Every Seven

Jousting with my own mind

2005-08-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy --

-- moving;

-- jousting with my own mind, which is always either a lose-lose or a win-win?!;

-- and making some DVDs on a subject on which I'm interested. So haven't been posting here.

Just when I was getting a few readers too!

It's HOT today in Washington. Haze over the monuments.

Hmm, that's all for now! I'm out of the habit of writing! :)

Coke incident

2005-07-22T02:30:00.000-07:00

I have a friend, "M" I'll call her.

"M" doesn't drive, and she is not in the best health, so our grocery shopping trips are done together -- I provide the car, she provides wonderful company.

Which sounds like I don't, in return, provide wonderful company, but just provide the car! -- which M would say is not the case.

She would say that, because she's a 'fan' friend -- you have friends who are your fan, they are on your side, they see all your good points though realistically.

The little things that mean a lot in a friend, like spilled maple syrup... once we got breakfast at a McDonald's drive-thru when we were on the way to an appointment late, and I somehow spilled the little packet of maple syrup on ME rather than on the hotcakes.

It was one of those times you're just falling apart for various stresses, and I can't describe the gentleness and helpfulness with which she helped clean off both the syrup and my frantic mood. The love. The laughter. Little things store deeply in my psyche in friendships.

M is 'house poor' -- has a beautiful large home completely paid for, but little spending money, fixed income. Whenever we go out she asks me to buy her a Coke or a vegetarian platter at our favorite restaurant, or whatever. She asks because she and I feel comfortable with each other and know each others' circumstances.

She felt loved yesterday, but by such a little thing that it's hard for me to understand. Yesterday I ran into CVS pharmacy to pick up some film, she asked if I could buy her a large bottle of Coke, and yet I suddenly sensed a discomfort, an embarrassment at asking.

Usually I don't sense those feelings in her at all.

She said to get the diet Coke, caffeine free.

I went into CVS, my film wasn't ready, and none of the bottles there were caffeine-free. Cans were caffeine-free, but she prefers bottles to cans.

So I came back to the car and suggested we go somewhere else. She said, "I'm so thirsty, let's just go thru McDonald's."

We went thru the McDonald's drive-thru. She told me that by the way it would have been fine if I'd gotten the caffeine bottle, or the cans.

I went back into the CVS to get my film, and I figured she still wanted Coke. I debated the bottle in which she doesn't like the caffeine, or the cans in which she doesn't like the can.

I got both. And my film.

Went back to the car, put the bottle and 12 pack of cans in the back seat, and she said, "Oh is that for me?" I said, "of course!" She said, "you got me all that, after getting me Coke already at McDonald's?"

I got in the car, and she had a touched look on her face.

M, I suddenly saw, needed to feel that the little things she asks me to buy for her are much less than what I want to buy for her. Are much less than she could ask me for and I would still be happy to spend for her. Is that how a little thing transmogrifies into a big deeper thing under the surface?

For her friendship, a car and a little money are no recompense. For the maple syrup incident, feeling cared for when I needed a friend's mothering is uncompensatable. Just a little story of little things that have built part of a friendship that started 15 years ago, and has continued and will continue, always!

2005-07-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

What if I read in a book somewhere that if you get it in your mind that you can't be alive internally or relate to people or relate to life at the deepest level of your innermost atom of your cells, because of life beating you down in whatever way life has to beat people down --

-- what if I read that in a book somewhere, and the book said that if you get that in your mind, you can go ahead and be alive internally and relate to people and relate to life at the deepest level of your innermost atom of your cells.

What if the book you read that in was the bible, or the Quran, or the Book of Life. It's true.

I know it's true. I just read it in a book somewhere. The book of the smartest wisest part of my mind. :)

Fatten up

2005-07-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

I was out of town for three days with three wonderful traveling companions, my daughter and two women friends visiting here from France.

They exclaimed with surprise about seeing what they had heard about, how there is a much larger percentage of overweight Americans than overweight people in France. They really noticed, and I began to notice. I guess the official statistic is that 60-some percent of Americans are overweight. And I could lose weight myself, so I'm not trying to sound above this problem!

One of the French women, Fanny (pronounced with the accent on the second syllable) eats very consciously and lightly. Last night at dinner, at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, she ordered one egg, with a side of green beans :).

Yesterday we went to a 'Sbarro' restaurant, & Fanny ordered a salad at the counter. The man handed her a huge extra complimentary piece of garlic bread wrapped in aluminum foil and said, "Here, you need to fatten up." She quickly handed it to me -- the woman in the group who probably strikes her as already a fat American!

Oh dear! :)

Helicopters

2005-07-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

We live right on the edge of Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia. And on edge is how the city feels these days.

I had a metaphor about the city come to my mind this weekend. Our neighbors were having a huge party Saturday night and at some point in the evening it spilled out onto their patio and back yard.

I had gone to bed early, but was awakened around midnight by loud voices, frequent sudden spurts of yelling, and constant laughter.

This was making for a lousy sleep, in view of the fact that a helicopter started loudly circling the Pentagon, which is just down the hill from our house, feeling like it was breaking the sound barrier at 6:30 a.m. the next morning, Sunday, though I didn't know that was going to happen on the other end of my night.

Our other neighbors usually call the police when a loud party goes on past 11:00 p.m., but apparently they hadn't called.

I never like calling the police about loud parties, since I deal with them too often in traffic court. I went to the back door thinking: "If I slam the door, not too loudly, it will give a subtle message to the neighbors."

Opening the screen door exactly halfway, then letting it slam, not too loudly, just 'nicely' slamming, felt like the polite amount. The laughter and voices continued.

I went back upstairs to the bedroom and turned on the light, thinking if they saw that someone was turning on a bedroom light, the partiers would realize they were waking up people and be immediately remorseful.

I then got in bed again and tried to sleep. I was half asleep when the voices woke me up again. Almost involuntarily I screamed out, near our open window, "oh, shut up!"

There was a temporary silence -- had they heard me? - then laughter continued.

These are all the non-recommended ways to stop a party if you really want to. The problem was, I vacillated between wimpy half-measures and bombastic yelling, and actually didn't wholeheartedly want to stop the party. They sounded like they were having a wonderful time on a beautiful night outdoors in Arlington. What would have been effective was direct, honest communication.

What I complain about around here usually, is that our area is not as full of openness and joy and personal freedom and direct honest communication as it used to be, because of all the post-9/11 changes in our area --

-- including the cement barriers around our beautiful D.C. monuments, the police curtailing of protesters at various events, and the lack of government officials directly answering direct questions, and open information from the government at an all-time low, and the lack of the press 'pressing' to uncover abuses of power whether locally or nationally.

Our capitol area is less beautiful, it is less open, it is less what it used to be, and it is a city armed for battle. Do we have to approach security with the barrier method? And it's coupled with misinformation and lack of honest communication, which leads to insecurity for all.

I think security ultimately rests upon honesty in communication more than upon barriers and stonewalling. And I disagree fundamentally with the mindset of inspecting every package, every person, every bag; putting up every barrier, every wall, every possible closure. To me that's the wrong paradigm with which to approach security, ultimately unworkable anyway, and enormously expensive.

I fell asleep sometime between the laughter and the helicopter. Sunday morning I groggily got up and stood leaning out the window watching the helicopter, its flight path taking it literally right over our house again and again. I filmed it, its blades looking like the synchronized legs of an insect somehow.

In a city caught between laughter and helicopters, more and more of us are working for the policies in the world and in our own city that we believe in, joining our power together in groups like "moveon.org".

I support some of moveon.org's policies, I don't support others. I pick and choose. I am an American who has the ability and the right to think for myself, and write my congressman, and join protests, and call radio stations, and get involved in government -- rather than jump over the cliff following a leader when I think a policy is a cliff, whether it's a Bush policy, or a moveon.org policy -- and I try in various ways to bring to the media's constant attention the stories it's not covering adequately or forcefully enough, like the genocide in Sudan continuing, continuing...

Getting involved in our world, in our mutual welfare, with direct honest communication, is the only way anyone can sleep at night, anywhere in our world, right now...

Go back, oh go back but I can't

2005-07-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

Random poem from my journal writing this morning.

Oh self, Go back! Go back!
Go back - may I talk to you, Self?
You don't usually listen to me

Go back!, Re-do, patch up

When you go back
this time take that last exit off
from the highway you stayed on back then

That highway with no further exits,
that highway to self-destruction.

You missed the last exit off
and there had even been a sign,
"No more exits for thirty miles, for thirty years,
from this path to self-destruction".

2005-07-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Mommy, am I pretty?

Little girls tend to ask this. (Do little boys ask something similar, I wonder?!)

My sister and I often asked our mother if we were pretty, when we were growing up.

She would always quote that old line: "You are pretty enough for all practical purposes."

To me, that was a horrifying answer, because it implied I wasn't pretty enough for impractical purposes.

I read a joke, a different slant on practical purposes:

"A mathematician and an engineer were both standing 20 feet away from this pretty girl when they were asked, if they could only walk half the distance to the girl, then again half the remaining distance to the girl, and half the distance each time, what would they do?

The mathematician exclaimed "... I will stand right here because I can conclusively prove that I'll never reach her", whereas the engineer said, "I agree, but I can get close enough for practical purposes."

Gay; unloved; afraid to show it

2005-07-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

I couldn't get a real sense of the man

His distant aura said
"I don't know who or how to be

how shall I be me
because you'll see
that I am gay"

I could not get a real sense of the girl
she almost seemed to feel
"I don't know how to show my real self

because you'll see that I'm unloved"

And oh what would happen
if they let their real selves
be seen
be known?

Somewhere between kindness and self-protection

2005-07-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between kindness and self-protection, but where is the line...

There are people who cause us to close ourselves a little bit, and we want to be self-protective when they are around us, yet we want to be kind to them; and yet with other people, we open, we open to them.

And it's strange but sometimes we choose to be around the people who make us close a little bit, because of some neurotic need, but ideally we seek out the people around whom we open our souls.

We have these effects on others, too - some people bloom in our presence, they love how they feel around us, others feel threatened or not like they're in a good space around us.

How do we balance being sensitive to others who do not like us, and yet remain self-afirming... and how do we balance being self-protective, and yet kind, when around those who feel slightly toxic to us ?

Just worrying thoughts, this morning.

I turn to God for help on questions like these. I am not Christian, I'm not Muslem, I'm not Hindu, I'm a bit drawn to Buddhism knowing very little about it; I don't follow any of the organized religions yet in metaphor I follow all of them -- but I'm someone who turns to God. I ask, where does God stand on these issues?

I like to remember to ask God for help, and to "Ask God for the abundant blessings which he longs to give you." (Joe Madison, quote from his morning radio program).

No. I don't agree

2005-07-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

An excerpt below from People magazine. I'm copying it because I don't agree with Mrs. Bush that wanting to help others is a "particularly American character".

Yes, Americans have that characteristic, for sure, but wanting to help others is universal human character.

Why do people say that Americans are more of (whatever) trait that of course all peoples have the whole world over? It diminishes the loveliness of any trait and diminishes America.
--------------------
From People:
The first lady said both her 23-year-old daughters, who graduated from college last year – Barbara from Yale and Jenna from the University of Texas – feel strongly about helping others. "It is certainly part of the age. They're idealistic and they wanted to help," Mrs. Bush said. "But it's a particularly American character and I admire that very much in my own girls and in the young people I've met around the country." --->

blogs

2005-07-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Blogs
we're all sharing together
we're describing life

- someone writes about a morning jog,
- someone writes about an evening job
- someone else writes about a leaf

I can't seem to stop reading

today I got out in sunshine,
my virtual bloglife starting
to shade my own leaves

Foundation

2005-07-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

My life is spinning at the speed of niceness

Was I a person built on shifting sand,
on rolling rock...

a person built to please,
attune with others but
not to expect others
to attune with me,

to try too hard again and again,
am I Sisyphus pushing the bedrock
that rolls down the hill of my personality

Stopped by a police car
once again
I want to arrest my aura
of too apologetic apologizing

To wish to have been built
upon unmoving rock --
yet proudly I think I built my child, built my daughter so.

I am happy, breathless and in shock
at my offspring's traits I don't have,
I am a better producer of a person
than a person in my own right

I push bedrock up a hill again and again
Slowly building my own foundation
higher, impressive heights,
spinning bedrock up to dizzying vistas...
but Sisyphusian vistas...

Learning

2005-07-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

I just learned of a beautiful, beautiful blog. You know how some writing just grabs you immediately.

Here's the link to a great little post there about bananas and the hidden banana peel trip-ups in smooth voices etc.: http://the-apple-pathways.blogspot.com/2005/07/bananas-mananas_112127918383740601.html

Thanks again to Josh for my learning to link -- do most people, like me, put off learning things that are so simple and would be so helpful; and, then, oh how helpful it is when someone steps in and says, "hey, here's how to do it." Another example, my friend Al noticing what trouble I have merging, and he then took an hour to practice with me.

On highways I used to stop and wait till no car was coming in the oncoming lane. I couldn't understand how one could keep going at a decent speed to merge in. Once learned, it made my life better, and the lives of honking drivers behind me on exits, no doubt.

"Little things mean a lot". Now I merge into other blogs and link into highways between cars just fine. Check out the haiku on this linked blog, too -- I was drawn in immediately to the first ones about warm dinners and aching feet, and tidy corners and tiredness.

A Serious Word About Detoxification

2005-07-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

Realizing my former tips on detoxification through saunas and epsom salts sound a bit flakey new-agey, I wanted to write seriously for a moment on detoxification. Wow, you say, just what anyone wanted to read?!

It's an important topic, really, in view of how much our health is being affected by the onslaught of chemicals in our bodies now, a topic Bill Moyers has gotten into.

Moyers has had his fat tested for chemical load; and in view of the studies coming out about mollusks losing their ability to detoxify the heavy metals in the oceans, people are starting to wonder about what's in their bodies that shouldn't be, and how to get it out. All animals' detoxification mechanisms are being affected by toxics in the environment, not just humans'.

Detoxification is actually an interesting subject. It has to be -- kind of like Smucker's Jam (with a name like that, it has to be good!) With a subject like detoxification, it has to be interesting to broach writing about, given the connotations.

I've had to learn about how the body detoxifies pesticides, heavy metals, various foreign substances, because of the toxic exposures my family went through. I learned out of necessity -- the learning-about-toxic-exposure equivalent to taking one of those mandatory driver improvement classes perhaps?! - you just gotta do it!

Before my own personal experience, I just thought that toxic chemicals got peed out of the body. I assumed that if you breathed in a massive amount of pesticide, or took it on your veggies, or breathed the mercury-filled air that is ubiquitous, or had a more acute toxic exposure, it came out of you, one way or the other -- pee, poop, sweat, breast milk, any avenue of exit from the ole' bod.

But I learned that it's not that simple, at all. Your body has to detoxify this stuff through rather intricate biochemical processes. There are detoxification mechanisms and pathways in the body. We don't think of them usually, probably because, for one thing, the detoxification system is not a medical specialty like the immune system in immunology, or the liver in hepatology --

-- unlike with those well-known medical specialties, we don't get a lot of exposure to the idea of our body having detoxification pathways and detoxification mechanisms.

Toxicology is the field where much of the research into the detoxification system is done. Actually a lot of docs don't know a lot about the body's detoxification mechanisms, kind-of the way medical schools used to avoid nutrition, most medical schools having no or maybe just one course on nutrition, which slowly changed.

When people realized that doctors weren't the people to go to for nutrition knowledge, and started learning about nutrition elsewhere, and feeling better using their knowledge, medical schools realized they should incorporate the subject.

Food, you want to take in; chemicals foreign to the body, you don't, but when we take in chemicals, as we all do every day, some does get peed out right away, and sweated out, without going through the detoxification process, but much gets stored, and it is stored in fat cells.

Then the problem becomes for the body, how to get this stuff out of the fat cells, which is especially crucial when the chemicals are in the fat cells of organs such as the brain, the liver, doing damage.

Relatedly, the cause of the Gulf War vets has gotten a big boost with funding to research toxic effects on brain function -- the Pentagon has gone from saying that Gulf War Syndrome research should focus on the psychological aspect, to recommeding research into the toxic exposure aspect.

I hope I can be helpful on this if anyone's interested; I've talked to many doctors who specialize in environmental medicine, and I think I have the ability to put things in clear terms, sifting through their talk of things like the cytochrome P450 detoxification pathway, etc., as I've had to do to gain an understanding of how to recover my family's health after toxic exposures.

Is this enough for now? Toxically tired of this post already? :) Anyone interested in detox?

Thoreau take II

2005-07-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

Josh made a good point, in the comments on my "Thoreau and bawdy professors" post, that Thoreau did much, besides sit and write!

I'm 'afeared' that what my prof may have, at the real heart of it, been saying, is, as Josh I think implies... It's the thinking, contemplative nature, many pursuits done in solitude, that the prof is saying would make Thoreau boring in person.

The contemplative quality in Thoreau, in any person, in most writers... is that seen as boring in a personality? Is that what my prof was disparaging?

I think Josh hit it that sitting and writing is probably not the operative quality motivating my prof's statement. Yes, he's right, Thoreau was active -- the best of both worlds, active and contemplative.

The prof's comment was a euphemism for something deeper, I think.

The dilemma is that no matter how active you are, no matter how much of your life you spend in other pursuits: whether you're Thoreau walking -- exploring nature in a depth and intensity that few have done -- or Whitman travelling America, or William Carlos Williams practicing medicine --

-- whatever active pursuits you're involved in when not writing, you still get quiet and solitary and almost in another mental state, when writing.

Does it come down to, "when writing you're writing and not doing" (a tautology if there ever was one) -- perhaps the contemplativeness that produces good writing is not great social personality fodder!

You're solitary with your thoughts, much of the time, as a writer, though probably many of your ideas come to you when you're walking or out among people.

And unfortunately I think that's what the prof meant about writers -- they're using much of their time in a certain way that isn't about being the life of the party.

Thoreau was more contemplative than many writers, and wrote about being contemplative, in part, among the other subjects of other writings. There's always that intense contemplative quality to his writing, no matter what he's contemplating. It appeals to me enormously, a depth of quiet thought, patient thought.

Perhaps the quality of contemplativeness is stereotyped in our pscyhes in negative ways.

And maybe that's why there are too many Americans watching stupid TV shows? - we're supposed to want to be popular, the life of the party - doing anything BUT thinking. Yet I believe in the 'common man', despite how "common", as in coarse and non-thinking, our culture has become.

And maybe this theory of Thoreau being boring in person is patently untrue. And most writers -- I'm not sure it's true, at all, anyway! Take a comedy writer for the Tonight show -- probably not boring in person.

Oh why did I write all this anyway, it all started with an off the cuff remark by a prof which has haunted me for years, argh. Any thoughts appreciated. Just thinking this out here.

Personal diet diary

2005-07-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

(Someone suggested I keep a diet diary on a separate blog -- great idea. I'll keep this one diet tip up, then quit the diet tips business too.

Diet tip: When you see a cookie, know that your priority is thinness more than a temporary cookie. Just remember, every cookie is so temporary! :)

weight loss

2005-07-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've GOT to lose weight and get in shape. Anyone else?

Weight loss tip: Toxins stored in your body can prevent your body's weight regulation mechanism from working properly, or so many alternative docs say.

Saunas, epsom salt baths, are two ways I know to supposedly sweat/get out toxins. No, I'm not a Scientologist, but actually scientologists' use of saunas is probably one of their right-on beliefs, as long as it stops there. Claiming anything else that saunas will do for you is where they go wrong.

If you don't have access to a sauna, sweating while exercising sweats out a lot of toxins of course. Cultures for centuries have used saunas, sweat lodges, etc., instinctively feeling better after them.

Epsom salt poured in your bath supposedly draws toxins out of your cells - again, according to alternative medicine, don't know that conventional docs are even into detoxification except for acute poisonings - It feels great, in any case! Research it on the web to get more info.

simply lazy

2005-07-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you're lazy to learn the simplest thing. Josh of www.somethingbigandglassy.blogspot.com wrote me an email as to how to post a link, and I've done it, feeling silly I didn't realize it was nothing to learn, ole' technical-disaster me. Thank you Josh, who sounds like such a mensch on his blog, by the way, go there anyone reading here :)

I thought I'd paste a link to a funny entry on the blog of "Midwest Hick", since he was good-natured about my post of my husband making fun of his name :). My husband couldn't stop laughing, "well, you have a midwest hick reading your blog, ha ha."

Anyway, here's a link to an entry that had me laughing! I turn to jelly laughing at his description of his overblown reaction to a TV commercial... well, I'm spoiling it. Some of his posts have a raunch score on the raunch meter that gets too high for me (sorry, Midwest Hick :); some have an acceptable bawdy level; some are just right. Go read for yourself. Note to Josh: With learning to link on here, I have now surpassed my previous breakthru event of the century, opening a fortune cookie while blogging.

http://midwesthick.blogspot.com/2005/07/forget-cari-need-aspirin.html

Thoreau and bawdy professors

2005-07-14T03:30:00.000-07:00

I remember an English prof in college saying, "If you met Thoreau in person, he'd seem very boring". I was incensed. I'm still not sure how he meant it; did he mean that sitting and contemplating is boring?

This prof went on to say something like, "Writers aren't the exciting people we think they are; they're, after all, sitting writing! Thinking."

Of course, Thoreau wrote in part about... sitting and thinking!, as he sat and thought, whereas other authors write about murder or mayhem or more 'exciting' stuff, as they sit and think! But in the final analysis, they're all sitting and thinking, and why was that considered boring by my prof?

On the final exam in that class, we had the final 'bonus' question, 'Who were your favorite authors in this course'? I wrote 'Thoreau', because it was true at the time, and also just to be perversely confrontational with the prof, who obviously wasn't excited by Thoreau.

Haven't we all done that on an exam -- gotten our disagreements out with the prof, in one final way, even if it risked your A!

I guess it all depends on whether one thinks that sitting and thinking, particularly in the way that Thoreau did, is boring. It's one of the most fascinating things people can do, inner-ly. To sit and create an inner world through thought.

To set out very deliberately in one's thought as Thoreau did, or Descartes sitting and philosophizing as to whether he could be sure he existed.

"I think, therefore I am" -- to some, that breakthrough realization of Descartes's is breathtakingly exciting; to some, Thoreau's realizations about the essential relationship of man to nature, and man to thought -- are realizations that are exquisite to read; but no, I suppose it doesn't meet a standard definition of exciting, like skiing down a killer hill.

And yet if you want 'exciting', wasn't Thoreau's civil disobedience pretty darn risk-taking? -- that was a killer hill.

And don't, really, most people engage in deep thought, a kind of patient thinking, creating their own inner universe, contemplation, recreating the world inside?

My prof might have wanted to set Thoreau apart from the common man in terms of boringness! It's not a great division, though -- even if it's a supposedly boring pursuit, the common man sits and contemplates too.

"Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature" -- most people do that! Most people have quieted their minds and engaged in Thoreau-ian pursuit. I don't divide the world into the great thinkers, versus the rest of the populace. But then, I'm a populist, an ardent populist politically and every other way. I think we all have Thoreau in us, at whatever level.

And yet this prof was pretty hysterical and I suppose populist, when regaling us with tales of his summer work as a construction worker -- he would take things that happened in that job and relate them to Shakespeare or other authors.

Like, a one-night stand, by the wife of one of the men with whom my prof worked. She appeased her husband by telling him that he was a worlds better lover than the other man, and then this prof read us the Shakespeare passage of a similar happening.

I still picture that prof's amused face. He laughed heartily, "She thought she was being so original; she didn't know she was just re-creating Shakespeare."

I suppose we yuppy kids sitting there were shocked -- our other English profs were not as bawdy, or if they were, they were bawdy in a more traditional Shakespearean way, not bawdy with tales from their own lives!

He was a character, and charismatic. He melted the female students with his eyes in a very unsettling way, an intensity of gaze that seemed to pierce your eyes, that may or may not have been sexual. My roommate at the time had a huge crush on him. He obviously loved literature. His name was Professor Strandberg, by the way. I don't know what happened to him -- after I write this, I'll have to Google him and see what comes up. I don't think he published enormously; but was a real 'teacher'.

He has stayed with me as just a handful of college profs have; other profs I've almost forgotten. He did make an impression, despite my disliking, or perhaps not understanding, his comments re Thoreau being boring -- and by association, all contemplative types.

Teasing

2005-07-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

My husband was asking about my blogging the other day, and asked if I've gotten any greater number of readers. I said, "no, basically one or two, (actually I think it's 3 or 4, ta da! :), besides friends who say they read here but don't leave comments because they don't have blogs".

I brightened and told him that one guy seems to come rather regularly and leave comments. My husband said, "oh, who?"

I suddenly felt embarrassed. "Well..." I said.

My husband sensed my hesitation. "Who?"

I said, "Well... 'Midwest Hick' ".

My husband burst out laughing.

"But he's NOT a midwest hick! He's funny, he's articulate, he's maybe a little raunchy, but... don't laugh!

(Seriously -- thanks, "Midwest Hick", and actually I like your blog name :)

So steep

2005-07-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

"I thought my kids would be more like me, and less like themselves."

Maybe you have to be a parent to appreciate the feeling in that line, but isn't that a great ironic line?! -- from a mommy blog I found, which I can't find again.

Mommy blogs are scary yet appealing to me -- they scare me because they remind me gut level of the kind of total immersion that is necessary when your kids are young.

And it strikes me in the gut-- when you're a mommy of young children and you write a blog, you write mostly about this one overwhelming thing in your life. The intensity can't be defined.

From my vantage point now I look back and remember all the gushy mommy stuff and get misty-eyed... but reading mommy blogs jolts me because it puts me back in the middle of the real daily detail.

I turn to mommy blogs in a kind of trepidatious nostaglia, and quickly turn away from them in a kind of fascinated horror. They're mostly about colds and diapers and picking up spilled things and love.

But I do wish I could find this one mommy blog again; her good lines stay in my mind. I'd like to find it and reread it, kind of like I wish I could find my three-year-old daughter again; and re-read...

But not re-live diapers and colds and picking up spilled things and all that -- just re-live the love! When I was twenty-five, a woman in her forties where I worked told me that she would never want to go through raising her kids again.

I couldn't understand that then; I thought that motherhood was the greatest thing on earth that I was looking foward to.

As the woman in the mommy blog wrote, you think motherhood will be a walk through a flower-filled park; but it's a walk up a steep grade of hill carrying a child on your back, without adequate shoes.

I wish I could find her blog again, even though that walk up the hill had me shuddering and running from her blog, it was too too real; and even though having a child IS the greatest thing, the grade of the mothering hill is still too recent to want to read the intensity right now in young mothers' blogs --

-- and yet I want to go back to smell the flowers along the side of that hill. Maybe when I've had my footing on the crest of the hill for a bit longer, I won't feel like running when I read about others still climbing the hill, without shoes... the greatest love, the greatest work.

Where do American dreams come true

2005-07-13T05:04:00.000-07:00

Heartsick, seeing the headlines of Iraqi children being killed by "insurgents". It turned my stomach to see in contrast, an AOL news headline about something or other, "Where American dreams come true."

It's galling. How can anybody continue to dream American dreams right now? I know a minority of people in this country continue to believe we've done the right thing in Iraq.

Am I too simplistic to think it's obvious that we have blundered enormously?

Heartbroken is what most Americans are, and to feel outrage and impotence at the same time mirrors on some small level what the rest of the world feels about America right now. Outrage and impotence. Simplistic or not.

I'm made of prunes and pencils

2005-07-13T03:29:00.000-07:00

"You look like you're sucking on a prune with a pencil up your ass" -- my friend Bob, to me. Sometimes metaphors get misinterpreted.

I don't suck on prunes. I don't even eat prunes for breakfast. Or Sugar Pops.

I wrote a post about eating Sugar Pops. I liked the idea of eating Sugar Pops for 50 years and not doing so tomorrow as a metaphor to change your life, in one day if you really want to change! Just decide.

That post got such good support in comments by people naming their favorite sugar cereal, I didn't have the heart to say, "What? I would never eat sugar pops!" I hadn't make it clear at all it was a metaphor initially.

If someone had eaten Sugar Pops for breakfast every day for 50 years, that would definitely cause a state of looking like sucking on a prune with a pencil, well, giving one very straight posture!

I'm such a sucker for a good descriptive literary line, even an insulting one about me. Well, tomorrow I'll stop sucking on prunes. Metaphorically.

Confronting connotations

2005-07-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

My aunt perished today. Not really, but my posts seem to be dividing into four categories: words and writing; family emotions; racism; and environmental rants. This one is a rant about words.

Words words words -- It grates on my ears when people use a word that has an incorrect connotation.

"Perish" -- it has obviously a different connotation than "die". If your aunt dies, you don't say "My aunt perished today" -- unless she died at sea perhaps. (Perhaps I shouldn't use that example, as my parents and brother and his family are on a cruise to the British Isles as I write this!)

My best friend, who is legally blind, married to a husband who is a paraplegic, called me this morning from the hospital, with a story of deadly wrong connotations.

Her husband is awaiting a nephrectomy, and a lowly resident physician, a first-year resident which is hardly a full-fledged doctor in my book, came in and changed the hypertension management instructions in his chart without ever seeing him! - or talking to him or talking to his attending physician.

This could have cost my friend's husband his life; this resident did not know the complications and medical history she was interfering with.

The attending physician, when my friend questioned her about the resident's incompetent actions, told my friend she was being "confrontational".

NO. (By the way, the only good thing about this story so far is that the pronoun 'her' has been used for both the attending physician and the medical resident, both females, which is just an aside as a tribute to the numbers of women in medicine now, most of whom are not morons!)

When someone does something that threatens your husband's life, and you confront her about it, you are confronting her, but you are not ipso facto being "confrontational".

Even if my friend had been "confrontational" encompassing all the negative connotations of the word -- unreasonable, argumentative, unpleasant -- well... it would have been understandable, under the circumstances. I'm sounding that way now, out of such outrage, more than my friend probably sounded, because she's learned how to be politically correct in the politics of the medical system.

"Malpractice suit" isn't an option when you're a paraplegic with complications... I've learned too well, from my friend's husband, that his life depends on keeping the goodwill of the local medical community on which he is dependent...

... there are those in life who don't have the luxury of being confrontational, in their confronting, and the doctor who accused my friend of being confrontational was the only one being so, against people who don't deserve any more negative connotations to deal with at all in their "paraplegic" and "blind" (how are those words for connotations?) lives, whose lives don't fit those connotations at all, the most fabulous, happy and centered couple I know, in more ways than I can name.

poetry argh

2005-07-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

Poetry ain't non-fiction..

Unlike non-fiction personal essays, with the most truthful degree of accuracy.

Poetry, it's a ... well, it's poetry, where the "I" isn't always I.

It may be factually true sometimes, but poetry is metaphor for emotional truth... but I'd put it in the fiction category if I had to choose whether poetry is fiction or non-fiction, though it's a lousy classification to have to make because a poem is neither fiction nor non-fiction.

I know this is pedantic and didactic explanation. I was just thinking about the metaphor of a night of separate beds for a marital fight in the poem I posted last night --

I didn't have a fight with my husband last night. But my good buddy who reads here is going to call me today and say, "I'm so sorry you and Ken had a fight." You think of an image or a line, and you want to write it, sometimes in first-person even though it's not about you.

I can't seem to convince my friend of the difference between the "I" in a poem and the "I" that is me, though. She must think I have a much more varied life than I do. Oh well, it's all good, but -- Bud, this post's for you! :)

bed bye

2005-07-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

Marriedly we go to bed, go to bed, go to bed...

The day
funfilled with people,
bedroom not filled with husband

going to bed
going to bed
to sleep, perchance to dream as is said

Going to bed, going to bed,
another bedroom filled with husband
down the hall
husband's back looks so large alone, quiet

his presence without me seems looming

going to bed
cold air of loneliness
on my hot headedness

In the limbo between a single and a double bed,
In the space between an argument and an apology,
in the space between going to bed and
making up in the morning
in the space between my anger and my love

this is where I exist till dawn

packrazz

2005-07-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

I have a friend, packrat species.

If you're not famliar with this genus, let me clarify that a packrat is usually not messy, just packratty. If you can perceive the difference.

I visited him today. He recently married, and I was looking around at all the stuff in the living room. Stuff pretty much stacked to the ceiling, and taking up almost all the floor space.

I asked if his new wife minds his habits. He said, "She's a packrat too". He pointed to one end of the room and said, "that's her side".

I looked, and did see more feminine stuff on that side of the room.

Could a species other than packrat live with a packrat?

I'm the messy species. I'm not sure other species do well living with us, either.

Probably the worst intermarriage would be a packrat and a messy. Although two messies is a ... mess.

I know two twins who are a lot alike, but one is neat, the other messy. Messiness or neatness does seem to be inborn, genetic, simply a difference in brain organization/brain wiring. Messies are often creative, or maybe 'messy' and 'creative' are synonyms only in the minds of hopeful messies.

Packrats are often inquiring, curious, wanting to save every newspaper clipping to finally get to, one day, to read.

I worship my friend's brain -- he is compassionate, politically aware, kind and sensitive to a fault -- I'll take his brain wired just the way it is. Take the packrat out of him, and who knows what balance of creative brain chemistry you might upheave.

Yes, it's hard to walk in his house, and it's finding a trail through a maze to get to the bathroom.

But his packratism is in synergy with the whole of his being, and the whole of his being is spectacular. He's successful, caring, and politically activist and giving.

I wish him happiness in his marriage, and I hope he is in synergy with his new wife -- if they can just get TO each other, or find the bed under the stacked boxes!

Humor under construction

2005-07-11T05:32:00.000-07:00

Humor in some favorite blogs --- I was thinking, I just would give a lot to have that kind of sense of humor than makes others genuinely laugh -- guffaw, even.

My husband and I have more subtle senses of humor, but it's not a trait that anyone would name when describing either of us. Seinfeld we are not.

Last night we had a dinner party and I was noticing which of the people there made people laugh. It's such a gift; people who are graced with that gift put people at ease, they relax others' social anxieties.

My uncle can get anyone to laugh. When I'm with him in an elevator, in a store, in any place where there's at least one person, 9 times out of 10 that other person ends up laughing. And it's genuine laughter.

My uncle knows how to soothe with humor; I think it's why he's in such demand. People want him around them.

Once when I didn't like a boss, I complained to my uncle that this boss told me a joke first thing every single morning. It was a stilted ritual, and I just couldn't find the jokes funny.

I moaned how it was getting embarrassing to laugh awkward fake laughs at my boss day after day, and I didn't even feel like smiling at this boss, let alone laugh.

My uncle advised me to paste a big construction-paper clown grin on my mouth before work!

I tell him he's my funny uncle. He tells me he's really my father, that he and my mom had an affair. No...

... if he were my dad, I'd have humor gene -- and no need for construction paper smiles.

Good sex and bad sex

2005-07-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

I was thinking that the difference between good sex and bad sex is... and I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it --

-- in good sex, your feelings of love and response to the other's desire, mind and emotions translates to your sexual organs.

In bad sex, simply the hand or body of the other is the main method of arousal of your sexual feelings/sexual organs.

When the stimulation is mainly by physical means, you don't have that feeling of your body's sensations being carried by spirit and emotion and mind. They're just mechanically produced sensations.

Your body is moved by the other's mind in good sex, by the other's hand or body in bad sex. "Moved" meaning both physically and emotionally.

I don't know. Just a half-formed thought. Woody Allen says even bad sex is good sex, so maybe I'm on the wrong track. :)

Do you have what it takes to be a firefighter?

2005-07-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm wondering if I have what it takes to be a firefighter. At dinner at my daughter's boyfriend's family's house the other night, a neighbor dropped in. He's been a firefighter with the Arlington Fire Department for thirty years, and is retiring.

He was doing a bit of offhand recruiting among us, telling us that no one on the Arlington firefighters right now is making less than a hundred thousand a year if they do some overtime; that there aren't that many fires in Arlington, and that there's a great camaraderie among the men and women.

I asked him if there's an age limit; he said no. I asked him what I would need -- he said upper body strength, but that that can be achieved by anybody who wants it.

I thought of the last time my husband and I took a walk in the park near here, which has stations for exercises along the trail. One station is for pull-ups. My husband was utterly humiliated that he couldn't do one pull-up, as an old military guy who used to do too many. I couldn't do one either, though I remember doing one in phys ed class when I was tweleve in junior high to pass a minimum proficiency requirement.

I think our future firefighter career is doubtful!

post absenteeism

2005-07-10T03:59:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting blogs I've found is by a gym teacher in Canada. He wrote several posts at the end of the school year about his students, about teaching, about life really -- then he has stopped posting for a while, probably due to school being out.

I picture him out jogging or hitting baseballs or mountain climbing this summer instead of writing on his blog, and yet he's a writer too, a very perceptive one.

It's weird how you find blogs that you check in on every so often, because you like the writing, similar to going straight to your favorite newspaper columnists in the paper -- then unlike with newspaper columnists, you grouse that bloggers are under no contractual obligation to write every day/week :)

I should stop my spoiled "write, you!!!" commanding instincts.

Post deletism

2005-07-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm going to delete that overly angsty, overly personal previous post.

I'll leave it up one more day, in case there's any merit in it, some dark need to read by one of my handful of readers, then I'll delete it.

"Post deletion ambivalence" -- a new modern blogosphere neurosis :)

post about to self-destruct, as I self-destructed by writing it :)

2005-07-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

(Post deleted except for the moral at the end. You always have to eat the moral, like your vegetables. It's good for you.)
----------------------
When you realize you are no better than the parents you've always criticized... when you see you have a million of your own faults that your mother doesn't have and never could have had... it's a moment you never forget.

"We are never too old for our daughter to embarrass or hurt us," my mother and father still must feel, at 88. My daughter, not too old to be embarrassed by her mother too...

And I... never too old to be embarrassed, by my own old ...self.

sugar pops

2005-07-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

If you've gotten up every morning for fifty years and eaten Sugar Pops, you don't have to eat Sugar Pops tomorrow. A paraphrase of Sartre.

Tomorrow I'm not going to eat Sugar Pops. I defy all my brain conditioning.

No, I start right now.

Sorry, just a note to myself, as I am the primary reader of this blog.

Titanic statue

2005-07-08T00:54:00.000-07:00

Has anyone been to the beautiful statue on the waterfront in southwest D.C., the statue dedicated to the men of the Titanic?

Under the shadow of that statue there is a great place to write/read. There's a wide smooth cement bench to lie, sit or lounge on, and it has a wonderful wide back, and tall sides. I feel so comfortable there, leaning my back kind-of in the corner against the side and back, legs fully stretched out with a laptop or tablet or book, as if I'm in my own bed. It's easy to fall asleep there in the sun.

The river cruise boats dock a little ways down, and of course there is the seafood market further down. It's a nice place to walk.

Why am I sharing this, I usually have this little alcove pretty much to myself! :) At least during the day. More people go there in the evenings. For some reason the southwest side of the Potomac right along there is somewhat of a nicely kept daytime secret, whereas people are always jogging and biking along the trails on the Virginia side.

There's an attractive man who often walks there. He lives in that neighborhood apparently. At night I sometimes walk when I can't sleep, to see the moon on the Potomac. The waterfront in southwest is filled with enough people, restaurants, and lights to be quite safe to walk at night.

Twice while I've walked there, this same man has approached me with pleasantries. The first time he greeted me, we ended up having a great conversation till I mentioned that I'm married. He immediately respected that, though I still enjoyed the conversation and saw no need to end it, two people talking about common themes to their lives.

The second time I saw him, a couple weeks later, he approached me with the same first friendly sentence he'd used the first time, and then he suddenly realized I was the same woman he'd already approached once before.

Interesting to hear the same line from him again, as if I were a different woman. No, same woman, just different night :)

I like people who talk to strangers under the shadow of the statue dedicated to the men of the Titanic.

oh to be me, once more

2005-07-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

What if I can be me again,
on God's and life's terms
what if I can be me again, what if what if
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
iiiiiiiiiiiif...

What if I can me again,
what if I ME again,
me be?
be me?, oh to be so without the serious silly no you can't be

What if I, me... what if me.
Whose is me, I am who, I am whose?

Why he? Why is me, his?
Why is my me now his,
why is me now he?
Why am me of he, why not be my me
oh why can't
I?
Me?

please help

2005-07-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

There is a man whose aura I would describe with Keats's phrase, "truth is beauty, beauty truth...". A brilliant, thoughtful man in my life sphere right now who is black and who has written a book about how to deal with racism/white supremacy.

I talk with him on the phone about racism. He also has given emotionally to me without meaning to, in specific ways that no one else has given, which is a beautiful but another story. My husband and daughter are grateful to him for what he has done for me.

I have promised him that I will ask people, specifically white people, about an idea that he feels is the bottom line cause of white supremacy/racism.

He feels the bottom line cause of racism is an unconscious fear of "genetic annihilation"... that because mixing black with white doesn't usually result in white offspring, that unfortunately therefore white people do what they can to protect their genes, their genes for white skin/blue eyes etc.

This genetic protection includes white people as a collective keeping a certain amount of separatism between races, keeping black people down economically and in other ways so they will be less desirable as mates, etc. etc.

I have been talking to white people about this, trying to get to the heart of whether this is true, this genetic annihilation fear.

Does anyone have any comments about this? I will get the comments to him, to read.

I would appreciate any thoughts on this, for him -- and for the purpose of getting to the heart of what are the root causes of racism. Thank you so so much. As he says, "Let's solve this thing".

blip

2005-07-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

What do you do if you think someone is disappointed in you, and you don't know how or why?

If you think you have lost his respect somehow, and then you start questioning if you ever really had it.

If this person is so important in your world, if this person gives pleasure to your brain... and yet you are just a blip on his radar screen... how do you know when to back off gracefully and let him live his life in the greater peace your absence would provide? How to know when to be selfless by removing your self...

2005-07-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

My daughter's favorite series of bedtime stories that I ever made up for her was the Mr. Mouse series.

It's funny because the first Mr. Mouse storyI told her was on a night I was so tired, I was falling asleep on her bed and was barely coherent. She was about seven. I sleepily made up a story which wasn't even making sense to me about a Mr. Mouse, his family, some adventures.

Every night after that for quite a while, she wanted a Mr. Mouse bedtime story. Nothing else would do.

Years later she told me Mr. Mouse had been her favorite of all the bedtime characters and stories I'd made up.

I said, "You know, I hate to admit this, but I never knew who Mr. Mouse was, I made him up but never figured him out as I went along. I never knew if he was a mouse? A man? I was embarrassed to tell you that I didn't know."

She said, "I didn't either".

To want

2005-07-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

My Daughter (again)

To want confiding whispers from her again
and yet to be content
with all past whispers
of her breath

To want her saltwater waves
and yet to be content
to simply watch
the tides recede from sun-baked shores

Or to want the mellow soft restraint of her
and yet to be content
with thunderstorms and crashing waves

To want to be content to
be content
whispering to myself
while she has other shores
to grace and to explore

To want to meet her
when another greets her
with the smile she wants
with her whole moon-pulled being

and her daddy and I will stand shyly
to be content to be
the shores for her smile
home

Love

2005-07-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

Love.

I just read a very interesting entry about love, on a blog I really like, www.dclagniappe.blogspot.com.

It would be anti-climactic to add anything to her writing, so that ends this post! Check it out.

What are you going to give today?

2005-07-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

From pretty little bound notebooks, to blogs... How many of us, who used to write in our journal notebooks, often while sitting in cafes or in picturesque places to record angst, now write online? Blogs replacing journals.

Is KMart disappointed? Are sales of notebooks declining in places like Target? Perhaps they are becoming an economic casualty of blogging, the way typewriters are of computers etc.

I'm now going to do something online that usually would be a private moment -- and yet it is something that having an audience gives the impetus for.

I'll do this on a blog, but not in a private journal. I'm going to open a fortune cookie online! -- and I pledge, to whomever witnesses this grand opening, to take the fortune's advice, to make its message part of my day.

Please contain your excitement.

While doing the dishes, I found this buried fortune cookie on the counter under a clutterclatter of plates. I ran upstairs to open it here on my blog as a FIRST; this unveiling/opening has never been done before on any blog, and whatever the fortune says, I'm going to incorporate its message deeply into my writing, my being, my day, my life!

If it says "you will travel" I do live near the airport.

And anyone reading this has to make it part of his day too, by the way. We're all in this together.

Okay, here it is:

I'm now holding the cookie's plastic wrapping...

I'm now breaking neatly in two the yellow-beige folded-over cookie shell; it feels glass-smooth and almost sanded down, yet a little crumbly...

... I'm pulling out Fate on a strip of paper...

Ta Da, Drum Roll Please... The Fortune:

"IF YOU CONTINUALLY GIVE, YOU WILL CONTINUALLY HAVE."

Gosh. Goodness and the Golden Rule, so axiomatic to seem anti-climactic! But this whole entry has been anti-climactic! :)

(It's perfect fortune though! More than appropriate after Live 8 last night.)

"orbs of drool-provoking female-ness"

2005-07-03T06:08:00.000-07:00

"Nipptacular orbs of drool-provoking female-ness".

I love it! That is how Sarah of www.philoillogica.typepad.com described... well, I'm sure you can figure out what is being described, no need for redundancy on my part.

Two other favorite descriptions I've read of late:

"The bunch a yellow filigree of crescents" -- bananas, as described by Josh in a poem on his blog.

And a description that perhaps makes me think of my husband, also from Josh's blog (www.somethingbigandglassy.blogspot.com) :

"How long will it take to get lean and hard and fast again? Too old? What's the difference? That which we are, we are, and if we now are less than we once were, still even so we are what few men ever dream or hope to be." From Confessions of a Barbarian, Edward Abbey

Live 8!

2005-07-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

Live 8. Wow. Hope.

Maybe people really are so good when they can just organize like this.

Eve-olve

2005-07-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

The word evolve -- someone said recently it's based on "Eve - olving" from Eve, figuratively.

I'm not very eve-olved! I'd rather savor the apple of knowledge and chew it around than tend the garden (and house) and keep my responsibilities.

Is that the age-old truth in that Biblical story, that women have this pull to knowledge that men of course have too, but men find it easier to indulge?

That in women, that hunger for knowledge kicks us out of the garden and kicks us in the teeth because of our conflicting responsibility as the traditional keepers of the home and children, as much as we ask our Adam to take out the trash and help so we can both have time for intellectual pursuits and work outside the home.

The tedium and joys of garden and home still seem to fall more on us females.

Eve, I'm you.

the blondish leaf

2005-07-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

My daughter.

She is coming home.

She's returning from a year in France, flying in on the 4th of July. As one man said, "bang bang!"

Throughout her life, she and I have always had a song that we made our mother-daughter song, until this last year when she lived with a family in Trigny in between high school and college, and went to school there, and became fluent in French.

Our mother daughter songs evolved and changed.

The mother of the family with whom she lived this past year, she called "mama cherie". When I visited in France, my daughter introduced us to people, her 'two mothers': "THIS is mama cherie; this is mommy". It made me laugh.

I'd rather be plain mommy than mama cherie.

Our first mother-daughter song was the Barney song, "I love you, you love me..."

Songs of every genre seemed to become our mommy-daughter song through the years, from hip hop to hard rock to classical to Eminem's song about his abusive mother, so full of pain.

We liked the irony and kind-of humor in that Eminem song being our mother daughter song, and also, the honesty in Eminem's voice is to be respected -- honesty is the key to mother-child relationship.

I've been honest with her about the dysfunctions in my own family growing up; I've tried to compensate or overcompensate in my mothering, inevitably making my own mistakes while trying so hard not to. She somehow escaped all my neurotic genes!

She's been perfect ever since I first saw her confused expression after my c-section and they handed her to me, and she looked bright and intelligent and deep and a little confused, "what just happened?" and I said, "Oh! You! I'm sorry you had to go through all that", and we've been bonded ever since.

At one point our mommy daughter song was country, "Can we Talk about Me?" We both laughed when listening to it.

How do you keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?

I already know somehow, we won't have a mother-daughter song when she returns; and a few weeks after that, she's leaving for college.

Mommy song is ending. Back around the corner, just a day ago, I was eighteen and going off to college, and back around the corner she was three, walking off to ... oh never mind. Anything you write "mommyish' gets to sound maudlin. Forgive me!

Stinky Wrinkly; sausage in the key of C

2005-07-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

Down days and up days ...

Today everything was yuck, it was just a middle C day, my day seemed orchestrated by a child playing middle C over and over on the piano.

Every conversation I had was stilted, the people on the other end of the phone were voices wonderful, but I felt as bright and emotional as a dead cocktail sausage, the house was hot, I was cranky, tired. Looming worries.

Finally Ken and I went down and walked by the Potomac.

There was a cruise boat docked, with a man singing opera on the deck for the passengers on board. We stood leaning on the fence by the water, listening, wanting to clap at his final note. Even a down day has one good high note.

After all, middle C played long and monotonously creates overtones of higher C's ringing.

We thought the day was modulating to a different key or at least to a higher C, and in a brief moment of ariatic enthusiasm that lasted about as long as an eighth note we talked about eating dinner in a waterside restaurant, but both of us felt stinky, looked wrinkly, and weren't up to submitting our embarrassingly middle C selves to waiter approbation.

Now my blog entry is reverberating soft echoes of middle C, which just happens to be the vibrational frequency of a cold cocktail sausage, too.

Nighty night

that generation

2005-07-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

I think people of my parents' generation in this country have a strength and stamina that was greater than that of my generation. On a personal level, in many ways my mom and dad have more energy than I do.

I think it came from their growing up with homegrown fresh food and no McDonald's!; it came from childhoods lived before they had the onslaught of the exponential increase in chemical exposures in food and environment, and so many other factors unknowable. They grew up in America before nuclear tests, before so much noise, so much crowding.

They had the Depression, the lack of the medical and scientific knowledge, other hardships, of course.

They were built well for the most part, though. Their immune systems didn't have the onslaught of chemicals. They've had less chemical sensitivity, less asthma, less allergies, than the following generations. They're living well up in years on average. My parents are healthy '80's, going strong and enjoying life. My parents were unusual for their time in that they had their kids in their late thirties and early forties with no problem. They both have done so much in their lives, I'm proud of their accomplishments, as I am the accomplishments of their generation.

I see a strength. I love seeing it.

Yet... While our generation is trying to clean up their toxic sites and pollution... the South Pacific that went from being their musical to our toxic dump site; groundwater, which was for the most part clean when they came into the world, and into which they've poured billions of tons of pesticides through the ground, has become our subterranean nightmare...

So our generation has birthed the Erin Brokovich's, the environmental groups, the new technologies to help clean up.

I know I'm mixing generations and making unscientific divisions of generations as to who poured the pesticide... "who shot the sheriff, who poured the pesticide"... tra la. But I heard a man say something once, sadly, "Our generation took the best of the earth." He was about seventy. His sincerity touched me.

My mom keeps saying she doesn't want to die until she's gone through all her boxes and papers, she doesn't want to leave anything for me to clean up. I say, "Mom, don't worry about adding a few boxes to what you're leaving behind. Your generation has already left more than enough to clean up." And our baby boomgeneration is perhaps more culpable in that we have more knowledge -- we have the proof of what we're doing to the environment, and we're still doing so much of it...

a man said

2005-07-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

A man said to me recently something about poetry.

This man, to whom words are of paramount importance, said that a poem is an arrangement of words -- that's the bottom line, that's it in the most basic definition, you now?

Composed in the best arrangement, like music, he added. I should write down what he says, now I'm not remembering his exact words.

I really liked that. He didn't embellish or elaborate. He gets to bottom lines. His whole being seems somehow an arrangement of words. His being sings of an orderly arrangement of thought, an elegance of composure, composition.

There are so many conceptions and misconceptions of poetry out there, from the people who think a poem should always rhyme, to people who think that a poem can only be about sunsets and flowers, to people who think that a poem is just prose in lines, to people not willing to put in the slow reading that poetry requires especially when it's opaque.

Reading a poem is often more akin to deciphering a puzzle than to reading a novel.

More akin to listening to a piece of music.

More akin to associating words like you associate musical notes, and giving time to the interrelationships of words to words, and words to sounds, and being willing to give time, ten minutes if it takes that, on one line or phrase, or a whole day of mulling it in and out of your brain, and another intense span of minutes of figuring it out the next time you read it, and again the next day; whatever it takes, till it seeps in.

But whatever a poem is, I am still not sure. I write them. A million people have written books trying to define a poem. I like the saying, "a poem should not mean, but be." And my favorite book, Perrine's "How Does a Poem Mean" -- I should reread it. My latest poems are far too prosey and I'm getting away from the "how" a poem means.

And my arrangements of words have not been sufficiently musical -- though when that happens in my poems, they are probably prose-poems.

Whatever those are.

racism

2005-07-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

I used to see racism as practiced only by those ignorant white people who do things that are racist, use the n word, etc.

I didn't see racism as a system in the world. I didn't see that as a white person, I have to actively be aware of and work against that system, in a global way.

To be aware of how non-white countries in the world are treated in colonial ways by white countries, to be aware of how everything I buy is made and who is hurt or helped by its manufacture.

It's not enough just to be a person who is not racist in my own little self. I want to be aware of the whole system in the world. And change it.

What are we each doing about every injustice in the world? How much time do we each spend on creating justice?

progressive blog

2005-06-30T13:58:00.000-07:00

Just discovered a progressive blog in my random blog searching. It's www.lastleftb4hooterville.blogspot.com. Politically right on, yay!

how to help

2005-06-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

My sister

I shovel yummy cake
at the diner, chocolate fudge
so dense it needs a forklift to budge

I'm eating with a friend
Two forks
one slice of cake
stuffing ourselves to grieve
about
My sister...

It feels like my sister's
in some deep hole
or some deep woods
in her mind
where I cannot follow right now

she has been depressed before,
everyone has their own way out

To others, she's a person
but to me, she's my duality

I remember as a child
my sister diagnosed with diabetes...
"You mean I can never eat
chocolate cake again?
I remember disbelieving tears

My friend and I ordered
our chocolate cake for that,
bizarro-universe
tribute to her deprivation,
taking in what she cannot

My sister
skins animals,
collects feathers and herbs,
gardens and composts,
composes, plays piano...
we used to play duets
but our rhythm differences
no metronome could mediate

She helps people all the time -- sometimes when they don't want
her to,
and unfailing, when they do

She grows things, and wishes
she'd had a child
She puts up her teepee each spring,
and drives with it overpowering
the roof of her car
each summer to South Dakota
to live with her Rosebud Reservation family

Her Lakota Sioux family is her heart-family
I'm her thirteen-month-apart 'twin',
she's my almost-wombmate,
often roommate, we shared a bedroom
growing up,
always talked at night

Whispered ghost stories,
we each would put the other
in a starring role with a ghost
in the woods
and we always got a kick
out of each others' imaginations

We sang late into the nights,
never getting enough sleep,
me melody, she making up harmony --
Santa Lucia, Bicycle Built for Two,
Little Grass Hut,
whatever songs we knew

We made up poetry and schemes
against parents, teachers, adults
and overly authoritative babysitters

It was she who led the mischief
but both of us who thought up schemes
but I sometimes wonder, without her
would I have been simply polite
and obedient and bland? Who is one person, without others?

We had secrets,
our system of calling out a made-up word, "ert",
to cousins and friends in other bedrooms down the hall
when they stayed

One "Ert" was "Come here!"
Two "erts" meant, "Parents coming, go back"
Three "erts" meant...
I've forgotten,
I'm trying to remember what it all meant

She and I have the same interests,
music, the environment, writing poetry,
helping people...

the same interests with
a completely different spin and expression

I go into things one of two ways
either listening, learning,
wanting to help but not lead, showing
my admiration for others,
respect for most authority until they dis-earn it,
I feel deference to men
I listen with my third ear

or I go in sometimes putting
my third foot
in my mouth

she goes in leading, taking charge
stepping with a sure foot
sometimes surer than it should be
but never in her mouth
she strategizes, she thinks ahead
even as a child, she could think ahead
- whereas I 'think behind', she always says
making me laugh

She's quick-witted, knows when not to give her name,
yet to my admiration, yet to her own legal risk,
in all her civil disobedience arrests as an adult,
she's been proud to give her real name

She has an authoritative hand,
a leader's stand
She charged in to save a soccer field
in a community
and gave her all, gave money,
chained herself to the fence to stop the bulldozers, got arrested...
and yet...
I saw something on the faces
of the people she was helping...
they wanted her to help,
not so much take charge...
it was their cause,
she was occasionally
a bit ham-handed

But then, sometimes she does things
just right, and perfectly in balance

She could always make me feel
the discoveries she shared with me,
the adventures she led me to,
they were mine, too

Our neighborhood woods, as an adult she tried to save,
she went to all the neighborhood association meetings
begged and pleaded
for woods to stay undeveloped for the new generation of children

Now the woods are cleared, new houses
sit lovely and large,
kids play but we don't know where,
the tree with the 'I love Calvin'
carving is gone
and all the childhood mysteries are vanished there

She doesn't dwell on past accomplishments,
doesn't do things for recognition
She would pretend not to be
the good fairies who would come to our bedroom
when she was "asleep",
when fairy voices sang and talked to me.
Fairies came especially
when harsh, fighting voices
tore through our bedroom walls

She is my duality, yin and yang,
sometimes her presence was so
overpowering
I thought my life could only fit into the corners
of life that she left unlived

I thought she was the real daughter
in the family
and I went into second child world of fantasy

She tries to be a good fairy to the world
as well as to me,
she tells the world what to do,
she tells me what to do, even now

She protests, trespasses, gets arrested,
goes to trial
In court in Tennessee
she quoted the Constitution
and the judge said the Constitution
was not admissible
She was so brilliant, so right
and the judge, just maybe, began to see
the downwind citizens' plight

Sometimes she doesn't listen
as much as tell,
there are ways about her I will never understand, her authoritative hand

She picked up hitchhikers over my scared
objections when we drove through the midwest, to help them,
said loving, crazy things to them

to one scruffy man getting in our car,
"Godspeed, how are you and your seed?"
I hid my face, mortified,
but she said he smiled at her 'blessing'

What would childhood have been like
without my playmate?
I used to dream little girl dreams
of the handsome brave cowboys on TV
They would kidnap me
and take me from our house
so full of yelling
while she would make up her own fantasy to friends
"that's not our real mother,
she's just our stepmother",
to explain being treated harshly

Her clothes were always worn out
even when new
scruffed and frayed from so much energy

Without my sister, leading me to adventures,
I think my childhood would have been
less full of quantum leaps

As an adult
she still has that courage,
that fight

But what does it all mean
if she's so unhappy now?

And if people love her
have always loved her
And if she was my first teacher,
and if she picks up any stranger,
and if she tries to save the world
from nuclear waste
and strontium-90 in river waters

If she didn't get to eat chocolate cake
and if she can turn into a good fairy
in the dark

as she sinks into an emotional nightmare
where is she, that I can still follow?

And she thought she was the beast
and I was the beauty
just when I thought I was the beast
and she was the beauty
or usually we both thought we were the beast
struggling to find ourselves and our self-esteem
as we discovered ourselves through each others' eyes

And how can I be a fairy to her, now?

Don't bank on justice

2005-06-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

How's your bank treating you?

Apparently the U.S. government has gotten away with such atrocious banking inaccountability in relation to native American lands.

I was listening to an attorney on Madison's radio show this morning representing over 500,000 individual native Americans who are being hurt by our government... yet again...

The U.S. government has been managing much native American land, and putting the money in trust for the native Americans.

Congress passed in 1994, the Trust Fund Reform Act. The Department of Interior ignored it.

The native Americans' money has been mismanaged. So they've had to file a lawsuit about such basic things as asking for the accounting system to be fixed, to adjust the account balances and give accurate accountings, to stop destroying records, boxes and boxes of records, to manage the trust according to common trust law standards.

How would you like to have to sue your bank just to have your account balance adjusted correctly, and your records kept and not destroyed?

Website: www.indiantrust.com

It's about the mismanagement of the trust. And of course, of trust.

sharing the whole enchilada

2005-06-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

There's something very sharing and very self-centered about writing a blog, all at the same time.

There's something very sharing and very self-centered about living, all at the same time.

They say selfishness is the opposite of self-interest. But there's the prize-winning theory of the mathematician portrayed in A Beautiful Mind; he showed definitively, mathematically that there are times when everyone is better off when group good is considered over separate individual good.

Each individual comes out better than he would have if he had considered his individual good in the decision.

But we have the ethos in America that doing what is best for oneself will always result in what's best for everybody else. Each one take care of himself. Mathematics has shown, that's sometimes the case, but not always the case.

Random thought not connected to any of that: at the health store tonight, I gave the young clerk the giggles. The guy behind me was buying an enchilada frozen dinner and a bag of chips (doesn't sound very health storish, but organic ingredients in both). I love noticing what people are buying to eat. I just do, sorry.

While I was paying, the clerk was commenting to me that the guy's dinner looked good. I looked at it, and said, "yeah, it does look good."

She said, "and it looks filling." I said, "Well, that's something I don't need" and for whatever reason, that sent her into a fit of giggles. It was so fun hearing her giggle, and it became contagious. I giggled, having no idea why I was laughing, but I assumed she did.

I liked laughing letting someone else have the responsibility of the why.

blogus picture

2005-06-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

In thinking which pic of me to put up on my blog, I thought of what my friend Colleen said about a woman she knows.

This woman is overblown, fat, fifty-- or sixty more like it, with the air of a disheveled, blowsy -- well, you get the picture. And she carries a picture -

-- she carries around a picture of herself at twenty -- thin, young, chic, and gorgeous.

And when she meets people, she whips it out and says, "look, look, this is me, this is the real me, this is what I really look like," waving the picture in their faces.

Ah, time.

Viagra Against Bush?!

2005-06-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

The majority of the American people don't want Bush, we don't want his policies, we don't want the Iraq war.

But for some reason we feel impotent. Impotent to influence the horrible direction the country is taking. We sit and watch. We feel the helplessness and hopelessness of our will being violated, and we're not fighting back. What's wrong with us? "When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it?"

A radio talk show host said this morning, "We need some political viagra" -- what a great quote! Brian Higgins said it. He's the host of "Mind Yo Business" on XM satellite radio channel 169 the Power, 10 a.m. to 12 noon east coast time. I don't own stock in this radio station, by the way! I just love to spread the word about it.

If the American people are feeling impotent, we do need viagra.

Political viagra. Would it come in a little blue pill? Would it get us demonstrating in the streets against this stupid war? Calling our congressmen? Writing into moveon.org? Boycotting things made with oil, such as plastics? Fragrances?

Would it get us hepped up enough to be able to tell our kids they can't have that Barbie doll because oil is used in her production? and right now, oil is part blood?

If we take Political Viagra, maybe we can keep this population of American Barbie dolls under control, and give birth to the real, politically potent people that we've lost touch with -- ourselves.

Best liberal voices on the radio

2005-06-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

"Leaders do not beg, and beggars do not lead."

"If you think getting your civil rights is difficult, wait till you try to keep them."

"Young black people need to build wealth, and use that wealth to protect what their fathers and grandfathers and great- grandfathers paid for, whether with their lives or with their pocketbooks. Freedom is not free."

Those are quotes from the best liberal voice on the radio, Joe Madison, "The Black Eagle".

Speaking of liberal voices on the radio, I called in last night to Alan Colmes's show on Air America radio, and argued with him about reparations. He is not for reparations. I think I gave him a good argument, about how the greater economic status of white people in this country as a group, can only be attributed to the whole history of slavery/Jim Crow/and all the sequelae.

Alan Colmes is a liberal voice on the radio. He is not able to go into the depth of issues in his format, but Joe Madison goes as far down as the depths go. Channel 169 The Power, on XM Satellite radio. Check him out, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., east coast time.

Olen Burrage

2005-06-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

Olen Burrage is a powerful, rich white man who was involved in the murders in the civil rights era. We have to put names on folks who've done these atrocities.

He's not being pursued, like Killen, because of his power and money in Mississippi.

During Killen's trial, details came out. James Cheney was to see his week-old baby daughter for the first time, the day he was murdered. He was on his way home from civil rights work, registering voters, on his way home to see her. She never got to see her daddy.

James Cheney's brother, Ben Cheney, on a radio show, commented that more and more brown babies are born in Mississippi, but black men are still impotent politically there.

He said some wounds are never healed. Killen wasn't the only one who should go on trial. If more of us put names like Olen Burrage up on the internet, will it help? Help not only heal, but help push for justice even against the rich and powerful?

The End of a Divorce

2005-06-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

My cousin is nearing the end of his divorce, which has taken over a year. It's been so hard to settle all the property, etc., and the lawyers have been enriched.

Why does thinking about the end of a divorce depress me? Is it because it's the end of something that's in itself an end? Even something mundane - The last swallow of the last bite of your dinner.

The last swallow in the flock of swallows flying south at the end of summer. A summer in the autumn of life, like my dad's summers now: "Eighty-eight summers, eighty-eight suns have left their gold on my dark lashes, eighty-eight October skies; eighty-eight more April rains will fall before I'm very wise..."

And is an opposite of the end of an end, the beginning of say, a birth? The first labor pain? But this divorce has had so many labor pains, and still isn't completely born, so it's gone full circle from being an end to a beginning. And I hope my cousin begins well, his new chance.

My young friend

2005-06-28T13:10:00.000-07:00

She's as emotionally fragile as a lightbulb filament in its glass shell. And when life inadventently bangs her around, she never seems to have the relief of completely breaking, her inner beauty just goes out.

How can one magically transform her lightbulb filament into flower filament. Or her filament into firmament.

She is, really, to me a flower growing in the firm ground; yet she seems ready to shatter like those famous glass flowers in that museum, in Boston I think it is. And she's as beautiful as a glass flower, on the inside, but she seems to be stuck right now in being a delicate filament, and who looks at the beauty of a lightbulb filament anyway?

Slogosphere

2005-06-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Right now I am depressed about something I did.

(be warned, friends who call me today expecting my voice to be cheery)

Drowning will be my fate, OR I will keep my emotional head above water, and either way, the situation will be clarified.

Working at the computer, not creative work, I take breaks at blogs, and I have found a few that speak to me.

Some blogs you read, and you are mildly interested, and you may go back once or twice. Other blogs you sense the person behind them, and if there are common topics of interest, you find yourself going back regularly, like to a favorite newspaper column.

I also like to leave comments on peoples' blogs. I just am wondering though, if you like a blog, how do you participate in it, and leave comments, without seeming to be some weird blogger-stalker! I tend to get overly intense about new things, like when the Washington Post had a neologism contest, I entered every month, boatloads of entries.

I got words in the column nearly every month, which was an accomplishment because 30 or so out of 3,000 entries would be chosen. But I was too intense. My daughter said wryly at my gloating, "but Mom, most people don't write neologisms to enter the contest FULL TIME!"

Ouch, was I that intense?! But since there's a woman of my same name all over Google, I don't worry about the dumb things I write or do that may end up on the internet, like my over the top neologism contest obsession; people will think anything I write, was the other me of the same name. It's nice to have her as a cover :)

Once I finish this work at the computer, I can take more breaks in real life rather than in virtual life. Real life I'm experiencing lately as confusing, as good and bad, up and down, while trying to always be centered and open, expectant and ready for ecstasy -- I hope that's the right attitude.

But since real life involves sitting at this virtual screenlife, I exist both in the virtual and in the real, this slogosphere - my life.

2005-06-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

It seems sometimes you can feel so happy that you wouldn't even mind dying at that moment, you feel at some pinnacle that makes it okay to leave.

Or you can feel so loved and so filled with pleasure in another person, that you feel reassured in dying, knowing that person has been in your life and in the world.

It seems that dying only seems okay after love or happiness. I don't know, just some things I've on rare occasions felt and heard one other say he's felt, too.

2005-06-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

My husband is a very admirable person. He's someone who does the right thing, even when no one will ever know, even when it would be a million times easier to do the next-to-best thing and it wouldn't make much difference.

He's a perfectionist in rightness.

He has a classically handsome face. He's a wonderful person. Our marriage is made on earth as most are, not in heaven.

Sometimes, when I'm super annoyed, I can't stand him.

Balanced by, sometimes I can't stand myself. So when I get a fantasy of leaving when I'm really annoyed, I realize I can't leave myself when I'm really annoyed with myself. So I keep me! and him.

bump on a blog

2005-06-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

I've been tied to the computer all day working like a bump on a log. Escaping from the rough bark of work fatigue, I'm reading other peoples' blogs for breaks. They're so varied and often fascinating.

I take breaks so often, I might actually make a dent in visiting one one-billionth of all the blogs on the internet! The statistic is that a new blog is started every seven seconds. That's a lot of blogs, we'll all become bumps on blogs.

Writing naked

2005-06-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm naked here, so to speak, and so are all who share, uncovered and alive, their minds, but it's bracing to have people with interesting minds read one's blog! -- strangers, and...

... for me, the few friends who read here. One of my friends said she comes spy at my mind in its more raw and vulnerable form than she sees in person, because writing kind of just does that...

...writing grabs the mind's curtain back from the front of the stage brain, like the curtain that had been covering the nude statues at the Justice department.

So I like being vulnerable here, just opening up, but friends haven't yet left comments. I wait with trepidation for my more acerbic friends' comments, ouch. Or maybe they reserve their jabs for oral 'acerbickering' (not a very good neologism).

I wonder if everyone feels jittery about strangers reading their online writing. Certain personal topics feel like laying out one's diary for the world.

But diaries in a notebook in your house aren't always that private either; notebook-hidden angst never was security-guaranteed; your feelings were not completely hidden in those lines of ink between lines on notebook paper.

The spying starts with those childhood diaries you kept. In my case, my sister and I guiltily stole each others' diaries like most other close sister pairs. We liked and empathized with each other more, by seeing innerness.

And I had been guilty of reading others' diaries, continuing a lack of boundaries from the family ethos I grew up in, before I changed. I now refuse to violate such boundaries -- but back some years, when my family was renting our house to a young couple for a year, I had to go back in the house, and there it was -- there was the man's diary prominent on the bedroom dresser.

Did I peek into it? A rhetorical question. I both wish I hadn't read his thoughts, and still think about some of the things he wrote.

And the low point of my own privacy was as a teen, looking for something in my mother's bedside table and finding all these piles of papers. Xeroxed pages of my diaries.

In contrast, writing online is chosen nakedness. Comments are wanted. Eyes are okay; they're usually strangers' eyes; I can look out from my blog with eyes looking back; when I put out thoughts on certain subjects, readers with a common interest will find them, and the exchange can be fruitful.

Without readers, a writer is Ozymandias, kind of writing into the winds and 'the lone and level sands, stretched far away'.

I sold my self

2005-06-25T04:45:00.000-07:00

I'm SO curious if anyone reading here does this, or even knows what I'm talking about.

So what AM I talking about? How can I define it: It's when you sense the picture of you that someone else has in his mind, and you find yourself conforming to that picture, becoming what he thinks you are, or agreeing that you are what he thinks you are, to make that person comfortable with you.

Like someone who sees you as a dumb blonde (okay, I guess you have to be blonde for that one), you start acting just a little bit that way, out of fear of annoying the person who sees you that way if you don't confirm his opinion of you. So you act a little dumber. You go to the drugstore and buy Clairol summer blonde number 5 hair color.

You think I'm nuts, right? Does anyone, anyone out there do this? I just did something so self-denying, so soul-killing, yesterday. I basically said about myself what I thought a woman wanted to hear, to conform to her. There was a little bit of truth in what she thinks of me, so I agreed with her assessment. But her assessment is unnuanced and not really true of me.

I sold myself out.

If I'll sell my SELF out, I'm lost. I'm hopeless. But I have to pick myself up and try again -- what else can I do? I guess other people do this because once I read an interesting sentence, "I am what I think you think I am", implying that we are all influenced in this way.

Does this have its roots in infancy? If our mother conforms to our picture of our newly forming selves, or instead we conform to our mother's picture? Agh. I'm not a psychologist.

Genocide

2005-06-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

Last summer I marched with a group of people every day for about two months, in front of the Sudan embassy, protesting the genocide in the Darfur region.

The embassy actually closed down during our protests, for reasons other than our protest perhaps, but we kept going there every day and marching and chanting and carrying our signs.

We were led by Walter Fauntroy and Joe Madison. Several people every day deliberately trespassed on the embassy property, to get arrested. Some prominent people came and got arrested - Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame, some Congressmen, some Reverends, and many ordinary people, including some grandmothers.

You didn't hear much about the genocide in Darfur in the press last summer, while we were protesting, but we knew it was making a difference, and shortly after that, it was in the news continually.

The day that Colin Powell declared that it WAS genocide taking place in Sudan, shortly ater Labor Day, the day he finally used the word to define it for what it was, we ended the protest, thinking something would start happening.

But the killing hasn't stopped, the raping hasn't stopped, the people dying in the refugee camps hasn't stopped, the burning of peoples' villages hasn't stopped, it all still continues, and our government is confusing the issue now, backing off the 'genocide' word, and using confusing words to de-emphasize the basic fact that the government of Sudan is behind the genocide of the black Muslems in Darfur.

I'm disappointed in our State Department and in the Bush administration. In a confusion of words about Sudan, about the bombings in east Sudan, and words about the North-South Peace agreement, they are not still boldly using the G word. Condoleeza Rice talks of the government as an ally against terrorism???, when they are committing genocide??? I'm confused, and this summer I don't have a protest to go to every day at noon.

Are forces in our government allied with the government there, the genociding government there?

Complicated. Arab against black. And money behind it all. And oil companies behind it all, including PetroChina. It's about Oil. And water resources, clean water underground.

One man who came every day to protest had haunted blue eyes. He would stand and look up at the windows of the embassy right at the northern Sudanese people looking out at us, before they closed the building. I found out his wife is from Rwanda, and all her family had been killed in that genocide, eleven years ago.

That man -- he held signs up towards the embassy windows with a stillness. Not shaking the sign belligerently, as I tended to do. Just holding a sign and watching. We wanted these representatives of that government to know we were watching their genocide. We wanted to make their genocide "inconvenient" for them. Is the Bush administration making their genocide MORE convenient, now??

How Do I Kill

2005-06-23T05:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I'm posting this poem. I suppose because it's a universal feeling, talking to someone of the opposite gender (not one's spouse), feeling a chemistry, and wanting to feel the friendship and mental kinship, but downplay the gender chemistry. Or is the gender chemistry okay to feel, to be enjoyed even, while, of course, being faithful to one's spouse...

How do I kill

an emotional response
to a man?

How do I separate
his words from his voice
manly, bass deep, sometimes sotto voce

His voice is the way that reminds me of how
a father is supposed to sound

It's a voice I heard in my childhood
was it my grandfather's voice?

This man isn't old enough to be
my grandfather
and says he is not qualified to be a father to me
no matter how much I feel his daddy wisdom
and tenderness

His voice is like the voices I heard long ago
a little bit grumbley, then inflected with kindness,
sometimes kind-of chuckling, amused
Musical intonations the range of all instruments' scales

How do I separate
my response to the man
from my response to his mission

How do I separate
hearing the testosterone
from my estrogen regulation?

How do I keep separate
my emotional inclination towards his ideas
from emotion towards him?

How do I separate
white from black?

Drawn to truth like a magnet,
trying to hold myself back

How do I separate his cause
from his effect?

How do I keep my moth self
from the impartial flame -
impartial, yet somehow horrified
to draw the moth?

Poets try to separate
moth from fluttering,
candle from flame,
flame from fire
water from wave

How do I separate woman from brain?
How do I keep the woman in myself
out of my mind,
when I listen to him?

My inclination to kill my inclination
has velleity

But I will rip my inclination out
like chitlins from a pig
--something he taught me about
before I knew what chitlins were
before I knew I should slaughter in myself
what needs to be killed

I will rip myself apart, throw emotions
that could poison,
into the mud

Husband

2005-06-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

He needs me to open the door
so softly there would be
no catching of the latch

He needed me to hold our child
so gently there would be catching
in his heart

He needs me to catch his neck
firmly,
reassure nerve endings

He needs me to close my ears,
his eyes catch in what his voice abandons
He needs me to listen visually

He needs me to follow his thoughts
unknown gestures I'm blind to,
for which
I can't find the unlatched door

Father's day

2005-06-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Doing some people-watching, waiting in the car for my husband, I watched a father and his two very young children, a boy and a girl.

The little boy was wearing a cute little hat and he was running around and around a fountain. The father was sitting on the side of the fountain, and the girl was playing to herself by the father. He had just picked her up into his lap when --

-- suddenly the little boy tripped and fell. He burst out screaming and crying as he lay on the cement. The father immediately stood up, put the little girl down gently, went to the little boy and picked him up and in one swoop sat down, covered the little boy in his arms and his head bent down to the little boy's face.

Then he bent his head further and kissed the little boy's knee. The little boy stopped crying. The little girl came over and kissed the boy's knee.

The father continued holding the little boy, gently rubbing his knee in circular motions with his hand, still talking to the little boy. The little boy was taking it into his subconscious beliefs that when you cry you will be comforted, that when you are hurting you will be surrounded by loving arms, that this is the way the world is when you fall down.

But this is not the way the world is.

Tinsel loneliness

2005-06-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

Searching not for profound joy
- like a child born
- a great calm after war or a storm
- or a truce

searching for...
any small joy would do, any connection,
joy as small as a bauble, a piece of tinsel

lonely, walked by the water without ending
around and around the Roosevelt Island path in a circle

clouds sunlit
soft grey shadings
sparkling like tinsel

Man stood fishing
hoping for fish gleaming tinsel silver
to talk to a soul, I said hello,
"are you catching anything?"

he shared, I learned
the small rockfish were okay to eat
just arrived from the ocean,
rockfish not too filled yet with Potomac filth
I asked if he's scared, many male fish having eggs
many fish in the Potomac do,
I said
if I were a man I'm not sure I'd eat those fishes
with their estrogenic chemical stew!
But they glistened like tinsel lures

He laughed, called goodbye
Already walking away, I half turned,
back to him, over my shoulder "good bye",
depriving myself of looking again
at the tinsel fish hopes in his kindly eyes

A man was on a bench, feeding the birds and squirrels
and I wanted to sit down
so he would feed me too, feed my loneliness, throw me a crumb
I ventured out of my shell, I said, "They like that bread"
and he said, "I give them peanuts too" and I said,
"Oh, I'll take some peanuts like the birds" - awkward attempt at friendship
silly and shallow like a piece of tinsel on a tree
and he turned away from me

I drove home
passed an older woman
talking to a younger woman
by a car
the older woman had a wild blue eye

fear in her face
she was gesturing agitated

and will the younger woman - her daughter? - soothe the fear
glinting from those wild eyes

or does fear remain
like tinsel
still on the tree
long after Christmas is gone

aloneness

2005-06-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

I was standing at the kitchen stove, making instant coffee for an instant mood lift to stop self-indulgent tears, wondering how to cope with situations confronting me with their scary ugly heads roaring up in my face, and feeling alone.

But I'm not alone. I have people who have loved me, who love me now in some way, who show me caring, who help me, and all that is stored in all my cells, although they say cells constantly get replaced. And it is not possible to be grateful enough for any love given by anyone. And I have support in non-people girders which help my life. And I wonder...

I wonder about people who don't have any people, who don't have people who love them, who don't have girders and they are collapsing.

If you think of a person in the world who doesn't have even one person, who is totally alone -- how to find those persons before it's too late. How many people are there in that position? And how can we help. Everyone has empathy for a feeling of total aloneness; sometimes in the troughs of life that feeling hits, whether the aloneness is real or not. But it's sure a heck of a lot better when the real feeling is not real aloneness in reality, than when it's true and real aloneness.

2005-06-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Little gestures -- when my husband comes back to the car from dashing into 7-11 to buy us juices in this hot weather, he always buys two different flavors of Mystic or Snapple and holds out the two different bottles of juice, and asks, "which one do you want?"

And I've come to learn that he always holds towards me, in the hand nearest me, the one he'd prefer, because he wants me to choose it, if I'd also prefer it. Since it's always in the hand nearest me, I always choose the one in the other hand, then ask him which one he wanted, and it's always what I thought.

He doesn't know I've caught on to his little gesture of generosity, which enables me to keep up my little gesture of generosity, and smile to myself.

My friend Katherine, when I take her grocery shopping because she can't drive, always gets some yummy treat to eat in the car on the drive home, and she always offers me some. But she doesn't just give me SOME - she always gives me a huge proportion, usually half or more of the piece of cake or whatever she just spent her limited money on. It sounds like a little thing, but when I know how limited her budget is, and know how she splurges on these yummy treats, it means the world.

You know how you notice about people, these little nice things or their opposites.

2005-06-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

To a man with whom I talk about white supremacy/racism, I wrote a letter about the piano lessons I took in my childhood and teens, and about one piano teacher who meant a lot to me emotionally.

I wrote that I would write him about how my piano lessons related to white supemacy/racism. I'm going to try to write it, but it's not coming easily to me.

I know that some of my friends who may read here think I have gotten extreme in seeing white supremacy/racism in everything. But if it's a system in the world, then it IS in everything, isn't it? And that would mean it was in my piano lessons.

I have come to believe that white supremacy/racism is a global, international, national, local system, as one author/psychiatrist, Dr. Welsing, says, and as more people are beginning to see when they look around the world and really see what they're seeing. In Africa, the effects of the past colonializations, the lack of action to stop the genocide in Rwanda and now Sudan, etc etc., in every day injustices, in every day on this planet where so many non-white people can tell you how they were affected by white supremacy/racism, where every day on this planet so many white people will say, "huh? We don't see it".

And yet, one of my differences with Dr. Welsing is something she doesn't mention seeing -- all the white people who DO fight for justice, all the anti-white supremacy actions and thoughts by so many people white as well as black.

But as a 'white' person, how does something ordinary, like taking piano lessons, fit into white supremacy/racism? I guess I'm asking that question because I am trying to see how white supremacy/racism is in everything. I don't immediately see it in the piano lessons I had, so that's why I'm writing it, to ponder it as I write.

Music is a universal language, and there was nothing, I don't think, wrong with playing the music by the white composers such as Beethoven, Debussy, etc., that I learned, although I just didn't know till years later that there were many black composers during the same periods whose works were extraordinary but who didn't get published, played, etc., as the major white classical composers' music did.

Some symphony orchestras now are beginning to discover and play these works.

I grew up feeling that black people were on the side of justice in the '50's and '60's and the white people who weren't in favor of the civil rights changes were horrible. With deeper sight now, I see that by not seeing this system of white supremacy/racism as I see it now, I didn't see how my life fit into it even when my feelings didn't fit into white supremacy/racism; but didn't my life fit into it just by being white and living and being part of a world where it exists, no matter how I felt... does that make sense?

Growing up, my feelings and family were for integration, equality, I had a black boyfriend when I was 25 which I thought was a good thing, although I have now been told by various black people who think differently, that it's better for the black man not to date a white woman until there is a system of Justice, for many reasons.

Now that I see through a greater scope about white supremacy/racism, I see in my mind's eye that even in something like my piano lessons, I was fitting into the world, fitting into my neighborhood, fitting into my piano lessons, and all that fit into a larger picture of a world of white supremacy/racism even though there was nothing racist per se about the piano lessons.

There were subsets of racism in the piano lessons, in that for example economics is a subset of racism. I didn't think about the cost of the music lessons to my parents, I took them for granted. As more monetary equality between white and black is achieved in this country, there are undoubtedly more and more black children and teens who take piano lessons and don't think about the cost of the lessons just as I didn't, taking it for granted as I did.

At the time I was a teenager, there was much greater economic inequality between black and white in this country, and although I was aware that piano lessons were a luxury more available to white kids because of the economic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow than to black kids on average, I don't remember ever talking about that fact or thinking of something to do to try to correct that imbalance.

At music school at the conservatory at the U. of Cincinnati, there were black as well as white students, and one of the black students who was a student there when I was a freshman, is now a household name -- Kathleen Battle. She of course has the voice and musicality of an angel. The staff and faculty at the conservatory worshipped her, and as much as they wanted to they of course could not take credit for her God-given musical talent. They were blessed to have her as a student there, when she could have been at Juilliard or anywhere.

I do remember that in a starring role in an opera, they chose a black tenor to play her love interest, and everyone knew he got the part because he was black, to go along with her in the female role. I wondered at the time why they did that, I thought that the tenor should have been chosen on talent alone and that it was racist to match up the lead roles based on race, probably so no one in the audience would be offended.

Many people have musical talent that blossoms and appears in their lives very early, they may have the ability to play by ear, or 'perfect pitch'. I had none of those; my ability came about strictly as a result of being given the opportunity of lessons. But music is so much more than lessons on one instrument. And concentrating on classical piano, was a very narrow focus -- it almost made me an anti-musician in some ways, because I didn't see the whole picture while I toiled away at Hannon and Czerny finger exercises.

I don't know that I've even scratched the surface of how my piano lessons link to white supremacy. I do think this kind of thinking is necessary, and more will be revealted to minds that search for these kinds of answers. If every white person thinks about how everything in our lives is part of a system in the world of white supremacy/racism, isn't that the first baby step to justice?

And I love the definition of justice written by one man, that it's guaranteeing that no one is mistreated, and that the person who needs help the most, gets the most help.

If that definition were applied in every situation today, this very minute... can we conceive of that world?

If we think/talk about white supremacy/racim in every situation in our lives, that awareness is the first step to Justice.

So no, there was nothing wrong with my taking piano lessons and studying music, that's not white supremacy/racism per se, but it did fit into white supremacy/racism because everything does and that's what I didn't see, at the time. And we should all acknowledge this truth. But how many white people acknowledge it?

If we can see that everything fits into this system, we will be uncomfortable with everything, until Justice is achieved. And discomfort is necessary.

Until we have a world of Justice, even piano lessons between a child and her beloved teacher are tainted with taking place in a world of injustice overall. And this needs to be acknowledged constantly by white people, and in everything we do we need to talk about how to solve the problem of a world where ten percent of the populaton is white, yet the white population controls the resources of the planet.

A world of white supremacy/racism invisible to white people. Black people see it. Many white people don't see it. Does it have to be seen with a third eye, and why? What does that say?

Leave comments please, I want opinions on this more than anything, thank you.

2005-06-13T03:42:00.000-07:00

In Iraq, the story of the Marines abusing the American contractors... I'm trying to get my mind around all the implications.

Abuse begets abuse begets abuse. People who didn't speak out about the Americans' abuse of Iraqis now see Americans abused by American marines. How will people begin to understand the whole picture of abuse, and how it relates to white supremacy/racism which is a part of the Iraq picture and of imbalance in the whole world.

balance

2005-06-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

The reason I'm posting so much today for no one to read, ha, except you Uncle Frank my one reader, is that I'm taking breaks from transcribing some audio. The audio's actually on a fascinating subject, it's about what our massive trade deficit is doing not only to our country but to the world.

We've never been in quite this position before as a country, with a trade deficit in the hugely discomfitting numbers range, at least as measured as its percentage of GDP, and never has the world been in this situation either, with the foremost world power in such trade deficit, in this more-than-ever interconnected globe where everyone's well-being is dependent on balance, in trade and in everything.

Balance -- that's the problem underpinning white supremacy/racism around the globe too, we need balance between people. And that would save all of us, ultimately, not just those on the down side of the see-saw. A man used this expression, balance between people, as a definition of justice, and I don't want to plagiarize him, but I don't know if he especially wants me to use his name. I like the expression.

humdumb

2005-06-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

My uncle saw the movie Thelma and Louise last night. He identified with them, wanting to change their humdrum, dumbdrum, humdumb lives, as he said. He went in the navy when he was 18 years old for a desire to change his life. He was hesitant about making that big move, but he did it.

Uncle Frank says I have to stop being a humdrum wife in a humdrum life, and he says he'll give me lessons to do so, $200 a session, and 20% interest on the money.

Hmm. There's always a price for changing one's life.

Friends - Moony over them

2005-06-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

Friends. Each friend exists as a parallel universe.

Oh, another metaphor, each friend in some sense is another moon orbiting one's life. When Ganymede and Io and the other moons of Jupiter were discovered by astronomers, that was the first discovery. But these moons are continually discovered by each child who first learns about them.

As it is with people. My husband's friends Pat and Phil long were in their own orbits of course before I "discovered" them when I met my husband Ken. And these two "P's" had been in my Ken's orbit sharing various common interests, computer technology, Air Force associations, etc., and of course, just friendship. Then Ken came into my orbit, and all his 'moons' came with him into my universe.

I now enjoy the spheres they all add to my life -- with the "two P's", it's Pat's interest in reading historical fiction and everything she can get her hands (or eyes :) on, and her interest in psychology, and her intense devotion to 2 Phils, "genius Phil" and "Dr. Phil"; it's Phil's investing and computer and technology whiz activities; it was early on, an art auction we attended because of them, which fascinated me. They keep adding ideas to our own planet.

Many friends' orbits have changed from distant to closer to distant to closer over the years, and pull us or recede from us and their orbits cycle around us like that. Some friends' orbits that I thought would always be somewhat distant, have begun to circle closer.

Scott and Colleen, two friends who started out as fellow parents of a teenager who was a friend of our teenager, and now are fellow parents of a college student, have circled in sometimes life-saving ways. Their son and our daughter brought us together but now Scott and Colleen are Io and Ganymede in our sphere, not just circling our children's spheres.

I treasure exploring the heavens of old friends, while still excited when I discover new worlds, new moons, new universes. My best friend when I was 11 wrote in my autograph book, not good poetry, but heartfelt: "True friends are like diamonds, precious but rare; false friends are like autumn leaves, scattered everywhere."

And some friends' imprints are scattered everywhere through one's life, like my best friend Nancy's. She's rarer than diamonds.

To me true friends, new and old, are like moons. False friends are perhaps space debris.

The REAL Uncle Frank

2005-06-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Frank is EVERYONE's Uncle Frank. Does everyone have an uncle like that... that everyone starts calling him Uncle, too. All my friends call my Uncle "Uncle Frank". It's his only legitimate name. he's just an uncle. Born to be an uncle.

Of course, what I said about him in the previous post, that isn't real :). Yes he owns lots of houses and yes he lives in Machias, Maine.

But I knew he'd be reading my blog so I had to write something weird about him to amuse him, one of my only blog-readers. (thank you, Uncle Frank)

'Bout his turning his town into "Stepford", The Stepford Wives movie is such a common cultural reference in America's subconscious, isn't it? It scares women to death on some level. We wives have a lot of Stepford Wife in us perhaps?, i.e.longing to be perfect, needing to be made into a robotic machine by the men in the town in order to ever be so? Or is that a crazy analysis...

The real uncle Frank, the very un-Stepford Uncle, will be written about in my next post.

Hi Uncle Frank and Amanda

2005-06-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Frank lives in Machias, Maine in one of about a million houses he owns there. He has a wonderfully nice sounding woman doing some paperwork for him, named Amanda.

He buys all these houses because has a secret plot to buy up the town of Machias, and convert it into Stepford. He used to be married to a Stepford wife named Janet, and he misses that complete feminine devotion. ha ha. Actually Janet was quite the feminist.

He plots to turn every feminist in Machias into a sweet grocery-cart-pushing housewife smiling at her husband and telling him he's the master in bed. Which I don't know what is wrong with that, as long as you can be feminist too.

We'll see how the Machias women take that! Right now he's still in the buying houses stage, but watch out...

toxic chemicals

2005-06-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Has anyone out there been hurt by exposure to chemicals in some way? Leave a comment or email me if you want to brainstorm together, it's something I have been through too and we can share our experiences and stories, and I can give you the info re the help I have found that is available and we can exchange resource information.

My husband and I and daughter lived in a house which tested at EPA toxic levels for chlordane and other pesticides, and we drank well water in Ga. which was apparently contaminated with methyl bromide.

It's been a long journey learning what to do to detoxify and get our health back, because mainstream medicine isn't into that detox journey. If you just feel sick and don't know why, more often than we realize sometimes it's environmental exposures.

I'll never forget a woman in the next bed from me, behind a curtain, in an ER of a southern Virginia hospital. I was there for a UTI on a camping trip near there, and I heard everything, heard her tell the impatient young doc that she'd come in because she just didn't feel well, had a strange rash, and she hadn't felt well ever since she moved into her new house.

The doctor diagnosed this as nerves. I wanted to shout thru the curtain, "Hey, she said NEW HOUSE. Be Sherlock Holmes, that is a clue you should follow up! Mybe just maybe since her symptoms started when she moved, she's reacting to something in the house.

Maybe it's been termiticided heavily; maybe she's reacting to new carpet chemicals as the people did who worked in an EPA building in D.C., if you've ever heard that ironic story of toxic exposure at an EPA building of all places!

I didn't shout through the curtain. I didn't make an effort to help that woman. Why????? I was intimidated by the doctors too? I don't know. I will always regret that among the many other situations where I could have helped a stranger but didn't. While cherishing the times I did, and awed by the times perfect strangers helped me. Angels.

White Supremacy/Racism

2005-06-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

If you are a fish you're not aware of the water, a wise man told me. I am 'white', I am trying to see the white supremacy/racism in the world. To do that, I also have to see it in everything that goes on in my own life. If I eat a piece of chocolate, how did its manufacture hurt non-white people? If I wear a diamond, how did its mining hurt black people?

I don't have a diamond. Luckily my husband never bought me one. I say that in all sincerity.

We all can become aware of not only all the manifestations of the white supremacy/racism on this globe, but the whys and THE one basic "why".

Manifestations like the disparity in drug sentencing between white and non-white people; the fact that the genocide in Sudan is not being interfered with by the United States, even though after the Rwandan genoicide ten years ago we said "never again"; the "driving while black" phenomenon that many white people want to deny even exists.

As far as the one basic why, I'll write about that in another post. I just wanted to introduce this topic. So far I don't think anyone is reading my blog, but on this most important topic, comments would be very much appreciated by any phantom readers who may float in!

Husband's hand

2005-06-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

My husband rubbed my forehead yesterday.

He took his hand and gently caressed my hair down, smoothing it across my forehead, again and again.

Still worrying that one day he'll wake up and realize he married someone ugly rather than the beautiful woman he says he married, I worry when he rubs my hair down flat on my forehead - I worry that it makes me look ugly, and I worry about my hair getting messed up. Yesterday I needed the love and I relaxed and accepted his hand's warmth and the feeling of being comforted, and I looked into his eyes.

His eyes and face had caring and concern, and even as I looked into his eyes to see if he noticed that I don't look good with my hair rubbed flat against my forehead, in his eyes I only saw signs that what I looked like was loved, with my hair being rubbed flat against my forehead.

mother birds

2005-06-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

The birds outside my window this morning had no lack of confidence in their songs, no anger... does a bird ever feel anger, and express it in his song?

My mother used to watch birds while she washed dishes at the kitchen window. When she moved to the retirement home, she stopped cooking. She and Dad go down to meals in the dining room.

They live on the twelveth floor, so I don't know how many birds they see up there. And my mom's eyesight is very low, although she would be able to see the flash of color a cardinal brings. Just writing that, about her eyesight, and thinking of her courage, makes me realize I love her... All we've not understood...love mixed with the inexplicable times of harshness.

Seeing birds from the kitchen window were highlights of her days when she was home as a mother and houswife. The birds she saw were one thing she talked about at dinner when we kids were thinking about our homework, and wanting to get away from the dinner table and practice piano, competitive about whether our musicality was good enough to make it into the most select singing groups, whether we'd get accepted into the best music schools.

Now I notice birds at the kitchen sink as I do dishes, and they are a gift, a thrill. Their songs are always in tune. Why did I not get a thrill out of birds and their songs when I did dishes at the kitchen window as a child, wanting to get to the piano?

Metrics of Being Helped by Somebody Else

2005-06-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

Recent memories
of harshness
and a hand slapped
by mother's hand
resonates back to childhood

I put on
the "worthless" inner headband
worn invisibly
visibly

A man
listens to this story
his mind seems to lightning
and rain ideas
brainstorm, change
the atmosphere in my brain

"Two hundred years ago
her hand didn't exist"

The shrinking in my brain
stopped
while he talked...

My brain rained with thoughts, what does he mean?
... maybe to say as if any hurt
is not eternal,
throughout the universe of
time and through all space
and God's plan
-was that what he meant?

His ideas flowed like a stream
"her mother probably slapped her hand"
"she was brought up that hands are to be slapped"
"why not ask her, are hands to be slapped? --
or held, caressed?"

He said, "You felt worthless
because she slapped you?
Worth less than what?
Worth less than who?"
But I couldn't seem to think it through

To counter
the slap
he used
the metrics of his process

process of questioning
process of thinking to me, with me
he used
not only what he said
but how he said
and why he said
and THAT he said, at all

process of truth

He, putting his counter weight
on scales,
slapped hands -- balance?

If I can I could
use my slapped hands
for giving

many use slapped hands in life
and give with slapped hands for what else do they have,
what else would they use?

And my mother too
gave with slapped hands
the good and love she gave
too

and I don't think she ever had
much counterbalance or
someone like this man,
an angel-in-some-ways-almost-a-stranger
in some ways almost-a-father,
helping man
on the phone to talk to

the metrics of having not
many angels
given to her
on the scales of her own life

"It"

2005-06-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Thinking about "It"

Having been called "spacey" ever since the word came out, I thought I'd admit to it and introduce myself by writing about the advantages of this state of being.

"Spacey" or "space cadet" or "spaced-out" -- the first time I realized
how it applied to me, I was in a college writing class.

We were sitting at our desks, blank notebooks and pens ready. The instructor said, "close your eyes". I closed my eyes.

Our desks were in a circle. I was tired, and closing my eyes was just what I wanted. I heard some shuffling around in the room as we sat there with our eyes closed. I drifted into stream of consciousness thoughts.

"Okay," the instructor's voice said. "Open your eyes."

I opened my eyes.

"Write about it," the instructor commanded, and then walked back to her own desk. The room was silent as everyone else began to write.

I thought, "Write about it" -- Well, that's an odd assignment.

"Write about it." Write about what?

"It".

I kind of panicked at everyone else writing when I was sitting figuring out "it", but then I realized that what she must mean was, write about anything. Anything, in a metaphysical, existential sense, can be "it". We could choose our own "it".

What will be my "it", I pondered. At that time in my life, I had been thinking a lot about ugliness, trying to come to terms with my own looks. I had decided I was ugly with beauty, or beautiful with ugliness. My face changed so much from day to day, I had no consistency to how my face looked. I decided my own "it", that I most wanted to write about, would be "ugliness".

I figured our prof didn't want us to say what "it" was, but instead by describing it, to define it.

I wrote, " 'It' is so much itself, it's almost cute. 'It' is not a pug nose, it's not a wide grin."

"It is not reason for suicide" was my next line.

I don't remember the whole poem. At some point the instructor stopped us. "Okay, let's read our descriptions of it to each other. Karen, we'll start with you."

I started reading, and everyone burst out laughing at every line. They loved my poem! Someone even clapped at the line, "it's not a reason for suicide". The instrcutor told me how original it was. I wondered if they knew the "it" was ugliness.

Then the next started reading. Her "it" was a laundry basket. She had written about how it carries clothes, etc.

The next person read her poem. Her "it" was also a laundry basket. Hmm, what a coincidence, I thought.

When the next person's "it" was also a laundry basket, I suddenly noticed a laundry basket on the floor. The instructor had put the laundry basket on the floor when we'd had our eyes closed. I'd been too oblivious and spacey to see it.

If you think ugliness when you're supposed to think laundry basket, or if you think go when you're supposed to think stay back, you're getting the benefits of spaciness. Being out of step with others, it's got its advantages sometimes.