about writing before. In fact, I’ve composed at least one blog post in my head every day for the last few months. But I didn’t write them down and I blame this entirely on Blogger for not perfecting their brain-to-keyboard interface yet. Thus my thoughts have gone unwritten, unpublished, and forgotten, which is probably not so tragic as it sounds.

Trust me, you haven’t missed much. I’ve basically spent the last few months enacting the story of the Jewish couple who go to their rabbi complaining that their house is too small. The Rabbi says to them “bring all your chickens into the house.” They bring in the chickens. Then when the couple continues to complain, the Rabbi tells them to bring in all the goats, then the cow, etc. Soon their house is full of livestock and feathers and noise and horrible smells and they are losing their minds. Truly desperate, they go back to the rabbi and he says, “Okay, now take all the animals back outside.” And when they do (and clean up the mess) they look at each other and say, “Yes, this is MUCH better.”

We began with moving everything from the lower half of our house into the upper rooms. Then came the tearing up of carpet and knocking down of walls. Soon it escalated to jackhammering the floor to make way for new plumbing. At one point, our basement looked like this:

No chickens, but plenty of noise, foul smells and a sinking feeling in my gut that we had made a big mistake. A big, expensive, ineradicable, we will have to live with this for the rest of our lives because we plan to keep this house forever but now I’m thinking “to heck with the bad market, let’s sell and start over again somewhere else” mistake.

But here we are, several weeks later, with a new basement and children who are happy in their rooms and only the faint smell of goat poop that dissipates more with each day. Ken and I are pretty much of the opinion that Yes, this is MUCH better.

The really good news is that soon, very soon, as soon as we can finish clearing out the boys' room upstairs and moving Nora into said boys' room (and convincing her that she can live without purple walls and a princess bed for a few months while we finish other projects), we will have a real office. Yes Virginia, a Room of One's Own in which to write. I plan to write a novel to celebrate. (Ha!) But seriously, I can manage blog posts now and then. I actually miss writing. I woke up this morning, very early, feeling desperate to write. Maybe I needed the sabbatical as much as I needed the cow in my kitchen.

Gabie the arborist

2009-04-18T16:33:00.005-07:00

Fallen Monarchs by William Bliss Baker

This painting is for Gabie because Gabie loves trees (and by love, I mean he is obsessively attached to them with as much devotion and defensiveness as he has displayed in the past for pandas and penguins). His favorite trees are aspens but he pretty much loves every kind. Here's what it's like living with a 7-year-old arborist.

At breakfast one morning, he informs me, "This better not be REAL maple syrup. I won't eat real maple syrup because it's just plain mean. How would you like it if someone stuck a tube in you and sucked out all your blood?"

Another day we're reading a sweet little story about a girl reading to her father. Her Dad puts a log on the fire and Gabie's instantly all emotional, teary-eyed and everything. He wants to know what kind of tree they had to cut down to make that log. And where did they get it from? Next it's "How would you like it if people cut all your cousins down for paper and then came back for you for logs?" (he's a pro at the "how would you like it?" guilt trips).

We're on the freeway this week and we pass by a truck hauling lumber. Gabie gives me an angry look and I know exactly what he's thinking. "Hey, it's not MY fault!" I have to tell him. "Stop glaring at me."

We are thinking about adding on to our house this summer (cause we're all squished in here) and every time we talk about it, Gabie's the one crying about the 2 aspen trees that we'll have to chop down to make room for the new garage. (I can't wait to see how he responds when he finds out about all the trees that will have to give their lives for the 2x4's we'll be using).

But there are advantages to having a tree-lover around. When we went to Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I was horrified by all the nudity and blatantly sexual images on the strip. For several blocks we even drove right next to one of those huge advertising trucks with a line of women dressed in nothing but a strategically placed print banner. I didn't know if I should cover all my boys' eyes or just ignore it all and hope they didn't notice (yeah, right). But the whole time, Gabie was in the back just going crazy over each and every palm tree he saw. There are naked women everywhere, flashing neon signs, the Eiffel Tower, The Grand Pyramid, fountains going off, Vegas in all its glory and Gabie can't get over how cool the palm trees are. Gosh I love that kid.

Man with a newspaper

2009-03-17T10:43:00.004-07:00

Magritte, Man with a newspaper
In the first frame, a man reads a newspaper. In the second frame, the man has disappeared. By the third frame, we are wondering where he went. By the fourth frame, we are wondering what’s the point? Why does Magritte introduce the man to begin with, only to strip him out of the scene one-fourth of the way through the story, never to reappear? Is the painting about the man’s presence or is it about his absence? Or maybe it’s about the inconsistency created by having both in the same painting. It’s the lack of a pattern that makes this work frustrating and elusive.

Art is usually all about patterns. Art provides things like symmetry, balance, familiarity, and meaning in a world that is mostly unpredictable, unfair and irrational. That’s why we like art. We like knowing what comes next. We like artists who make up their creative, passionate, opinionated minds and stick to a single composition without wiping out major protagonists at the start of Act II.

Doesn’t a man with a newspaper usually symbolize a creature of habit? The guy gets his daily paper at the same time. He walks to the same café. He sits at the same table. He orders the same breakfast. And while he’s waiting for his order to arrive, he reads the paper (always the sports section first, of course). But here, for no good reason, our newspaper man changes his mind. He doesn’t show up. If the painting depicted only two frames—one with the man, one without him—we’d at least have some balance. And balance is a form of consistency. But instead, we get total flakiness. Magritte tells us there’s going to be a man with a newspaper (the man must be important because the painting’s named after him) and then with each succeeding frame, we have to watch the artist remake the potentially agonizing decision of whether there will be a man or not. Magritte happens to decide Yes No No No. But I get the impression he could just as easily have said No Yes No No or any number of other combinations. It all seems pretty arbitrary and capricious. Or as my teenage son would say, “It’s so random.”

If our lives (and I believe this to be true) are made up of the sum total of our daily, hourly, momently decisions, then our lives are also given meaning by the patterns we create by these decisions. One of my biggest challenges is creating these patterns. I lack consistency. I am flakiness incarnate. I make decisions or commitments only to forget about them or change my mind. Case in point: I’m on a diet. No I’m not. Yes I am. No, I’m just eating only healthy food. Except when my daughter brings home a bag full of chocolate eggs from her trip to the store with daddy because then I’m a hedonist. But the next morning I’m recommitted to healthy eating. Until the next slight temptation comes along. Wouldn’t it save a whole lot of psychic energy if I could just make this decision once and for all?

I did decide to never take an elevator on campus again (after being inspired by a former student who set this goal when she started her Freshman year) and I’ve stuck to this decision faithfully. This may be because I told all my current students about my resolution and it’s partly the fear of humiliation that keeps me honest. But nonetheless, I’ve been consistent. Why can’t I show this kind of consistency throughout my life?

I really hate making decisions. (I seriously get hives in the sandwich bag aisle at the store. I'm standing in front of this huge wall full of colorful little boxes and it's just too much. Will it be zippers or folds? Ziplock, Glad or generic? Which ones are on sale? How many are in each box? Do I use my coupons? Do I really need sandwich bags? Or do I need snack size or pint or gallon or the “bread and food” size? Or should I just forget the whole thing because I recently decided to limit my use of plastic since its production and disposal are bad for the environment? We could just reuse the containers we already have, except these are also plastic and I read somewhere that they cause cancer... Honestly, the reason I can’t go to the grocery store in the evening is because I have a threshold for how many decisions I can make in a single day and by the evening I’ve already hit my quota and I’m likely to have a complete mental breakdown on aisle four.)

So my point is that if I hate making decisions, wouldn’t it be more efficient to make certain decisions ONLY ONCE and stick to them? Getting up in the morning, for example, should not be a battle of will. I should be able to pick a time and just know that I will get up at that time. Why do I continue to re-invent the wheel every morning when I think “Oh, my alarm is going off. I know I decided last night that I would get up at 6 am, but now I don’t feel like it so I will sleep for a (totally unrestful) nine more minutes. And then, of course, I have to re-decide this getting up business nine minutes later and again and again (sometimes several times) until I finally drag my sorry self out of bed. This is a huge waste of my limited supply of decision-making energy for the day.

Especially frustrating is the fact that I seem to have passed my flakiness on to my kids. Every day they have to remake the same decisions about whether or not to practice the piano (often determined by whether I have decided to remind them or decided to be distracted by other things and not remind them) or whether or not human children should inhabit clean rooms or messy rooms or whether or not homework is important or forgettable or whether the TV stays off during the week (as mom has sporadically proclaimed) or if maybe this week is one of those weeks where the man with the newspaper hasn’t shown up and it’s a free-for-all. I can’t tell you how many times Gabie has come home from school and fallen immediately into some activity or project and when I tell him that he needs to do his chores first, he looks at me with an expression of total surprise as if I’d just announced we’re going to speak only Norwegian in our home from now on. “Chores?” he says disdainfully. “Seriously?”

And here’s the point I’m arriving at this week. I think I am also capable of deciding once and for all whether or not to be happy. Normally, I make this decision every day, and really every moment, depending on what’s at hand. In fact, I typically ride the edge of a paper-thin line between cheerfulness and total depression and it takes a slight breeze to send me off one side or the other. Why is this? I’m smart enough to know that I control my emotional destiny. I can be a happy person if I want to. But much of the time lately, I choose to be grouchy or frustrated or sad. I believe I choose to be this way. And then I choose to tell myself that I have no choice but to be this way.

The other night in my class (we were discussing Tolstoy), a student began a comment with, “I think the reason why people choose depression....” My first reaction was to argue that people don’t choose depression, they suffer from it. But I’ve been thinking about this ever since and I know my student wasn’t entirely wrong. Now before I go further, I have to clarify that I know, on a very personal level, that sometimes depression is not something we can “pull ourselves out of” and it requires outside medical or even chemical assistance. But lately, I feel my dark moments are of my own creation. I have four healthy children. My husband has a secure job. I have things to do that are important to me. The weather is finally getting warmer. If I am unhappy, I have decided over and over to be unhappy. And the scary thing is that if I decide to be unhappy most of the time, I’m creating a pattern. I’m defining myself as a generally unhappy person. Do I really want this to become a habit?

My sister Kathy told me last night that she made a similar realization a few months ago (that she can make the conscious choice to be sad or happy) and so she has decided to be happy. When people ask her how she’s doing, she spends her excess mental decision-making energies playing a game of her own creation. Each day, she has to use a different letter of the alphabet to describe her happiness. Today, she is on letter V. She may be vivacious today. Or victorious or venerable. Tomorrow, she’ll be wonderful or wacky or winning. The point is that it’s her choice. She does save the 27th day to be in a black mood if she wants (because we all need to be truly sad once in a while). But the next day, she’s back to awesome. And just imagine what a smart, talented, compassionate person can accomplish with the pre-made decision to be awesome.

So, in honor of my sister and for the sake of replacing bad habits with good patterns, and to set a better example for my kids who need more consistency in their lives, I’m deciding to be happy. And because I can still be random, and because today is St. Patrick’s day, if anyone asks me how I’m doing I’ll probably tell them I’m feeling very verdant.

frescos, failures and feedback

2009-03-03T10:15:00.002-07:00

Michelangelo had been working on the Sistine Chapel for more than six weeks when he discovered that the surface of the newly painted ceiling was growing moldy—a result of his imperfect fresco technique. He had no choice but to scrape off the entire thing, everything he’d finished to that point, and start over. No doubt, this mistake seriously frustrated the artist who hadn’t wanted this project to begin with, but it also taught him an important lesson about the proper moisture level to use when applying the fresh plaster to a surface, a lesson Michelangelo learned well and employed over the next four years as he finished the ceiling. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is an undisputed masterpiece and a reflection of the genius of the artist. But the fact that the work has lasted for five hundred years in remarkably good condition (despite many layers of wax, smoke, glue and ill-advised attempts at restoration) testifies of the artist’s eventual mastery of the difficult fresco technique and his ability to learn from his mistakes.

There’s a line I heard in a podcast recently. It’s a philosophy I am so struck with that I’ve taken to quoting it to my children (whether they want to hear it or not): “There are no failures, only feedback.” This means every mistake we make is not a failure but a learning experience, if we choose to see it correctly. When we blow it, we could choose to wallow in regret and frustration, but what’s the point if instead you can apply your hard-won feedback to future improvements?

I shared the line with Ethan on Saturday, when after weeks of practicing for a piano festival, he played poorly (and by poorly, I mean he forgot entire chunks of his pieces and was fighting back tears by the time he slunk back to his seat next to me in the audience). My heart ached for what he was suffering but I also knew that he could have practiced harder, especially during the last two weeks when he should have really been solidifying his memorization of the music and instead, he chose to do other things with his time. Ethan didn’t want to hear it, but after offering him my hugs, sympathy and unconditional love, I also reminded him that this was a good dose of “feedback” and he should decide what lessons he was meant to learn from the painful experience. He took it better than I thought and he admitted to making bad choices. The next day he was making a chart to help him remember to practice more consistently.

Since I don’t want to be the doctor who will not take her own medicine, I have been accumulating in my mind a list of the non-failures I’ve experienced lately. The feedback has been painful in each of these cases, but lessons learned the hard way are often the most lasting ones.

1. Don’t get cocky.
If your daughter (after months of ~~failed~~ feedback-rich attempts at potty training) finally, for the first glorious time, goes into the bathroom voluntarily and takes care of business by herself rather than messing in her underwear, you should smile in the moment, but don’t let it lull you into a false sense of security. There will be plenty of cleanups in your future. And just to prove the point, within the hour, your poor 10-year old son will be sick all over, so be at the ready with bucket and washcloth.

2. Resist temptation, especially when it’s disguised in pink bows
If you decide that when you return a borrowed dress to your friend, you’d like to give her girls a whole box full of dress-up outfits to replace the ones they lost in the fire, and you go to Savers and spend an hour filling your cart with satin and velvet and taffeta, don’t, under any circumstances, give in to the impulse to buy a few extra dresses for your own daughter to play with (that is, unless you are fully prepared to watch her turn into a one-woman fashion show and change her outfit every 10 minutes for the next two weeks).

3. You live in UTAH. Get used to it.
If you visit your friend Tara in Arizona in the middle of February and you have a wonderful time and the weather is mild and Springy and then you have to return home to a climate where palm trees do not sway freely in the breeze in February because IT”S WINTER YOU IDIOT, prepare yourself for an emotional let down.

4. The actual dental work is never the most painful part
If, after weeks of hardly being able to chew your food and drinking only warm water because anything cooler than tepid makes your head explode off your neck, you have major dental work done and after an hour in the Chair of Torture, you are thick in a pain-induced neural fog and you walk to the receptionist desk to pay for your new crown and the punishment that went with it, don’t be foolish enough to hand over your credit card first and ask for the bill second. You will undoubtedly be over-charged by more than a hundred dollars and then be forced to debate, for 30 minutes with a condescending billing secretary, the meaning of the words “Preferred Provider” and “Copay” and “Dental Insurance” when all you really want to do is get home, suck up some ibuprofen and cry yourself to sleep.

5. How to lose your pride...and all your junk
Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’ve arranged for a brilliant organizer named Lara to visit you and present an organizational seminar (which by the way, turns out to be very helpful). And just for the sake of argument, let’s say that this “Lara” offers to come to your home and take a look at your most frustrating organizational ~~failures~~ feedbacks and give you advice. If she tells you not to clean up your house for her...if she asks you not to tidy things up because it will defeat the purpose of giving her an honest look at your issues, DON'T listen to her! No, just kidding. Listen to her and leave your house in its natural state because you'll learn more that way. And go ahead and tell yourself “What the heck, what do I have to lose but my clutter and all my remaining personal dignity?” But be prepared to spend the next two weeks positively cringing every time you think of this woman you greatly admire walking through your home in its most chaotic, post-trip-to-Arizona-haven’t-had-time-to-unpack state. You’ll eventually get over it. Maybe. And you’ll have some great ideas to get your house into better shape for her next visit, that is if she’s not to disgusted with you to ever come back.

6. Free-lance writer beware
If you write an article for a magazine that pays really well but has been in the market for less than two years, be careful. You may see your words in print but never get paid because the publisher might get caught in the same financial crunch as everyone else and have to close up shop.

7. Don’t count those cute, furry, photogenic chickens before they’ve hatched
And if you are naïve enough to get excited about the magazine publication and the big paycheck without realizing that it’s not a sure thing, don’t (for heaven’s sake!) spend the money before you get it.

Even if it’s on a camera you’ve always wanted.

8. It's okay to be a squeaky wheel
And if you are naïve enough to anticipate the money and stupid enough to spend it before you get it, don’t forge ahead and spend many, many more hours researching and writing a second article for the same magazine. Or at least you should listen to your husband’s advice and tell them (BEFORE dutifully sending the article in on the day of your deadline) that you’ll be happy to send it to them once you’ve received a check for the first one.

9. D’oh!
If you find out, four days before the event, that your son has a French horn recital, don’t forget to ask him if he’ll be needing a piano accompanist for his solo.

10. Don’t overleaven the loaf
If you spend half a day making bread from a new recipe (interspersing kneading and rising with trips to music lessons and Knowledge Bowl practices) watch it closely at the end or you’ll get to see what happens when loaves rise too high and then fall disappointingly flat at the end.

11. Your son rocks
If you blow it on the bread, and you feel like complaining about all the time you wasted, you probably shouldn’t do it in front of your son Ethan because he will undoubtedly remember the advice you just gave him two days ago. And he'll say, "Mom, remember that time you said there are no failures, only feedback?" Yeah, he’ll use that line. In fact, he will put his arm around you and ask you what you’ve learned from the experience and you will have to admit that there are at least 365 different ways to screw up bread and you’ve just eliminated one more of them the hard way. And really, this is not that painful of a lesson, considering it didn’t involve public humiliation (unless you confess to it on a blog or something) and your son has been through worse this weekend and you are unbelievably proud of him for his sympathetic heart and you’re gratified to discover that sometimes he listens to your advice if only to be able to pass it back to you when you need to hear it too.

Organizorama

2009-02-12T14:00:00.005-07:00

Because I need it more than anyone else I know, I'm hosting an Organization Seminar taught by the very lovely and talented Lara Gallagher of the Lazy Organizer. Well, technically, my mom's hosting it since it will be at her house because my house is far too disorganized to host an organization seminar. But I did talk Lara into coming. So that's something.

So if you live in Utah or thereabouts, you're welcome to join us. Here's some info. There's more (and a link to register) on Lara's Seminar page. You can also send me an email with any questions. I'll try not to lose it amid the chaos that is my life.

February 21st
9:00 - 4:00
(with a lunch break: potluck salad bar)
An Organizing Journey; It’s not about your stuff.
A six hour seminar including: Organizing Basics, Learning to Simplify, Using Systems and Planners, Goal Setting, Money Management for Kids, Teaching Kids to Work, and more.
Cost $25.

This is not a metaphor

2009-02-03T09:57:00.003-07:00

When you are standing on the sidewalk watching your friend’s house burn, watching the firemen swarm, watching the smoke pour out from the playroom window, watching the sky fill with a giant grey column that rises like a mushroom cloud from their roof, a few things go through your mind.

First, you are sick sick sick with pity for your friend and her husband and their children.

Then you are relieved they all made it out safely even though the kids were home alone with the oldest son, and only a child would think to wake up the baby from her nap and drag all his sisters out to the neighbor’s house when he heard the smoke detector because adults would assume it was a false alarm and waste time looking for a fire.

Then you remember how just a few days ago you were walking through their house, admiring your friend’s new addition—barely finished—with its hardwood floors, all new appliances, new carpets, new furniture . . . you stop when you get to the custom bookshelves because you just can’t stand the image of it all in flames.

You think how last week you told your friend, and meant it, how happy you were for them. How much they deserved every inch of this beautiful new remodeled space. How glad you were they hadn’t moved away into a bigger, fancier home, even though they could have afforded to do it. But they love this neighborhood and can’t bear to leave it. We all do.

Then, for some reason, you think of their new flat screen TV and how cute your friend’s husband was about it when you were there. How it was still in the box but he was like a kid at Christmas, barely hiding his anxiousness to open it up and install it above the new stone fireplace in the family room now at the heart of the fire. He is the bishop of your ward and sacrifices much for the people he serves. He gets emotional almost every time he gives a talk in church. He called personally to apologize when your son was left behind from last week’s youth activity even though it wasn’t remotely his fault and he had been out of town all week on a business trip and probably hadn’t even had a chance to hug his own kids yet. He is exactly your age but seems decades more mature.

You think about the house itself. All the work that went into it. All the work it will take to rebuild it.

You think “thank heavens for insurance.”

But then you think about Christmas decorations, baby blankets, books, family pictures, kids’ school projects, a wedding dress... You wonder what your friend would have saved (besides the children, of course) if she'd been given a minute to decide.

You get philosophical and ponder the impermanence of material things. The transience of life itself but especially the stuff we grow attached to. It’s all tinder.

Then you hug your friend, say something cheerful and stupid that you’ll later regret and then beg her to tell you when you can help in any way. You are sincere but feel hollow and powerless. What are you going to do? Take them a casserole and say, “so sorry your home is ruined?” It all seems so unfair and cruel. Not that anyone deserves disaster. But especially not them. This is just too wrong.

As you walk home, you remember that the last time you were in their house, you were talking with your friend while she moved dishes into her new cabinets and your daughters both played. When it was time to go, both girls had changed into princess outfits and your daughter refused to give up her pretty blue dress and she threw an embarrassing fit and so you promised to bring the dress back later that night. But when you got home, your daughter still wouldn’t take it off and at dinner she spilled salsa on it so you had to wash it. And then you realized the sash had come unstitched and you had to mend it which took another day to get around to. You had meant to return the dress yesterday but forgot. And now you are glad to have one small thing to give back to them. One piece of their kids’ possessions that wasn’t burned or stained with smoke. It’s a drop in the bucket and you know it. But it’s something. It’s a start.

Enabling podcast addictions since 2008

2009-01-27T08:51:00.002-07:00

For months, I’ve been promising friends and family members I would do this. So here it is...

Julie Q’s Podcast Addiction Enabling Tutorial

I’ve typed up a thorough review of all the podcasts I listen to, from my favorites down to the ones I let pile up but can’t bear to delete because they sound fun even though I’m too busy to get around to listening to them. I’ve also included a “getting started” guide if you’ve never podcasted because you just didn’t know how to do it. Let me help you. Let me introduce you to my favorite hobby. It’s easy. It’s free. It’s therapeutic. But beware, once you push that first GET EPISODE button, you may never want to stop.

What is a podcast?
The podcasts I listen to are generally radio programs you can download for free and listen to whenever and wherever you feel like. You can play them on your computer or load them to your iPod or MP3 player to take with you and listen while washing dishes, exercising, driving the noisy carpool kids, or falling asleep at night. Call me crazy, but I confess I have an iPod with almost NO MUSIC on it.

I’ve included links to the websites for each of these shows but the best way to subscribe is use iTunes (or something similar) to keep them updated for you.

My favorites

1. WNYC’s Radio Lab
This is by far my favorite podcast right now. It’s essentially science oriented, but science in an oh so fascinating, real people can totally get this stuff, let’s discuss what it means to be human kind of way. The show is highly produced with quirky sound effects and dialogue that get occasionally hokey, but I think you’ll get used to it and grow to love the style like I do. The great thing about Radio Lab is that on iTunes, you can download all their old episodes going back over 2 seasons. Some of my favorites are: Choice, Placebo, Who am I?, Memory and Forgetting, and The Ring and I (most amusing discussion of Wagner’s operas I’ve ever heard).

2. Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life
So popular it now has its own television spin-off, this is a classic radio broadcast and one of the best podcasts out there. Each week, host Ira Glass and his various producers choose a theme and present different stories connected by that theme. It’s always interesting, often educational, very entertaining. Of the many months’ worth of episodes I’ve listened to, I can only think of maybe two that didn’t keep my attention from beginning to end. The only drawback to This American Life is their shows are only available for free downloading for one week after they air on the radio, so you have to make sure you get them during that window. You can always stream them for free on their website, but it’s less convenient.

3. NPR’s Wait, wait, don’t tell me
A weekly news quiz show. Always hilarious; makes me laugh out loud at least once during the hour-long show. If you have the slightest interest in current events and politics, this podcast should appeal to you. The show has a celebrity panel with regulars (Paula Poundstone is my favorite) and each week they host different guests, ranging from NBA stars to supreme court justices. My one warning is that while I feel Wait Wait is an equal-opportunity mocker, I’m fairly liberal in my politics and not all conservatives might agree with me. If you’re a big George Bush fan in particular, you might not appreciate their satire. Anyway, this is usually the podcast I listen to when I’m driving home from class and I need something amusing to give my brain a break.

4. PRI’s To the Best of our Knowledge
Another great program that takes a theme and explores it through interviews with authors and deep thinkers. It’s educational and often fascinating. Once or twice I had no interest in the topic, but generally, it’s a good way to gain some exposure to interesting philosophical issues. Some typical topics include: Libraries, Einstein and God, Debunking pop mysticism, Musical Taste, Living Green, etc.

5. Oprah.com’s Spirit Channel
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m an Oprah fan. But I probably watch her TV show less than 4 times a year. Instead, I listen to her interviews with guests about spiritual topics on this podcast. I’ve really enjoyed these discussions, especially the ones with Eckhart Tolle, Sarah Ban Brethnach, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Jill Bolte-Taylor. You can download most of these episodes in either audio format or various video versions (I pick the audio because I have a slow connection and it would likely take a week for my laptop download the big fancy ones). Oprah is generous: you can still get all kinds of old episodes for free.'

More podcasts

The rest are really in no particular order. I love them all and listen to whichever ones I happen to feel in the mood for at the time.

If you like science, try these next two. Both are fascinating and accessible enough that you don’t have to be a big science nerd to learn cool stuff.

Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American
A weekly show covering the latest in science and technology. Host Steve Mirsky explores cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues while interviewing scientists and journalists. Recent episodes have discussed things like alternative energy, astronomy, science in the Obama administration, and pigeons. If you don’t have time for an hour-long show, Scientific American also does a daily “60-second Science” program. (They also have a 60-second Earth and 60-second psych).

NPR’s Science Friday
Another great science show, this one hosted by Ira Flatow (I like Ira and his voice reminds me of Alan Alda). Ira interviews guests from the world of science. They discuss and take questions about topics from science, technology, health and the environment. Recent episodes dealt with the “invention of air,” cold and flu season, birdsongs, and nano-knotting.

APM’s Speaking of Faith
I love this show too (can I please have like 20 favorites?!) Krista Tippett interviews various scholars, priests, poets, theologians, etc. in this fascinating discussion of all things spiritual, religious and ethical. You can access all of the old shows (going back to 2006) on iTunes. Some of my favorites from the past include: The Ethics of Eating, Quarks and Creation, Yoga (with Seane Corn) and Inside Mormon Faith (Krista’s interview with Robert Millet).

PRI’s RadioWest
Host Doug Fabrizio drives me absolutely nuts but I’m willing to overlook (overhear?) his idiosyncrasies when he has a great guest or fun topic, which he often does. This is a Utah show, but the subject matter is usually of more general appeal. I download several of these episodes a month when the topic catches my interest or the guest is someone I’d like to hear more about.

WAMU’s Diane Rehm Show
This is one of the first podcasts I started collecting. Back when I used to listen to the radio all the time, I would often catch Diane’s show in the middle of some interesting conversation and wonder what the rest had been like. This way I can download whichever episodes sound fun to me. Diane’s voice takes some getting used to (she has a neurological condition affecting her vocal chords) but she is a very witty, insightful interviewer. She draws out interesting dialogue from all her guests (who range from actors to authors to political figures to doctors to academics). Episodes are only available on iTunes for about a week.

NPR’s Fresh Air
Speaking of great interviewers, Terry Gross has to be the best. She hosts a daily program and manages to get very candid responses from her guests. She has been around on NPR forever and has an amazing flair for conversation, very friendly but probing. Her topics are usually related to the arts and popular culture, (current TV shows, films, etc.). I have to say that Terry is one of those people whose voice does not fit her body. I finally saw of picture of her recently (and learned that she was very short) and it totally blew my mind.

NPR’s Story of the Day Podcast
I used to listen to the NPR news programs religiously. Now I just don’t have the time (or the emotional constitution for all that depressing news, more like). But I can still catch the best story of the day (editor’s pick) from Morning Edition or All Things Considered.

NPR’s Book Tour
A weekly program featuring best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors. The writers read selections from their latest books and then take a few questions. This program has introduced me to some pretty darn fascinating books (which I then rush to the library to check out and then leave next to my bed for 3 weeks intending to read but eventually have to return to the library because they are overdue, and I feel bad about this but then I realize I probably got to hear at least the best bits in the podcast and I hardly remember anything I read lately anyway although I still love to read and maybe I’ve just crammed too much stuff into my head and I should chill out on all the podcasts but I can’t). Yeah. So. Authors range from Toni Morrison to John Hodgman.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation
I’ll admit this is one of the ones that has just been piling up lately. I think I have 40+ hours of it waiting for me to get around to listening. But the topics sound interesting and the ones I’ve listened to in the past were good. It’s a talk show/phone call-in show dealing with hot issues (like health care, politics, etc) and just plain cool topics (like the high cost of parenting, why it’s so hard to swat a fly, etc.). Probably considered liberal, but what do I know? The host is good. The dorks who call in are often annoying. Friday’s show is the Science Friday program mentioned above.

New Yorker Out Loud
A weekly short discussion about one of the stories in the New Yorker magazine. It’s best when the editor interviews one of my favorite New Yorker authors (like Adam Gopnik) but typical New Yorker fare is often quirky or amusing.

New Yorker Fiction
A monthly short story from the New Yorker archives, read and discussed by another New Yorker writer. I have loved a few of these. Others have been mind-numbingly boring. I must be getting old.

Last but not least, if you want inspirational talks, you can download recent BYU devotional/forum speeches or BYU’s classic speeches. Just type “BYU speeches” in an iTunes store search. You can also download LDS General Conference talks (search iTunes for “LDS Conference”).

Getting Started
I am by no means an expert at this, but here’s what I’ve learned. I have your basic iPod. (Ethan has a newer, fancier iPod and calls mine a relic.) But you can do all of this on other kinds of MP3 players too. I also have a fairly slow connection so the following may be quicker on your computer than mine.

Set up an iTunes account.
Find the podcasts you want by searching the iTunes store.
Subscribe to your favorite podcasts. You can also select only the episodes you want to download and manually check in once in a while to see what you’ve missed.
Every time you open iTunes, your podcasts will automatically check for new episodes and begin downloading.
Go out on several errands while your podcasts are downloading.
Go eat lunch because they aren’t done downloading yet.
Change a diaper.
Plug in your iPod and make sure the “Podcasts” tab is set (in iTunes) to “sync.” (You can sync all of your podcasts or just selected ones. At this stage, I have to rotate the ones I sync because my relic pod fills up very quickly and I can’t fit them all on).
Regularly go through your iTunes podcasts list and delete the ones you’ve listened to. (I have yet to figure out an easier way to do this).
You can save episodes that you really love. They are already on your computer’s hard drive (in mine, they’re under My Music, iTunes, iTunes Music, Podcasts). I create a separate folder and move my very favorite podcast MP3 files there so they won’t keep loading onto my iPod every time I sync it.)
Listen at your leisure.

If your addiction begins to take over your life (signs include wearing headphones during all waking hours, getting all twitchy when your batteries run out and you have to wait a whole hour for your pod to recharge, beginning every conversation with the phrase, “I just heard the coolest thing...”, and actively looking for new podcasts even though you have so many already that there are not hours enough in the day to listen to them all) you may want to seek professional help.

So, hey, if you're already a podcast fan and you've discovered any good ones that I don't have listed, please let me know. I'm still in the collection phase. And maybe a little in the denial phase. I can stop any time. I just don't want to.

A twist of ribbon

2009-01-12T12:34:00.002-07:00

Here's my latest publication (page 34). It's in the Wasatch Journal and is about a fascinating Utah artist named Edie Roberson. I wish I hadn't been restricted by a word limit because Edie is the kind of person I could have written much, much more about (as it was, I did write more but alas the magazine edited it down to what they had room for). I have tremendous respect for Edie who is not only brilliant and creative, but a warm, kind soul with the great wisdom of her years. What a privilege it was for me to meet her and see a piece of her world. Take a look. The magazine's online user interface is a bit tedious, but hopefully worth the download time...

Barbie's strangest Christmas ever

2009-01-06T08:52:00.006-07:00

Can you guess which present Nora loved most this year? Was it the sweet, adorable blond-haired baby doll with matching Nora/doll Christmas dresses? Or was it the slightly creepy Jack plush?

Good guess.

At least the doll has since gotten a little play time. According to Nora, her name is “Gear.” A lovely name for a baby doll, I must say. Jack has been a more constant companion and only had to stay home once when we went to church (a bitter, tearful separation for all parties, believe me).

We ended up giving Jack to Nora a day early. On Dec 24th, Ethan wanted to give a gag gift to his cousin Alex along with the iTunes gift certificate we had already purchased. So I took Ethan to the thrift store and he picked out the most hideously dressed, shaggy-haired Barbie he could find. I made Ethan carry her to the checkout stand because it made him squeamish. “What if I see someone I know from school?” he pleaded. “Then I guess the gag’s on you,” I answered. And then I proceeded to take the longest, most scenic, most populated route to the front of the store because it amused me.

When we got home, Nora took one look at the Barbie and fell in love. She heard the name “Barbie” and began begging for her Bah-bie and chasing Ethan around the house: “My Bah-bie...my bah-bie!” And Ethan, my teenage boy, was running for dear life, holding onto this skanky doll — with her medusa hair and silicone implants and sparkly cocktail dress — yelling “No, it’s my Barbie! It’s mine.” The scene was all the more comical because I have never let Nora (nor if I get my way, will I ever let her) own a Barbie. How ironic that my untainted, Barbie-free daughter, gets obsessed with the first one she ever sees. She would not relent. Every time Ethan tried to hide the Barbie, Nora found it again. Eventually, we got Nora calmed down and distracted while Ethan wrapped Alex’s present. A few minutes later, it was time to go to the big family party and we discovered that Nora had found Alex’s present and ripped open the wrapping paper to get to her Bah-bie. This time, there was no distracting her. She refused to relinquish the stupid doll. Finally, we resorted to getting out Jack a day early and letting her unwrap him. Her first reaction was to say, “That’s not Jack! That’s Jack” (pointing to the picture on the video case). But soon she was willing to give the imposter Jack a chance and we slipped Barbie from her other hand and re-wrapped her. Whew!

It helped that at the family party, my brother Thom, who happens to have the entire score to The Nightmare Before Christmas memorized (and I do not exaggerate), held up Jack and sang some songs from the movie. Nora—and the rest of her cousins—were totally transfixed. Jack is now definitely Jack. And Barbie is likely back at the thrift store, confused and more than a little relieved to have escaped the crazed 2-year-old and her wacky brother.

Making Christmas...slightly morbid

2008-12-22T08:41:00.007-07:00

Since Nora can’t read yet, I think it’s safe to write about one of her Christmas presents. We bought her a Jack Skellington plush. She loves The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s her favorite movie (and by favorite, I mean she’s so obsessed with it that she wakes up in the morning asking to watch it, and she carries the video case around the house with her and gives us a panicky “Where’s Jack?” when she’s misplaced it somewhere, and at night she throws a fit because we’ve only let her watch the movie twice instead of the 17 times she’s begged for it). Yes, it’s an odd choice for a two-year-old’s favorite movie, but we’re all a bit macabre around here.

Nora wants me to sing “Jack songs” to her at bedtime. This has proved difficult since the lyrics are extremely tricky and even now that I have finally looked them up, I’m not sure they make the most soothing lullabies:

I am the one hiding under your bed
Teeth ground sharp and eyes glowing red
I am the one hiding under your stairs
Fingers like snakes and spiders in my hair

But Nora loves Jack. And frankly I think it’s a great movie. We try to watch it every year between Halloween and Christmas. But only once.

My sister told me this week that her daughter Juniper also loves The Nightmare before Christmas, so now I’m wondering what it is about the movie that appeals to children. You’d think it would scare the bejeebers out of them. I’d like to suggest that we all have an innate taste for the macabre, for the images of death and gore. Cases in point: the inevitable rubbernecking at freeway wrecks, the popularity of horror movies, the fact that every time I turn on a news channel lately, I’m met with photographs of Caylee Anthony’s skeletal remains. But honestly, I suspect Nora has no clue what the movie’s really about. She certainly doesn’t have a clue about death. I think she just likes the music. And Jack.

Detail from Brueghel, Triumph of Death

I’ve decided that The Nightmare Before Christmas is the modern equivalent of Pieter Brueghel’s Triumph of Death. You’ve got the dancing skeletons. The corpses. The morbid themes treated with a twisted sense of humor. It’s all there. I remember being fascinated by this painting in the Prado when I was a little girl. I also loved Bosch’s gruesome hell scene in his Garden of Earthly Delights. They were just plain cool. Of course, I had very little appreciation for the concept of death at the time. Now that I have children, I fear death in giant, parental proportions. But I also have such a respect for the reality of death that the painting amuses me more than scares me. I know that death is not likely to show up at my kitchen table with a lute in one hand, an hour glass in the other and an army of friends behind him. I also suspect that death doesn’t have a pinstriped tux, a bat-shaped bowtie and the voice of Danny Elfman.

So as Jack would say, “what the heck!” I can let Nora enjoy the movie despite its darkness because she sees only the light. I still think it’s better than the other syrupy, sparkly drivel out there marketed at preschool girls. And when requested, I will attempt to sing “Making Christmas” to my daughter without worrying about the fact that the melody comes from the Dies Irae, the medieval chant for the dead.

my favorite email ever

2008-12-21T19:51:00.002-07:00

deer mom I luve you thaeck you for getting this meshij luve gabriel.

Did you miss me?

2008-12-19T11:44:00.005-07:00

Hi. It’s Gabie here. I know you haven’t heard from me in a while, but that’s just because my mom’s a total slacker. She says she’s been too busy to write and she doesn’t know how November slipped away from her. But I say she just needs to refocus on her top priorities. Like my blog.

Here’s what I’ve been up to. While my mom was busy grading papers, I came up with an Ingenious Solution to keep people from bugging her. I set up my Ingenious Solution on her door. I’m not allowed to tape anything to the door because it might ruin the paint, so I used sticky notes and then taped my mechanism to the sticky notes. This was very tricky and it took over a whole hour to make and I had to ask Mom for more tape and then some yarn and then some scissors to cut the yarn. Then the weight of the whole Ingenious Solution made it fall a few times and I got really frustrated and cried a bit and then Mom said she would help me because she wasn’t getting much grading done at that point anyway. But at least when it was all finished, it was an Ingenious Solution to the grading problem. The best part is that the message “Do not Dastrb Mom” can be blocked by another paper attached with a string that can be wound up on its spool when Mom finishes grading. This still hasn’t happened yet. I think she’s always grading.

My big problem lately is my little sister Nora. I hate sharing a room with her. Nora’s a total brat. She gets into everything. I leave “Do not Dastrb” signs all over the place but she ignores them. She climbs on my top bunk and messes up the way I arrange all my pandas and penguins to be facing each other so they can have a long talk while I’m at school. Nora wrecked my CD player. She lost my teeth that the dentist had to pull and I was saving. She scribbled on the wall. She scribbled on my dirty clothes hamper. She squeezed toothpaste all over and messed up the way I put all the toothbrushes in a criss-cross pattern when I cleaned the bathroom. She changes her clothes like 20 times a day and leaves her dresses all over the floor. I’m not allowed to say I hate my sister, but sometimes I say it anyway.

This week I put up a barrier so Nora can’t get up in my bed. It only took one roll of masking tape and half the Sunday newspaper. So far it’s working. Mom’s wants to know if she’ll be able to access the closet again anytime soon, but I say that’s the cost of a little privacy.

And finally, I have started leaving notes for myself every night on the white board above my pillow. This is so I won’t forget important things while I’m sleeping. Here’s the note I left yesterday. Mom laughed all morning when she saw it, which is a bit strange since she’s the one who wants us to eat better.

Halloween 2008

2008-11-04T09:10:00.007-07:00

This year for Halloween, we had a slightly melancholy panda (clearly contemplating the recent spike in bamboo prices).

A train. (And I take very little credit for the fabulous costume. This was all Aunt Kathy's creative genius.)

A little German miss, wearing the dirndl I wore when I was her age.

And a teenager (not pictured) who has decided he's too old for the dress up scene and would rather play computer games at a friend's house than make the rounds with his family. Sigh.

I think of all the kids, Nora probably had the most fun. The Halloween concept combines two of her most favorite things in the world: dressing up

and candy.

What's not to love about that?

Truth Patrol gone amuck

2008-10-09T09:47:00.003-07:00

My son McKay is the sweetest, most soft-hearted kid I know. But for some reason, McKay suspends all compassion when it comes to his little brother Gabie. There are deep issues here — no doubt some sibling rivalry, some resentment for the adorable child who demands the attention of every adult in the room, some middle-child syndrome at work. Who knows? But whatever the cause, McKay and Gabie frequently argue and bicker about the stupidest things. Case in point: yesterday’s whole “you can’t be a fire chief” debate.

In the afternoon, Ken took Gabie and Nora to a safety fair where they both got fire chief sticker-badges and red fireman hats. Gabie was thrilled and even considered momentarily trading in his dream of being a doctor for the equally plausible dream of fighting fires for a living. At the table, Gabie put on his hat and told McKay he was a fire chief. McKay immediately launched into what I call his Truth Patrol mode. He just can’t stand to let even the tiniest bit of non-factual information flow from his little brother’s mouth. “That’s so stupid.” McKay said. “You can’t be a fire chief. There’s no such thing as a 6-year old fire chief. You have to go through real training and get certified...” etc. etc. etc. This went on for a while until I told McKay to knock it off and please let Gabie imagine he was a fire chief. “Gabie’s ideas are not hurting you in any way,” I told him. “Just leave him alone.”

I don’t really understand McKay’s Truth Patrol impulse. Or at least I didn’t understand it until recently. Now I think I see where he gets it. And it just might be from his mother.

A few days ago I went to see an art exhibit at the University of Utah. Or maybe I should just say that a few days ago I died and went to heaven. Anyway, I’m wandering around with my jaw hanging down and my mind whirling and my pencil madly scratching across my notebook pages and then I find myself in front of Rodin’s famous statue of “The Thinker.” Now I’m enough of a Rodin scholar to know that there are dozens of versions of this statue in various museums around the world but it was still exciting to see this casting and take a look at the details and the beautiful bronze patina of this particular copy from the Cleveland Museum of Art. And while I’m studying it and feeling the art-lover’s high that comes from being in the presence of a masterpiece, these two women step up behind me and start to talk about the sculpture. The dark-haired one begins to rant about how lucky they are to be seeing The Thinker. “I can’t believe it’s the Real Thing,” she says. “I wonder how they managed to get it here. This is so amazing.”

And what do I do? Well, I’m ashamed to admit that at this point, some other Julie — an ugly, know-it-all, pretentious, professorial, snob of a Julie — sprouts out of the top of my head and sticks her nose up in the air and speaks to this total stranger. “It’s not the original,” the ugly Julie says in an 'aren't I helpful to disabuse you of your erroneous assumptions' tone. “There are lots of copies of this all over the world.” And the woman (rightly so!) gives me the most piercing scowl I have ever received from any creature other than my 2-year old daughter. Truly withering. And then Truth Patrol Julie withdraws back into my head and I slink my way into the Picasso room. (And may I add that slinking is hard to do with one foot on the floor and the other firmly wedged in one’s mouth.)

So if I had perhaps really looked at "The Thinker" and been inspired to do a little thinking of my own, I would have just shut up and let the woman imagine whatever she wanted to imagine. It was not hurting me in the least to let her bask in the glow of what she saw as the Real Thing. It was certainly not my place to burst her bubble. The other thing I should have considered is that Rodin’s thinker is actually an illustration of Dante looking out over the gates of hell and the sufferers therein, many of whom are guilty of the deadly sin of — hello? — Pride. And how does Dante define pride but the “love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor.” A little less love of self and a little less contempt for the errors of others would serve me well, I think.

Julie Q. in print

2008-10-07T07:10:00.002-07:00

Here's a nifty development. My essay in Segullah is finally available online if you'd like to read it.

You know you’re addicted to canning when...

2008-09-22T11:56:00.003-07:00

It starts innocently enough. You cook up a batch of apricot jam and are pleasantly surprised to find the process easier than you had imagined. And deeply satisfying. But what you don’t suspect is that apricot jam is not as sweet as it seems. It is, in fact, the gateway drug of food preservation. Soon you find yourself buying Mason jars and then other, more serious, paraphernalia: jar lifters, tongs, funnels, giant steamer pots and stacks of lids with rubber seals. You bottle some cherries. You do a few jars of tomatoes. Your grocery budget spikes from spending obscene amounts of cash on white powdery substances like pectin and sugar and Fruit Fresh. You put up some peaches and pears. One day you try a cocktail of peaches and pears diced together. Then, when simple fruits just aren’t giving you the same high, you move on to heavier stuff: tomato sauce and salsa and pickles. Still you deny you have a problem. “I can stop anytime,” you say. “Just let me finish this batch of plum-raspberry-pear jelly and I promise I’ll lay off.”

Let’s face it. You’re hooked.

As a public service to those who may be suffering from a compulsive food preservation, or to those genetically susceptible to a canning addiction, I’m offering my own story as a cautionary tale. Don’t let this happen to you. Be proactive. Get professional help if necessary. Be on the lookout for the following signs of a serious canning addiction...

Since mid-July you’ve had boxes of empty Mason jars and bushels of fruit all over your back porch.
You are still buying more boxes of empty Mason jars and bushels of fruit.
You wake up in the morning thinking about blanching peaches.
You believe the words blanching, de-seeding, and rolling boil have a musical quality to them.
You have a tell-tale track of tiny scars running up your arms from stirring spitting-hot jam.
One Saturday you spend the entire afternoon making spaghetti sauce—a process that begins with a truckload of tomatoes and 15 other ingredients like “one cup of dried basil” and after several hours of slicing and mixing and simmering and submersing in a boiling-water bath leaves you with a grand total of three jars—and you feel this was a half-day well spent.
You begin envying your neighbor’s pressure canner and consider breaking into her kitchen just to “try it out.”
You think of every batch of dishes as another chance to heat up some jars.
You hang out with friends who say things like, “there’s no sound in the world more satisfying than the pop of a hot jar of jam sucking in its lid”
And you totally agree.
In your parents’ new beautiful 4,000 square food home, the thing you covet most is the cold storage room under their porch.
You know that all Mason jars are not alike and you find yourself caressing the ones from the 1970s with stars on the front.
Your new most prized possessions—after the kids of course—are the antique Mason jars (the ones that once belonged to your grandma) that you appropriated in a late-night raid of your mother’s basement.
You deny the obvious reality that, given the proper case-lot sale, you could buy all of this food for less money than it’s costing you to bottle it yourself. Instead, you insist that it’s good for the environment, better tasting, and makes you really really happy. And you mean it. Because you sense—as you lift those jars out of their water bath, set them in a row on your kitchen counter, check the seals, and admire the fruits of your labor—that you are participating in some kind of age-old ritual. That you are your grandmother’s granddaughter. That you are preserving more than food.

hot letters

2008-09-19T09:19:00.004-07:00

I heard in an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin that Abraham Lincoln used to write what he called "hot letters" when he was particularly upset at someone. He would write a letter to the person, get his feelings out (very eloquently no doubt) and then put the letter in a drawer for a few days. By then he'd usually have time to cool down and think better of the situation. Many of these letters have survived with Lincoln's later notation on them: "Never sent. Never signed."

I'm adopting this idea. I already wrote one hot email this week, and although I'll admit I had intended to send it and only got distracted before I could polish it up and push the send button, it worked out for the best in the end that it's still sitting in my draft folder and I'll likely delete it soon. I wrote the email to the owner of a new store in town. Their name boasts they are a "farmer's market" but when their advertisement came in the mail and I looked through the pages, I could find not one single item from local growers. Instead, they import all their produce from Washington or Oregon or California, even the peaches and pears which are in season and falling off the trees in the orchards all around here. From my lofty perch up on the high horse I shall name Barbara, I found this to be offensive and misleading (not that I have anything against those states, mind you, but why use up all the fossil fuels to drive something hundreds of miles when we grow it in Utah?). In any case, you shouldn't call yourself a farmer's market if you don't support the local farmers. So I wrote a lengthy epistle to that effect. But I didn't have time to finish it.

Then I went for a walk with my friend Stacy who is actually thrilled to see this new store coming to town because she loves organic food and herbs and she thinks we need more of these kinds of markets around here and she convinced me that I really ought to actually step foot in the place before I condemn it for high crimes against humanity and the environment. Huh. Not a bad idea.

So I'm glad I had a chance to cool down and see another side of the issue. I plan to pay a visit to the farmer's market that is not a farmer's market. Maybe I'll like the place. Maybe I'll decide it's worth driving past six other grocery stores and two other health food stores to get to. Or maybe I'll eventually revise my letter and send it. But in the meantime, I'm feeling more reasonable and a little less incensed. I'm feeling more Abraham Lincoln and a little less John Wilkes Booth.

Mamma Carter

2008-09-17T09:50:00.003-07:00

I listened to an interview yesterday between Diane Rehm and former president Jimmy Carter (originally aired in April...yes, sometimes it takes months for me to listen through my pile of podcasts). The conversation fascinated me and brought up some interesting questions....

1) How exactly did Jimmy Carter get such a bad reputation when he was in office? I remember when I was little, I bought into the negative image of Carter as a dumb peanut farmer. Now that I have seen his work in the last 20 years in international affairs and on behalf of the poorest people of our own country, I think he’s a tremendously compassionate, intelligent man. In the interview, he was articulate and funny. And frankly, everything he had to say about today’s economy and the war in Iraq and bringing peace to the Middle East made sense to me. I’d vote for him. I'm curious to see how history will remember this man.

2) President Carter talked to Diane Rehm about his recent memoir entitled, A Remarkable Mother. He described his “mamma” as a full-time nurse who in addition to her job, spent many hours a day volunteering in the local community. She worked 20-hour shifts. She was rarely home. On a black desk near the front door, Jimmy’s mamma would leave loving notes for him and his siblings, telling them what to do each day (feed the chickens, fill up the wood box, etc.). Years later, Jimmy and his sister teased their mother that they thought the black desk was their mamma. This is the woman (the real woman, not the black desk) that Carter now calls a remarkable mother, whom he describes as one of the “most extraordinary people I have ever known,” whom he credits as the inspiration for all of his life’s work.

So here’s my question. Am I seriously over-thinking this parenting job or what?

dissonance

2008-09-09T13:59:00.004-07:00

A nice man with silver hair is tuning my piano. He arrived 3 hours ago and is still at it, whacking at each key over and over and making hair-width pitch adjustments and then moving on to the next note on a keyboard that seems to go on forever. The piercing, repetitive tinkering ricochets through the whole house, around every corner, through any doors I close to block it out. The noise has accompanied all my morning cleaning and eating and laundry folding, like a grating, atonal soundtrack to a really frightening movie about a housewife and her 2-year old daughter who I suspect are just about to be murdered by some kind of Hitchcockian psycho. I refuse to take a shower.

Detail from Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece

So I’m thinking about dissonance, which is why we called the piano tuner to begin with. (Ethan informed me last week: “I refuse to practice the piano anymore unless we get it tuned because it’s driving me crazy.” Like he needs another excuse not to practice.) Also I’ve been thinking about cognitive dissonance—that mental state which occurs when a new idea hammers itself against an older set of beliefs and creates acute discomfort. It’s difficult to hold two conflicting ideas in your mind simultaneously. This isn’t to say that we don’t do it all the time. For example, I truly believe sugar is bad for me. But I also believe Dreyer’s Spumoni is a gift from the gods. Somehow I manage to keep both thoughts segregated in opposite corners of my brain, properly appeased and happily oblivious to the other’s existence.

Last week, I finally set aside my personal prejudice against all things Oprah (a lovely woman but oh so very trendy) and began reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. To my surprise, I’m loving the book and experiencing one “aha moment” after another. Yes! I do allow my mental noise to drown out my true self. Yes! I’m a pain-body junkie. I live in the past. I dwell on the future. I need to embrace the NOW. I’m unhappy because I allow my ego—and all its defensive mechanisms—to define who I think I am. This is all heady stuff and I already feel my soul awakening (though it pains me to use the word) to a new, happier way of looking at the world.

The only problem is that I’m an old lady and I’ve had nearly 40 years to develop my mental habits. This new material is producing some serious dissonance in my head. Plus I’m having to reconcile Tolle’s new-age-pop-psych-mystical definitions of God and spirituality with my own religious beliefs which rise from an organized religion that is just about as organized a religion as they come. Talk about your pitch adjustments.

The other soundtrack blaring through my house today is a literal soundtrack—the one from the musical Annie. Nora is a huge fan and wakes up in the morning asking, “Watch Annie?...Watch Annie?...Watch Annie?” (continued ad nauseum until Mom relents). I won’t let her watch the DVD more than once a day so I’ve made a CD of the music and it seems to be continuously playing in her bedroom. And when the CD isn’t playing, the songs are still running through my head. This isn’t such a bad thing; it’s a great musical and I used to listen to the Broadway soundtrack myself, somewhat obsessively, when I was a little girl—long before the movie version came out. But here’s the problem. I’m trying to train my mind to live in the NOW, to be alive in the moment (a la Tolle) and at the same time I have the following lyrics stage vibrato-ing their way through my head: (feel free to sing along...)

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun

Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none

When I'm stuck with a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And grin,
And say,
Oh

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may

Tomorrow
Tomorrow
I love ya
Tomorrow

You're always
A day away

You know what? I actually believe this with all my heart. The gray days. The sunny tomorrow. The sticking out of chins. All of it. See the dissonance? Can I love ya tomorrow and still focus entirely on the present moment? Ow. It hurts.

sign sign everywhere a sign

2008-09-06T06:47:00.002-07:00

Now where was I? Oh yeah, I was saying that parents are very good at reading signs. (And if I wasn’t saying this, I really meant to say it but I didn’t because my laptop has been quite sick and only recently been released from the hospital where it underwent major surgery. Thanks for all the cards and good wishes.)

Anyway, I believe one of the things we develop as parents is superhuman sign-reading powers. No, I don’t mean road signs and I don’t mean signs about long-haired freaky people or even the dawning of the age of Aquarius signs but rather the more subtle signs that tell us the future or enlighten us as to reality. For example...

My daughter is throwing her body down into her pillow and popping back up for another dive and yelling to the Olympic judges (in Mandarin Chinese I can only assume) “watch this next one” over and over and over again. This is a sign that, contrary to my first impression as she was nodding off into her chicken dinos at lunch, the child is not in fact tired enough to take a nap.

The house is peaceful and quiet and suddenly I realize I can no longer hear Nora playing contentedly in the bathroom sink with her plastic cups. This is a sign that she has found the tube of Neosporin which makes no noise when its contents are squeezed out and smeared into a map of the Great Lakes and all their tributaries across the bathroom mirror.

My kids come home from school to the smell of snickerdoodle cookies baking in the oven. They think this is a sign that Mom is in a good mood. Their Dad knows better. When he gets home and sees the cookies he asks, “So, what’s wrong? Having a depressing day?”

The edge of the bathtub is completely covered with different sets of tiny little underpants and shorts—all of them wet. This is a sign that Nora’s potty training is going well. After all, every accident is an opportunity for learning. Right?

Nora has begun playing with books as if they were every toy in the toy box. She stacks them and builds bridges with them. She pushes them around in her shopping cart. She puts a pile of books in the baby cradle and covers them with blankets. She pulls every single one of them off the shelf (and have I told you we have hundreds of books?) and speed-reads each for about 20 seconds and then chucks it over her shoulder and grabs the next one. This is a sign that she will always love books and will someday become an editor.

I sit down to write a blog post and find myself thinking only of all the crazy things Nora has been doing all week. This is a sign that school has started and the boys (including Gabie, my usual go-to guy for blog material) desert me for most of the day. This makes me sad and a little lonely sometimes, but when I so much as indulge in a passing thought of homeschooling my kids, I get a feeling of utter panic in the pit of my stomach. This is a sign that we are doing the right thing for us right now.

time for a REAL vacation

2008-08-20T07:18:00.004-07:00

A few weeks ago, I heard a story on this radio program about an (unfortunately bogus) new concept in luxury vacations. You go to this spa for two weeks where they put you into a medically induced coma. While you're asleep, they give you a full makeover and feed you intravenously just barely enough nutrients to keep you alive. So when you wake up, you're 10 pounds thinner and looking great. Fantastic idea, right?

Well, since I've been struck by a nasty cold this week and am suffering greatly, I'm beginning to think a similar luxury vacation for the sick might catch on. If you come down with a cold, you simply go away for a week of pampered quarantine. At the spa, they'll keep you away from your family (so you don't get your kids sick, which is one of the things I hate most about being sick). Doctors will put you into a coma and keep you under until the virus has run its course. And they may as well throw in the intravenous diet part too because it's just too tempting.

Really, it's a much better alternative than my current approach which is to whine and moan for a few more days and wash my hands so many times the skin is starting to flake off the bones. Plus I think I could pay for the spa with all the money I would save from Kleenex alone.

in praise of band-aids

2008-08-09T07:55:00.003-07:00

It’s band-aid season at my house. I find them everywhere. In the washer after the spin cycle. Stuck to the carpet along the edges of my hall. Inside Nora’s socks. In my bed. Clinging for dear life to the drain in the bathtub. Curled up like a baby pigs’ ears on the floor of my van. Nora is obsessed with band-aids, or baa-baas as she calls them. We’ve gone through hundreds of them this summer. I’ve taken to putting the box up on top of the fridge to make it last longer. But then I get it down to take care of a real owie and forget to return it to safety and then I’ll discover an hour later that Nora has used up half the box in a concerted effort to baa-baa every exposed inch of flesh on her body and she has run into enough trouble with unwrapping and unsticking the rest that there are now two intact bandages left in the box, holding onto each other and quivering like the final contestants in a really cruel beauty pageant.

One day, with the band-aids safely out of reach, Nora made do with what she could find. She emerged from the bathroom with a broad grin and a strange shininess to her countenance. She had squozen (it’s a word if I say so!) the entire tube of Neosporin out on her lap and spread it thickly over her arms, legs and feet, like some kind of high-gloss, anti-bacterial spa treatment.

Nora’s just really into the concept of owies lately. When she gets a bona fide injury—and any scrape, mosquito bite, scuff, or broken toenail will do—she isn’t satisfied until the world kicks itself up to DEFCON 5 and slathers her with the urgent attention and ointment and flexible fabric bandages she so desperately requires. What amuses me the most is that when I plunk her next to the bathroom sink to attend to her wounds, she turns herself towards the mirror so she can watch herself cry. She’s tragically beautiful when she cries. There’s something about having your pain and suffering reflected back at you that doubles the call for self-pity. Oh the injustice of it all! She’s thinking. I never did anything to the sidewalk. Why has it bitten me? I am an adorable creature. Everyone tells me I’m the cutest thing ever to grace the planet. There’s just no call for that kind of vindictiveness. Then she tells me she needs “two baa-baas....and more” because there’s clearly blood involved this time and big-toe wounds are notoriously prone to gangrene.

Maybe this obsession is a sign that my daughter will someday find herself in a medical profession, like her brother Gabie. Or maybe she’ll just be a professional hypochondriac. I’m just hopeful that when summer ends, we’ll see a decrease in the band-aid consumption. This is the season that has introduced Nora to the thrill of the great outdoors. She loves to ride her little bike and run around wild and free with the big boys. The world is her oyster. Or maybe it’s her spiny sea urchin, judging by the injury rate.

One of the great masterpieces to survive from the Hellenistic period of sculpture is an image of a boy with a thorn in his foot. He sits on a pile of rocks with one leg crossed over the other knee, studying the bottom of his foot and tweezing out the thorn. It’s rare in Greek art to see children depicted in sculpture. Greeks were more interested in the ideal: the perfect athlete, the goddess of beauty, grown men with washboard abs and chiseled confidence. But here’s a child with a problem. He’s oblivious to all else but this thorn in his foot. The lines of the sculpture—his shins, arms, even the angle of his nose—all point us to the center of his space and the center of his attention. There’s this crucial, all-important thing he has to take care of before he can go anywhere. Once you have a thorn in your heel, it’s going to drive you crazy until you get it out, simple as that. Kids are simply more honest about the process of pain and pain relief. Why suffer in silence when the natural thing is to get help or at least help yourself? Adults should be so smart. If band-aids make my daughter feel better, she should have them, lots of them, boxes and boxes of them as long as they continue to work their magic, as long as her wounds are this easy to heal.

Gabie-ism, Olympic edition

2008-08-06T10:44:00.002-07:00

I'm explaining the Olympics to Gabie last night. I tell him about the different medals: the bronze, silver and gold. He interrupts me and says "There's no way it's solid gold. I'll bet it has a steel core....And who gets the aluminum medal? Cause aluminum would be a good thing to make one out of. It would be lighter. And you could take it camping."

Organic cuticle treatment made with locally grown cherries

2008-07-30T05:52:00.003-07:00

Step one in the Kingsolver plan and the reason why I discovered, while raising my hand in a university meeting yesterday, that my nails are still stained such a dark purple I may have to sit on them for the rest of the week...

here and there and on a train and with a cake

2008-07-22T07:50:00.005-07:00

Update: I’ve checked the “My pictures” folder several times a day for the last three days and it’s still empty. I keep hoping maybe all the files will suddenly appear again as mysteriously as they vanished. But nope. I did back up my laptop about a year ago. I also have many of the family pictures on another computer so all is not lost. Most of the art images that I use in my classes are also embedded in Powerpoints (and thankfully those were not abducted by aliens or I wouldn’t be typing this right now because I’d be humming show tunes softly to myself in a padded cell). Anyway, life goes on and other such plucky platitudes. I’m shopping for an external hard drive so I can do more regular backups. And maybe a new laptop. Any suggestions?

In more cheerful news, McKay celebrated his 10th birthday this weekend. He’s our resident train aficionado and future engineer, so we spent the day on Saturday riding Trax up to Salt Lake and then the Front Runner commuter rail from Salt Lake to Ogden. Three full hours on trains. We also went to the train museum in Ogden and spent another hour with the trains in their side yard. The boys were all in ecstasy. Nora, after the 30 seconds it took for the novelty of riding in a train to wear off, was bored and stir crazy. Enough of this train scene, already! By the end of the day (and it was a long, long, long day) Ken and I were tired of trying to keep Nora from climbing on everything and running near the doors every time they opened at a new stop and pestering every other passenger on board as if they were her newest and dearest friends. Ken saw a t-shirt on another 2-year old that I just have to get for Nora. It said “My parents are exhausted.”

Yesterday, we had Ken’s family over for cake and ice cream. McKay wanted a train cake (of course) and since he loves to cook, I came up with a plan for a cake that he could help me with. Tahdaah!

McKay really did most of the work. He glued all the cars together with royal icing and attached the wheels and designed the tanker cars. I love how the red and white theme works with the strawberries, which were also McKay’s touch. When it came time to cut the cake, nobody had the heart to demolish the train, so we carefully removed all the cars and just ate the cake. I may have the train on top of my fridge for the next 10 years of his life.

why my laptop is in a time out

2008-07-19T09:45:00.005-07:00

There’s very little in life more frustrating than having a laptop—a laptop that you depend upon for all of your writing projects and teaching materials and correspondence and various family projects and blog files—develop a habit of losing power and shutting down at random intervals at least 4 or 5 times a day. You’ll be typing away, or dealing with an email when suddenly, your laptop starts beeping at you, whining that it has reached critically low battery level (even though it is plugged in and the battery stopped working years ago). This means you have about 15 seconds to save whatever you’re doing and close everything down and shut your laptop and pray for it to decide that it has reason enough to keep living at least one more day. You’ll decide you feel like you have a two-year-old child in your arms and she doesn’t want to go wherever it is you need to take her and so she’s gone limp, like a 30-pound eel, and it’s all you can do to keep her from oozing out of your grasp and running away from you, and maybe she’s clothed only in a diaper because she refuses to let you put a shirt over her head, and maybe that diaper is even saggingly wet because you’re dreading the battle it will be to change her, and maybe she’s trying to run outside again because she wants to live there—just take her pillow and hot-pink crocs and never step foot inside the house again—but you need to get something done in the kitchen and you don't have the time right now to follow her around the block on her new Little Mermaid bike so when she manages to arch her way out of your clutches onto the floor, you have to race for the door and lock the deadbolt before she gets to it so she can throw her fit on the inside rather than on the outside where she’ll make you chase her into the driveway and maybe into the road where you pray there will be no traffic if you’re too slow. Or something like that.

The only thing I can think of more frustrating than this is moving your cursor across the screen to pull up a picture for a blog post one evening and clicking on the folder that says “My pictures”—the folder that has hundreds of family photos and every single work of art you’ve ever scanned in for your classes—and having your laptop lie to you and say “Folder is empty” when you know there is no possible way on earth that the entire folder and all its sub-folders and sub-sub folders with their massive lists of jpg’s could have been wiped clean with no warning. This must be a lie. A cruel joke that your computer is playing on you to punish you for your loss of faith in its ability to compute or even turn on when you ask nicely. Yeah. This is probably worse.

Spiral Jetty-ness

2008-07-12T08:57:00.010-07:00

Last week we made a pilgrimage to the Spiral Jetty. I've been there before, but not for a few years and I wanted to see how it was doing. The jetty is the artist Robert Smithson's masterpiece. It's Utah's claim to fame in all the art books. It's the best-known example of a post-modern earthwork--a type of sculpture that defies museum culture and evokes the mounds and monuments of ancient civilizations. And really, it's just a darn cool piece of art, just about my favorite piece of art on the whole planet. It's a shame it takes 3 hours--the last of them on a road so bumpy you're swallowing your dental fillings by the end--to get there. But it's also a good thing it's in such a remote spot. How else could we experience a masterpiece and spend an hour looking at it, walking inside it, feeling its surface, smelling and tasting the salt of the air around it entirely by ourselves?

I'm writing an article about the trip that I hope to sell to a local journal. (Current rate of speed: one hour per paragraph. I hope this picks up.) In the meantime, I'll post some photos to give you a sense of how incredibly beautiful this place is. Ethan declared it an "ugly beauty" and I have to agree. It's a desolate, surreal, unsentimental kind of beauty.

Here's the Jetty from above, coiling out into the lake bed. As we were walking out of the spiral Ethan and I ran into a dude coming in (Ethan later nicknamed him Hippie Dave). Hippie Dave was shirtless, wore a braid of hemp around his neck, and had long straight black hair with the top tied up in a pony tail. He (seriously) bowed to us as we passed and then we struck up a conversation about the place and Smithson's philosophies. What a trip. If you look closely at this photo, at the very center of the spiral, you can see Hippie Dave as we left him, his arms raised up to heaven, communing with the forces of art and nature.

This is Ethan, walking the first coil of the spiral.

This is McKay, dancing in the shallow salt marsh around the jetty. Yes the water really is pink. Smithson described it as the color of pale blood and made references to primordial seas.

More water. I took about a million pictures. Be grateful I'm sparing you the whole slide show.

The basalt rocks on the jetty are covered in salt crystals. Smithson was obsessed with the idea of entropy, the dissolution of order in the natural universe. He died 4 years after completing the jetty. I think he would love to see the way his sculpture is gradually returning to the lake.

Me at the center of the spiral. I'm resisting the urge to crop the heck out of this photo (like maybe show it from the nose up). Trying to keep it real...

The only picture Ken would let me take of him. (You can play a little game of "Where's ~~Waldo~~ Ken" if you'd like).

Gabie eating a Ho Ho after we got back to the car. This is my contribution to the whole "pilgrimage to Spiral Jetty" culture. I take spiral snacks along: this time it was ho ho's and the makings for peanut butter wraps. Last time it was cinnamon rolls. Next time maybe I'll make a whole jelly roll cake.

Animal, vegetable, guilt trip

2008-07-11T19:15:00.003-07:00

Does this ever happen to you? You read a book that makes you want to radically change your life? It happens to me all the time. Some fantastic author presents a convincing argument for a new way to raise kids, or persuades me that sugar is the worst thing I could put into my body, or tells me how I can become a thinner, happier, or more Zen me and I’m caught up in a wave of agreement. I can’t wait to get started on my new course. I’m going to change the world. Or at least my family. Or maybe just myself. But it’s going to be a change for the better. I’m sure of it.

Then the momentum wears off and reality sinks in and I usually fall back into old habits and not much changes. Except that I feel guilty on yet another level because I’m more aware of something else I should be doing differently.

I’m reading an amazing book right now: Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. There’s no doubt she’s a fantastic writer. But did you also know she and her family chose to live a year on a farm in the Appalachian mountains eating only food they could get from neighborhood farmers or grow themselves? I already lean towards the tree-hugger side of the environmental awareness scale, so I knew I’d love this book, but now I find myself wishing we could really do this—that we could give up our dependence on food that has crossed several state lines or maybe entire oceans to get to us (and used limited fuel resources and contributed to global warming on the way), that we could eat only food that is in season (not strawberries in January and synthetic tomatoes in March and imported bananas every single day of the year), that we could know where everything on our plate actually came from. Her arguments are very convincing because she’s right. I was converted by page 5. When she started talking about how food is a spiritually loaded commodity, that everything we eat (and how it gets to us) represents an ethical decision, she had me singing “Amen sister!”

The trouble is, I’m not sure I could really change my life so drastically (and the lives of my husband and children, let’s not forget them and their love of all things packaged processed and out of season). Am I prepared to deprive my family of bananas? Or artificially-large-breasted-but-darn-juicy chicken? Or canned everything? I have a hard enough time cooking meals when I can choose from every single item in the supermarket for ingredients. What makes me think I could be the home-canning queen? I looked into locally grown food this week and guess what? It’s more expensive than the stuff in the grocery store. We’re already feeling the pinch of higher food costs lately. How can we afford to spend more?

We have a healthy garden with 6 different kinds of peppers and tomatoes and squash and some zucchini plants that are already producing like there’s no tomorrow (anybody want some free zucchini? please? anyone?). But now Barbara has me thinking we should be planting heirloom seeds and starting a poultry farm. She has me feeling great pangs of guilt because my fridge and pantry cupboards are full of fossil fuel. She has simultaneously won me over and depressed the heck out of me. I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish the book. Do I really need to keep reading to find out how it ends? I assume they all survive the winter. She couldn’t have written the book if they starved to death, right?

I’m not sure what to do. Any suggestions? While I’m waiting for answers, I’m going to go numb my conscience with a really tasty—and unethical on many levels not the least of which is cinnamon that had to be flown several thousand miles to my house—batch of snickerdoodles.

life and death and mail-order caterpillars

2008-07-07T15:35:00.004-07:00

A month ago, we sent away for caterpillars.
Three weeks ago, they arrived in the mail.
We watched them eat.
We watched them produce five times their weight in caterpillar dung.
We woke up one morning to five chrysalises.
We waited.
The butterflies emerged a few days later.
They dried their wings.
They fluttered around a bit in their net but did not fly.
They pressed their bodies together, mating in captivity.
Yesterday, we let them go.
They flew, awkwardly at first.
They stayed close, swooped around our flowers and circled back for several minutes.
Then they were gone and we took the empty net back inside.
Today, in two milk lids taped together, we buried the one who died midway to maturity.
My son is sad and I tell him that it's part of nature. We can't help it if sometimes nature is cruel, sometimes butterflies just don't make it. He seems to accept this explanation.
But I can't get over the image of the tiny interrupted thing, its sticky wings caught in the cracks of a chrysalis shell so thin it is already turning to dust.

Hey Kool-Aid!

2008-07-03T07:35:00.003-07:00

There are two boys on my front porch asking if Gabie can play. They live at the other end of our neighborhood and are Gabie’s same age, but they aren’t kids he usually plays with. It has been a very hot day and we’ve spent it mostly inside, and Gabie is clearly restless and delighted that Joseph and Jason have come over. “I’ll meet you on the other side of the garage,” he tells them, “I have to grab my shoes.” I can hear him jabbering to them from the garage about his new bike (“which isn’t really new, but it’s new to me since I just got it from my brother McKay who got a new one for his birthday, and mine's the blue one and look how big the tires are. . .”).

Shoes on, Gabie opens the door into the kitchen to tell me they’re all going to ride their bikes over to Jason’s house because Jason is going to give him a popsicle. “Be home in one hour,” I tell him, “and call me if you’re going anywhere else.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Gabie is back. He has a wounded look on his face. “What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“They wanted me to pay for the popsicle. And I didn’t have a dollar and 25 cents so they told me I couldn’t play and had to go home.”

Naturally, my first impulse is to run down to Jason’s house and give those boys (and their mothers) a piece of my mind. Those little punks. Instead, I see that Gabie still just needs somebody to talk to. I ask him, “How do you feel?”
“Exhausted.” he says. “Exhausted and disappointed.”

I get him a drink of water (wish I had popsicles!) and a few minutes later he seems back to his old spunky self. Now he’s babbling on about how he wants to give something away. “What can I give away?” he asks me. “I’m not going to make anybody pay for it. It will be free. This is going to make other people really happy. I’m sweet aren’t I.”

“Yes, you’re sweet” I say. I’m laughing out loud by now and grabbing my pen. He’s used to this and lets me take a moment to document his sweetness on paper. Then we have to figure out what it is he’s going to give away. He suggests cookies but I think it’s too hot and too close to dinner to make cookies. We settle on Kool-Aid which is a rare treat around our house (because I know most kids’ drinks are full of sugar but with Kool-Aid you actually witness the whole cup of sugar going in and I just can’t handle the honesty).

Soon Gabie has mixed a batch of grape Kool-Aid and grabbed a stack of plastic cups and a table and chairs and is parked out on the front sidewalk waiting for “customers” to walk by so he can surprise them with the news that it’s all free today. Unconditional sweetness. No charge. No strings attached.

musings from Gabie the linguist

2008-07-01T21:38:00.001-07:00

I love the phase Gabie’s in right now. He’s six and reading and keenly aware of language but still doesn’t appreciate how random it all really is. He thinks once you learn the basics of grammar, you can predict how it will always work. If only this were true. But being Gabie, he just charges ahead undaunted. If the English language doesn’t make sense, you just invent your own, more logical, more Gabified version.

A few recent examples...

Mom, why do they call it cider? Cause I think there’s nothing it goes on the side of.

Gabie: Is this paper terrible?
Mom: What?
Gabie: You know, is this terrible paper?
Mom: Honey, I still don’t understand what you’re talking about.
Gabie: Is this the kind of paper you can tear?
Mom: Oh! You mean is it tear-able?
Gabie: Isn’t that what I just said?

That was so funny. You laughed the heck out of me.

(After a trip to the dentist this week...) Mom, how much did it cost for him to look at my tooth? I don’t think we should pay the dentist, I think the dentist should pay us. Because he’s the one that makes the kids suffer hurtiness.

(This one’s my favorite, but it might take a minute—like it took me—to figure out Gabie’s thought process). Mom, my favorite pants are dirty. Can you please wash them? Don’t worry, it won’t waste much energy if you wash just one cloh.

the cave - an allegory entirely unlike Plato's

2008-06-30T15:48:00.007-07:00

We're back from our jaunt to Bear Lake. Yes, I had an intense, week-long writer's conference followed immediately by a family trip and now I'm faced with the laundry and teaching-issues backlog to prove it. I have a whole list of things to write about and wish I had more time today to devote to such lovely tasks as writing, but in the meantime, here's one simple thought I had this weekend while spelunking (or rather walking up and down conveniently widened corridors and metal stairs) in the Minnetonka cave near St. Charles Idaho.

You know when you go on a tour to a commercialized cave and the guide has this memorized speech to give you about the different formations? You know how she tells you that this rock is Kermit the Frog and over here is Miss Piggy's tail and if you shine the light just right on this huge slab over here you can make out the face of Abraham Lincoln? I was thinking about how we go along with this scenario so willingly. How we wait for her to tell us exactly what we're supposed to see in the limestone because someone before us has decided what it all means and heaven forbid we decide that we don't think that looks at all like a pig's tail and in fact we're sure it is one of those curly fries you can get at Arby's only without the extra dusting of paprika?

This is the challenge I face with some of my students. They're waiting for me to be the tour guide. They're used to being told what art means by someone who's been there before and knows where to shine the flashlight. They have a hard time accepting the fact that we're looking at independent objects, things that have no absolute labels stamped on them in a secret code that only the fully trained park rangers/teachers can decode. Sure, each work of art is a reflection of the artist who produced it and the cultural values behind that artist, but it can also be about a million things more. It's my job to convince my students that I can only teach them how to study art, I can't (or at least I shouldn't) compound the myth that they have to wait for the proper interpretation before they can make their own judgments. I can (and should) let them experience that liberating feeling you get when you realize that the artist is not the only creative force in the life of an artwork. It takes creativity to decide for yourself what you see in the stalactites. Or maybe, you can even just see the stalactites for what they are: art for art's sake. They serve no real purpose, no practical function. They don't have to mean anything. They are simply beautiful--surprising twists of life and color and texture in an otherwise ordinary slice of earth.

What the living do

2008-06-26T04:56:00.005-07:00

Another day. Another assignment from the writers' conference. This one was sparked by a poem by Marie Howe called "What the living do."

What the living do
By Julie Q.

Each year on his birthday, for the first part of his life, Vincent Van Gogh visited the grave of his dead older brother. I picture Vincent—wild-eyed and serious, even as a young child—facing the grave stone and staring long and pointedly at the letters and dates carved into it. I picture him watching his mother cry for the stillborn baby, the baby who shared Vincent’s own first name, shared his birthday, shared his rust-colored hair. Did he see his mother’s coldness towards himself and her tortured grief for the first child as a sign of her preference for the dead over the living? Did he ask the ghost of this first Vincent to walk beside him for all of those 37 years? Did he, as some suggest, paint this dead brother numerous times? Give him what he lacked: adult form and textured presence?

Each year on the Sunday closest to my birthday (which happens to fall near Memorial day) I visit the graves of my two dead brothers. This is what the living do. I help my sisters clean off the headstones with paintbrushes and water collected in a plastic cup from the nearest spigot. My mother brings a pair of gardening shears and trims the grass away from the edges. In the months between our visits, the grass always encroaches. It covers the lips of the stone and must be trimmed and pushed back, like nail cuticles. My father stands next to the boulder, the one the cemetery agreed to roll next to my brother’s grave after a careless driver let a tire stray too far off the gravel roadway and crack the headstone.

When I was younger, I would help more with the tending of my brothers’ graves. Now I have to keep an eye on my own children, remind them to stop running in the cemetery, pull them away from the water, keep them off the road, tell them again the stories about why my brothers died, the one with the backwards heart, the other—the one I remember only as a gush of fluid on the stone entry-way floor and as a tranquil baby in an orange sleeper, resting in a coffin the size of my dollhouse—the other, I was told, who was born too perfect for this world. And I watch my mother—my beautiful mother—who was not cold and who was not crazy except maybe a little crazy to have had so many children and to have not cried every single day for the rest of her life for the loss of these two alone. I watch her. And I marvel. This is what the living do.

This was not what I asked for

2008-06-24T20:11:00.003-07:00

Each day of our morning workshop at the writer’s conference, our instructor (the fabulous Abigail Thomas) gives us an assignment. Yesterday, she read a poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly that began with the line “It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish.” Our follow-up assignment was to write something with this line for our title: “It was not a ______ I asked for. I asked for a _______.”

I fully intended to write something worthy of the task—to compose a little gem as lyrical as the original poem. But my life is not conducive to poetry. It lends itself more to prose. Silly prose at that. Oh well. They always say you have to write about what you know. Here's what I know.

It was not a swim in pool of sludge I asked for. I asked for a bath.
by Julie Q.

It is 9 pm and after a busy afternoon and evening, I finally have a few free moments to spare for writing. I pop open my laptop on the kitchen table. Gabie and Nora are a few feet away, across the hall in the bathtub. They splash and giggle. I think deep writerly thoughts and wait for inspiration to strike. It strikes with a vengeance.

A cry comes from the bathroom. Two cries. I’m in there in a split second but it takes a moment for my brain to process the scene. The bathwater is filled with floating chunks of shredded cardboard. No, it is not cardboard. “Aaaah!” Gabie wails, “Nora pooped in the tub!” Nora is equally indignant. “Poo Tub” she cries, accusingly, as if the stuff has appeared out of nowhere.

I don’t have a clue where to start. I assume I should rescue the children first. But where do I put them while I decontaminate the tub so I can load them back in it to clean them off? What tools am I going to need? I suspect my box of baby wipes—the Swiss Army knife of the American housewife—just isn’t going to cut it this time. How is it possible that a 2-year old child could even produce so much waste at once? I have been a mother for more than a decade. Over the years I have cleaned up all manner of children’s bodily fluids from every surface imaginable including my own clothing and hair. When I recently read an author’s blurb bragging that she had used more than 27 different terms for vomit in her parenting book, I found myself nodding in total understanding. But we may have reached a new low in grossness.

Just so you know, I would never make it a point to use 27 different terms for vomit in my writing. I don’t even want to write about vomit. Or toilet training. Or disasters of the pee and poo variety. I am not Erma Bombeck. I am not a 9-year old boy who thinks every sentence is better if it somehow incorporates the word “underwear.” I’m not even the type of writer who considers the use of 27 different terms for vomit praiseworthy. It’s just a frank reality that a large part of parenthood involves dealing with bodily fluids. I once calculated it at about 80%. (Of course, this was the year my oldest son had acquired the world’s most sensitive gag reflex and rarely made it through a day without incident, so the statistic may be skewed.) This is not something I knew about motherhood before I began. I did not ask to become an expert on the containment and removal of urine, vomit, diarrhea, blood, and tears. Childhood is a wet, sticky, oozy place.

One winter while I was in graduate school in Pennsylvania, we took a trip to New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art. We spent hours in the museum, but I can only specifically recall seeing two works. I remember standing in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. And I remember walking past—in a baffled state—a row of large metallic jugs presumably filled with liquids and labeled pus, vomit, saliva, urine, semen, blood, etc. I was a student of the arts. I had been exposed to post-modern absurdities before, but even I was mystified.

The fact that I remember this work 15 year later instead of the dozens of other masterpieces I saw that day speaks for itself. This artist (Kiki Smith) was a genius. Her ideas are transcendent and universal, not to mention memorable. It doesn’t even matter that her work expressed entirely different ideas to her than it did to me. She was likely inspired by the AIDS crisis. I find myself thinking of these jugs from a different perspective, the perspective of a woman who has learned intimately how vital and natural and common these fluids are. I have gained a whole new appreciation for why the medieval philosophers believed that we are kept in balance only by the ebb and flow of bodily humours. I have carried children in amniotic fluid. I have produced milk from my own breasts to feed them. I have tended to their wounds—their pus and blood. And yes I have cleaned up their wastes. And then I have bathed them and rinsed them clean and toweled them dry and held them against my beating heart.

on being a brave writer

2008-06-23T21:44:00.002-07:00

My dear blog readers: (I’m hoping there’s maybe 3 or 4 of you still left after my past several weeks of neglect, but maybe I’m just talking to my mother at this point. Hi Mom.). I feel like apologizing for not writing on my blog more faithfully, but I won’t. I won’t apologize because I think I’ve been in this position before and I worry about it becoming a bad pattern (post lots, post less, post hardly at all, beg for forgiveness, promise to do better, post lots, and so forth. Sound familiar?). I also won’t apologize because it was all for a good cause. I’ve been busy with other writing projects and I’m feeling good about how things are going. I also plan to blog more, starting today. (Okay, so maybe I’ll do the “promise to do better” thing after all. I can’t help it). I will admit that I won’t have time to polish everything I want to say or even come up with snazzy connections to art every day, but my blog is my incubator for my writing and—if nothing else—I need to keep it plugged in. Gotta let those little chicks hatch.

Today was day one of my writer’s conference. I’ve been looking forward to this conference for weeks. And so far, it does not disappoint. In the morning workshop, we discussed three manuscripts and one of them was mine. Can I just say I’m eternally grateful we got mine over with on the first day? I was a nervous wreck. I felt like bursting into tears just from the sheer terror of it all. But the really amazing thing was everyone seemed to like my writing. The feedback was encouraging and I got some good ideas of things I need to work on. Mostly, I walked away with a renewed sense of confidence. I’m not a total joke of a writer. I can finish my book. I will finish it.

These are important things I need to say to myself. Writing is a natural thing. Most of us can write. It’s not that scary. But trying to write well. . . this is another thing entirely. To write well, you have to take risks. You have to dislocate language from its comfort zones—the clichés and turns of phrase that are always the first to pop into your head and that are poison to any sincere attempts at saying something truly creative and new. I’m not typically a risk taker. I’m a wimp. I go into a panic when I have to stick my neck out. There’s always the chance that I’ll say something utterly stupid or too melodramatic or over-reaching. I could just play it safe and say things that sound familiar. But the problem is, they sound familiar because they’ve been said a million times before. To write well, it takes courage and a willingness to make a total fool of myself along the way.

So tonight, I am relieved. It’s always a huge relief when it feels like my occasional bursts of bravery might get me somewhere worth going.

sadists with brushes

2008-06-13T06:23:00.005-07:00

It's the end of the term, so I'm in the thick of a grading marathon (plus the mommython continues as always) but I just had to post my nomination for the typo of the year. My student here was writing about Impressionism, so I think the word he was going for was "paint." But at midnight, I appreciated this version so much more...

"Art during this era was particularly fond of heavy doses of pain."

Exploiting the workers

2008-06-11T13:48:00.005-07:00

I spent the summer after my sophomore year at BYU working at my uncle Randy’s cookie factory in California. It may sound like a dream job (and yes, the cookies were amazingly good, and no, I never got sick of eating them for every meal—and I really mean for every meal not with every meal) but I worked mostly in the business office, sorting through invoices and dealing with boring accounting paperwork. A few weeks into the summer, my little brother Steve joined me and my uncle put him to work in the factory. Steve had just graduated from high school and has always been a smart kid, but for some reason his assignment turned out to be doing menial tasks: fixing broken things, cleaning stuff, climbing up inside the drop ceiling to dust off the tiles.

A few days before it was time for Steve to head back home, Uncle Randy and the other factory owners were having trouble with their computer system. Steve suggested that he could fix if for them and they finally discovered what a brilliant little brother I have. Even though he was young, Steve had been programming computers for years and had (still does have) a real gift. My uncle was amazed. He also totally regretted not taking advantage of Steve’s skills before. For weeks, Steve had been dealing with ceiling dust when all along he could have been a great help in the office.

I’ve been thinking about this story lately because I have made a similar discovery. My kids are far more capable than I have given them credit for. They’ve always had chores—simple things like cleaning their room and unloading the dishwasher (and they have always whined about how said chores are a huge pain). But honestly, looking back, I see they’ve had it pretty easy. They worked for a few minutes a day; I did all the rest. No wonder I always felt overwhelmed.

Lately, thanks to the amazing influence of Lara (the Lazy Organizer) and a great book by Debbie Bowen, I have turned over a new dustpan. The kids make most of the messes around here. They can certainly contribute more to household maintenance. They also need to learn how to do things (for their own good and for the good of their future roommates and spouses). I just had to start delegating and firming up the resolve to exploit my built-in underage working class.

Courbet, Stonebreakers (1849)

Step one was establishing a new after-dinner policy. No one leaves the kitchen until it’s clean. No exceptions. I offered an incentive (a special excursion when we had 50 stars on the calendar, one for each night of a clean kitchen) and enlisted the help of my husband who is always willing to wash the dishes. Did you know that a 12-year old boy is fully capable of sweeping the floor, even if it’s a really nasty tile floor with deep grout joints? That a 9-year old can clear the table and wipe off all the counters and only has to be called back a few times to catch the spots he missed before he’ll learn to do it right the first time? That a 6-year old will insist that unloading the silverware is “way too hard” but is more than willing to scrub off the stovetop and clean all the knives because he got to pick these jobs himself? That as long as the kitchen is full of happy workers, a 2-year old will stay in her high chair forever? Maybe the rest of the parenting world has already figured this out years ago, but I was totally underestimating the beauty of child labor.

Step two has been to increase the daily assignments and realign Saturday chores. With the start of summer and a sudden surge in free time, this has been relatively easy. We may have to reevaluate things when school starts again, but for now, I think the workload is totally fair. The kids are cleaning the bathroom, dealing with the garbages, vacuuming, mopping the kitchen floor, and straightening the living room. On Monday of this week—and I swear this is the truth—McKay told me he wanted to be in charge of all the laundry from now on. After picking my jaw off the floor and smothering him with kisses, I said “Okay, if you twist my arm.” I supervised him a bit and gave him some instructions but he got the hang of things pretty quickly. He did 6 full batches on Monday alone. If this continues, I’m going to be out of a job soon. What on earth will I do with myself?

The next step is to follow Lara’s tutelage and get my kids cooking dinner. I may have to set out some guidelines or it will be Ramen noodles every night.

Maybe I should give my Uncle Randy a call and get a few of his cookie recipes.

12 excuses why I’ve been averaging one sorry blog post a week

2008-05-29T10:52:00.004-07:00

1. I’ve been busy.

2. I’ve been funneling all my creative energies into other writing projects in preparation for a writer’s conference I'm attending next month (where I get to meet with agents, editors and writers who actually know what they’re doing. Wahoo).

3. Lately, whenever I get some free time, I don’t feel like writing on my blog. I feel like reading. Or listening to a podcast. Or walking. Or watching entire seasons of West Wing in one stretch. Or pretty much anything besides writing on my blog which for some reason feels like a chore to me or maybe an old boyfriend who I used to be infatuated with but now he just gives me the creeps so I ignore his calls and walk on the other side of the hall whenever I see him coming just to avoid eye contact.

4. Sometimes I’m just too sad.

5. It’s not that I’m depressed. It’s just that my life is depressing and I’d be an idiot not to get sad about it. I like to think there’s a difference.

6. Some days, I’m sad enough that I hear things like this about how a giant new particle accelerator may have the potential to create a black hole that will eventually swallow all life on earth as we know it and you know what I think? I think: What a relief.

7. Trust me, nobody wants to read what I would write on a day like that.

8. Some days I remember I also have a wonderful life with amazing kids and a great job and a husband I can talk with about anything. I should write on days like that. But I don't because I'm too busy taking care of my kids and dealing with my job and talking to my husband.

9. I’ve been exercising an hour every day. This is good for my body but it cuts into my writing time.

10. Nora has been sick (again) and grumpy. She insists on sitting on my lap (up peese!) whenever I try to type anything.

11. I keep meaning to get back into the habit of writing every day (okay so maybe I wasn't ever actually in that habit, but I plan to start). I have the best intentions. I compose handfuls of posts in my mind over the course of a single day. I have a million things to say. Then it’s 11 pm and I say, I can write something or I can just go to bed and worry about it tomorrow.

12. I have a very comfy bed.

Why we need a national kid day

2008-05-20T08:13:00.004-07:00

It must be spring. My kids would move their beds and all their worldly possessions outside and LIVE in the yard full-time if I let them. Also, they can't wait for school to end so they can get on with the really important stuff. All weekend long, all four of my children were seriously committed to catching every bug within a 2-mile radius and studying them like the scientists they are and then, every night, releasing them ceremoniously to live another day.

McKay has had a particularly tough school year and he's the most excited to see summer vacation right around the corner. He told me he's tired of adults who never listen to what kids really think. "Kids have great ideas if people would just pay attention," he said.
"I think so too." I said. "What's your great idea today?"
"Kids should get paid vacations."
"But you already have those. Don't you get holidays and spring break and stuff?"
"No, I mean paid vacations. You know how Dad gets days where he doesn't go to work and he still gets paid. Well, I think we should have times where we don't have to go to school but we still get straight A's."

He's right. Maybe we should just put the kids in charge from now on.

Flashback

2008-05-13T15:28:00.004-07:00

In honor of Mother’s Day weekend, I spent from 6 am to midnight on Saturday working working working. It was one of those days where I hardly had time to eat (wish that happened a little more frequently) and my body ached all over by the time I finally crawled into bed, but it actually felt good to get so much accomplished. I tackled some projects I’d been meaning to get around to for months, the largest of which was to sort through every stitch of children’s clothing in the house (many boxes and many hours’ worth) and pack away the clothes we are saving and give away the rest. I took not one but two trips to the thrift store, where they were kind enough to tell me “thanks for your donation” and hand me coupons as I unloaded on them several garbage bags full of my purgings. Suckers. (Of course, I’ll be back next week to use those coupons and pay them real money for a pile of things they got from someone else for free. Who’s the sucker now?)

My laundry room is now clean. The drawers on my children’s dressers—the ones that used to require the thigh and back strength of linebackers to wrestle shut—now glide into place with at least a centimeter of head room to spare. My home feels a little lighter. My list of things to do is shorter. What more can a mother ask for?

In my sortings, I came across a box of old calendar pages. In our leaner years, the only way I could afford to decorate our home was to buy artsy calendars on clearance in February and cut the paintings out and frame them with whatever used frames I could find and refinish. One of the pieces of art I rediscovered on Saturday must have come from a calendar we had actually used because on one side was a gorgeous painting by Frederick Carl Frieseke and on the other side—the month of May, 1995—there were notes and scrawls about appointments and such. The fascinating part was not so much the notes themselves, but the huge empty gaps in between. In the entire month of May, there are only six days with anything written on them (and one of those things is a reminder to watch a documentary on TV so it hardly counts as a pressing engagement). The rest of the boxes are blissfully naked. How is it even possible that I once lived a life of such negative space?

I’m sure if you had asked me at the time, I would have told you I was a very busy person. I was working full time. I was teaching a class each semester. I was cooking and cleaning for two. Ken and I were hunting for a new house that summer. And I was pregnant (one of our six May appointments was the ultrasound that would tell us our first boy was on the way). But truly, in comparison to the effusive, ink-covered calendar that currently hangs on my kitchen wall, May of 1995 was a positively peaceful month. I would even dare say it felt much like the painting on its reverse side. I must have strolled through the days like the woman in pale green, taking a moment to examine a dainty stem of hollyhocks. She blends right in, another column of greenery among the rest. She is surrounded by flowers and space and time in abundance. I can’t even imagine having that kind of leisure.

A country fantasy

2008-05-06T13:41:00.003-07:00

For our anniversary, Ken and I took a weekend jaunt to a historic town in central Utah called Spring City. While we were there, we looked around at the sleepy main street, rode our bikes up and down the sidewalk-less roads (past sheep and goats and pastured horses and a cemetery with gravestones dating back to the 1800s), ate in a café where the regulars chatted about water shares, and watched a man drive to church on his four-wheeler. We also got as serious as you can get in 24 hours about moving there someday. It’s a kind of mutual dream Ken and I have—to transplant ourselves to country soil, to get away from the crowded valley where we live (…and work and fight the traffic of a half-million other people’s lives and works), to trade in our tiny backyard for a few acres of weeds and some sycamores big enough to anchor a treehouse for the kids. I yearn for a coop full of chickens so badly I have already picked out names for all of them. I want to sit near an open window and not hear the sounds I hear right now: the beeping of reversing construction vehicles, the zooming of semis on the freeway a mile away, the roaring of the lifeflight helicopter landing at the hospital down the road, the incessant yelping of our neighbor’s neurotic penned-up dog.

I’m fully aware that we might hold a slightly romanticized view of country life. In my Spring City fantasy for example, we have no neighbors with trashy yards full of rusting abandoned farm equipment and discarded appliances (Mavis next door, however does keep an old cast-iron tub spilling over with wildflowers out back). The air is always fragrant—not “pastoral” in a way that had me checking the back of my shoes obsessively for the first several hours of our stay in Spring City. The regulars at the café never tire of discussing irrigation and move on to gossiping about our private lives. Our children would never get injured in falls from their four-wheelers and require a 45 minute drive to the nearest medical facility. There are no biting flies in my Spring City. The cows mill about cooperatively in a picturesque fashion and produce no cow pies.

I’m willing to take even a less-than ideal version of my fantasy if it would allow me to extricate myself (and my children) from our current nature-deprived, plugged-in, materialistic surroundings. But of course, as Ken said more than once over the weekend, if we really ever tried to move, the kids would kill us. Yes, they would love the treehouse, but they would hate leaving their friends and schools behind. They would love the wildness of it all, but they would miss the library (and, I admit, I would dearly miss the library too). They would especially hate having to mow the acre of back lawn and take care of my chickens. Oh, and Nora loves real birds but she loves our frequent “copper” flybys even more.

Boucher, Shepherd and Shepherdess reposing

And so I get to keep my fantasy intact—pristine and beatific and all loamy— because I doubt we’ll ever really take the naked leap into a country life. Like the 18th century noble Parisians who imagined the lives of peasants to be sweeter smelling than their own, we’ll have to be content with the perfect, unreal version of farm country we have managed to till in the creative soil of our own minds.

That is, unless we found a really good deal on a five-acre lot with a few sycamores . . .

feedback

2008-05-01T09:36:00.001-07:00

Grades were due yesterday, which means I woke up this morning with the thought that I could finally check out my course evaluations online. If I were a stronger person, I wouldn’t care so much about the evaluations, but being the validation-junkie that I am (exhibit A: my blog), I get a kick out of reading students’ comments at the end of every semester. This morning I was not disappointed. Let me first say that I had a great bunch of students this semester and I put a lot of extra time into class preparations and things just went well. Sometimes things don’t go so well. This time they did and my evaluations reflected this. In terms of ratings numbers, this is my second highest semester ever (and nothing will probably ever beat the summer I had only 25 students and they met outside of class twice a week to have extra study sessions with pizza and we all clicked in a way that made them better students and me a better teacher and at the end of the term I gave them almost all A’s and they gave me a standing ovation and an inscribed book about cathedrals, and well. . . that semester has ascended to semi-mythical heights in my mind and on my evaluation records). But anyway, this past semester came in a close second. I don’t want to brag, but it’s always gratifying to read compliments from the students I have worked hard to teach and have grown very attached to over the past four months. I’ll try to ignore the 2 or 3 negative remarks, including the one that suggested I only teach in classrooms with softer chairs and stadium seating.

My kids were up already and they read my evaluations over my shoulder. Ethan said, “I didn’t know you were such a good teacher.” And McKay said, “Way to go Mom!” This is also gratifying since it’s my kids I must desert when I teach and whom I neglect in innumerable ways when I grade papers and choose to put that aforementioned extra time into class preparations.

Then I read my email and found a rejection letter for an essay I submitted to a journal about two months ago. I interpret the confluence of events as a sign: clearly I’m a better teacher than a writer. And maybe, judging from the feedback I’m getting today, I should be focusing more on my strengths. And maybe even, despite the fact that there’s no such a thing as a Parent and Wife Evaluation form, I should be focusing more on the five people who matter most to me rather than wasting my time with dreams of writerly grandeur. Obviously, I don’t take rejection well.

But really, the Parent and Wife Evaluation form isn’t such a bad idea. For one, I’d like more regular feedback on things like: “Learning materials are effective” and “Course has strengthened my spiritual and intellectual skills” and the important “Instructor shows respect for individual students and their opinions.” I guess with mother’s day coming up, I may expect a card or two, but what if I had a quarterly review complete with scaled questions and suggestions for improvement? What if I could compare my efforts from one semester to the next and keep an eye on my approval ratings (which I suspect just might show a sickly little dip during each pregnancy just as my student evaluations have).

Then again, maybe the occasional “way to go Mom!” is feedback enough. Bear hugs are also good and then there’s Nora’s fishy-mouth kisses—neither of which, let me just make perfectly clear, I get from my students. McKay tells me almost every day “Thanks for all you do for us.” Ken says I’m a good mother. Ethan tells me my cooking is so gourmet I should open a restaurant. Gabie lets me come into his room and hang out with him even after he has attached a forbidding sign to the door that says, “no pepol at ol.” What do I need evaluations for?

Plus I think I’ve long since earned my mommy tenure.

thrifter

2008-04-29T11:55:00.004-07:00

Here’s something you may or may not know about me. I buy about 90% of my clothes and my kids’ clothes at thrift stores. There are many reasons why my thrift-love is a deep deep part of my personality, here are just a few.

1. I’m cheap. And by that I mean I have a very difficult time spending large amounts of money. I get nervous, panicky and literally sick to my stomach when I feel like I’m spending too much. I was raised in a very frugal household and some of my siblings have told me they get similar anxiety attacks when faced with large financial decisions. And by large, I mean anything more than $15.

2. I suffer regularly from buyer’s remorse. Oh the stories my husband could tell you…. (Here's one about a quilt I bought, unbought then bought again, and here's one about the million-dollar chair that still haunts me). I rarely feel buyer’s remorse coming home from the thrift store. It’s hard to feel bad when you just bought several new outfits without crossing the dreaded $15 threshold.

3. To tell the truth, I get a serious, primal thrill out of the hunt. I love finding great buys and doing little self-congratulatory dances in the aisles when I snag cute, high quality clothes for a fraction of what I’d spend if I went to the mall. Here’s what I bought today.

Let me just clarify up front that never in a million years would I waltz into Baby Gap and buy a crazy-quilt skirt with a tag on it that says Dry Clean Only for my almost-2-year-old daughter (for heaven’s sake!). Nor would I bounce into Gymbouree to buy an embroidered WHITE blouse that may or may not see two full wearings before meeting its sticky grapey juicy end. But hey, if I can find both of them for $4 total, I’m a happy woman. I only feel bad that they didn’t have the skirt in my size because it’s that darling.

3. If you have rowdy boys and/or a husband who likes to go camping and/or a mother-in-law who feeds your babies black licorice without first tying around their necks one of those lead vests they use at the dentist’s office, you need to be able to look at your kids’ torn, hopelessly dirty or stained clothes and say “Oh well. Easy come easy go.”

4. My environmental conscience has been overactive lately (and his name is Ethan). I feel guilty about driving my car, about printing my syllabi on virgin paper, about remembering about my recycled grocery bags only when I’m already in the checkout line and I feel really, really guilty about the woolly mammoth parade of carbon footprints left on the earth by my family of six. But I feel okay about giving a second life to a perfectly good pair of jeans that someone else felt okay about giving away. I embrace the slogan they use at the Saver’s thrift store: “Once is not enough.” It reminds me of that obnoxious handbag display I encountered at Nordstrom’s recently—“What if one was not enough?” —except that the first slogan is about conservation and the other is all about corporate greed and the American lust to acquire more and more in an attempt to amass happiness through material things, so pretty much they have nothing in common except the word enough. And doesn’t a lot hinge on exactly how we define that word?

Gabie's Jrnil

2008-04-25T10:11:00.002-07:00

Today's post comes straight from "Gabie's Jrnil" where he writes gems every day far more poetic than anything I've managed to come up with in years of writerly effort. This one falls into the category of really useful instructions that should come in handy at recess or on that great big playground we call life.

(I've tried my best to recreate his original spelling and punctuation. You'll just have to imagine all the S's facing backwards).

Aprol 24t 2008

I aM God at swinGinG AnD THis is THe seCRet
STeP 1 tHinK oF A HAPPY thot
STeP 2 BLef in Your selF
STep 3 PAMP AT A Srtin Sped

a bear of very little brain

2008-04-22T21:16:00.003-07:00

A genuine conversation I had with Gabie today while walking across campus to my office:

Gabie said, "I wish I had brought Panda with us."
"Why is that?" I answered.
"Because he would like to see your office."
"Hasn't he been up here before?"
"Once, a long time ago. But Panda has a very bad memory."
"Oh he does?"
"Yes. When he was just a baby, he had a small brain tumor removed and so now he has a bad memory."
"Oh dear. That's terrible."
"Plus, he has a very small brain. But he still makes a good pet because he's not afraid to take his baths in the washing machine."
"That's the best kind of pet there is."