Purity

Content Advisory : this fictional work-in-progress takes place among college students in the 1970's and contains some crude language and jokes.

--

An October afternoon in 1973;
a dorm in a Midwestern women's college.
The 1st draft of this passage was written about a year ago.

--

It wasn’t till she reached Woodard that Audrey realized she was hugging the bookbag. She shifted it to her shoulder and yanked open the lobby door, which sucked an exquisite damp‑sweet scent out into the sharp October air.

Somebody’s huge vase of yellow roses, bearing a birthday-themed envelope, awaited its addressee at the reception desk. She stood awash in their marzipan fragrance.

A burst of laughter brought Audrey out of her trance. She ventured around the corner, where a cheery crowd of about twenty was decorating the lounge for the Woodard Halloween party.

“‑‑need to ridicule everything.” Stephanie Anderson stood at the piano, spacing construction-paper autumn leaves along a string of red yarn, and reprimanding someone.

There was Gwen, of all people, elbows on the piano and holding the yarn’s other end. She jabbed leaves onto it with a big darning needle and slid them down toward Stephanie.

That’s right, Gwen likes this Dana Girls school chum stuff.

Others chopped leaves out of red and gold paper, using little blunt grade-school scissors.

“I completely agree. We should save it for things that need ridiculing,” Denny responded. She glanced up from her task of drawing leaf veins. “Audrey! You can be Diligence!”

“Oh stop being idiotic.” Stephanie yanked leaves irritably.

Might have known Denny was the one goading Stephanie. Wow, this is a sight. Gwen, Laurie, Denny and Steph, working together on the same project.

Well, not exactly together. Far apart in a fair-sized crowd, actually.

“Here. I’m sick of leaning over.” Vickie abandoned a lounge chair, slid cross-legged to the floor and resumed leaf-cutting with her arms propped on the coffee table. Audrey shrugged off her coat and took the seat as someone else pushed orange paper within her reach and tossed a pair of scissors on top of it.

“Stop being tight-assed,” Denny answered Stephanie, using her favorite tactic of saying something rude in a bright, lilting voice. “Audrey, we’re getting up a group to come to the Halloween party as the Seven Holbrook Virtues!”

“It’s the Seven Ideals, and there’s nothing wrong with them,” scowled Stephanie.

“Seven Ideals, fine, whatever!” Denny turned back to Audrey. “You know how they used to elect them and parade them in gowns like a prom queen court? Laurie’s going to be Responsibility. I, of course‑‑“

Denny dropped her paper leaf, assumed a spacey Beauty Queen smile, and hoisted a boob in each hand.

“‑‑am going to be Charm!”

Rowena Something ‑‑Heidt, that’s it‑‑ a First Floor who sat next to Laurie in the leaf-cutting group, chortled. “Display those charms, now!”

Denny complied by pointing them in various directions like searchlights. This produced howls of laughter from the room, with the exceptions of the leaf-stringers.

“Charm,” said Stephanie patiently, “was not one of the Seven Vir‑‑ I mean, the Seven Ideals.”

“So tell us, what were they?” asked Kaaren Bishop, the Fourth Floor RSA, with convincing innocence.

Stephanie sighed. “Responsibility, Unselfishness...uh...”

“Diligence,” supplied Gwen brusquely. “Honesty, Service, Faith, and Love of Learning.”

“Holy shit.” Kaaren pursed her lips admiringly. “We’ve actually found a freshman who knows them.”

“Every freshman used to have to memorize them and pass a test,” Gwen stated, then eyed her string of paper leaves critically. “These are too uniform. We need to vary the sizes.”

“I can do that!” Rowena quickly began to trim down a leaf.

“Wait, I know,” said Denny. “What we ought to dress up as are the real Holbrook ideals. The things every ladylike girl really was supposed to conform to in the olden days. Charm. Obedience. What else...? Grooming!”

“Hygiene,” Laurie corrected.

“Yeah, that’s better!”

Laurie bounced in her seat. “Please can I be Hygiene? Let me be Hygiene, please!”

“Of course, dear,” cooed Denny, “you can be Hygiene.”

“Godliness,” suggested someone Audrey didn’t know.

Vickie spoke up: “Yeah, and Laurie has to stand next to whoever that is.”

It took a beat for most of them to get it and the laughter burst out again.

Denny flipped a leaf over and began to make a list with her felt tip pen.

“Hey,” said another of the serious types, “those are for the party.”

“It’s one leaf, for God’s sake. Okay, we’ve got...” Denny scribbled. “Charm, Hygiene....Obedience....Godliness. We need three more.”

“Wait! Purity!” Again, it came from someone Audrey couldn’t name. From one of the upper floors. Beautiful figure, big nose.

“Oh, but everybody had to be pure back then,” said Denny.

“It sti-still makes a good Deadly Virtue,” said Laurie.

“Yeah. Okay, you’re right. And whoever comes as Purity can wear a big doctor’s certificate of virginity.”

Gwen gave a hiss of disgust, tossed her threaded needle onto the piano with a clink! and stalked out of the room. Kaaren looked at her retreating back, then got up and took over the leaf-stringer job.

Denny ignored the drama. “Vickie, wanna be Purity?”

"Why me?” laughed Vickie. “Anyway I can’t afford a dress for this.”

“Aw, c’mon. We’ll get some of those ancient formals down at Community Thrift.”

Vickie shook her head. “I can’t even afford that. Wait, though, could we borrow costumes from the theatre department?”

Apparently Rowena was a theatre major. “I can maybe sneak out one dress for somebody, but we can’t raid the costume collection for all of them.”

“One’ll do fine” said Denny. “I can alter any thrift store dresses if people need me to. Audrey! Wanna be Purity?”

God damn my little girl looks. “Sheesh, can’t I be Godliness instead?” She took a completed leaf and used it to trace two more onto a sheet of orange paper.

“Come to think of it, you’d make a better Obedience,” Denny grinned.

“Yeah,” Audrey muttered, cutting. “Tell me to jump and I’ll just say Ooo, how high, and thank you.”

“Uh-oh.” Laurie got serious. “Bad day?”

Audrey shrugged. “My schedule might get fucked up.”

“In the middle of a semester?” Kaaren, the RSA, looked concerned.

“Only if I want to drop English and mess it up myself.”

She could feel Laurie and Denny watching her. She gave full concentration to trimming her leaf.

“Drop English.” Typical Denny, never asking a question, just dropping a statement in a skeptical tone so you had to explain.

Audrey shrugged and examined a finished leaf. “If I want to. I need to make some of these small, don’t I?”

Don't even read this whiny entry

Really, skip this entry. It will be nothing but whining, despite the fact that everybody's healthy, we're threatened by neither hurricanes nor wildfires, and plenty of people would be glad to have problems as dumb as this. I don't care. Just ignore this post.

Something woke us both at 3:30 AM. By the time we were fully awake there was no clue as to what had done it. Probably, I figured before I dozed back off, a last rumble of a storm that had peaked earlier, around midnight.

Woke at 7AM with a whopper of a migraine. Whimpered. Took stuff.

At 8, Larry marches into the room. "Somebody broke into the car. That's what we heard."

"Uh-oh! The gas tank!" My first thought. Gas theft is running rampant, often obtained by a costly gas tank puncture.

No, thank heaven, apparently they were just looking for money or small valuables.

But: "Did you leave any mail from banks or credit cards out there?"

The headache's better but I struggle to think. "I don't think so, but maybe we'd better call the police before I touch anything."

"Don't bother, they won't fingerprint the car for something this minor." I struggle to my feet. Dress. Go down to inventory the car junk.

It's really funny. We have nothing that anybody would want to steal. They'd gone through every pocket, glove box, trunk, all for nothing.

This reminds me of one of my long-ago moments of amusement, circa 1982, when I owned my AMC Pacer. Exited my apartment one morning to go to work and found that someone had considered stealing my car radio, until he discovered it was merely an AM radio and not worth the trouble. He was apparently so disgusted by my poor taste in electronics that he forgot his screwdrivers. A standard and a Phillips, there on the driver's seat. Nice quality set. I used them for years. But I digress.

So Larry calls the sheriff's dept. in case they want all the reports. And oh, they sure did. This is happening a lot. Kids, they say, just looking for money, credit cards, iPods, other things that people Much Less Intelligent than we are leave in their cars. They steal CD's too, she said. This also amused us, since, for some reason, they had left Mozart, the soundtrack to Lord of the Rings, and Norah Jones. I'm sure they really wanted them. They must have gotten interrupted. Yeah, that's it.

Anyway, I mix my protein shake and sit down to read comics online while we await their arrival. Larry goes out to meet them. Comes back in.

"Boy are you in trouble!" he says, but he's grinning. Turns out they did want to print the car. Turns out he told them "his wife" had opened the door and examined things. (Actually, he admitted his own examination of the car to them, but that wasn't the story I got!) Turns out he failed to mention that I wasn't going to until he scoffed at the idea. (Must...plot....revenge...). They dust and depart.

As this pseudocrisis winds down, we are informed that EIGHT out-of-town guests will arrive, starting tomorrow, in overlapping shifts.

And this while we have a flea infestation.

There's no excuse for having a flea infestation, with these cool hi tech monthly treatments. But...

(Here's something AA members are cautioned not to do: whine about how they're singled out for problems, "Oh I'm so special, nobody has it as hard as me-e-e-e!" )

But I swear, if Frontline, ordinarily a fantastic product, makes one bad batch a year, we will get it. Murphy's Special Law Just for the Pleistocene Family. But we did get a batch that did nothing, might as well have been Aquafina. (Yes, I'm going to tell Frontline, when I remember to bring the box upstairs for the batch number). And poor Scooter infested the whole downstairs with fleas he was not supposed to have. We switched to Advantage, he's flea-free, but the downstairs has become a biting nightmare. It's been professionally treated once, to no avail. Needs another treatment, but with small children arriving and Scooter needing someplace to escape the heat.... Well, we'll work something out. Scooter is fine in the foyer at night, so daytime, he can be out and about while the garage is...being dealt with.

At least the fleas aren't in the upstairs living space but I'm complaining anyway, o-KAY? Time for Excedrin.

So that's the news and the prospects for the week ahead. I want chocolate.

Great granddaddy's flag

46 stars, circa 1910, in rows of:

8 - 7 - 8 - 7 - 8 - 8 stars.

About one story tall - it's hanging off the second-story porch rail on its annual Fourth of July chance to wave.

Professionally preserved about ten years ago, with as much cleaning as could be done and a backing which enables single-sided display only.

Rainbow

Taken about 15 minutes ago

Random notes

See what I put up with?

OK, alright, I strew hair clips around the house, but sometimes they come in really handy. Like, when I have a half-eaten bag of crackers and all the chip-clips are in use. Why not just clip the bag closed with the nearest paper clip, piece of tape, or ... hey, there's a hair clip right at hand. One, OK, I put one on the bag to hold it closed.

But then I get up the next morning and find this.

8~)

It fell off a truck.

No, really, it did. This poor shrub was lying beside the road withering in the sun. We stuffed it in the car trunk and planted it here, guessing as to its species. Possibly a camellia, in which case it should like this partial-shade spot.

The new finch mix is popular.

Lousy photo, partly because I took it through rain, and partly because zoom really erodes picture quality in this otherwise nice little camera. But it shows every perch occupied, and somebody awaiting an opening.

And in this other bad photo, you can see a painted bunting there -- the brightly colored guy on the pole.

One of our dwarf peach trees has two peaches.

And last but not least...

...in trying to read the T-shirt that ronniecat's cartoon avatar was wearing (over on her blog but the avatar changes clothes frequently!), I went to yahoo! avatars ...

... and got distracted making one for myself. It shows just what mood my computer is putting me in. I'm trying to finish two editing projects before dealing with the problems, a decision I made before new problems with the cursor, and with highlighing text, showed up. To continue is a gamble, but I was so close to finished! But I do have backups...

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad

56 years today.

1952

6/28/08

Things

I grew up in this little house. I took the photo on a nostalgic visit in 1999, but it looked different in my time. From 1957-1966 it was white with dark shutters and an unsheltered concrete front stoop. The arrow shows my bedroom and the dormer I gazed out of on my own nightly version of Neighborhood Watch. Those front lawn trees were shorter then and their leafed-out branches filled my view, though winter's bare branches let me see starlight. On ground floor right is The New Room, a cozy den added on by my parents in 1963. I accidentally dropped a spoon between the floor joists while I was eating ice cream one evening during construction. I expect it still lies buried in the foundation like Tut's treasure.

This was our 4th dwelling in my lifetime, and there would be 2 more. But the little white house was "home." Catherine, whose post about home got this train of thought started, mentioned the importance of place as a "source" of who we become. This was the place, for me. I was aged 3-12 there, and that house was a constant through a decade of huge change.

I grew, learned to read, battled the multiplication tables, got sick and got well, believed in, and then stopped believing in Santa Claus, gained crushes and ambitions and lost my only-child status of almost 7 years when my beloved (eventually) brother was born. My concept of an orderly law-abiding world shook the day in 4th grade that our teacher announced the shooting of John Kennedy, and I came home to find my mother doubled over on a hassock with a box of Kleenex in front of the TV, crying. And it crashed with the suicide of my friend's dad down the street.

That house shaped in me a concept of home as a place that stayed stable while nothing else, within or without me, did. My room, the tree outside. The two elderly gentlemen who lived at either end of the street and would meet on the sidewalk in front of our house and argue politics. Salesmen and deliverymen who had the same route for a decade and became warmly greeted friends. The tiny neighborhood soda shop and newsstand where kids could stock up on Double Bubble and the new comic books ....and that I was still walking to later when I got interested in Redbook's short stories and the always intriguing "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column in Ladies Home Journal (housewife magazines fascinated me from about age 9 on. How I fell into that reading habit I have no idea).

I guess I had that feeling of permanence long enough to keep me looking, hoping to find it again. I never will. Not in a house or its contents. In each of 3 Opportunities For Growth -- a Charlotte flood, Hurricane Hugo, and a divorce -- more of my valued possessions have been culled out. Life shift after life shift shows me that the key is something I've just barely come to possess: a little eye of the storm inside me which houses my essential "self" and will let me transplant it somewhere new. Theoretically I could do this with no beloved memorabilia at all. Theoretically. I'm not there but I oughta be.

This could turn into a post about spirituality and how "this world is not my home," and for me that's part of the answer, but I see that calm eye in people of all brands of spirituality, and of no spiritual belief at all. New climate and terrain, accents and local traditions... for people who carry the calm eye within them wherever they go, these things are details. They color life, they don't draw its features.

Hurricane season is here again. I have a shelf of hard or impossible to replace books. Some are common printings that I value because they bear my grandparents' bookplates. Stuck between them is The List. It's my evacuation checklist of other treasured things scattered around the house. All I have to remember in a crisis is to go to the shelf, get The List and follow its instructions. I could get what matters most into a laundry basket. With advance warning, I can get secondary-priority stuff into a couple more. Things are the home I can carry with me, my seeds for transplanting to make a new home.

Like anyone who watches the news, though, I know a bit about disaster. Lead time is a luxury many don't get, and no inanimate object can be counted on. I really hate that thought.

We dream about our eventual mountain retreat, the place that will be our "real" home. "Someday," we say, "when we can get some land, we'll make the exact home we want." Once we pay off some other debts (and $43 fill-ups for a Civic ain't helping), we plan to look for a spot, maybe with a secure little storage building, and begin to move some of our most cherished belongings to it, out of storms' reach. But I know it's an illusion. One good mountain wildfire could sweep through. Larry, who's been through his own versions of the loss-thing, thinks it's possible to regain a lot of that safe and settled feeling, and I hope so but pessimism is my old buddy. I'll always expect the world to be lurking on the doorsill trying to pick our locks, but if I can expand my inner eye-of-the-storm, I can ride it out.

Writers and readers

Tuesday, 14 March, 1944

Dear Kitty,

Perhaps it would be entertaining for you--though not in the least for me--to hear what we are going to eat today. [1]

--
In 1966 I read Anne Frank's Diary for the first time, and encountered this unforgettable line.

If you're wondering what could be more forgettable, believe me, I wondered too. Why wouldn't this bit of trivia leave my head? Why did it seem important?? It was one of those writer-to-be wake-up moments, but I was 12 [2], and I didn't recognize it at the time.

I'd run into plenty of entries about the minutiae of her daily life in the 100 pages before that, but here's where she kind of broke the 4th wall of diary-keeping and seemed aware that her readers would be living different lives from her own. It might not even have been the first time she did it -- it's been some decades since I read it -- but it's the one that got through to me.

So I blink my eyes and ka-foof! [3] it's 40+ years later and I'm in this Jetsons world I never imagined, where I can write anything I want, ignore rules and conventions, put it online for free, and even get read.

In the land of Twelve Steps we're urged to live the examined life, to really look at what we do, why we do it, and why we feel what we feel. When other bloggers feel they need not only to take time off but to delete years of carefully crafted and often excellent writing, I don't question it. OK, that's a lie. Let's reword it: I acknowledge that I have no right to question it. They're examining their lives and deciding accordingly.

I'm examining mine too, though, and wondering what the "negatives" of blogging are.

The time it takes from Real Life? Well, yeah. The way it satisfies a need to express myself, which bleeds energy off of writing a book? Yeah, it does that. That it elevates the trivial?

But Anne Frank proved that the trivial can be very interesting and even important. It can be that little glob of paint I spotted in Bruegel's The Harvesters, last time I visited the Metropolitan Museum.

I used to sweep through museums like a Roomba [TM], but last time, I got smart and realized I wanted to see less but to really see what I looked at. I love Bruegel, so I sat and studied it without imposing a time limit on myself. There among the meaningful brush strokes was this little spot where the paint had kind of glommed before the brush moved on and it was breathtaking. It connected me with a "trivial" moment when the paint was wet, 400+ years ago.

Most of my blogging friends live everyday lives that are very different from mine and I enjoy that window on their worlds.

Criticism?

So far I've run into no outright nutjobs, and if I do, there are powers that I could wield to remove their access.

As for honest disagreement .... I reallyreallyreally hate it, OK?!! I hate when I'm an idiot and someone calls me on it, but blogging makes me think my stuff through and by the last draft, I often end up with a more balanced view than I started with. Plus I need badly to face it as an Opportunity For Growth [4].

I speak for nobody else, this applies ONLY to me, but I see these not as negatives of blogging, but as negatives of me. Temptation to give short shrift to my real life, to take easier paths, to avoid criticism. It's all personal baggage and it'll go with me into anything I do.

Used rightly, blogging can hone some of my writing skills, and teach me something about discourse. Maybe even interest readers but that needs to follow my process, not lead it.

A delicate balance to strike. Its important to get tough on oneself, especially when it comes to blogging, because it's so easy to hold oneself to no standards at all. This power, this freedom to say anything any way, could tend to corrupt.

But it can also corrupt me by making me try too hard to pre-empt criticism. My perception suggests to me that I have a soul. And that it needs nurturing. Experience has taught me that letting others tell me what to say, and how, starves it.

When am I making my writing better, and when am I failing to be true to my vision? A blog can be a good place to repeatedly examine that issue and practice a healthy balance.

For its first six months or so, I concocted a few blog entries to entertain myself and blow off steam, but nobody knew it existed. Then people started discovering this thing.

It wasn't by design , but it was probably where I needed to go next. Writing to engage reader interest is a skill I need to hone. But I also need to stand strong against pandering to The Market.

So here's an entry from last December, that I never posted because I thought it would bore people. It's about hymns! Scintillating! 8~) I'm putting it back there in mid-December where it would have shown up, so here's a link.

I could be wrong about reader reaction, but that's totally NOT the point. I need to hold myself to high standards, but not post to please. Otherwise I'm squandering this opportunity.

--

[1] Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl. The original 1947 version I grew up on.

[2] One proper-form rule I get to break is that of spelling out numbers instead of using numerals. I hate spelling out numbers. Vive la révolution!

[3] I also get to make up any weird onomatopoeia I want to.

[4] Opportunity For Growth started out as a suggestion for healthy attitude adjustment toward coping with life's problems. But it's become a sarcastic 12-step-program euphemism for Miserable Experience. When you complain, you get told to stop your Pity Party. But word it as, "I had an Opportunity For Growth this week," and you get lots of sympathy: "O no! I am so sorry!" etc etc.

[UPDATE] eBay feedback changes - "neutral" ain't neutral no more, folks!

An UPDATE is called for!

Sincere thanks to my friend Christy for passing along to me eBay's announcement that this policy will be changed back to the logical stance of neutral feedback being.....neutral!

The seller outcry -- and maybe some protest by buyers who meant "neutral" when they said "neutral" -- must have been substantial!

--

One day in 1999, Larry came home from work early, which was very weird. He worked at a federal government office in a Trenton NJ neighborhood. Public service US government offices keep exact hours. Something serious has to happen to alter that.

"What..what..?" I sputtered.

"The mafia is burning out the independent crack dealers on our street, so we were told to close up early and go home," he explained. Fires were going up in various rowhouses across the street.

It was around then that I started thinking we oughta notch up our (then) part-time online business to make it a full-time career for us both.

We were practically a ground-floor eBay seller, starting in 1998. Our pride was, and still is, actually caring about our customers. It shows in our feedback.

I've never believed that "the customer is always right." We've run into too many wackos. But in practice, you're crazy to try to reason with unreasoning people, and you're better off biting the bullet. We had a no-questions-asked return policy and never got a negative feedback.

Never. In 10 years. Not one. Our score was 100% positive.

An excellent seller can have a 99.8. It's not a catastrophe. I did cherish that 100% and what it meant to buyers, but I also knew that its days were numbered. No matter how great we were, a crackpot with our name on him had to be out there somewhere. Someone who'd accept no concession that even we, willing to go the extra mile, could in good conscience provide. Or who wouldn't even ask for satisfaction before hitting the red button.

But I was completely unprepared for it to be eBay's managers who bitchslapped us by changing the tally value of feedback categories, and applying it retroactively.

Somebody gave us a neutral four months ago. The toy Matchbox [TM] car he bought, which we'd called 1:64 scale, was actually scaled a bit smaller than true 1:64, as most Matchbox items are. They vary. When we asked why he hadn't requested a refund or some other compensation, he wrote back that the scale did not actually matter a bit to him. But the neutral sits there. Until now, it was .... neutral.

Recent changes to their feedback system have made lots of news but I can't seem to find any outrage over this particular new policy. To any sellers dropping by - you may have missed this little gem, because other changes in your score masked or absorbed it.

"Neutral" feedbacks now count as negatives, against the seller. Yes. Really. Click any seller's feedback page to look at the new calculation method:

Positives are now a percentage of all feedbacks.

________positives_________
positives + negatives + neutrals

Of course eBay doesn't word it as transforming neutrals into negatives. O no! They are merely Doing The Right Thing To Create Great Buying Experiences on eBay!

Click for more condescension by eBay spokesman Brian Burke:

"We know that seeing your positive Feedback percentage drop is hard," he coos.

No. It is not "hard." It's inaccurate.

They simply "include" neutrals in the calculation, he says.

No. They do not merely "include" them. Neutrals are now placed in the denominator, counted equally with negatives. They now carry the same score-lowering weight as a full negative.

The carefully crafted example he gives is misleading. See, Burke tells us, if two sellers have the same number of positives and the same number of negatives .... but Seller Two also has fewer neutrals, the score needs to reflect that Seller Two is "providing a better overall customer experience"!

Aw, I feel terrible for questioning their much greater wisd-- But wait a minute.


Here's how that works out. Say you have :

100 feedbacks;

_____98 positives_____
98 positives + 2 negatives

= 98.0

_____98 positives_____
98 positives + 2 neutrals

STILL = 98.0

Other feedback changes may make my life as a seller harder, but they're at least logical. They were instituted to boost buyer confidence. Well, OK. Somebody wins, even if it's not me.

But this one makes no sense. These two sellers would have the same rating. Buyers whose Great Buying Experiences eBay is so terribly concerned about, aren't getting an accurate picture by eBay calling neutrals and negatives equivalent. Nobody frikkin' wins.

Buyers issued neutrals under ebay's own rules -- that they would neither boost nor lower a seller's rating.

eBay is not explaining why they now want to override that choice, but -- and I'm speculating -- this seems to be an additional measure to compensate for the past when some buyers wanted to leave negatives but feared retaliatory feedback in return.

If so it doesn't wash, people.

For one thing, it's a blanket change, and assumes that all neutral-clickers really meant negative, and that no seller has the right to the rating he was originally given. That no buyer ever really felt neutral. That it was never about honest misunderstanding or minor nuisances that left the buyer with no complaint once they were cleared up -- which is, in fact, exactly what neutrals are likely to be.

For another, eBay has already disabled retaliatory feedback. Sellers can't give any but positive feedback to buyers anymore.

I don't know whether I'm more baffled by eBay's belief that they need to penalize previous neutrals equally with negatives, or by their belief that they are entitled to do it.

Legally entitled - maybe. Sure, these fat corporations can make their own rules, but in this case, they are not changing a rule from this point on -- they are taking a term that meant one thing, redefining it to mean another, and applying that to past uses of the term.

If the yes-or-no system wasn't adequate, it's wrong to reassign a value after the fact.

And it's nonsensical for that value to be identical to the value of another choice.

They could split every neutral. Add half a point to the positive numerator and half to the negative in the denominator. That would "include" it.

They could eliminate "neutral" and have buyers simply give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. But if buyers dislike having to use simple extremes, that's understandable.

Other sites, like amazon.com, use a 4- or 5-choice spectrum. This would mean that "pretty good" and "great" wouldn't need identical values. Neither would "not so great" and "terrible."

--
Full permission is granted to any reader, to quote from this post. Use it.

A song for today.

Using dreams

Once in awhile, no matter how long ago we quit drinking, we AA members still have a "using dream," in which we begin again, drinking or drugging. And wake up with a start and a cold chill, wondering, "Did I just flush my life down the john?!" For me they come at the rate of a couple times a year. Including last night.

Why? What does it mean? Is it just a way to renew my feelings of gratitude for the freedom my program gives me? Or is it a warning?

In my version of this dream (which may be pretty common), I don't dream that I'm overwhelmed by temptation. I don't say, "I want it, I mean to have it, pour me one!" Nope, in my using dreams, somebody hands it to me and I swill it without thinking. My dreams aren't about conscious decision-making, but about dimwitted unthinking auto-pilot behavior.

So possibly I have the dream when I've been playing with fire in some way. Maybe by longing for abuseable substances, but maybe with some other form of bad life management. Ignoring a cautionary message my smarter self is trying to hammer through my thick skull.

My latest temptation -- boy my blog is one thrill after another these days -- is cashew butter. Hey, for me it could be the road to perdition.

But it's s-o-o-o-o good. Oh wow. The colors.

I discovered a year and half ago, through dietary experimentation, that I'm allergic to peanuts. This was hard to face. Very.

I have to eat sugar-free and low carb. I hate low carb. In heaven, I fully expect my reward to be the ability to eat all the bread, potatoes, and flaky buttery piecrust I want. But it ain't an option in this life. On low carb, one can and should do small, sensible amounts of healthy complex carbs. I hate small sensible amounts.

Peanut butter is one thing I both loved with a passion, and was allowed on the diet. Besides, I've eaten vats of it all my life. This is one reason that I never attributed the -- um --- distress I experienced to my beloved peanut butter. A late-life allergy to peanuts is unusual but it happens, and I faced facts and gave it up.

Yesterday in the grocery store, I picked up a jar of cashew butter. Carefully, I checked the label. Organic stuff, and not processed with peanut oil, which nuts-in-a-can usually are.

Should I try it? I weighed the risk: at worst, I'd be looking at about three days of itchy misery but no danger, if my system handles it the same way it handles peanuts.

Took it home. Stirred it up. Spread it on a single slice of ultra-healthy whole grain bread, thickly enough so that I kept having to catch the ooze and lick it off my finger. It was delicious. It was magnificent. Forgive my emoting, but it's been a long, long time. [YouTube alert -- for those with slow connections]

By nightfall any reaction would be fully underway. I told myself, "Even if you can eat this stuff, that doesn't mean you can gulp spoonfuls out of the jar every day and overdo it, like you did the peanut butter. You need to do this sanely. Sensibly. As a treat, not a steady diet."

No allergic reaction. O joy! I missed my peanut butter so much, and here was a gift from God to compensate me.

That's very much the way I felt about alcohol when I first discovered it. And maybe that's why I had the using dream.

Overindulgence in cashews actually could be dangerous, if I end up in the emergency room with an allergic reaction. Botanically, cashews are nuts and peanuts are legumes, but most people with peanut allergies are sensitive to tree nuts too. Since there is a difference and since my allergy is mild, hives-oriented, and late-life, it was worth a try, but if I developed one sensitivity, I could develop another.

The question is: Can I do cashews in moderation, or is my basic tendency to overdo everything gong to take over? Will this treat be like alcohol, which I have to stay entirely away from, or like carbs, which I have to learn to do in moderation? We'll see.

Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do

Lucky readers! Here's a post almost as exciting as watching water boil.

A current bandwagon onto which plenty of cartoonists and news sources seem to be jumping is that of mocking bottled water buyers : "Why, bottled water is nothing but tap water sold at ridiculous prices to idiots!"


On the left you see the end product of 2 liters of my local tap water boiled down to half a cup.

On the right is 2 liters of the much-maligned Aquafina [TM], boiled down to, actually, less than one-half a cup. PLEASE NOTE: I tried to to catch the pot and remove it from the heat at the exact same point for each type of water -- that is, I tried to distill each to precisely one half a cup -- but waited a minute or so too long.

Yet it only proved my point better. The Aquafina is more concentrated, and yet still much clearer than the tap water.

My point is not to claim that the cloudy ingredients in the tap water are toxic. I have no idea what they consist of. There is no need whatsoever to condescendingly inform me that H2O containing NO dissolved matter is virtually nonexistent, that My Government Cares About Me, and that "simple minerals" are harmless and nothing to worry my pretty-old little head over.

I don't claim otherwise.
Another concession: The bottled water industry is self regulated, while municipal water plants have to meet government standards! Yippee. Well, anyway, no argument there either.

Nor do I claim that the environmental toll exacted by the process and by the plastic bottles is worthwhile. I don't know. To determine that would require more than just the hard figures of environmental cost. It would require an equally hard set of figures as to the benefits of drinking the bottled stuff.

Those figures don't exist. They probably cannot exist because :

1. health impact caused by gradual exposure and by delayed effects is hard to quantify;

2. the water in each service area differs, both in processing technology used, and in the stuff the raw product contains;

3. health effects also differ from person to person. Those seriously troubled by kidney stones, for example, need to avoid many dissolved minerals that are harmless to most.

My one and only point is that "purified" water is not "just" tap water. The price I choose to pay for a bottle of Aquafina is for the purification process, not for its source water.
However mentally challenged we may be, this concept is simple enough that most buyers do kind of grasp it in our slackjawed way.

That means the pundits probably know it too. This is what bothers me. There are honest arguments with which to criticize bottled water. But the cute images of a tap directly filling a name-brand water bottle are dishonest arguments and insult my intelligence.

Meanwhile, I dislike the taste and smell of my local water. I do not entirely believe in the healthiness of this yellowish muck in it. I am sure it meets government standards but I have long taken government standards with a grain of sodium chloride, as being based on acceptable risk weighed against unavoidable budget limitations. They define "acceptable." I don't get to.

I'll keep buying it and taking the bottles to the recycling center. That'll have to do.
--
If I need it, here's my disclaimer: I have no financial, nor any other, tie -- political, business, family, NUTHIN' -- to any product, company, or agency mentioned in this post. It is purely my opinion, and is strictly about my personal observations and preferences.

Stymied [update]

This will be a rare spontaneous post from me. Usually I work 'em over thoroughly, rewrite them at least a couple times before posting, but all my plans have gone awry.

I will never buy another PC. Ever. It's Mac next time. This [bleeping] computer has (again) developed a host of problems. My work plans idled, I said to myself, OK, I'll do a blog entry I've been meaning to do. That's when I discovered that I can't upload pictures either.

But I can still scan! So for lack of anything better to do until a solution -- and that might mean taking it in to the shop -- here's a blog entry I did not plan, an assortment of scanned photos to ... um ... ponder.

Two pictures that I couldn't find for My Unillustrated Robert Goulet Post have turned up.

Me (in white) and my cousin Emily (in blue): The not-very-matched set of little girls our paternal grandmother -- who had two boys -- had always longed for. We're about 11 and 12 months old, respectively.

And a later pairing. 1959 is a guess. We look about 5 or 6. She got to have a ponytail, while short cuts were my lot in life. I'm still rebelling. Our plaid dresses do not match precisely, but you can see the effort at coordination. Whenever our clothes had a theme like this, it probably meant that our grandmother had bought them for us.

In unrelated scanning: Snakes are fire hazards??

Why did I take this picture? I have no idea.

Wait! Guy I was dating had picked the flowers for me. That's it.

Around the same time, I took this one as kind of a humorous still life. My unwashed dishes, spring 1988. I stood on the opposite countertop, my head nearly against the ceiling.

Last but definitely not least, my dear little cat Alpo, 1995, lounging in my Wilmington, NC, apartment window, as I look up from the walk below.

I'm afraid that's all the entertainment I can provide for now. This miserable machine may be in the shop after tomorrow. If it weren't so filled with toxins I'd be sorely tempted to dump it into the marsh.

---

An Alpo Update - Sherwood in a comment mentioned that Alpo looks like a tuxedo. On looking back at my initial post about Alpo, I see that he does look rather like one in both pictures. Neither gives a good view of his true colors, which were really dark tabby and white. This early 2000 photo shows him more clearly.

Our older daughter does share her life with a lovely tuxedo - Larry gave her an entry in the cat blog.

Meanwhile some computer problems are solved, thanks to Larry! Others persist. My Pakistani tech support friend is getting very tired of me, but hasn't yet run out of things to make me do. I tend to gravitate toward all-or-nothing solutions and hadn't really thought about Linux, but I may need to look into that!

Fear and popcorn. On Expelled, part II

Sheesh, days of reaction to Expelled stewing in my brain and I still can't distill it down into a blog entry that isn't book-length.

FIRST, apologies for any missing names, or inexact words of speakers I quote. Each scientist interviewed was name-captioned at least once, but I wasn't taking notes in the dark theater, and they were not always identified each time they appeared. The website covers a few but not all. I doubt if I will spend another $6 (bargain matinée), though I might rent Expelled later for another look. I'm trying to be vigilant in my quotes and represent them accurately.

I wonder if my fellow believers really know what they're getting into, when they ask that Intelligent Design be taught to students?

The film at first seems to make a reasonable request. Ben Stein walks all over the world in his suit and sneakers, interviewing scientists. The film time he gives to all his interviewees, on both sides, is fair. He doesn't edit his "opponents" to make them look stupid. Occasionally they fumble the ball, and I can't blame Stein for using the footage. I'd use it too.

He talks to scientists who claim to have been ousted from teaching positions for such seemingly mild transgressions as mentioning the existence of the ID point of view.

If they really get fired for such mild acknowledgements that ID exists, then that's obviously out of bounds. But Stein doesn't tell us the facts of their cases. I'm not saying they all are guilty, all I'm saying is the film didn't put that to rest.

Then there's another very reasonable statement from Dr. Richard Sternberg. I thought, he says, that science was free to ask any question and then follow the research wherever it leads.

It should be. No argument from me, but as the film progresses, it becomes clear that this is not what Stein or his pro-ID interviewees really want.

The specious equation of Darwin's theory with Nazi atrocities (discussed in my first post about Expelled) was a big mistake on Stein's part, and should be resoundingly denounced by Christians everywhere. Dehumanization of other races or the "unfit" has existed throughout human history, it is not something Darwin caused or advocated.

Darwin did state that:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world." - Darwin, Descent, vol. I, 201. [Source: "Quote Mine Project" Scroll down to quote 2.10]

For a knowledgeable view of the issue, Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, offers this piece on his website.

I maintain that the use of Nazi extermination in Stein's film to vilify Darwinism requires equating genocide advocacy with the theory that the Nazis hijacked and mutated from a benign cell into a cancer. It's inaccurate and wrong to do so.

It indicates to me that a fair hearing for ID isn't what ID proponents want. They want Darwinism vilified. If science departments are acting paranoid and ousting any professor who whispers "ID," they're beating a dandelion with a tire iron, but the hidden ID agenda to vilify evolution makes their reaction, NOT justified, but understandable.

See, the real controversy isn't about advanced-level Origins research, either in astrophysics or evolution. The trouble is that the controversy is about us commonfolk. It's about what we should be taught. Stein mocks the nanny mentality with an ancient film clip in which some blowhard says, "People can't make decisions for themselves." But in the realm of advanced science, is that an entirely crazy statement? I'm not equipped to evaluate DNA research or theoretical physics. I took my last science class as a high school sophomore. 1969-70. Yeah, really.

Time out to warn any unfamiliar readers dropping by that I am an avowed Christian. I feel quite certain that there's a creator God.

But Darwin doesn't bother me. His theory has been modified through much new knowledge in the past 150 years, and if we let facts pull us forward, then any untruths in it will fall on their own. So God is a fact? Great, then we need not worry about any line of inquiry that follows facts, right?

I fear that there are a lot of believers who hear Richard Dawkins and others say that their scientific journey killed their belief in God. Then the believers malign the science, thinking "If it's creating atheism, it must be wrong." The film runs with this.

Well I say: if anyone thinks that premature atheist conclusions formed by individuals mean that the science which brought the conclusions about is evil, then they're thinking way too small. And drawing a premature conclusion that there's hard data supporting an Intelligent Designer at this point is just as wrong. There could someday be proof, but if we make a claim that later gets knocked down, that can even do greater damage to faith.

One pro-ID interviewee whose name I missed came right out with it: Maybe, he said, we're going about research the wrong way. Traditionally one investigates and eventually the results lead one to forming a world view. But maybe we need to start with a world view and then do the research.

Wrong turn. The answer comes at the end, not the beginning. We can't know where God ends and physics and chemistry take over, until we follow the whole scientific trail back to it. We're way way early on that trail.

Here's how it looks to me. Human learning is like building an arch, and the answer to the God question is the keystone. Placing either atheism or ID in the classroom, considering humanity's current level of knowledge, is like trying to place a keystone without completing the piers and the arch-stones. You can't build an arch backwards.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

And that is why the insistence of believers that science courses address that issue -- lay a keystone right now -- is out of order, out of line, absurd. Any teacher who is claiming to understand and define the nature of that keystone is out of line, and yes, that goes for defining it as a godless scientific force, as well as for defining it as God. Either one deserves the to lose credibility, if he/she calls it anything other than an opinion. Its nature is way beyond our comprehension. When humanity is ready for that stone, it will be ready for us.

--
Illustration from: Winston's Cumulative Encyclopedia. Charles Morris, Editor-in-Chief. Philadelphia and Chicago : The John C. Winston Company, 1914. Vol. 1, s.v. "Arch," unpaged.

On Expelled, part I

There's a lot to say about the movie Expelled. I saw it today and it's percolating in my mind and will be posted. But one thing needs to be addressed first.

In this film, Ben Stein, in a quest to defend professors who acknowledge Intelligent Design, takes us to a Nazi insane asylum.

It comes fairly late in the the film. Up until this point i disagreed with much of the film, agreed with or respected a few things about it, and felt i could write about it fairly with no need to express outrage.

But from a relatively low-key, calm and reasonable, "fair and balanced" plea for all views to be on the table, all rigorous science to be allowed to stand or fall on its own merits, suddenly Stein takes a dark and nasty detour.

Framed by quotes from Darwin, about how only in regard to human beings do we nurture the defectives among the species -- how no farmer in his right mind would breed the weakest farm animals -- Stein devotes an outrageous stretch of film time to a tour of a Nazi insane asylum, one in which the "defective" were gassed and dissected. After a fairly brisk pace throughout the earlier portion of his film, Stein spends long quiet frames walking us through the gas showers, the dissection table, the echoing hallway of this slice of hell. Powerful imagery. Imagery which he quite intelligently designs to play on the viewer's mind, to associate Darwin's theory with a regime that perverted that theory to commit crimes against humanity.

This was reprehensible.

Stein should be ashamed of playing on the worst excess of warped Darwinism as practiced by Nazi Germany, in a film in which he keeps crying out for Intelligent Design to be fairly represented.

I'm glad it came late in the film. It would have colored my opinion of anything that came after it, and some points earlier seemed honorably made and worthy of discussion. But that passage worries me a whole lot. I'm still mulling over just how much the later passage should alter my respect for the earlier points.

More thought is in order before i address the film in more depth.

Granddaddy's chair

My grandparents' house, I have to admit, was kind of a Victorian horror. Heavy dark red drapes always shrouding the windows, dark upholstery on gewgawed dark wood chairs and settees, ornate gilt frames, a huge bad family portrait that loomed on one living room wall.


Granddaddy, 1929. Different chair.

One room was a delight. My grandfather's den. Warm, simple, comfortable, light shimmering in through the windows. A room barely bigger than a closet but you could tell he lived in it and let my grandmother have the rest of the house her way. The TV set was in there, and every male relative would crowd in to watch football on holidays. Once the game was over, often the big red armchair would be unoccupied and I'd hunker down in it, make myself invisible. Even when I was an adult, it could almost swallow me.

Messing with my new camera, 1988

When my grandmother was alone and could no longer live there, the grandchildren got to go through the house and choose the things we wanted. Talk about youth being wasted in the young. I was 18. The things I shrugged off! The antiques that, incorporated into the decor of any light-filled room would be things of old-fashioned beauty. The books!

But I picked a few nice things, and the one I wanted most was Granddaddy's chair. With every relocation for 36 years, I've watched movers struggle to get it through doorways, and it's always had to live in the first big living space it landed in. It won't go deeper into any residence through mere interior doorways, even if you take the doors off their hinges. I've let go of a lot of stuff over the years, but giving up the chair has always been out of the question.

We didn''t get many hard freezes way down near Savannah, but one spell in 1986 was bad, and a sweet yellow cat who lived free at my apartment complex -- friend to all, owned by none -- was going to be in trouble. I let him in at about 10 PM when the temperature was in the 'teens f. and headed for single digits.

Guest cat, 1986

He hopped into the chair and looked at me. Thanks. This will do. Maybe he roamed around after I retired upstairs, , but I never saw any sign of it. He was curled on the chair when I went up and curled on it in the morning when I came down. He lifted his head. I went to the door. "I've got to send you off," I told him. "I'll be at work all day." He hopped down and went out into the cold morning air. We repeated this for three icy nights. Then the cold spell was over. I saw him often around the grounds but he never became "my" cat.

Downyflake claimed the chair -- reupholstered in 1990 -- the day he came to live with us in July 2001.

Downy, aged about 12 weeks, 2001

He can't fit on the arm anymore and stretch out, but he keeps trying (March 2008).

The chair was, until a couple weeks ago, in bad shape. Lots of grime, threadbare patches. Sprung springs made it impossible to sit on. So off it went to an upholsterer, for fabric carefully chosen to resist wear and pulled threads. Not that the animals determine our lifestyle or anything.

It's back. And for some reason, it reminds me of this Charles Addams cartoon:

It's not a gift

Hot on the heels of my relatively lighthearted look at attention deficit disorder, in which I referred to myself as "differently focused" came this morning's Dear Abby. Yes, I read Dear Abby. It's right there in the feature section. You might as well know the worst about me. I even think Jeanne Phillips is pretty smart, and does a good job. OK, there are worse things about me, but we'll save those till later, like 2012.

Anyway, it wasn't Phillips who teed me off this morning. It was the last letter. The one in which the adoptive mom of a child with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder is still the official term) says that "we" choose to use a "new term." MPG. Multiple Personality Gift.

"We" who?

I looked this up. It seems to originate with a book, and apparently one that's a great help to people brave and cool enough to take on loving a multiple.

Usually when something gets me angry, I whip out my trusty keyboard and start fighting about it with the appropriate online entity. But this morning I was angry beyond words. I put the paper back on the coffee table, made a conscious decision to forget I'd even read it, and did.
Something on TV this evening brought it back into my consciousness. I had probably, no joke, dissociated, the everyday mind trick kind of dissociation that we all use (daydreaming is another one), because I really had no idea why I was in such a foul mood all day.

We've got a language problem in this society, and it's caused by a boundary problem. We've traditionally defined people by some out-of-the-mainstream characteristic. Blindness, deafness, ADD, things we used to call "handicaps" and "disorders." We'd pigeonhole somebody as "handicapped" as though nothing else about them mattered.

And the movement to call these "differences" and "challenges" so as to acknowledge that it's something they do -- and deal with and overcome-- it's not who they are, is not a bad thing.

To me it would be better to call a damn disorder a disorder, and then train people that it's a small part of who a person is. That it does not define them. This may be too hard. I never had such a concept of identity or boundaries myself, until life as a 12-stepper. It's not a quick and easy concept to train into oneself, much less society as a whole, and I can accept changing the terms as a practical solution.

I have no answers.

But I have a great big answer to the claim that multiple personality is a gift and that answer is No.

DID is a coping mechanism. It helps people, usually as young children, get through trauma. But like many coping mechanisms, it mutates like a movie Gremlin, from a nurturing servant into a lousy master, and is no gift.

I see several letters in the column, and other things I've encountered in other sites, showing how successful relationships with some DID's are possible. If spouses study up first and know what they're getting into, OK. But forgive me for thinking a happy outcome is not typical.

Forgive me for thinking that childhood trauma most often creates relational problems for the victim (survivor, whatever), whether he/she becomes a multiple or not, and that DID is no more likely to prevent those problems than is non-dissociative response.

Those who want to point out that DID is not an angry or violent disorder intrinsically, fine. That it allows the patient to put the trauma into a smaller more manageable box instead of having the fear and anger that the trauma creates permeate all of life - great. That works for me.

But that's still far from it being a gift. At best I would call it Less Worse. The kids, parents, or spouses of DID patients can live in a confusing, frightening hell. Anything traumatic enough to cause such a dissociation is also quite likely to cause relationship problems. That unresolved abuse often makes the abused feel a lifetime attraction and hatred --both-- to people who remind him of the abuser or trigger the old feelings, is well-known.

Yes, this is personal. Yes, I know whereof I speak. Yes, mine is one person's experience, and others differ.

Yes my reaction was way more emotional than rational.

But I stand by my contention that calling this disorder a gift is the worst of PC excess. They can be very gifted people. They can be very brave people. For some, getting out of bed in the morning and facing the day, relating, creating, is an act of courage and a bloody miracle. Distance and time have enabled me to see this in someone I once knew, and to admire the admirable in him and wish him well.

But the overwhelming need to call negative things by positive terms can sometimes deserve "otherly differently abled" mockery. I've lived with a DID and it was no gift to anyone, least of all to the one who had it.

Life in slow motion

I just got it.

It took me 45 years to really see this cartoon. While looking for a different Addams cartoon a couple days ago, I happened across this one, and at last! the light went on.

I was about (?) 8 or 9? when I first saw it. In addition to the Peanuts books, I was raised in a home stocked with a library's worth of Charles Addams, possibly a peculiar thing to appeal so to a little girl, but I pored over them for hours.

At that time all I saw was the spectral "hand" of the tree root. I even noticed it was reaching for the glass, but to me it still looked menacing. It's gonna pick his pocket too, I bet! That trapped, dehydrated, desperate little tree over on the left? It barely registered, and 45 years of looking at it numerous times didn't change that.

Possibly, this demonstrates a simple rule of childhood, like: the way you perceive something when you're 8 gets locked in, and you see it that way forever because you see your mind's interpretation instead of the real object.

But there's another factor at work here and that's the ADD thing. My first take on anything I see, read, hear, is just that narrow. I can't handle much info, so I zero in on key elements and let them define my response. Often very inaccurately.

Last time I wrote about ADD Life, some interesting responses came up in the comments, mostly about remembering things, retrieving stored information out of what Mike likened to a bank of file drawers in the brain. Diane Harrington's term "attention difference" brought a grin to my face because it's so like the "differently focused" label I concocted for myself.

There are also encounters with the new, and with the unexpected, to consider. I can be extremely focused, and that's the word: I focus in the extreme. I narrow my mental aperture to a pinhole, find a key element and screen out the rest. In searching for something that's usually in a predictable spot, I look in that spot. If it's not there then a normal person opens the aperture a notch and widens the search. I do too, but only after
SYSTEM FAILURE/SHUTDOWN/REBOOT. And a few $#%* -type words.

In fairness, most people use mental shortcuts, especially people whose day involves sifting through minutiae. I've noticed, with my teeth gritted, that doctors are real big on this. You can say, "I haven't walked in the woods for a month and this rash appeared yesterday," and they listen for key words: "walked in woods"; "rash." Then ka-ching! (in more ways than one) a poison ivy diagnosis pops out, the one-month gap between the walk and the symptoms unheard.

I go further and simplify even the already-simple:


ADD QUIZ time!


Can you spot the exercise ball in this picture?


I couldn't. Really. It's usually on the floor in front of the cedar chest. I walked in, looked there, walked out and asked Larry, "Where'd the exercise ball go?"

Bless him, he resists the nearly irresistible "Are you blind?!" kind of response. He's had 12 years to get used to this stuff, and just tells me, if he knows the answer. He's a kind and supportive man. Who values his life.

Meanwhile, my life's work is to rethink. Re-look. Reread, re-listen, reassess nearly everything, for the details, the nuance, the broader picture that I nearly always miss the first time. And accept the fact that I will never cover more than a third-to-a-half of the territory others cover, because my gears turn so bloody slow.

But lest you think that I fail to see the flexibility advantages that come with learning slowly, I have encountered the upside.

One day in library school we got a classroom exercise. Prof handed out 4 sheets of paper to each of us. On the top sheet were numbers (1-20, if I recall correctly) scattered randomly, like a kids' connect-the-dots puzzle. He took out a stopwatch. Our task was to connect the numbers in order.

We all fumbled through it. Then we did the 2nd sheet. It was identical to the first, so, having done it once, most people got faster. By now I was coming in last. The third sheet was also identical to the first 2. The rest of the class whipped through it and put down their pencils, while I continued to fumble.

The prof took 2 dollars out of his wallet and slapped them onto the table. "OK, the first person to finish the last sheet wins the money," he said.

[cackle] Yep, sheet 4 was a whole different pattern. I finished first and won the 2 bucks. I had less to unlearn.

He suggested that most people would buy the class a dozen doughnuts and share the winnings. No one in that group really needed doughnuts, and he for sure didn't. On my all-frozen-dinner grad student budget, it would buy me two -- two! -- "Mr. P's" frozen pizzas (They fit in my toaster oven), so in another demonstration of my decent IQ, I kept the money.

Stealing a car

This post by genuine, and multiply award-winning, artist Brian Fies on his Mom's Cancer blog, shows how he used a model to place an automobile into a drawing.

I am about as genuinely Not An Artist as it gets. People who can draw seem to me to be channeling a god who snubs me. I loved Brian's post, and I love any illustration that an artist does which shows his/her process. It remains a very mysterious process to me.

But I did copy a car image one time. Brian's post inspired me to haul my 1976 embroidered denim shirt out of storage.

I miss the old ten dollar bill. The engraving on the back, of the U. S. Treasury building in around 1928, is just delightful and so much more interesting than the new serious designs. One element that always enchanted me was the little car on the street. I always thought it was a Model T Ford, but according to wikipedia's article on the bill's history it's no particular model, just a sort of generic car of the era.

I traced it onto the shirt with a pencil and embroidered it, taxing my artistic abilities to the max, while I watched the Ford/Carter debates on the dorm-basement TV. Did a so-so job on its proportions, but, hey, it's not a real car anyway, so accuracy is irrelevant!

Attack of the Fifty Foot Cat

A great idea, at the time

There's a bicycle path along the local leg of the highway, through Murrells Inlet. There's also a bike path through the state park, which lies on the other side of the tidal creek.

For years, the plan has been to build an unbroken 11-mile bikeway from Litchfield (south of the park) to the county line (at the north tip of Murrells Inlet). Each leg is to be connected to the others. And we loved the idea. Actually, we still love it in theory, but we failed big time to take a hard look at what they planned.

This creek is a fragile tidal estuary. It's home to a lot of wildflife, seasonal and year-round, including the threatened woodstork and the Eastern brown pelican. When a developer across the street decided to build a shopping/condo eco-horror, a bunch of us residents took it to hearings and got the plan reduced to accomodate a big wooded setback around its perimeter. It's still going to release asphalt-soaked runoff into the creek, the developer is still taking down beautiful 150-200 year old live oaks, and we're still depressed as hell by the destruction, but we did what we could.

The bike path was another matter. We paid no attention to the plan. Stupid!

The Americans With Disabilites Act is a great thing, and if we'd realized the impact it would have on this path, we'd have found a way to make it meet ADA and still be more ecologically sound. But it slipped under our radar. When we heard the power saw, we ran outside.

First, the already-made bike path through town is on both sides of the street. But to cross the creek along this bridge (thereby connecting to the park's path), both northbound and southbound lanes will run together on the east side of the road. This triggers width requirements that, according to the contractor, mean two wheelchairs must be able to pass one another. Fine, ADA is important.

The next part, though, is elaborate and unnecssary. Some grandiose wanna-be Nature Lover decided that it needs to have a scenic overlook (which will go on the other side of this guardrail). So now a big wide observation deck must go where we thought only a level, bikeable path over the bank needed to go.

That means the death of that beautiful old cedar in the top picture, and, worse, it means pressure-treated pilings to support the deck. Pressure-treated lumber is necessary if you have to use wooden posts. Of course. Otherwise they'd rot quickly. And while there are newer, less toxic types of pressure treatment, they are lower-rated, and suitable only for residential use. To live outdoors in salt water, the rating must be 2.5 (explained in this article -- see the green box and below), and that means CCA (chromated copper arsenate. Yes, that is arsenic).

Bottom photo by Larry

At the very least, we could have required some other material be used. None are very good, rammed into this precious creek, but pressure-treatment means slow leach of poison into the water when the tide comes up.

Woulda coulda shoulda, again. From now on, we'll have to be vigilant about any project, even one that seems as blasted nature-friendly as a bike path.

Decades

I'm curled on my chair, or was a few minutes ago, listening to Joss Stone. Joss, Katie Melua, KT Tunstall, I listen to a lot of kids I'm old enough to be the mother of. They sing about the way their bodies sing, like roaring crystal springs, while I feel like a stagnant pond today. Unintelligently designed to make babies then croak when I'm done, not to do what I'll be doing, thanks to science, stroll through decades with equipment that doesn't know what to do with itself anymore so it needs pinches and scrapes from unnatural objects that make it recoil and that silence its quieter song for awhile. They leave me curled in a chair for the day listening to Joss Stone sing about things old women like me also get to have, those extra decades, entitled to them or not, natural or not, the walks and the crystal air and nights curled with my head on my arm while my body sings more softly now, but still sings.