airport observations

Airport lobbies are the junk drawers of humanity. Full of fascinating, irritating, useless, priceless subjects. One of my favorite pasttimes is to get on the plane with someone I've been watching and try and guess what they'll do to pass the time in-flight. Particularly, what reading material they choose.

There was a woman waiting for the same flight as we were on, who looked like she should have had the words "My self-esteem went on a permanent vacation and all I got was this large, oversized, non-descript t-shirt" which covered her large, oversized, round-shouldered, slouching frame. Now, I'm a big girl and my point is not that she was large but that she had been well-taught to embrace invisibility as punishment.

Anyway, when we got on the plane, my vantage point enabled me to see her reading material. The perfect match: a binder labeled "The Building Blocks of Successful Leadership" propped up on the tray table, yellow highlighter and mechanical pencil gripped tightly in one hand. Self-help seminars and how-to management courses enrich themselves on the clueless and desperately insecure.

Then there's the cellphone criminals. Some day, I'm afraid, I'm going to lose my shit in an airport while listening to one more person yammer nonsensically on a cellphone with their "public" voice. I know this subject has been beaten to death but I can't leave it alone. And I'm not alone. (I love that there are people out there considering this problem from a design solutions point-of-view!)

I just can't believe that anyone would think that the drivel and minutae of their banal existence is the slightest bit interesting to those poor saps who happened to pull the short stick and end up sitting within earshot. I'm going to lose it and nobody but you, dear reader, will fully understand how long I've resisted.

august beginnings

I started a new job yesterday. At one of my favorite sources of rant fodder: the Houston Chronicle Online. My first permanent (non-contract) job in 8 years. Not one to count her chickens, I usually reserve judgment and keep my expectations basement-low. But between the welcome basket and the warm welcome I received yesterday, my expectations for a positive experience are creeping up.

Today's tidbits and high points:

• Did you know that when there's a plane crash, they pull all the airline ads from the online paper, lest the ad fall next to the story? I did not know that. Not something that most people would think of unless they were reading the horrible news and saw the ad pop-up next to it.
• I love working somewhere where having the newspaper on your monitor is not something you need to hide!
• Happy to report (ha) that there's a fairly widespread sense of humor and promise of entertaining, but not over-the-top, anarchy.
• To my relief, most of my co-workers have a general aversion to flourescent lighting
• Surprisingly, this is an unusually quiet workplace; only a few voices carry. Not anything that headphones can't eclipse. It's more open than I'd prefer, but not too distracting so far.
• Working downtown Houston is great. Plan on exploring (read: getting hopelessly lost in) the tunnel system which has one of its starting points beneath my building.

I wonder how soon I should break the news about my sleep disorder. Swear to god, I'm going to wake up face-down on my keyoard today.

relatively speaking

Attended a family wedding this past weekend. Bride beautiful, groom handsome, both in love. A cake-topper couple if I've ever seen one. The wedding was held at a state park. Other than the heat, the wedding and reception were unqualified successes. The interaction with family, on the other hand, felt like being in a shooting gallery. If you didn't sustain a direct hit, you got nailed in the crossfire. Exhausting. I fear that I may have, inadvertently, contributed to the injuries. I don't know, it seems so hard to break through the defensive barricades and well-primed munitions.

counter to clockwise

definition
We're going to start this off with a definition. (For godsakes, who do I think am I? The Queen? We are not going to speak in the plural because it displeases us.)

I'm going to start this off with a definition:

widdershins adv. /WID ur shinz/ or /WITH ur shinz/
In a contrary or counterclockwise direction.

A bit whimsical sounding when you read it but, I'm afraid, a bit obnoxious-sounding if you drop it into everyday conversation. Especially if you use the alternate pronunciation. And affect a slight British accent.

body parts
I am a lifelong fan of body parts. I mean anthropomorphising them, assigning unbiological characteristics or giving them extra attributes. A warning to the faint-hearted and delicate-natured: I am not. I am the proud owner of a freakish bladder. Yes, it's true. A container of dromedarian power. I have theories about childhood camping trauma from KOA toilets crawling with bugs contributing to my holding ability, but I am weary of the nature/nurture debate--it simply is.

I once worked somewhere for a week before asking the location of the bathroom. I used to be more embarassed by people's reaction to my 8-12 hour bladder, but no more. When I die, I think it should be sent to the place where extraordinary organs go. There, they could marvel at its elasticity and maybe discover hidden pleats, neatly pintucked all around. Now that I've opened the floodgates (oh, the irony!) of ongoing inner body commentary, be warned that there is no stopping me. I will gross you out. Not my goal but, unavoidably, a side effect of this topic.

softball
Or more accurately, fast-pitch...whatever. I'm not a big sports fan (camping, pets, and sports--the holy sapphic trinity--I'm telling you, if it weren't for power tools and pussy, I'd lose my membership to the all-girls club) but if I enjoy watching any team sport, it's baseball. It's easy to understand and your mind can drift without losing your place in the game.

I tried to surprise Barbara by taking her to see a women's professional fast-pitch game. She sort of guessed what I was up to but was pleased nonetheless. So we drove down to League City to see the Texas Thunder or was it Tornados? It was Thunder. Anyway, it was fun.

And fairly rich in imagery. For instance, the (former Olympic) pitcher was very good. She did the fast-pitch windup and hurled that neon ball with incredible speed and accuracy. However, as she was standing there on the pitching mound (hill, lump, bump) I noticed that her pitching bicep was huge. I mean twice the size of her other arm. For a minute, I thought it was lighting or perspective. But no, there it was, a true Popeye appendage sans tattoo. This is what makes sports fun for me. Wow.

aggieland
My good friends came back from visiting College Station, home of Texas A&M, the other day. They were full of observations and news. Evidently there is a Meat Science building there. Where they study meat, I kid you not. And sell it. What a Green Acres moment I had over this. They bought us some mesquite-smoked pork chops. Those aggies can smoke some incredibly good porkchops. More about this in upcoming entries.

sales tax smoke & mirrors

If you had a sale advertising, let's say, 10% off everything in your store, you might attract a smattering of customers. 20% would do a little better but would hardly bring in the hordes.

Back-to-school, sales-tax-free weekend starts tomorrow here in Houston. The stores will be crammed full of people clamoring to save a big 8.25%.

And why would anyone enter into that fray for such a small discount?
It's all about getting the man.

I hate to throw cold water on your shopping foreplay but while you snub the tax man, the business man is splashing on the (cheap) cologne in anticipation of your arrival.

abandoned fallen angels

From yesterday's news:

Child Protective Services is asking the public for help in locating the parents or relatives of a 1-day-old baby girl found abandoned Sunday afternoon in an alley behind a West Houston shopping center.

CPS officials need genetic and medical information from the biological family, which can be passed on to an adoptive family, Olguin said. Also, the sooner the parents' rights are terminated, the faster the adoption process will be, she said.

The parents of the infant face possible felony charges of abandoning or endangering a child, according to Houston Police spokesman Lt. Robert Manzo. Police have received a few calls regarding the infant, but there are no leads yet, Olguin said.

So what do you think? Do you think that someone who abandons a baby is going to come forth now that they are facing felony charges? Hmmm.

Some have started calling the baby Angel Doe because "she must have had angels with her because she was found so quickly," Olguin said.

Ah, the circular logic of belief. So the dead infant found earlier this year should be named Fallen Angel Doe? Obviously that baby didn't have any heavenly babysitters.

a brief report of decency

An excerpt from an AP story I read in the Chronicle about the terrible flooding in Bombay:

"One minute we were hanging onto the rope, and the next my cousin slipped, and his head went under water," Bhargava said, shuddering. "I tried to pull him out with one hand, but my legs gave way. I kept shouting for help, but people couldn't hear me above the roar of the water."

As he fought to stay above water, hands grabbed him and pulled him onto a tree by the side of the road. He spent the night with the strangers who had saved his life...His cousin was pulled to safety by people farther along the road.

This hectic cosmopolitan city may be famed across Asia for its movie industry, its wealthy stockbrokers and its powerful business clans, but this week it proved something else: It looks after its own.

The people who rescued Bhargava and his cousin were among the still-nameless Bombay residents who offered help despite the dangers, or who opened their homes to strangers, or who fed tea and biscuits to people wading past in waist-deep water.

Now was that so hard? A news story that mentions something noble that people have done.

I don't want whitewashed puff pieces about the bonnie state of the world. And I don't want the newspaper filled with feel-good, kitty-rescue stories.

But I'm weary of the unrelenting horror. Terrifying stories of loss, murder, war and natural disaster. It's lopsided and we know it. Because while we all know people who are miserably cruel, we also know people who are exquisitely kind.

And this isn't unique to rural areas nor urban centers. It's not about the eastern hemisphere or the western. It doesn't belong to the Christians or the Hindus. It's just about human beings rising above the muck and showing their decency.

backlog blog

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missed you, too

Okay, so I've been away. Had a short contract job and didn't have time or frame of mind to write. Damn, I missed this blogsport.

Before I jump right into the jumbled pile of stored thoughts, I am happy to announce that I've just accepted a job with the Chronicle's online department as a web designer. I am relieved and excited and relieved. Contract work has been slow and disappointing these past six months. I am looking forward to working at a company that:

• is not tied (at least not directly) to the oil & gas bi'ness,
• pays me regularly, and
  
• is located downtown.

Hair shirts
I'm fascinated by the concept of hair shirts. Or any of the methods of self-mortification that characterize the righteous and the insane. Hair shirts are such a great metaphorical tool. Like when a friend is over-apologizing for some minor infraction and you can tell them to spare you the groveling and just put on a hair shirt.

hair shirt n.
A coarse haircloth garment worn next to the skin by religious ascetics as penance.

For my tardiness in keeping up this blog, I've been wearing a hairshirt. Well, a summer-weight hairshirt.

The good old days
This from Michael Chabon The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

"One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either just past or in the offing."

Isn't that the damn truth?

We are always, it seems, too close to our own lives/times to clearly evaluate them. My pet peeve is the doomsday type who insists that people have never been so evil or violent as they are today. It's rather arrogant and myopic to make such comments—like we're so cutting edge now. Makes the survivors of past genocides out to be, I don't know, runner's up in the pageant of human cruelty, doesn't it? Sort of disrespects their nightmare. Seems to me we've adequately shown throughout history that we can be appallingly, consistently inhumane. Modern man is embarrassingly not unique.

Same is true for the positive clichés. So many people think of their childhoods or their grandparents' time as the golden times—replete with sparkling dewdrops and saturated colors—and the present as a gritty, thin, crumbling residue.

By the way, Kavalier & Clay was great. Unexpected twists and difficult passages but ultimately satisfying

been reading the newspaper again

It's just too hard to read the paper some days. Never mind that the world is full of violence and all that depressing shit. Then, you have to cope with the inane.

Lewis Black decries the startling lack of common sense in the world. (Aside: I think Lewis Black is brilliant. Not just about the common sense thing, either.)

Here's a common, common senseless story from the Chronicle.

Police officers were being accused of not issuing tickets to drivers speeding 5-10 mph over the limit. The inference was that the cops routinely chose to ignore the letter of the law. A police spokesman vehemently denied that this was policy.

First of all, why the hell is this in the paper?

Second of all, is this really a surprise? Of course they don't have a written policy on this! Yet, just what do you think would happen if they started pulling people over for driving 5 miles over the speed limit? Traffic cops would by pulling over 10 cars at a time and the ridiculously backed-up court system would have a judicial aneurysm.

These kind of journalistic debates leave me sputtering incoherently. Idiots.

So this geriatric crossing guard is asked to pee in a cup. No, not a bad joke. Yet another story from the news. Seems this retired old guy has been a crossing guard at a local school for many years. A woman comes up to him (one presumes while he is at his station, clad in his regulation reflective vest) with cup in hand and tells him he has to pee in it. I don't know all the logistics but the septugenarian refuses. And he is fired.

HISD says that its policy mandates firing any employee for refusing to submit to a drug test. This whole war on drugs thing is completely out of control. How would we feel if an employer had the right to scan our personal computers every couple of months to make sure we weren't looking at porn or reading anything subversive or downloading rap or marijuana recipes. For christsake, why isn't anyone objecting? Maybe they have and we just can't hear them over the din of the righteous. The civil liberatarians must be frantically running from issue to issue, so rich is the landscape with violations.

As a graphic designer, I often rant at the stupidity of drug testing. In my job, I'm not likely to drop a crate of cement or drive into a pylon while using my little mouse to remove an eyecatching pimple off the CEO's face in Photoshop.

It's like this. You shouldn't go to work stoned or drunk because your employer is paying you to do a job. Not paying the incapacitated you. Which means you shouldn't go into work sober and hung over or sleep deprived and bitchy, either. Of course, they can't test for sleepiness in the workplace yet. Just wait until the day that your job is dependent on a portable EEG machine rolled from cubicle to cubicle. Bottom line is what you do on your own time is your own damn business.

juror's prudence

Jury duty today.

Why do people call up their friends while sitting in the big-ass juror holding tank? And inform the callees, in hushed tones, I've just gotten to the jury room. It is seven kinds of tedium sitting in the jury room—why would you have to pass that along? Are you that hard up for a sense of importance?

Here's what I did:

• I spent three hours with the beer drinking song, In heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here... on a continuous loop in the nether regions of my brain. It's a catchy little tune and when I get hold of my dear friend, Lori, who kept singing it Friday night I'm going to... sing it back to her. Loudly.
  
• I rediscovered my passion for earplugs. God, I love earplugs in public. Even day-glo yellow ones.
  
• I read to the halfway point in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and it just keeps getting better.
• I didn't get picked for a jury. But had the civilized decency not to clap at the end.
• I was grateful I finally got to answer my jury duty summons without losing any income. The damp silver lining of unemployment.
  

When I got home I wrote an email and used the phrase "eschew red meat" to describe those healthy poultry-eating types. Eschew something you chew, I just love it. I know, I know. I've had too many dictionaries dropped on my head.

today's news

Lightning bolt strikes family reunion, boy in critical condition

I've always said that family reunions are dangerous. And gatherings on farms in Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania are no exception. But when family members are struck or almost struck by lightning, the greatest tragedy is when they lose their psychological grip and begin speaking on behalf of Deity:

"They say lightning is rare, but this is very rare for lightning to come down on so many people and not kill anybody," said Larry Bell, whose mother owned the farm. "God was showing his strength."

What in the hell...?

Here's where me and the believers part ways. IF there was a God the Father, and we are supposed to be His c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n, why would He zap the shit out of a 12-year-old Pennsylvania boy and his family to "show us His strength"?

How could anyone witness this and then, praise said god for sparing their lives?
WHAT KIND OF GOD/FATHER WOULD DO THAT? Only a nutcase.
Imagine the (apparently bored) ruler of the universe sitting out there muttering, "Hmmm, I wonder how close I can get with this bolt without actually killing any of them?...Woohooo!"

Village People policeman arrested by real police

DALY CITY, Calif. — Victor Edward Willis, the original policeman in the 1970s music group the Village People, was arrested by real police who allegedly found a gun and drugs in his convertible.

Sometimes you've got to just wiggle your toes in the bubble bath of Irony.

utility sick

When I was in London a few years ago, I was amazed at how much the Brits paid for gas and utilities. It seemed ridiculously expensive but, I reasoned, they pay more for a lot of things because they choose to live under a different governmental structure.

I got my electric bill on the same day that I filled up my car this week. Inadequately cooling my modest home (see earlier entries) cost almost $350 last month. Filling my economical Honda Accord cost $32.

All I can say is, Where is my damn socialized medicine?

eating humble crow pie

When I was 16* my parents adopted a boy. No squalling, cuddly bundle of blue was he, however. Michael was a greasy, red-headed, obnoxious eleven-year-old. He was moved into a home with 5 females and my father, who was a policeman in another county and worked shifts that kept him out of the daily fray two-thirds of the time. I was the second of four daughters. Up until this time, our house consisted of my parents and "the girls." Which later mutated to a strangely convent-ish "The Sisters," but that's another story altogether.

Anyway, this was a situation screaming for a social worker but, alas, that wasn't how things were done back then. Michael was a foster child with a family that attended our church. He had had a rough time of it. His father abandoned the family when he was toddler and his mom died when he was 7. He was about to be booted out of his current foster home** when Dad stepped in.

I'm not denying the nobility in saving this urchin from the child welfare system. Not to mention getting that operation to fix his crossed-eyes. But let's not underestimate the misguided machismo of a man who had seen his wife's four pregnancies result in one female child after another. The man wanted a son and he wasn't going to sire one then, goddammit, he was going to pick one up at church.

So, into our estrogen-saturated abode was dropped a pre-pubescent male child. I never took to the little intruder. I was a year or two from leaving the nest for good (unbeknowst to me) and Michael's passage from 11 to 13 did little to endear him to me. As a good Christian girl I tried to act the part but my hardboiled allegiance to truth eventually won out. You don't have to like your family members, you just have to act that way.

Okay, fast-forward. Michael, who is just 4 years my junior, grows up. Well, not very much. Fate set his vertical limit at 5' 2"*** which, through no fault of his own (calm down all ye defenders of the short), seemed to add to his smooth, schmoozy, salesman-like personality. Admittedly, I saw him little after I left home. Once or twice a year for family visits. But as an adult, he started selling Amway and my already jaundiced view was eclipsed by the slamming of the I-can't-believe-he's-my-brother door.

A public reversal
A few years ago my grandmother died. She was 91 and impressive. All of The Sisters (yes) arrived in eastern Florida to pay their respects to the implacable, matriarchal abuela. When I got there, Mom mentioned that Michael was coming. With my usual obeisance to gentility I shot back, But WHY? Mom, in her ever patient, endearing manner said, Enita, she was his grandmother, too. Oh, I grumbled, ceding the point.

Michael arrived and I told myself to make the best of it. This was a family funeral, forchristsake. But gone, apparently, was the plaid jacket and the photos of him with a "babe" on each arm. Warily, I watched and waited. He was quiet and unobtrusive. At one point, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. The previously mentioned, dead-bolted door cracked open.

I am not a woman averse to reconsidering her point of view, no matter how set in concrete it may have seemed. No matter how scathing and public her former opinions may have been presented.

In other words, I am a woman who can eat crow/humble pie. Now for the etymological part of our show:

Eating Crow
The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one’s fallibility. (There's another story about this expression's origin that involves Brits, Americans and poaching crows that, frankly, I found a bit tedious. Suffice it to say, it isn't that interesting or appetizing.)

Humble pie
(The British equivalent of eating crow. Abridged here, for those less enchanted by the OED)
The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the lord’s hall...However, it seems it was not until the nineteenth century that the expression humble pie appeared in the sense we now know...The word umbles is a variant form of an old French term noumbles, (originally from Latin lumulus, a diminutive of lumbus, from which we also get loin and lumbar)...umbles also sometimes appeared in medieval times and later in the form humbles. Contrariwise, the word humble (originally from the Latin humilem from which we also get humility) was frequently spelt and pronounced “umble” from medieval times right down to the nineteenth century. (www.worldwidewords.org/articles/eatcrow.htm)

I love that they actually use the word contrariwise. Those Brits kill me.
Back to my umbling.
My slowly revised opinion of my naturalized sibling was boosted this past week by the weather. My daughter, on her way to Italy (a graduation present from her moms), was stuck in Atlanta for 24 hours because a storm had delayed her flight and caused her to miss her connection to London. I called my brother to ask him if he could help her. And, dear reader, he came through like...a brother. He drove out to the airport, had her stay with him and took her back the next day. I am just a sap when it comes to my kids. He's in. It took over 30 years, but he's no longer in the "family by name only" category. I admit to an opinionated reversal.

Give me a big ol' slice of that humble crow pie.
 

*I hate not having the facts in line. Update: I was almost 16 (15)
**I'm not sure he was about to get booted. I am sure, however, that he was happy to leave his foster home for ours.
***He is almost 5'2" (5'1" if anyone is counting)

darwin award nominees

Every single week I read a news heading in the paper that goes like this:

• Man killed crossing the freeway
• Woman hit by truck trying to get across highway
• Pedestrian struck while running from fast lane to shoulder
  

I'm flummoxed. People! We've got a physics dilemma here: Cars fast, people slow.

Wait on the shoulder, walk to the next exit and go under.
Yes, it sucks, but so do eighteen wheels.

Okay, do what you want. Go ahead and take yourself out of the gene pool.

raining frog monkeys

Houston had a drought last month. It's normally as hot and wet as a Finnish sauna here but June was waterless. Well, this past week the rains returned and my dead brown grass resurrected itself (with little or no help from me—I'm no farmer). Along with the return of the green came the sound of frogs under my "pier and beam" house.

I want to know where the hell they came from. Are they like sea monkeys—just waiting to be reconstituted? Unless they are ventriloquists, there must be five of them under my house. Every room is alive with relentless trilling. Since I witnessed no massive amphibian migration (hordes of hot, dry frogs dragging their withered, unappetizing legs across the yard to the crawlspace under my home), I must assume they were there the whole time. Throats parched (with humans, forgive the pun) and unable to make a peep. Maybe they were like those geckos you find under the couch: shriveled up and flat as a tortilla. Then, like cheap toys, they swell up to twice their size when immersed in water.

Anyway, they need to give it a rest. It was all Discovery Channel delight for the first day, but now it sounds like amphibious whining.

Postscript: AHA! I am not alone. Hawaiians have frog issues, too.
And I don't even have hyperacusis.

And if that wasn't enough...
In addition to bringing frogs, the storm managed to trip a breaker. So Barbara went out to the box and switched it back on. It made a decidedly uncooperative sound and switched itself right back off. This bodes poorly. It goes without saying (but I'll do so anyway) that the line affected included the refrigerator. Filled with that day's purchase of a week's worth of groceries. If I have to depend on one more heavy duty extension cord to keep things going in this house, I'm going to park my car on the front lawn and tear all the sleeves off my shirts. We made coffee in the living room.

pinkeye

I attended the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Houston kickoff luncheon today. Very nice. Artista, the restaurant in the Hobby Center. (Tres leches. Tres bien.) It's a very good cause, okay? I know that. But one's observations need not be awash in pink just because one agrees with something in principle.

Witness the birth of Ladylike Activism.
(I am laying claim to the phrase.)
All these otherwise middle-class (and on up) white women who don't seem inclined to political rabble-rousing have taken up this issue with a coordinated vengeance. And swathed it in cotton-candy pink organza. And icing. And matching purses, jackets and ribbons, let's not forget the ribbons.

Breast cancer diagnosis and treatment has, historically, suffered from sexism. There's nothing earthshaking about that fact. Many illnesses specific to women took a back seat to issues that affected men or the population in general. That trend is reversing at a debatable speed because women got angry. But like many female-driven movements spurred by a "hell no, we're not going to take it anymore," this one has toned down to a demureness that I find unsettling.

We should not remain furious all the time because that's impractical and exhausting. I just think we need to rinse out some of the sugar (or nutrasweet, godforbid we lose our girlish figures) and remember that this is still a young fight. Houston is one of the most active and successful Komen affliates in the country yet Race for the Cure has only been here for 15 years. Part of the reason we're facing an epidemic of breast cancer is because we're so far behind in research funding. We're so far behind in research funding because this was a female problem and, in the past, women (and their health issues) were dismissed or ignored. And we sure didn't talk about female parts publicly. Ick.

I'm glad the Komen Foundation's Race for the Cure is around. I'm just tired of all this candy-coated, ladylike behavior.

panda hyperbole

Headlines
The first two headlines I scanned yesterday from the Chronicle were:

National Zoo's giant panda gives birth
3 London bombs exploded nearly at same time

but I read: National Zoo's giant London panda exploded...birth

This has got to be a universal experience. You know, perusing a paragraph and having the adjectives jump a line or two...which enhances or confuses the point.

Birth and Dairy Products
Now about the giant panda. Mei Xiang (may SHONG) is a female giant panda. Giant pandas are an endangered species that does not, on the whole, do a very good job at reproduction. Females ovulate once a year (cry me a river) and are fertile for only about 3 days a year. They generally produce a single birth once every 2 or 3 years.

One must question, on a Darwinian level, why are we so hellbent on compensating for this? I know, I know, they're cute. From a distance. Breeding in captivity doesn't seem to be very successful either. 5 of the 5 cubs born at the D.C. Zoo have not survived. Nor were Mei Xiang and her beau Tian Tian successful in the mating arena—so artificial insemination (champion of lesbians nationwide) comes to the rescue.

Now we have a pregnant panda. Gestation is about 3-5 months (sympathy levels rapidly dropping). And since this whole breeding deal is expensive and rare, Mei has more video cameras trained on her than most celebrities. Finally the moment arrives:

"Volunteer watchers noticed signs of Mei Xiang going into labor, including restlessness and panting, about 1 a.m." (nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/GiantPandas/) The spokesperson adds that she was grunting and "vocalizing."

So everyone is on high alert and a little over 2 1/2 hours later, the panda baby is born.

It weighs in at 3-5 ounces. 3-5 OUNCES, forchristsake. The size, we're repeatedly told, of a stick of butter.

Okay, okay, okay. So you're telling me that a 200 lb. animal makes all this fuss and takes 2 1/2 hours to produce the equivalent of a normal bowel movement? I'm so sorry I can't appreciate the magic here, mired as I am in disbelief. What was all the fuss about? When was the last time you couldn't sleep for 2 hours, then panted and whined because you needed to take a standard-issue dump? I'm not talking about coming back from a nightmare camping trip and have 5 days worth of stress food-retention. I'm talking a stick of butter.

And I'll bet you she felt all bloated and unattractive with those 2 lbs she put on.

Perhaps I'm a little bitter (and have lost all panda sympathy by now). Being a human female, my firstborn was not 1/900th of my body mass. More like 1/20th. And most of us can't sleep, are restless and "vocalize" because our stick of butter has a cantaloupe* leading it out. And labor feels like a giant charlie horse from your rib cage to your birth canal. Which, I might add, is about the size of a stick of butter.

Not to mention that we incubate our young for 9 long months and have the ability to drop at least one every year. We ovulate every damn month and may be fertile up to 12 weeks out of the year. Were it not for the development of brain matter and the basic desire to keep one's teeth from falling out, we could be pregnant every year from 13 to 50.

Thank goodness the civilized have learned to regulate these little miracles—except for those poor sots participating in the Reproductive Olympics (Team Mormon and Original Team Catholic).

Congratulations, Mei. As soon as the stick of butter is large enough, we'll be able to see if it's a male or female because right now everything is TOO tiny. In the meantime, rest up for the strenuous nursing of that baby rat.

*One last thing. I broke one of my critical rules. Comparing anything that is removed from or exits out of the body to fruit. You know, the proverbial grapefruit-sized tumor, godsaveus. The comparison of the panda poop offspring to a stick of butter is quite refreshing. So much better than a small banana or whatnot.

life, independence & pseudo-poetry

Belated Independence Day to all.

Political Rant Section
I love how our fuzzy relationship with history blunts its connection to current events. What, after all, is a rebel? A revolutionary? A freedom-fighter? We look back at our country's beginnings and never question that the independence-seeking colonists might be labeled terrorists today.

Politicians expound on the bravery of those first Americans. They were seeking, among other things, religious freedom. Yet our leaders see no irony in the modern-day imposition of Christian icons and practices. The Ten Commandments in courthouses, prayer in public schools and legislation based on Biblical interpretation, to name just a few.

Give me that ol' time freedom-from-religion.

We talk about the founding fathers and their commitment against powerful, centralized governments and then call the most serious danger to our civil freedoms since McCarthy, the Patriot Act.

In a related note, I was reading in the paper about our troops in Iraq and their 4th of July celebration. Seems they had roast pig for the occasion. Roast pig. In a Muslim country. Now there's some fucking cultural sensitivity for you.

Movies Everyone Else Has Seen Section
Over the holiday weekend we tried to chip away at the mountain of noteworthy movies we had yet to see. An attempt at (last decade's) cultural awareness.

Anyway, we watched Life is Beautiful for the first time. I purposely avoided learning too much about the movie beforehand; sat down knowing only that it was significant and recommended. So I was emotionally blind-sided by the second half of the film.

What a brilliant performance by Benigni as Guido, the happy-go-lucky Italian Jew who ends up in a the concentration camp with his family.

How heart-wrenching his final scene: prodded by the machine-gun barrel of a nazi soldier, he spies his beloved little son, Giosue, across the compound—well-hidden inside a discarded cabinet and peering out from a slot in the door. To perpetuate the protective game that he had concocted to shield his son from the horror and hopelessness of the camp, Guido performs this preposterous, cross-dressed "silly walk," while grinning and winking at Giosue as he, Guido, is marched away to his death.

Such love and hope in the face of total despair. I find it hard to imagine anyone objecting to the movie's comic content because they feel it trivializes the holocaust. Because of Benigni's approach, the whole nightmare becomes at once more horrific and more hopeful. How many parents even have the capacity go to such incredible lengths to protect the body and soul of their child?

Domestic Dyslexia Section
Over the weekend, I also did some baking. I love the art and science of cooking. However, since my children have left home, I am less inclined to stand in a hot kitchen cooking copious amounts of comfort food. So, I'm a little rusty. Since we were going to a July 4th celebration on Monday, we needed to bring something. No stranger am I to irony and cliché: an apple pie seemed just the thing.

The pie crust recipe was a dismal failure in the rollout phase but, I comforted myself, it would surely taste great—inundated as it was with butter. But my first broken-fluted-edge crumble tasted...significantly saltier than normal. Damn, damn, damn. I'm SO anal about mis en place and quality ingredients, etc. I looked at the recipe and re-read the ingredient list:

1 teaspoon table salt. Hmmm. 1 teaspoon table salt.

Well, it doesn't take an learning disorder scholar to figure out how I misread that. The pie was okay just as long as you ate it with ice cream. An tolerable solution if there ever was one.

Weird Poetry Section
I've lost faith in spam blockers. I just can't seem to eliminate the junk without slamming the cyber door on legitimate email. The only amusing thing is the way something out there scrambles or inserts words in spam to produce paragraphs of jumbled text. Senseless verbiage, but often strangely poetic. This week's sample:

Daniel was at sandhill when that happened moorish; familiar at obsolescent or even dragoon as in excellent. Eldon was at isotropy when that happened postcondition. Rosalind was at figural when this happened militarist politico at diatom or even degas as in infantrymen.

It looks like someone grabbed all the refrigerator vocabulary magnets and flung them at a great metal wall. It's accidental almost-poetry.

ahm lichen beer

Oh, constant reader. Or sporadic reader. Here's my hodge-podge. I'd like to blame the following randomness on our culture's growing addiction to sound-bytes but that's crap. A flurry of disconnected ideas is the unrefined ore of thought. I don't have the time or inclination to polish the little lumps. Not much of a diamond lover anyway. ANYHOW, here it is.

Work
Did a one-day training at KBR this past week. Doesn't that just itch to be read KGB? And, their website has one translation option: Russian! No kidding. Known once-upon-a-time as Kellogg, Brown & Root, my agent, it seemed, tried to downplay their relationship to the Mother Ship...but that was bogus. Halliburton is everywhere. Their intranet site is called HALWORLD. As in, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." A questionable choice, at best.

Death
Death or illness among your extended group of friends can be a litmus test for how far you've drifted away. Someone I had a real affection for, regardless of the lack of regular socializing, died this past week. Janet was quirky, efficient and kind to the bone. You know how sweetness can rise to the surface of a person and be so much more endearing because it breaks through their cpa facade? She was critically ill for two months before passing and I had no idea. I mourned and berated myself for failing to keep in contact. But, the fact is, that is the nature of casual friendships. It is foolish to think that she would have known what was going on in my life, though I know her affection for me and my family was sincere. So is goes. I will miss her. The loss feels sharper than I would have guessed it would. My circle of friends has shrunk–partly because people change and relationships evolve/devolve. Partly because our (Barbara's and my) philosophy and practice of non-monogamy has, it seems, greatly increased the expected distance of waning friendships.

Beer
Speaking of litmus tests (a terrible segue, I admit), it occurred to me that there is a small subset of all the people I know that I might call, for instance, when I've been drinking. Oh, enough with the euphemisms–when I'm good and drunk. It's a curious group. There's also another category, people you can leave voicemail messages for when you are drunk. You have to choose this group carefully (an oxymoron for enebriated decision-makers) because recordings are made to be played back. Over and over. Read on.

We finally went on a St. Arnold's brewery tour. And, goodgodalmighty, it was a hot day. But the beer was cold and delicious. And free. One should always have some self-descriptors that might blossom into country-western lyrics: "I'm a three-beer woman, a fourth token in my hand...I'd trade it in for pale ale, but I ken har'ly stand," etc.

[FYI, I called one of my best friends and my youngest sister in my besotted state. I resisted leaving voicemail messages at my parents' home or The White House.]

Of course, the sainted name of this place caught my attention. Who knew there was a patron saint of beer? Is that even true? I had to research. But I got waylaid at www.catholic.org and never was able to verify if that was, in fact, a "fact." The important thing I did learn at catholic.org(y–I can be such an adolescent) was that you can navigate from Saints & Angels to the Saints Index and just go to town. St. Arnold's description wasn't very enlightening (I kill myself) but there was a feedback box that I was utterly taken by:

How reverent is "Rate This Saint"? It's like Star Search for Saints. Vote on your favorite saint. Runners Up get a gift certificate to the Vatican gift shop.

Words
While I was trying to wrap my brain around this concept of a litmus test, I looked up the word.

Litmus test n

1. a coloring material (obtained from lichens) that turns red in acid solutions and blue in alkaline solutions
2. a test that relies on a single indicator

Lichen. Another slangy homonym for my entertainment. I'm likin' me some lichen. I had no idea that litmus was made from lichens.

I think the urge to reduce events to a single indicator is natural but naïve. Yet the concept of a litmus test is so appealing to me. A figurative measurement of intangible catalysts.

Also, I was looking up "occurred" to make sure I'd spelled it right and, ironically, I typed the url incorrectly: www.dicitonary.com. Up comes a site with the masthead "dictionary". I don't get it. If you register a site about dictionaries and you settle on a misspelled url, isn't that embarrassing? It's not like they are making a statement or being tongue-in-cheek. Crackerheads.

Okay, I must evolve into a walking upright position now and get away from this computer. I'm positively perfecting a cyber slouch.

opposites and clones

And another thing about our not-so-little queer girl community. Either the couples out there polarize into Bubba and Mrs. Bubba or they look creepily like siblings. What is the deal? I was reading in the Pride 05 magazine about this lesbian, Honey Labrador, doing a Queer Eye for the Straight Girl thing and I practically yelled: NO, goddammit, stay home! Dykes are in desperate need of some style consultation of their own–the straight girls have legions of advisors.

Okay, so the younger lesbians are a little more in touch with presentation. And don't get your lavender panties all in a bunch, I'm not talking about Lesbi-glam. That's not the focus, L Word be damned. I'm talking about looking at your bodies (particularly the large & lovely variety) and giving your slump-shouldered, old oversized t-shirted torso an honest review. I hate spending time on image fussiness and I'm the first to admit that I could use a do-over. But you can be casual and sexy and big and put together without hours of primping.

I sound like a damn fashion consultant. It's not just about the surface, of course. For years we've defied the stereotypes about being girly-girls and rightly so. But rather than look like sulking mid-western farm wives or passionless, pale androgyns, why not face the stereotypes with a defiant panache?

Dictionary.com defines androgyny as:

1. Biology. Having both female and male characteristics; hermaphroditic.
2. Being neither distinguishably masculine nor feminine, as in dress, appearance, or behavior.

Isn't that something? A definition with completely opposite options. All or nothing. Okay, so I'd just as soon throw out the latter and run full-tilt with the former. There's nothing sexier than a tough, beautiful woman with close-cropped hair in jeans, leather jacket and a hint of lingerie. Or some femme-looking thing who can change a tire and flip you off. Very unladylike. For me, it's all about being strong and true to your full-spectrum self. How hard is that?

It shouldn't be so hard. And there certainly are people out there doing it. And, yes, there certainly are more important goals than image. Voting, for one. Reading. Thinking. etc., However, how we present ourselves is an indication or of how we perceive ourselves. Don't make it your life, just make it your opening paragraph and move on to the good stuff.

Jesuschrist, I sound evangelical. And I haven't even started on my rant about transgendered/intersexed issues and our hypocrisy in hesitating to include them...
...and my concurrent irritation with the continued polarization of what is a male or female?
...and how those stereotypes are such a hindrance.
I don't understand why a person fighting against the popular notion of being, let's say, a "real" man and all it means to the female side/center of him can turn around and embrace the same limited image of what it means to be a woman.

I know. I don't understand. I love the societally defined "feminine" and "masculine" aspects of myself and I don't understand why anyone would reject any part of themselves.
It's a continuum, people. All about our hackneyed, arcing spectrum of color.
The logic of biology and history point towards a majority of gender blending and a minority of gender polarization (which is not a rejection of you out there on either ends of the bell curve, so just calm down). And gender blending is simply about a panoply of qualities that would be better off unattached to a vagina or penis or anything in between.

Okay, enough, I'm exhausted. Besides I've got to find a pair of silk panties that match my big, butch pick-up truck.

a gigantic gaggle of girls

The Pride Parade was good. My most persistent observation? Where did all these women come from? Seriously, I've never seen so many queer women in one place. So many young women (I mean younger than my 23-year-old-daughter-young), older women, Hispanic women, African-American women, plain ol' white women, well-dressed women, trailer trash women, big women, skinny women (okay, so big was more the order of the day), etc., I swear they bused them in from the hinterlands.

Lori made us some (appropriate) mixed drinks for the event: Pink Panties. They were delicious. Then, Barbara and I went over to Cosmos to see our favorite bartender (read: son) and have a beer. Even though I had a pretty good time overall, too much of the evening seemed to boil down to drunken drama and I'm afraid it sort of reinforced my desire to stay home. I've got to get out there and find a group to converse with...a relatively sober group. A slightly drunk reading group perhaps.

gay day, gay day

Yes, that's right campers, it's queer pride day here in Houston. Not much different than St. Patrick's Day or the Greek Festival except for the social disapproval and corresponding legislation. Barbara and I plan on getting out there and mixing it up with the rest. The queer population is often portrayed as a smaller, intimate subculture in an urban environment. Yet it amazes me every time we foray out to some queer event how few people we know or, for that matter, even recognize.

Other than that, I've started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Which promises to be delightful.

again with the temperature

One of the telltale signs of aging (other than ranting about the crap music kids listen to today as opposed to the real music from your day–a rant that sounds exactly like a mind slamming shut) is talking about the weather and/or your health. If the words polyp, watery stool, or mucus discharge start do-si-do-ing with humidity, cold fronts and low pressure troughs, you are pretty much slipping into crustiness.

So you'll understand my trepidation at bringing up my heightened temperature sensitivity again.

It is SO bloody hot here in Houston. And there's a solid three months ahead of the same. Our air conditioning window units are feeble. They cool like an emphysemic blowing at you over a block of ice. I'm convinced that if sweat didn't contain salt I'd mold right up. [If that's not a geriatric image I don't know what is.] That Houston is miserably hot in summer is not new. That our a/c units are straining to do their jobs is not exactly new either. That my internal thermostat is mutinying...well, now that's kind of new.

On the flip side, I just finished Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Yes, Stephen King. Truth be told, I started reading King out of maternal duty some 15 years ago. My, then 11-year old, son was given some Stephen King books and I was concerned that Carrie and Cujo were going to warp his pre-teen mind. I mean warp it more than is to be expected from the nature/nurture ball of wax he'd been born into.

Anyway, I loved the damn series (and felt my son's love of reading was ample trade-off for the scariness and relatively harmless vulgarity contained in King's books--and I say that like vulgarity is a bad thing). Give me a campfire, s'mores and a good storyteller...and the man knows how to tell a story.

Back to my thermostat issue. In the final book, King's characters endure a long period of cold without respite or proper supplies. His descriptions of cold are like the unformed words of my childhood. The kind of cold that makes love, thirst and hunger seem insignificant. The kind of cold that makes you fantasize about wool and down feathers trapped by quilting. The kind of cold that makes you want to weep and sleep.

I may curse the inferno that is a Houston summer but I never, ever want to live in cold country again.

Nevertheless, it's goddamn hot.

one year later

This blog started as a way to share my experience studying and living in Spain. When that ended I, somewhat unconsciously, stopped blogging.

But I feel this tug to get back to it. So here are my random thoughts.

Work. I've been un(der)employed for over 3 months. The previously fabulous agency I worked for (for 7 1/2 years) has lost something. Namely the ability to keep me employed. I battle with my budgetary panic demons while finding this period remarkably rich. Creatively, intellectually and emotionally.
Let me go back a bit. I left a contract job at the end of February after 5 months of, and I choose this word carefully, abuse. Managerial overlords. Expecting unreasonable accomplishment using browbeating as motivation. The other serfs were, on the whole, great. Funny, intelligent and hard working. The idea that I grew close to my co-workers because we were under the same whip disturbs me. I would like to think we would have become just as close without the external negativity...but I don't know. All I know is that I stayed until I could stay no longer. It was a painful and liberating decision not unlike divorce in its subsequent relief and poverty.

Menopause. Or the silliness of it. (I still insist that this is occurring way too early in my dotage.) I have come to the conclusion that the best evidence of the "change" in me--other than having only 2 periods in the past 12 months--is my increasingly narrow thermostat. I can only abide like a 3°F change in temperature. Under 70°F and I'm freezing, above 73°F and I'm uncomfortably warm. Like I've transitioned from warm to cold-blooded. And you all can just resist the personality comparisons there.

Hermitage. Is that a word? Well, the point is, I am aware of the tendency I have to stay at home. To LOVE being at home. And how that feeds on itself. The longer I'm not working out of the house, the harder it is to make myself leave. It's not exactly "The Net" syndrome. I don't have everything delivered. But making myself run errands is not much different than making myself pay bills. I do it by force of will not desire.

Money. The urge to panic about finances is more subdued in me than I'd have predicted. However, since I was absolutely nuts about money before, being only 3/4 nuts may still seem a bit extreme for some. The point is that I find myself worrying that the porch will actually slide off the house and I'll be standing there in the scalding Houston heat with some old warped 2x4's and rusty nails crying because I can't fix it right. Or I drift into daydreams/daymares of being 70 years old and still using a goddamn extension cord to make coffee because that bank of outlets never got fixed. The only thing that soothes me is that the odds are I'll get a job soon. The odds are. And I hate gambling.

Spanish. I still talk to my father by phone every weekend and we almost always speak in Spanish. However, my Spanish is so NOT where I'd hoped it would be. It's frustrating and upsetting...but my conversations with my father have been delightful. Unexpectedly fun and encouraging. I still want to go to a country in Latin America to further my language skills. But must shelve this right now until the issues of the previous paragraph are addressed.

Skeptism. For the many years since I lost my belief in religion and God, I have resisted finding a group that shared some of my philosophies. The idea of joining so chills me. But lately I've been reading about the Skeptics Society, Center for Inquiry, etc. Instead of Atheism, which is a group defined so much by what they don't believe--an anathema to me, skeptics and the like simply challenge notions, myths, beliefs with rational, scientific questions. Intellectual inquiry and dispassionate examinations into paranormal, theistic or folkloric theories seem so much more about truth than simply not-believing in God. Anyway, I'm still not interested in joining but the resources are fascinating and the individuals who have written on the subject have been thoughtful and thought-provoking. I've read speeches by Natalie Angier, Julia Sweeney and Tom Flynn that were excellent.

Daughter. My daughter graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in architecture. Graduated magna cum laude and received the Faculty Award...not to mention (but I'm going to anyway) being nominated for two other prestigious awards. I can't resist sharing this. We're all so happy to elaborate on the shitty parts of parenting or work or relationships...because, well, they're actually more entertaining or interesting than descriptions of bliss. And less threatening to the non-blissful. However, it's all out of balance. And since I'm well-armed against pollyannaism with my cynical eye...I am happy, happy, happy to say that Marisa's graduation was a huge reward for 23 years of parenting. And Barbara and I (and the whole damn family) were awash with the joy and relief of it all.

gemar and jada

gemar and jada
Originally uploaded by enitatorres.

my beautiful nephew and grand niece. why do we dress our babies up in goofy headwear?

so we have leverage when they are teenagers.

wrapping it up

tonight is my last night in salamanca. tomorrow i will take the bus to madrid; i fly out late tomorrow night. i feel like i should make some grand statement of conclusion about my experience in spain but it´s way too much to sum up right now, if ever.

the best i can do is say that this has been one of the great adventures of my life. my spanish is greatly improved, albeit not at the level i want it to be. i can understand and make myself understood in almost all cases and that is no small feat. okay, there are verbs and adjectives lying wounded all around me when i finish speaking, but i feel satisfied that now i have the tools to either say what i mean or describe adequately the vocabulary word that i don´t know.

my attachment to this place is greater than i´d anticipated. it´s strange to find that in just 2 months or so your life has fallen into a pattern that a short time before was so foreign. i have met some wonderful people, mostly young people, from all over the world. with some of the students, spanish was the only language we had in common. that was very cool. i am amazed how cogniscent they are of u.s. politics and how universally worried they are that bush might be re-elected...and we barely know the names of the presidents of each european country. my experience with these students has defied the stereotypes that abound about the french, germans, israelis, greeks, russians, and japanese. hopefully, some of the u.s. students and i have helped dispel the negative stereotypes that so many people here have of americans.

no matter how much i have come to love spain, however, i am so incredibly ready to be going home. i miss barbara fiercely, i miss my children and my friends. i miss mi propia casa--my own house! i am counting on all the people in my life who speak spanish to help me continue practicing. i am looking forward to taking additional classes and do whatever it takes to keep learning spanish. i also am looking forward to going to a doctor and finding out just how much damage i´ve done to these old feet of mine! damn, i have walked a couple hundred miles and my feet hate me but good. other than that, the warm, dry climate has agreed with me. i suspect i´ll need a couple of days to adjust to the sauna that is houston.

well, people, thanks for (virtually) taking this ride with me. i have no regrets--what a great time. the culture, the language, the food and the people are now all mixed into my quirky viewpoint. i would love to hear from any of you. especially if you have questions or are just curious about studying abroad.

by the way, i did really well in my second grammar class. i think it was partially a regalo (gift) from the professor, but godknows i learned a lot.
i actually used the subjunctive a couple of times yesterday.
correctly.
voluntarily.
ì have witnesses.

i´m still here

people, don´t give up on me--even though i have been lousy about entries this past two weeks. all is well here in salamanca. barcelona was incredible and i spent this past weekend in madrid revisiting the museums and that was wonderful. got to try cochinillo (roasted suckling pig) and, though i apologize to the vegetarian and faint-hearted among you, it was absolutely delicious.
 
now, unfortunately, i´ve got homework that needs conjugating and pronouns that need confusing, so this is all i can do. if you are irritated with me about my apparent blog slacking, you can always add your comments...

post test post

well, it´s official. the subjunctive has kicked my ass. i don´t know how i did on the exam but i am pretty sure i didn´t ace it and half as sure that i didn´t fail.

i´m not even getting a grade and i got all bunged up about it. damn the man. in any event it´s over and all i have to do is get my stuff ready to move and cross off the days before seeing barbara. how do you say sappy in spanish? i´m all that.

i´m in my favorite internet place. my 7-year old friend, michele, is speaking spanish v-e-r-y slowly to me. i just love the kid. his uncle runs the place so he´s always in here playing when there´s free machine. i´m afraid i´m learning more spanish talking with him about vice city than i did from my literature class...of course, knowing how to say chainsaw (cierra electrica) makes me happier than it would most women.

now it´s time for my celebratory coca cola light with lemon. boy do i know how to live. actually, i´m actually going out tonight. for a real drink or two. woohoo.

i once heard an old wives´ tale that eating really late, just before going to bed, would give you nightmares. i´d be a wreck if that were true. we finish our evening meal between 10-10:30pm and i´m usually in bed within the hour. of course the rest of the country is out and about until at least 1am. not me, i am an 8-hour-a-night kinda gal.

grammar kills

my final exam in grammar tomorrow is (i wish i could say this in spanish) so going to kick my ass. i would be afraid but i´ve crossed over into the place beyond panic and hysteria. (did i use the subjunctive in that sentence?) my only consolation is that i will not be beaten alone...there will be other grammar casualties in the room. this shouldn´t comfort me, but somehow not have a body count of one makes me feel better.

today is mad study day. so i mustn´t dawdle here. just wanted to give you this update.

and also want to say that i ate fetal pigs´ feet last week. and, while i like to keep an open mind, i think i´ve fufilled my lifetime quota on eating anything unborn and cloven-hooved/hoofed [(?) must be that english-be-gone stuff they keep spraying on us]. yep.

finally, my presentation for practical communications has been moved to monday instead of tomorrow. praise the lord. praise allah. praise zeus.

still don´t know what i´m going to say...

reporting back

okay, it´s time to study for finals so i have to make this quick.

first update: the apartment (four floor walk-up) has been exchanged for another with an elevator. saving my knees one flight at a time.

second: carlos´naptime music is actually his uncle´s mobile phone. which makes more sense than a toy but it´s still a little weird to have mick sing your toddler to sleep.

galicia was beautiful, a 4-5 hour drive from here. okay, my friend´s 19 month-old got carsick 1/2 hour outside of salamanca. then the 8 year-old responded in kind (at least he made it into the bucket). after a lunch of tortilla española (kind of like an potato/egg omelet), a croissant and some cheetos for the 8 year-old (which were unavoidably shared with the baby) we were back on the road. one half-hour outside of pontevedra, up come the cheetos. however, in spite of the digestive reversals, the weekend was great. beautiful scenery. i drove up to santiago of compostela. the cathedral there is a pilgrimage site. holy backpackers. the church was magnificent and the city was very appealing. galicia is green rolling hills and farmlands. gallego is the language spoken there--more than a mix between spanish and portuguese but that´s how it sounds to me. i understand more than i expected. in addition, i had some of the most enjoyable and challenging driving experiences that i´ve had so far.

i know that i´ve made language progress because i can read so much better now than when i got here. but it´s like time-lapse photography, you have to speed the pace up to see any changes.

one more fun fact. people here say "venga" when they leave one another. but it means "come". just to confuse the hell out of me.

random thoughts & the origin of epiphenita

i haven´t blogged in a while. i am afraid i´m experiencing blog irregularity...you know, bloated with unexpelled thoughts.

started to lose my voice last week. wouldn´t that be ironic? i come halfway around the world to learn a new language and then i can´t speak. not to worry--it came back. i can hear the universal sigh of relief, gentle readers.

fluency creeps forward. one preposition at a time. in the meantime, english slips away and i´m in that purgatory between losing one language and not having enough ability in another. lots of grunts and gestures. which makes talking on the phone especially tricky.

i am having fits finding an apartment for next month. however, it has been a test of verbal skills and i´ve found the huevos (don´t pronounce the "h" or the profesora will bite your head off) to use the phone to call and speak in spanish...which, let me tell you, removes the all aforementioned critical grunts and pointing from the equation...

a couple of things i am understanding better here. one, i am so defined by language. i love words and logical, concise communication. so one of the major aspects of how i define and feel about myself is reduced to the now twice-aforementioned grunts and pointing.

ditto with humor. who the hell can understand irony or sarcasm if all you can muster is, "how you say salmon mousse* make me feel ca-ca?" it could affect the self-image of the most stout-hearted. but i´m bouncing back. i just rest on the laurels of my beauty and charm until the language thing kicks in or the game over buzzer sounds. still, i have this writing and it does save me on some days.

there´s way too much graffiti here. most of it ugly and uninspired. however, saw some great graffiti recently: homofobia es fascismo. hurrah for cognates.

they use the same word here for big women as they do for strength: fuerte. that is so fabulous. i´ll never refer to myself as fat again. no, it´s fuerte all the way.

as i may have mentioned (ad nauseum) it´s damn hot here (without air conditioning). but the mornings are blissfully comfortable. some people here think it´s cold in the morning. last week on the way to class, i saw an old man walking around with suit jacket and a muffler. it seemed positively reptilian.

culture out of context:
the couple of stay with have a 2-year old grandson. when it´s time for carlos´ nap, they wind up some electronic music toy for him to fall asleep. one day i paid attention to the tunes and it turns out to be a medley/concoction of the rolling stones´ satisfaction, paint it black and then, what i swear is a snippet of auld lang syne. the rest of the tunes are too hard to identify. it does strike me as odd that a child would associate those blissful drifting off to sleep at grandma´s house moments with a tinny electronic version of mick´s hits.

well, the apartment thing has been resolved. that sentence really deserves about 20 exclamation points after it but i´m plum tuckered out. my good friend maggie worked some magic with her señora and hooked me up. yes, it´s a real damn apartment and it has 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and living room. the major suckage part is that it is a four-story walkup. one of the best parts is that it has a lavadora (a washing machine) and the very best part is that i have an apartment for july...

by the way, this whole epiphenita thing has a story (of course). it´s short, hang on. i was talking to someone in broken spanish before i left for spain. and suddenly, i realized that i would really learn to speak. not an intellectual realization but a gut-level belief that i´d never had before. it seemed an epiphany, only not so dramatic so i said it was an epiphanita. which, with a slight alteration, seemed like a perfectly good new name. so epiphenita it is. that´s all.

*the only thing worse than salmon mousse for lunch is left-over salmon mousse for lunch. i´ll eat almost anything (okay, almost anything, except for organ meat and blood sausage) but the pink cream of fish, asparagus, mayonnaise pudding on soggy bread had me challenged. do i really have no gag reflex? well, evidently not. i forced it down on day 2 without so much as a little cough.

i´m off to galicia this weekend. it´s a five-hour drive and it´s supposed to be beautiful. will report back. i swear.

i rented a car!!!

i rented a car!!!! it´s periwinkle blue. a nissan (model type not sold in the usa, with a name like "minor" or "rollerskate" or something). driving here is challenging because, among other things, you can´t find a fucking street sign anywhere. i mean when you´re walking they have small street signs (periodically) up on the sides of the buildings but when you´re driving and dodging the pedestrians and motorcycles and double-parked cars, it´s nuts. and just try to find a parking space. it´s a great metaphor for navigating the language as well. you´re dodging direct objects and verb disagreement and mixed up gender articles. trying to turn on calle de subjunctive without ending up on a one way irregular street. and just try and find a vocabulary word when you need one.

still, i´m thrilled to have a car!! and it´s airconditioned, praise the lard!!

i managed to find my way over to meet my friend bill near his apartment. only had to turn around two or three times (which almost qualifies me for a magellan award). we decided that i´d pick him up tomorrow morning and we´ll head off to the medieval city of alberca. it´s about an hour away in the sierra de francia mountains.

i also got bill to call a place that i´m interested in renting during july (bill is one of the spanish professors with our group and he can understand the spoken spanish word via telephone--something that will take me ages to accomplish). hopefully the landlord will call me back soon, and hopefully, i´ll understand half of what he says so i can go look at it. it´s in the center of town, near the university. i just hope that it´s not way too noisy or too skanky. but i won´t know, until he calls. i´m crossing my fingers...

no matter where i find a place, i am definitely going to get a fan. it´s hard as hell to sleep in this heat.

i had a dream about mongo (our last remaining, geriatric pet cocker spaniel) last night! strange but sweet. i was carrying him around and he was all sweet and content. must be homesick to start dreaming about the livestock, eh?

now i´m off to do some homework. it´s conditional (the form of grammar, not the decision to do the homework).

a little convent

salamanca has a lot of tourists this time of year. today i saw the largest number of diminutive nuns i have ever seen in one place. it was like the order of the short sisters. not a one could have been taller than 5´1". if the word penguin kept popping into my head, you couldn´t really blame me.

today is so much better than yesterday. it´s hard to imagine how i could have gone from incredibly stupid to just a little slow in 24 hours. yesterday i couldn´t put 3 words together correctly in spanish. just couldn´t do it. jeez. today i stumbled through all sorts of challenging tasks...

just one word

Subject: A.Word.A.Day--deracinate
Date: Jun 8, 2004

deracinate (di-RAS-uh-nayt) verb tr.

1. To uproot.

2. To displace someone or something from a native culture or
environment.

okay, so today´s word feels personal. can´t write much, but i´m feeling (on this fourth day of class) more confused, inept, and plain old stupid than i did a week ago. yes, it´s all good. expectations adjusted, mistakes appreciated. if it were easy most of the world would be bilingual. wait a second, most of the european world is bilingual. ach. anyway, you know what i mean.

tune in soon for a more upbeat post. i´m sure it´s on the way.

6-5-4

i know that europeans don´t use the m-d-y format, but as far as i´m concerned it´s happy 6-5-4 day!

it´s my first saturday in salamanca. i got to sleep in a bit and putter around. then i met my friend for lunch and did a little shopping (farmacia and papelería for throat lozenges and school supplies) i just finished writing a lovely little blog entry and lost it in preview! i must return to my piso (apartment) and put away my shopping before i run off to the movies. where i will understand about half of what is going on...

will try and fill in the lost stuff later.

settling in

i am now settled into my little room in the home of rosario and augustin here in salamanca. we live on a little street called regato del anis which doesn´t seem to translate into anything but does reference aniseed/anisette. we are situated between calle de escultores and calle de carpinteros: sculptor´s street and carpenter´s street. if i believed in destiny, i´d say i was destined to be between these two of my favorite professions.

rosario and augustin are probably in their early sixties and retired. actually he is retired, it seems she has been a traditional housewife/mother and continues to keep an immaculate house, cook, and wash the clothing. augustin seems more helpful than the traditional stereotype. they tend their grandson, carlos, aged 2. carlos´ mother is cristina, who is their 32 year old daughter; their son, jose, is 38 and lives at home. rosario and augustin are very sweet and gracious. they, like many salamancans, house students to supplement their incomes. our house (apartment--while salamanca is not a big city, hardly anyone here has a free-standing house. almost everyone lives in apartments.) has four bedrooms, a small kitchen, combination livingroom/diningroom and a bathroom with shower and another small bathroom with a washing machine and a toilet. my room is quite small--maybe 7´x7´, but clean and quiet.

it is strange to be living in someone else´s house after so many years of being on my own! but there is no doubt that living with spaniards (who speak no english whatsoever) and not having a roommate definitely forces me to speak more. i am alternately frustrated with and proud of my verbal progress. one of the many cultural differences i have been taught is that we americans tend to say thank you, i´m sorry, you´re welcome, and excuse me constantly. the spaniards do not and it is not a sign of rudeness. i was told today in class that it makes them uncomfortable to constantly be told thank you and i´m sorry by americans. it reminds me of my reaction to southern gentility when if first arrived in texas...i kept thinking that all that politeness was annoying and insincere. but of course, it is just a cultural trait, like the ubiquitous ma´m!

a couple of other observations. they call the (computer) mouse rato which amused me. but their word for rat is rata which is almost the same. because they are so much the same--why do we make such a distinction? we see the mouse with affection but demonize the rat...when they are essentially the same kind of creature. see what living in another country has done to me? suddenly i´m defending the honor of rats.

another thing is that they use the expression vale (BAH lay) all the time here. it was confusing when i tried to figure out what the hell they were saying because it´s not really a word...i mean it could come from another word but it doesn´t have consistent meaning. it´s used like okay or that´s right or cool (with more enthusiasm, i might add).

while i´m still getting used to all the walking and heat, my knees and feet are better and my homesickness has abated some. being in school is very good. i have more hope today that i will learn to speak fluently over the next two months. however, i am not sure about learning the vosotros (informal plural for you that is used here in spain and no where else) and the correct use of the subjunctive is still hazy.

how do you say, blah, blah, blah en español, i wonder...

if it´s martes this must be salamanca

it is strange to blog. it´s so public and i´m afraid i´m going to edit out the truthful, however catty, remarks that i make everyday. and lose something in the process. one more self-conscious remark: i normally do not write in lowercase but getting used to european keyboards and the desire to set my writing apart during this 10-week stay in spain has me giving in to this method. it feels lazy or trendy for me. my inner puritan harps on me to go the extra mile and use the shift key, else my pinkies like the rest of me will become slothful.

the predictable summer/travel cold has found its way into my throat. and predictable feelings of alienation and the ever present barbara-sickness have combined to give me a dose of "nostalgia" which seems too wistful a translation to describe my homesickness.

tomorrow we are tested for placement in a level of spanish. hope i don´t freak out during testing and forget everything i´ve learned and find myself in the calle de sesame clase.