woodstock

From yesterday's Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1969 that Woodstock began. This music festival on a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, in upstate New York, was originally advertised as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.”

The Bethel town board of supervisors refused to grant the permit to legally hold the event, arguing that the proposed porta-potties didn't meet the town health and safety codes. But the organizers went ahead with the concert anyway.

The lineup included Jimi Hendrix, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Janis Joplin, Santana, Ravi Shanker, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Melanie, and others — a total of 32 acts, all outdoors, sometimes in the rain.

They predicted that 50,000 people would show up. Instead half a million people came. [emphasis mine]

I suspect they were a few hundred unacceptable porta-potties short as well.

t-minus 2 months

Two months ago my dad was talking to me about what he and mom were thinking about doing for their 55th wedding anniversary. That, in itself, is a little odd for the non-celebrating, unsentimental couple they usually are. They considered Puerto Rico (where he was born and has relatives), Portugal (a great idea but I doubted they'd spend the money/travel that far) and something else I can't remember. And then, he said, but we've decided to spend our anniversary with you. In October. (4 months from the phone call, 2 months from today.)

• I am tickled.
• I am horrified.
• I am honored.
• I am terrified.

My parents haven't been here in ten years. You know all this DIY I've been referring to lately? That's the connection. So, to recap. I am thrilled that my parents are coming to visit but I'm bouncing between high anxiety and...less anxiety...

• My parents (mom-driven, family-wide) are 100% house-perfect crazy. Their house always looks like a model home. I am not shitting you.
• I love that we'll be celebrating their 55th anniversary here.
• My mother's standard is insane. But I am an adult! I choose how I live! BUT this is hard-wired. I can't escape how my fairly normal looking house will look to my folks.
• My house is in dire need of fixing up and this is probably just the impetus I needed.
• I can in no way get it up to the acceptable standard I was raised to expect but I'm going to die trying.

Stay tuned.

stories!

Great stories. Well told. Just discovered.

Ed Gavagan
Drowning on Sullivan Street

Jeffery Rudell
Under the Influence

Jon Levin
Elevator ER

Cindy Chupack
'Til Death or Homosexuality Do Us Part

Alan Rabinowitz
Man and Beast

Rudy Rush
Harlem Cowboy

We don't hear enough well-told stories. These are fantastic.

http://www.themoth.org/listen

P.S. My friend Aaron often talks about how people want to tell their stories. Or is it that they need to tell their stories? I don't know. I am self-conscious about how much I enjoy telling my stories because I don't always enjoy listening to other people's stories. It is comforting to know that I enjoy listening to other people's stories when, godhelpme, they know how to tell them well.

heavy things and happy things

Our vacation recuperation day started out promising. I spent most of the morning getting my proverbial ducks in a row. Wrapped a present for my nephew, made calls to verify items I needed to purchase and store hours. I put away travel stuff and took something out of the freezer for dinner. I puttered.

Then, the skies started to darken and that lit the fire under my puttering ass. There was drywall to be bought and unlike wood or fabric, drywall does not reconstitute well once it's been soaked. It turns into, what we call in economics, a sunk cost.

We hopped into that butch and beautiful Tundra and headed over to the place...where in fairly short order, 14 sheets of 4'x10' 1/2" drywall was fork-lifted into the truck bed. When we finally got home (25mph at a time—I know, I know, St. Barbara's caution is all wisdom and common sense) we unloaded the sheets onto the porch just as the rain began to fall. Can I get a hallelujah?

Drywall sheets are often paper "bundled" in sets of two. This keeps the good sides facing each other for protection. So, we maneuvered them into the house two at a time. Just like Noah. We are strong women (St. B is, admittedly, taller and stronger than me...but I like to think I carry my own weight (...that's funny, I rarely stumble upon self-referencing fat jokes)) but this extra-long sheet rock is dense. Of course, I had to look it up: each 4'x10' sheet weighs 64lbs. So we moved 128lbs every time we carried a pair into the house. Seven times.

I figured that was all the hard labor I could expect to deal with in one day. Unfortunately Barbara pulled something in her ribs/back and began to experience pleurisy-type pain, so she was off-duty for the duration. Thank Buddha we were done.

My shirt was covered with sweat (Oh, say ewww, if you must. Sweat is the natural antidote to spontaneous combustion, thank you very much) so I cleaned up and put on a fresh one. We headed back out to finish our errands. And there on the front passenger side was a very flat truck tire. When we picked up the drywall, we got a large nail in our tire for free. Sheeyit.

Now Barbara was out of commission, and much as she protested, this job was for me. I've changed plenty of car tires but truck tires are...well, they're fucking big. And unwieldy. I'll spare you the details. Well, most of them anyway. You have to lower the spare down from under the truck with this ridiculous rigged crank the manufacturer provides. Once it's on the ground, you have to get under there (did I mention it was raining intermittently?) and drag that bad boy out.

To get the flat tire off, you have to put the wrench on one lug nut and stand on the other end of the wrench and bounce carefully, until the tightened nut breaks free, without you losing your balance. Repeat 5 times. Finally, you set up the piece-of-shit jack and try like hell to figure out from the mystery diagram where to set it up so you don't break your truck by setting up under a weak joint. All this while wiping the humidity, grease and dirt off your glasses so you can see enough to kill the mosquitoes draining your blood. Did I mention I just changed my shirt?

ANYHOO...the first round with the jack provided us with a heart-stopping slip. As in, a few thousand pounds of truck starting to slip off a jack the diameter of a cheap flashlight. Cranked the thing all the way back down, repositioned, slipped some wood under it for stability and started over. The best news? The spare was not flat!

I put on the spare, hauled the dead tire and it's hole-making spike into the truck bed. Then, I went inside and scoured the incredible amount of filth I'd accumulated off of me...so we could head to the tire store. Could they patch it? My emotional brain said sure, my frontal lobe said, are you fucking kidding? You've had these tires for 9 years! I threw a tarp over my frontal lobe...

...which was mercilessly yanked off at the tire place as the cute little butch girl measured (in microns, I believe) what little was left on my tread. On all the tires. I know. I know. It was time. Jesus. Four new tires the day after coming back from vacation. Like a vacation stinger.

There you have it. My post vacation blues got pushed out of the way for the crisis-at-hand. This is not unlike the second hammer thwack on your thumb erasing the pain from that first misguided hit.

In spite of all of this, I am happy to be home and grateful for a wonderful vacation. What's more, I've got the happiest event to anticipate and erase these little bumps in the road: my sweet, wonderful daughter is moving back to Houston! She'll be here in the next 2 weeks and I can't wait to kiss her face and give her one of those pick-up hugs.

writing, woodworking, wishing

Ernest Hemingway about his writing:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'

—Ernest Hemingway, quoted on today's Writer's Almanac

This for me and for my dear Eric.

I've also been reading, in between the house-fixing. And traveling. And breaking bread with my beloved family and friends. I can't write about that now because as I left my son yesterday at the Portland airport, I realized that the only thing I could concentrate on to prevent the tears I'd like to keep so neatly contained was ripping wood on my table saw. Thinking about that methodical and dangerous process edges out the grief. Funny that.

But real grief is losing those you love...this to keep perspective.

I miss him. Dearly. But seeing him again is as dependable as my reality. I will wake tomorrow, in all likelihood, and I will embrace my son and laugh with him again some day, as well.

all good things

I wrote to a friend:

The last full day of vacation tempts some people to begin mourning the inevitable end. But vacation time is too short to waste a single minute whining about going back to one's "regular" life. Besides, one should love great swaths of one's "regular" life and not hate to return to it.

But still. I have waited to see my firstborn again these 18 months and am hard-pressed to keep every seam of my resolve sealed against sorrow. It leaks in a bit.

In my inner dictionary, his face illustrates the definition of joy.

if it's friday this must be eugene

There are few things more wonderful than being transported from a hot, muggy Houston summer into a lovely, temperate Eugene summer.

But one of those things is getting to spend time with my boy. I am delighted to be here.

not quite a collage of vocabulary mishaps

A client once asked me to take a bunch of photos and make a camouflage out of them. I tried to explain that I was so good at what I did that she wouldn't be able to see anything when I was done.

Not three months later another client asked me to make a decoupage of several pictures.

I am intrigued by a collage of décolletage, however.

i would trade perfection for flavor

Figs

byErica Jong

Italians know
how to call a fig
a fig: fica.
Mandolin-shaped fruit,
feminine as seeds,
amber or green
and bearing large leaves
to clothe our nakedness.

I believe it was
not an apple but a fig
Lucifer gave Eve,
knowing she would find
a fellow feeling
in this female fruit

and knowing also
that Adam would
lose himself
in the fig's fertile heart
whatever the price—

God's wrath, expulsion
angry angels
pointing with swords
to a world of woe.

One bite into
a ripe fig
is worth worlds
and worlds and worlds
beyond the green
of Eden.

from today's Writer's Almanac

narcolepsy

I stumbled upon this interesting series of interviews with narcoleptics in the New York Times. I don't think about being a narcoleptic much. Since finding medication to alleviate most of the sleepiness my life is so much more manageable.

It's a weird disorder and kind of funny. Not as funny untreated, though. Untreated it's a ball and chain.

may

Walked past one of our security guards a few minutes ago and said hello. She responded, "It's National Prayer Day. Don't forget to pray!"

If I were really as mean as I'd like people to think, I'd have told her, "And May is National Masturbation Month. Don't forget to masturbate!"

in which i break up with atk

This is personal and filled with drama...I broke up with America's Test Kitchen! In an email, no less (they won't take my calls):

For years, I've been damn-near evangelical in my love for Cooks Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. I receive your publication and I own your cookbooks. While perusing recipes with a friend (who pays for web membership) we hit a recipe that was blurred out and reserved for "Editor's Choice" memberships only.

...I've had it with premium memberships, elite memberships and all the other marketing crap that striates and monetizes every level of information and makes everything into a goddamn tollroad. I am heartbroken to say this, but I'm done. I'll go elsewhere for recipes from now on.

Seriously, I'm bummed. But a girl has to set some boundaries.

*see shameful update

happy easter to my peeps

To all you believers out there, enjoy your chocolate-covered resurrection celebration tomorrow.

Today, however, take comfort in the words of the great philosopher, Miracle Max:

See, there's a big difference between mostly dead, and all dead.
—Miracle Max

magic mouse?

They call it the magic mouse. I didn't know this when it came with packaged with my new iMac at work. See the smooth top surface? No buttons, just touch control. Not unlike the surface of an iPhone, I assume, but I don't know if it's the same technology. Something about the magic makes me less inclined to research.

Of course it's wireless, so when IT dude asked me if I wanted to keep it or get a "regular" mouse, I said I'd try this one. More because I dislike cabled mice so much I bought a wireless one for work on my own dime. Or my own $10, which was how ridiculously cheap wireless mice are these days.
Excluding this magic one, which is not so cheap.

Okay. So why a post about the humble and innocuous mouse? Because it triggered a phenomena that I hadn't expected nor experienced before.

20 years of mouse technology has seen dozens of changes that seemed significant to me. The addition of scroll bars. The transition from little wheels and balls (chock full of desktop bellybutton lint) for motion to laser sensors. And of course, wirelessness.

Some failures (for me) were Apple's first round mouse that looked cute but required visual "righting" because you couldn't tell quickly, by feel, which curve was the top. And the trackball: a large ball inserted into a stationary mouse–which some folks loved but not me. I draw with my hand and wrist in a movement that I couldn't quite transfer to just my fingertips. There's also the Wacom-style pads and styluses, which my coworker swears by. The tablet seems quite intuitive but I never have felt quite as comfortable with it.

All these things were nice little adjustments that happened over time and made computer life a little more pleasant. I played with the pristine little lozenge and thought its low profile might be a problem. It wasn't.

Here's the amazing thing: the touch movement, scrolling and clicking were so...intuitive I was unaware how quickly I'd adjusted. Within days, I was at home with my now Flintstone-like block-o-plastic mouse and realized I was dragging my finger over the completely non-responsive surface* of a mouse I'd used for years.

In less than one week, my decades-long training on clicking and scroll bar use was seamlessly supplanted. That is creepy and amazing. I hadn't personally experienced technological evolution at this speed before. If mice were a species [yes, I'm chuckling] this one would be the genetic super mouse that adapts as its ancestors die off. That is, if it wasn't priced $50-$60 in a market where you can get a decent wireless mouse for $10-$15.

The only drawback is that it's so sensitive that sometimes I'll be working in a palette window of one of my programs, adjusting an image size or line width. Then, I'll move the mouse to my main window when suddenly the 25% adjustment that I chose is racing up to 90% because the cursor was still active in the little field. It interpreted my innocent move as a command to scroll the numbers up.

The other surreal behavior is that when my fingers are just hovering over the top, Magic Mouse thinks I'm just asking for something very quietly and complies. Like a Ouija board planchette, it sometimes moves things around without my participation.

See? It really is a magic mouse.

*Like whispering at a rock concert, nothing is communicated.

in response

When you delete an email in Gmail, the following phrase appears in highlighter yellow:

This conversation has been moved to the Trash.

Just thought this might be helpful when walking away from rabid teabaggers.

a little something while you wait

It's an age-old quandary, well, since the age of written communication anyway: writing takes time and energy. It is the living part of my (godhelpme) facebook status: The minutiae of sustenance is the getting in the way of living. Conversely, depression drives many of us to write, which is often therapeutic but not often conducive to good writing. There are exceptions, of course, but I am not one of them.

So while I toil with the turmoil and wrangle with the tangle, enjoy this.

This poem from today's Writer's Almanac picked my spirits up:

Naming My Daughter

by Patricia Fargnoli

In the Uruba tribe of Africa, children are named not only at birth but throughout their lives by their characteristics and the events that befall them.

The one who took hold in the cold night
The one who kicked loudly
The one who slid down quickly in the ice storm
She who came while the doctor was eating dessert
New one held up by heels in the glare
The river between two brothers
Second pot on the stove
Princess of a hundred dolls
Hair like water falling beneath moonlight
Strides into the day
She who runs away with motorcycle club president
Daughter kicked with a boot
Daughter blizzard in the sky
Daughter night-pocket
She who sells sports club memberships
One who loves over and over
She who wants child but lost one.
She who wants marriage but has none
She who never gives up
Diana (Goddess of the Chase)
Doris (for the carrot-top grandmother
she never knew)
Fargnoli (for the father
who drank and left and died)
Peter Pan, Iron Pumper
Tumbleweed who goes months without calling
Daughter who is a pillar of light
Daughter mirror, Daughter stands alone
Daughter boomerang who always comes back
Daughter who flies forward into the day
where I will be nameless.

chatty cathy

It is difficult to tease out whether this is just the upper half of my normal loquacious cycle or the result of the quarterly switch-over of sleep-disorder meds. I'm leaning towards the latter. Why? Because then it's not some cracked-out aspect of my personality...it's just the speed.

However charming or witty or urbane I may have been today, I wish I could just shut-the-hell-up because I'm a exhausted with sound of my brain churning out thoughts and my mouth trying to keep up with the deluge.

playing with my food

Nudging other projects aside (momentarily), I made a cake for my coworker last week. It was his 30th birthday and he shares the date with my son who is exactly 1 year older. So he benefited from transference as I poured some missing-my-boy energy into the celebration.

Mike is nuts about cars and drifting, so I made a three-layer cake to match his wheels...in a smaller way*:

Still, it's a large cake pan (14" diam) and I ended up tripling the yellow cake recipe (the equivalent of 6-8" layer cakes) because we have a lot of people in our department...and the proportions worked better.

I made the rim template in Illustrator from his photos. I iced the whole cake in the chocolate frosting, laid the template on top and used a toothpick to make the outline. Then, I took some regular butter cream frosting and using my little cake decorating set, drew the outline and then filled it.

The chocolate frosting and yellow cake recipes are from Cook's Illustrated. The frosting uses dutch-processed cocoa (couldn't find Callebaut so I used Droste) and melted chocolate (I used Lindt milk chocolate) and copious amounts of butter as well as confectioners sugar and corn syrup. Seriously, I'll never use another chocolate frosting recipe if I can help it. The taste and texture are decadent.

We also filled his cube with balloons and shrink-wrapped that fucker. I thoroughly enjoy these significant birthdays. Maybe it's the lack of religion with all its ritual that I've supplanted with secular celebrations. Whatever it is, it's fun.

*A word about photographs. I really don't like stopping and taking pictures of my work...all consumed with process as I am and (in this case) sticky hands. Whenever I'm working on something, my dear Barbara will come around like project paparazzi to document. I usually grumble because it means I have to stop, clean off some surfaces and generally fuss about it's not-quite-doneness. Then, when everything is done (in this case--eaten) I am so grateful she took some photos. We've repeated this cycle for over 23 years so you'd think I'd stop grumbling. Let me make this completely clear: she's completely right on this one and I'm so wrong. Thank you, dear woman!

painless steak?

An Op-Ed piece from the New York Times this past week by Adam Shriver (a doctoral student at my daughter's alma mater, Washington University)...that unsettles me.

The problem:

Veal calves and gestating sows are so confined as to suffer painful bone and joint problems. The unnatural high-grain diets provided in feedlots cause severe gastric distress in many animals. And faulty or improperly used stun guns cause the painful deaths of thousands of cows and pigs a year.

The premise:

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.

A solution:

This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. This second pathway appears to be associated with activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who are given morphine, because there are more receptors for opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain.

The article concludes:

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

I understand that blocking pain in terminal patients is a humane thing to do. After all, what is the point of denying relief for that kind of suffering in hospice? And Mr. Shriver's conclusion makes some sense, if we can't change the format, at least reduce the suffering...justified by it's better than doing nothing, right?

What needles me about this approach to animal suffering is the message it sends to sloppy humans: You can kill your food without "humanity" once the animal is anesthetized from pain. So, don't worry about the abysmal conditions, digestive and dietary damage inflicted. And don't worry about half-assed stun gun performance--the creature has its pain center "interpreters" turned off--you're guilt free. It is fundamentally and philosophically so full of holes that it makes me queasy.

Wouldn't it be better to put some of that energy into finding solutions for the cruel conditions, rather than research ways to pull a pleasant curtain in front the cruelty? Aside: what happens when animals don't react to pain? Will their keepers have no clue to serious illness or injury because the animals don't low or squeal?

I'm going to talk my steak-loving self right into vegetarianism at this rate. Fuck.

yesterday

Definition of insanity:
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

This is the suicide note my nephew left on the white board in his room before he killed himself yesterday. (The saying is attributed to Albert Einstein...for whatever sad irony that is worth.)

He'd been plagued by a number of physical illnesses, the worst of which was Crohn's disease. The terrible pain overlapping the depression overlapping the prospect of more pain proved too overwhelming for him to bear.

I grieve for him. I grieve for his parents, burying their 30-year old son. I grieve for his grandmother, with whom he lived for the past few years and mourn the end of their gentle symbiotic relationship. He helped her do the things around the house and yard that even the hardiest (and she is) 84-year old can no longer do alone. She made sure his ravaged digestive system got the healthiest food possible and provided him a place to rest and heal. In her hard life, she buried an infant son, a 21-year old daughter and her 46-year old eldest son, my children's father. Her own husband died suddenly at 50. And now this dear grandson killed himself in the basement room where he lived in her house.* She is stoic and staunch in her religion but this must shake her world.

And my heart breaks for my children. Lars was born less than six weeks after my son. He was his closest cousin; when I spoke to my son last week, he was worried about his cousin's health. The friendship between Lars and my daughter has been a wonderful thing to watch blossom as they've become adults.

And now he's gone and so is his pain. And that's the only cliché that gives me any comfort right now.

*As it turns out, he did not die in her home but in his car.