XC@JD: the 'zine.

Following counterintuitive's practice of using acronyms (SUMB=swearing under my breath), we decided to speak in acronyms although XC@JD (cross country at Juan Diego) was really as far as we took it. Juan Diego High School, for those of you who don't venture into the south part of the Salt Lake Valley, is the new complex built by the Roman Catholic Diocese, and includes a church, a Catholic Center, a primary school, a middle school, and a high school, and is very deluxe. They sponsored an invitational meet this morning.

My son did very well--his best time so far in a true 5K--!7:47. Zach, however, streaked by him at the very last and beat him by a fraction of a second. Those of you not following this story will be enlightened to know that Zach is the formerly second place runner that Walker has been beating in the last few races, now restored to second place, for who knows how long.

This is the last race before Region, which is on October 10. On the training schedule, there are a bunch of training runs, including "run the Region course" and "run the State course." Last year at Region, the first-place runner for my son's high school had a bad race, so the team didn't qualify. We're hoping that this year will go better, and that on October 19, we'll all be at Sugarhouse Park cheering the West Jordan team on.

Today's a day that required split second timing on everyone's part. It's one of the last few market Saturdays, and I have agenda items to accomplish before the winter. In squirrel fashion, I have nuts to store--really, actual pecans from the organic pecan growers in Hurricane. I had to buy some more tomatoes to roast, more basil from which to make pesto to freeze, etc. So we had to get up early enough to be downtown by 8. We hauled our produce down to Draper and Juan Diego, caught the beginning of the junior varsity boys race, then the varsity girls. We were finished with the varsity boys by 10:45 or so. My adorable husband the historian is helping his son move into his first house today, whereas I have been facilitating two 'zine workshops for the Utah Progressive Network's Youth Activism Summit. Whereas when I left the house, Bruiser and my son, just arrived home from the race, had stretched out on the couch for a rest or perhaps even a nap.

I have been on my own case this whole week because I offered to do two two-part workshops. Nobody asked me to be this volunteer-y--it was, like, "Will you help us by teaching a 'zine workshop?" and I'm all, "Sure, why don't I do two two-part workshops, to be spread out over two days?" Whose ass was I actually kissing by being this helpful? Of course, it's all turned out fine, and I'm enjoying it very much. The youth activists, several of them anyway, know more than I do about 'zines. For instance, did you know there's such a thing as a "distro"? Here's one to check out: http://www.microcosmpublishing.com. This place serves as a distributor for a bunch of indie products, such as t-shirts, posters, books, 'zines, stickers . . . as well as a manufacturer of personalized buttons and stickers. It's a cool site, and helped me understand a little more about how some 'zines might be circulated on more than a micro-local level.

My own experience with 'zine-making has been connected with my experience as an imaginative writing teacher. In my intro classes, we generally finish the course by making a class 'zine, which involves collaborating on various elements of the 'zine, but allowing a lot of latitude in individual page designs. I have always loved the eclectic effects such 'zines have. The youth activists, however, had amazingly creative ideas for their 'zines. What about a 'zine that focused on public restrooms in SLC? Photos and reviews. It could spin out into issues about other types of public spaces. Or a group of high school aged punks doing a 'zine about the bands, both local and touring, that come through SLC. These guys had already thought a lot about the project.

I think I should do a 'zine about Saturdays at the megastore household. I might call it "@the megastore." Certain people would be out and about doing good works, such as helping people move and lifting heavy items, or teaching people who already know about how to make 'zines how to make 'zines. Others are taking a nap with a dog after having run 3.1 miles in their best time ever. I would definitely have photos, and there would be witty captions. Or perhaps poignant captions. Ou sont les neiges d'antan*? One never knows, really, how many more races in the season there will be to run, or at which to cheer.

*"where are the snows of yesteryear?" Francois Villon

The Home Food Preservation Front.

Even though all the cool kids are bowling now, my adorable husband the historian and I have stayed at home, making grape juice from our very own grapes.

You'll be edified to know that, in the home food preservation arena, I have also been roasting tomatoes*. I took a pile of sweet cherries from our trees and preserved them with lemon juice and some sugar--they are pretty much the nectar of the gods on vanilla ice cream. While I've been messing up the kitchen, I've also made granola, a total of three plum galettes, cookies, a cake, and more cookies over the last few weeks. (Anyone coming to the Five-Year Plan meeting tomorrow gets cookies, by the way. You'll have to come to find out what kind.)

I have nothing profound to say about the home food preservation project. There were years when I had several dozen jars and I filled them all with tomatoes and peaches, pears, apples, and grape juice. Also a jam-making episode that was financially ill-advised, if delicious. There were years when I looked at all those jars and thought, man, I can buy canned [fruit, tomatoes, etc.] and save myself the damn trouble. And then, there was the year when we canned all the peaches off my aunt's tree and took digital pictures to prove we did it (not for my sake--the recipe my aunt submitted to her church's cookbook was for tacos, and featured instructions like "Put the dogs in the car and drive to Taco Bell"). This episode occurred a couple of years ago, and since then we've been doing it.

I must say, however, that the grapes in our backyard are amazing and make amazing juice. We are slob viticulturalists, in that we let the grapes grow wherever, whereas the extension service folks like to tell you to prune your grapes severely, like an old-fashioned schoolmarm. Not us. Our grapes grow in and through the apple and cherry trees and all over. One time when my mom was visiting, she brought in a tiny bunch of the most delicious green table grapes--the kind that, when they're ripe, you can crush them in your mouth, tongue on palate--and said, "Did you know you had these little green grapes?" No, we did not. Now we guard them zealously--it's a race against the wasps, who can leave a bunch of grapes decimated (in the etymological sense of the word), the fragile little hulls of the grapes left to mock you. And we love our red grape juice so much that we're reluctant to share it, even with the children.

We got a dozen jars of juice from this year's harvest, which also involved an unfortunate and rather severe pruning shear injury when my husband was trying to balance on a ladder and reach over the back fence to cut the last few bunches. I heard him swear with great vigor as he extricated himself from his extreme harvesting posture (I provided the first aid). That's just how far we're willing to go for the juice.

*Roasted Tomatoes: Oven at 375. Take as many tomatoes as you want to roast, blanch them and remove the skins, cut them into fourths. Place in a pan that's big enough to hold all the tomatoes, plus the other stuff you're about to add, but before you put them in the pan, put some olive oil at the bottom of the pan. It's for a good reason. Okay, now put the tomatoes in. Add as much garlic as you think appropriate to your tomatoes. Also fresh basil, and don't be stingy. Salt, pepper, more olive oil. Give everything a good stir so that the oil bestows its blessing upon everything. Roast for two hours or so, stirring occasionally (okay, once, sometime during the two hours). You want the watery juice to disappear, leaving you with slightly caramelized, dense tomatoes. Cool. Use as many as you want right away, and freeze the rest in ziploc freezer bags (sorry for product placement). These are so much better than bottled tomatoes or canned tomatoes or any other kind of tomato you might be tempted to eat in wintertime, you will not believe it.

Not writing.

On Sunday it was my writing group, which meant that it was time to pull another poem together. I've often said that being in my writing group is the best way to make sure I write at least twelve poems a year, which is mostly true, though for a long time I've been riding on material I produced in the fall of 2001, when I was at the artists' colony (she says with a superior sniff. The Artists' Colony. In Vermont. When the Leaves were Turning.). Which can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It's good, because I produced like 60 odd pages of stuff when I was there, most of it very rough and raw, and it's good, because I'm taking that material and working with it and making it into something, something very like a poem. But it's bad, maybe, because once again in my artistic life, I'm not exactly tearing it up with new material.

That characterization, of course, is not entirely fair, as I've written entirely new poems that I started from scratch in the meantime. Sestinas. Sonnets. Pantoums, even. So I should probably just be glad that I can get a poem together at all, and not search my soul, for crying out loud, about notions such as "artistic life" and "new material."

This new poem actually came out of stuff I wrote last summer, sketchy and bare notes. Notes like "burning our artifacts." Or "Feeling sick inside at missing my beautiful husband, my beautiful children—" Or a note like "last night my heart racing, sleeping and not sleeping in a dark enfolded by motel curtains (tenderly lain . . .)" (that last bit sounding pretty poetry-ish, I admit). Also a couple of lines from David Wojahn.

When I opened this set of notes on Sunday morning, I realized that sometime not too long ago I had amplified and embroidered them into a messy draft. How did I do this and not remember it? I find this happens all the time--sometime, apparently while I was sleep-walking or automatically writing or something, I open a file and do something new to the notes. When I open the document again, I see: Ah, so I turned that into a canzone. How/when did that happen? (Of course, I've never actually written a canzone, but I find I'm just as surprised by whatever I did write as if I had turned the notes into a canzone.)

I write all the time--it's like I never stop writing--but it's a little disturbing to find that poetry has crept into the least noticeable part of my conscious life. In part of the ongoing cleaning and sorting that is a new theme in my life (speaking of surprising developments), I found a file of old poems from a period when I wrote a poem a day, practically. I remember feeling then that the poems were being torn from me, like pages from a notebook. (Sorry--perhaps that metaphor's too torrential?) What would that be like now? I remember living in a constant state of heartbreak. Maybe, for the most part, I'd rather have poetry show up once a month on a Sunday morning, just hours before my writing group meets, to surprise me.

Men, Women, Clothing.

After reading sleepy-e's recent post "Dating for Dummies, Vol.2," I have been thinking about gender differences re: clothing. He says, "Women like clothes. I dare anyone to get huffy about this either. Bring it on, because you are lying and you will lose. Women like clothes. They like other things too, like puppies and unicorns and literary theory, but they especially like clothes." Here are my thoughts:

Part One. When I met my husband, his wardrobe philosophy consisted of the following:

1. Own two pairs of identical trousers (khakis).
2. Own ten shirts.
3. Own two pairs of the exact same--identical!--Rockport boots.
4. Wear the khakis for a week's worth of classes.
5. one shirt a day.
6. Take all the week's clothing to the dry cleaners
7. Repeat with alternate set of clothing.

If he got a new shirt, he used to say, that would mean he'd need to get rid of one of the old ones. It was simultaneously a philosophy and a closed-system science. I really admired it and still do.
Part Two. Needless to say, in every respect, I approach clothing myself in a fashion directly opposite of my husband's. I don't resent him for his philosophy/science/practice. I appreciate the diversity of human beings. I found, and find, his method of costuming himself to be utterly endearing. Meanwhile, today I made a second trip to T.J. Maxx for a skirt that I had made the terrible mistake of not buying two days ago. It fits into no system or science, though I do have some thoughts, and perhaps they are philosophical, about sweaters, jackets, and shirts I may wear with it. And shoes.

Part Three. Let me add that my son, the same one who's running these days, came up with the brilliant notion three years ago of buying five of the same pairs of shorts (red) and five of the exact same tee shirt (olive green). His philosophy was that, like most cartoon characters, such as Bart Simpson and Pepper Ann, he should wear the same clothes every day. A uniform, if you will. Anyone who can fail to appreciate the platonic beauty in this scheme needs to get a clue.

Part Four. Even cargo shorts, tee shirts, and basketball shoes are costume, no more fake or less fake than, say, dockers and a laundered shirt. Repeating the same clothing day in and day out is an elegant and admirable conception, regardless of the nature of the attire.

Part Five. Okay, I do like clothes.

Pysch.

Today was the Wasatch Rendezvous meet at Cottonwood Recreation Center. It's a great way to spend a Saturday morning--the junior varsity runners go first, then they have the varsity runners go, the seventh-place runners competing against all other seventh-place runners, the sixth-place runners against all other sixth-place runners, and so on, up to the first-place runners. Each school determines who runs in which place, and there were about twenty-four schools competing.

My son's coaches determined that he should run with the first-place runners. When the coach pulled him aside after training yesterday to tell him so, he told me, he replied, "Why?" The coaches wanted to give Josh, the kid who's been in first place for his school all season, except for the last meet, a chance to relax a little. He's been struggling, and last season, when it came to the Region qualifying meet, he choked, and the team didn't qualify. But the coaches also wanted to see how my son would do.

He got a little bumpy start--the official asked all the runners to step back from the line a bit, and my son looked to the side just as the starting pistol went off. He pretty quickly took up the seventeenth spot, and that's where he finished. The course was 2.9 miles, and he finished at 17:08.8, which gave him a 5:49 minute mile. Not bad at all, but not what he had hoped. When we spoke to him afterward, he was disatisfied with his performance. When he'd taken the hills--and it was a very hilly course--his legs had felt tired. "I feel like I could have run better," he said.

We noticed that, with so few kids running, maybe the first ten or so runners had a pack to run with, and there was a bit of position-shifting among that group. My son, however, occupied position seventeen with quite a bit of space between himself and the sixteenth runner, and quite a bit of space behind him as well. In that position, I guess, it's up to the runner to push himself to go faster, to cut into that distance. One thing I love about watching any of my kids play sports is seeing them take their experiences and figure out what to make of them. A less-than-stellar performance can be the occasion for figuring out how to take your game to the next level. I'll be interested to see what and how my son learns from this race. At some point, he'll tell me about it--I won't ask.

We watched Josh run with the second-place runners. His time was about eighteen seconds faster than my son's--so it's pretty clear that he's still the fastest runner on the team, though the top three kids on the team all finished within twenty-five seconds of one another. I've always enjoyed watching Josh run--he's tall and lean, has an easy stride; but he's lost some confidence this year--the expression on his face looks more uncertain. I wonder about the strategy of switching kids around in situations like this. I'm pretty sure the coaches weren't trying to play mind games with these lads, but that doesn't mean that the runners' minds weren't being played, nonetheless.

The small rain down can rain.

Yesterday, I watched my son come in third in a 3-miler. It was a beauty of a finish--he pulled ahead of the fastest runner from his school, thus finishing first for his school for the first time ever.

We hypothesize that he may have given himself an edge by shearing off his enormous head of hair. Think dandelion. Think Big Head O' Fluff. Think Black Power 'fro, except on a scrawny white kid. He informed his dad that he needed a cut by Wednesday, the day of the meet. Yesterday, when he tore past me at the start, I didn't recognize him. Think pencil, think Q-tip.

In the middle of the race, it started to drizzle, as the weatherman said it would, and then it started to pour. I personally had dressed for the forecasted weather by wearing flimsy and inappropriate clothing, covered with a raincoat. At the end of it, the runners were all drenched and so was all their gear, both what they were wearing and what they'd stashed under the bleachers for protection. It was so wet that one kid actually slid in horizontally across the finish line.

It was a pretty great day considering I had to change my clothes when I got home. He finished the race in 17:17, not a bad time at all. He's running like he's got religion. He's running like he believes.

Five Dollars.

Last night, my husband came out of his study after making an examination of our finances. "Let's not write any more checks until we get paid, all right?" he said. "Unless you can think of anything we might need to write a check for."

Let's see, I thought:

We get paid on Thursday. Today I spent $2.24 at Wendy's (diet Coke, french fries) and $0.42 at Wild Oats (filtered water refill). I have about $5.16 in my wallet, give or take a few cents. Here are some things I think I might need to write checks for, beforeThursday:

1. limes
2. the New York Times
3. a brown corduroy skirt
4. a beaded belt
5. caramel colored trousers
6. snacks
7. miscellaneous other stuff

Obviously, I don't need to buy any of this stuff before Thursday, not even the limes. But I feel a slight sense of panic, so I go into stores to take a look at the stuff. Then, I don't buy it. I'm sure that there's a discourse of late capitalism that has inscribed me, but I don't really want to hear about it. This brief moment of panicky clarity has suggested to me that I may need a moratorium on stuff.

In a related development, I had the fleeting but recurring thought that I should probably curtail my late night sitcom watch, which is what I use to ease myself into sleep. It doesn't last for hours, but it starts pretty late. I'd like to be one of those yoga-doing, centered, non-material girls; instead, I'm a sitcom-watching, stuff-buying American. Here I am.

Luckily, we didn't have the check-writing moratorium before I bought a pound or two of purple plums this weekend at the farmer's market, which I turned into a delectable plum galette. What a lovely phrase--plum galette. It's fortunate that there is leftover plum galette to ease me through three more days (!) with only five dollars to my name.

XC.

Yesterday, I attended--as a spectator--the Murray Invitational Cross Country Meet. My youngest son, master of summer school and of last quarter intermediate algebra and therefore qualified to compete for the honor of his school, runs on the varsity cross country team.

Having been (a) a girl and (b) a snob when I was in high school, I have exactly zero athletic credits to my name (not counting the swimming, walking, and weight lifting I have done as an adult, and may do again if I can fight the demon sloth). So I have consistently found it amazing that all of my children have played/participated in all manner of sports, and have found one of my highest callings in life: to be a fan. For years, I was a soccer fan (matching up with the enormous number of hours and days and afternoons and evenings I spent watching my kids play it), and learned a great appreciation for the beautiful game. We've had flurries of basketball, more intensive of late. Track meets. And now, cross country.

A cross country meet might seem, at first blush, like a boring event, but your first blush would be sorely mistaken. Yesterday's meet, which had kids traveling from all over Utah to run, is a perfect example. They divided the runners, who probably totaled well over a thousand, into freshperson, junior varsity, and varsity divisions, with the women and the men running separately in each division. So six races, each a 5K. Translated, this means that you don't get to watch your kid run every part of his/her race; and you have to watch a ton of other kids run, mainly because with that many kids running, you can't exactly target your arrival to coincide just with the one race.

I sat with my son's dad, chatting away about teaching English, for the better part of two hours. At some point during that period, his wife also arrived. While one race was being run, the runners for the next race would be gathering at the starting line, stretching, jockeying for position. Meanwhile, you'd hear a roar come up from the crowd across the park, which meant that runners were approaching. You'd see them, several hundred yards away, and then they'd draw nearer. The noise where you were sitting would swell. As runners passed in front of you on the home stretch, you'd cheer for everyone running by. Once the big bunches of runners had finished, you'd cheer for the stragglers, especially for the stragglers.

By the time the varsity runners had lined up for the final two races, it felt like the excitement had intensified. The women finished their race, then the men's took place. Part of the reason the last races are more exciting is that the best runners have faster times, so there's less down time between the time they disappear from view and reappear for the finish. It was damned thrilling. It turns out, for me at least, that when you're trying to keep a look out for a particular kid, you can feel almost overwhelmed with sensation: the noise, the speed with which they approach and pass you, the feeling you have of not wanting to miss any of it.

My son ran his best time yet yesterday. He finished the race at 18 minutes, 0.9 seconds, which put his mile at 5:47. We all caught up to him as he was walking with his teammate Zach, a fine runner. For a long time, my son had run third for his team, behind Zach, but yesterday finished a few seconds ahead of him. He had the card the officials had given him, citing his time and placement overall (second for his school, 95th overall out of who knows how many runners). Zach wandered over to where the rest of the team was standing around. My son was clearly feeling great. After a couple of minutes, he decided to find the team, too, and figured he'd be able to catch a ride home with Zach. We all wandered off to our separate destinations in the beautiful but fading fall light. And if you think that's an overly aestheticized ending, too bad you weren't there, because that's exactly how it was.

Cleaning and Sneezing.

Readers of this blog who've been waiting breathlessly to find out if I ever cleaned my office, an announcement: The Office Is Clean. It's the kind of accomplishment that I feel inordinately proud of. No one needs to pat me on the back for this, as I have been congratulating myself for it all day long.

Moreover, my darling husband and I spent some of the evening (not all of it--we're not animals!) cleaning the basement in preparation for carpet cleaners who are coming tomorrow. I will spare you most of the details, but may I say just two things: (a) soda pop and (b) cat pee. Also (sorry, one more thing) (c) splinters of many woody items. I attribute responsibility for these egregious carpet horrors, respectively, to (a) teenage boys who should have been spilling their sody-pop in the club house aka shed, which was designated for such riotous living; (b) the cat; and (c) Bruiser. This may be his only character flaw, however.

We did find some good stuff, though. For instance, I found a pair of my underwear that I thought I had lost (static electricity, in a pile of clean towels, for heaven's sake, not whatever you were thinking); $15 (birthday money for my college daughter, so I'll send it to her as a little pick me up); and, along with the birthday money, a little bit of Christmas-era candy. Which I may have eaten, just a bit.

The sneezing comes of dog hair, probably, and certainly dust. When you're trying to pick up splintery items from the carpet, you're right down where the sneeze-instigators live. I'm sniffing in a most uncharming way. Lucky you you're not here to hear it.

But! all the sneezing will not be for nought (read the last two sentences for a bit of complimentary homonym action), as there will be clean carpet. It will be a companion to the sleek bamboo floor of the main floor. No longer will we have to descend into squalor.

Next: the sad, seventies den-style paneling in the basement comes down, baby. Who knows what terrors this project will reveal?

[As a footnote, I must add that I was very annoyed to have the POTUS make a speech tonight, as it postponed The O.C. for a half hour, and Without a Trace wasn't on at all. Does it make me shallow if these television shows are the pinnacle to which all in my week is directed? I feel all
. . . frustrated and incomplete.]

Peer Pressure.

Here's my Google poem, heavily edited, but hey, I've been to a workshop or two in my time:

Metonymic Bruiser Movie

for fans of West Coast beach party movies and 60's girl groups

Unreleased soundtrack for the movie:

A beautiful mixture
of wistful

BROWSING BRUISE-BRUISED
BRUISER, BRUISERS BRUISING BRUNCH,

METICULOUS METIER! METONYMIC METRES:
BRUCINE BRUIN BRUISER,

bruiter of "Flies Inside The Sun" (Metonymic) ...
My name, Bruiser:
che, elettrificato rock bello

... browpiece browsick Brucella brucia
bruckle brugh bruise .--

Things that are just a little harder than they look.

1. Working the Mac operating system (OS to you plebes).
2. Not making the window in which you're viewing footage completely disappear.
3. Pointing the camera at the subject you're trying to film, especially if said subject is fleet of foot and furry.

Dream Renewed.

The Bruiser Meditations is now a go-picture. Because of the great generosity of my son's friend David B., who sold me his old e-Mac because he wanted a newer, more powerful computer (newer, more powerful, younger, prettier . . . when does it stop?) at a bargain price, I now have the means to turn my dream into reality. Which is, precisely, a video essay about the paragon of doghood (dog-liness? dog-itude? doggiosity?), Bruiser.

When I say I have the means, what I really mean is I have Final Cut Pro and a DVD burner. As I have gathered from the abbreviated demo Dave gave me, I have plenty to learn. I expect to premiere this film (I'm aiming for a 3-minute piece) sometime in the next year. Or maybe the next eighteen months. Stay posted.

Rolling Stone Update.

1. In the most recent Rolling Stone, the one with the actual Rolling Stones on the cover ("it's their best recording in 20 years!" except I'm pretty sure they said that about their last recording), there's a little piece on Burning Man, which pretty much confirms what signifyingnothing had to say about it. Now I really will have to invent my own festival with francesca.

2. What's the best grave you've ever visited? There's a little piece, also in RS, about rock star graves. You know, Jim Morrison, the Strawberry Fields memorial for John Lennon, Johnny Ramone, Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes. Karl Marx's grave is in Highgate Cemetery, which, come to think of it, I personally didn't visit--my husband did. But I've seen a picture.

3. Here's a question they only ask you if you're a rock star: "In what bar have you written the most songs?" Or, at least, no one has ever asked me this question.

Cleaning my office, or not.

Today, I had a big fat span of time in which, with no meetings, an online class, and a commitment to be here in my office until 4 p.m., I could have finally brought myself to make order out of the whirlwind that is my office (see Hosea 8:7, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind," which shows why the Bible remains relevant to my life, as it explains how my office got messier over the summer when I wasn't even here!).

But I haven't cleaned it, though there's still time--a little. That's because middlebrow taught me how to make new lists in the sidebar of my blog. Learning is more important than cleaning (words to live by). Also, I had to eat my lunch, which was ratatouille, but sans the polenta I packed last night, because I grabbed the wrong plastic container. And I had to have various conversations. And add pages to my website.

All of which leaves me with an office that contains a metric ton (I'm not sure what that really is) of

• old student portfolios,
• books I will never read or use again,
• piles of paper to file,
• old witty things I've posted on my door that have certainly outlived their amusement quotient,
• binders with material from old conferences (sample: "Integrated Learning: The School-to-Work Connection," from 1996--held in Beaver Creek, CO, which was a damn beautiful site, though I'm pretty sure nothing came of this expensive conference to which my place of employment sent a gaggle of faculty and administrators),
• assorted 'zines from my old creative writing classes . . .

I'm tempted all the time to hire one of those professional organizers who could come and shame me into more order. The thing is, the bamboo floor (floor warming party still to come!) has imposed order at home, but there is no equivalent here. Maybe that's what we need--a big renovation-style project in the office, one that will create an order-imperative. So far, even having students come into this chaos has not persuaded me that if I don't clean soon, I'll be permanently ashamed.

Labors.

In honor of Labor Day, I'm listing today's work, which included:

1. Shopping for a teapot and a flash drive.
2. Folding a mountain of nearly, but not exactly, identical white athletic socks.
3. Packing my son up to go live with his dad.
4. Taking a grief nap.
5. Holding down the TV fan section for James Blake in the U.S. Open.
6. Finishing a lecture on voice for my fiction-writing class.
7. Reading and responding to a mountain of brief student exercises for the fiction-writing class.
8. Digesting a cheese enchilada.
9. Sorting through the archaeological dig that is our videotape collection.
10. Taking Bruiser to the dog park.
11. Preventing any simulated copulation action on Bruiser's part at the dog park.
12. Engaging in speculation about probability of future suburban blight at local retail/mixed-use development (location of cheese enchilada ingestion).
13. Contemplating the removal of a trace of enchilada sauce from a white tank top.

The idea of Burning Man.

Happy Birthday to me, as of a couple of days ago. I'm 48 now, and I'm at peace with that. No, really.

I ran into a former student who said he thought he would register for school this semester, but that he was going to Burning Man, and that would mean he'd miss the first week of school. I advised him (oh, Advisor Me!) to contact his professor ahead of time, and he'd probably be okay. And he probably will be.

I have a little fantasy about Burning Man, which I think would probably be a nightmare of grit and heat and not enough water for it to really be an enjoyable experience. But I retain a space for it every August in my cosmic year. I know a few people who've been there, and the little glimpses of it I've gathered I use to shore up my vision of it.

I have this theory that there's a holographic self that hovers and wavers on the border of the self we bring to all our responsibilities, relationships, and meetings. That self shimmers and never ages and dares to do all sorts of things. My sheer and dangerous self would be at Burning Man, or at the Burning Man of my mind, and would not be afraid of a little nudity. She would also live in Alaska, in the bush, without fear and without a specified end-date for the adventure. She would never worry about younger people and their beauty, because she is beautiful herself, just as she is. She knows that.

I like my life best when I feel the wild girl nearer.

Hey, shut up.

This weekend, one of the last if not the last weekend of summer, my son remembered that he had to read a book for Honors English, and it had to be read before the term began, and he had to write an 800-word essay about it. We were in Idaho, where there are no bookstores (just kidding! but no bookstores within easy reach), so my husband, who happened to be driving up with my daughter and her husband a few hours from this belated realization, picked up a copy in Salt Lake.

The novel was The Chosen, by Chaim Potok in case you didn't know, a book I read when I was in my early college years. My husband started reading it on the way up and finished it on the way home (I'll let you guess how much my son "read," or perhaps you haven't met Spark Notes?). Anyway, between my husband's reading, and talking about it with him, which revived my own memory of the novel, and the conversation I had with my son as he was preparing to write his essay (oh, it can be done, and done well! I read the essay this morning--stellar performance), I have mulled over this question: what is the value of parental silence in raising children?

If you haven't read the novel, it's a father and son novel, with one son being raised by a radically orthodox Jewish father, the other being raised by an observant but less orthodox Jewish father. The two boys are friends. Anyway, the orthodox father, who is a rabbi, chooses to raise his son in silence, which means that he doesn't speak to the boy except when they are studying the Torah. He explains at the end of the novel that he knew his son had a brilliant mind but a heart and soul not capable of understanding suffering, and so, by raising the boy without conversation, he produces this suffering, which tempers the boy and makes him a more compassionate man.

Okay, on the face of it, this seems nuts and extreme. However, I found myself contemplating how much I have needed to learn to shut up as a parent. It's probably more along the pragmatic, "pick your battles," kind of silence, but I have learned (sometimes--other times, I'm sure I natter and nag on, accompanied by loud eye-rolling on the part of the relevant teen) to just be with the kid without talking. If the kid will let you be near, sometimes being near without saying much, or anything, is the best thing you can do.

For a variety of reasons, my son and I drove to Idaho alone, with the others coming a day later. We decided to pick several new CDs we wanted to hear and listen to them on the way up. It wasn't exactly silence, but the first disc on the Foo Fighter's In Your Honor gave us a lot to talk about, even though we barely said a word.

Desert Islands.

If you were on a desert island, what one [book] [movie] [food] [CD] [fingernail polish] [not that last one] would you take with you? This dinner table game, or some version thereof, seems endlessly amusing to my family, and even more amusing if you play it with a shifting cast of family characters. My brother and his family were here briefly this weekend, and after hearing my son sing a role in The Gondoliers (silly opera, magnificent son!), we sat around a big table at a Chinese restaurant and discussed this matter.

It does not pay to get philosophical with this game, I found, at least not with this group. My daughter, the pistol, basically disallowed all my choices. My desert island music? Keith Jarrett's recording of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, a work and a performance that are endlessly beautiful and interesting. Desert island movie? I said Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, mainly because I think that its combination of inventive narrative structure and emotional directness would be something to contemplate for a long time. The spunky daughter argued that these were not, in fact, my favorites. And she's probably right--but maybe your favorites aren't what you want on a desert island, after all. Maybe what you want is something that your soul could rise to. Something that would, Old Testament style, give you a little lick of the refiner's fire. Are you really going to elect to listen to pop music, however great the pop music, on the desert island, whence you might never be rescued?

As you can see, my desert island is worlds away from my daughter's. So screw me--I can't even visit her island, as with my sad, overly philosophical choices, I would have "nothing to offer" her.

As for food, I wanted to say the green papaya salad at Thai Delight, but because I knew she would disallow this as well, I said pasta. With shrimp, garlic, and parmesan, which would be pretty good, too.

Ephemera.

It's the end of the summer, and the reason I know this is that I spent the day at work, getting ready--fixing my website, working on syllabi, creating a new teaching blog, thinking about all the things I haven't done that I thought I would have done.

In this self-assessment mode, I note for the record that I spend a shocking amount of time reading material that by its very definition passes away quickly. Newspapers, magazines. (I save lots of it, too, but that's another syndrome.) Also television, which is another mode of consumption, equally ephemeral (though I tend to re-view things, the video version of saving clippings and articles, probably.)

As a result of buying a DVD set (Invader Zim, second season, v. funny, for my son) at Media Play, we became proud subscribers of both Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly for some odd period of time--five months, maybe? Talk about a waste of paper, both of them. If you added together all the interesting, worthwhile articles in both publications for the subscription period, you'd probably have one fat issue--call it The Best of Entertainment Illustrated. Yet faithfully, weekly, I would read EW (actually, SI is only readable for me during b-ball season).

My daughter left yesterday to go up to college. [wistful silence.] As she was packing up, an old issue of EW surfaced, one with the crazy, post-Oprah couch-jumping Tom Cruise on it. I found myself reading it, thinking that perhaps I hadn't--but I had, and that's just how ephemeral it is. It treads so lightly on the brain that I couldn't even remember having encountered it--yet I allowed myself to spend my time on it. Twice.

In contrast, when my husband and I were in Idaho a couple of weeks ago, I finally finished Mao II and read a whole nother novel, My Russian, by Diedre McNamer. I also read in another book, Arts of Living, by Kurt Spellmeyer. I felt myself sinking into another kind of thinking. It's not like I didn't know this would happen--I hoped it would--but I find myself in my regular life anxiously living in the shallows and at the ready, like I'm waiting for a call that I'd better not miss.

Gender Difference Synchronicity.

In a curious coincidence, tonight I saw The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants with two of my daughters and one of their friends, and, at a separate locale, my youngest son and his pals also went.

It's a girl movie, okay, and there were flaws, some flaws, sure. But we all got a good cry out of it and felt affirmed in our female bonds.

So, my son trips in the house with his friend, full of hijinks and boy-wit at 1:15 a.m. I'm the kind of mom that can't sleep till the kids are home, if they're supposed to come home, so I'm making good use of my time by playing computer Free Cell. Jeez. Anyhow, they decided to see The Sisterhood instead of The Longest Yard, piece of garbage that that film is, because they will amuse themselves by making fun of the girl movie.

Say what you will about this practice of satiric movie watching. Here's what he had to say about the film:

"They're all, like, 'I can't believe these pants fit all of us! What should we do with the pants?' Uh, I don't know--buy them?"

or "So they're all making the rules, and that one girl said, 'No one else can unzip the pants,' and I turned to Dustin and said, 'Why?'"

and "I liked it! We should buy it, but we should wait for the special limited edition that comes with a pair of pants."

Dear readers, I am observing my son turn into a guy.

(By the way, I expect none of the congratulatory comments I read in other blogs about how I'm raising my kid right. I see my job here as keeping it real. Judge me if you must.)

The Saddest Music in the World.

Make that the oddest movie in the world, the one directed by that Guy Maddin from Canada. The title does, however, implicitly pose the question: what is the saddest music in the world?

I nominate Elliott Smith's eponymous album, the one with "Needle in the Hay" on it; Joni Mitchell, For the Roses; Jackson Browne, Late for the Sky. Also Tonight's the Night, by Neil Young; "Hallelujah," written by Leonard Cohen but sung by Jeff Buckley; "Little Wing," sad in all iterations; Rickie Lee Jones, Pirates and "Last Chance Texaco" (off her first album); Annie Lennox, "The Gift," "Two Grey Rooms" by Joni M.; Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here; "Human Nature," but only (so far) as sung by M. Jackson (may he RIP); "Don't Talk," the Beach Boys; Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones.

Does the sadness inhere in the music itself, or is it because of the sad stories we attach to the music? For instance, I find all Nirvana heartbreaking (a form of soft-headedness my son-in-law ruthlessly condemns). I'm pretty sure, however, that I'd find "Hallelujah" devastating even if Jeff Buckley hadn't fallen into the river.

I remember lying on my bed as a teenager listening to sad music just for the pleasure of feeling sad. Long before Oliver Stone used it in Platoon, I used to listen to an old monaural recording that once belonged to my dad of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," for its waves of emotion, like an unstoppable sob.

Seminal.

I use the term advisedly, as a feminist, but if you haven't listened to Blonde on Blonde recently, you better.

Car Music.

When you've never before had a car with a CD player in it, and you're about to hit the road in a rented SUVehicle because they upgraded you without even asking if you wanted an upgrade, here are 20 CDs you might put in your brand new CD wallet (since your past CD wallets have been coopted, along with many of your CDs, by your children):

Magnetic Fields, i
Bright Eyes, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
Nick Drake, Made to Love Magic
Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed
Richard Thompson, rumor and sigh
Sting, Ten Summoner's Tales
James Taylor, Flag
Elliott Smith, [eponymous]
The Strokes, Is This It
Carly Simon, Hotcakes
Radiohead, OK Computer
Me'Shell NdegeOcello, Plantation Lullabies
Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light
Led Zeppelin, [symbols]
Keren Ann, Not Going Anywhere
Nellie McKay, Get Away From Me
Elton John, Honky Chateau
Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
The Who, Who's Next
Jackson Browne, Late for the Sky

Random.

1. Summer School Update. My son finished his quarter-credit of Intermediate Algebra just fine. The mystery of it all: what makes math in summer school so much more do-able? Superior instructional design? More attractive, portable classroom accomodations? No formal instruction--just packets and your questions answered upon request? Fear that you won't be eligible to run cross country?

2. Another Job I Would Like To Have, and Might Be Qualified For. Personal chef.

3. Rental Car Upgrade. Once, when I was in Georgia visiting my kids who were living with their dad for a few months, I got a midnight upgrade from a mid-size to a convertible. It ended up as the equivalent of Disneyland in car form. The following story isn't quite as good as the convertible: as a result of the insane car mishaps we have undergone as a family, we decided to rent an economy car for the weeks prior to my daughter heading off to college (where she will have no car). So I got online, found a reasonably good deal, stopped off at the car rental counter at the airport when I got back from my reunion, signed the contract, and headed off to the lot. I handed over the paperwork, the woman checked it, handed me a key and said, "It's in slot 28." But there was an SUVehicle in slot 28--a Jeep Laredo, to be exact. I marched right back in and said, "But I rented an economy car!" She checked my paperwork again and said, "Oh yes, she was able to give you the upgrade!" As if I had requested an upgrade, and as if I wanted to drive an SUVehicle. Which is precisely what I'm doing, and I admit it's kind of cool. My son, as I was driving him to his last day of summer school, said, "So Mom, do you feel in charge when you're driving this car?" And I admit, I kind of do. I also realize that every second I'm in it, I feel like explaining to everyone--to people I don't know--that this isn't my car, it's just a rental, they upgraded it without asking me, no way in the world would I buy this car. On August 21, back to the rental people it goes, and I will return to driving the early nineties Chevy we bought after one of the wrecks, and which my daughter is driving now. I will be driving this car, that is, if she doesn't wreck it before she goes to college. Pray for us all.

4. Sublimely Beautiful Bamboo Floor. Wait for your invitation to the floor-warming in a few weeks.

5. The Bacon Exception. I've been a vegetarian, with some lapses, for most of my adult life. I also make exceptions. I eat some fish from time to time, and I'm not a vegan, though I try to take great care with any animal products I buy/eat. There are all kinds of rules to govern this consumption: organic dairy only, eggs with all the qualifiers (free-range, organic-fed, etc.). Only wild salmon from a vendor I trust, and then only in season. Despite all of this, I have never lost my taste--or, probably more precisely, my nose--for meat. At the farmer's market, on the corner of the square, someone grills meat for carne asada tacos. Occasionally, at Christmas, for instance, I will make some grand meaty dish, and I usually have a taste. The most insidious smell of all, however, is bacon. There are lots of reasons not to eat pork, which I won't detail here. But bacon smells sublime. Occasionally, therefore, I make a bacon exception. In San Francisco, for instance, I ate at a French bistro where I had the most wonderful salmon in a red wine reduction, which also included lardons of bacon. As the waiter said, "that sauce [pronounced sose] is delicious [pronounce each syllable separately, French-style]." And he was right. Today, in Wild Oats, at the meat counter, they had slices of a superb bacon fried up, rolled up, speared with toothpicks, under the heat lamp. I made the bacon exception today. Twice.

It's All Happening.

So, today I learned a new use for a pry bar (old uses: to remove the hubcap when you're changing a tire; to use as a lever to move something heavy, like a rock; to hit someone over the head--saw this last one in a movie): you can remove the staples that once attached carpet padding to the subfloor in a jiffy. That's if you put your back into it, so to speak. After a while, I was back with my flat-head screwdriver and slipjoint pliers. Staple by staple. That's because the bamboo floor is, as we speak, being installed.

Last night, my husband, son and I removed about a half-ton of old carpet and padding, baseboard, tackless carpet strips, old dirt, and the unspeakable detritus of being. It was a project that lasted into the wee hours. I expected this project to involve some soul searching, and it did: we have a lot of stuff. To speak more precisely, I have a lot of stuff. Why so much stuff? is the basic form my soul searching took. I've given quite a bit away, and there's still a lot, and the always beckoning figure of more, and more desireable, stuff. I already know something about why--I have, after all, had some therapy--but knowing why doesn't discharge that whole circuit of desire. Mattea Harvey wrote a book of poems called Sad Little Breathing Machine, and I think my book should be Sad Little Wanting Machine.

Even so, the floor going down is a thing of beauty. The floor guy Mike and his son Alex are working upstairs--all the upstairs rooms are in play, floor installation-wise, so I'm holed up here in the basement with Bruiser and my son, who are both engaged in furious napping--and it's actually a pleasure to see people who know what they're doing when they do that thing. Moreover, all the rooms are empty of most of their stuff, so the floor actually has become the embodiment of a cleaner, more contemplative, less stuff-involved life. We've all agreed that we're not putting everything back just as it was--everything is up for grabs. I tried to be ruthless as I was moving things. I'm a scavenger, and love to pick things up when I'm walking--some beautiful large-ish twigs from some sort of willow-ish tree that twist in a poetic way; a large dried sunflower stem with the head of the flower intact. I tried to throw away the branches, nothing doing. Too poetic. The sunflower head, I thought I could part with. My husband, however, wanted to save it, even when I said I was trying to be ruthless. "You can be too ruthless, I think," he said. I'm pretty sure this is an emblem of why we found one another.

I am holding on to the hope that the new floor will create a new motive force, arguing by its sheer elegant plainness for simplicity.

My Own Personal Film Festival.

Yesterday, when I got home from work meetings (in the summer! it's barbaric!), my son and his friends were having a superhero film festival. It started with X Men, continued to X Men 2, then I think pretty much stopped there, as they ran out of steam. (We went, my son, his friend, my daughter and me, last night to see Sky High, which was fun--my son's friend noted, however, that it couldn't be a truly great superhero movie, as no one was likely to die in it.)

I've always been taken by the idea of hosting a film festival, if only for an audience of myself. Once I hosted a birthday party for myself in which I made dinner for my friends, then had a short program of Diner and My Dinner With Andre. It's a marker of the dissatisfactions of my life at that point that hardly anyone could appreciate the wit of this conceit. I also thought, back in the day of Gallipoli and Mad Max and an underappreciated gem Mrs. Soffel, that I'd like to have a Mel Gibson film festival, an idea that seems quite a bit less appealing these days. Quentin Tarantino puts together a film festival in Austin, I think it is, every summer--usually the B-movies he treasures so much.

If I were putting on a film festival today, what would it be? I think it would be the Festival of the Melancholy Comedy, perhaps my favorite film genre (if it's not a genre, it should be). Or a Festival of Romantic Comedies (instances of really good ones are rare). Here are some films that should belong on some film festival program of my own devising: Songwriter (written by Alan Rudolph), Choose Me (an Alan Rudolph gem), Something Wild (Jonathan Demme), Lost in Translation, The Secret Lives of Dentists (hmm, an Alan Rudolph theme emerging--perhaps its own film festival?), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I [heart] Huckabees, Being Julia, Mr. 3000. Also, how about a great Sports Movies festival?

Letter from California.

I'm back from a trip that lasted, basically, 32 hours. It was my high school reunion, thirty years.

LAX is a horrible airport. It has all the detractions of LA and none of the city's virtues, which is to say, all heat, all smog, all sprawl, whereas no beach, no cooling morning and evening fog, no surf and no nostalgia. In the petri dish of the Hertz Rental Car lobby (note to self: is it worth it to become a Gold Member?), anger was a-brewin'--there was a long line, about forty-five minutes' worth. When we got to our our agent, however, he was nothing if not helpful, charming, and efficient, including an upgrade when the keys to our economy car were not immediately forthcoming. Hello, Taurus!

However, I was triumphant in navigating from the airport to Redondo Beach. The directions I printed out from the handy Hertz interactive computer said I needed to get on two different freeways, but really, it's just Sepulveda Blvd., which turns into Pacific Coast Hwy., which turns into all the streets that lead to the ocean.

The reunion hotel was just across a skinny little street from our hotel, so we had that going for us, which was good. The 20 year reunion was at the very same place, which is odd, I think, since I didn't go to high school in Redondo Beach. We did have proximity going for us--I went to Rolling Hills High School (we are the Titans, the mighty mighty Titans), on Palos Verdes Peninsula, the hill to the south of Redondo Beach.

As predictable, there were a lot of the usual suspects peopling the reunion--former athletes, homecoming royalty . . .--but that wasn't the whole story. A couple of women (hi there to Debra Millar and Kathy Lewinson! --not their married names, sorry--) had the kindness to say hello to me, and we made one another's acquaintance essentially for the first time, it felt like. We ended up sharing a table for our sorrowfully not wonderful dinner (note to self: the vegetarian meal is almost always abhorrent, but then so was the chicken, according to my table mates). We all agreed at the conclusion of the event that meeting one another again was a real highlight for all of us. Also, Eddie Skinner, with whom I sang in the Madrigals, was there, this time with his lovely wife Linda, bearing pictures of a charming young son. Todd Bishop also sat at our table, he of a great, infectious laugh, on his way with his partner Troy across the country in an RV with four dogs. Finally, I did have the great satisfaction of seeing James Hitt, high school crush (one of the people I hoped to see at the last reunion, though I was denied), and having a very interesting conversation. Basically, I realized that in some ways I'm still exactly the person I was in high school--a little intense, and with a little more knowledge about some stuff.

Which leads me, then, to today, which we spent driving around Palos Verdes. I moved there right before 9th grade, from Tucson, where I'd gone to half of 6th grade and both years of junior high. I was utterly clueless about a SoCal high school. For the first day, I actually had a school dress, as in a dress you buy for the first day of school. It had a sailor collar. I had knee socks. Basically, I was dressed like Sandra Dee for my first day at Sodom and Gomorrah High. I'm pretty sure I'm not over the shock of that, lo these many years hence.

Last year, I traveled with my best friend--our Reunion Tour--to the area. I realized that, not having grown up there, I lacked the kind of memories and connections to that place that she had. She told me that she and her brother had visited the Malaga Cove Library, and they could still go straight to the books they rememebered checking out as children. That library, for me, would exist on an Air Force Base in Japan--if it's even still there.

What this means, really, is that the location of all my rawest memories--the ones of when you felt like you would break open with feeling and longing and urge, the ones that form your sense of who you are in the world--is a place that feels profoundly strange to me. My husband and I drove around Palos Verdes today, and although it's crowded with affluent people, there's still a wildness to the landscape that still calls to me. But a road I thought certainly led to a house my parents once lived in dead-ended. There were gated neighborhoods I know I've never seen. Lunada Bay Elementary School--who do I know that went there?--had some sort of bells that pealed at noon over the empty schoolyard.

I wish I knew this place better. I realized that I want to know its history, so we bought a book with a sort of florid style that starts with Don somebody in the 1700s, then moves directly to the Sepulveda family. It doesn't, however, tell me what I want to know: where did the field go where Brent Robinson kissed me? How about that beautiful ravine--where is that? And the high school my best friend attended--where is that now?

Cheers to this beautiful and alien place from my past, for which I long and to which I do not, and will never, belong.

By Hand.

There are plenty of things that I'd rather do by hand, even if there exists a more efficient and even more efficacious tool or technology: mixing and kneading bread, making cookie dough, chopping vegetables. I used to make butter cakes by hand, too, but now I use a hand mixer. James Beard says that in 19th century America, bakers had to have a strong arm, as they would often make large cakes, or even more than one at a time. Either I used to have a stronger arm, or else I just got tired of beating a cake for 500 strokes, or however many it was. Still, it's nice to know how. A few years ago, I got a decent chef's knife, and still find great pleasure in sharpening it and preparing all sorts of vegetables with it.

I also have occasionally made myself an item of clothing by hand--a couple of skirts, for instance. There was something good about the enterprise--very slow, meditative, I guess.

I'm noting this fact because I just bought myself a swell new kitchen tool--a mandoline. For those of you who don't know, it's basically an implement to slice vegetables and fruits. It has a fold-out leg, but the operating part of it slants. The blade is very sharp, and you can also insert a little julienne tool. You use it to cut carrots or potatoes or whatever into even, fine slices, matchsticks, or shreds. The day I got it, I immediately took just one small potato--a Yukon gold, in case you're wondering--cut it into even and beautiful circles, thin slices, and fried them in small batches. Voila! potato chips, the best possible potato chips. I love my knife, but there's no way it could match the mechanically-assisted quality of my mandoline-engineered potato chips.

My kitchen has entered a new phase in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Jobs I would like to have, and might possibly be qualified for.

1. French baker. (preferably in France)
2. Senior policy analyst. (also preferably in France)
3. Supreme Court Justice. (why, oh why didn't Bush nominate me?)

I would like to know what my readership would rather be doing than the jobs they are doing now (preferably in France).

The 'Burbs.

I grew up, until the 6th grade, on Air Force bases. Perhaps that fact explains another: that I like the suburbs. I like a little bit of lawn, and I like a suburban street in the summer time. I remember a summer when we used to get together with our across-the-street neighbors, sit on their lawn and watch TV. I don't even remember what we watched, but the grass was cool, the air got cooler as the evening wore on, and somehow TV seemed mesmerizingly entertaining because we watched it outside. At that house, when we moved in, the whole subdivision was new--it was west of Airport #2, so close to the west side of the valley that the Oquirrhs seemed, like, your backyard. We planted our trees--cherry trees, peach trees, a Lombardy poplar (known derisively as a trash tree because it grows so quickly) that was in short order the tallest tree in the whole neighborhood. We laid our own sod. It took a couple of years to lay it in the back yard, that's how poor we were. Our Vietnamese neighbors, who made the most awesome egg rolls (they'd deliver a plateful, hot, at Christmas and Thanksgiving, like other people brought cookies), used to borrow our poplar's shade to sit in during their huge family get-togethers.

I can get a little exercised by my very hip peers (maybe I'm not their peers, because I don't live downtown?) who deride the burbs. I hear the complaints, okay, I know that the word "suburb" connotes homogeneity (in architecture, in lifestyle, in politics . . .). And it's not like a tract-style ranch house is exactly inspiring, in the way that an early twentieth-century cottage is. All I'm saying is, don't stereotype my 'hood, man. You don't know me and you don't know my neighbors. Don't lay your hegemonic superior urban fetishization on me. I'll take my cool, late-night backyard with its over-planted flowerbeds, the stripmall around the corner and the school just a couple of blocks away, and the Mormon churches popping up at the rate of one every half-block. I'll take it, because I live here, and I like it.

Dog Park/Dog Days.

Aren't the dog days supposed to come later in the summer? I remember when I realized that even just a few degrees of heat--say, from 96 to 100--could make a huge difference. One hundred degrees makes you want to lie down wearing few, loose clothes, with a book and a glass of iced something, and it's pretty much a slow race to see if you'll finish the drink before the glass sweats all the way down to the bedside table.

That's me, anyway. I had some cousins whose dad was in the Foreign Service. They lived in many, many hot, sweaty places--Venezuela, Panama, the Philippines--and swore that we all whined way too much about the heat. "Take a nap," they urged. "Then stay up late, when it's cool!" This ingenious manana-style system did not accomplish one of my major objectives, that of warding off my inevitable post-lunch-nap headache, which follows hard on the heels of the siesta hour (or dos).

Also, in the days before AC (dark, dark days), I used to have terrible summer allergies. You'd have to keep the windows open to have air circulating, but then the madness began: dust, chaff, pollen. The horror. I distinctly remember lying with wet washcloths over my entire face. This when I had young children who only wanted to play all day long.

Bruiser, it turns out, feels the heat, too. Too bad he can't lie around in loose clothing and drink iced drinks. He does, however, take his ease under the direct flow of the swamp-cooled air. Occasionally he'll take a dip into the heat for approximately three and a half minutes, then bursts in the door to have another helping of cool.

When it's this hot, people tend to bring their dogs to the dog park later in the evening. There's a real influx around 8:30 p.m. or so. When we're within a couple of blocks of the park, Bruiser loses his mind, whining and crying in the back of the car. If I were the kind of person who translated dog noises into human speech, I'd say he's saying, "You guys, if you don't let me out when we get to the dog park, that would be SO UNFAIR!" (Actually, we took him to the park last Tuesday, only to realize when we got there that it was closed on Tuesdays for routine maintenance. It was Bruiser's worst nightmare realized, as my friend J says.) So we get to the park, go in through the double gates, and he runs like crazy. Meanwhile, we circumambulate the park, admiring all the dogs, little and big, while congratulating ourselves on having the best, handsomest, most noble dog. The dog with the best character. The most poetic dog. The smartest dog, the one who lights up a room, the dog who has the most to offer, the dog who looks beautiful when he runs in the cooling, darkening day.

Bruiser, Pillow Shredder.

Things dogs do that humans don't generally even consider doing:

1. Tear throw pillows up and shred their stuffing.
2. Eat an entire bowl of brioche dough.
3. Open a sixteen-year-old boy's backpack with their teeth.
4. Chew open a half-full bottle of flavored water, then lick the spillage from the carpet.
5. Gnaw old basketball shoes into a fine julienne.

High School Imaginary.

I'm going to my 30th high school reunion, don't ask me why. I was talking to my brother last night, who did not go to his 20th (I did); he said, "You had more fun in high school than I did," hypothesizing about why I would spend $200 on a plane ticket (my brother had an extra Southwest fare that they couldn't use before it expired, so donated it to the cause--otherwise it would be $400, since my husband has graciously agreed to accompany me), $150 on a hotel room, and $86 per ticket (including a memory book), in order to go.

It's true, I did have some good times in high school. I was in a singing group, and that was good. I sang all the time back then. I was a pretty good girl, though; when I went back to the area last summer with my best friend MS, she pointed out places in one little beach town where she'd gone to a party, whereas I have absolutely no sweet memories of youthful wild times. None. It's possible I might harbor a few regrets over this fact.

The thing is, when I went to my 20th, I saw only a handful of people I wanted to see: a friend who went to Stanford on whom I had a half-crush for awhile, a couple of people I used to sing with, a guy who's a doctor now (also had a half-crush on him), my friend Joe who's married to Catherine and lives in France. One girl had become a writer for TV--there was a Tony Danza sitcom that lasted just a little while. The big star of all the plays in HS looked very Vegas. A guy who'd been sort of a stoner-surfer combo looked pretty business-y. Sure, there's some interest in seeing what I just described. But where was the one I loved, the one who made me a dulcimer, with whom I had a love affair that ended in sorrow? Where was the boy I wanted to ask to the dance and who wrote the passionate comment in my yearbook?

There's a certain small pathos to it, I guess.

Anyhow, maybe the dulcimer-maker will be there this time. But in any case I'll be there with my husband, staying near the ocean; the morning after, we can take a little tour of the beautiful, wild place where I lived when I was young.

Summer School.

I spent half the morning at the alternative high school in our local district, in order to get my son registered for a quarter credit of Intermediate Algebra, which he failed last term and which he must make up in order to be eligible to run cross country in the fall. As I feebly joked to the guy holding the class cards (nothing, and I mean nothing, is digital in the registering for summer school project--you fill out your papers with a pencil, and apparently one finds out only through the ear-to-mouth process of lore-swapping that you should show up at 6:30 a.m. to be eligible to get in at 8 a.m., when the registration is supposed to start, though when I arrived at 7:45, they had been registering people for a half-hour!), "I actually passed Intermediate Algebra." He gave me a charity laugh--but nicely--and gave me the card. So my youngest son will be attending Intermediate Algebra for three weeks starting next Monday.

He's hoping to keep this fact a secret from everyone except me and the dog, I think. It's a testimonial to my fantastic mothering that this is only the second time a child of mine has had to attend summer school (either that, or it's a testimonial to something else--the lovable yet wrath-of-god-inspiring presence of a high school teacher dad, maybe?). Anyhow, he's hoping that he can make up the credit and run this fall without anyone giving him grief. And I, I suppose, am enabling this grand attempt at secrecy.

It was quite an assortment of kids there this a.m. registering for these make-up classes. Some moms and dads, but clearly a group of kids for whom making up courses is just a part of the great adventure we call high school. There's also the path of packets--the way you can make up courses during the school year, but you have to have a teacher around to complete them. Hence summer school. Anyhow, there were some kids who were clearly, like my son, needing to make up courses in order to make the eligibility requirement; a small but impeccable group of tight-pants-wearing, mohawked punks; many girls in their pajama pants; and plenty of people commenting on the whole deal on their cell phones.

It took me nearly three hours to actually register. Most of that was waiting. I found some shoes to buy at Target, planned a course for the fall, made a to-do list for the rest of the day, and wrote notes for two new poems, one of which will be called "Summer School." Check back here for a draft one of these days.

F***ing Productivity and the Productive Producers Who Produce It.

Short version: aka, not me, not this summer.

On the other hand, right now my kids are all either living in Scotland (hi, Amelia, Miriam, and Raymond!) or in California camping on the beach with their dad and an assortment of family and friends. That means it's me, my husband, and the dog. Some would say this is time handed to me as if a gift from the heavens, like manna in times of famine or rain in time of drought, so that I can write. Others, the slacker angels, would say it's time to eat tapas at Martine and see Cinderella Man and assorted independent films, to watch semi-competent romantic comedies on DVD, to do the NYTimes Sunday Magazine crossword puzzle while drinking diet Coke, and fall asleep in the middle of it. Time to make and drink iced tea by the quart. Time to take Bruiser to the dog park and admire his doggy character as he runs, nay, prances with the other dogs. Time to pick up merchandise, consider its virtues, consider whether I'm willing to stand in line for the time it'll take to pay for it, and put it back. Time to bake a cherry pie.

In other words, I haven't written much since Friday afternoon.

However, the kids'll be gone till next weekend, so I may manage to marshal my inner resources, gird up my loins, fresh courage take, and do some writing in the meantime.

Idaho.

I just got back from a trip through the intermountain west. To start, my son was doing a whole Mormon thing with his church youth group, trekking over the Mormon trail in Wyoming. This trek was planned at the exact same time as our family deal, which occurs every summer in Idaho, Island Park, where my father and grandfather built a cabin in the late 1940s. The unfortunate overlap of treks meant that my husband and I drove first to scenic Rock Springs, where we stayed overnight in a Motel 8, if you can call it overnight, since we slept approximately five hours, this so that we could arise and drive to Farson, WY (home of the Big Cone--ice cream, I'm presuming, from the illustration painted on the Farson Mercantile), then to Lander, WY, then just shy of the Sweetwater Ranger Station, to the Hudson-Atlantic City Road, a dirt road which we traversed for a dozen miles, to the Sage Creek Campground (no creek in sight, but a lot of dirty kids dressed in pioneer garb), in order to pick up my son by 8:15 or so in the morning.

That accomplished, we headed back through Lander in the direction of Jackson, which meant that we drove exhausted through some of the most beautiful country I recall ever driving through exhausted. For instance, the Tetons, right close up, and the Wind Rivers (best as I can tell). All told, however, where getting to Island Park usually is a 300 mile or so trip, we travelled around 600 miles. The plus side: a witty, gangly sixteen year old was a part of this vacation. There were ten of us--my grown son and his wife, me, my husband, daughter, and teenage son; my aunt and her two sons and a girlfriend.

Wildlife [aside from above-listed personnel]: elk, countless ground squirrels, etc., pelicans, trumpeter swans, moose, and a blue bird that I believe might be a pinion jay (after consultation with the bird book). Many rounds of card games played at high speed and volume. A hike around Silver Lake in Harriman State Park, including a quarter mile or so through what seemed clearly to be a freshly turned horse sign/soil mix. I cooked up a storm. It took me about five tries to get through articles in the New Yorker, but hey! I did read a lot of cutting-edge fashion advice, so there's that.

Disturbance in the Force.

I know I'm way behind, but I actually thought the new Star Wars was good, and really good in some passages. The fight between Windu and Palpatin was thrilling and emotional, and that showdown between Obi-wan Kenobi and Anakin was actually heartbreaking, I thought. I know I'm an easy cry, but seriously, I felt unexpectedly kind of undone by that scene.

Reasons why I shouldn't feel this way: George Lucas is a terrible, terrible writer; there's plenty of clunky staging; those crazy dissolves; there's agonistic music playing all through the tragic scenes, telling you the scenes are tragic; apparently they gave Padme a gradual lobotomy. Still.

I find myself wanting to watch the whole series (somebody stop me) just to follow its argument. I probably won't, but I have now reconstructed my earlier appraisal of Episode 2, and its whole thing about democracy and empire. I think now that this latest film is also offering a critique, if nascent, of such cabal-like organizations as the Jedi Council, the failure of which is total here.

Okay, I'll say no more, as I'm pretty sure this topic is exhausted for lots of people. But I'm on record. I'd rather see this one, flaws and all, than any of episodes 4, 5, and 6.

Go to sleep beat, wake up still beat (beater?).

Just taking my pulse this a.m. I have already been to the Driver License division for a points judgement (not mine, my daughter's--see earlier car accident post). She is on probation, which means that she has one year from the accident in which she must have no moving violation. Why does this make me feel jumpy?

The computer at home--since I'm operating away from home at the moment, perhaps the computer will not hear me when I say it is a sorry git of an information technology delivery device--is frozen. None of our home remedies--ctrl/alt/del, cursing, pushing the on-off button for longer and more vigorous periods of time--work. Sledgehammer, anyone?

I'm about to see Star Wars, which I haven't yet seen because my kids went with other, cooler people, and my husband, with eminent good taste and good sense, doesn't really care to see it. So said accident-prone, darling daughter will be my companion.

Hope your day feels a little less errand-y, frustrate-y, doldrum-y. Hope I feel some Aristotelian satisfaction in watching Anakin turn into pure evil.

Eighties Synchronicity.

I drove with my daughter up to Logan today for a freshman orientation. Since it was her day (with the exception of five minutes, when I scoured the Utah State University Bookstore for a kind of binder with a spring clip that all the cool poets use for readings, to no avail), I let her choose the driving music from her folio of CDs, which happened to include my very own copy of The Immaculate Collection (Madonna, duh). She was kind enough to let me choose the playlist, which included my nomination for one great dance song, "Into the Groove." In the middle of the song, hearing these lines

At night I lock the door where no one else can see.
I'm tired of dancing here all by myself,
Tonight, I wanna dance with someone else.

I realized in a blinding flash that there were at least two other eighties songs that had the protagonist dancing by him/herself: Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," and Billy Idol's
"Dancing With Myself."

Any speculations on the meaning of this?

Karaoke and Writing Group.

Right now, on Family Guy, Peter Griffin and friends are doing karaoke--that song by Journey that starts "Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world." Reminds me of last weekend, when I was down at my parents with all my sibs. My youngest sister acquired a karaoke machine (as did my daughter) awhile ago. My mom liked it so much that she got one for herself, so she could sing the gospel songs of her youth with cheesy accompaniment, evidently. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyhoo, we all got into it. For my mom (and who am I kidding? I loved it, too) I sang "Moon River," as an homage to my childhood, when my brother and I were relegated to the back of the station wagon at the drive-in, after the kid movie (Born Free?) was over and Breakfast at Tiffany's had started. And, in an eerie synchronicity thing, there happened to be a Carpenter's disk, so we all sang "I'm On Top of the World" and "We've Only Just Begun" (but left "It's Yesterday Once More" alone, because that song is just wrong). However, the best karaoke moments of the evening included "Break Another Little Piece of My Heart," "We Belong" (Pat Benatar, with awesome hand-clapping action), and "Time Warp" from Rocky Horror (my sisters were disturbingly good at the dance for this). On another occasion, my son-in-law did an excellent "I Ran," though without the Flock of Seagulls hairdo, it was missing something. (He does a very good Fred Schneider on "Love Shack," as well, though he insists that he has retired this performance, a loss for us all.)

I'd be interested in hearing the best karaoke experiences of anyone who cares to offer one up. For one thing, it seems like a new karaoke disk would be a great gift for pretty much any occasion, so I want to be able to make an informed decision about which songs rock the most, or whatever.

Poetry Writing Group: Apparently no one in my writing group is worried about the death of poetry, because we all keep showing up with new poems. Today the group was at my house, which meant that last night, as I told my husband, I realized that not only did I need to clean up the house, make delicious and writing group-appropriate food, and decide what to do with Bruiser during the group--he is, shall I say, not poet-appropriate--I also had to write a poem. All of this and more I accomplished, with the assistance of the best husband on the planet. Here's the poem I brought to the group, revised as they suggested.

At least an aperture

We used to spiral past the tower house,
someone's fancy, visible only from the winding drive.
A single stroke of stone by another stroke incised:
crenellated head, a long slit eye as for arrows,
it seemed to be guuarding something,
but kept only its own counsel. I think that even
simple forms contain some little shutter,
some hinge, a pinhole out of which to peer.
The window, so fine a fissure from outside,
must rustle with homely draperies, some resident
with book or candle seeing the bright shifting blur
of peninsula cypress, road flurry. Was there glass?
I think the labor and whoosh of engine,
of tree-stir, tide would pierce that vestibule.
I think it was an opening cut in bone.

Charles Barkley Said.

At moments like these, I become philosophical, remembering the words of that sage, C.B., who said, "In a seven game series, the best team always wins."

I'm referring, of course, to the Pistons' loss to the Spurs. As I lay, desolate, in bed this morning, I told my husband that I thought that ultimately, the Spurs were just a little better than the Pistons. Duncan showed his true mettle, and I will acknowledge that Ginobli was pretty much revelatory. I love the Pistons--their no-star team ethos, for instance. I could go on, but I won't.

[Anyone who was rooting for the Spurs--you know who you are!--who's tempted to gloat about their triumph had better not, at least not around me, or our friendship will be over. OVER!]

Okay, so now the long winter until basketball starts again. In the meantime, my writing has been going well, so well that now I actually can conceptualize this rather lengthy piece of writing, so well, in fact, that I look forward to writing, that I actually believe, for the first time in a long time, that it's within my power to do this thing. Just so you know. Thanks to middlebrow for his research on behalf of my question, which is still open, by the way. You don't have to be an expert--in fact, I'd rather you weren't--to tell me your anecdotal evidence about whether poetry thrives or withers at the present cultural moment. So tell me, for the love of God and for the sake of science: what do you know?

Poetry: Dead or Alive?

I've been "working" on my "dissertation" today and yesterday and the day before that and, basically, for my whole freaking life. [Sorry, the total futility of it just spun me round (right round, like a record, baby, right round round round . . .).]

Anyway! I just (re) read Dana Gioia's uneven yet touched-a-nerve-until-we-jumped-up-screaming essay "Can Poetry Matter?" I'm asking myself about the general health of poetry, especially not as practiced/read by college professors or creative writing students. Can the readers of the megastore please help me by passing along any anecdotal information they may brew up?

Also, if you have actual social scientific data, we'd take that at the megastore, as well. We'd pay for it, in fact.

New purchases at the megastore: Frank Lentriccia's The Edge of the Night: a Confession ($0.88, plus shipping)

The Year of the Bat.

In the company of two of my sons, I saw Batman Begins this weekend. Both of them agree that it is the best of all Batmans so far.

Myself, I liked the comic-gothic Tim Burton Batman--great Danny Elfman score, for one; Jack Nicholson, sure; but I also liked Michael Keaton as Batman. A lot. Really, his portrayal is very much of a piece with Christian Bale's--I could see the two portraits sort of merging. What I like about a somewhat effaced Batman is that his heroic gesture is always somewhat compromised: he has no superpowers, only excellent equipment. His judgment and instincts about how to deploy the equipment are the only things he has going for him. I like a Batman where the restraint seems rooted in the personality.

This Batman also gives us a sort of renunciatory quality: the sense that, because of his restraint, his judgements, his instincts, and his secrecy, he is also somehow stunted, operating emotionally at a remove. This film explains the trauma (to get Freudian) that initiates the removal. It also gives that trauma a history. I loved the part of this film that has Bruce Wayne somewhere in the Himalayas (that's how I read it, anyway), abasing himself, then submitting to the quasi-spiritual discipline of the Shadow Brotherhood. Eerie connections with Kill Bill, featuring a similarly brutal discipline/disciplehood in the martial arts. What is it about the East? Once he comes back, all that zen seems to evaporate into tanks and body armor.

The last question the film raises for me is this: why do so many filmmakers want to take a crack at material like this?

Sitcoms and the Sublime.

Middlebrow's recent posting which discussed WKRP in Cincinnati got me thinking about sitcoms. Friends and family have no doubt heard me opine (more than once--very sorry, friends and fam!) that there is little in life as rewarding as a good sitcom. For one, it's a reliable source of laughter in a world where laughter is necessary for survival. For another, it comes around every week! What a gift from the media gods.

As it turns out, WKRP was once a favorite of mine. There are bits from that show that I still fondly recall. I'm tempted to try to theorize what makes a great sitcom, but perhaps instead I will, in the tradition of Burke, Schiller, and Longinus, try to define what makes a sitcom of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth, not to be excelled, supreme:

• a verbal virtuoso (which WKRP had--two times: Dr. Johnny Fever, in the manic vein, and Venus Flytrap, in the smooth vein. Add also the tightass Les Nessman performance, and you've got a triple threat going.)
• a pompous blowhard (viz., Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Diane Chambers on Cheers, or, in the Alien Blowhard category, Dr. Dick Solomon on Third Rock from the Sun)
• an amoral pleasure hound (extra points if it's a woman, like Karen on Will and Grace or Nina Van Horn on Just Shoot Me--which also featured a pretty consistently hilarious David Spade as Dennis Finch, who also belongs in this category)
• sparkling repartee (Frasier, Cheers, Mary Tyler Moore)

There are other things that don't fit systematically, at least not for me. For instance, most family sitcoms leave me cold--but Malcolm in the Middle has been unbelievably funny sometimes, and some episodes are indelible. Ditto Everybody Loves Raymond. I will acknowledge the conceptual greatness of Seinfeld, and also confess that it largely left me cold. I found Friends absorbing, but I felt it undid its contract with the viewer in the last two seasons, so much so that I somehow failed to watch it during that period (exception: the always great Lisa Kudrow, esp. the episode wherein she channelled Kathryn Hepburn, apparently involuntarily, to her boyfriend's snooty folks).

Lastly, a shout-out to The Simpsons, and, more recently, Family Guy, both of which I watch only in the company of teenagers, a strategy which vastly enhances the aura of their greatness.

The 3 Rs, According to Phil Jackson.

On rejoining the Lakers: "It's a story about reconcilation, redemption. It's a story about reuniting."

Huh.

Thank you to the Pistons for that excellent performance last night. I'm choosing to ignore the first two games of the series, especially rubber-man-flop-artist Manu Ginobli (okay, so he's great).

Over and over.

I have just finished re-viewing an episode of Without a Trace, a show I got into because I watched it with my daughter and her brand new baby (my granddaughter!) in Scotland last summer. It was a good episode, guest-starring Charles Dutton as a father whose son was kidnapped several years earlier who couldn't give up looking, even though the search was ruining his life--marriage, job, etc. Even though I knew how it ended, and that it ended in tears, I watched it again, just the same.

My first husband couldn't believe that I like to do stuff like this, especially with regard to movies. His philosophy was, there are so many things to do/see/read, repeating something is effectively choosing not to do something new, and thus constricting rather than expanding your horizon. This is certainly a legitimate point of view (although repeating the experience of some things, like recordings you love, seems more the norm. Plus, I believe that seeing a great movie is like looking at a wonderful painting more than once, except you sit in the dark and can opt to eat popcorn.). I, however, have been a repeater since my tender years. Here is a partial list of things I like just as much, and maybe better, upon repeating:

1. Re-reading certain novels--Harriet the Spy, Underworld, Housekeeping
2. Eating again and again at the same good restaurant (Thai Delight, Trio).
3. Eating the same thing at the same good restaurant (such as kung pao shrimp).
4. Eating the same thing at every restaurant in a certain category (such as kung pao shrimp at every Chinese restaurant I ate at during a certain era. Okay, let's not kid ourselves--I ate kung pao shrimp until I got sick of it, and then stopped eating at Chinese restaurants altogether, for the most part. I switched to Thai, where now I eat papaya salad).
5. Certain movies: Raising Arizona, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, French Kiss (really, there are too many to list in this category.).
6. Seeing certain movies in a theater repeatedly (I saw Cabaret eight times in various theaters, I think, and also The Way We Were and O Brother Where Art Thou?, though not quite that many times).

Farmer's Market.

Despite the wet spring-into-summer we've had going on here in SLC, today was the first day of the farmer's market. I have been excited about the first day of the farmer's market since, like, January. I woke up this a.m. at 6:30 because Bruiser wanted to go out to check on the progress of the sleepover in the shed (2 teenage boys, Zoolander, bag of Doritos, massive amounts of Coca-Cola). When I got back in bed, I thought, how much longer do I get to sleep? an hour? oooh, the Farmer's Market! before I drifted off for another hour.

So, we got there about 8:30. It was already crowded beyond belief. Some of my favorite vendors weren't there today, which was both disappointing and alarming. What will I do if the herb lady's not there this year? Like an idiot, I let all my scented geraniums die because I didn't bring them indoors. How will I replace them? Etc. Still, we got: a bag of salad greens, a bag of arugula, a bunch of scallions and a bunch of garlic scapes (a very cool vegetable, excellent in stir-fry), a bunch of parsley.

There's a whole socio-economic-demographic thing going on with these types of occasions, obviously Lots of Tevas, dogs, outdoorsy clothing, a few infants in fancy infant carriers, etc. We saw a lot of people we know there, which says something, I guess. The fancy produce store that dr-write calls "Libert Heist" was there, selling figs. However, the guy who's, if not homeless, only marginally housed, who plays a cello with no spindle at the bottom outside the movie theater where we always go--he was there,playing beautifully, as always. Also the aging Utah Phillips type playing folk music on the guitar. Plus the west-siders who grow herbs and make furniture and other wood items--definitely not in the demographic, but they were there. I love the farmer's market. Once a week, it's all about beautiful, fresh green food, the various people who grow it, and people like me, who buy it and eat it.

My Awesome Kung Fu Moves.

Saw Kung Fu Hustle tonight, and have been contemplating what my kung fu moves would be if I were a kung fu master. The best thing about this movie is that all the masters are middle-aged people with bellies, and they often don't get out of their pajamas. So there's a guy whose kung fu signature is that he can basically go floppy and swerve without moving his feet. Also, there's landlady who wanders around with curlers in her hair, wearing a nightie, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, whose move is the Lion's Roar--which is essentially yelling really, really loud. (If I were a yelling mom, I would be in fighting trim, in other words. But I'm not. A yelling mom, I mean. Or in fighting trim, for that matter.)

I would like to be the kind of kung fu master who could fight from a supine position on a couch. Maybe I'd use a remote control as my secret weapon. (Some people have poles, some have axes, some have bands of steel on their wrists. I would wield a wicked remote.) Maybe also I could perform a lightning quick channel change to Fear Factor, a show I find really, really scary, to deal any necessary death blows.

Anyone? Signature kung fu moves?

Blog Lag and Retro Tea.

Blogs are for narcissists--this we know. Beneath all the quirky, opinionated observations and comments lies the obsessive heart of a raging egotist, checking for comments. (I won't say anything about how frequently I check, because what if I check more frequently than you do, and that makes me even more of an narcissist? Yikes.)

Just had to get that out of the way.

This afternoon, I met a friend for tea at the Beehive Tearoom downtown. This place aims squarely for quaint and hits the bullseye: little round tables, bent cane chairs, furniture that looks like your grandma's, walls painted the colors they painted walls in the forties, old forties-style jazz, lace curtains. And they've nailed the tea part, as well--you can have almost any kind of tea you can imagine (I noted that they've added the trendy bubble teas to their repertoire since the last time I was there). Also, dainty, very lady-like food, served in lady-like portions. The tearoom doubles as a wedding library, which means there's a wall o' books and mags about weddings that you could use, presumably, to get fantastic and very over-priced ideas about planning your wedding.

The proprietor also has a retro look. She's a young woman, but she wears vintage clothing, retro eyeware, and extremely buttoned-down hairdos.

I admit, I find this place charming. The clientele most days I've been there is women--young, middle-aged, old. I saw, for instance, another friend of mine there with her great aunt and other older female relations.

I suppose this is in contrast to the steam-spewing, noisy, burnt-smelling hustle of coffee houses. It's genteel, feminine, refined . . . Anyhow, among other things, it made me wonder what it is about retro. What, exactly, is the appeal of the throwback, the reconstituted, the slightly finicky evocation of the past?

From whence the blog?

I am in a policy meeting at my place of employment at the moment (sample of the discussion: "what is a 'mission-critical asset'?"). Is this wrong?

On another note, I'm glad that the Pistons emerged victorious. When the Suns lost, and it looked like the Heat might actually win last night's game, I had a sinking feeling. Now I can enjoy watching the finals, with Tim Duncan (my son-in-law refers to Duncan's "evil genius"), Manu Ginobli, Tony Parker, and so forth as the worthy opponent.

Oldies Radio.

Because my teenage children prefer music on the car radio (Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys, and, incongruously, Tupac and Fifty, in the case of the 18-year-old daughter; a mix of appropriately cool and oddly named bands for my 16-year-old son--the Zutons, the Postal Service), and because television news and even the local newspaper do such a thoroughly lame job of reporting, and because I'm driving a new used car, and have not yet transferred my mix tapes from the old wrecked one, when I have control of the radio--i.e., when I'm driving alone--I usually listen to NPR. But today, I turned my radio dial (metaphorically--it's all digital now) away from my local NPR affiliate and landed on oldies radio.

First of all, there are often great moments to be had on oldies radio--a song you haven't heard in five hundred years that gives you a feeling of great relief, as if you had been waiting to hear "Rocket Man" but didn't quite know it. Also, there are unbelievably serendipitous moments, where you think, I wish I could hear "Blackbird," and then the radio gives you what you asked for--or something pretty damn close, like "Here Comes the Sun." Also, old Rolling Stones loses pretty much nothing with the years ("Start Me Up").

However, there are disturbing moments, moments in which you realize that even music you despised at the time (the seventies), you may have listened to enough to be able to sing along (that Carpenter's song that has this chorus: "Every sha-la-la-la/ every whoa whoa-o/ still shines"). No thought I have summoned up--such as the revelation that many ultra-cool rock stars love Karen Carpenter's voice--has alleviated the frightening dimension of that unconscious and unbidden sing-along, which has brought on a sobering reconsideration of all the happy memories I cherish of my youth.

I'm going back to my old policy, for the time being, of listening to music only under controlled circumstances. It's not safe to drive when you're that weirded out, for one thing.

Taste: An Essay.

De gustibus non disputandam est, some Roman is said to have said. Roughly translated, this means, no matter how bad your taste is, nothing I can say will change it. Presumably, the Roman thought he had pretty good taste—he just threw up his hands at other people’s taste.

Discriminating is the best kind of taste—preferring only what is the most refined and excellent; discerning and selecting from among the dross the most beautiful, the most shapely, the rarest, the uncommon. For instance, in the world of art, someone with discriminating and discerning taste would be able to tell that the Picassos at the Milwaukee Art Museum aren’t the good ones. In the world of cinema, if you had discerning taste, you’d know that Ron Howard is a talented schlock-meister; that Sean Penn hams it up in Mystic River; that 21 Grams’ narrative contortions are gratuitous and not scintillating.

Discrimination is the essence of taste, in fact. And while I call the discriminator who called out the inferior Picassos in Beer-Town a snob, in fact, I make my own discriminations. I love my little independent music store, Orion’s, in the hip little strip of Sugarhouse. Sure, they have more interesting music than, whatever, Borders; but every CD I buy there has the cachet of having been purchased at a little independent music store, where the manager is hipper than thou, especially since younger than thou. Ditto my beautiful obsession with organic food. I pay a lot for the prestige of my cleaner-than-thine food.

Most of what we call principle shares a thin, permeable border with taste. Don’t eat meat, because you don’t want to be party to the slaughter? Are you sure you’re not just expressing a more refined judgment about what is proper to like and do? Doesn’t eschewing the actual dead pig to its soy simulacrum make you a better, more refined person? I think so, as I eat my delicious Boca Italian Sausage-like entity, pan-grilled and served in a toasted bun with organic ketchup and mustard (yeah, really) and a side of really good organic potato chips. You’ll have to try it.

[anyone who can find out who originally said the Latin proverb above wins a prize. Okay, mention of her/his name in this blog.]