Dear Universe: I Get It, Okay?

Now can you go pick on somebody else? I have to clean up this mess and throttle my new kitten. Pardon the crappy image, by the way; I was midway through damage control when I realised what I was doing. And no, this was not in any way staged. I placed this book on the table four months ago in my apartment's entryway to amuse myself--a verbal, visual sort of pun. Only tonight it's the universe that's laughing back at me. If you can't read the subtitle, it's "Finding Hope Amidst Life's Chaos."

And believe me Nellie, there's plenty of that here in the Nerderie.

Dis-Cursive

Just now had a discussion with, among others, my friend Cris (she of the infamous Toothgate situation) about Indiana's recent decision to stop teaching cursive writing. Some people are horrified, others seem, frankly, a little relieved. Cris compared it to her (nonexistent) outrage when people switched from fountain pens to Bic pens.

Guess which camp I'm in. Hint: I don't even allow ballpoint pens into my home or office.

Even before I am a teacher, I am a writer. And while I do a good deal of my writing online (I have a blog, of course; I write emails and research papers and some letters online, but only some, and they're to specific people for specific reasons) I still do the bulk of my creative writing by hand. And I've noticed that my writing is different when it's done on a keyboard, as opposed to by hand on a pad or a piece of paper or a journal or notebook. The syntax is different, the flow of ideas is different.

One of the great physical pleasures of my life is writing. I like the way it feels. I like the meeting of pen (yes, fountain) and paper. I like the feeling of moving my hand across the page. Writing is a tactile art form, as much as sculpture. I understand in a way a lot of other people don't how deeply my handwriting conveys my personality. My writing--both the product and the physical presence and shape and, yes, colour of it--is very much who I am.

This grieves me more than I can say. I know it is not rational, but there it is.

Lest I Feel Homesick for Three Feathers

This year, I am celebrating Independence Day in my new home in Doodlehem, instead of with my parents in Three Feathers, land of the Attack Chickens. Seriously. My mother got pecked by a chicken this morning and had to go to the hospital to get it disinfected. Where they asked her if she knew the name of the chicken who pecked her. (She didn't, but offered to share the various things she had called it. Sensibly, the triage nurse declined, saying she could use her imagination.)

Anyway, back in Doodlehem. For supper, I had a dish of spicy channa dal, which stunk up my kitchen fabulously as it was simmering, and now I am being serenaded by my drunken neighbours, who are singing at the top of their lungs in Spanish semi-unison around the grill on their back patio. One is gesturing with his cigar, the other is using his Corona as a microphone as they bellow some cumbia classics. Times like this, I love this country. Every crazy bit of it.

Later on I'm gonna ask them if they know Cielito Lindo.

Thank You for Not Googling

I am going to completely change the subject and alert you all that I am a fricking genius.

I was 2/3 of the way through knitting a sweater when the unthinkable happened. Yes, again. I ran out of yarn. You'd think I would prepare for this unthinkability, considering the number of times I've failed to think of it. So I ordered more, but it was a vastly different dye lot, so the colour is...um, different. The company is actually notorious for that, because she dyes in such small batches. I love madelinetosh with all my heart, I truly do, company and woman, but please--for the love of cats, for the sake of my sanity--please, Amy, can you do something about the dye consistency in amber trinket? Pretty please?

Anyway, rather than rip the whole thing out and start over, rather than have a stripey sweater where it didn't mean to be stripey, I enlisted the help of my friend Mary O. Who really is a fricking genius. Seriously. She used to be an engineer. Even after a debilitating car accident that left her with brain damage, Mary O is still smarter than most people I know. Mary O announced a simple solution (though she originally suggested Kool Aid, apparently it doesn't come in green in my part of the world). Mary O suggested her close cousin Jell-O.

Y'all, I'm dyeing yarn in my kitchen as we speak. And it's working. The finished product is passably identical to the half-knit sweater. I don't even care that my apartment currently smells like some whacked out combination of wet sheep, vinegar, and lime Jell-O.

Yes, there will be pictures. First I have to figure out how to keep my newly matching yarn from jiggling away off the counter.

More Pie Dreaming: Cutting Butter

My husband used to joke that he'd married me for my pie-making ability. Apparently, he chose this over other, more useful skills, like visual acuity, common sense, or the simple powers of observation.

It is strawberry-rhubarb season here in Doodlehem. It is also farmers market season. Ergo (in parentheses therefore), it is also what we lovingly refer to as "Pah Season." (No, he wasn't Southern. Or a Kennedy. Don't ask me why he called it pah. He just did. But only mine.) Anyway. Since unpacking my eleventy-billion boxes of kitchen gadgetry--most of which I was surprised to have still owned, having not seen it in so long--I have gone on Red Alpha Seven Nesting Alert and made two different kinds of jam, orange-cherry conserve, weekly loaves of bread, lemon curd, and approximately half my weight in pies. All without the use of what I long thought was my trusty pastry cutter. I thought for sure I'd had one. If not in Putnamistan, then at least in Kingston before I got married. Then I thought I must be hallucinating, because there it wasn't, and I was the only one who ever made anything that even vaguely resembled pastry.

Which brings me to the current contents of the oven. It's hard to make pie crusts four at a time. The proportions get all hinky, the bowl gets small, things get coated in flour that should never get coated in flour, and when you apparently never owned a pastry cutter to begin with, it gets really damn annoying using a dinner fork. In the midst of the carnage, I called my dad to reminisce about a one-armed Jesuit we know who is an artisanal baker (among other goofy things, he mentions in his cookbook that he kneads his dough with one massive hand, but says he supposes it's ok to use two if you have them) and his story about cutting butter. It's an apt metaphor for a disabled man--trying to be content in the moment, using the one arm God gave you to cut industrial size bricks of butter into usable pound increments with a complex system of wires and handles--and so I called to ask my dad if I was "happy cutting butter". I allowed as how I wasn't, particularly.

Twenty minutes ago, I put into the oven the ugliest pies I have ever made in my life. The dough was sticky. I had to use unsalted butter. The lattice was crap. In short, they're going to be (I hope) one of those things that taste infinitely better than they look.

I had just started to do the dishes and wipe the drifts of flour and squished butter off the butcher block counter into the trash can when something came crashing down on my head from its hook above the sink, where it sits in plain sight every damn minute of the day.

You guessed it. My pastry cutter. Because apparently I can't just get the lesson, submit with grace, and then move on. Apparently I have to also have the Three Stooges squeaky-toy, hammer-to-the-head, pie-in-your-face (or in this case, pie implement on top of your face) moment.

Yup. That would be me.

Saturday Mourning

I am spending the weekend with my beautiful friend Asia, who lost her husband suddenly on Thursday night. I will process my own grief later, in private, because Joe was a dear, funny man, and I will miss him terribly. Right now I am sitting with Asia and doing what needs to be done: proofreading the email she is sending out detailing memorial plans, making sure she eats and uses her inhaler, cleaning the catbox, sorting the mail, laughing over things Joe would have loved and crying that he's not here to share them with us, and drinking endless cups of tea and trying to reassure the cats, who can't for the life of them find the other person who should be here. And every time I walk into the kitchen, I am struck by the saddest thing I think I have ever seen:

Three Signs I Am Losing Control of the English Language Forklift! Arthropod! Fleem.

I have uttered the following three sentences, in context, in complete and utter seriousness, during the course of the past 72 hours.

1. Drive safe, and please stop making poor peanut choices.

2. You can't buy an orange from a hole in the ground.

3. Call off the pillowcase dogs!

(Please note that this last one is in no way related to a sentence that will live forever in the archives of Weird Things My Husband Used to Say in His Sleep as the number one entry to top, namely, "Fire the dogs from the launching pad!")

This does not, perhaps, bode well for my career as a PhD student in this very language which I am so mangling. On the other hand, it might launch a career in comparative literature. Or performance arts.