Category: THINKING

twenty-first century fox

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Once upon a time there was a fox. Foxes are awesome because they have all the playful bounce of dogs with an insouciant "don't need you" splash of cat-attitude (catitude? whatever). The fox is all, as long as I'm not living in England where the people have terrible teeth and hunt me, life is fine. Bouncy fox.

Foxes are omnivores so this fox ate a bunch of different things. Fruit, bread, bird food; even some chickens. Yeah I know about the unfortunate incident with the henhouse but we're actually going to be dealing with a different idiom here. 

So in the course of the merry bouncy life of this fox, lots of food. Some fantastic things. There was a bush of berries so sweet that it took some time to move away from it, and even though the berries were sweet only most of the time, and were in season only some of the time, still the fox stayed and ate them, mouth stained red with pleasure. Another period spent living near a farmhouse, eating mice, the excitement of chasing them, catching them, the fast gulp of consummation. A long time spent almost tame, living off what scraps were thrown its way, until the scraps turned from bits of tender fresh meat that could be ripped from the bone to dinner scraps to moldy bits begged from the back of the fridge and the fox knew it was time to move on.

And now the fox is out again, roaming. It's made a few poor food choices in life, shivering and heaving in the forest that runs alongside the houses, eating leaves to calm its stomach and thinking that anything that looks too good is bound to hurt. Thinking it would be better to never eat again than to feel this pain. Better to shrivel up.

One day the fox passes a vineyard, and remembers the taste of grapes. Some sweet, a bit of mold on them, the heady tail-chasing dance of that night. Some with seeds that crunched in the teeth and the juice ran down, sugar matted fur, the feeling of being completely sated. But the last grapes were a bad batch, sweet on the tongue but with a retching sour aftertaste, and now the fox isn't sure. Standing hesitant before the tidy rows of vines, and the fox doesn't know with certainty if the gnawing feeling is hunger or just curiosity, what it wants or if it even wants anything at all. 

between the bars

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Sometimes I think I'm going to see you and I prepare fun stories in my head and then I realize that I'm not going to see you, that we're not like that now, and my whole little speech about how a diagnosis reads like a poem is totally shot, like our love of an/unspecified nature/suggestive/of malignancy.

I don't think I'm going to die today or even soon and sometimes I think that I have done some pretty poor planning in terms of my potential failure to die. Like the last time I did some life planning it was more like death planning and I was smoking a pack a day and drinking until the walk home was at best vague and now I'm hardly saintly but it occurs to me that retirement planning is like a real thing, like I am past the "good-looking corpse" clause if you know what I mean.

When Squire was wee he had a total meltdown on a plane where he was sure we were going to crash and die a fiery death. There was nothing to reassure him, and I felt then how empty such reassurance was, because this is exactly what you cannot prepare for, the surprise. Fat fear tears rolling down his cheeks, but he was brave and he was ready, even while he was beyond consolation. I might have turned around and gone home if we could have gotten home without flying. And yet what could I say: relax, you're not going to die. It's exactly what everybody says. It is exactly a lie.

I bought shampoo for gray hair today. I will probably never stop missing you. 

my little town

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Brno is a VILLAGE. Sometimes I forget, because there are a hundred cafes and pubs and restaurants. An opera and several theaters. Nightclubs and bars with live music every night of the week. Four new places opened up this week, including the best one. To me these are all things you go to The City for. So I get to thinking that Brno is a city (albeit population under half a million) and then boom I slam up against the town green of it, the two degrees of separation. 

Anyway, that was what I was thinking last night when I went to see a concert and ran into about 10 people I knew in 10 minutes, tapping out our crude rhythms of bear dance tunes. If you want to go to a place where everybody knows your name, it is sufficient to walk out onto the street, or send a message via the woman who does your pedicure, or turn e-mail into coffee, tap tap tap. 

the only thing that shines

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A deep sadness that I have examined EXHAUSTIVELY over some 23 years and which would not go away and so instead became a story I am tired of telling; tired of telling myself, tired of telling others. Do you get tired of telling the story of how you met, your first death, your first birth, a funny mistake you made in a foreign language? I have told this story until I could tell it to anyone, until I had nobody to tell it to anymore, until I could tell it in my sleep, until it had no power over me. Yet it still exists, the sadness that made the story. Still a thing that happens, a tide that pulls up with some regularity. And I have to say, ah, there it is, that again. But I just don't feel like telling the story anymore and so instead there is a silence to observe it, like some sad anniversary. Maybe some day we will have picnics and fireworks and completely forget the meaning, though I don't think so, not in my lifetime.

Another story I promised to be done with already in 2009 that keeps telling itself while I curl away, ears plugged, wishing for some lizard-skin spine to keep it off of me, yet it settles on my shoulders again and again, this disappointment, this anger, black wings that are incapable of flight.

Heard the title of a song I once loved, a madeleine, so I went and dug out the tape. This is a tape he made for me before he left and so it belongs with him in my mind but it is also entirely mine. The plastic stretched and warped beyond repair, I can't even play it anymore, but now I can download the song in a heartbeat and listen to it again, remember curling around a speaker so that the sound reverberated through my body, how much I felt music then, literally. Listening to a song over and over; how it was to believe that if I listened enough it would be more than an echo of my feelings, that it might explain how to get out, because there is always that next song. 

 

question authority

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A thing that is interesting about teenagers is that they think that much of what adults are doing is wrong. Either the act itself or the reason for it or the way it is done: wrong, wrong, wrong. I remember this feeling myself, as a teenager, that the grown-ups around me had missed some key ideas when laying out their lives. In a way, this is a pretty good thing, evolutionarily, that as they approach adulthood they're almost programmed to question every thing they've been told so far. If we didn't question, if we just kept doing things because that's how they're done, then we wouldn't improve much as a species. On the other hand, there are some things that we do precisely because they help us to survive, and so blindly playing the opposition isn't always smart either. 

I think that one problem for me was that people didn't often tell me WHY; they mostly told me WHAT. You have to iron your shirt because it's a rule. You have to be home by 10 because that's curfew (actually my parents believed in curfew as defined by the event, which I appreciated then and still do). You can't eat that because it's bad for you. This kind of logic is fine for kids, but it starts to backfire with teens. And ESPECIALLY if they've found out that some of the things that they were presented as absolutes are only true some of the time, if at all… well, everything else you say becomes doubtful. 

For example, if you say "You have to study or you won't get a good grade", then boy are you undermined when no study or poor study correlates with a good grade anyway. Talking to teenagers successfully involves so much conditional framing, and this at a time when they're some of them taller than you and twice as stubborn, and there you are with your wishywashy it might could… well, it doesn't feel nice.

I have noticed, though, that very specific directions with justifications tends to get things done better, repeatedly, than "because I'm the parent, DAMMIT" does. Even if that's what I very much want to say. I think it also helps to really encourage a teenager to question why every single time it isn't volunteered if they don't know. And (and I actually very much enjoy this part of parenting) it is very useful to have teens suggest and justify different ways of doing things, first because it encourages them to think through their alternate idea before they try making soup by dropping in whole potatoes and trying to cut them up later, and second because they may have a better way of doing things, since that is (after all) what their brains are supposed to be doing now, so it benefits everybody. Plus it's good practice for people to question what they don't understand and be answered politely as a matter of course, as it makes the world a more pleasant place to live when people are in the habit of not viewing questions as challenges, but as opportunities to explain. 

Just a thing I've been thinking about for the last week or so. Writing it down to help myself remember.


you keep using that word

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I've ranted before about how it bugs me when people take words with specific meanings and use them to dramatize their feelings about things for which there are already perfectly good words in existence. I realize there are horrible things in the world that I could be getting upset about instead, and that these are annoyances rather than rages, but boy-oh. Pets are not children. Friends are not family. And the ones that's been bugging me lately is the misuse of "single parent". 

 

If you are not getting any partner-type support, financial or otherwise, from another adult, then you are a single parent. That is exactly what those two words mean – you are unpartnered as a person and specifically as a parent. But here's the thing: If you only get every other week to yourself while your former partner has the kids, or you're fighting about pick up times, or you think they should be giving you more money, or they work out of town, or whatever, you ARE NOT a single parent. It cheapens the extraordinary difficulties that actual single parents have to deal with, and it also makes your own difficulties seem like you have to exaggerate them when in fact they're often horrible enough on their own. I'm glad every day that I don't have to worry about custody and child support, believe me. Look, we all make choices — and sometimes we don't even have a choice. But when you choose to call a divorced or separated parent a single parent, I lose some respect for you. Wouldn't you rather call yourself what you actually are, or skip the labels altogether, and pull up a bottle of wine and talk about it?

 

what chance do I have here

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There's a moth trapped in the lampshade and I can't believe he won't die. Flap flutter flap. You know the joke about the moth who goes to the doctor I am sure or if not I will tell you sometime, or I guess you could let your fingers do the walking. Remember when looking things up in the phonebook was a snap. Now I can't even fill out a nice voter ballot without wondering if my poor, tender hand is going to get all cramped up from the writing. Oh computer you have spoiled me beautifully, oh internet you must really really love me to give me so much.

What else? After having spent a very long time with pocket tissues I bought a box of tissues for my desk and it is like, wow, that is luxury. I splurged another 25 Kc today on a box for the living room. I want so much to be a tortoise and take everything with me everywhere but it is some kind of wonderful to not have to pat all the pockets to find simple things, but instead to reach out one's hand and it is there, the thing you wanted. I don't think it's a metaphor for anything in particular.

You want to know why blogging died? It is because the people who were talking the most forgot to do much listening, and the people who were talking a little stopped being interested in listening so hard. Who is the politician who said to people "I see you, I see you"? That guy gets it. Everybody wants to think somebody sees them, and if you're seen by a bunch of people I expect it can get hard to perform but I think just as importantly if you're not seen by anybody it's sometimes hard to keep watching. So you should say "I see you" even if all you really mean is "I see you seeing me". I actually have no fixed theory on this, but I know it hurts to feel invisible, even though it is one of my top five desired superpowers. I also want to be able to teleport, both to get to places and to get away from them.

My heated dislike of sports and competition in general is so directly counter to my love of games that I have had to give it some serious thinking lo these recent weeks. Because I love games. And I like winning them, I guess, though I like playing them most of all, and if I am with someone who plays well I am happy to lose to them. I do not think this applies to sports because sports seems more focused on playing as a means of winning than a pleasure in itself, but maybe most normal people play games to win as well and it's just that I haven't had my name never called when choosing sides at Carcassonne.

Also to be able to tell when people are lying, which is a variation on reading minds that seems less invasive than reading all of someone's private thoughts but would make me feel safer, because more than broken bones I am scared of being lied to without recognizing the lie. He never said he loved me by the way so he neither lied then nor told the truth and later changed his mind so that was a survivable pain.

After several attempts to let youtube teach me, I've decided to pay for ukulele lessons although now I have to decide if I want it tuned to C, which is US style, or D, which is European style, or whether I want to know the difference. The issue being, I suppose, whether I'm going to want to jam with Americans or Czechs. My main goal now is to learn like 3 songs and play them to myself all the time. I had not featured "jamming" as any kind of goal even down the road. But Czech or American is the first question and not which three songs. I wish I could learn languages instantly is also one; I wish I could play a musical instrument is not but get back to me next year, because if it's worse than learning Czech I will be stabby. Meanwhile I have honestly no idea what to tell you, meaning I know neither what you want to hear nor what I would say if I knew.

pernicious anemia

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"If, after being exposed to someone's presence, you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence."

So six weeks in the US, in addition to entirely depleting my bank account, made me step back and re-evaluate how lucky I am in the life that I've made here. Love the work I do (could use some more, but love what I have). Love where I live (though I was inspired by the bustle of my US buddies to review and improve some things here). Love the socialized bits, the healthcare and the transportation and everything. Love my friends. So I count all those things, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't still a bit cranky.

It does seem to me that possibly some of my recent unusually high irritation with others has to do with the fact that I have no skin for it. I'm tough for some stuff, but I don't have to be nice to people at work any more and it makes me weaker at being nice to people away from work. Why should I be? I am very good at realizing that somebody's got a different burden to carry than I do, or is coming at the elephant from the other side and perceives it differently or whatever, but HONESTLY some of the time I feel like I'm the only person trying to bring tolerance and forgiveness and politeness and everything to the table, and I'm tired. It's as if people state their points of view not to have them understood so much as to cut a wide swath in front of themselves in which those points of view have to be respected. And I think now: You know what? Here is a very wide swath for you; here is me leaving the table, the room, the party altogether. That's about all the respect I have the energy to muster today.

And yet I had a great conversation about guns with a man in Montana who owns them and likes them a bunch. He changed my mind about some parts of my argument against guns. I don't mind arguing; I like that when it feels like "You don't have to agree with me, you just have to understand why I disagree with you, and the opposite is true." When what we're trying to do is be understood, more than agreed with necessarily –although I did agree with him, more than I'd expected to, in the course of understanding him. He didn't come into it saying that I was a bunch of nouns I'm not, and that helped. I feel like these conversations are harder to have, not because of me but because of the world. I blame the telegraph. 

hungry as an archway

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This giant cauldron of feeling that you carry around where your heart should be, and you cook up some love for other people and dole it out to them in steaming cups of the flavor of praise and admiration, bubbles of you go girl and the thick heady scent of I love you the way you are because you heard that was the right way to love, because it's the way you want to be loved, but when the camera swings back around to you, there you are with your aching and longing, your expectant face, your want for payback which, sweetheart, proves that you were never loving in the first place, not really, not the way you like to think. You were placing bets, putting your money on the queen of cups and hoping that once just once somebody would put enough in your bowl to satisfy you. You weren't even looking to have it overflow, just to the brim, like your eyes with tears when the third unconditional serving is handed from your (not actually) generous hands and the thankful smile turns and walks away. Say what you want to make it fine; say you don't need anything, never wanted anyway, easy enough to live without, but if that's true then why is there a tally book in your head and why do you only remember what you give away? Hint: It is not giving if you keep track. You say into a room filled with people that it hurts when people ignore you, or pretend to pay attention and do not, and your voice echoes against the empty walls because nobody wanted to be invited to this, and it turns out the echo of your own voice hurts even more. I'm sorry, I love you, or anyway I want to, but my darling: your need is fathomless, meaning both it never ends and it cannot be comprehended. It makes you hard to be around, and even though I really want to love you the way you are, even though I really want to

too many thoughts in my head

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Seems like some people want to teach their subject, some want to inspire in a more "life lessons" sort of way, some want to be popular, some want to be in control. I went into teaching with a certain amount of excitement about language that I wanted to share, and at some point I maybe became a bit of a Nice White Lady about it, and then when I was no longer that person (i.e. no longer inspirational to people) I at least had the courtesy to quit. I'm saying I'm not above teachers in any way, having been a good one and a totally crappy one at different times, so I'll even give the crappy ones the benefit of the doubt. But I feel increasingly like people sort of "get" that students are not all that into the subject, and they compensate for this not by trying to make the subject more interesting, but by making themselves, the teachers, the focus of the lesson. This can be by means of making themselves more fun, or likable or whatever, or by making themselves more intimidating. In neither case does empathy for the student or the sort of approach of trying to involve the student in the lesson seem to come into play. You should learn this because it is good for you in some moral values way seems useless; you should learn this because otherwise I will flunk you seems not the best lesson, either. If you can't come up with a reason why the thing you are teaching is worth learning, maybe you're teaching the wrong thing? Or maybe you're not a teacher. I don't know. I understand unmotivated students, and I once had an adult fly an airplane at my head so I understand the frustrations of teaching those students, but it was never beyond my grasp how entirely useful my subject was. 
ANYWAY. Tip of the iceberg, here. I have to go to an audition now. I AM READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR, DEMILLE.