Down

Yesterday at about supper time, I was presented with this fellow. My neighbour called me over by asking if I'd ever taken care of a bird with a broken wing.

Well, no, and I have no intention of starting now. For one thing, I have two very hungry kitties. For another, I would presently find myself without a home, because frankly certain members of this domicile (namely, the ones with their names on the mortgage) have had About Enough of the coming home with the wounded beasties, already.

Technically, his wing wasn't broken, either. It was sort of....gnawed on, looking for all the world as if, before pulling away from whatever was clamped firmly on the other end, Mr. Bird forgot to tell his wrestling partner to please let go. (In my world, of course, the aggressor would most certainly have obliged--but that might just be my personal experience with klutziness: when caught in the act with anything, or even distracted momentarily, I am bound to drop it, whether or not it's in my mouth--though stolen or sneaked-in cookies are not an exception. As a stunning example, I randomly flung salad across most of the dinner table yesterday, for reasons entirely unrelated to the conversation we were having at the time. But I digress.)

On his return from the County Wildlife Refuge, my neighbour told me he was impressed that I'd known it was a woodpecker. Really? Didn't we both grow up on this stretch of river? Given the black-and-white stripey spots, the red head, the bill useful for boring holes in trees, and the fact that earlier yesterday morning I'd seen possibly this very bird--well, pecking wood--what else could it have possibly been? Maybe he was expecting a woodpecker to look more like this?

It's not that my neighbour is stupid, either. Far from it. The man has a PhD in some sort of clinical pyschology, and has taught seminars at Princeton, for god's sake. I'm just continually astounded by how unfamiliar most of us our with our surroundings. With, for instance, the fact that while Louisiana's Gulf Coast might not be the only place there are shrimp Mr. Randy Prescott of British Petroleum Not To Get On a Political Tear, but--to even leave out of the equation the livelihoods of Louisiana and Mississippi shrimpers--it's the only place these particular shrimp live, and I suspect that to these individual shrimp, as much as shrimp are able to have an opinion on things, it matters quite a bit actually, whether they live or die.

Am I naive for wondering if these two mindsets are, at the end of it, any different? I know most of my human neighbours by name (even if I can't pronounce some of them, since my Spanish still generally sucks). Why is it that so many of us don't bother to learn the rest of our neighbours by name? Am I still a starry-eyed, Thoreau-worshipping romantic (well, yes, but there's a qualifier coming) if I maintain that it might make the beginnings of a difference?

The World's Largest Doily

Apparently, I've knit it. It's actually a circular shawl, and even unblocked it takes up the majority of the living room floor. This thing is, in fact, bigger than the kitchen table. The bulk of this thing was done while avoiding homework or watching all nine hours of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. I finished the edging on the bus on the way home from Washington after a trip to the National Holocaust Museum. Let's just say knitting in the dark takes a certain determination.

This is the first time I've really embarked on an extended lace project, so I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I've yet to weave in the ends and block it (so it will only get bigger) but am already wearing it about my shoulders while listening to Zoe Keating and working on the interminable pile of work I have to do in the next ten days. Which is a post unto itself.

Anyway, behold my Shipwreck. Pardon the crappy lighting, I don't have Photoshop on the laptop, so I didn't get a chance to colour-correct before posting. At some point I'll fix that, as well as photograph it on something less stripey.

Well Played

(Scene: Kitchen. Intricate choreography of two people fixing breakfast, gone awry to the point where ME is now puckishly anticipating HER moves and consciously getting in HER way.)

Me: It's a good thing you love me....otherwise one of us would probably be in jail by now.

Her: Well, it wouldn't be me. In my case it would be justifiable homicide.

Stepping Out From the Page

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

(Don't worry. This isn't really going to be a post about Ulysses. It was just the first thing I thought of when I saw the prompt; furthermore, for my trouble I now have a Kate Bush song stuck in my head as well. Instead, this is going to be a post about some other, mostly unrelated, things.)

All writing comes from the place of Yes. All life comes from the place of Yes. My study this semester has been within the context of Yes or No--I'm doing readings on representations of the Holocaust, and on violence, visuality, and race. Questions have come up about whether or not to look, whether or not to speak, to acknowledge. And I am torn. Because to me, all life comes from the place of Yes. And yet, so many of my mistakes have also come from what seems like a Yes, that should have been a No. (I sort of have boundary issues.)

How can we measure? How can we speak? How can we look?

How can we bear to turn away?

This week I read Susan Sontag's essay "On Photography" and it made me viscerally angry in a way her other writing doesn't. Especially the part where she talks about photojournalists choosing a photo op over a life. It made me want to fling this in her face, the life of the greatest man I have known, a man who has chosen life, a man whose life is one big Yes, a man who has given his own life over and over again for the lives of those he photographs. It made me want to tell her to get up from behind the barricade of her own desk, her own death, and say Yes.

Right now I am waiting--here, I'm about to say this out loud for the first time in public--application decisions to three PhD programs (the fourth has a deadline in February). Right now my own future hangs in the balance of Yes or No. This has not made me a happy puppy. In fact, it's made me a very spastic puppy. For some reason, this past week has been particularly difficult, with the starting up of two new spring semesters and the waiting and a personal issue all bundling into one big fuzzy Maybe. I'm not liking it. It's resulted in tears almost daily, long sleepless nights, and--just yesterday--one half-full box of paperbacks launched in outraged frustration against the back wall of the storage facility where most of my belongings are (still) housed. Not my finest moment, though I was impressed with my upper body strength for a minute there.

It's made me realise how much of my life has been lived in the Maybe, in the interstices between Yes and No, how much I try to get away with foisting the decision on someone else. How not saying Yes is not the same as saying No. How much responsibility I try to avoid. We all try to avoid. How little I like feeling powerless. I wish this post had an uplifting ending, a kick at the end like Molly Bloom's Yes, but right now that apparently isn't my lesson. Because right now I am being asked to say Yes to the Maybe, and I am not liking it one bit.

How am I supposed to say Yes to something that is bigger than me? How can I measure? How can I speak? How can I look?

How can I bear to turn away?

Stick(l)er

It just so happens that one of my greatest peeves in life is stickers on my books. Any kind of stickers. Price tags, those yellow USED stickers, Oprah's Book Club stickers (those are the worst), anything. Hate them. You may have noticed, I'm a little particular about my reading materials. Okay, I'm particular about a bunch of things, and opinionated about almost everything, but for some reason, I cannot stand stickers on my books. As a result, the first thing I do upon roosting after a trip to the bookstore is unpack my bags and peel off whatever thing has been defacing my precious booky. (For the record, pun barely noticeable in today's media, I'm also the same way about immediately unwrapping my CD purchases. And don't even get me started on shrinkwrapped books. It's not like they have to stay fresh.)

Last week I purchased textbooks for the spring semester--which included Stickers, All Kinds. Almost all the books were used, but even worse the college I attend uses particularly odious pricing stickers the size of my hand, stickers that could have patched the Mauritania, stickers that....well, in a word, stick. Since Law and Order was on, I settled down on the floor in front of the television with a trash can, a tower of books almost as tall as a FireCat sitting on a floor, a paper towel, and the industrial size bottle of Goo-Gone. My father was amused enough to take a few pictures of this, but I shan't post them, as the shirt I am wearing is tissue-weight and my slouched posture leaves something to be desired in the body-fat-appearance category. (On the plus side, I have excellent cleavage in both shots. But I digress.) His reason for this was he wanted documentary proof of "the sadness."

Sadness? What? How could anyone be sad surrounded by that many squeaky-clean books? Even if half of them were about the Holocaust and the other half were about visuality, violence and race (hey, it's the only two classes they were offering that weren't about Thornton Wilder, and I've already taken that.) Only one lonely poetry book by Eavan Boland rounded out the group. Anyway. I embrace my nerdliness. He wasn't going to shame me with this.

And then, the next night, I found myself in the same place, polishing my multivitamin capsules one at a time.

I so wish I were kidding about this. But one of the capsules apparently exploded, split along the seam, or just gave up the gelatin ghost, and the contents oozed all over the bottle, coating all the other vitamins with gunk. This wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't been excruciatingly foul-tasting gunk of the "making a face like a cat eating a peanut-butter sandwich" variety. And this stuff had gotten
e v e r y w h e r e . So there I was, with a little white terrycloth bar towel, carefully polishing each phyto-fucking-estrogen until it gleamed as darkly as my thoughts.

Incidentally, this particular variety of vitamins is also particularly hard to unseal from its hermetic little peel-off lid. Seriously, GNC ought to give some thought to this problem. Do they really want a bunch of women within eyeshot of perimenopause to be so frustrated with their packaging that they must resort to wielding sharp objects? I'm thinking not. But that's another post entirely.

From the Bottom of My....Er, Feet

And now, a timely message from my socks while I finish up my last term paper of the fall semester:

Parenting Strategies in Elizabethan Drama and Its Sources

This was inspired by an email conversation among several colleagues about final paper topics for Shakespeare and His Contexts (the "feckless mice" course).

Parenting rule number one: Do not feed your children to your dinner guests
PR number two: Do not feed their children to your dinner guests
PR number three: Do not have sexual relations with any mysterious, beautiful stranger your child's age. It will turn out to be your child in disguise.
PR number four: Do not leave your children under a rock/on the top of a mountain. This will result in the ultimate violation of rules 1-3 in the distant future.
PR number five: Do not divide your kingdom among your descendants. Most of your children are greedy dirtbags. The only one who really loves you will end up dead if you do this.
PR number six: Do not lock your children up in towers. They didn't do it.
PR number seven: Conversely, do not allow your children to sneak out the bedroom window every night. They are up to no good with your sworn enemy.
PR number eight: Never, under any circumstances, brag that your children are better/prettier/stronger than (insert name of local deity here). It will just end badly.

In fact, perhaps it's just best to dispense with this "having children" nonsense altogether. It just leads to too much disruption of your tidy plans for world domination. Become a nun and lock yourself in a convent.

Oh wait. That leads to the same sorts of troubles, doesn't it. Maybe you should just bite off your own tongue and allow yourself to be tortured to death during a play for the royal palace to expose the murder of your sister.