Author: tuckova

Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

remember this

tuckova2 Comments

Oh and you, with your dangerous mouth.
I cannot even think the color of your eyes,
but your exact mouth better than first fruit
and I cannot imagine anything else.                      

I would have kissed you for a thousand nights,
a thousand and one.
Your mouth the only thing
to make me stop telling stories,
and we knew that to stop telling stories
meant my destruction; I didn’t care.                  

Your mouth with its clever tricks
even clever deceptions and when you whispered
that you missed me I wondered
if it was true or
just a slip of the tongue.

love letters

tuckova3 Comments

Dear U.S. Dollar,
Knock it off! I pay taxes on you in two countries. Pull your socks up, sir, or … or. Seriously, though.
With love, but just a little longer,

Dear Thanksgiving,
HAHAHAHAHA! Enjoy yourselves! The only turkey that will be consumed in this house tomorrow will be Wild. Otherwise, man, I’m saving all my love for the winter break, during which my goal is to fully indulge my inner bear and sleep and sleep and sleep. Eyes on the prize; we shall not be distracted by something that involves more cooking than eating.
Gobble!

Dear Internets,
I think you should be free like butterflies but I also cannot believe I
do not have to pay you for the very fabulous experience of
shoe-shopping with Squire and having him tell me which shoes rule and
which shoes suck. And then I crushed him under my foot and said Stupid
Boy Stupid Boy and then we collapsed in an agony of geek giggling.
I’m yrs, etc.,

freedom of choices vs. freedom from choice

tuckova4 Comments

NIGHT 1
ME: Tonight, instead of arguing, let’s vote for which game we play.
FRIAR: Catan!
ME: Catan!
SQUIRE: I want to play Clue.
ME: But we voted.
SQUIRE: I don’t care.
[argue argue argue; we play Clue]

NIGHT 2
ME: Do you want to play Clue or Carcassone tonight?
SQUIRE: I want to play TransAmerica, it’s my favorite.
ME: But I offered Clue or Carcassone.
SQUIRE: [heavy sigh, with drama] I guess we’ll do what you want to do anyway.
ME: Well… I want to play a game.
[we play TransAmerica]

NIGHT 3:
ME: Okay, how about if you narrow it down to two games you want to play, and then we can choose one of those two.
SQUIRE: I don’t want to choose only two games. I want to choose five and then you choose one of those.
ME: O… kay?
SQUIRE: Catan, Carcassone, TransAmerica, Risk, or Clue!
ME: Any of those… I guess Catan or Carcassone.
FRIAR: Catan!
SQUIRE: I don’t want to play Catan.
[we play Clue and Carcassone]

Whereupon it was determined by me, who is tired of this Every Single Night, that games shall henceforth be played in alphabetical order. HA! It’s a very democratic approach the games, albeit not to the players. But it is more democratic than the dictatorship we were sliding into, and sometimes in a democracy we have to do things for the common good, and it’s to everybody’s benefit to not have a stupid argument over what game to play every. single. night. Amiright.

three

tuckova1 Comment

standing under the eaves in the rain, smoking
sitting inside watching the snow fall and drift into piles
walking down the middle of the street in the dark

11/44 = 1/4

tuckovaLeave a comment

We had the quarter-year parent/teacher conference at Squire Tuck’s
school. BOY do I like his new teacher. She just does so many small
subtle things that I think are correct. Like she offered either
individual private consultations or she said she could talk to us as a
group. Offering to talk to us as a group says: We’re all adults here.
We’re all working on the team that wants our kids educated. This runs
circles around standing out in the hallway shifting our weight from one
foot to the other for one or two hours, wondering what the hell was
going on, and the teacher exhausted by the end. So we sat together and
we all heard about little Vaclav and little Martin and little I don’t
know, some other kids’ name that isn’t actually a kid in the class. And
then some parents stayed behind to talk about private concerns; I
stayed behind to tell her I appreciated her approach and how much
happier Squire was this year, and that I hoped she’d let us know if
there was anything we could be doing.

It’s always interesting to hear the parents’ side of the
story, isn’t it? You learn so much. The mother who is defending her
child’s behavior is the one whose kid is a bully. The one who is
surprised to hear that her kid is flailing is also the one who just had
a baby. I am the only parent with a notebook for writing down what the
teacher says, and I think at first that it is because one of my
superpowers is Preparedness! but then it may also be because I’m the
only one who can’t hold a thought in her head for more than 5 minutes
unless it’s printed in front of me. I wonder what correlation that will
be found between me and my kid, as I sit doodling in the margins of the
notebook I brought and listening to the other parents.

No, yeah, I get it.

Out of the nine boys in the class,
two have not yet been to the principal’s office for discipline
problems; one of them is our boy.The teacher says he’s in his own
world, and existing in that world keeps him from learning as much as he
could, but he’s not dragging anybody else away with him. It’s both good
and a little sad. The endless renderings of detailed spaceships, each
window perfect, hold him drifting in orbit away from grammar and
division; if he didn’t have a tutor 3x a week, I doubt he’d be pulling
in the Bs and Cs he’s getting now. But it seems to me that now he’s
doing this because the schoolwork is boring and he’d prefer to draw,
rather than because he is confused or because he needs the escape, so
it’s quite an improvement over last year. Baby steps, you know.
And you could do worse than be a drawer of starships.

Last
month the applications came around for the kids who want to transfer
into college prep schools beginning next year. You were supposed to pay
for the applications, and we didn’t know, and I kept asking him about
it and he didn’t know, and we went rounds, and the date passed. I spent
about 5 minutes being upset about it. Well, maybe a whole day. It’s a
door, closed, which always makes me want to kick at it. And Friar said:
You cannot honestly think he could handle the workload college prep
school when he can’t even remember to tell us to order the
applications.
Which is: yeah.

This has been a Squire Tuck update.

got it want it need it

tuckova4 Comments

What you want is not what you get. What you get is what you get. You
can feel as good or bad about it as you want to feel, but it will most
likely not change what you get.

You can embrace what you have,
what you got, what you will get. You can shout from rooftops or perhaps
websites about your lucky draw and your happy hands and your pretty,
pretty life.

Or you can alternately mourn what you do not have, have not
gotten, will never. Keen and wail over it or suffer semi-stoically,
baby martyr. Did dur baby have its feewings hurted. Whoa is you indeed.

The thing about martyrs is that they’re only impressive to the
people who believe what they believe. To everybody else they are
terrorists, windmill tilters, demanding nonsensical whiners. In no case
are they people who appreciated what they had. In no case are they people
who get what they want. And the longing and the whining and the
violence, the glass thrown across the room the plate smashed hair from
the roots white gasp and the seam of blood dissolving in tears or
flames temper temper takes from what you have, and what you have is
consumed in the yearning for what you did not get.

Want what you get. For starters, it’s easier.

dissing, decorating, and dressing

tuckovaLeave a comment

So one of the things I was afraid of happening if I returned to
teaching? Happened. I was teaching a
lesson about politics, as one of the things the students are expected
to do is discuss the political systems of the US and UK and compare
them to the Czech Republic. Which I’m sure you agree is a perfectly
reasonable thing to expect 18 year old students to do in another
language. ANYWAY. So there we were, and this one girl is slouched back
in her chair so I went over to see if she was confused or what exactly,
and she asks, "How much longer are we going to do this?" Well, I say, I
thought we’d do it until it was finished. Why, do you have a hot date
or something? "No," she answers, "but this is boring."

Ah. So I say entirely pleasantly that I’m sorry she finds it so but it is a required
topic. Later in the class she was talking and the other students hissed
at her to be quiet but she wasn’t. Alrighty then. She had the quiet
attention, she had the peer attention, she apparently needed more. So,
you know, I gave her the full force of my level-eyed
disappointment. I’m unpleasant when I’m angry but I’m apparently
downright scary when I’m disappointed. She came up after class to
apologize. I’m sorry to have had to do it, but I’m glad I remembered
how. And that it’s done now, so I don’t have to dread it.

Over the weekend I turned out to not be quite so sick as I’d
expected, so I washed windows and sewed some new curtains for the
living room, and made some exceptionally pretty shelf coverings out of
this fabric I bought a year ago because it reminded me of Klimt, but it
was too stiff to work with as I’d wanted to. Friar hasn’t noticed any
of these things yet; another advantage to him is that all aesthetic
decisions are made to please me and possibly the young Squire. It’s
like living alone, except with a place to warm my feet at night.
Oh, I’m kidding, calm down.

Mistrust all institutions that require new clothing. I ordered a dress
from the internets because I had a craving for something pretty to wear
and couldn’t stomach going out to try things on; also the shipping
costs are blahblah– I don’t know, I bought a dress. I’m not gonna
apologize for my motives. I attempted to branch out colorwise and went
with "eggplant" instead of "burgandy" or "black". I expected a dark
bruise-y purple, but it turned out to be a purple I associate more with
Easter eggs than eggplants, very pale and ladylike. SIGH.  I know that
I am not yet ready to tackle sleeves, but think perhaps I will try to
make a skirt, since it cannot be that much harder than making curtains
and it cannot be a more bizarre-for-me color than this dress. A skirt
of leftover curtains, perhaps! Like Scarlett O’Hara only less so.

fevah!

tuckovaLeave a comment

For a non-atheist to see and enjoy "The Golden Compass" is the same as
for a non-Christian to see and enjoy "The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe". The Chronicles of Narnia are tasty and His Dark Materials
are also delicious; beautiful movies are always worth seeing; also, and most
importantly,  ideas can’t hurt you*. Let’s hug it out, shall we?

*banned in my house: anything that features more cussing than
I can produce when I bang my head on a sharp corner; anything that
features more violence than I can produce in a chili-fueled nightmare;
anything that utterly lacks redemption.

Onward, then:

Squire said he felt crappy on Monday but
I persuaded him to go to school, because I thought he was actually
nervous that kids would tease him about his hair, which a couple kids did,
and which was not that big of a deal, since we’d discussed all manner
of potential insults and: whatever, he looks awesome. Tuesday they were
going to see a documentary about Nicholas Winton, which he wanted to
see, so even though he said he didn’t feel a scrap better, he went.
Wednesday morning his temp was 39.5 and so here we are, with a kid
parked on the couch. He’s fairly easy to take care of: he reads and
generally stays covered up and tries to drink delicious tea because he
is a good patient, and takes his temperature every 30 minutes that he’s
awake because he is my son.

So anyway, he’s home for a few days, delighting me to bits and also
probably getting me sick by means of being so sweetly warm and in need
of forehead kisses. We burrow under blankets and watch movies.
Yesterday we watched a movie in which a character evaluates a song by
saying, "Well… I’m tone deaf"; Squire nearly broke his head open
laughing, and then asked me quite seriously, "Wait, what’s tone deaf?"
which nearly broke my head open. Which is when I realized that I was
not feeling a hundred percent.

If you are ever inclined to fill out an "ideal partner" form, in which you are given choices like "good looking" or "sense of humor" or
"likes to dance" or whatever, I will tell you that you need to
have one box checked and that box is: can take care of me when I am
sick. Because I’m telling you, you can get your sense of humor ticket
punched in a dozen places and your non-dancing partner is not going to
mind your going out dancing with your easy-to-find dancing friends, but
it’s hard to find a friend who will come over and make you chicken soup
or bring over a giant packet of soft tissue paper for you or stock up
on spices to help you breathe again and stuff, much less one who will
live with you while you are miserable and ugly. "Sense of humor", HA.

One time in Southern California I got the ‘flu so bad that my
mother actually flew down to take care of me and we still didn’t
realize I should have dumped that guy.

Anyway, my point was
going to be that last night Squire was having a feverish bout of guilt
that I might get sick from caring for him, and I told him that was okay
because it was my duty and privilege etc to take care of him and this
is parenting and it’s actually fun to take care of him because he gets
sick so rarely etc and that anyway if I got sick Friar would totally
take care of me. Which he will. Which is something I’m not used to
knowing, and so even though our relationship was pretty much cemented 5
years ago when he made me four different dishes to tempt me after a
particularly nasty stomach… thing… still, it surprises and delights
me to find that I am cared for, and even more so that I am becoming
accustomed to being cared for.

I know: Awww.

Anyway. A bit woozy. Probably no cottage this weekend; probably movies
that I’ll get to pick, and possibly I’ll even be read to. Sweet!

Why I don’t

tuckovaLeave a comment

This one is like
nobody you’ve ever met,
She is not like you.
The music she likes is music
you’ve never heard of,
The books she likes are books
you’ve never read.

She goes to parties
and talks to nobody

seeing everybody talking,
Or holds forth on topics
til there are no topics left.

Her hair was wild until everybody’s was,
then hers was wilder;
shorter the year they were wearing it short;
she’s paying attention
to ensure she never fits.

She has nothing in common with you.
Nothing at all, to be sure, to be sure.
This girl is a bore.

bad haircut

tuckova1 Comment

I’m not talking about the haircuts where you think that when you get
your hair cut like Brad Pitt you’re going to come out of it looking
like Brad Pitt. I’m talking about the haircuts where your total
inability to articulate what you want and/or the hairdresser’s total
inability to understand you ends up with you crying.
And how in the first case (Brad Pitt’s hair) you are just being really
silly, but in the second case the problem rests in the disconnect between
what you want and your ability to express it so that other people will
do it, and that disconnect is what makes you cry as much as the bad hair.

People
have been trying to give me long fringey bangs and cute little side
fringey things ever since I came into my face. It’s a big face, like
I’m coming at you through a peephole, and some softness around the
edges would probably make it less whoa, but the thing is I hate having
stuff touching my face and ears, and I’m the one who lives with it. So
lots of "soft little fringe" experiences in high school wound up with
me coming home making cat splutters and (because i could never cut a
straight line) eventually doing something with my mother’s pinking
shears. Sorry about that, Mom.
But if people had just done what I said, instead of what they thought would be best for me, tips would have flowed instead of tears.

Once I wanted my hair like a cross between Alannah Currie and
the Heat Miser, bald on the sides and dramatic chunks standing up on
the top; it was long and there was a perm growing out on the top,
perfect, and I cut the sides up very short myself but was perplexed by
the back. I went to a proper hairdresser who "shaped" it, oh my heavens
no. My boyfriend at the time came home to me crying hysterically
because there was nothing I could do to fix it. He took me to a barber
and the barber shaved it all off,  and vacuumed up all the stray hairs
with a wall mounted vacuum, which was a hundred kinds of awesome and cost about a tenth of the proper hairdresser.  Still, I didn’t get what I wanted and  I was so close, and I know that haircut would have been so embarrassing to look back at now, and I mourn it.

In Japan I went with my terribly well groomed and fluent
friend to get a haircut- I’d been cutting my own hair there, because
it’s superfine hair and my Japanese was atrocious and I was scared of what might happen, but I was getting
seriously tired of sweeping hair out of the tatami and ready to take a
risk. "She wants it exactly the same, but about 2 cm shorter" he told
them. They cut it 2 cm shorter than his. I even got
a nice shave for my gaijin sideburns. Yay.

All
things considered, my trip to the hairdresser today was not the worst
thing that has happened to my hair, but man. I came home today looking
like a mushroom. A mushroom that cries. I told her "cut it jagged"
which every hairdresser here has understood, and she gave me some
ass-symmetrical emo thing. We are not emo, although I was beside myself
with unhappiness for a full 20 minutes over a
haircut which is the stupidest thing ever. I tried to explain
it to her again, but she was all huffity "I don’t know what you want" and I
thought I might take her stupid straight scissors and poke her in the
eye so bah, I left and cried a bit on the way home and then did it
myself. I got out the clippers and stuck my fingers in and sort of
jabbed at all the bits that stuck up, only grazing my knuckles a few
times. I look fine. Mainly it’s not around my eyes or my ears or
touching the back of my neck anymore.

The thing that comes to me this time is that it’s not just the haircut.
It ties in to my hesitation to ask for things from others that I can do
for myself, and my utter fury when it doesn’t go well, because I feel
like partly it goes wrong because the other person screwed up, but
partly it goes wrong because I explained it badly and shouldn’t have
delegated and paid for what I’m perfectly capable of doing anyway. It’s
a whole life lesson or something. I’ll work on it once I’m done
sweeping up all the hair bits.