10
Mar
I vaguely remember the conversation that prompted it. My father discovered I liked reading classic novels, and even preferred them to the Sweet Valley High books I’d torn through until I could not stand any further comparison between Jessica and her “chocolate brown walls” or Elizabeth’s ponytail and lip gloss.
He began bringing books home for me. Discards from the library at the high school where he taught. Books from flea markets. Stacks of them, from everywhere. I thought he was getting them free and only later found out that no, he paid for rather a lot of them. In fact my most cherished book – a complete collection of the poetry of Carl Sandburg – was gift from him. It seemed like as soon as I read them, he brought four more. A good chunk of my book collection in high school I didn’t read until my 20s. Some I still haven’t read. Once Dad began accumulating for me, he never stopped. Once, when I got into college and mentioned casually I was struggling with writer’s block on an assignment, he greeted me on our next holiday visit with three books designed to overcome writer’s block. I still haven’t read them, in truth. I could never ever talk to my father about boyfriend troubles or the conditions of his household that drove me away, but when it came to writing and keeping working he paid attention with acute detail. He was simply thrilled to finally have something in common with me.
I’m not sure when I began doing it to myself. Hoarding books from library stacks, surfing book sales, even overcharging my credit card for five books at a time at Barnes and Noble. But the evidence was there, my home overstuffed with bookshelves. When I went to meet with a professor in his home, he had to move bookshelves to let us in – his extended out onto his three season porch. I realized that there was no way the man could be regularly accessing and using all those books. My ex had the same reaction that I did to his proposals we buy a wooden Indian for our living room. “No…just…NO.”
The books may have been a point of pride, but after my divorce I recognized their burden. They were the heaviest moving boxes, the ones that took the longest to pack, the ones I paused over, cringed over, cried over. Forget the Waterford crystal and other heirloomish things foisted upon me unwilling. My heart was in the books.
Recent years of fighting to swim upstream in the world with the weight of my belongings tugging at my neck have caused me to rethink who I am, and rethink the place of books in my self-concept. I still have books, quite a lot. But I need them less and less. I’m actually quietly phasing out any book I would not reread, and that’s rather a lot of them. Some I’ve even torn up and used in decoupage, marking up boxes I intend to use for shipping so they’re at least nominally “packaged” in the way many of my perfume clients like to demand. 1 I’ve also noticed more people televised and in real life who are burdened, even restricted, by their stuff. Books weigh heavy among them.
I can be smart and geeky and maybe even someday only own one bookshelf. Besides, I have an awesome computer and the Nook doesn’t look so bad.
- Just because I client “demands” doesn’t mean I do. In fact demanding something is one way to get me to dump a transaction. Your happiness is important to me, and my happiness is way more important to me. [↩]
9
Mar
No.
Chances are, I haven’t read any book you will recommend or reference, especially if it’s got award-winning buzz or time on the New York Times bestseller list.
It’s not that I’m not a reader. I read all the time. Constantly. I have stacks upon stacks of books – it’s actually something of a problem.
But in my quest to be a good writer, I’ve decided that beyond my book reviewing duties, I’m just going to read stuff I enjoy.
And the stuff I enjoy is not the stuff critics acclaim. So to those lovers of Barbara Kingsolver and Maya Angelou, or even Ursula Leguin: I’m sorry. At fifteen years behind and counting on my reading, I’m just not going to tour the vineyard or goldmine when what I want is just a soda pop.
8
Mar
It’s a long story, but last winter I came into possession of hoodoo coins. I did not, of course, immediately know they were hoodoo coins. I just thought they were eleven cents that I randomly picked up off the ground and dropped in my purse.
Suddenly I’m looking at my high school peers’ sport of bouncing pennies in a whole new light. After a long series of weird and disturbing happenings I rediscovered the coins, or more specifically, had them pointed out to me. While they’ve been disposed of – the cure for a penny curse is a dollar coin cure – I can still feel the adolescent malevolence vibrating at me through the picture. I had stashed them on my balcony until the snow began to melt in earnest. Today I got the nudge, and gave them to the Mississippi River along with the cure. As each person looks at this, the power is diluted until it is nothing more than water flowing to the sea.
Also, for those wanting to show off power: only shitheads do this. Don’t.
It’s not.
The only time I’ve encountered darkness and violence as a result of my religious preference has been when people who are NOT Wiccan decided to be assholes about it. Much of the “violence” comes when a family member who is not Wiccan has an inappropriate sense of what s/he has any right to control.
But for the under 18s, they can still make you go to their church. But no one has a right to control what you think, despite motherly selfish con artistry since Eve. Hang in there.
I’m not eating your cats or your children. I don’t need baby fat for flying ointment when olive oil is so easily obtainable these days.
Oh, and I’m positive I’m not going to hell. But you might want to take a step back and think about where you’re living; I’m pretty sure spending that much time scared and angry is hell. I’ve always liked God, and I can’t imagine my big buddy being pleased with anyone doing a job he’s already quite good at.
6
Mar
I bought the boots in 2005. Part of my second or third paycheck from the corporate job that meant to Change Everything1 I dropped a significant chunk of my income on two pairs of shoes. The second pair, I sadly don’t remember. But the first, a pair of 1.5 inch Clark’s ankle boots, I due. Their salutary effect on my higher-ups was near immediate.
In some ways, Showgirls was right. Women communicate in competitive environments via nails and shoes. And since I find manicures beyond basic nail sculpting ecologically abhorrent, I embodied the perfect cognitive dissonance for my position: bad nails. Great shoes.
A wobble in my heel caused me to bring the boots in to Fast Eddy’s, a cobbler in Dinktyown. Eddy himself mans the shop (presumably) and he immediately recognized that Clark’s had a manufacturing error. The shanks were weak and broke too easily. Even so, he rhapsodized at length about the quality of my boots, and even though they were sometimes the culprits behind my hiving feet, I was proud to wear them. I felt elevated – not just that inch and a half, but in some dynamic way I lifted myself a social class and style class. Even my breasts looked better when I wore those boots.
Yesterday as I dashed from bus to train for a social event, I noticed the telltale wobble in my right heel. I found reasons to sit down even though I meant to work the room at the social event I attended with my husband; I found ways to work schmoozing and sitting together, ever conscious of that wicked little wobble.
I brought them back to Eddy. He flipped the boots over and shook them. The left rattled. the right did not. “The shanks are broken,” he told me. “The right one isn’t even making that sound.”
He then shoved the boots to the side. “When my kids got their first dog, I explained to them that dogs only live about fourteen years, and sometimes only to eight,” he explained. “These boots have done their time.”
I left my trusty Clarks with him once grief counseling completed. He says he can reuse the leather. I just realized that I left the shoe inserts behind.
- and did, making me realize that nothing would change [↩]
Last year, the Herb Companion ran an essay contest inviting its subscribers to write on “the future of herbs.” What won were very sentimental my kids and grandkids future stuff, which does fit into the vein of the magazine.
Here is what I submitted, that lost:
Herbs, those little green subversives poking their heads above ground just as we think they’re gone, are plotting a revolution in photosynthetic collusion, appointing their gardeners as generals. Their battle strategies consist of guerilla actions: they have infiltrated foods and gardens, even our sidewalk cracks. We have had agents concealed in our spice racks for years, subtly enhancing the flavors of our lives. We are surrounded. They’re ready to make their move, having signaled to our governments and medical agencies that they have power. Herbs have more attention than they’ve ever garnered before, changing our world and oxygenating our lives. As antibiotics continue to fail, as we reclaim contaminated properties for public use and as we recognize how very much we need to find ways to generate oxygen to preserve a breathable atmosphere, herbs are creeping back in small armies with their sights set on the ecosphere. Watch out for those herbs – once they invade, they put down roots! Already, these little green men are repairing here, correcting there and through their hearty nature even overcoming some of the worst of the damage that we’ve done.
It looks to be a winning campaign for the chlorophyll set. The future of herbs glows green and vibrant with fresh approaches to old problems. Skyscraper rooftops will be dotted with herb gardens as cities offer greenroofing tax-break initiatives to reduce air pollution. Corporate farms will plant marigolds, garlic and thyme between rows of major crops, having finally determined that the whole plant and not just an extraction keeps off parasites. Indoor and outdoor gardens will be absolutely commonplace, with all sorts of technical gadgetry to make their care easy and convenient. A media blitz about the healthful effects of indoor plants on their owners will create a boom in indoor gardening. This mushroom shaped cloud looks like kombucha, as more individuals learn the benefits of cleansing tonics.
The medical field will have the most complex advances. Nurse practitioners will lead the way in introducing live plants to hospital rooms, and greenhouse therapy as a post-treatment follow up will begin with cancer patients but eventually become a routine practice after any surgical procedure. This therapy will involve simply bringing the patient into a greenhouse space attached to the hospital and letting that person enjoy the benefits of immediate, truly fresh air. These greenhouses will double as medical facilities, allowing on-site pharmacists to grow the plants needed for treatments. Since doctors are already overwhelmed with medical advancements, the role of the pharmacist will expand to include herbalism and this will become a new specialization as more pharmacists will need to be onhand who understand traditional medicine and how traditional drugs will interact with herbs.
Herbs will storm our lives, freshen our minds, and gently guide us into a revolution where we can breathe easier, think more clearly and enjoy the taste of simple living. They won’t just be for farmers or homeowners – they will be uniquely urban, and city dwellers who love city dwelling will learn to once again look at their sidewalk cracks, build up their window boxes and even do drive-by herb gardening in the form of guerilla gardens.
Herbs are already everywhere. They’re already uniformed in green, biding their time in fertilizer-filled foxholes, waiting for their chance to take over. All it will take is a few more empirical studies, a few more gardens in neglected urban space and a few more companies recognizing the cost-saving benefits of putting down a few plants. Viva la revolution!
3
Mar
image by Darwin Bell on flickr
This morning, my second high school locker combination popped into my head as I woke up. 10-24-8. I avoid thinking about high school – if it weren’t for Facebook I might have succeeded in my lifelong quest to pretend that the living hell of my senior year and all the events and people that led to it never happened. But now, getting friended by the girl who had the Deep Crush on the same Boy I had the Deep Crush on in high school is triggering up loose memories.
Like my high school locker combination, and why I had to change it.
I’m not mechanically inclined at all. I’ve dug into my inner resources to fix broken things in the past, but ultimately, I have to get a professional. Coming into junior high and high school where the lockers had actual locks was particularly awkward for me. And, if locker position is everything, I wonder if, at the end of elementary school when my locker got located downstairs and a few hundred feet away from my peers with only two other students beside me, if we were all pre-selected for ostracism as we moved on to junior high. It certainly worked out that way for all of us.
In junior high, I found myself fighting to get my locker open with inept fingers and then to run – nay, dash – for the bus while a seat was still available. My bus route had more than its fair share of aggressive, outright hostile kids most of whom would mace themselves rather than be seen sitting next to the fat girl on the bus. I tried asking a friend to save a seat for me, but she decided that she was not my friend which she told me in a nasty note in study hall one day – claiming that I “treated her like poop” which seemed to be based solely in my asking her to save a seat, and that was that. The girl would then occasionally come back to me with fake-cordiality over the years through high school as though I were indeed one who had wronged her deeply1 The reality was that she dumped me in pursuit of friendship with a low-ranking popular girl on the same bus, but if she admitted that was why, suddenly she was the horrible person and not me.
I can assure you dear audience, that my only crime was to ask her to save me a seat on the bus. I was too fat to steal anyone’s boyfriend, after all2 . She tried to friend me on facebook recently. I was not kind.
This has nothing to do with high school, not directly. I’m sure upon rereading at some point I may see the connection, beyond lockers and bus seats.
In high school I had a whole new locker and a new combination. And for the first week of classes I could not get the damn thing open on my own. I finally enlisted the boy two lockers down, who was happy to help given the numerous locker-kicking freakouts he observed. Eventually this locker assistance turned into a little thing, and he became my first boyfriend. He read my stories, I edited his handmade comic books that were actually pretty good. My best friend was ragingly jealous that I had a boyfriend, although I innocently overlooked the signs. His mother hated me, saying I was too “fast” and we both got mocked by our peers; he was zit faced and I was nerdy with a big butt. Awkward makeout sessions turned into setups where people could “catch” us and build his cred while I got the “easy” label that people had been wanting to give me since my sister hit high school3 . Bizarrely this label disappeared after our breakup, or, at least, people got to the point where they just didn’t care. I was never on the list of that school’s hot girls, something for which I’m grateful. The ones that turned out “well” have lives I can only describe as insipid.
When I finally got tired of him watching television when I called him, and him informing me I was never allowed to break up with him, I broke up with him. Amidst the drama was a very creepy reality: he still knew my locker combination.
So I had to get it changed. And of course, when it did get changed, I received no notice.
I remember running between the admin office and the janitor’s office twice before the janitor finally gave me the damned combination. When, after I’d been called in the office after one girl felt the need to yell I was easy and kick me in the shins despite never having a real conversation, ever 4 I was asked for feedback. I brought up that the notification about locker maintenance might be improved. I even had a concrete plan that is used in most schools nowadays.
The Vice Principal shot me down. He didn’t really want feedback. He just wanted to feel important, after telling the lawyer’s kid essentially that it was just fine that she physically assaulted me in the hallway because she didn’t like that I had a boyfriend.
Notably, my parents were completely useless in all this.
By the end of my first year of college I could no longer remember the second combination, although I remembered the first one for some incongruous reason. And then today, more than ten years after I graduated from high school, I remembered the stupid combination. Usually when memories get unlocked like that, it’s because my brain is making room for something. I hope, whatever it is, it’s really good. It will have to be amazing to make up for reliving any part of my adolescence at all.
- Some of this was prompted by my sister’s popularity among my classmates, many of whom wanted to sleep with her, girls probably included. The very thinking that led to this sideways ass-kissing still grosses me out. Incest by proxy is still incest, and I contend that some fantasies are actually harmful. [↩]
- attitude of my community at the time, not my attitude towards myself. I’m fine with being fat [↩]
- One of many reasons sister fantasies piss me off on a very personal level. My only problem with my sister’s sexual activity at any age was that she lied to me about having sex while “advising” me not to have sex until I was 18. This was one of many raging hypocrisies built up among my clan that has over the years almost totally alienated me from my family. This is still not as bad as her expecting me to drop my college plans because she was pregnant. She denies she said this, but crazy hormones and pregnancy hormones look pretty damn similar on her. [↩]
- and people wonder why I still hate them [↩]
Made of fail pens - shot by Diana Rajchel
I have this box of pens, a type I used to love before gel pens were invented. The kind that live in that in-between space; not quite a marker, not quite a pen. I acquired them when a company I worked for went out of business. I snatched the box of them, knowing that I’d likely never see any benefits for my troubles, and probably on some level motivated by my frustration that what could have been a good job for me went to hell before I could even get anywhere. (If my old boss happens to read this: Phil, I’m the one who swiped the pens. I’m sorry. Also, I’d love to meet you for coffee sometime. I’m freelancing now.)
I now stash them in an old check box in one of my office drawers. Over the years they have dwindled from hundreds to a bit fewer. I’ve taken to using them for my Morning Pages, rather than the gel pens I so love. It’s become a strange ritual act every morning: as I write the crap contained in my head that stands between myself and creative production, I use these pens. As the pens are drained of ink, I also drain the circumstances that screw me over. These are my made of fail pens. By using them up, I drain out the failure from my creative wounds. Maybe I even drain the fail of old workplaces, psychological pressures and that weird period of job-hopping that was so little understood by those around me.
It’s not geometric like ceremonial magic or particularly folksy. It’s a pen, and it’s on paper. The energy all starts flowing from there.
There’s a standard formula for what constitutes a “good” Wiccan book that I’ve seen in various Internet postings and at least one pagan gathering in the past decade. It is as follows:
1. Must have a long bibliography. The more pages of the bibliography, the higher the estimation.
2. Must be historically accurate in whatever form of historical accuracy is presently trendy.
3. The denser the prose, the better.
There are exceptions, but they pass quickly. I’ve barely heard Phyllis Currott’s Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess
I suspect, when publishers insist that the 101s sell better, they are telling the truth but are too polite to say the entire truth.
These dense semi-academic Wiccan books that some clamor so loudly for? They’re damn near unreadable.
Writing quality matters. A good writer can be understood. A bad writer does a lot of things, one of which is refusing to “dumb down” the writing for the sake of some academic self-perception/illusion. One of the dirtiest secrets of the Ivory Tower is that academic writing is some of the worst in the world.
I bring this up because I just read a doctoral thesis with lots of historical accuracy and a huge bibliography. I know I’m supposed to say it’s excellent. But truthfully? I found it unreadable.
I think relatively few people think I’m stupid. Most people know that I finished my bachelor’s degree (and had to fight for it) and that I do have three years of graduate-level education as well. I do know a little bit about academics and academic writing.
So I’m going to risk accusations of heresy and say the following:
Now I’m hoping that the next think on my review pile is something I can read.
27
Feb
When I was a really little kid, no older than kindergarten, I would lie in bed for a little while before my mother came to get us up, staring at these colorful curtains with blocks of different patterns and colors. As I did, I would challenge myself to imagine things: “Think of a purple giraffe!” or, “What would the neighbor boy look like with a clown nose?” It wasn’t conscious, the exercise of imagination, but it still happened on a regular basis.
Then one day I challenged myself to think of a color I’d never seen.
And I couldn’t do it.
I always get a little sad, thinking about that day.
More than thirty years later, every so often, I try to imagine a color I’ve never seen. Sometimes I feel like I’m almost getting there. But then I stop. And it makes me a little sad, like I’ve discovered some limit to what used to be a limitless mind. But then I try again, and I can feel my third eye buzzing, and it’s like I can almost see it, this little mystery of the universe – the color I’ve never seen.