Dial-Up: Like Picking My Nose While Wearing Mittens

tuckova2 Comments

Three weeks ago, the internet company decided to upgrade me without my permission; the upgrade frightened my poor little modem to death and I was suddenly without internet. As a person who works, shops, and even socializes from home, this is probably my equivalent of suddenly lacking a car in a town without public transportation.

At first I raged, but they said they’d have a new powerful amazing modem delivered in two days so I decided I’d be fine. Not all editing requires internet access, so I did what I could, and it turns out that I am internet-reliant but not internet-dependent, jobwise. The hardest part was giving up the parts of internet access that are not strictly job-related: reading the news, catching up with friends, and “finding stuff out”.

So I muddled through the week with a dictionary and an encyclopedia during the day, and it was okay. In the evenings, instead of reading up on mysterious rashes, adaptations of “My Fair Lady” into foreign languages, and the number of calories you burn brushing your teeth, I worked on home projects. I re-organized the books. I put together a new CD shelf. I waxed the living room floor. I patched things. I made myself useful.

But I didn’t feel useful, because there’s a difference between what you can do and what you’re good at doing. I’m good at about two things: watching television and looking stuff up. Because watching television tends to turn me into a bit of a nutter, I restrict that, but I am in the habit of giving my research urges unrestricted access. And not being able to look stuff up nearly did me in, because I could go to my friend’s house up the street to download projects and upload completed work, but you don’t feel the same about spending time on somebody else’s computer searching for pictures of Franklin Pierce (which is something I did the day after I got access back: quite a handsome fellow).

After a week (which is Novera-speak for "two days"), I was back on line. And reflecting on this experience was… not good.

I have thought of myself as being a knowledgeable person. There’s knowledge you have and knowledge you know how to get, and I didn’t mind being poor in the first type because I believed I was richer than many others in the second type. It isn’t necessary to know how to spell well as long as you know that you can’t and you’re reconciled to the fact of looking words up often. This applies to nearly anything: if you’re able to find the answer, you don’t have to carry it around in your head. However, it’s quite a blow when your second brain is suddenly missing.

And last Monday, the telephone company started playing with the line, and I’ve been on and offline again all week. Last night I was sleeplessly cataloging the things that I am good at and not good at, and I’ve realized that all this being good at looking stuff up has made it possible for me to forget that being good at one thing does not necessarily mean that one is good at many things, and it certainly doesn’t mean that one is good. I rationalize that I can’t wax the floor because I am “busy” looking for recordings of Algonquin poets reading aloud (?don’t remember why). Without that excuse, I am forced to discover that waxing a floor does not require any particular degree of awesome, and that waxing the floor doesn’t make me personally more aesthetically pleasing. Making crappy craft knock-offs of more creative projects doesn’t make me artistic. The ability to alphabetize my CDs, no matter how efficiently and thoroughly I do so, doesn’t make me organized. And none of these things, neither the alphabetizing or the art projects or the floor waxing, or even the live poetry, actually me a better person, or even a more interesting person, and the fact that being good at looking stuff up has distracted me from this lack is merely a testament to the horror of it.
What I am left with, when left alone, is the ability to realize how thoroughly hateful it is to be alone with me. It’s been rather a rough week.

a lot of thinking about YA fantasy fiction

tuckova6 Comments

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis over the weekend. Squire told Friar that
it was about "how we define our humanity under different circumstances"
and I thought: well, yeah. And this is, I think, one of the appeals of
fantasy. It’s not just looking at a different world: it’s also that
it’s interesting to look at what’s true about ourselves against a
variety of backgrounds.

The Chronicles of Prydain are my favorite fantasy books. They
may be my favorite children’s books, hands down (although Bridge to
Terabithia now looks at me with its lovely painful face and I am not
sure, but…. ) Okay, definitely my favorite series. I’ve re-read them
every year since fifth grade, which is a lot of times to read the same
books. I learned about writing from those books; I learned about the
subtle beauty of "not without regret". And I learned about the
difficult choices, and about both sides of trust, and about saying what
you’re afraid to say because not saying it is worse.

The only thing I didn’t like about those books was the ending.
It seemed unbearably unfair to my childish hedonist heart that the
choice would come down to happy oblivion or emotionally wrenching
reality. Later I concluded that the happy oblivion was a metaphor for
death (see also: C.S. Lewis; Tolkein), and I was irritated that this
was presented as happiness. I mean: really irritated. Because in fact I
think the choice is: emotionally wrenching and rewarding reality or…
nothing. Do you want to go through life standing in the dank armpit of
the tram and watching the light catch the snowflakes as they fall and
listening to your child laughing or do you want… nothing?

And I felt like Alexander skipped the real choice, which is
interesting, in exchange for a fantasy set up: You get the kingdom of
happy ever after or you get the kingdom of right here right now. The
first one is unreal, is blissful oblivion, is heaven, is death. And the
second one is…hard. According to Alexander, a hero chooses the
second; death comes to a hero only incidentally, only later. I’m not
crazy about that, but at least I get it. Certainly I prefer it to the
choice of deciding whether you believe you
can go further up and further in whilst in a room too small to swing a
dwarf, because it seems like a fairer choice. Though I don’t like the
choice as it is presented, at least it is a choice, and the point is
clear: If we are heroes, we choose what is right, and what is right is
difficult. It’s like Fantasy Novels for a Young Poet or something.

Second favorite fantasy series: The Dark Is Rising. It’s a
child swept into a parallel world; it’s time travel; it’s Arthurian
legend; it’s beautiful You Are There writing (first time I saw the
Thames, I was like: yeah); it’s trust and honor and all the things I
want a book to do. It’s also Destiny, which I have problems with. You
should have seen me try to have a reasonable discussion of "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God" because it induced the same sputtery anger that hits me any
time I see destiny, no matter how pretty the packaging: That’s not
fair.

I don’t mean fair like "she gets more candy than I do"
because while that is not fair, it is certainly true. Some animals are
more equal than others: some people will get more advantages than they
deserve and they will get away with murder and they will be rewarded
rather than punished. This is true, and I don’t expect fantasy books,
no matter how fantastic, to present me with something truer than
reality can muster: I do not expect the fairness of equality. But the
unfairness that I cannot handle is the unfairness conveyed by Destiny,
by Fate.

So I was pretty excited to read Philip Pullman‘s books,
because I thought he would have no truck with Because God Said So,
whether we called it God or The Oracle or The Light or Dumbledore. I
thought: Yay! A new children’s series with free will! Characters doing
what they think is right without regard for messages from higher
beings. Characters stumbling in their steampunk darkness, so like our
own; characters making their own choices. And then on top of that,
Pullman can write his way around a sentence and through a book like nobody’s business. I even thought in my naivety that perhaps the characters would not get the kingdom of hard work vs. kingdom of happy oblivion choice at the end, and wouldn’t that be nice!

HAHAHA. I should have known already in the Golden Compass,
when the alethiometer gave me pause, but Lyra seemed so self-determined
and Will even more so: "I may be inclined to be this sort of person but
it doesn’t mean I have to choose it." And so we bopped on through three
books of me thinking my lofty thoughts about fairness and free will and real choices. Boy, was I pretty pissed when I finished Amber Spyglass. Philip Pullman
so didn’t "kill god". He pulled deux ex machina like a rabbit out of a
hat. Fate? We pretend it doesn’t exist only because it’s too depressing
to contend with. Destiny is reality, and the only reason the human
characters won’t be told their destinies is so that they continue
existing under the apparently illusory free will they hold so dear
(even though they don’t have it really have it, since Destiny trumps
Free Will). And so to be heroic is to acknowledge the existence and
even inevitability of your fate without even asking what it is. This
is… not free will. Oh, and yeah, and the final choice (which isn’t a choice)? You have to give up what you want
most because an angel said so. OH, ferfle.

We’re totally going to see the movie still, but I am disappointed. I’m getting my Alexander books encased in gold, I guess. And
I will continue living in the Star Trek world with Squire Tuck, unless
somebody can recommend some fantasy books where the world is fantasy
and the moral approaches something I can live with, something at least
as true as reality.

SORRY THAT WAS SO LONG.

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!