the most powerful story of my life
beautiful Maxine Hong Kingston
Tonight, I am going to the 92nd Street Y to hear a lecture by Maxine Hong Kingston. Toni Morrison will be introducing her. It starts at 8pm, which is really late for me! It’s on the other side of the park, so it’s awkward to get there and back, and it’s still disgusting outside with piles of crappy-looking snow everywhere and unplowed streets. I must really, really, really, really want to go…..which I do.
Kingston wrote a book that had a tremendous impact on me, and I choose the word ‘impact’ purposely; it impacted me like the asteroid that hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. It crashed into me and left me changed forever. My first semester in college, at the age of 36, I took a literature course on women and identity, and among the books we read were Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid, and The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. There were others, but these two were my favorites. The Woman Warrior is about a 1st generation Chinese-American girl whose mother raises her with stories from China, and one of the important stories is of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior. It’s just an incredible, incredible book, and if you haven’t already read it you should get it immediately and read it. Fa Mu Lan was a young child when terrible people were marauding, decimating villages, destroying everything, so her parents sent her into the mountains, where she lived with a kind of mythical couple who trained her as a warrior. She returned to her village many years later, planning to ride into battle as an avenger. It was illegal for a woman to ride into battle, so she hid her hair and bound her chest. Before she left, her parents had her kneel before the ancestral alter and they took sharp knives and carved their family’s story into her back, washing the wounds with wine so they’d always be visible. That way, if she were killed in battle, her body could be held up as a reminder of what everyone was fighting for. She literally did ride into battle with her story on her back. I later heard that some version of this tale is among the first stories that Chinese children learn.
Anyway. That idea stayed with me, the idea of wearing your story on your back. I knew it had some kind of power for me, it rattled around in my gut and spirit for 4 or 5 years, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. When I was in graduate school, it all came together, after a period of deep, deep depression. I didn’t want to carve the stories of my own brutal childhood into my back; they’re there already, I carry them around with me all the time. But I did want to honor my experiences and so I decided to carve something else into my back. I spent several months thinking about what I got from those experiences. I selected Chinese characters that represent the concepts. I printed them out, arranged and rearranged them until the order made sense and they were also arranged in a beautiful way.
Because I was extremely poor, I saved and saved and saved any spare money I had, until I had what I thought might be enough for one tattoo. I took my folder of papers, and my $35, and went to a tattoo shop near campus, in Austin. When I walked in, I was the only customer; it was just me and the owner of the shop, a kind of scary-looking dude. I told him my story, and asked him if $35 would be enough for one tattoo. I had kept my head down the whole time, but when I looked up at him, his eyes were filled with tears. He walked around the counter, locked the front door, and pulled the curtain over the windows. (I was more than a little scared by this.)
He told me that he’d give me all the tattoos, for free. Did I want to do it right then? I took a deep breath and grabbed my hands together to stop them from shaking, and said yes. My heart pounded while he got everything together, and when he was ready, I stripped to the waist and got on my knees, leaning over a large chair so my spine was fully exposed. The characters run the full length of my spine, and the process took 4 hours. It was excruciating — I’m no pain junkie. He sat perpendicular to my body, and he’d take a deep breath and hold it, then carve the lines into my back. The lines had to be perfectly straight, it was intense work. He’d carve a line, then explode an exhale and kind of throw himself backwards. My whole body was sweaty from enduring the pain…it hurts, right on the spine….and he kept asking if I wanted to stop, if it hurt too much. I didn’t want to stop, and it was right that it hurt.
hope
I am always aware of those characters on my spine, I feel them and their power. I had space for one more at the very bottom, and it took me 6 years to figure out what to put there. A few years ago, I finally figured it out — at the bottom, the concept on which all the others rest, I have the character for hope. It’s the only one that’s red; all the others are black. Red is a powerful color, and it carries a lot of meaning in China.
- Bill Moyers and MHK
- MHK on Wikipedia
- The Genius of The Woman Warrior (Slate)
- The Woman Warrior study guide
- The Woman Warrior on NPR
This was a long post, but this is an enormous aspect of me and my life. Read The Woman Warrior, it’s really an amazing story. I can’t wait to see Kingston tonight.
EDIT: afterwards, and especially in response to Noreen’s comment. She was amazing. Totally, honestly, tear-streaming amazing. As I sat there, though, I realized that it almost didn’t matter what she was like, or whether she met my expectations. She wrote that book, and that book is part of me. And I got to listen to her talk, and read from it. I cried throughout the whole reading, and I’m so very glad I went.
another weekend blew past. they go so quickly…
I had a stay-indoors weekend, very cozy and quiet — wonderful to enjoy, but once again, difficult to capture in a photo. We watched two movies (the wonderful Jackie Brown, and the 125% dreadful Unstoppable), I baked apple oatmeal bars and a couple loaves of bread, we ate some yummy meals, I did enough housecleaning to feel better but not so much to use up too much time, and I knitted, finishing up Anna’s socks and getting 1/3 of the way through a frankbaktus. Plus, I got pissed off by politics. There were a couple 5-minute periods of sunshine, which I soaked up, but otherwise it’s about as ugly and dreary out my window as you can possibly imagine. Thank heavens for color.
cherries, blackberries, raspberries, vivid color.....thank you, universe, for red! and thank you, cones in my retina, for being to detect color!
DO NOT let H.R. 3 pass you by — pay attention, speak up.
I do not discuss politics here — or rather, I haven’t until now. And I’m sorry if this offends you, or causes you to decide never to read my blog again, whether it’s because you aren’t interested in political commentary from random people regardless of the content, or whether it’s because of the specific content of this post. I’ll miss you, because I’ve enjoyed your online presence in my online life.
The GOP has introduced a bill to the House, H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress. The bill is intended to restrict the definition of what rape is. Of course the fundamental issue relates to the government paying for abortion, and I could get off on that issue, but I’m trying hard to stay focused here. Here’s a summary of what the bill is trying to achieve, and here’s a thumbnail: “Other types of rapes that would no longer be covered by the exemption include rapes in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rapes of women with limited mental capacity, and many date rapes.” The proposal is intended to limit the definition of rape to FORCIBLE rape. So if a child of 11 is raped by her father, who didn’t have to use force because of all the obvious reasons, then she wasn’t raped. If she becomes pregnant, too bad for her.
Obviously, I am extremely upset by this and maybe you want to disregard my intense emotion — but every person, and every woman in particular, and every mother in particular, should look into this and let your representative know how you feel about it.
It may be easy for you to sit on high, from an intellectual or theoretical place, and say that you are against allowing federal money to be spent on abortion. Perhaps you have religious beliefs that inform your position, or your own moral compass, or whatever. And if it were your child, your 11-year old daughter who was raped by whatever kind of male you find most terrifying, and you were poor and she was pregnant, and there she was, 11 and pregnant because she was raped, would you be as certain of your position? What if she was mentally or developmentally challenged and 11 and raped?
If you don’t already know about OpenCongress.org, it’s a great site that lets you follow your representatives, particular bills that interest you, etc. You can track them, get RSS feeds of interest, etc. You can, with a click of your mouse, let your representatives know how you feel about bills, and issues. You can, with a click, write them. Here’s the H.R. 3 page, so you can see it was introduced by Christopher Smith (R-NJ) and it’s been referred to the Ways & Means Committee. Only 18% of people who visit that page have indicated that they support the bill — so 72% oppose it. Add your voice….not that (I fear) it’ll make any difference, though I do always hope.
Luckily for me, my representatives share my political beliefs, for the most part. If I lived in a state that had representatives who were voting for this bill, I don’t know what I would do, but I know I’d do everything I possibly could to get the bill defeated.
We all have to pick the issues that matter to us; no one has the time to become passionately involved in every single issue. We even have the pick among the issues we care about, because we’re so busy we can’t even give enough time just to those that matter to us. We have to pick and narrow. This one matters to me, a lot. A LOT. You may speculate about why it matters to me so much. If it matters to you, please please please please let your representative know about it. Please. It’s so easy to do that now. Go to OpenCongress.org, sign up, it’s free and quick.
a little of this, a little of that, and pretty soon you’ve got something.
Well, let’s see, where even to begin. First, I did make the apple oatmeal bars yesterday, and they were QUITE delicious. I used this recipe, and it was incredibly tasty but a little too soft to qualify as a bar, exactly. Next time I’ll make a more standard bar bottom, but do the top using this recipe. I mean, this one is fantastic-tasting if you like the taste of butter, sugar, and apples…and really, how bad can anything be with those ingredients. 
I got Anna’s birthday socks finished inside one week, which is slow for lots of people but not for me! It’s a fun pattern to knit, and free, so double winner. The color does remind me of a Texas summer sky, so since she’s a yankee living in Houston I think she’ll like them.
anna's 20th birthday socks, done in 7 days go me!!
The combination of almost 0 hours of sun so far this year, plus EVERY project I’ve finished in 2011 is blue, what’s up with that, led me to seek something that’s a big punch of color. When I glanced down into my huge and overflowing knitting bag (which is really a repository of any yarny thing that happens into the living room), I saw my Zauberball, which is red and cherry and purple and blue and all combinations in between. It made me think of summer berries, and boy that’s just what I need, here in the bleak and grim ending of such a snowy January. I had been so inspired by perches’ gorgeous Zauberball shawl and had planned to make one for myself, but I’m on a very rigid no-yarn no-pattern purchasing diet so I had to do something different.
I didn’t really find it all that much fun to knit, but whenever I wear my baktus, I get loads of compliments. I hadn’t realized there was a lace version when I made the last one, so I’d planned to make a 2nd one with lace. Then Eskimimi came along and did a variation on the plain baktus, striping two halves of a Zauberball skein. So I decided to assemble these variations into one thing — an Eskimimi version plus lace. Here it is, all together:
i really like this section - the stripes are showing up
it's becoming more a muddled purple mess
But see what’s happening? By the random luck of striping, both balls are in the same color right now, so the striping has disappeared. Still, it’s interesting to watch the shifts in colors, so I’ll keep going for a while. I’m not committed to it, so if I don’t like it all that much I’ll frog it and find a free shawl. The yarn is so lovely — be sure to check out perches’ shawl to see what I mean. Really, beautiful.
And speaking of perches, she’s got a month-long thing going called building winter; read this post of hers for details. This week, I have
relied on daydreams of green and warmth and summer; kind and warm words from my friends……
slogged through trying to teach college students the concept of means, averages, etc., and going nuts that they can’t seem to get it; deep and icy-cold puddles of brown filthy snow melt at every corner; a couple days of serious pain in my sheck…..
cherished my sweet sweet daughters and their loving communications; the fact that I get to work at home, which is especially wonderful when the weather is so miserable; the fact that even though it’s sometimes a slog, I get to be in this world again each day.
Happy Sunday, y’all.
happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, so let’s sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again! all together now!
How and when did “woot!” come become an exclamation of celebration? And it’s often written with zeroes, as in w00t — what’s that about. I’ve never once in my 52 years of life exclaimed woot! I’m more a fan of whoa, wow, whee, yay, yippee, hallelujah! Those words I seem to say on a regular basis, and today I’m saying them all.
Even though I really, really wish I were in San Antonio at SPSP, my annual conference (this is the first year I haven’t attended since 1998!), and even though it isn’t particularly sunny in the sky today, and I don’t think we’re expecting sun (which we haven’t seen in months and months and months and months, or so it seems to me), and even though the chance of sunshine is strictly metaphorical, it’s a big enough chance that I feel like saying those exclamatory words. Why?
- my schneck is all better, yippee!!!
- i finished Anna’s socks last night and plan to cast on a new project today – unsure just what, but i’ll be back when i figure that out
- i feel happy today and remember that even though it feels like it will, winter will not last forever and one day riverside park will be all green again. and one day i’ll be bitching about how hot it is. there’s no pleasing me.
- i have no specific requirement plans for the weekend, but i hope to bake a couple loaves of bread and some apple oatmeal bars and a focaccia so i look forward to that.
- last night I acted like a kid. i stayed up until 3am, watching episodes of the wire and eating candy. it was fun.
- my house is a cluttered mess, and i’m looking forward to restoring it to a less-cluttered state. there’s only so much you can do when your place is too small and there’s not enough space for everything, but it can be better than this and i’m in the mood to get it there.
- i’m extremely grateful that i didn’t wake up with a headache, or a spasming muscle, or anything wrong. when you get older, it’s so easy to get all screwed up just by sleeping. i have slept on my eyebrow wrong. getting older ain’t for sissies.
- i have a bunch of great movies and i want to watch a couple this weekend – that makes me really happy.
I hope there’s a chance of sunshine in your life today, too. After a string of gray days passes, THEN you can say ‘that’s the good thing about gray days, they make the sunny days so good.’ Just don’t say that to someone who’s in the midst of the gray days, they might slap you.
tell me something good – wackawackawacka
One important area of research in social psychology is attributions — the explanations we come up for everything, from our own behavior to others’ behavior, to the way the world works, to who we believe and why, etc. And social psychologists have identified a bunch of really cool findings…..very cool to me, but I’ll spare you (for now). One way people try to figure out attributions has to do with identifying the cause of things — right? Pretty obvious. But it all depends on where you start, because very few things begin all at once, arising out of nothing (at least not since the Big Bang). The process can quickly deteriorate into a “he said/she said,” “but he started it/no he started” it mess. Just pick any hot spot in the world and listen for a few minutes. Israelis: The Palestinians started it! Palestinians: The Israelis started it! And from each of their perspectives, given the way they chunk the series of events, they feel perfectly justified.
But the thing is, life doesn’t work like that. Time doesn’t work like that. Everything is a continuous stream, every little thing is multiply determined, overdetermined, even. Although we all say it (“it started when….” “and I was just sitting there when….” “everything was fine until…”), none of those stories hold up to close scrutiny. Actions have long, long ripples, and sometimes they undulate through time, through generations, and you might get smacked by something you never saw coming, because it started long ago and far away. That’s just life. We’re meaning-makers, though, so we come up with a story to explain things because we need to. (and oh, here I could tell you one of the coolest research studies ever but I’ll do that another time.)
[just don't anyone say "ooh, the butterfly effect" because for some reason that irritates me. ]
What the hell does this have to do with the price of tea in China?! Well, in the wake of this disastrous pulled muscle in my shneck (shoulder + neck), since I’ve had plenty of time to sit here squinching, thinking about it, I realize that it didn’t come out of the blue. For the last couple of weeks, at least, something has been squirming around in my psyche, something is trying to work itself together, something is trying to crystallize so I can see it, and it hasn’t been even a little bit pleasant. I’ve gone in and out of waves of extremely high anxiety, where I felt like if you flicked me I’d shatter into a million pieces, everything in me was so very, very taut. And always for no reason I knew, for no explanation I could point to. So of course my poor body will have muscles that end up in spasms! They’ve been tense as all hell for a couple of weeks.
It was a too-easy story to say “oh, I slept wrong. That’s it.” Instead, this is a system story, and something is rippling from a cause I can’t see, or recognize it even if I do see it. My mind and body (and dreams) kind of assume I’m an idiot, and communicate with me using Dummy 101 methods. My dreams are as obvious in their symbolism as possible, and if I still don’t get it, I’ll just dream the same dream again, but this time in red! Didn’t get….ok, this time in blue! How about green! COME ON LORI, we can’t make this much simpler for you! How’s about we give you a pain in the neck.
Even though it’s causing me a good deal of physical pain right now, I actually find this among the most fascinating parts of being a human. Once I get it – smacking my forehead, oh! Obvious! – then it’s kind of fascinating just to watch and wait. I’m learning something, I just don’t know what it is yet.
Thank you one and all for the excellent suggestions (but Nancy, I couldn’t find any Blue Goo!). I tried extremely hot baths and showers, a heating pad weighted down with a big bag of rice, a klonopin, and sleeping. By the end of the evening last night, muscles in adjacent areas were going into painful spasms, including my arm muscles and my pectoral muscle on that side. THAT hurt, I’m telling you! Today it’s no longer having spasms (thank heavens, I’ll take that), but the muscles are really painful and I’m cautiously worried that it might go back into spasm. I’ve been sweating with the heating pad, and trying to stretch and relax the muscles, and moving gently, big muscle movements, etc. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be gone.
But the best part is that one of these days all these little unpleasant puzzle pieces will come together and I’ll be able to figure it out. Even if I can just get a corner put together, psyche….c’mon. Tell me something good (wacka wacka wacka….that’s actually playing right now ).
trying – OW! – to get — OUCH! — through the – OH! – day – OW!
I sure hope so — I’m getting tired of hearing my grumpy self. Today would’ve been just fine, even great, perhaps, but I slept wonky (wonkily, I guess) and woke up with a terrible crick in my neck. The muscle is a big knot, right where my neck joins my shoulder, and it’s spasming and I can’t turn my head in any direction. Breathing makes me gasp, you know that kind of deal? I just tried to eat, so I’d have something in my stomach for the aspirin to land on, but I couldn’t lean my head forward which, turns out you need to do a lot, to eat. I must’ve gotten stuck in one position in my sleep last night and goofed up that muscle.
But we had another snowstorm last night – a whopper – and it came with thunder and lightning again. Oh how I love that. We woke up to deep, deep, deep wet snow, the kind that’s great for snowballs and snowmen and sledding. Schools are closed, streets are unplowed, and it’s really beautiful (even though I have now legally and officially had ENOUGH OF THIS). I had to take a subway ride a couple of stops downtown from where I live, and I snapped these shots:
heavy piles of snow blanketing the trees -- it'll come crashing down very soon i'm sure
an urban snowman, with baby beets for buttons, and that's probably an organic carrot. this IS the upper west side, after all.
I think I’ll crab walk my way over to the market and get a bottle of Brooklyn Brown Ale. Since I drink so rarely, a little bit goes a long way; maybe it’ll help relax that poor little knotted-up muscle. I’m sure y’all would be thrilled not to have to listen to me yelping every couple of seconds.
If you have any secret home remedies for spasming muscles that you’d be willing to share, heaven knows I’d love to hear them.
bringing it home.
And boy does this joint need to be heated up. Snow AGAIN, still, always. Today it was the wet slushy kind, and the temps stayed above freezing so it’s just disgusting, wet, ankle-deep, brown slushy watery ickiness. Not to put too fine a point on it. It’s Wednesday, so I made my weekly trek down to Union Square, which is not too bad a trip since most of it is underground in the subway and in transfer stations.
On the way home, my spirits were a wee bit low, and as I walked through the Union Square station to the N train, I heard sounds of joy and light up ahead — Roosevelt Dime again! I’ve been watching for them. Here’s a little snippet, and boy do I need to learn how to use the camera in my phone. For real.
So that definitely lifted my spirits, and the ride home was pretty sweet. Then these two little boys and their mother got on the train and sat next to me, all with their adorable little British accents. The boys were probably 4 and 6 years old, and the older one pointed to an ad for a movie and said “that looks like a very interesting film.” REALLY, little boy??? A very interesting film? How old are you? Precocious and so adorable, all at once.
memory is SO concentrated, isn’t it.
It’s snowing for the fourth time this year — amazing. This time, it’s those huge fat fluffy flakes, which are my favorites. The previous snows have been the fine diamond dust kind that sting your face, but these float down like bits of lace, or feathers, or clouds. Butterflies. Whatever, it’s really beautiful (though I’ll bet the sanitation workers outside my window who are picking up the mountains of trash find it less beautiful than I do), but it does kind of look like fake movie snow.
I just went to pull a stats book off my shelf and had to move this object off the top of that stack of books:
kinda creepy - it always scared me
This is a very heavy ceramic doorstop that always held the bedroom door open at my grandparents’ house, in Graham, Texas. No one had air conditioning, except for the occasional swamp cooler. We just relied on cross breezes, which could be quite rare, and lots of iced tea. Still, there would be windy days, as there are on the open plains, and heavy doorstops kept the doors held back so they didn’t slam shut.
That one always creeped me out — the face looked scary, mean, sly. Too much make-up, fake cat. And who does their eyebrows like that, c’mon. But I’ve kept it all these years, moved it with me 70+ times, even when I took nothing with me but what I could hold in my hands. It reminds me so much of my grandparents, Mom and Big Daddy. When I look at it, I feel their house in my bones, the particular smells come back, the memory of Big Daddy’s fake vinyl lazy-boy reclined in front of the ancient tv where he sat to watch wrestling, the smell of that green liniment I rubbed on his feet. The smell of pinto beans and cornbread cooking in the kitchen, where we sat on red vinyl chairs around an old metal table. The old quilt I slept on, on the floor, with the soft flannel back that was powder blue with orange rockets, and tied with orange cotton string. Big Daddy’s smell, that was a combination of Red Man chewing tobacco and Four Roses hair oil. Mom’s smell that was a combination of Avon carnation sachet and Dr. Pepper.
I’m a kind of orphan, with only a very small handful of things from my past — this doorstop, a small wooden boat my dad made when he was a boy, a falling-apart copy of Little Women, and a few pictures of my young childhood that I rescued from a dumpster. Each one of these things carries a lot of weight, because they carry all the memories. And you know how memories are; they’re there but you don’t really know it, or think about them except in a category way (summers at Big Daddy’s) until you open that door and see all the detail that’s tucked away inside that category. The sensory details, the stories — like Big Daddy taking me to the rodeo on summer nights, to get us both out of the house and away from my mean old grandmother who was strung out; like Big Daddy waking me up at 4am every morning to ride into town with him — the feelings that aren’t really attached to any one moment.
I guess some day I’ll give that creepy cat to one of my kids, even though it has absolutely no meaning to them. It’s really just in my way, it’s not like I have any space to spare, but it’s far too big to throw away, if you know what I mean.
not the best, that’s for sure!
Well, given the dark tone of my previous post, it’s pretty clear that my weekend wasn’t my best. Of course, it wasn’t my worst, either — worth keeping in mind, always. I was trying to think what kind of image would best capture my weekend, but there isn’t a photo of it. It wouldn’t be knitting, or baking, or cozying, or wintering, or being outdoors, it’d just be a bunch of white noise or something.
But I did stay up late and finish sock #1, so in the hope of closing my weekend on something approximating a high note, here’s sock #1 of Anna’s 20th birthday socks. The color really is summery lovely, and balm for a bitter winter spirit. Here’s to a much better week!
crappiness squared. cubed, even.
Whatever, whichever order is better, the bottom line is the same: it’s now Sunday at 5-something pm, the weekend is nearly over, and mine was awful. Not big-time awful, like someone I love getting hit by a train or anything (poo, poo, I spit and curse at those gods), just quotidian awful. The kind where you suddenly see that it’s Sunday at 5-something pm and you didn’t get anything good done, and yesterday all day was one crappy thing after another and turns out today was, too.
As always, I had such hopes, such dreams, such plans. I was going to knock out 1.5 socks (didn’t happen). I was going to do some writing (didn’t happen). I was going to take a walk (didn’t happen). I was going to catch up on some work (didn’t happen). I was going to bake some goodies, plus 2 loaves of bread (didn’t happen, with half an exception). I was going to watch a good movie or two (didn’t happen). I was going to curl up on the couch and feel cozy and happy (didn’t happen).
So what did happen? I have no idea. But it was all crappy, and I feel grumbly and grumpy and crummy and crumpy and crumbly. And tomorrow begins another week.
With whom do I take this up. Who do I take this up with. I want cake. Good thing I’ve lived long enough to know that life goes in cycles, that down today won’t last, and then again, neither will up tomorrow. Cake, though, is the eternal constant, perhaps Einstein’s c.
Oh! And last night, at ~3am, a woman across the street started shrieking, help me! OH GOD! Someone help me! Please!! Shrieking, on and on, lights were going on, we were all rushing to our windows. I immediately thought of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was murdered in NYC in the 60s, in full view of neighbors…none of whom did anything. It is the stuff of social psychology. The shrieks and screams last night were pure horror. And a manifestation of the shrieker’s psychosis. We’ve been through this before, with her. We’ve all called 911, the police have come, it’s just a crazy woman. But I feel for her, so much, because even if it’s a psychotic experience, she is clearly in hell. Unfortunately, so are we. Life in NYC, you’re always “interesting.”
is there anything worse than babka fail? [OF COURSE THERE IS.]
Continuing in my long series of complimentary advice — you’re welcome — is this one:
Never make babka when you’re upset.
And its corollary:
Never ever make 2/3 of a recipe of babka when you’re upset.
For some reason, babka recipes make 3 loaves (these are good: one, two). Well, we’re just two little people, even though one of us (hint: not me) eats on the scale of a small family, especially where sweets are concerned. But anyway — we don’t need three babkas. So I put the list of ingredients in an Excel spreadsheet, multiplied each line by .66, and bingo: the ingredient amounts I’d need for 2 babka instead of three.
Would’ve been great, it was a smart plan, blah blah blah, but then, inside the recipe would be a statement like “using 10 T of butter” which did not represent the entire amount of butter. So I had to figure out what portion of the 3-loaf recipe 10T counted for, then try to take that portion of my butter. You can see the nightmare. I’m sure.
in case you don't know, this is chocolate babka (not the lesser cinnamon babka, cf Seinfeld). it's a very eggy, buttery bread wound up and twisted around a filling of chocolate, sugar, and cinnamon. RIGHT?
I was not having a great morning, after a bad night of sleeping/not sleeping, and my nerves were shot from too much coffee. Shaky hands, brittle mind, the whole “you shouldn’t be making babka, Lori” shebang. Which, of course, I stupidly ignored.
Hence, this advice post, in which I hope to spare you the similar anxiety and angst and absolute abject…running out of A-words here…failure. (Unless it’s not a failure, in which case I’ll post later.)
from poe to kafka to aqua socks. it’s one of those days.
I was thinking about how my posts seems to veer between thoughtful ones — a run of those — and knitting ones, a run of those. (With daily boring ones scattered in between, of course.) So that made me think of a pendulum, and how there are emotional states that go with both ends, too. Introspection is, for me, associated with quieter, more melancholy moods, though not exclusively of course. My brighter moods can be introspective too, but it’s the quieter moods that lead me to write more introspective posts. When I’m dashing about with little time to think, well, it’s pretty obvious that it’ll be the shallower posts, the “here let me show you this thing” posts that are more prevalent.
So then, thinking of one end of the pendulum made me think of a pit of melancholy, which took me then to Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, which opens with these great lines:
I was sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.
And then that reminded me of Kafka’s deeply horrifying story, In the Penal Colony. And then, after all that descent into horror, I remember: wait! I was going to show you some pretty socks!
Anna's 20th birthday socks, Komet
They’re the Komet socks by Stephanie van der Linden. If you think the color is familiar, you’re right. I originally bought this color — Sweetgeorgia in summer skin — and I must’ve been drunk or insane, because I bought it specifically to make these socks. But I bought it in worsted weight. WHAT was wrong with me. I’d planned to make socks for my youngest daughter Anna, who turns 20 early in February, so I showed it to her when she was home over the break. I actually gave her a choice of this color or another, and she picked this color.
The day after Christmas, I picked up the yarnWHAT?! Worsted weight, was I insane (I ask myself this question a lot)? I immediately went online and ordered a skein in sock weight. And I just got it yesterday, almost a month later. Note to self and to y’all: don’t order from Sweetgeorgia if you need something in anything approximating a hurry. I’ll have to get the socks in the mail by Saturday 2/5 to get them to her in time, so I’ve got to focus and get them done. Other people can knock a pair of socks out in that amount of time, I just don’t know if I can. I imagine I’ll be knitting all weekend. Like that’s a bad thing.
Another snowstorm last night — what’s that, the 3rd one so far this year? And today’s only the 21st? Hope it’s warm where you are, and if it’s not, I hope you get to stay inside and knit.
look at what Katie did! (said her exceedingly proud mother…)
I think my hosting service is having a bit of trouble; if you’ve noticed that my blog is taking forever to load (as I have), I do suspect it’s host/server issues rather than something on my end. I don’t usually have a problem, but it does seem to be kind of wonky right now, so my apologies if it’s happening to you!
I have too much work to do to knit or tend to blogs (either as a reader or a writer), but I wanted to show you something. When I was lucky enough to visit my daughter Katie in Austin, last October, I taught her how to knit. She took to it immediately — a natural knitter, she is. We bought her some beautiful apple green yarn, and she launched into a great scarf. When I left her, she was a few sections into it, and going strong. Then her little dog grabbed it one afternoon and ate a chunk out of it, which kind of took the wind out of Katie’s sails. She frogged it back to before the chomp, and tried to get going again. Then she decided she might like to have another project underway too, so she picked the Habitat hat, by Jared Flood. Kinda intense for a brand new knitter! Especially since I live too far away to just pop over for a quick here’s-how-to-do-that session. WELL! Look what she did, her very first-ever FO:
Katie's husband Trey, wearing his new hat
I’m completely blown away! Here’s her project page on rav, if you want to see more pictures. This time I am bragging. Mama’s rights.
Back to trying to teach stats to people who don’t like stats. And editing manuscripts by people whose imaginations exceed their writing grasp. It’s one of those days, friends.
i know i’ve said this before, but this time I REALLY MEAN IT.
Even though, as they say,
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Screw it. I’m making plans anyway. For once in my life, I’m going to just take my time and do it right. (Mister Rogers has a song about that — I like to take my time, I mean that when I want to do a thing, I like to take my time and do it right. I mean I just might make mistakes if I should have to hurry up, and so I like to take my time. That came entirely out of my memory, by the way.) I’m making plans, I’m taking my time, I’m going to do math (gasp! No! Not math!), I’m going to measure myself (get the smelling salts, gussie, ma’s fainted), and this time, I’m making a perfect sweater.
Geez, what a long-winded way to get here. In the wake of my gorgeous-but-large Dark & Stormy (which I will get into shape this weekend), I want to be thoughtful and slow and careful with the next one. I’ve now made three sweaters — my mondo cable cardi, my Peasy, and my Dark & Stormy. I adore them, they’re all gorgeous, but I did them my usual way, getting a wild hair, willy-nilly ordering some yarn and yes, making a little swatch, but then plowing ahead blindly. It’s a wonder they’re as good as they are.
Next up: Gudrun Johnson’s gorgeous Laar sweater, in dragon’s blood red. Here’s hers:
so beautiful!
One lesson I learned on Dark & Stormy: use needles you enjoy working with, even if it means you have to go buy new ones. I absolutely hated every minute of using the Denise needles, and believe it took me much longer to make that sweater, in part because of the needles. The constant difficult scootching, ugh.
So I’m making a substantial swatch, I’m measuring all the critical areas of my body for fitting this sweater, I’m making adjustments to the pattern so it fits ME (especially since I look absolutely nothing like the gorgeous model), and if I goof, I’m ripping. If it’s ok but meh it’s not quite right, I’m ripping.
I’m making a public vow. Promising myself. Yeah.
i think i’ve milked this for all it’s worth. time to move on.
Well this was quick and easy, even including my brain-damaged goofiness that required a bit of frogging and starting over. Sheesh. It’s been a rough new year for finished objects. (Speaking of, I’m going to deal with my too-big Dark & Stormy this weekend, believe me you’ll know how that goes. ) So anyway, this is my new project, officially known as “a very braidy cowl” (pattern here, rav page here, my rav project page here, ta-dah!) and designed by Maryse Roudier. Mine is named Oh, Marcia. Enough — here it is:
Marcia, Marcia Marcia - a very braidy cowl
The color’s not quite right; it’s more aqua than that, but I don’t have my laptop and I’m lost without all my junk. So this is just the raw shot out of the camera, unadjusted to righten-up the colors. The yarn was lovely to work with (SweetGeorgia superwash worsted, colorway summer skin….shoulda been summer sky if you ask me but she didn’t), and this pattern used .8 of a skein. I haven’t blocked it yet, I just finished kitchenering it together and wanted to throw this up before I head downtown. Will I be wearing it, on this dismal gray day? Why yes I will.
If you ever need a very quick gift that looks much more difficult than it is, this would be your project. Size 8 needles, less than a skein, a few hours’ knitting, and organic braidy yummy soft warmth is yours (or theirs!). Of course, if you make it, you’ll read the whole thing before you start, unlike me this time, so you’ll see the “cast on provisionally” before you start. You’re just so good that way, maybe one of these days I will be, too.
oh, and p.s.: when i pulled it off my head after trying it on, it rested for a second on my head, covering my ears, so i can tell you with authority that it’d make a damn fine earwarmer, too. or hair thing to hold your hair off your face when it’s driving you up the WALL man, and those scissors would just take care of it but then the husband wouldn’t like that because he likes long hair but today it’s driving me NUTS…oops.
this book represents my proudest moment of my years in publishing, and my greatest contribution to my field.
…and have no one to share my on-the-spot joys and woes with, no co-workers I can grab in the hallway, no colleagues’ offices to dash into, my blog has to handle all that weight.
I am a social psychologist. When I worked as an acquiring editor for Oxford University Press, I acquired books in social psychology, which was an honor and a thrill, and quite unusual. Usually, a new editor just inherits a subject and a list and you develop your knowledge of that area. But in a stroke of luck, I came a-calling just as they needed a social psychology editor.
An acquiring editor thinks of book ideas and finds people to write them. Or, people have ideas and come to the acquiring editor to see if the publisher is interested. The acquiring editor is the gatekeeper for what does and doesn’t get published; it’s a powerful position, actually. Since I did not go into academia after graduate school, this was an amazing opportunity to make a real contribution to my field. Just the right book at just the right time can have an enormous impact. It was a responsibility I cherished and never took lightly.
There is one book I signed that just brought me to my knees. The concept was that the 50 most prominent social psychologists would, in a casual tone, write about their work that was misunderstood, ignored, or that didn’t get the attention they thought it would get. Sometimes, your article comes out just as a more provocative paper is published, so yours gets lost in the shuffle. Or you just gave it a terrible title. Or you just didn’t write it in a compelling way, etc. And sometimes, the article is misunderstood and takes on a life of its own.
The book’s editor succeeded in getting the superstars of our field. I was completely blown away by the roster. The names wouldn’t mean anything to you, but if you knew my field you’d be as gobsmacked as I was. And the essays were charming, and humble, and funny, and surprising. It was a peek behind the curtain, a chance to think “wow, even HE was ignored?”, a chance to learn lessons from people whose opinions you should trust. It was a wonderful concept, a shocking roster, and full of great stories.
But then something went terribly, terribly wrong, and it looked like the book was not going to make it. I had most of the essays in, but the book crashed and burned. I was heartbroken and devastated, and I’m not being melodramatic about that. After several bleak months with many people working behind the scenes trying to revive the book, the best and right thing happened and the book came in. One year late, but the book came in.
Today I received my copy. When I pulled it out of the envelope, I started crying. This book is me, in such a real way I gave birth to it, and it was a huge-headed baby whose birth nearly killed me. I wish I could express all the feelings I have, but I can’t tease them apart. I am so proud, so honored, so thrilled, so many things, to have brought this book into existence, and to be forever connected with it. My dissertation advisor is in the book, and the article he cited (as a success, not a disappointment!) was one on which I was a co-author…..I know he did that just for me.
In the acknowledgment, the editor of the book wrote about me in the 2nd paragraph. I put it here not to brag, but to have it here for my own future reference and to convey a bit about how involved I was, to help explain why I am sitting here with shaking hands:
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lori XXX, Senior Editor at Oxford University Press, who saw the value in this project from the start. her advice and counsel at every stage, start to finish, and her willingness to field incessant questions and lend her critical eye to all made her the best sounding board anyone could hope to have. Lori is not only a gifted thinker and writer generally, but her PhD in social psychology meant she knew all the “usual suspects” and she understands the field intimately, and I ultimately adopted the salutation Jedi Lori when writing her (as in “Dear JL”).
In some ways that captures it and in some ways it really doesn’t, but it is a reminder to me of the book’s often-terrible journey, and its ultimate birth. My heart is still pounding, 20 minutes after seeing it for the first time, my hands are shaking, and I’m crying. It really is a lot like giving birth.
why? why? why? was it hubris? that’s the usual suspect with greek gods…
I have made an executive decision. The goddess of knitting is Ariadne. She’s the one who gave Theseus a ball of yarn so he could find his way out of the minotaur’s labyrinth. Remember her? That girl?
I figured any woman who is clever enough to come up with a use for a skein of yarn AND who is handy and familiar with labyrinthine things must be our patron woman. And I have clearly pissed her off somehow. I’m trying to find a corner clear enough to do a burnt offering, though I have no livestock to give (pa rum-pa-pum-pum). Maybe I’ll put some yarn scraps in a bowl and set fire to them.
Or maybe I’ll just use my Dark & Stormy Cardigan. Yeah, that one. That gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous sweater. That somehow grew — like the Grinch’s heart — 3 sizes. After careful blocking, it became the cardigan for a giant. And I’m no giant, even though I’m pretty dang tall. (ok, it’s not 3 sizes too big, but it’s at least one size too big.)
The yarn I used, madelinetosh vintage, is superwash. I don’t know how much success I’ll have tossing it in the dryer, but I’m ready to give that a try. My hair is already thinning with age, so I don’t want to pull it out. With my family history, I’d better not take up drinking to soothe my spirits. So all I can think of are (1) burnt offerings, and (2) a hot dryer. Which means going to the coin-operated dryer in the basement, paying for a whole hour (the minimum), and hoping no one comes in to do laundry while I’m trying to shrink my sweater.
p.s. and yes, for those who might ask, I knitted a swatch, I washed it, I blocked it, I let it dry, I kind of whipped it around in the air a little to try to stretch it out, and it didn’t grow.
oh poopy day (oh poopy day), oh poopy da-a-ay, I’m glad you’re gone (oh yes I am), so glad you’re gone (you’re really gone)…:)
BOY am I glad it’s a new day. Thank you for your sweet comments on my last post; as always, you helped me feel less alone. I really do know, intellectually, that everyone has experiences like mine. But when you just keep doing one wonky thing after another — even though, especially though, you know better — you start to think it’s just you, man. At least I do.
The last comment was from Naomi, who gave the very best name for days like that. They’re poopy days. Yes they are. Poopy, poopy, poopy days. I like that so much more than crappy days, or shitty days. Those two descriptors are as foul as the day itself. But a poopy day, well, you kind of have to laugh a little, feel a bit lighter about it. It’s just a poopy day.
And the good thing about poopy days (or weeks, months, seasons, or years) is that they end. At some point, finally, they do end. This morning I woke up back to my old self, and thus endeth the poopy day, and hallelujah for that. Last night I put in a bit of time knitting my new cowl while I watched an incredibly poopy movie (The Company Men, as cliched and idiotic as you’d expect). Thank heavens for knitting, it salvages lost hours. At least I got something done while wasting time on a stupid movie. Want to see?
oh, marcia cowl -- in sweet georgia worsted
Something’s gone wrong with my big flash for my camera; I’ve replaced the batteries twice, so it’s not battery-related. It’s really too fancy for me — I don’t understand any of the settings, so I’m sure I just goofed with a setting or something. But you can see the result in my photo, which is not well-lit. Maybe my flash is having a poopy day, so I should just wait to see if it’s better tomorrow.
The cowl will be wonderful, I can tell. Just using the brilliant sunny yarn is enough to lift gray spirits, and when I wear it out into the winter, I know that it’ll lift gray spirits too — mine and anyone who sees it, I hope. Because oh yes, winter continues.
I spent the morning grading stats papers — not as much fun as you might imagine — so now I’m going to get to work on a little bit of house cleaning before settling back to my knitting position. Which is my favorite position of them all. Oh yeah? Yours too? You’re in my tribe.
who IS the knitting god and how can I appease her? anyone?
I woke up all out of sorts this morning. You may not believe this, but it’s nearly impossible to find an image of “half a bubble out of plumb” in Google images. Of course it didn’t help that I first typed ‘half a bubble out of plump.’ Paging Dr. Freud. But that’s me this morning, half a bubble out of plump. One card short of a full deck. One egg short of a dozen. One skein short of a sweater, to turn this into a knitterly saying.
After frogging everything I’d done last night on the g^*#_&damn, motherf^*#*%&* Eve’s Rib shrug, I decided to knit a quick winner, as I posted earlier this morning. Maybe I should’ve just honored the whacked out state I’m in and decided to do something else, BUT NO.
So I cast on, and was on row 3 when I noticed further down after the pattern rows it says “if you want to avoid a seam, do a provisional caston.” OH WELL, I thought. So what, I’ll seam it. My hair’s long, it’ll be hidden anyway.
So on I knit. The cable crosses are 8 stitches, so it’s cumbersome and tight, and somewhere along the way I dropped a purl stitch. I saw it and hooked it back up there with my crochet hook, but I noticed on the return row that I’d somehow bungled it. OH WELL, I thought. It’s right next to a cable, that kind of thing won’t be noticeable.
So on I knit. I finished the cable crosses, did the return row and then two more stockinette rows and the pattern seemed to say it was time to do another cable cross. That didn’t seem right. The photo shows long sections between cable crosses. I looked at the pattern again — yep, repeat row 1, repeat row 2, cable cross. So on I knit. When I was working the return row I thought this canNOT be right. So I looked at the pattern and noticed that it said something like this:
Rows 7, 9, 11, 13 – same as row 1
Rows 8, 10, 12, 14 – same was row 2
See, I didn’t notice the whole several-rows-each thing. (cf my state today.) I’m sure this kind of thing never happens to you.
Marcia Brady + Willie Nelson + ELO = I need a break.
Last night I picked up Eve’s Rib, since I was on my “finish a sweater, whoo!” high. I hate that bitch. That’s really all there is to say. It’s the most ridiculously-written pattern. I frogged everything I did last night and put it back in Time Out. I didn’t sleep well last night and woke up feeling out of sorts and icky, and decided that what I needed was a quick-to-knit project. A bit of success to keep me on the knit wagon that I’d so recently fallen off of.
So I looked through my queue and my stash for inspiration, and decided to knit the Very Braidy Cowl. As it was surely intended to do, it made me think of…Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. I watched her a lot, when I was a kid. My parents were divorced, back when that was just beginning to think about maybe coming soon losing stigma. Our culture — at least mine, in Texas — wasn’t ready to go there yet, so being the divorced kid was kind of shameful. I didn’t know anyone else whose parents were divorced, and wouldn’t for quite a long time. So I watched The Brady Bunch. I don’t remember particularly identifying with or liking Marcia Brady (I had a very intense thing for David Cassidy so the Partridge Family had a different vibe for me), but she’s pretty iconic, isn’t she. My cowl, therefore, is named Oh Marcia.
ah....
And winter is getting me down, man. I’m from a place where winter is more of a concept than a reality, so this thing that just goes on and on and on is hard to take. Usually I skip along with it, but I’ll kind of get slammed here and there and feel like I can’t take it another day. That’ll last for a few days, then I’m back to being ok with it (unless it drags on through the end of April, and then that’s just ridiculous). So, I prowled my stash for something guaranteed to lift my spirits, something that would remind me of blue skies while I’m knitting and wearing Marcia (I guess I’ll call it that, for short). Luckily I have two skeins of this amazing Sweet Georgia worsted that I bought in Brooklyn, while shopping with Sherlock. The color name is summer skin.
So then THAT made me think of two songs that I love, Blue Skies (performed here by Willie Nelson of course) and Mr Blue Sky (ELO of course!). What a post. Marcia Brady, winter, Willie Nelson, and ELO. I tried to weave those pieces into something that made sense, but there’s only so much I could do. Off to knit….
it’s about time! i’m pleased to introduce you to……
excuse everything about this photo please!
There’s nothing good to say about this picture — my hair is its morning mess, there’s nothing styled here, the sweater is just off the needles and so not yet blocked, and it’s pinned together with yellow-headed pins — but LOOK! My Dark & Stormy sweater [rav link] is a fait accompli! (and p.s., that’s not really a muffin top around my waist, it’s the unblocked sweater pooching out. i swear. )
And do I love it? With the heat of a thousand burning suns. With the calories of a thousand triple-decker chocolate cakes. With the winds of a thousand level 5 tornadoes. With the spit of a thousand tobacco-chewing cowboys. With the seeds of a thousand watermelons. I’d say I do.
Janna, I think you were on to something. I needed to finish something. I haven’t had an FO in months, and finishing this has re-lit the fire in mah belly. Now I just want to grab Eve’s Rib and finish her off. I’m in a tough spot since I came to be crazy about sweater knitting; knitting small things doesn’t thrill me like it used to, but it takes me a long time to finish a sweater so the FOs are fewer and farther between. I’ll have to figure this out.
Au revoir, ennui! Hasta luego, malaise! Hello, new sweater!
just don’t get me started on this, i’m trying to get over it.
I either need to hit someone, have a drink, or take some drugs after reading this article, in which the Tea Party co-founder says that the Tea Party is a victim of the Arizona shooting, and it’s partly Giffords’ fault that she got shot. I don’t talk about politics on this blog — not because I don’t have political opinions, ’cause I do — but because I don’t know, it’s not the place, given that it’s alleged to be a knitting blog.
So imagine my delight to see this on the Serious Eats blog:
you'll want to click to enlarge this, as much as you can! 3 clicks'll get you to huge.
New York is represented by pizza; Texas by steak. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Some may be dicey, I don’t know how you feel about how well it represents your state, but it cleansed my mental palate after that previous thing that I can’t mention again or I’ll get all pissed off and…dang. Maybe wine.
Bali Ha’i may call you … “Come away…Come away.” I wish my knitting would call me. 
The post title comes from my daughters; Katie did a series of posts in December and we were so thrilled to get such regular posts from her. In January, the series was over and unfortunately so were the regular opportunities to hear from our Katie-girl. So Marnie suggested a few series options, one of which (since Katie is a new and enthusiastic knitter) was called “Knitta, please!” Katie actually wrote a post with that title, and showed her Habitat hat, by Jared Flood (her project page on rav, but she’s well into the cables now…..new picture please, Katie!)
So I loved that title, knitta please, but had no thoughts of co-opting it until it seemed such a perfect fit with what’s on my mind. So with gratitude (and apologies) to both daughters, I’m saying Knittas, please. Insight requested.
I don’t know what’s happened to me. I have fallen off the knit wagon and cannot seem to climb on again. It’s not the oft-reported loss of “mojo” one hears about so regularly, it’s something else. It’s not a sudden dislike of the endeavor. It’s not disinterest in what I am working on. I know what all it’s not, but I don’t know what it is.
Some of it may be due to the shift in my work life. Up until last July, I worked Monday through Friday, very clear division between at-work and not-at-work. When I was at work, I was daydreaming about knitting, and when I was not at work, I was knitting. Not-at-work meant whee! I can knit! I have this couple of days and I’m going to knit knit knit! OR, I’m home for the day, I’m going to [finally] spend the evening knitting! The time not-at-work felt like a reward, like the time that was FINALLY mine to spend however I wanted before I had to go back to work so I’d better get. on. the. stick!
Now, I wake up whenever I wake up, I drink some coffee, maybe have some toast, poke around on the internet, brush my teeth, and settle into working (notice that “get out of my pajamas” was not on that list ). I sit on the couch, my corner of the couch where I used to knit all the time, with my laptop on my lap. I’ll sit there for long hours at a stretch, focused and working hard. At some vague point — either when my mind won’t do it any more, or when dinner is ready, or when I have an appointment — I’ll kind of stop working. After dinner, after the cleaning up, I don’t seem to be picking up my knitting, and on the weekends, I sometimes work (sometimes a lot), but I don’t seem to be spending every spare moment knitting.
i miss you!
I’m at the last cuff on my Dark & Stormy, I want to finish that tonight, weave in ends and do a little finishing task and get it blocking tomorrow. I don’t have buttons, and the weather is so dismal I don’t feel like wandering around the button district so I don’t know what I’ll do on that front (ha, front, get it?). I absolutely love this sweater and cannot wait to wear it. It fits very well, it’s comfortable, the color is amazing (especially in dismal old winter), and it’s my birthday sweater. What’s not to love?! And I’m very close to finishing Eve’s Rib, if you remember that one from so long ago; I could easily have two new gorgeous sweaters like *that.*
I know it’s not a race — ravelry and blogs can make it very clear how much/how fast/how whatever everyone else is knitting. I know, who cares! In the time I’ve had Dark & Stormy on the needles, other people have started and finished two sweaters. OK, maybe they knit faster, maybe they have more time available to knit, and also see the “I know, who cares!” line above. But the thing that gnaws at me is the knitting ennui** I’m experiencing, the knitting malaise**. And there are two reasons I’m so troubled by it:
- I want it back! and
- This is, after all, a knitting blog and I worry that you’ll get fed up with the very clear lack of knitting that’s going on around here. It’s just that I like you, and really like having you around.
So if you have any advice for me on this situation, I’d really love to hear it. Has it ever happened to you?
** ennui, how often does one get to use that word?
Tulsa is better than New Yo-ork, Tulsa is better than New Yo-ork. ha!
Even though I really do get it, as a Texan (you know we think the sun rises and sets on Texas), I get awfully tired of New Yorkers’ attitudes that NY is the best at everything, and beyond the NY borders ignorance reigns supreme. The attitude is so pervasive it’s probably invisible to NYers. I think this is what they mean by the “New York state of mind.” A very small example: in an episode of Law & Order, the cops discovered a sweat shop filled with dead workers, and while looking at all the dead workers, they said “This doesn’t happen in NY, this happens in Texas.” OH YES, THEY DID.
So it was with a bit of smug pleasure that I just read the rankings of most literate cities in the US. And you know what? NYC isn’t in the top 10. In fact, it’s #26…..behind (wait for it) AUSTIN, and even behind Tulsa Oklahoma! No offense is intended toward anyone from Tulsa, but even I was surprised that Tulsa is more literate than NYC.
If you’re into this kind of thing, here are book recommendations for each of the top 10 cities.
Off to gloat quietly. Or maybe not so quietly. Plus, this is Wednesday, which means Union Square! In the aftermath of another snow storm! fun!!
in which the wordsmith uses words to say she cannot deal with any more words today
I’ve been doing deep editing of a dissertation proposal, and OH MY. It’s requiring every molecule of ATP in every cell just to keep my mind working hard enough. My brain is so fried, I’m taking a huge risk by picking up some knitting, but I just can’t work one more second. I’m around the elbow of the 2nd sleeve on my Dark & Stormy, so I’m coming into home plate.
About being an editor. When I was in graduate school, when people asked about my research I learned to be cautious in describing it. I studied what we can know by analyzing the words people use. As with most things academe, it was much more interesting in concept than in detail — people who are depressed use the pronoun ‘I’ more frequently than non-depressed people (but then again so do women, and coincidentally women are more likely to report being depressed than men). There are pronoun differences as a function of power status, a particular linguistic profile associated with cognitive complexity, more complicated pronoun differences associated with psychological and emotional change, etc. Really interesting stuff! But when I’d answer someone’s question about my research, they’d often grow quieter and quieter, and they’d frequently say that they no longer felt all that comfortable talking to me because I’d know stuff about them. (Note: you can either listen to someone, or count their pronouns. You can’t do both simultaneously. And you can’t really count their pronouns just listening to them, either. So it’s definitely not a problem…)
Even though I’m not a clinical psychologist, people who don’t understand the different types of psychologists sometimes say that they are afraid I’m analyzing them. I may be, but just in the same casual way you are! I suspect people who are clinical psychologists get this all the time. I’ll bet they also get people telling them their problems, hoping for free on-the-spot therapy.
And now that I’m an editor, people are often quite self-conscious with me about their writing. This one’s a little more complicated than the previous issues, because it’s always been true of me that I notice typos and incorrect grammar in everything I read. Chicken and egg, man. Still, there’s a big difference between noticing and judging, and this makes all the difference. When I read my friends’ writing, whether in an email or a blog post or any other format, I assume my mind registers any typos, but I don’t tend to really notice them because I’m not reading with editing in mind. And I definitely don’t judge them! The only time I do get judgmental and irritated is when there are a lot of errors in a published work. That’s bad form, publishers and authors. Well, one more: THE “INCORRECT” USE OF “QUOTATION MARKS” AND APOSTROPHE’S. (incorrect there for emphasis, as if the all-caps weren’t enough.)
The other side of this sword is that now, if I make a typo or use incorrect grammar, it has dire implications. If a potential client emails me, my email had better not have a single typo, or I’ve lost the job. I live and die by the same sword, not to be all violent about it.
Anyway, my work isn’t typically about spotting typos and incorrect grammar. That’s just proofreading. An editor does deeper work than that, expanding and eliminating, rearranging, making sense and better order, reworking paragraphs and sentences to make the author’s voice clearer and the story oh so much better. You kind of have to hold the whole thing in your mind at once. It’s great great fun, like solving a 3-dimensional puzzle that’s also a 4-dimensional Rubik’s cube. Trust me, that’s fun.
how many ways can we love Cee Lo? AND DONUTS.
Popping in for a very quick post while eating my impoverished little diet lunch. These two videos have my head spinning. An ASL version of Cee Lo Green’s F*^k You, made even better if that’s at all possible, and a piece on Cambodian donut makers in southern California. I have a soft spot in my heart for all things Cambodian….and, well, donuts. My kryptonite. My achilles’ heel. And now I’ve gone and revealed that to all of you. (mmm, donuts, part of the explanation for today’s lunch I guess.)
Awesome, right? R-i-i-i-g-h-t.
how was your weekend? i really want to know!
My weekend was so quiet, I couldn’t even tell you what happened. A little bread baking, a (too) little bit of knitting, three long telephone conversations with two daughters, sushi Friday night with the other daughter, wonderful chicken parmigiana last night, and …. um …. more snow. Here, then, are a couple of pictures that represent my weekend pretty well:
just enough snow to make the trees so lovely
and here's a bit of Riverside Park, my NYC love
Shots taken with my phone, which I’m still trying to learn how to use. But the pictures capture a kind of empty quiet that represents my weekend very well.
I do remember that I saw two amazing movies this weekend, and that they shared a theme. True Grit (yee-ha!) and Winter’s Bone. In both movies, a very tough young girl is on a quest related to a dead father. I’m sure you’ve heard about True Grit, and what’s not to love? Coen Brothers [love], Jeff Bridges [love], filmed in Austin and Blanco TX [love, for me anyway]. I had to keep wrapping my mind around the fact that the landscape was pure Texas, but they kept saying they were in Arkansas and the Choctaw Territory. If you know all three places, you’d know in an instant that something was wrong, that’s not how Arkansas and Choctaw Territory look, like, at all. But who cares. The only quibble I had about it was that the Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) was written as a silly character, not quite effete but a bit too dandy. Real Texas Rangers are tough, man.
But you may not have heard about Winter’s Bone, and I’m here to tell you that you should definitely see it if you can. I had to keep reminding myself that they were using actors, and not filming life as it was actually happening in Ozark poverty. If you’ve ever known people like this, and I have known them very well, you’ll be stunned at how right on it is. Crushing poverty and ignorance has a very particular flavor, a particular way of holding a face, holding the shoulders, expressing a thought, wearing the hair, living, and all the actors just hit their marks — even the young children. I know that hair and wardrobe go a long way to helping make a character real, but it’s the smaller things that make these people so real. It’s a hard, hard movie — don’t think for a second that it’s not, you have to be ready for it — but it’s haunting and visceral and very real.
So? How was your weekend?
Paging Alfred Hitchcock, paging Alfred Hitchcock.
Across the street from my apartment, on the 2nd floor of the building, something’s going on. From my couch, I can see the bedroom window. It’s a fancy one. It is more like a glass door, it swings open like that. There are no cross-panes, it’s just a full door-sized window. The owners open it when the weather is nice; they have one of those tiny little balconies sticking off the front of the building, just deep enough for a few potted plants.
For the last several days, the overhead light has been on 24 hours/day, and for the last 3 days, that window/door has been standing wide open. Last night I was up from 1-3am and there it was. Lights blazing, door/window wide open, despite the snow.
Now, the door/window has been closed but the curtain is still pulled aside and the overhead light is still on. I haven’t seen a person once; it’s not like I see them very often — it requires a coincidence of timing, I just happen to glance over as they just happen to be there. But it does happen often enough that I would’ve seen them by now.
So! Just enough ambiguity to leave me uncertain what to do.
Tomorrow: lots of knitting. Hope to finish knitting D&S, in fact. Fingers crossed.
remember Rosey Grier, the huge dude who did needlework? he’s got nothing on these guys.
Do you already know about Fine Cell Work? Prison inmates do embroidery, small quilting projects, needlework, and the program seems to have been transformational. One inmate you’ll hear, if you watch the little video below (which I highly recommend) said, “when i get angry, i pick up my stitches.” And don’t we know just how true it is, that doing our handwork shifts our deep selves, changes our mood, relaxes us, makes us feel productive, no matter what else might be going on.
The items are sold, and the quality is apparently exceptional; the first part of the video is too long, it’s there to emphasize just how great their work is, so be patient through it. One of the guards said, “we can’t just keep them locked up anymore.” What a concept, rehabilitation.
have you seen KW’s ridiculous tweets? Do you like soft pop? this one’s for you.
Hey, just this one more from me. I adore Alan Cumming (I got to see him perform the role of Emcee in Cabaret on Broadway, and I was right by the stage, close enough to see the glitter on his nipples. I KNOW!) and follow his blog. This morning he posted this, and it cracked me up, man:
a clever segway into prayer. and NO, I didn’t misspell segue, thank you.
I know the post title sounds like the opening line of a joke, of the “priest walks into a bar” variety, but the truth is, it kind of was a joke. Yesterday was Wednesday, which — of course — meant my weekly trip to the Union Square part of town. Union Square is often more ripe for storytelling than even the Times Square station, and that’s saying something.
There were three notable things, but by the time I got home late last night, I could only remember these two:
just like this, but inside a gloomy subway station with fluorescent lighting
As I was walking through the station, approaching me was an NYC cop riding on a tricked-out segway. If you’ve never seen one in action, let me tell you this: they don’t go very fast. I know the photo to the left has a blurry background, as if the cop is racing along, but that must be Photoshop. They just kind of putter. So here’s a cop, coming toward me putt-putt-putt, with a helmet on and a big blue and white headlight flashing on and off. (He does look kind of embarrassed.) And walking behind him – and staying at the same pace, which tells you how not-fast the segway goes – is another cop who is smirking at the segway-riding cop. OH how I wanted to take a picture of the ridiculous deliciousness of this, but by the time I got my phone out of my bag I could only have shot the backside of the walking cop. And who needs to see that.
Then, as I was nearly out of the station, I started passing people wearing red smocky aprons, the kind people wear at home depot-kinds of places. Like a sleeveless shirt that ties on the sides. Anyway, in white letters on the front of their little red smocks it said “Prayer Station.” What? A few steps later, I see the Prayer Station. It’s a little stand, like Lucy’s psychiatric help stand, but draped in red cloth. PRAYER STATION, it said, in big white letters. And all the red-smocked people were standing around, trying to hand passersby something on paper. I guess the idea is that you go up to the prayer station and they’ll pray with you. In heathen pagan NYC. I guess if ever there were a place this set-up was needed, it’d be the Union Square subway station in the NYU part of NYC. The funny thing is, even though this doesn’t fit in my belief system, I thought about stopping because I’ve got an issue going on that’s nearly killing me and I’m willing to try anything. In the end, though, I just kept walking. They were gone when I came back on my way home.
Dang, I really wish I could remember the third thing. It was so funny. All the way home I was muttering to myself, like some schizophrenic. “Cop on a segway, prayer station, and WHAT!” “Cop on a segway, prayer station, and WHAT?!”
Happy Thursday, y’all.
que sera sera — but who knows what that is.
Cases in point:
- one of my dearest friends in the world, age 41, in perfect health and with no known family history, had a major stroke just over a year ago and of course everything everything changed in that moment. now she can’t work, she wanted a child and now that’s not possible, she lost her verbal fluency (although it feels much worse to her than it seems to those of us who still love to listen to her, even if it is more halting), etc. she was (is) brilliant, and while she still is brilliant, her fluency problems make it so much harder for her to express herself. so all at once, in one unexpected moment, everything changed.
- another of my dearest friends in the world, newly married, crazy in love with his wife, happy life filled with plans — his mother-in-law, dear to him and his wife, learned she has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). it was like an atom bomb in their lives, worst for the mother-in-law of course, but big-time life-changing for my friends. they’re selling their home and moving in with her to care for her. all at once, in one unexpected moment, everything changed.
- i just learned that right before thanksgiving, an acquaintance’s wife was ok, then something was wrong, then it was diagnosed as kidney cancer, then she had surgery. in a 3-week period of time.
and of course we all know these things can happen (though they usually happen in other people’s lives), but we don’t even think about them unless we have to. we go about our daily business making all our happy plans, imagining the long string of tomorrows and next months and this summers and next falls. but of course what else can we do? it’s all there is to do – make plans, expect them to be possible at least, and shoot for tomorrow.
but they do serve to remind us — at least a day or two after they happen to other people — that life is fragile, and that we really should appreciate it and that today’s the day, man.
last night i had dinner with my friend who had the stroke. we were talking about the ways we can feel so sorry for ourselves, and how irritating it is when people say “but look at all the ways it could be worse.” (seriously, don’t ever say that to someone who’s dealing with something horrible.) (if you aren’t sure what to say, just say that, that you don’t know what to say but you are so sorry they’re having to deal with it. and also, don’t say you know how they feel unless you’ve had that same experience. and also, don’t say that you couldn’t deal with it if it happened to you — oh yes you could, just like they are trying to.) ANYWAY. we both realized that with enough time, we are able to think about all the ways it could be worse and find some measure of comfort in it — but not in the way you’d think. “it could be worse” stops the spiral of sorrow for yourself, but it does not make it better. it just stops it from getting worse. for a while, anyway.
so my long-winded point: today’s the day. don’t forget that.
ever wanted to see a NYC neighborhood in January?
Walk with me — I had to run a quick errand and took a couple of neighborhood shots with my phone (do we still call them that?):
my street, on the other side of Broadway - grim winter
see what I mean about the trash?!
one of the public schools in my neighborhood. I KNOW! Wild, right?
These weren’t taken in my neighborhood, but I think you’ll agree they’re very nice:
let's all make this New Year's resolution! I'M IN!!
ME TOO.
And with this, I quit making blog posts for the day!! Geez, get to work Lori.
did you know that God’s favorite book is Frankenstein? IT IS!
radiolab
Do you listen to Radiolab? It’s an NPR program, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. They take a topic and present interviews, stories, and musical bits about that topic. I’ve mentioned it before when I wrote about how weird my own thinking is, and if you’re on the home page of this blog (and not just a page with a single post), there’s a widget — the “favorite things” widget — presenting the most recent program. I have small potatoes complaints about the program now and then, but I have enjoyed every single program they’ve produced so far. I highly recommend it — get the podcast.
A program they did that stuck with me, actually a series of programs they did in July 2009, was about the afterlife. That program comprised 11 brief stories about death and what comes after, from an individual’s death to the death of the universe. And most points in between. They interviewed a biologist, a paleontologist, a geologist, a neurological psychologist, a man who survived a suicide attempt, a man who lost his partner, and they present readings of very tiny stories. None of it is about the “white light” at the end of a tunnel. It’s smart, and moving, and fascinating. A couple of the stories were written by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and writer and all-around Smart Dude. The stories were taken from his most recent book, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives.
This book doesn’t need me to help sell copies; the reviews are amazing (it’s even been turned into a performance at the Sydney Opera House, music by Brian Eno). For the most part the book is so strong, and I wanted to share a couple of things with you. (Out of 40 short stories, you can’t like them all, of course, but they’re mostly wonderful. It also reminds me of Alan Lightman’s great little book Einstein’s Dreams.)
The story that was read on Radiolab that left me thinking the most was called “Metamorphosis.” The concept: we have three deaths. The first is when our body dies, the second is when our body is buried, and the third is in the future, when our name is spoken for the last time.
And that’s the part that really left me thinking. I have no great aspirations to make my mark on something (other than the lives of the people I love, I hope I mean something important to them). I don’t need my name on a building (good thing, it’s a little late to start now!), or to be immortalized in some way. And actually, if you read that story, you’ll find out that that’s a path to misery. But to think about the moment when the last person alive who remembers me dies or never mentions me again, that’s stirring in some way. Isn’t it? I was thinking about this regarding my dad last month. I don’t think he had any friends, but aside from any he may have had, I’m the last person alive who knew him, really. He only exists in my memory, now, and when I’m gone it’s as if he never existed. (Not sure that’s altogether a bad thing.)
But the stories are definitely not all heavy. Some are funny, and some just have hilarious lines, like the opener of the story “Mary:”
When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.
After some questioning, you discover that God’s favorite book is Shelley’s Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands, alternately reading the book and staring reflectively into the night sky.
Well, that just completely and totally cracked me up. What a starting point. Not all the stories are about God, and some are about what that means, the idea of God.
I grew up in the Church of Christ (you know, “the only ones going to heaven”); fire and brimstone, we’re all worthless worms, not a lot of grace. And no stained glass or cushions on the pews or musicians, for heaven’s sake! Those things aren’t mentioned in the Bible!! (I always wanted to point out that neither is air conditioning, but we had that.) In high school I completely lost my faith, and any belief in God. Then I lived a few years as a Quaker and that meant something to me. Now, though, I just don’t know what I believe. Of course I have no idea what will happen after I die; I definitely don’t have that heaven, St. Peter, and God on His Heavenly Throne idea. I’d like to think that it’s about energy, that my energy will just become part of the universe in some way, but hell, I don’t know if I’d really like to think that or not. It’s a story to hang on to.
i’m tantalized, are you tantalized? we’re so tantalized! what a weird word.
ooh! that looks suspiciously like a finished sleeve!
mmm hmm. yep. that’s right. i did it. uh huh. me go girl. all riiiiiiight.
work work work BEANS work work work
Well, you know how they say you should be careful what you do on New Year’s Day, because you’ll do a lot of that thing throughout the coming year? I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but I worked all day long, like 10 hours. And I did the same thing yesterday. But I did finish the giant manuscript, hallelujah.
A photo that captures my weekend, therefore, would have to be me at my computer. BO-ring. So instead, here’s a shot of Texas caviar, the cold black-eyed pea salad I eat every New Year’s Day. It’s a southern tradition to eat black-eyed peas for luck, but guess what? It’s actually an ancient Jewish tradition. The Talmud recommends eating them at Rosh Hashana for prosperity in the coming year. Many Jews moved to Georgia in the 1700s, so of course that tradition came with them. Southerners recognized a good thing when they saw it, and adapted it to their New Year celebration (and adding the obviously un-Kosher ham hock, but that’s what makes it so good!).
So with no further blathering: Texas caviar. It’s damn good – meaty and spicy and limey and jalapeno-ey.
eaten with tortilla chips, so good it'll make you slap your mama
it’s just for today – all bets are off tomorrow!
I suspect I’ve arrived at this place for no other reason than I’m older. I mean, everyone is older — older than they were yesterday, for heaven’s sake. But I mean I’m older now, I’m 52 years old. As Sherlock used to describe me, in previous decades I had a kind of thrashing quality about me. Frantic, misspent energy, getting amazing things done but in a thrashing way. I always aspired to calmness and centeredness, but that’s hard to do when you’re a thrasher.
So, acknowledging that about myself, I return to being older. It’s really wonderful being older. Girls (by which I mean y’all who are younger than me), do not fear the 50s. This assumes nothing horrible happens to your health, of course – but otherwise, do not fear the 50s. Amazing things happen to you in your 50s. They certainly have happened to me. Even Sherlock agreed a couple weeks ago that I’m not a thrasher now.
Everyone’s talking about resolutions – either they’re making them, or talking about how they’re not going to make them. It’s funny that such a wholesale effort is focused on one single and specific day out of 365. But the thing is, every single morning it begins. You have this day; it’s your life, this day. This is it! What do you want to do and be?
When I wake up each morning, these are the things I think of:
- just for today, i’m going to walk slowly
- i’m going to remember to breathe, and regularly
- i’ll keep my shoulders down away from my ears
- when i’m spoken to, i’ll take a beat and think rather than just racing out a thought-less response
- just for today, I’m going to think about what I want and let that be part of the conversation too
- And what’s best for me, that’s part of it too
- I don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow, but at least once today I’m going to get up and move my body around. I’ll take a walk outside if I can, but if I can’t, a little bit of yoga will feel so good. Just for today.
It really doesn’t matter what you did, how you were, who you were yesterday. You probably did the best you could with what you had to work with. It really doesn’t matter what I did, how I was, who I was yesterday. I probably did the best I could with what I had to work with. Do my best today.
And probably I’ll eat M&Ms or something. I’m no holy man, dude! Probably I’ll also be impatient at some point, and say nasty things about people who walk too damn slowly on the sidewalk – maybe even out loud so they can hear me.
Katie is preparing to knit her second project – the Habitat hat, by Jared Flood. You know that’s pretty complicated for a new knitter! Knitting in the round, ribbing, loads of cables, and learning to read and follow charts. When I taught her to knit last October, I cast on for her, so she had to do it for herself this time. We don’t have easy video phone capacities; neither of us have computers with built-in cameras. So there were lots of telephone calls trying to work things out, she followed lots of YouTube videos (thank all of you so much, who upload those little how-to videos!), and she’s getting there.
Lots of work today; I’m teaching two sections of statistics, beginning tomorrow, so today I’m trying to finish editing a giant manuscript. Have a wonderful Sunday, y’all, and remember: it’s just for today.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote the best rule to live by
Auld Lang Syne — and New Lang Syne too! I just made that up.
Did you hear that in Barbra Streisand’s accent, the post title? That’s how I wrote it.
Ah, New Year’s Eves I have known. One little night, fraught with such imperative – must have fun! Must be memorable! AAAAGH!! Here are my most memorable New Year’s Eves to date:
- 1977, making macrame with my mother
- 1981-1987, setting the alarm clock for midnight (these were the baby years, so we were crashing the moment the babies went to sleep), waking up to kiss my husband and then going RIGHT back to sleep, with urgency
- 2000, the big one, the one that was maybe going to bring the world to a crashing halt. i was all alone, analyzing data for my master’s thesis, feeling extremely sorry for myself. the tv was on in the other room, and the arrival of the new year was being announced as it came: 2000 in Sydney! 2000 in Bangkok! 2000 in Paris, in London! it’s coming, it’s coming! Stock up on water and guns, aagh!
- last night – yesterday was not a great day, but at 11:50 I bundled up in my coat and lake-proof boots, and headed outside. I walked to Riverside Drive, and at midnight I stood in the middle of the street and looked at the sky.
I didn’t think 2010 was so bad, though I know a lot of people did. I have high hopes for 2011 but I’ve been a failure with the crystal ball often enough to know I’m not even going to make a prediction of anything, much less what I ‘plan’ to do. A day at a time, that’s my plan. Do the best I can every day, and then try to do the same the next day. Make as much stuff as I can. Enjoy the life I’ve been given.
For now, though, I’m off to bake a couple loaves of cranberry nut bread, then do a bit o’ house cleaning. And make some blackeyed peas, of course — I’m not crazy enough to tempt fate by not doing that!
blogrumps
another of my brilliant neologisms. or not.
I made up that word, “blogrumps,” and it’s not about the expansion of bloggers’ rumps (though that may be true, too), it’s a melding of blog and grumps. Most sincere apologies if I offend anyone, but I have a couple of complaints:
And thus concludes the end of my blogrump. My blog grump. Maybe I’m just grumpy because I accidentally put too much cinnamon in my oatmeal this morning. And the city hasn’t picked up the trash since Christmas Eve, and there’s just a tiny narrow path down my street between the giant piles of trash spilling out from both sides of the street.
Here – this’ll change the mood. I love these little boys.