Just Checking In

What has transpired since the beginning of September for life within reach:

• My twelve year old Border Collie ate a sock that required surgical removal
• I wrote a nearly 200 page technical document
• I started taking an online poetry writing course, my first online class ever
• I won and lost numerous Words with Friends games
• I presented at an academic conference
• Laundry was done

Life is busy and I would very much like a nap, followed by a good night's sleep; in short, to live like a cat.

Writing Space With a View

I have tried several times to set up a writing space in my house and failed several times. The desk, wherever I put it eventually fills up with clutter, overwhelming the space to write. I even tried writing without a desk, setting up shop on my bed. For a while the natural light and view to the back yard compensated for the ergonomic incorrectness. Then I got tennis elbow, which apparently one can contract without setting foot on a tennis court (one of my life goals). And my posture wasn't doing much for my decrepit spine, so I'm trying another approach: the fold-down desk. Despite having to drill into a masonry wall, my tool-savvy husband took only one trip to the hardware store, so I would rate the level of difficulty for the wall-mounting as a 7.5 of 10.

I'm a stranger to anywhere beyond the paint or garden section of a hardware store, so I had to take a picture, like a tourist, when I saw this wall of fasteners (screws, bolts, and all sundry items needed to attach one thing to another). Is the world such a complicated place that we need this many different doo-dahs to hold it together?

An hour and three more holes than required later (the dimensions in the instruction booklet were wrong) and I'm writing at a desk by my bed while looking out into the backyard. When I'm done I just fold the desk up so no one can pile clutter on my writing space. So far so good.

Invasion on the Waning Cucumber

After a long hot summer, the cuke plant is fading away. Most respectable gardening books recommend getting rid of waning plants that no longer produce, but I like watching the cycle of life in the garden. Call me peri-menopausal, but it seems rude to feast on the bounty of my one-cucumber harvest and then yank the plant simply because it can no longer produce.

So I'm still watering the wilting plant and today it responded by squirming. Closer investigation revealed a colony of bugs. Bugs hatching, bugs in neat little egg cases under the elephant-ear like cucumber leaves, bugs bound together in end-to-end bug lust. Books recommend killing bugs-that-eat-plants (pests) and letting bugs-that-kill-pests (beneficials) live. I don't know if these are pests or beneficial bugs, but it also seems rude to kill a creature in the middle of sex (theirs not mine), so I left them to continue colonizing the cuke plant. But not before I snapped a few pictures.

When a Door Closes. . .

Q: Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?
A: A person lacking a handful of treats.

This is the new dog door my husband installed last night after I cried (a lot) about how broken the patio door had become (note the duct tape). At first our big fat chocolate lab was skeptical, her being big and fat and the door seeming ever so much less so. All it took was for me to fling a handful of treats through the door into the back yard. Problem solved. At least until the extra diet of treats widens her girth beyond the door's dimensions. It's rated for 100 pounds, so I figure we have a ten pound margin before we need to develop a new plan. My husband weighed her yesterday (yes, he can actually lift her into his arms like a baby and step on the bathroom scale. He is a stud.).

And so the patio door is retired as a form of human egress. I should feel sentimental, but after lifting it with both hands (not like a baby) for the past few years to get it to open, I feel only relief. And besides, I can go through the new door in my bedroom and my son can scamper though the dog door any time. He has more poundage leeway than the chocolate and is infinitely more agile. He doesn't even need the lure of a handful of treats.

Here's an Ecofriendly Tip for Poetry Lovers

My son loves origami and as an obsessive enthusiast of learning things about things, I have spent hours boning up on origami paper history. It also appeals to my interest in plants, since the best papers are made from plant fibers. But, since I now learn more and more via the internet, I tend to stumble on gems while surfing off on a tangent. This morning I went from the process of turning gampi trees into washi paper to learn that poetry is sometimes written in Japan on square sheets of washi paper. So I Google "Poetry Paper Japan" and find this awesome link: http://blog.toiletpaperworld.com/japanese-poetry-saves-on-toilet-paper/

Now I just need to find the right poems to post at eye level in front of my toilet (which BTW is a Toto).

Any suggestions?

Trees We Need

My kids call this the hundred-acre-woods tree. Some just say "let's meet at the tree in the park," and it's understood that the rendez-vous will take place under this carob even though the park has many other species. But none others so revered. See how it's branches are crutched up like an old veteran's broken bones. So far, I've found two other trees propped like this, an attempt to keep them alive beyond their years. The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest under whose canopy Robin Hood and Maid Marian courted and the long-dead oak in Rome where poet Torquato Tasso sat in the shade and waited for papal recognition for his genius. He died in 1595 still waiting. Now the dead tree shackled up with metal bands waits for him.

Trees like these matter beyond reason and beauty.

Test from Outside

Finally cool enough to be outside, so I'm testing my mobile blogging ap.

More from the Garden

I'm not sure what the little squash/gourd is, another garden surprise.

It's hot enough today to melt the brain.

Here's a little quote from Cicero:
"If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need."

And, I might add for him, a better body guard.

Egghead Plants Eggplant

This is my first foray into growing an eggplant and I highly recommend it, especially if you're fond of purple. Thinking of eggplant conjures memories from my mandatory vegetarian days when a slab of eggplant fried on a griddle was the closest thing to a steak in my house. Despite having a not so extraordinary kid reaction to actually eating eggplant (fried, baked, or otherwise disguised), I still admired it as just a beautiful object. There are few naturally purple foods: plums, grapes, cabbage. . . and the eggplant, in its mature figure at the supermarket, has a seductive shape. But I had never seen one emerge from the remnants of the bloom. Adorable. A little baby in a bonnet. Take a look.

Society has a strange hostility toward the eggplant. Take this comment from Ursula le Guin: “I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.” Why not a Brussels sprout? 

Addendum to the Flood

Okay, so I wasn't completely right about my trunk being full of old school notes. While the trunk dried out in the carport, I filtered through the stacks of papers and, besides being reminded that I rewrote all my lecture notes, I found a notebook marked "engineering 4." Now I have periodically reshuffled these papers for the past thirty years and have always assumed that this little narrow-ruled notebook contained notes from the one engineering class I took in college (taught by a turdish man who would never looked at me when I came up to ask questions yet joked with any of the students with penises, so I abandoned the career plan to become a bridge designer that I had entertained in my freshman year.) So, because I had no fond memories of the class, I had never opened the notebook, until the other day. It turns out I must have thought so little of turd man and his instructions for drafting bolts that I never rewrote my lecture notes. Instead I used the notebook as a journal. It's mostly filled with silly debates with myself between two boys I simultaneously loved and hated, but it was also written during my I-think-I-can-write-country-songs phase. Not being a cowboy, I didn't write about beer and dogs. No, my subject matter drew from the life experiences of an egghead dorkette. Here's my favorite (note the one-word instruction in the top left corner):

Yes, I wrote love songs to my cat, to be sung "soulfully." And, in case you're wondering, I do not write songs for a living.

Flood of Memories

The other day the output hose on my washer jumped out of the drain pipe and flooded the laundry room/storage room/cat toilet. I assessed the damage without my glasses on and mopped up what I believed to be all the water. So today I'm cleaning the two cat boxes, wishing I could do this without my nose on, and I noticed that my old steamer trunk had water stains near the floor. Yes I store cherished memories right next to where my cats poop. After hauling the truck out from under boxes, I could tell it definitely had water damage.

Was this going to be like when termites ate my Kindergarten school pictures? Would I open the trunk to find my high school and college calculus tests ruined? Could I survive the loss? No, no, and I really hope so or my hoarding tendencies are worse than I thought.

Luckily during my last purge of contents I had had the foresight to line the trunk bottom with a plastic kitchen bag. The trunk was soggy, but I can still read the letter to my french pen pal I wrote for Mrs. Griswold in ninth grade (the draft, of course. I sent the letter to France, received a ball point pen and a very nice letter in return, all of which gave me an overwhelming sense of obligation to maintain this friendship, so I never wrote a thank you back and still carry a speck of guilt for my neglect).

The contents matter little in comparison to the trunk. I put things in it, because keeping it empty seems inefficient, but what I cherish is the trunk. It had been my father's when he was young. He took it to Europe on a trip he made with his grandfather. I think he was a teenager and any stories he tells about the trip always give him a smile and a twinkle in his eye. When  it became mine, when I was elevenish, I kept everything I owned in it while living in a kids commune (which was scary and weird and I can and eventually will write more on that experience). The trunk was like a rigid security blanket. From then on I have toted it with me wherever I have lived, changing the contents as I grow older. When my daughter was a toddler, she scribbled on the front with a permanent marker. Unfortunately, it is not her best artwork. She has skills that aren't represented on my trunk. As she enters high school, I try to find forgiveness. When I do, I know where to store it.

I used to pull the trunk out from time to time, but now I only open it hoping to throw something away. Or, like today, to access the damage. It's made of paper, which seems an odd choice for a steamer trunk, but I think it will survive the recent flood. It's drying in my carport, so I guess fate has offered me an opportunity to consider replying to my pen pal. Merci beaucoup Feit.

Here's something Ralph Waldo Emerson said about fate:
"Tout ce qui nous limite, nous l'appelons Destin"
"Whatever limits us we call Fate."

The Mirror Reflects on Mirror Neurons

I've been reading about the brain a lot lately, and why not? I have one and this is one of the things in common I share with other human beings, a species I often feel estranged from. We all have brains, which is nice, allows us to say things like "my thoughts exactly," but human minds are also very different from each other and these differences, quirks, are what I find make people endearing and interesting.

Then I heard about mirror neurons, these specialized wires in our neural network that give us monkey-see-monkey-do tendencies. You fall down and I grimace and say 'ow.' The up side is that they help us develop empathy, the "I feel for you, man" sense of connectedness. Mirror neurons seem to be the network that allows people to be Borgish (resistance is futile). However, not everyone has as many or as effective mirror neurons as everyone else, specifically people on the autism spectrum. As a consequence, some brain scientist have speculated, people on the spectrum have trouble linking up to the Borg (acceptance is futile).

Why this concerns me is that Borgish behavior has a highly effective way of isolating and disposing of perceived threats to the Borg. Consider what Dr. Alex Lickerman wrote about mirror neurons recently on his blog Happiness in this World:

"couldn’t we consider the effect of culture as I’ve described it here, i.e., all the advances that arise out of collective consciousness and cooperation, as providing protection against environmental forces that would otherwise select out “undesirable” traits such as mental illness? Not that I’m in any way arguing we shouldn’t treat mental illness, but in doing so, aren’t we relieving the environmental pressure to select it out of our population?"

I read that and felt like a germ in the body of humanity right after it got a shot of penicillin in the ass. Will the quirky, often ill, yet creative and active human brains become endangered species, selectively bred out because of odd deficiencies such as the mirror neuron condition seen in people on the autism spectrum? I hope not, cuz I for one am looking forward to hearing the theories from tomorrows Albert Einstein, reading the next book by the future Virginia Woolf, and playing the next video game by a future Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon.

Flora Domesticus

Spring lingers this year. Today the sky is clouded and, like many days, it's felt like I live by the sea. The plants are happy. Here are a few happy plants from the garden and our half-made bathroom. The drooping flower cluster is from a succulent my daughter planted. It has been working on this one stalk of flowers for about a month or so. Patience yields rewards here. While, the other lovely example of fungus sprung up over night from a leaky pipe. In this case the gratification might seem instant, but we have been cultivating this mushroom habitat in the bathroom for years. Careful and enduring neglect finally paid off with this fleeting flora. It was gone by the next morning. Nothing but its black spray of spores on the floor to remind us of its presence.

They reminded me of one of my favorite Sylvia Plath poems, called Mushrooms:

Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air. Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room. Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding, Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless, Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us! We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible, Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies: We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.

Bed Ridden

I just bought a rolling bag and put inline skate wheels on it so I can walk to work in quiet, just the softened thrump, thrump, thrump as the bag glides over the sidewalk joints. Every time I walk to work, it's like rushing to catch a plane.Makes me walk with purpose. Yesterday I took 10,013 steps and was feeling grand.

Today I can barely move, old horse injury that flares up every time I push at life too hard. Twenty five years ago I got on a horse, a young stallion who had spent all winter out of the saddle. None of these details mattered to me, because the sun was shining, the California air smelled sweet like velvet and hay, and the next day I would be turning twenty five. A quarter century and still alive, why shouldn't I mount a stallion?

For one, I usually ride nearly crippled nags. And when I say usually, what I mean is almost never. And, as it turns out, winter-wild horses can be frisky and a little sneaky. The one I rode took a big belly of air while we saddled him up, a horse trick for keeping the gear loose and comfy. That's the sneaky part. A smart horse person knows to ride a short while and then get off to tighten the straps, so the saddle doesn't slip to one side or the other.

After walking the horses for a bit, the young man I was riding with suggested we gallop across an open field. Here comes the frisky part. Just one tiny heel tickle from me and this horse took off. He ran past the young man who I think was galloping his horse, but I just saw a blur. Speed is not my thing, even back then. I don't tilt my head back and laugh at the world in times like this. I become consumed with terror.

Maybe it was my roller skating instincts that saved me. When I needed to stop while skating, I'd turn rather than brake, dissipating the energy going forward by converting it to angular momentum. That's my C-in-physics explanation. I yanked the reins right and back and eventually the horse pulled up into a turn and stopped.

This is my plea for following your gut.

My gut said get the hell off that beast right this instant. It is way more horse than you can handle. But the sun was shining, blah, blah, blah. And my smiling young friend promised not to gallop any more. So we wandered the horses toward the shade of the oak woodland that draped a hill. With my stallion's nostrils flaring and his muscles twitching with the memory of his great dash across the open field, I entered the quiet shade of the trees. Maybe a twig cracked under his hoof. Maybe he was just young and full of adrenaline, but the horse took off at a gallop. By now the saddle had loosened and began slipping to the left, taking me with it. We were headed for a tree on the horse's left. He intended to scrap me off on the tree trunk. I had just enough time to guard my head with my arms before colliding against the tree.

I fell to the ground and lay on my back, unable to move. I could see the lovely blue sky through the oak canopy and hear the stomping and snorting of the horse trying to fight out of the saddle. I thought he was coming back to finish me off, but I couldn't seem to look around to find him. So I just lay breathless and still whispering "help."

I snapped three transverse processes (the little wings off the vertebrae in my lower back) and cracked a rib, and needed a few stitches over my eye, but was otherwise fine. Spent the night in the hospital having morphine-induced hallucinations that my mother was calling me to say happy birthday.

Ever since then, if I begin to think I can mount life like a wild stallion, my back reminds me that speed just isn't my thing.

P.S. I did get back in the saddle ten years later
on a horse named Lips whose lust for fresh lupines
kept him at a constant strolling pace. 

Passing Along a Little Walking Research

I heard this on NPR and am spreading the word on yet another good reason to walk. Check out this story
Yeah walking!

Things That Annoy Me and Things That Make Me Happy

Inspired by the essay “Hateful Things,” by Sei Shonagon and anthologized in Phillip Lopate’s book, The Art of the Personal Essay, that I read during the summer, I made a list (in July) I called “Small Things that Annoy Me.” Sei Shonagon lived during the Heian Era (some time in the 10th century) in Japan. She hated things like "a mouse that scurries all over the place" or when "one is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby starts crying," or when "one has been foolish enough to invite a man to spend the night in an unsuitable place--and then he starts snoring." She also hated fleas, noisy carriages, crows that circle and caw,  and people who say spells to themselves after sneezing.

After I wrote my list of annoyances, I felt an urge to balance it with joyful things, so I made another list called “Small Things the Make Me Happy.” I recommend the exercise, especially to list-makers. Here are my two lists:

Small Things that Annoy Me

A feeling like small nails driven into the skin

Mosquito bites

Stubbed toes

Banging my head on a cupboard door

Stepping in dog poop

Stepping in a hole

A sprained ankle

Ketchup on a shirt sleeve

Flies

Wind

Tight underwear

Bad hair

Wet sleeves (I'm very particular about my shirt sleeves)

Synthetic fabric

Clothing tags that itch

Bad cologne (especially wore by young men who would smell fine without it)

Cigarette smoke

Toilets that don't flush

Noise

Meetings

People who talk in meetings just to hear their own voices

People who say "per se"

Pains in my neck

Avoidable stupidity

Dishonesty, avoidable or otherwise

Mud when I’m not in the mood for it

Dogs jumping on doors

Muddy paws

Commercials

Product placement

Being interrupted

Lateness, even my own

Small Things (and not small things) that Make Me Happy

Cats

Cats purring

Flowers

Cool weather

Listening to my kids play

Getting first place on Word Scramble online

Taking pictures

Losing weight without thinking about it

The ocean

Writing

Watching movies and shows with good scripts

Traveling

Reading

Baths

Sleeping dogs

Watching kittens play

Talking to my husband

Playing dominoes

Summer

Sleeping in

Sleeping in general

Swimming

Gardening

Taking care of other living things—kids, animals, plants

A clean house

Laughing

Reading to my kids

Watching my kids grow up

Going places with my husband

Going places with my family

Fruit

Coffee

Not worrying about money

Clean sheets

Now, in the chill of late winter, I can add more things, mostly to the happy list:

My heater

Friends

Knitting

My new bedroom door

Visits from my Dad

My glasses leash

Not losing my glasses

Walking

My kids

My husband

My cats

Being able to put “my” in front of so many awesome people/cats

When I remember Barrack Obama is president and not George Bush

Jon Stewart

Earplugs

Writing well

Walking Women Writers

I'm reading two books right now, both on walking, one by Rebecca Solnit, whom I have for the past decade referred to as my Doppleganger, a term that I just learned from Wikipedia is taken from the German (Doppel (double) and Gänger (walker)). Solnit lives in San Francisco and publishes books I always think I should have written, an opinion based on their titles, because I haven't, up until last week, been able to bring myself to read her work. Why? Because she writes the books I think I should have written and, if that weren't enough, we share the same first name. But that isn't it entirely. No. She has beautiful hair. Long wavy blond hair that spills around her face like a waterfall in a sunlit spring.  How is that fair? If she gets the published books, she ought to have to take my mousy straight thin locks.

So after ten years, I made myself download her book Wanderlust: The History of Walking, onto my Kindle. Seemed like less of a book that way. And now I'm 15% into it (that's how Kindles count progress, not by pages but by percents) and am so relieved to find out that while she is very smart, we couldn't be more different in how we see the world, how we write, or even how we walk. I still envy the hair, but she makes some excellent observations about walking. 

After reading one too many sentences like this: "Feminism and postmodernism both emphasize that the specifics of one's bodily experience and location shape one's intellectual perspective," (location 605-10, 8%) I took a break and picked up a used hardbound copy of Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking at my favorite local bookstore. Infinitely more entertaining and humble. I like to laugh while I read and he writes with wit. But, he just went through a litany of writers who walk and, with the exception of Wordworth's tag-along sister, Dorothy, who wrote in her journal while her brother traipsed around with her in the Lake's District waxing poetic about daffodils (see poem below), nobody on his list was a woman.

Why?

Where are the walking women writers? Other than Solnit herself, the walkers in her book (so far) also are mainly  of the penile (the adjective for penis, a word derived from the Latin term for tail) persuasion.

If anyone has references for walking women writers, please let me know.


Daffodils by William Wordsworth

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils. 

Changing Water

This little canal where I walk seems to suffer
from bi-polar disorder.
One day the water surges down the channel
all full of slosh and vigor. And then. . .
empty--it's debris and thick mud, full of sticky smells
exposed and raw.

This week my mood reflects
these watery fluctuations--
A happy life gushing forward
full of promise and reward
followed by the same life seeming stuck
snagged on junk around the house--
dirty dishes, recyclables, laundry.

How is it that the same circumstances
can appear so
inconstant?

Lessons from the Wise and Furry

I'm still walking on the canal and to temper my habit of taking the fun out of walking by turning it into a workout, I invited my two gurus of fun.

This is their grammar lesson about the important distinction between on and in.

Today, I am Grasshopper. Thank you Masters.

And now a word from Master Khan:
"See the way of life as a stream. A man floats, and his way is smooth. The same man turning upstream exhausts himself. To be one with the universe, each must find his true path and follow it."  Kung Fu, season one episode 9: "Chains"

Putting it into Words

Yesterday, I found a precious little book by poet Mark Doty called The Art of Description. Read the first chapter this morning which ended (the chapter, not the morning) with this:

"The need to translate experience into something resembling adequate language is the writer's blessing or the writer's disease, depending on your point of view. That's why Whitman [in his poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking] isn't sure if what sings in him is a demon or a bird. It is indeed a symptom of a problem, of life not having been really lived until it is narrated, at least that's a condition that winds up giving real gifts to others. The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing."

Such a relief to finally have a diagnosis for what has ailed me for. . .my whole life, perhaps. That gnawing obsession to put into words all experience. Thank you, Dr. Doty, for recognizing what so many medical professionals could not:

I am a writer.

He's right, too: It is a blessing and a disease.

This book is part of The Art of Series, which is sponsored in part by Target, go figure. If you aren't familiar with Doty's work, he writes awesome poetry.

What a Difference 185 Days Make

Sometimes when I walk, I get thoughts I think are worth remembering, so I type them into my notes app on my phone. This way I can e-mail them to myself for use later, if I still think they are worth remembering. For example on July 3, 2010, while walking on the canal, I wrote this:

"Late afternoon winds pickkingg up like a river rushing through the tall trees efood along the canal citrus fig pomegrAnit fish canal muddy with new flow watering time summer dove coos walking into the sun glare hand up to psee edibles mesquite beNs it's raining pine needles in the strong desert wind the canal is cat jumpable a long hair turtle coated cat jumped in front of me dates too I solve prnlems while walking like how aunt and uncle can get neighbor not to look in back yard take up nude gardening"

Then on Jan 4 2011, strolling down the same canal:

"185 days later winter I can see more through the naked trees
Cold air no wind to stir up dust"

So, observations: I like trees and nakedness, regardless of the season. And wind, but not dust. I write more with warm fingers, but still can't type well on a phone.

I also caught this shot as a train passed by on my way back home. I like the idea of a graffiti poet.