Busy busy busy.
Reading a 962 page library book.
Gabby Giffords is furious, and so am I.
Liz Gumbinner, a/k/a Mom-101, is furious too, and has a list of things you can do.
Me, I used the list of twitter handles that the Huffington Post helpfully published, and sent a tweet to every single senator on that list - even though none of them represent me. Pissing in the wind, I'm sure, but at least I felt like I'd done something.
Remember Network? Even if you never saw the movie, you've probably heard the quote:
I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
If you want to get my dander up, all you have to do is buy a package of puff paste and stick it in my freezer.
I mean, not that I have anything against puff paste - other than I think it's often used as a misguided replacement for pie crust and is better suited to palmiers and vol-au-vents - but um, Good Wives? What the hell is a good wife?
Good: a general term of approval or commendation, meaning "as it should be" or "better than average"
Wife: 1) a woman, 2) a married woman; specif., a woman in her relationship to her husband
I am certainly a better than average woman, but if the puff paste in my freezer is called Good Wives, is that not attempting to replace me? Is that not suggesting that I am not a better than average woman?
Not content with spewing venom at my good husband, I looked up the brand on the intertubes:
In 1979, the two wives who started making these hors d’oeuvres in their homes thought the name "Good Wives" would be appropriate and fun. "Good Wife" was a term applied to a married Puritan woman, implying industry and integrity.
Okay. Puritans. Gauntlet thrown.
Goodwife: a wife or a mistress of a household" or "a title equivalent to Mrs., applied to a woman ranking below a lady
You know what? Those women had it hard. Housekeeping was arduous, childbearing was dangerous, church going was de rigueur. "A married woman in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian. On the war-torn frontier, she might also become a heroine". She was powerful, she was burdened. If her ordinary honorific was Goodwife, so be it, and the more power to her.
So I've simmered down, and I'm no longer offended by the poor innocent puff paste. But it took a couple of hundred pages for me to get there.
NOTE: All definitions in italics are from the Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, ©1970
I can't put a finger on why I love this image so. Is it the chicken feet? The magical triangles emanating from her fingertips? The bird on her head (which I like to think is a magpie)? Was I Lithuanian in another life?
It's a Lithuanian man-eating wood nymph, says Rima, but I can't help but think of Baba Yaga - she who flies around in a mortar and pestle and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs. I always loved that story - but Baba Yaga isn't Lithuanian. Granted, in the case of Baba Yaga, it's her house that has the chicken legs, not the lady herself.
Come to think of it, the moving castle in my favorite Miyazaki movie also moves on chicken legs. So maybe it's just that I have a great affection for chicken legs, chicken feet? I know I always want to take a picture when I spot a tray of them in the Asian grocery store.
Hmm.
In my kitchen, I have my mother's mortar & pestle. Where she got it, I don't know - maybe family, maybe a flea market. But it's cast iron, with shapely mortar well suited to the hand, and a barbell-shaped double-ended pestle. Grinding spices in it sets up an industrial musical hum, and I think of Baba Yaga beating her pestle against her mortar - "fly faster!" she says, "we've children to eat!"
Rima's wood nymph, Howl's moving castle, my little mortar & pestle - disparate notions, yet so oddly interconnected. My mind is a weird place.
An imaginary friend. Cancer. Death.
Sweet & caring, Dawn was. I never met her. I knew her via Twitter, Facebook, blogging, email - all those ephemeral vehicles, except that they aren't, they're real, my imaginary friend was real. And now she's gone, too young, too soon. I'm sorry I never met her.
These moments, such deaths, they demand something - or they feel like they demand something from me, anyway. Why? What?
Say it with me now: Fuck Cancer.
I just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes - a fascinating, hard to describe book. It starts in the late 1900s, and meanders from Paris to Vienna to Japan, and ends in the present day. Along the way, it follows a collection of netsuke and tells tales of the family that owns them, and how they've passed from generation to generation, and the attendant political and social history.
The author, who is the current day family member with whom the netsuke presently reside, is also a potter, a creator, a maker of objects.
How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? (p. 17)
Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters. (p. 348)
I sit here writing at the desk that was my mother's, and before that, in my father's family. It's an Eastlake cylinder front desk, with burled insets, and a glass-fronted bookcase on top, and a cornice atop that which is missing its finials - and it dates to around the time in which The Hare with Amber Eyes begins. How do I tell its story? What are the important parts? When was it built? Who was the first owner? Who else has sat in front of it, tucked notes in its cubbyholes, fiddled with its hardware?
Tucked in one of its little drawers is a scrap of paper ripped out of a shelter magazine. Once upon a time, before Antiques Roadshow, you could send in a picture of your antique what-have-you and get an expert opinion on its provenance. Someone, not my mother, because it isn't this desk, had asked about a similar desk; my mother, pre-Evernote, clipped the column as an aide-mémoire, and tucked it in its twin.
I don't know who bought this desk, but it's likely - given its age - that it was my great-grandfather. At the time that my grandfather was born, in 1900, the family was living in a white, shingled farmhouse. My grandfather went to college, got married, moved to a small house in the same town, and later - after his father died in 1933 - moved back into that family house with his wife and older children. At some point, the Eastlake desk was moved into storage in the garage attic. Before my great-grandfather died? After? Later, after my parents were married, and after they'd become homeowners in the early 1960s, my mother - in need of things with which to furnish their house - discovered the desk and convinced my father and his brothers to lower it down from the attic by block and tackle. She refinished it, and it stood in the dining room of their first house, and in the front living room of the house they moved to in 1972.
In 2012, the desk arrived in my living room. Gently, and with the great understanding that we were making an irreversible alteration, my husband drilled several small holes in the back - allowing me to snake a power cord and ethernet cable through onto the desk surface. Built around 1870, it suits my 1920 house and 2013 connectivity, still relevant these many years later.
I tell its story, because it will go on.
As I was reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, I found myself thinking that it was a peculiarly idiosyncratic book, one that wasn't right for everyone - though two different people had recommended it to me, both rather out of the blue. Oddly, though, since I've finished it, I've urged it on a surprising number of people: friends, co-workers, imaginary friends, and family. Maybe it's because it has something for everyone: a little art history, Jews in Vienna in WWII, lovely writing, expats in Tokyo, supple charm, aristocratic bankers in Paris, a family tree. I hope you'll read it too.
Like lots of people, I spend a good deal of time scratching my head about health care costs. I'm particularly sensitive on a personal level, because the health insurance that I have has a very high deductible - $10,000 a year for me and my daughter. We get a handful of things "for nothing", that is, outside of the deductible - like well visits, flu shots and mammograms - but we pay the "contracted" rate for everything else. That's things like sonograms, sick visits, lab work, prescriptions, casts, colonoscopies and all those other things one might need.
I recently had to refill two prescriptions for maintenance medications. I usually just get them at CVS, but I thought I'd check out the mail order website offered by the insurance company. Back in the day when I had an insurance plan with co-pays, you could get mail order drugs for less. One co-pay would get you 30 days at a retail drugstore, but two co-pays (double, that is) would get you 90 days worth of meds by mail order. Since there was a decent savings, it was worth the hassle of doing it by mail order.
Alas - it's not like that anymore, at least not through my insurance. While the pricing on the brand name versions of the two drugs was more or less comparable between retail and mail order, with mail order coming in slightly lower on the price per pill, I was a bit dumbfounded to find that the generic versions of the mail order drugs weren't less, they were actually A LOT more.
| Source | Quantity | Patient’s Cost | Cost Per Day | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DRUG A | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $58.94 | $0.65 |
| Generic | Retail | 31 | $9.22 | $0.30 |
| DRUG A | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $400.49 | $4.45 |
| Brand Name | Retail | 31 | $151.31 | $4.88 |
| DRUG B | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $101.85 | $1.13 |
| Generic | Retail | 31 | $2.52 | $0.08 |
| DRUG B | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $474.12 | $5.27 |
| Brand Name | Retail | 31 | $178.90 | $5.77 |
In fact, it's so much more that I can't see how anyone would actually want to buy their (generic) drugs that way. Besides, even though CVS isn't exactly a local company, buying my drugs at the CVS that's down the road apiece keeps some of my money local, in the form of employee salaries and rent paid.
What is going on here?
Sometimes, you just find yourself poking around the free! out of copyright! books on the Project Gutenberg website. Right? Okay, maybe that's just me.
But look, here's an egg.
You know, for Easter. It's not dyed, and it's not hiding under a hydrangea, but it's an Easter egg none-the-less.
Go forth, nibble the heads off of bunnies and make egg salad with the dozens of eggs you undoubtably dyed.
Happy spring!
BRAIN FLAME
Quite, in a virulent wafer but vacantly happens, the compensator –
Poised the beeps of minutes
not of he run
squat after I
to let infrequently on past that vast extravagance.
Achieving this can make your brain flame in different ways.
The moment was even and was not longer,
And it frowned dry.
There screwed the ended ocean in the plainness.
A friend, an earthy-crunchy friend (and I use that with great affection, being of the generally earthy-crunchy persuasion myself) recently wrote a post railing about the ingredients in a box of cereal, and the attendant false advertising that promotes cereal as healthy.
As it happens, her post appeared in my Reader[1] on a day when I'd eaten shredded wheat for breakfast. I love shredded wheat. The big biscuits, not that spoon-sized stuff. I love splitting the shards off of the big biscuits - which I usually eat one & a half of, because they come three to an inside sleeve, so one sleeve is two breakfasts if you're a little OCD. They have wonderful mouthfeel, it's fun to splinter them apart, and inexplicably, they always remind me of my grandfather, Owl.
I digress. The reason I mention the shredded wheat is because I'd been struck by the verbiage on the back of the box:
An ingredient list that is so good we have NOTHING TO HIDE.
Indeed, the only thing on the Post shredded wheat ingredient list is whole grain wheat.
But by declaiming so boldly that this box of cereal has nothing to hide, do they not tar every other box of cereal in their line up? Take Waffle Crisps: the first ingredient is sugar[2]. Or Fruity Pebbles: the second ingredient is sugar, and they're laced with artificial colors[3]. These cereals do indeed have things to hide, like sugar and hydrogenated oils and artificial colors and artificial flavors and purportedly "natural" flavors that were probably fabricated in a plant hard along the New Jersey Turnpike.
Eat real food, people. Pick your cereals with care, and step away from the Fruity Pebbles.
Sometimes I think I’m lacking some parental-sentimental gene, or maybe it’s a parental-protective gene. I didn’t weep when my kid went off to kindergarten (though I did take a picture). I don’t get verklempt at the school plays. I might kvell sometimes, but I’m just as likely to mock.
The other night, there was an orientation for parents of kids going to middle school next year. (I know, how did that happen? She can’t be that old.) So I went – isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? The email announcing the orientation session read, in part, as follows:
It's an exciting and sometimes stressful time as your child(ren) prepare to enter middle school next year. If you are interested, the following are upcoming information sessions pertaining to this transition.
What I realized partly through this waste of a Tuesday evening was that the Administration and/or the PTA think that the transition to middle school is stressful for PARENTS. This was all about using cute fifth graders in a scripted Q&A to assuage parents who are all freaked out about locker combinations, and walking down hallways alone, and OMFG guidance.
In the middle school my kid will attend, there are three guidance counselors and a psychologist and a part-time social worker – for about 700 kids. That seems excessive to me, excessive to the point of coddling all the precious snowflakes.
Did you have a guidance counselor in middle school? I’m fairly sure I didn’t, and if there was one in the school, it was to address the bad kids. We did have guidance counselors in high school, but there their sole purpose seemed to be to help navigate the college application process. (My guidance counselor suggested I should apply to a school that I didn’t even deign to consider a “safety” school – I always thought she was aiming kids low so that her stats would look better.)
I'm thinking that perhaps I'll skip the second orientation meeting, dubbed "Middle School 101" which includes such scintillating topics as "friendship/social development" and "how to prepare your child for middle school". Do I really need to waste another evening getting answers to questions I don't have? Does that make me a bad mother?
Really, all I'm worried about is how we're going to get her out of the house by 7:30 in the morning, given that most days she's asleep until 8.
You know that certain kind of spam you get when a friend gets hacked? It appears to be from them, it’s to you and a few other people you don’t know, it includes a link full of consonants that screams “don’t click me” (if you have good spam ESP) and it’s invariably from someone using either AOL or Yahoo.
I got one of those this morning. I opened up the email on my phone and did a double take. Email from a man who’s been dead a year. Subject: Hot Copy. But the truly eerie thing about it? One of the other “recipients” was my mother, who’s been dead for four years.
Are Eddie and Moky somewhere together, writing hot copy about Joyce and Eliot? I like to think so, though I know better.
In Massachusetts all the way
From Boston down to Buzzards Bay
They feed you till you want to die
On rhubarb pie and pumpkin pie,
And horrible huckleberry pie,
And when you summon strength to cry,
"What is there else that I can try?"
They stare at you in mild surprise
And serve you other kinds of pies.*
May your Pi Day be full of pie.
There's a part of me that loves the idea of shopping at thrift shops. No, wait. I actually do like shopping in thrift shops, at garage sales, at the consignment store, and hell, at the swap meet at the local dump. Your discard, my cheap treasure. But while I will look in those places for Christmas presents, clothes for my daughter, or wool sweaters to felt into projects, I don't have the patience to rummage through racks of clothes looking for garments for myself. It's just too daunting.
But I've discovered a thrift shop that I love. In a deliciously solipsistic twist, the charitable arm of Eileen Fisher started a "recycled clothing initiative" - in other words, a thrift shop that sells ONLY Eileen Fisher clothes.
GREEN EILEEN is reimagining the way we think about our clothes. Inspired by Eileen Fisher’s timeless designs and high quality fabrics, our recycled clothing initiative gives a second (or third!) life to your garment. By donating or buying a gently used Eileen Fisher garment from GREEN EILEEN, you are helping to revolutionize the future of how we buy and wear clothes.
I love this idea. I love that by limiting the merchandise to only Eileen Fisher stuff, they've curated the thrift shop into something inviting, gemütlich. Tops are along one wall, lined up like a rainbow. Skirts over there, dresses and pants elsewhere. I can walk in and know that I'll find something I want and even need.
I just finished reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. The subtitle kind of says it all: it's indeed shocking to learn about the fast fashion industry. I'm a fairly low impact consumer - I don't buy a lot of clothes, because I'm just not that interested. I've learned that cheap shoes aren't worth the money, and I'd rather have a one well-cut top sewn out of quality fabric than five glitzy, shoddy* $10 shirts that pill up the first time they go through the wash. But still, the book made me sit up and think hard about the clothes I buy my child, and about the relationship between "own less and pay more". Later, as I was pulling laundry out of the dryer, I sighed at the broken stitches on the neckline of a barely worn Target dress, and at the holes in the toes of some nearly new socks**, and at the horrid pilliness of of a polyester shirt my kid got as a hand-me-down. But then, inspired by a chapter towards the end of Overdressed called Make, Alter, Mend, I reinforced a threadbare spot on a pair of my jeans, and artlessly repaired a hole in my husband's jeans. A few minutes work with iron-on twill tape and a sewing machine, and I bought at least some more months for two pairs of jeans. That's mending for you.
Overdressed exposes the underbelly of fast fashion in a way similar to those writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser who've eviscerated fast factory food. What's the antidote to bad food? Eat real food, eat local, cook yourself. What's the antidote to cheap fashion? It's complicated, perhaps more so than the food issue. It'll mean paying more for clothes that are better made out of nicer fabric by people who are paid a living wage. Or, it means learning to make things yourself - if you have access to a sewing machine and a fabric store. You could start shopping in thrift shops, and altering the clothes you find to better suit you. You might start buying the Danskos that are both comfortable and long lasting - the polar opposite of the "cute shoes" at Target that give you blisters on first wearing, and fall apart on third. I'd like to think that you could shop at Green Eileen; alas, that's not likely to be a scalable concept given that its parent, Eileen Fisher, is a fairly small clothing company - I have a hard time imagining that they could have more than a couple such stores (there's only one now). You could buy on eBay; it operates like a huge thrift shop. Try ThredUp - they'll pay you for your kids clothes and you can either take the cash, or buy "new" stuff from them. Or you could find a clothing swap: my town has done it for Halloween costumes, and prom dress swaps are fairly common. Jeans, sweaters, blouses - surely you have some that a friend wants, and vice versa. Have a cocktail party and swap clothes.
What it comes down to is this - the entire matrix of how we live our lives matters. The choices we make about beef (feed lot supermarket vs. grass fed butcher) and tomatoes (slave grown in Florida year round, or local farm grown and only available in August) aren't all that different from the choices we make about clothing. Live lightly on the land, and mend the holes in your blue jeans before they get so big that you have to throw them out.
First it was the costume shop. This time, the theatrical shoemaker in my office building went belly up.
He had shelves and shelves of shoe lasts, old wooden forms, most speckled with nail holes, many still sporting masking tape labels with the names of the actors/dancers for whom he'd made custom footwear.
Some were for flat shoes; others for high heels. A tiny doll-like pair was for a dwarf; a huge size 13D for an N. Wyman. The shop smelled like leather and ancient cigarette smoke, hot metal and dust.
Like the costume shop, he went out of business because no one wants custom made shoes for Broadway shows. Or no one wants to pay for custom made shoes. Or no one needs them?
And now, no longer necessary for their intended purpose, a pair of high-heeled feet - 7C, Dottie Frank - sit on a windowsill in my living room, a reminder of the days of handwork and small factories, of craft and things made one at a time.
I’m cleaning up my computer's “desktop”, filing all sorts of electronic detritus, the great morass of random, poorly named files, mostly pictures. And, as it's not possible to do otherwise, the task is filled with aimless archeology. It's not enough to move the pictures to a folder; one must ascertain just what these pictures are.
And my heart stopped when I found this. I didn't take it; the girl did. But it's my once-upon-a-time room, the room I grew up in, the bed, the fireplace. And she used a Hipstamatic filter so it looks all far away and underwater and old and, oh, memory.
It might as well have been taken 35 years ago.
How can it be that it's no longer there?
