The Liminal Hymnal

So tonight at 11pm Eastern Standard Time, they will announce the MegaMillions winner, assuming there is one.  I didn’t exactly know this when I bought my one and only ticket, me not being a typical supporter of the lottery, that this is a multi-state lottery, meaning people as far away as New York and buying their tickets, hoping to cash in their dreary existences with ones of opulence and splendor.  I also didn’t know that an interesting by-product of the winner of a multi-state lottery, is that that winner helps out his/her state in all those taxes.  For that, I would hope if it’s not me, that someone in the dear old North State wins tonight, so people like B. who teach elementary school can make something approaching a living wage, and so we can keep our state parks open, and we can keep riding the ferry to the outer banks. Though North Carolina is not the place of my birth, I’m deeply involved in her beauties and miseries, having stumbled into several jobs that were state-specific: state literature, state poverty…in addition to going to Governor’s school, and All-State band/orchestra in high school, where people from all over mountains and piedmont and sandhills and inner banks and outerbanks came together to play Shostakovich symphonies arranged for wind ensemble.  I’ve traveled to almost all of her corners, including the far northeast where the poverty is thickest, the swamps are thickest, and tourists don’t really go.

Buying this ticket and thinking about the lottery of course makes you think what you’d do with the moolah.  It’s a value-check as much as anything else.  If money were not an option, what would you do?  It’s the favorite inane question of high school guidance counselors, as if options to do anything are real possibilities for everyone, regardless of talent or ability.  If I said if I didn’t need money and could do anything and that anything would be professional basketball, that is me thinking me pretty stupid thanks for nothing high school guidance counselor.

If I had money, I’d play music and make art, and help other people be able to do those things too.  I’d help animals and all the people who have helped me in the past (a long list of well wishers).  I’d travel.  Otherwise, I think I’d keep doing pretty much what I’m doing now, which is indication that I think I’m pretty well doing what I need to be doing.

The lottery is now up to $640 million, one of the big biggies in the history of lotteries, and easily the biggest for little North Carolina, who dragged her heels at the lottery for years while states around us went lottery-loco.  Sometimes you hear about the oddity of someone winning the lottery twice.  Sometimes a whole cadre of lunch ladies go in together and win together.  Sometimes an already-rich person wins it.  I think the last thing I truly won, was a Halloween costume contest of a friend of Sara Zaleta’s, the prize of which was a weekend at her cabin west of Boone.  It was a fabulous weekend and the gift of getting very far off the beaten path, with accommodations that I’d never otherwise allow myself to afford.  So I am not complaining tonight at 11:05pm, when I am holding a piece of paper that is utterly meaningless, except maybe as a reminder of how lucky I already am, to be who I am and where I am, and to be doing things I love, with people I love in a community worth celebrating.

Good luck North Carolina!

So I was curious about my lottery numbers.  A computer spat them out for me.  Generally, computers have been my friends, and I have no reason to dislike the one  that chose these for me.  For added interest, I googled the series of numbers of my lottery ticket, in quotation marks.  What did the numbers mean? How had they been used in the past? The full list of numbers yielded nothing, but the first five (minus the megaball number) gave me 232,000,000 results.  

1) The first result was a date and time of printable version of a post on diets. Not that interesting. Some cheekiness makes me think it’s from another country, England I think. Here is the best tip in the thread:

• Save 300kcals by choosing sliced bread instead of a baguette. A demi-baguette or panini weighs the same as five slices of bread and clocks up 500kcals before you even add the filling!

Eventually, the thread got off track, and this was the most recent one, the comment that ended the thread completely:

•  Don’t really have anything of value here, just figured I’d make another one of these threads while I avoid doing anything constructive. On that note, the Major Lazer album is gonna be a sick release. Quite exciting. 

I hadn’t heard of Major Lazer, but apparently it’s two DJs who worked with M.I.A.

2) The second google hit, somewhat unbelievably, is a post about how NOT to answer emails that say you’ve won some foreign lottery, and instruct you to send your bank account information to blah blah blah.  It’s a site that warns you what a fake lottery scam/spam email looks like, and bewares you of it.  I sort of can’t believe it, but my lottery numbers are the ones in the scam email of a scam lottery that you did not actually win, but which was created to make some little old lady give up her bank account to a conman.

OK, now things get a little weird:

3) The next three are date/time stamps for flickr photos, one of a city street, one of a man at a podium announcing something called the 2010 Doug Wright Awards.  Behind him on the screen is projected what looks to be a book cover, Back + Forth, with the name Marta Chudolinksa underneath it.  The last one is one of a beat-up red jeep.  All three of these tell me what camera was used to capture the image.

4) The rest of the google hits are in Chinese or German.

So I looked up the Doug Wright awards, because I had never heard of them, and they are for Canadian cartoonists and graphic novelists.  Completely unbefuckinglievably, one of the jurists that year was Carl Wilson.  I actually know Carl Wilson.  Please, Carl Wilson, if you are reading this, please confirm that you did indeed judge the 2010 Doug Wright awards.  If that is the case, I’m dumbfounded.  How in god’s name did a computer in a North Carolinian gas station give me numbers to a lottery, a lottery I never play, then how did I  think up the idea of googling the numbers, with those numbers leading me to an image that involved Carl Wilson and how did I think up the idea blogging about this on the blog that Carl Wilson at one time told my sister he sometimes reads.  What kind of coincidence is this? I’m so confused!  Is it just that Carl Wilson is so ubiquitous? Should we be playing six degrees of Carl Wilson? Or is this a sign I’m going to win the lottery tomorrow night?

My very “country” software programming coworker alerted me to the enormous lottery prize right now available in our state, explaining how it’s been weeks since someone won the megamillions game.  It’s now $500 million, the largest, easily, in North Carolina’s short lotterific history.  The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 176 million.  I like those odds, so I bought a ticket, for $1, at the gas station across from my office with the weird guy in it who used to flirt with me, when I used to buy coca-cola there from the squeaky machine. I had to buy advil today, and while there, I remembered Wayne county coworker’s pronouncement of the largeness of the largest of prizes, and went ahead and spent my $1.  The drawing is tomorrow night.

I remember as a child my mother buying lottery tickets in Sarnia, Ontario, and for some reason I have strongly associated this with either coming back from piano lessons with first Terri, then Caroline Korstaanje, the younger sister taking over the older sister’s when older sister went to college.  They played accordion too, though my mother had to remind of that, sometime when I was in college.  I have almost no recollection of one piano teacher sister getting replaced by the sister - they are the same teacher in my mind, with different hair.  I would wait during my brother’s lesson and read the Highlights magazines, then we;d switch and he would read the magazines while I had my lesson.  The studio was in the basement of their house and I have no idea where either of them are now, though I’m somewhat aware that though they are monolithic in my mind, my current boyfriend might be about their age. This is all confusing.  At the end of the lesson, we got to pick out a sticker from the sticker pile.  Something else: they lived on Donalda St. (or Lane or Rd.) off Lakeshore Drive, and once coming back from a piano lesson, my mother got a speeding ticket and it was very upsetting.  Another time, the backdoor flew open because it had not properly been shut.  On the very first piano lesson, age 6, I chose a Donald Duck sticker in tribute to the lesson being on Donalda Ln.  As I write this right now, I am waiting for an oboe student to come to my house for a music lesson.

When we came back from those lessons, I have a strong memory of going to the basement and turning on the TV and watching the lottery happen  - they picked the numbers out of a big twirly thing with balls inside, and then showed the numbers on the screen and I would see if our numbers, the numbers we’d picked and written on the card, matched up, which they never did.  It was actually a show on TV, I’m pretty sure.  Here, the lottery card just picked the numbers for me.  The NC lottery is probably not printing the numbers that are winning so the jackpot gets huge and we all buy more tickets.  I don’t play the lottery but a few times a year, and whenever I do, I think about watching that show on Ontarian television after the piano lessons I hated as a child, because my brother was always better than me - more fluid, a better practicer, more naturally gifted, smarter, with bonier fingers.

A few things have jumped out at me recently in the news, and they’re not related, but they’re interesting and maybe that’s just a-okay to put them in one post, at least I hope so and actually maybe they are related, at least 1 & 2:

1) Wearing a hoodie apparently makes it okay for someone to shoot you in Florida even if you aren’t armed.  Weird guys hang around my neighborhood all the time, doing much more than just walking around in a hoodie with an iced tea in one hand and some skittles, and I never think to follow them, get into a kerfluffle with them and shoot them.  There’s a lot of horrible, obvious racism going on here, and I am glad for the outrage, but something that I haven’t heard talked about is just guns guns guns in general.  Let’s say Trayvon was actually doing something wrong.  Let’s say Zimmerman followed him and they got into an argument.  How would that have ended if there hadn’t been a gun involved?  Would some people have gotten beaten up, maybe some knifewounds, maybe?  It would have been horrible, but in a second, a teenager was shot dead on the street.  I’m just too Canadian to believe in the right to own guns because I just don’t get them and their lure and why they’re so important to have. They just seem like a tool to escalate bad situations into deadly ones.  You’re in your house, someone’s trying to get in - you don’t own a gun, what’s your instinct? Lock yourself in a room and call the police.  Same scenario, you own a gun — in the heat of the moment, do you just go for the gun? People use guns in situations when they’re probably not thinking clearly.  I think they stop good problem-solving in situations of crisis.  The other thing that’s mentioned but not talked about in Trayvon’s killing, is that he was walking through a gated neighborhood.  I don’t understand how he was able to do that, but why are neighborhoods gated anyway? Who chooses to live behind a gate? Exactly the kind of person who would follow an unarmed teenage and shoot him to death. The only reason to have a gate is to separate yourself from others, and as soon as you do that, you’ll always have an ‘us’ vs. ‘the other’ mentality, and as soon as another human is an ‘other’ you can do whatever the hell you want to him (think Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, slavery, you get the idea…).

2) A different race-related item in the news, is that apparently some of the Hunger Games characters in the movie were cast with black actors.  This surprised white people who had read the book not very carefully!  I thought it actually one of the more heavy-handed parts of the book that the two kids - little wispy Rue and the big guy Thresh - were from the agricultural district and basically treated like slaves (cuz black people used to be slaves, remember?) I was rubbing down the big bump on my head from when the author slapped me over the head with it, but apparently some white people read right over that and were disconcerted that the lovable little wispy innocent girl was black.  Because you know, you can’t have a sympathetic innocent black character!  Black people aren’t innocent! Even the nice ones are probably up to no good.  I think this goes back to the ‘white person as default’ — like you’re white and telling a story, and you say, “you know that guy” and that’s codeword for ‘that white guy’ but if you need to be specific for some reason you say “that black guy”.  Without a racial signifier, white people tend to default to white people.  So white readers who didn’t catch the ‘her dark-skinned friend’ part of the book, just imagined another little white innocent girl in the part, because white people are default, white girls are innocent, angels are beautiful innocent creatures, black people wear hoodies and are up to no good.

3) Chocolate is good for you!  If you eat tons of it like I do, it helps your metabolism. It’s a pretty unscientific study, but points to the fact that calories might not be treated the same in the body.  I’ve never understood why sometimes I binge on stuff that’s bad for me and don’t gain weight, but other things make me balloon up like a balloon that’s full of air, except in this case my body is the balloon and what I am full with is na-na-na-nachos! I love chocolate, and if I get to eat that and lay off the soda and candy and that’s the tradeoff I have to make for the sake of my health, I can do that. It’s a small price to pay. Thank you, science!

And if you’re thinking some part of my white person’s mind put two news items about race next to one about chocolate for some subtle racist reason, well you’re wrong. I realize that I did that, but rather than chocolate = brown = brown people, this has more to do with the fact that I just crave sweets every single day of every year and there is a reason my sweetheart’s last name is Sugarfix can you guess what it is?

I bought The Hunger Games around 2:15 yesterday, read it from 8pm to midnight, and finished it from 6am-8am this morning.  I’m a bit of a binge-reader typically, so a novel that’s meant to make you turn the pages to see who dies next, doesn’t stand much of a chance. It’s written for teenagers, so if you go into it expecting some over-the-topitude, you can read it with playfulness and not worry too much about the overblown bits, and I don’t mean the portions where people blow up literally, but the melodramatic parts.  This is the point at which you need to stop reading if a) you haven’t read the book and want to; b) you haven’t seen the movie and want to or c) both a and b, or d) don’t care about The Hunger Hype and what I have to say about it.  I say this because I am going to talk about what I thought of it, and spoilers abound, and you’ve have been officially spoiler-alerted so if you are in any of the a,b,c,d camps listed above, and you keep reading past this paragraph, I take no responsibility.  Note for further reading: I have read the book but not seen the movie, and this is about the book, not the movie, though part of the impetus for reading the book was to read it before seeing the movie, which is the next thing I guess I’ll be spending discretionary income upon.

I won’t delve into plot because if you’re reading, you already know it.  So, what a subversive little YA novel!  SO much has been written about its violence, whether children can handle this kind of gore, how into gore kids are, is this good for their moral development blah blah blah.  Whether it was intentional or not, the author managed to slip in a lot of commentary about a variety of complex social topics, and no one’s talking about those subversive elements because they’ve got too much blood and pus in their eyes. It’s a pretty brilliant device to distract in that way.  At heart, it’s an anti-capitalist screed – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be chosen, because you trade in your name multiple times to get oil and grain for the year (cough cough – poor people go into the US military disproportionately more than wealthy people).  Poor people starve to death in this novel, like they do in real life, while rich districts look away.  Would middle class kids whose parents bought them this novel, understand that?  Occupy the Capital – I wonder how much kids ages 8-16 (the intended audience for the novel, I’m gathering) have followed and understood what’s happening with the Occupy movement, and if they could make those connections.  There also seems to be some kind of anti-communist credo in there too – you’re not allowed to speak out against the regime, about the Hunger Games, the districts have to meet quotas…One of the districts is agriculture, and some kind of pre-Civil-War type slavery is happening there, though it’s not touched on much - race doesn’t get much play in the novel, which is too bad. Are we supposed to think this future is post-race, is it is almost post-gender?

I was struck by how in my day, a strong female main character (the narrator) would have been an oddity, and would have gender-categorized the book, making it a ‘girl book,’ but I don’t think kids reading this now, male or female, probably had this reaction. I’d be fascinated to hear about that from kids who have grown up now a couple generations from ‘70s feminism.  At one point, Peeta, the doughy baker’s son who’s injured and who Katniss, the female archer, is helping, says he’s obviously hurting her hunting chances with his lameness and lack of skills, and that he’ll stay behind and pick roots and berries and stuff.  You hunt it, and I’ll cook it, he says.  Would any kid/teenager reading that pick up on how revolutionary that is? Or is that just normal now, that these are just people doing things, rather than Girl X does this, Boy Y does this, by virtue of their genders?  Also, she’s a tough girl, but recognizes feeling vulnerable sometimes, confused – you can be tough and still be emotional, not 100% sure of herself.  Again, this feels like another step in what is allowed, expected, totally OK to be, in terms of young womanhood.  There were books I read growing up where first, the girls were weak and silly; then a different set of books about one-dimensionally tough girls who never wavered, like there was no in between.  The gender equality is not trotted out front and center, it’s just part of the culture of the novel.  I can’t tell if that’s a commentary on how it should be in the future, since the novel takes place in the future, or a commentary on how it is now, for kids who are maybe less gender-divided.

Then, as if that’s not enough, the novel’s a commentary on reality vs. superreality, in the fact that the games are televised, basically reality TV death matches.  Kids 8-16 today have grown up not knowing a time when there wasn’t reality TV of some kind.  That is mind-blowing, and I wonder how many of them understand reality vs. ‘reality tv’ reality.  Do 11-year-olds understand that those shows are scripted, at least partially? That they’re edited into a story that may or may not have existed?   In fact, Katniss herself and Peeta struggle with the same confusion over what is play and what is real, in the context of what they are feeling for each other.  It’s post-modern!  Lastly, you get an unreliable narrator for the second half of the book – or at least that’s how I read it – one who’s telling us she’s not feeling anything for Peeta, that this reality-tv-ness is what she is feeling, has been instructed to feel, except maybe those emotions are real, and what are ‘real’ emotions actually? At what point does thinking that you feel something for someone actually turn into feeling for someone? I would wager the 4^th graders B. is currently teaching who are mad to get their hands on this book, will likely miss this subtlety. I think though, for a sharp 7^th grader, a book like this could be pretty mind-blowing – because you’d be still young enough to feel shock from the violence of it, but you’d also be developed enough to pick up on the subversive elements, if not consciously, maybe unconsciously.

It’s by no means a great novel, YA or otherwise, but I do like that it’s about something, and can be read from a variety of angles.  I want to see the movie to see how my mind’s-eye imagining of the world matches up to what Hollywood executives with CGI budgets imagined it to look like.

p.s. I have no idea who the artist is behind these hilarious vintage-inspired Hunger Games propaganda posters, but they’re very clever (see top of this post, and yesterday’s).  You’ve got that 1960s Americana look to them, the ‘do this for your family’ can-do attitude of WWII posters, and the font that’s straight out of Soviet propaganda. 

Apologies to regular readers of the hymnal, once-a-day readers like once-a-day vitamin-takers, who missed yesterday because I didn’t write.  I promise, just like with a missed vitamin, you’ll be just fine not having had your dose.  NPR told me vitamins don’t do anything anyway, that unless you’re really destitute or are one of those adults that never outgrew the habit of only eating corn dogs, you get your vitamins from your diet.  I trust NPR.  I give them $5 a month, hoping to win the elusive trip to the city of my choice.  How would you like to win a trip to Paris? Well, duh.

Apologies too if the hymnal seems slightly less coherent, as I’ve had insomnia for 4 of the last 6 nights.  I had insomnia the summer of 2009, and couldn’t believe how you can stay alive for four months without sleeping more than 5 hours a night, but I did it, and I’m here, and just like this week’s early morning hours were spent staring into blackness with my mind on a treadmill, so too might next week’s and the week after that’s, or else tonight I will sleep easily, dreamily, although not likely because I am reading a certain book, see below, and fear it has filled my mind with evil trash.  Keep reading to find out more!

So today, in addition to buying groceries, cooking burritos and pierogies, sweeping the floors, teaching a kid who didn’t practice all week, loading up the dishwasher, taking a walk, flipping the mattress, arranging sheet music for a Felix Obelix ringtone primarily in 11/8, listening to wait wait don’t tell me and marketplace money, depositing checks, returning library books and borrowing new ones, I went to Flyleaf Books and bought the second-to-last paperback copy of The Hunger Games (now a hit movie!) because there are something like 39 holds on all 14 copies at the library.  All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this book about teenagers killing each other is everywhere and I like the idea of teenagers killing each other because I teach teenagers and can imagine the ones that might want to kill me when I give them sight-reading that is too difficult.  Theirs is an extreme species, the teenager.  This is a book that is 374 pages long, I bought it today, and I’m 194 pages deep already.  It’s a good thing it rained today, because otherwise I would have had have mowed the lawn instead.  It is decently written, better than most YA novels, appropriately over the top for its intended audience, but you read it for the suspense and there is plenty of that.  It’ll be fun to read this and then go see the movie, and then read the next book and go see that movie that will surely be made, and so forth.  I’m struck that it is essentially an anti-capitalist screed.  It’s Occupy Everything for readers age 10-18, through the lens of bloodshed and killer wasps and things.  I won’t say anymore because you may not have read it, and like I said, I’m only 194 pages in, but I’ll be done by tomorrow because I am a fast reader and can post more then.  People are screaming outside right now, down the lane from me, where the student housing is.  They could all be getting murdered, Hunger Games-style, but I hear their tortured cries and can think only, enh, basketball.

I will say this about the Hunger Games - there is a (so-far) bit character named Rue who is a little tiny kid, and when I worked one summer at the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of Nash and Edgecombe Counties (poorer counties in Eastern NC), there was a tiny little bird-like girl there, very dark-skinned with huge eyes, and her hair in lots of braids, just tiny tiniest little wisp of a kid, who reminds me of this book’s character Rue, except the girl in my memory whom I have cast as Rue in the brain-movie of me reading this book, that little girl I knew once was named…wait for it….Sagittarius.  I wonder where Sagittarius is right now. She must be probably 18 already.  Happy Hunger Games, Sagittarius, wherever you are.

Completely incoherent ramblings of it being 4:30am and not quite sharp.  I’ve been awake for 1.5 hours at least and have the feeling I may be up to watch the sunrise, something supposedly rife with Romantic tendencies but just feels like torture right now. Had insomnia two nights ago too - my brain, faced with something difficult to think about, always waits until the middle of the night to try to sort it out.  I think I’m too good at diverting my conscious brain during waking hours, and restless as it is, my unconscious brain then plays the role of jilted mistress who would rather stay up and keep arguing, than just let the matter drop.  In moments of rational clarity at 3am, I can say to myself, nothing productive is going to get decided right now, so just go to sleep, but it’s like my brain’s been hijacked and forced to ride a tilt-o-whirl at the fair, around and around and up and down, going every which way and nowhere at once.  Bonus though, that the cat is pretty excited by me being up right now, but she doesn’t have to be at work in four hours.  I’m also, in the light-nate haze, encouraging myself to do things like cut my own hair or shop for something expensive online.  When my hair gets to a certain length, I have the bad habit of twirling the two pieces near my ears when I’m thinking and/or nervous, which is basically all the time, so much so that my already-prone-to-greasiness hair gets extra greasy right by my ears, and the two pieces of hair stick out at right angles to my head.  I’m trying to resist the urge of cutting them both off right now - I know I’m not thinking straight.  Anne Gomez once told me to never make any life-altering decisions, or believe anything your mind is telling you, at 4am.  It’s good advice.

We don’t spend enough time on the little things, and recognizing the little things we love is an easy way to insert more happiness into one’s life.  It’s easy to get caught up in ‘if only I had X’ or ‘if only my career was in Y place’ and predicate our happiness on these Big, Future intangibles, when right in front of you, happiness can be acknowledged and reveled in, if you just pay a bit of attention.  Therefore, here are some sounds, smells, physical sensations, and words I love.  Think of your own, and pay attention to when they happen, and you can up your happiness quotient without doing much of fucking anything.

Here are some sounds I love:

An old school metronome tock tock – no digital beeping can compete

Cat purr – nothing in the world can compete

Thunderstorms, especially inside a house with a tin roof – bowling balls and tinkly raindrops, almost danger sounds but not really

The ding the toaster oven makes to signal the toasting of sandwich completion

Here are some smells I love:

Garlic cooking in olive oil – the smell of anticipation of something yummy soon to be put into it

Salt and vinegar chips, kettle-style with malt vinegar – it must be the Czech in me, but I love anything pickled, and just the smell of something pickled is enough to make me salivate.

Rose oil – my mother has/had a small ornate wooden vial of this with an onion-dome top and as a child, I would sneak off to untwist the top and smell it.

Here are some physical sensations I love:

Low note rumbly vibrating the chest cavity, making the feet tingle – one of the reasons for playing the bass is surely this.

Lover’s fingertip gently brushing hair out of my eyes - the hairline: under-appreciated zone of hubba hubba.

Lying on the beach with the sand under me and the sun beating down, the skin-roastiness and the sinking of muscle into soft matter

Breathing through nostrils after a long spell of having a cold and being stuffed up

Here are some words I love, regardless of meaning:

Rhythm

Twig

Megalomaniacal

chalumeau (shall-oo-moe)

Bonus points if you know what a chalumeau is without looking it up.  If you don’t, go look it up and when you’re falling asleep tonight thinking about 1) what made you happy today and 2) what you learned, you can think about the chalumeau, plural chalumeaux, and all the many centuries during which it has tootled so melodiously.

When did the grass suddenly grow so tall?  When did your baby you were just pregnant with, start talking?  How is it possible that you’re already getting divorced, I feel like I was just at your wedding.  Sometimes you look at the calendar and think, god we’re already almost four months into this year, and it seems like both a long time and no time at all.  Months fly by, weeks drag on, Monday, humpday, the weekend just passed too fast.  It’s a long time until Christmas, and then when it comes up, it comes too fast and it’s done and gone and another long time before it happens again.

When I was a kid, I thought about a calendar year like this: there was a half-circle that represented January, February, March, April, May.  Then a straight line down from that was June, July, August, then a sharp right, that curved upward for August, September, October, November December, with the curve of December leading back to January.  I have no idea how my brain put that together, but I’ve had that mental map of the year in my mind since childhood – something to do with Summer Being Different, no doubt.  I have a strong memory of being in the winter of sixth grade and thinking I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t in a snowsuit – like I could not remember what the previous summer was like, just that it had not existed in my recent past memory (though pointedly, I could remember memories where it was obviously summer).  I remember being scared about this realization.  I’ve often wondered what it would be like to grow up in a seasonless environment like Hawaii.  Do you experience time differently when the environment doesn’t change to signal its passing?  Around me, living plants go barren, then get their buds of spring, flower, leaves grow, leaves turn ochre, leaves fall off, go barren again, in a cycle that can mirror my time-map. The long slog of not being school likewise changes our perception of time.  For years and years, certain months equal school and some equal summer and autumn has a melancholy/bittersweet feel to it – the beginning of another long slog, but also the chance to see your friends every day.  I wonder if year-round schoolers feel time differently than their off-for-summer-vacation counterparts.  Too now when so many people around me have toddlers and babies, you acutely feel the passage of time, because change is so rapid at those stages.  Four years at a job is not much time at all, but I recall a previous boss who was pregnant when I started, and her kid was almost in kindergarten when I left.  This is hard to wrap a mind around because my rate of change was so much slower than that child’s.  Does it keep slowing own, is my next question – do you not change much at all between 70 and 85?  Are you who you are going to be, at age 70? 65? 60? At one point does time and change slow down to non-time, non-change? Is it different for different people?  Every once in awhile you hear about the 70 year old man who learned to surf, but we only hear about him because he learned to surf – statistical outlier, dude, because he’s different from the norm, implying that the norm is non-change, is non-surfing. 

I’ll be coming up on 10 years out of college this May, both a very long time in terms of thinking of all I’ve done in that time (quite a lot, actually), and not much time at all in the long view of my existence, assuming I make it to old age.  Unlike a lot of people, I’ve been steadily employed during this time, for which I’m grateful, but I’m also cognizant that a lot of people take themselves out of the workforce in their 20s and segment their lives into more compartments than I have, and can therefore look back on their lives as “the time I worked at company X” and “the time I took off work for two years to have a baby” and “the three years I was in graduate school”. I think this segmentation works to organize our minds about our lives, the changes and the passages.  I’ve not had these gaps, so it’s more like one long river, with a couple of major boulder-inducing tributaries, rather than five discrete lakes to gaze over and ponder and fish out memories from.  My father routinely says his memory is just an enormous jumble – people from different periods of his life gets mixed up in the wrong parts of his history; conversations are misordered; places lived, houses rented and bought – just a tossed salad of memory.  I’m acutely aware that I suffer from similar afflictions, though not as extreme.  For all my interest in memory and time, I have neither a good memory, nor a good sense of its passing.  It must be that the things that we don’t understand are the things that can hold our fascination.

I just wrote an above-average-in-wittiness post about my life as a reader, and my rediscovery of reading for pleasure, but the internet ate it up, and it’s lost forever.  So I’m just going to skip to the Book Review portion of that post that no longer exists:

Room by Emma Donaghue. This is a tour de force of writing.  The narrator is a five-year-old boy, describing a life of living in a room with his mom.  If you don’t know anything about this book, stop reading right now and go borrow it, and read it without knowing anything more.  If you’ve already read it, you know that what we find out from this tiny narrator is that the room is all he knows, and that his mother was abducted and kept against her will in this locked, soundproofed room-cave, which is the only environment the boy knows.  The sheer imagination necessary to write about this situation is staggering, let alone to write from the perspective and convincingly as a five-year-old.  She pulls it off.  I sucked back this novel in about three days - I couldn’t wait to get off work to read it, and the dishes piled up.  I waited a full year for it to be available at the library - at one point there were 39 holds on every single copy.  It was worth the wait. Impressive and empathetic.

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres - Growing up in a religious household with screwed up parents, this is a memoir and ultimately a love tribute from the author to her adopted black brother, with whom she was raised, sometimes cruelly, in Indiana in the ’80s, and then their experience of being sent off to a religious boot camp in the Dominican Republic as teenagers.  Note: do not skip ahead to the very ending to see how both the author and her brother fared post-boot camp - I did this by accident and it colored my reading of the latter half of the book.  Don’t be like me - let the book unfold as it does because it’s beautiful.  I was deeply affected by this book, loved the author’s tone, and realized that sibling relationships, sometimes very profound, are rarely examined in literature, movies, etc.  It is heartbreaking, but an excellent read.

Buoyed by that, I read the non-fiction work by the same author called A Thousand Lives, an account of the Jonestown massacre.  At the end of this book, the author says most people born after 1980 have never heard of the religious mass-suicide of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana in the late 70’s, but actually I had heard of it, and feel most people my age do know of it.  I saw a documentary on it, and recall Perry Wright’s Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers concept album on the topic that never quite came to be.  This book shed a different light, another heartbreaking light, on religious fervor in tropical hinterlands, and painted a different picture of the mass ‘suicide’ than what is traditional thought to have happened (that all 1,000 people had been brainwashed).  Thousands of FBI documents have been made public, and this is the book based on those newly declassified documents.  Rather than brainwashed zombies, the people were basically starved and worked to death, manipulated, lied to, then ‘murdered’ (you’re in a line to drink poison, children and parents are screaming, unwilling people are stuck with cyanide syringes, armed guards are pointing their guns at you - what choice do you have? It’s not exactly the ‘drinking the kool-aid’ we’ve come to think about when we think of that event.)  It’s sort of an unbelievable story, but Scheeres paints the portraits of the players in it in such a humane way that you feel you can understand them.  She writes the story of what happened, and the descent into the madness of its leader, in a slow, incremental way, that mid-way through the book, I realized I was taking it in just as the churchgoers must have been.  Things start off great, then they get a little weird, then a little weirder, but so incrementally you don’t see if happen, you don’t see the undercurrent of evil until suddenly old ladies are getting drugged, kids are put in solitary confinement for expressing anything negative about the church, people are undressed and humiliated with spankings during services, women are raped, letters from desperate relatives are censored…it happens so gradually, you don’t see the turning point of good to odd to eccentric to madness.  Haven’t we all known someone who descended into mental illness this way?  You wake up one day and realize, hey, this person is actually crazy, like not well at all in the head, when did that happen?  By then you’re in too deep. It’s just in this case, that person had convinced 1,000 to move to Guyana and consider him a god.  Fascinating and important, I also sucked this back in a few days, but if you find yourself reading it, take a little more time to process who is who in this book.  There are a lot of names, and I was reading too fast to remember who was who, and I think it is worth it to slow down with this one.  

Those are my top three reads in 2012 - three months, three books!

Today is St. Patrick’s Day.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been to Ireland but lots of my friends have and noted North Carolinian Amy Callahan lives there with her Irish husband and speaks in an Irish accent now but you can’t fool me, you are from Winston-Salem, Amy.  I like the brogue of the place, and am fond of green, and lush green especially and the tourist photos seem to be lush green all the time but those never show the homeless people in them, so you can’t believe everything you see. Apparently in some languages, blue and green and the same word (hat tip Robin Davies for alerting me to this), and that is just so confusing to my mind.  You’re looking at the lush Killarney fields of green, and up at the bright blue sky, and if you’re from some country with a certain language, you point to both and say ELIWEOIFHLSEIUHRLSIUFHLE and it’s the same color for both colors, as if sea and sky were same.  I was thinking about the poverty of thought of that, then realized that all the time I say, my what a blue sky, when every day the sky is a different color of blue - azure, periwinkle, cornflower, navy - but I just say blue, so I guess I’m not better than those other people from those other places speaking those other language. But I’m getting away from Ireland, and the little I know about it. When Amy C. came back to the wilds of NC mountains to marry her Irish groom, their Irish friends came too, and after a long drive, getting there at night, there was a bonfire where the Irish friends were boisterously loud and drunk and demanding I perform a party piece, which is like a short skit where you do something and be the center of attention for some reason, and I was just definitely not in the mood to do this.  I think I would make a puny Irishwoman, not being a drinker.  I always thought I’d do well in Japan, where there are rules and order and politeness, and lots of weird cultural products and gender fluidity — except that it’s also population-dense, and I do badly in crowds. We’re really narrowing down here on what I wanted this post to be about, and if you’re still reading, and haven’t just given up and gone to look at that scientist cats of the 1960s blog, then I ask you this: should there not be a website that takes all the information of cultures of countries (and for simplicity’s sake, let’s say countries, although I recognize that some countries are very varied in terms of culture, especially ones with multiple ethnic groups and/or large geographic mass) - you give people in cultures assessment surveys about what it means to be an Albanian, Tahitian, Australian, etc. and make a profile of each country.  How polite is the country? How greedy? How accepting of weirdness?  How hot? How cold? Then you, internet user bored at work, answer questions about what you like, how you like to be, and the data matches up and tells you that you should move to country X, where X represents the country whose profile most directly matches the profile created by my survey questions.  I read a book about happiness in different cultures, and couldn’t get over how fabulous Iceland seemed to be (despite bleak darkness for months of the year).  I have been to Iceland once, and met some Icelandic girls at a chamber music program in Switzerland, and felt an instant affinity, mainly because of three things: 1) people who are born in Iceland make friends for life.  People don’t leave, and there aren’t that many people, so you grow close to them and they do not leave you; 2) everyone dabbles at some kind of art form - it’s expected and 3) you are also expected to change your profession several times in your life - resumes of Icelanders are all over the map, apparently.  Now, this is based on the book I read, and which could be wrong, but I just need more information about other places and the habits of their people, so I can go visit there and feel at ease.  What don’t I know?  Why not?  All my study abroad friends always told me the pace of life in Australia is just slower, and more chilled out.  Pace of life would be a question on my quiz.  So come on, who is going to fund this website? Maybe it already does, but I doubt it.  Somewhere over the verdant Carrboro hills, a bagpiper warbles mightily, its air sack inflating, I think it’s coming from the train car restaurant place.  A bagpiper in a parked train car, the sun beating down, the sheriff patrol car sliding by, me on the porch, green headband in hair to ward off pinches.

I’m really sort of flummoxed by the new war on contraception, and specifically, birth control pills.  Why now? The first b.c. pills came on the market in 1960,  the year JFK announced his presidency, the Family Circus comic strip began, and Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini was the #1 hit for a week in that summer.  In other words, it was a different time - such an utterly different time as to be only barely imaginable to me, born twenty years later.  So why, if these pills have been on the market and accepted for 50+ years, do we have a new cadre of Republicans who want to make them disappear, or at least make them difficult to attain?  How out of touch can you be?  Younger voters, (gosh, after this birthday, I can hardly count myself in this group anymore) have grown up knowing nothing besides the fact that you can control when you get pregnant (barring infertility of course). Think for a second how revolutionary that is, in terms of the history of humankind.  Young voters don’t know anything besides the fact that if you’re not an idiot, you can take a pill every day and be in control of something so life-altering - why would any of these people vote against contraception?  We should all be celebrating this - it’s in everyone’s best interest, and the best interest of this country, that babies are born as choices people make when they are ready.  I don’t understand the let’s-just-see-what-happens mentality.  You have this important power, you have control, why cede that control?  I think it’s wacky that conservatives are trying to shove b.c. pills under the carpet, like we’re all going to go back to a time where if you wanted to have sex, you had to have babies, whether you could provide for them or not.  I’m guessing they think making b.c. pills difficult to attain will make people not have sex, because non-procreative sex is bad, but the point is, in the era before b.c. pills, people didn’t have less sex, they just had unplanned pregnancies.  Now, parenthood is a choice.  I find sometimes people of an older generation than mine never quite get their heads around this idea — that this is something within our control now.  I actually think the animosity of pro-parent types against people who claim to be ‘child-free’ (i.e. those who have made a choice to not become parents) is actually a byproduct of this shift from children as natural consequence of being alive, to child-bearing/rearing as lifestyle choice. (Why some child-free people bear animosity towards parents seems more complicated to me, and less understandable). The other thing I wish people would understand about contraception is that the people who use it, are the same people who may within their fertile lifetimes, stop using it.  In the black and white world of some conservatives, I think they believe there are two types of women: 1) single sluts who have lots of casual sex for fun and use birth control so they keep having slutty, fun sex without consequences, and 2) good, virtuous wives who hate sex but grit their teeth and have it once every 2.5 years to make a baby with their husbands.  Has this dichotomy ever been true? Though the marriage rate has been falling for decades, the majority of heterosexuals in America still get married, and most married people do have children.  This means that the same woman that has non-procreative sex using birth control, either outside of or within a marriage, during one part of her life, is the same person who may decide at a different time in her life, to stop using that birth control to get pregnant.  Seeing these women as one in the same would break down this false dichotomy of slut/good wife.  Also, don’t we almost universally agree that people marrying a bit later in life (i.e. not right out of high school, or at age 20, as used to be the norm), is a good thing for people, society, and future children?  What do conservatives suppose we do then - stay celibate until six years out of college, when first-time marriage rates spike?  For people who hate the notion of abortion, contraception is the great path away from that — I’ve sometimes wondered what I would do if I became accidentally pregnant.  Just how pro-choice am I?  Could I go through with an abortion?  Luckily for me, I can take birth control pills reliably, responsibly, in conjunction with some other form of birth control and voila, I do not have to worry about having to make such a decision.  Don’t these conservatives want fewer abortions?  

I wish in the aftermath of Rush Limbaugh’s idiotic statements, that more people saw that as a ‘teachable moment’. If you missed all that flapp, Rush chided this female law student for her testimony on the cost of birth control pills, making the assumption that because she spent $300 on birth control pills, she must be having sex all the time.  But birth control pills aren’t like condoms - you don’t buy one and take it right before sex to prevent a pregnancy.  If this dolt in power and with money is thinking this, you can bet other people in this country are similarly misinformed about how birth control pills work.  Instead of starting a campaign to pressure companies to stop advertising on Rush’s show, a campaign about how birth control pills work might have been a good idea too.

I hate that sex is taught now like heroin usage: it’s horrible, do not have anything to do with it, ever.  It’s goofy to take that approach, because though it’s pretty good advice to not even once try heroin, sex isn’t something you won’t ever do.  It becomes a part of adult life for most people.  

I also wish men were more involved in standing up for birth control pills.  Family planning is a joint decision.  I’ve never been in a relationship where it’s not been talked about and agreed on.  Unfortunately, in the recent flap about birth control pill access, in my personal life I’ve heard outrage mainly from other women I know.  I wish more men would stick up and add their voices to the conversation to say, you know, my wife is on birth control and deserves to be if she wants to be and is not some slut because of it. Where’s the male outrage?  Where’s the sense of urgency about protecting b.c. access, from all the men who benefit from it too?

I should end this by saying I’ve been a patient at Planned Parenthood since my early twenties.  I go there for my Pap/pelvic exam every year. I went initially because I was buying my own health insurance and it’s expensive to go anywhere when you’re self-funding your medical insurance, but more importantly, because a physician’s assistant there, Dr. Jennifer Biermann, is one of the most exceptional doctors I’ve run across.  So many doctors won’t listen to you, have some kid of agenda, and/or try to whisk you out of the room as soon as possible, but that’s never been my experience with her.  I go to Planned Parenthood because they practice good medicine and I’m impressed by their professionalism. Birth control pills are the only prescription drugs I take, and I like PP because they have more up-to-date about them (general practitioners don’t always have that kind of information).

What a great birthday! The internet knew about it, and people wished me a happy birthday on the internet and in real life.  Someone saw on the internet that it was my birthday and wished me happy birthday in real life.  Officemates provided cupcakes and balloons; got spoiled rotten with presents from B. including lots of money to spend on shoes, something I never do.  In fact, we have an ongoing argument about what is a reasonable amount of money to spend on a pair of shoes, with me being the cheapskate, so this was a nice way for him to manipulate me into treating myself.  It’s pretty clever.  I’m listening to a my new Lars Hollmer CD too - something that’s not that easy to find.  Fred Frith is on this CD, and I didn’t even know they ever played together. I share my birthday with: Andrew Jackson, Phil Lesh, Ry Cooder, Sly Stone (!), Lightnin’ Hopkins, Dee Snider (of Twisted Sister), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Fabio. I’m in fine, fine company here.  Anna Lena, a square dance caller and poet of repute, found out it was my birthday while I drank ginger beer at the coop, and sat down and sang me an old-time tune about a birthday.  I don’t know if the weather has ever been warmer on my birthday, in the place of my celebrating of my birthday.  I got a headache today and napped in the afternoon with my cat for an hour.  I cut out vintage wallpaper samples and ate Mexican food.  Does it get better than this?  I worked my brain out on a proteogenomic mapping paper and got a free sub at the Harris Teeter because I’d bought 15 previous subs as a member of the sub club, f*** yeah I did.  Hooray!  I had no idea what I was going to do today for my birthday and it turned out great.  I’m not worried about getting old because I’ve always been old. Three cheers!

I just learned some new words.  Maybe you’d like to learn along with me.  They are important because they are colors and if you can describe a color with just the right word, the picture you create in the mind of the reader is that much more specific and vivid.  Also, I remember in the 6th grade, the popular girls in my class deciding tomorrow would be black and white day, and everyone was required to wear black and/or white in order to be considered cool, and the next day, when our teacher Monsieur Hillier showed up in colors, disappointed, the popular girl asked him why he didn’t wear noir et blanche, he responded, “Parce que je suis un homme de couleur.” (“because I am a man of color”).  Since then, I’ve only looked for hommes de couleur and I daresay have been rather successful at this endeavor.

1) Smalt - Sounds like smelt, the tiny fish, but is actually a type of blue that’s produced by fusing potassium carbonate, silica, and cobalt oxide. It’s a science type of blue.  It’s the blue that’s used in pottery and painting, sometimes, I think. Here’s a little smalt goat for your Wednesday.

2) Damask - From the rose from Damascus, it’s a pretty, demure gray-red.  Why you might be upset with me and this definition, is that’s also a fabric with intricate designs.  I like both - both the color and the fabric.  Don’t be a hater.  Here is a damask in the color of damask brain explodes.

3) Bittersweet -This is a type of deep melony reddish-orange, named after a berry.  You think of that wistful time you did such and such with so and so, but it didn’t last — that’s the orange you’re feeling inside, or should be if you had any soul left in your twisted heart.  First it’s sweet, then it’s bitter, then you paint your forlorn kitchen this color, then you regret it immediately.  Here’s a bittersweet napkin to dry up those stupid little tears.

4) Jasper - This is the dark green you get when you mix too many paint or too many plasticene colors together. It’s the color of your art mistake, if you want to feel self-flaggellatory. It’s also kind of pretty, if you let it be.  Wouldn’t you maybe describe your aunt this way? You should start calling your aunt, Jasper.  B. calls me Jasper when I am being cheeky.  It’s actually named after a stone, which confusingly, can also exist in nature in other colors, like reddish-brown. Here is a Jasper from popular culture, who is not green-black at all, unless you use your imagination. It is what google images things jasper is.

5) Periwinkle - My favorite crayola crayon in the box, perwinkle is named after a flower when I want it to be named after a type of sea barnacle.  Why cannot I have my way, after so many years?  Periwinkle is pretty, and is rumored to be that color that looks good on everybody, hence its prevalence imbuing bridesmaid dresses that are otherwise ugly.  Periwinkle sounds like something a kid would use as codeword for a not-nice-name for a homosexual when he couldn’t get away with saying the f-word. Give it up for this bridesmaid in her ugly periwinkle dress, photo saved by seeing her ass in it thank you photographer.  I like to imagine, when I see a photo like this, of the model’s innards pouring out the front, where we can’t see them.

Let’s end this silliness right here and now.  Learning has been accomplished. Go forth with your newly-expanded life.