A couple of weeks ago I got an iPod nano and it's no understatement to say the thing's changed my life.
Originally I was just looking for something to run with-- the discus-sized portable c.d. player I'd been running with for the past three years had finally driven me completely insane. I used to run the four-mile loop around Town Lake in Austin, and at the time, tampon-sized MP3 players were all the rage. But that was Austin, techno-geek, uber-hip Austin, and my stubborn insistence on rationing myself to ONE c.d. for the entire run, and consequently developing an over-muscled right arm, seemed somehow virtuously retro. Still, I didn't miss the smirks on my fellow runners' faces when I trotted by with the technological equivalent of a ghetto blaster balanced on one shoulder.
Our subsequent military moves have been measured descents down the ladder of hipness and economic prosperity, so my c.d. player became less of a limiting factor on my coolness. But then it broke, and not in the way I'd expected. I always imagined I would drop it in the middle of a run and it would hit the pavement and burst into a million plastic pieces, but instead my c.d. player broke slowly, dispiritedly. Its motor wore out so that with every forward swing of my arm, the music stalled out and every backward swing would start it up again. Eventually, it even refused to tolerate being tilted in my grip. For two days I ran with my arm hooked out in front of me holding the c.d. player parallel to the ground, and doing my best to absorb the shock of my footfalls with a counteracting shoulder movement. At last the long silent voice of dignity spoke, and it said, "You look retarded." I agreed.
The iPod nano, in case you've been living under a boulder and never seen one, is a small, rectangular white wafer with a color screen about as wide across as two standard postage stamps, and comes with an iconic set of white-wired ear bud headphones. I've eaten crackers that were more substantial than the nano. It holds roughly 1,000 songs, or 3 solid days of music. Apple also developed the "click wheel" for its iPods, in order to navigate quickly among songs, artists, albums, and genres, and as with most things Mac, the device is beautifully simple and eerily intuitive.
Within two days I had my iPod packed with a broad sampling of music from my own modest collection and my husband's vastly more comprehensive one, (reason for marriage exposed) and I ran, hands free, feet on fire, and it was good, so good.
Lately, though, my love affair with the nano has come in off the street, and I find myself clipping it to the waist of my scrub pants (contraband courtesy of my friend Larry and the Aurora, Missouri ER) and singing along with the Eels while I make coffee. Our house has an awkward add-on with a long bay of window seats down one side, and I've found that this is the perfect place to spend a few weekend hours examining my toes and letting the "Shuffle All Songs" feature surprise me.
It occurred to me today that the "Shuffle" feature might be able to answer some questions that have been bothering me lately. The connections it makes from one song to the next are supposedly random, but I've found that if I let my mind wander and concentrate on a particular topic, "Shuffle" will call up a song that says something shockingly relevant. I'm not surprised by this-- in college, immediately after whatever break-up I happened to be going through, pop songs on the radio tended to suddenly take on new meaning, almost as though my name were inserted into the spaces between verse and chorus.
When you think about it, posing questions to a randomly shuffled stack of 1,000 songs based on all kinds of human experience is really about as logical and reliable as any form of prognostication. So today, as an experiment, I took a particularly knotty question and put it to the iPod: am I in control of my thoughts about food and weight and body image? Are the things I do to be thin choices or compulsions, and am I ready to admit to all of them? Does a behavior have to have a name for you to want to stop it? I've been going back and forth on this one for the better part of four years. Maybe it seems stupid to pose a question this fundamental to an electronic device, but honestly, that's about as much perspective as I have right now. I've rationalized this whole thing to pieces and come up with about 17 different qualified answers, none of which spur me to action.
The iPod answered with "Machete" by Moby, which, when you look at the lyrics-- lots of images of darkness and some creepy phrase about "help me broken baby help me break you with my mind"-- don't make a lot of sense. But the ominous and frenetic pace of the song resonates with me. I think of it more for what it's not-- controlled, comforting, coherent, hopeful-- than what it is. And maybe that should tell me something.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Images of South Texas
One thing that's both refreshing and maddening about the nomadic lifestyle is how it tends to make me collect mental clip files for future reminiscence. It's an odd grammatical tense to live in, the imagined-future-past-tense, but one convenient feature of this kind of thinking is that it does a light, little tra-la-la skip over the more obvious question, "What will the next place be like?"
So far, the military has pulled a neat little poker trick where it holds out two options of our next posting. We're allowed to express a preference, and it's filed away somewhere, but it's only a tiny part of the giant, mysterious equation that actually decides where we'll go. Up until our orders are written and posted, we must consider each option with equal weight, even though they may be on opposite sides of the country. Like Virginia and California.
Faced with such uncertainty, I find it's much more productive to think in the imagined-future-past-tense, and that's what I did on the commute to work today. South Texas scrolled before me in a kind of sensory montage as I tried to press each image and sensation into the deepest animal level coils of my brain.
The resulting impression was startling in its otherworldliness, and when I say that I'm thinking mainly about the plants. Sunflowers are everywhere this time of year, along the highways and railroad tracks, muscling their way into the neatly planted fields. They grow up to six feet tall in large, swaying clusters, and since it's nearly always windy, you get the impression of a crowd of nodding spectators, twisting their heads on whiskery green necks.
The crops here are corn, cotton, and grain sorghum and each moves differently in a strong wind. The grain sorghum attracts most of the birds, including the giant population of idiot doves who regularly smack into our living room window, causing me to drop whatever drink I'm carrying and crouch like I've been shot at. Grain sorghum is also given to rogue genetics depending on the variety of the seed, and at regular intervals, one bizarre stalk will poke out high above the rest. It's these rogue stalks that the grackles and mockingbirds like best, and they'll perch on top of one and bob lazily on a reddish sea of grain.
This whole lower part of Texas used to be underwater, and that doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider how big the sky is out here. Some people need a big sky. My mother talks about how much she misses watching storm fronts roll in from miles away when she was growing up out in West Texas, how you could see the whole thing tumbling towards you, lit from within by the stuttering flashes of lightning. On days like today, when the sky is crowded with an impossible variety of clouds, some solid and bone-white with scalloped edges, others scraped thin across a background of slate gray, I can agree with her-- I need a big sky. But on the days when nothing but a scrim of palest gray hangs between me and the sun, and it stretches from one horizon clear to the next, and all light becomes muted and hazy, I feel like it's too much, like I've been tucked in too tight under a smothering quilt and everything's pressing down on me at once. Then a few skyscrapers would be nice to poke the sky back a bit and give me some room to move.
Mostly I get a sensation of things growing here in wave-like profusion. Hibiscus blossoms as big across as my hand (and I have big hands) unfold like crepe paper in colors so bright they seem to vibrate. Bougainvilleas explode in purple, magenta, light orange, white, and yellow from well intentioned little corners in gardens, but soon take over sidewalks, porches, whole corners of parking lots with their thorny branches.
The most sinister and prehistoric of the plants are the cacti. Impervious to Nature's mood swings, these things grow in more frightening variety down here than I've ever seen. There's one devouring the back fence of our neighbor, and it's well over 12 feet tall, a sprawling, muscular mass of stems as thick as movie pickles that sprout thorns as long as hypodermics. I can understand how our neighbors would be afraid to do anything about this cactus, even if they had children. This thing looks entirely capable of whirling around smacking anyone who dared sneak up on it with a pair of shears.
One of the houses I run by in the mornings has a front yard consisting entirely of horrific looking species of cacti, carefully maintained and displayed, like nature's medieval armory. There are the prickly pears I'm familiar with, who sprout little cup-like pink and yellow blossoms of top of ping-pong paddle-looking branches (are they branches or leaves on a cactus?), but then there are about seven other types, each reaching almost chest high and sporting a variety of violent appendages that seem to me like the kinds of plants only dinosaurs could eat.
I guess it's that-- the feeling that everything I'm looking at has been around for ages-- literally-- before me, and so much of it seems to be aggressively bent on the idea of taking it all back, of shoving up through the asphalt and twining up the sides of buildings until it grows thick enough to snap something off.
There is a century plant down the street and around the corner from us, and in the last month or so it's been sending up its legendary blossom, a stalk that's reached the height of a nearby telephone pole with a chandelier of nobby yellow beads unfolding from the top of it. Lately its begun to lean streetward under its own weight and the constant push of the gulf wind, and what I wonder is, when is it going to snap and what will that sound like? And whose car is it going to hit?
So far, the military has pulled a neat little poker trick where it holds out two options of our next posting. We're allowed to express a preference, and it's filed away somewhere, but it's only a tiny part of the giant, mysterious equation that actually decides where we'll go. Up until our orders are written and posted, we must consider each option with equal weight, even though they may be on opposite sides of the country. Like Virginia and California.
Faced with such uncertainty, I find it's much more productive to think in the imagined-future-past-tense, and that's what I did on the commute to work today. South Texas scrolled before me in a kind of sensory montage as I tried to press each image and sensation into the deepest animal level coils of my brain.
The resulting impression was startling in its otherworldliness, and when I say that I'm thinking mainly about the plants. Sunflowers are everywhere this time of year, along the highways and railroad tracks, muscling their way into the neatly planted fields. They grow up to six feet tall in large, swaying clusters, and since it's nearly always windy, you get the impression of a crowd of nodding spectators, twisting their heads on whiskery green necks.
The crops here are corn, cotton, and grain sorghum and each moves differently in a strong wind. The grain sorghum attracts most of the birds, including the giant population of idiot doves who regularly smack into our living room window, causing me to drop whatever drink I'm carrying and crouch like I've been shot at. Grain sorghum is also given to rogue genetics depending on the variety of the seed, and at regular intervals, one bizarre stalk will poke out high above the rest. It's these rogue stalks that the grackles and mockingbirds like best, and they'll perch on top of one and bob lazily on a reddish sea of grain.
This whole lower part of Texas used to be underwater, and that doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider how big the sky is out here. Some people need a big sky. My mother talks about how much she misses watching storm fronts roll in from miles away when she was growing up out in West Texas, how you could see the whole thing tumbling towards you, lit from within by the stuttering flashes of lightning. On days like today, when the sky is crowded with an impossible variety of clouds, some solid and bone-white with scalloped edges, others scraped thin across a background of slate gray, I can agree with her-- I need a big sky. But on the days when nothing but a scrim of palest gray hangs between me and the sun, and it stretches from one horizon clear to the next, and all light becomes muted and hazy, I feel like it's too much, like I've been tucked in too tight under a smothering quilt and everything's pressing down on me at once. Then a few skyscrapers would be nice to poke the sky back a bit and give me some room to move.
Mostly I get a sensation of things growing here in wave-like profusion. Hibiscus blossoms as big across as my hand (and I have big hands) unfold like crepe paper in colors so bright they seem to vibrate. Bougainvilleas explode in purple, magenta, light orange, white, and yellow from well intentioned little corners in gardens, but soon take over sidewalks, porches, whole corners of parking lots with their thorny branches.
The most sinister and prehistoric of the plants are the cacti. Impervious to Nature's mood swings, these things grow in more frightening variety down here than I've ever seen. There's one devouring the back fence of our neighbor, and it's well over 12 feet tall, a sprawling, muscular mass of stems as thick as movie pickles that sprout thorns as long as hypodermics. I can understand how our neighbors would be afraid to do anything about this cactus, even if they had children. This thing looks entirely capable of whirling around smacking anyone who dared sneak up on it with a pair of shears.
One of the houses I run by in the mornings has a front yard consisting entirely of horrific looking species of cacti, carefully maintained and displayed, like nature's medieval armory. There are the prickly pears I'm familiar with, who sprout little cup-like pink and yellow blossoms of top of ping-pong paddle-looking branches (are they branches or leaves on a cactus?), but then there are about seven other types, each reaching almost chest high and sporting a variety of violent appendages that seem to me like the kinds of plants only dinosaurs could eat.
I guess it's that-- the feeling that everything I'm looking at has been around for ages-- literally-- before me, and so much of it seems to be aggressively bent on the idea of taking it all back, of shoving up through the asphalt and twining up the sides of buildings until it grows thick enough to snap something off.
There is a century plant down the street and around the corner from us, and in the last month or so it's been sending up its legendary blossom, a stalk that's reached the height of a nearby telephone pole with a chandelier of nobby yellow beads unfolding from the top of it. Lately its begun to lean streetward under its own weight and the constant push of the gulf wind, and what I wonder is, when is it going to snap and what will that sound like? And whose car is it going to hit?
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A (tiny) room of one's own
Today is a banner day-- at work, they've given me an office all my own. Yes, it's tiny and windowless and someone's left behind a pile of empty binders, a lamp that doesn't work, and warped photographs of a dog dressed up for Halloween, but it's going to have my name on the door, the door that closes with just me inside.
Workspaces are important. I know because I've had mine rearranged, compacted, and flat out taken away at several of my previous jobs. Nothing underscores the existential stupidity of life like not having a workspace.
Let me illustrate:
My first job out of college was being a receptionist for the dean of the school from which I'd just graduated. Imagine a runner training for a race for four years, and getting down into the blocks all tensed up and ready to bolt, only to do a face plant when the starter's gun goes off. This, for me, was the agony of answering phones and collating stacks of old memos when I was convinced that if I'd only had the balls, I could be in New York, perfecting my affected smoking habit and tapping out brilliant essays on my laptop.
Instead, I slouched behind a giant cherrywood desk in a giant reception area, writing short stories with no endings and occasionally transferring phone calls to people who did real work. In front of me was an empty hall and behind me and on both sides were private offices, whose doors, when they were open, afforded the occupants a clear shot at me for gossip and complaints. But more often, I acted as the yarn between tin cans as my coworkers yelled back and forth to each other and then asked me to repeat the unclear parts. It was a unique feeling of being both totally exposed and completely invisible.
The office also had an antique wood floor that screamed and moaned underfoot, and I suspect the only reason that it was slated for replacement was that it made sneaking out early impossible. A big rhinoceros of a woman contractor came to draw up the replacement plan, and it was her task to figure out what to do with me while they ripped the boards out from under my workspace. She and the dean pondered their options above my head, like I was an expensive piece of machinery.
"Can we move out the desk and the computer?"
"Well... yes, but she's got to be able to get to that phone line and that's the only jack."
The solution: the computer is packed off to a storage room, the desk is carted out in pieces, the carpet is rolled up and hauled away, and I am left in a rolling chair in the middle of the room with the phone in my lap. For three weeks. For added fun, an ex-president was due to speak at the college, and mine was the sole contact number listed in the paper, so for three weeks I sat in my rolling chair and fielded 200 calls a day, repeating the same vague ticket information. The only reason I didn't quit was that several whackos started calling me pretty regularly.
(To the man playing Hall & Oates' "I've Been Waiting For a Girl Like You" loudly in the background while he moaned and yelled, insisting he'd fallen out of his wheelchair, thank you. Your slurred speculation about what I was wearing made the next 157 calls like an Easter egg hunt-- "which one has a nut inside?")
My next job was far more challenging and interesting, in no small part due to the fact that my office mate routinely divulged the sordid secrets of her free-wheeling New Age lifestyle. Trance-dancing, polyamory, duct tape pasties-- all terms that make for an interesting google search, but also an awkward lunch conversation that tends to be a little one-sided. The problem was that I actually had to work hard at this job, and the all too frequent bleats for attention shattered my concentration into crumbs.
When given the option of staying where I was, in a sprawling communal space with my own massive desk and a couch, or moving to a cubicle roughly the size of a bathroom stall in another office, I jumped at the chance to move. Even when it turned out that the ceiling in the new office periodically leaked sewage from the urinals directly overhead, I counted myself lucky.
[Besides, --and this is terrible-- most of the pee ended up on another woman's desk, a woman who decorated her entire workspace with plush toys that corresponded to the seasons. In fact, if I was really going to talk about horrific workspaces, I'd have to devote most of my thoughts to V., who often came in to find biohazard bags covering large brownish pools on her desk, and whose computer was continually being disinfected. In the true spirit of resilience, V. replaced each piss-soaked pumpkin and bunny with an exact replica, never truly losing faith that one day the problem would be fixed.]
My current job is actually quite fun-- I'm evenly divided between teaching (and meeting a lot of characters) and more solitary, introverted tasks, and up until now, I've been hunched in a back corner of my boss's office, working on another person's desk in the hours she's not scheduled. It's a bit like being a tick-- for hours on end I make my living deeply ensconced in someone else's personal space. I see little notes she's left herself, her chewed-on pencils, candy wrappers, a picture of her sister as the desktop image. I try not to leave any traces that I've been there, but still, it's weird.
Now, though... a room of my own where I can work in peace and listen to Tupac and scan the New York Times in my breaks... it's going to be great.
Workspaces are important. I know because I've had mine rearranged, compacted, and flat out taken away at several of my previous jobs. Nothing underscores the existential stupidity of life like not having a workspace.
Let me illustrate:
My first job out of college was being a receptionist for the dean of the school from which I'd just graduated. Imagine a runner training for a race for four years, and getting down into the blocks all tensed up and ready to bolt, only to do a face plant when the starter's gun goes off. This, for me, was the agony of answering phones and collating stacks of old memos when I was convinced that if I'd only had the balls, I could be in New York, perfecting my affected smoking habit and tapping out brilliant essays on my laptop.
Instead, I slouched behind a giant cherrywood desk in a giant reception area, writing short stories with no endings and occasionally transferring phone calls to people who did real work. In front of me was an empty hall and behind me and on both sides were private offices, whose doors, when they were open, afforded the occupants a clear shot at me for gossip and complaints. But more often, I acted as the yarn between tin cans as my coworkers yelled back and forth to each other and then asked me to repeat the unclear parts. It was a unique feeling of being both totally exposed and completely invisible.
The office also had an antique wood floor that screamed and moaned underfoot, and I suspect the only reason that it was slated for replacement was that it made sneaking out early impossible. A big rhinoceros of a woman contractor came to draw up the replacement plan, and it was her task to figure out what to do with me while they ripped the boards out from under my workspace. She and the dean pondered their options above my head, like I was an expensive piece of machinery.
"Can we move out the desk and the computer?"
"Well... yes, but she's got to be able to get to that phone line and that's the only jack."
The solution: the computer is packed off to a storage room, the desk is carted out in pieces, the carpet is rolled up and hauled away, and I am left in a rolling chair in the middle of the room with the phone in my lap. For three weeks. For added fun, an ex-president was due to speak at the college, and mine was the sole contact number listed in the paper, so for three weeks I sat in my rolling chair and fielded 200 calls a day, repeating the same vague ticket information. The only reason I didn't quit was that several whackos started calling me pretty regularly.
(To the man playing Hall & Oates' "I've Been Waiting For a Girl Like You" loudly in the background while he moaned and yelled, insisting he'd fallen out of his wheelchair, thank you. Your slurred speculation about what I was wearing made the next 157 calls like an Easter egg hunt-- "which one has a nut inside?")
My next job was far more challenging and interesting, in no small part due to the fact that my office mate routinely divulged the sordid secrets of her free-wheeling New Age lifestyle. Trance-dancing, polyamory, duct tape pasties-- all terms that make for an interesting google search, but also an awkward lunch conversation that tends to be a little one-sided. The problem was that I actually had to work hard at this job, and the all too frequent bleats for attention shattered my concentration into crumbs.
When given the option of staying where I was, in a sprawling communal space with my own massive desk and a couch, or moving to a cubicle roughly the size of a bathroom stall in another office, I jumped at the chance to move. Even when it turned out that the ceiling in the new office periodically leaked sewage from the urinals directly overhead, I counted myself lucky.
[Besides, --and this is terrible-- most of the pee ended up on another woman's desk, a woman who decorated her entire workspace with plush toys that corresponded to the seasons. In fact, if I was really going to talk about horrific workspaces, I'd have to devote most of my thoughts to V., who often came in to find biohazard bags covering large brownish pools on her desk, and whose computer was continually being disinfected. In the true spirit of resilience, V. replaced each piss-soaked pumpkin and bunny with an exact replica, never truly losing faith that one day the problem would be fixed.]
My current job is actually quite fun-- I'm evenly divided between teaching (and meeting a lot of characters) and more solitary, introverted tasks, and up until now, I've been hunched in a back corner of my boss's office, working on another person's desk in the hours she's not scheduled. It's a bit like being a tick-- for hours on end I make my living deeply ensconced in someone else's personal space. I see little notes she's left herself, her chewed-on pencils, candy wrappers, a picture of her sister as the desktop image. I try not to leave any traces that I've been there, but still, it's weird.
Now, though... a room of my own where I can work in peace and listen to Tupac and scan the New York Times in my breaks... it's going to be great.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
As if bad pizza weren't enough of a reason...
I now have added incentive to keeping avoiding the Papa John's mere blocks from my house: today they forced someone to wear a giant, anthropomorphic, foam pizza suit and wave miserably to passing motorists as the temperature topped out at 98.
Peering through the shimmering waves of heat rising off 14th street, I witnessed this poor soul doubled over and awkwardly flapping the crust/hem of the costume in a weak attempt to promote air circulation. When the Pizza Thing saw me coming, it straightened and performed a little jumping dance that could be interpreted as either a playful jig or a manic prelude to utter despair.
This town has about 20,000 residents, and as a relative newcomer, I am already thoroughly familiar with its short roster of restaurants, so there's no way a manager could justify breaking out the pizza suit for advertising purposes. Besides, I can imagine nothing more off-putting than the thought of how a flacid, faded pizza suit with toppings made of peeling felt must smell from the inside. I am convinced that this was some sort of hate crime, possibly ageism, homophobia, or immigrant abuse.
Add to this the fact that I was listening to sound bites from the President's insanely optimistic Rose Garden press conference after his peek-a-boo tour of Iraq, and you can see where this dark assessment of power motives is coming from.
Which brings up an interesting and decidedly thorny issue: I have wanted to comment more on politics on this blog, but two things have kept me from doing it. First, it's being done far more eloquently and thoroughly on other sites by people who have the time and the resources and the uncrushable spirit to look closely at how our government operates every day. To me, this is a bit like working in a sausage factory-- you see all the unsavory things that go into the final product, and then you risk losing your appreciation for something you used to like. In my case, I'm already unable to stomach many of the outcomes and decisions made by this administration, and I'm afraid that if I start writing about what seems to be going on behind these factory doors, my entire worldview will begin to smell like the inside of a pizza suit-- in other words, I'll begin to realize how truly powerless I am.
The second, and perhaps more obvious reason I don't write about politics more often is because of my husband's job. I support him wholeheartedly and believe at my core that he (and we by extension) is in the right place and doing the right thing, but this is a hard message to communicate when I'm busy coming up with hyphenated F-word names for the president. This is not to say that we don't talk about politics, just that it's something that must be done mindfully, and with a clearer assessment of purpose than just blowing off steam.
It's a delicate balance, but one for which I'm grateful, since it's made me take a harder look at the purpose of disagreement and frustration, and indeed of the true nature of democracy. Paying attention, staying abreast of the situation, is a duty, but without positive action, complaints are just so much hot air in an already uncomfortable pizza suit.
Peering through the shimmering waves of heat rising off 14th street, I witnessed this poor soul doubled over and awkwardly flapping the crust/hem of the costume in a weak attempt to promote air circulation. When the Pizza Thing saw me coming, it straightened and performed a little jumping dance that could be interpreted as either a playful jig or a manic prelude to utter despair.
This town has about 20,000 residents, and as a relative newcomer, I am already thoroughly familiar with its short roster of restaurants, so there's no way a manager could justify breaking out the pizza suit for advertising purposes. Besides, I can imagine nothing more off-putting than the thought of how a flacid, faded pizza suit with toppings made of peeling felt must smell from the inside. I am convinced that this was some sort of hate crime, possibly ageism, homophobia, or immigrant abuse.
Add to this the fact that I was listening to sound bites from the President's insanely optimistic Rose Garden press conference after his peek-a-boo tour of Iraq, and you can see where this dark assessment of power motives is coming from.
Which brings up an interesting and decidedly thorny issue: I have wanted to comment more on politics on this blog, but two things have kept me from doing it. First, it's being done far more eloquently and thoroughly on other sites by people who have the time and the resources and the uncrushable spirit to look closely at how our government operates every day. To me, this is a bit like working in a sausage factory-- you see all the unsavory things that go into the final product, and then you risk losing your appreciation for something you used to like. In my case, I'm already unable to stomach many of the outcomes and decisions made by this administration, and I'm afraid that if I start writing about what seems to be going on behind these factory doors, my entire worldview will begin to smell like the inside of a pizza suit-- in other words, I'll begin to realize how truly powerless I am.
The second, and perhaps more obvious reason I don't write about politics more often is because of my husband's job. I support him wholeheartedly and believe at my core that he (and we by extension) is in the right place and doing the right thing, but this is a hard message to communicate when I'm busy coming up with hyphenated F-word names for the president. This is not to say that we don't talk about politics, just that it's something that must be done mindfully, and with a clearer assessment of purpose than just blowing off steam.
It's a delicate balance, but one for which I'm grateful, since it's made me take a harder look at the purpose of disagreement and frustration, and indeed of the true nature of democracy. Paying attention, staying abreast of the situation, is a duty, but without positive action, complaints are just so much hot air in an already uncomfortable pizza suit.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Toobing the Guadalupe
This past weekend my husband and I took a trip to Austin to float on tubes down the Guadalupe River and attend a wedding. In that order. Had we known what had happened to the Guadalupe River, and to the tradition of tubing, in the ten or so years since we'd visited, we might have seen the folly in committing to show up good-humored and clean to an event the following day.
First of all, tubing has now become "toobing" in much the same way fruit can become "froot" or "real fruit flavoring" when bastardized into a more artificial, palatable, and profitable product meant to appeal to a larger and dumber populace.
Tubing was a cheap weekend activity involving the rental of big, black rubber inner tubes meant to convey people and coolers at a stately pace down a stretch of river. It was an activity for families as well as college students.
Toobing on the Guadalupe, however, costs about as much as a nice dinner for four with top shelf drinks, and involves the same black rubber inner tubes, whose flaws (the tendency to chafe your underarms and the backs of your knees with their blisteringly hot rubber, and to poke you in the ass with their six-inch metal air nozzles) become much more apparent when you have to pull out a credit card and start rearranging the month's budget.
Lemming-like you get to shuffle your way to the water's edge with droves, whole platoons, of young sport-drinkers, the kinds of people who can stretch a college career into one long spring break before taking a well-deserved "year off to find myself." They haul along coolers, radios, cigarettes, dip, and long, snaking beer bongs, and periodically test out the well-worn mating call, "Wooooooo!"
The river was low, its grayish watermarked banks receding to reveal faded beer cans wedged into tree roots, and the log jam of human limbs further slowed its movement. I looked down at one point, horrified to realize that my sunscreen (industrial strength, SPF Irish) was melting off of me in giant, oily rainbow rings, but then just as quickly realized that far more horrifying things were being secreted by the people around me-- one guy squirted brown dip juice from a swollen lip directly into the water behind him, and the girl next to me giggled darkly when her friend asked, "So what do ya'll do when you have to pee?"
Only once, during the entire three-hour trip, did I see one of the river's natural residents, a frisbee-sized turtle, a yellow-eared slider. My brother and I watched him poke his head out of the water and blink twice, slowly. In the throaty Spanish accent I use for all animals, I quipped, "Why does the water taste like sluts?"
The Guadalupe has three "take-out points," places where you can get out of the river and catch a shuttle back to the toob rental place, but the cost of the trip is the same no matter what point you make it to. I think this reflects a certain amount of cynicism on the part of the rental companies. There is no financial compensation for having better judgment kick in at the first take-out, which is what happened to us.
The take-outs are arguably the best part of a toobing trip because people who have been lying prone and pounding beers in the sun for hours on end now have to stand upright and negotiate steep banks with a beer in one hand and an inner tube in the other. Years ago, when it was still tubing, I witnessed two burly lesbians fail miserably at this feat, one toppling down the bank and taking out the other, and both yelling at each in slurred contraltos, "Summer! Sum-MERRRR! Get up!" "God, April, I'm TRYING!"
This time, I was reminded of that scene in the first Star Wars movie where Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewy end up in the trash compactor in the Death Star. The trash seems fluid, but it's so dense that you never see any water, or, for that matter, the creature that lives beneath it all and keeps yanking them all under the surface. We washed up at the take-out next to a guy completely passed out in the water, toobless, his head hooked face up over a tree root and his body swaying slack in the shallow, oily water around him. We paused on the bank to regroup and watch another extravagantly drunk guy crash through the underbrush on the opposite side of the river, his knees buckling underneath him like a rag doll's as he waved to the cheering strangers floating past.
It was with quiet solemnity that we watched him slam face first into the human tide-- we were watching the death dive of tubing.
First of all, tubing has now become "toobing" in much the same way fruit can become "froot" or "real fruit flavoring" when bastardized into a more artificial, palatable, and profitable product meant to appeal to a larger and dumber populace.
Tubing was a cheap weekend activity involving the rental of big, black rubber inner tubes meant to convey people and coolers at a stately pace down a stretch of river. It was an activity for families as well as college students.
Toobing on the Guadalupe, however, costs about as much as a nice dinner for four with top shelf drinks, and involves the same black rubber inner tubes, whose flaws (the tendency to chafe your underarms and the backs of your knees with their blisteringly hot rubber, and to poke you in the ass with their six-inch metal air nozzles) become much more apparent when you have to pull out a credit card and start rearranging the month's budget.
Lemming-like you get to shuffle your way to the water's edge with droves, whole platoons, of young sport-drinkers, the kinds of people who can stretch a college career into one long spring break before taking a well-deserved "year off to find myself." They haul along coolers, radios, cigarettes, dip, and long, snaking beer bongs, and periodically test out the well-worn mating call, "Wooooooo!"
The river was low, its grayish watermarked banks receding to reveal faded beer cans wedged into tree roots, and the log jam of human limbs further slowed its movement. I looked down at one point, horrified to realize that my sunscreen (industrial strength, SPF Irish) was melting off of me in giant, oily rainbow rings, but then just as quickly realized that far more horrifying things were being secreted by the people around me-- one guy squirted brown dip juice from a swollen lip directly into the water behind him, and the girl next to me giggled darkly when her friend asked, "So what do ya'll do when you have to pee?"
Only once, during the entire three-hour trip, did I see one of the river's natural residents, a frisbee-sized turtle, a yellow-eared slider. My brother and I watched him poke his head out of the water and blink twice, slowly. In the throaty Spanish accent I use for all animals, I quipped, "Why does the water taste like sluts?"
The Guadalupe has three "take-out points," places where you can get out of the river and catch a shuttle back to the toob rental place, but the cost of the trip is the same no matter what point you make it to. I think this reflects a certain amount of cynicism on the part of the rental companies. There is no financial compensation for having better judgment kick in at the first take-out, which is what happened to us.
The take-outs are arguably the best part of a toobing trip because people who have been lying prone and pounding beers in the sun for hours on end now have to stand upright and negotiate steep banks with a beer in one hand and an inner tube in the other. Years ago, when it was still tubing, I witnessed two burly lesbians fail miserably at this feat, one toppling down the bank and taking out the other, and both yelling at each in slurred contraltos, "Summer! Sum-MERRRR! Get up!" "God, April, I'm TRYING!"
This time, I was reminded of that scene in the first Star Wars movie where Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewy end up in the trash compactor in the Death Star. The trash seems fluid, but it's so dense that you never see any water, or, for that matter, the creature that lives beneath it all and keeps yanking them all under the surface. We washed up at the take-out next to a guy completely passed out in the water, toobless, his head hooked face up over a tree root and his body swaying slack in the shallow, oily water around him. We paused on the bank to regroup and watch another extravagantly drunk guy crash through the underbrush on the opposite side of the river, his knees buckling underneath him like a rag doll's as he waved to the cheering strangers floating past.
It was with quiet solemnity that we watched him slam face first into the human tide-- we were watching the death dive of tubing.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Just putting it out there...
I don't intend to make a habit of issuing broad proclamations about what Should and Should Not Be Done in Public Radio, but my extravagant daily work commutes have begun anew and the local NPR affiliate is probably the only thing keeping me from falling asleep and plowing into a ditch every day.
So I'm grateful, but...
The morning announcer for my public radio station sounds like he wants to kill himself. He sighs with crushing world-weariness in the middle of sentences, as though he's honestly considering throwing in the towel before the end of the period. He also leaves long, ominous stretches of dead air between his station ID's and the start of the NPR feed.
I wonder what he's doing in those blank moments. Staring at the insulated walls that bind him? I wonder this as I stare at miles of flooded corn crops, waiting for the monster 18-wheeler hauling farm equipment wider than the lane to bear down on me and pass me. Being and nothingness in rural Texas, all the intersections of life and death and the pititful in-betweens coming up fast behind you. No way to start a day.
And then there's the melodious afternoon woman, who would have the perfect neutral radio persona were it not for her annoying habit of bringing the flow of information to a screeching halt in order to pronounce foreign words and names with native authenticity. In a region of the country where language is pretty much half and half anyway, this makes for a tortured, Intro to Spanish-like delivery. Plus there's something a little too overeager about it, like someone from up north ordering their first "en-chi-lada and marrrrr-garrrrr-ita."
This is also the woman who does all of the classical programming, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to hear her sprain her tongue on nearly all of the world's old school languages as she introduces German aurias performed by Czechoslavakian singers accompanied by Latvian orchestras performing in Israel. These are the people who make familiar names foreign again-- she adds a giant loogie to Bach and makes Debussy sound almost pornographic.
But these are minor quibbles. Some time I'll have to tell you about public radio in Mississippi.
So I'm grateful, but...
The morning announcer for my public radio station sounds like he wants to kill himself. He sighs with crushing world-weariness in the middle of sentences, as though he's honestly considering throwing in the towel before the end of the period. He also leaves long, ominous stretches of dead air between his station ID's and the start of the NPR feed.
I wonder what he's doing in those blank moments. Staring at the insulated walls that bind him? I wonder this as I stare at miles of flooded corn crops, waiting for the monster 18-wheeler hauling farm equipment wider than the lane to bear down on me and pass me. Being and nothingness in rural Texas, all the intersections of life and death and the pititful in-betweens coming up fast behind you. No way to start a day.
And then there's the melodious afternoon woman, who would have the perfect neutral radio persona were it not for her annoying habit of bringing the flow of information to a screeching halt in order to pronounce foreign words and names with native authenticity. In a region of the country where language is pretty much half and half anyway, this makes for a tortured, Intro to Spanish-like delivery. Plus there's something a little too overeager about it, like someone from up north ordering their first "en-chi-lada and marrrrr-garrrrr-ita."
This is also the woman who does all of the classical programming, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to hear her sprain her tongue on nearly all of the world's old school languages as she introduces German aurias performed by Czechoslavakian singers accompanied by Latvian orchestras performing in Israel. These are the people who make familiar names foreign again-- she adds a giant loogie to Bach and makes Debussy sound almost pornographic.
But these are minor quibbles. Some time I'll have to tell you about public radio in Mississippi.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Motorcycles and Divorce
I've been in kind of a writing slump lately. Days, weeks have gone by without something leaping up and stinging me, saying, "This! Something must be said about this!"
It's not like nothing's been going on. The dobermans disappeared suddenly one day like Latin American dissidents. My parents visited, igniting a streak of deliciously forbidden restaurant meals. My husband and I did a loop of Central Texas for Memorial Day and ate hamburgers the size of softballs in our favorite Austin bar, whose decor is based on the lower pits of hell.
But I've felt no urge to leave a word trail. In fact it's almost like I've been taking a certain pleasure in letting things go by, in wandering off the path for a while. Like all vacations, though, this one has its price.
I dream every night and I always remember my dreams. I've heard people say, "Oh, I wish I could remember my dreams, but as soon as I wake up they're gone." I want to kick these people in the shins and pinch them hard on the back of the upper arm where it really hurts. My dream life is exhausting and demanding, and it becomes infinitely more so a week before my period, during times of incredible stress, and when I've stopped writing. So, fairly often.
When I'm telling stories, I frequently have to stop and ask myself, "Did this really happen, or did I dream this?", and all too often I've already started the story and end up having to ask this question out loud, which just kills my credibility. I've held days-long grudges against my husband for things he did in dreams (most recently he passionately kissed a hippie girl all over her face after she told him he had a nice aura). I've called up acquaintances to check up on them after watching them be devoured by crocodiles in my head only hours earlier.
My dreams are also enormously self-referential, and thus almost completely useless in waking life-- like pretentious grad students, they adore alluding to other obscure dreams I've had, and the whole point to them seems to be to obscure the point. This is understandably frustrating when you remember each in detail, like having to watch French art films every night with the final the next day.
Last night was one of the nights when the bill for not writing came due. I dreamed all night and woke up tangled in sweaty sheets and thick images. I won't lay out the whole 8-hour plot, but the main themes were motorcycles and my parents divorcing, two things which terrify me beyond reason, and about which I feel compelled to say a few words.
First, motorcycles. These emerged as a dream theme only after I'd taken my first ride on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja a couple of years after I graduated college. It was my friend Larry's bike, and we wore helmets and he never went above 50, but the whole time I dug my nails into his sides and screamed inside my head. Originally I'd been excited to try it out, but after an hour of watching the pavement streak by mere feet below my face and picturing myself wrapped around the chassis of ever passing truck, I'd had enough. A dream metaphor had been born. I end up on motorcycles on dark highways in the rain, with no idea how to work the brakes, and no helmet, at times in my life when I feel like things are going too fast. Every time we move I get motorcycle dreams, and I wake up feeling like I've spent the night in a wind tunnel clinging to the walls.
The second theme is harder. All throughout childhood I grew up with the specter of divorce. It happened all around me, and some ways it felt like what I imagine the early days of polio were like-- no one knew how it happened, but when it did, things were never the same. Plus, most of my friends solemnly agreed that I was way more at risk, since my dad had an unusual job that required him to be away from home a lot. The ones it had happened to had lots of advice-- get separate toys for each house and play dumb on the old rules, incite a bidding war for your affections. My parents' "inevitable" divorce was an old, persistent fear, right up there with dinosaur attacks and the nuclear endgame. I had back-up plans for all three.
These two themes dovetailed nicely last night in an episode where I had stolen a motorcycle to sneak out of my parents' house and go to some huge concert, planning to be back in the morning. But I chickened out of the late-night, helmet-less highway drive and instead went to friend's house to sleep on the couch and await the inevitable explosion when my parents realized I had snuck out. Here's the twist, though-- my dad is already sleeping on my friend's couch, and casually tells me I would have been in big trouble were it not for the divorce proceedings occupying him and my mom right now. And then he rolls over and tries to go back to sleep! My dream response is to sit down in the meadow I suddenly find myself in and scream myself hoarse. Each scream is different from the one before it, one for anger, one for betrayal, one for sadness, one for complete and all-encompassing fatigue.
(I can picture my dad reading this and being deeply troubled, and doing that thing where he pinches his chin and juts out his lower lip. Clarifying here: fears are fears, and these have taken on metaphorical, totemic weight for me, meaning they no longer mean what they mean. Motorcycles don't mean motorcycles and divorce doesn't mean divorce. Both just mean fear. Now who sounds like a pretentious grad student?)
Anyway, this is often the cost of being lazy for me-- someone turns up the volume and color saturation on my dreams, and I have to find a way to balance things out again, to make my waking life heavier and more invested.
Mornin'.
It's not like nothing's been going on. The dobermans disappeared suddenly one day like Latin American dissidents. My parents visited, igniting a streak of deliciously forbidden restaurant meals. My husband and I did a loop of Central Texas for Memorial Day and ate hamburgers the size of softballs in our favorite Austin bar, whose decor is based on the lower pits of hell.
But I've felt no urge to leave a word trail. In fact it's almost like I've been taking a certain pleasure in letting things go by, in wandering off the path for a while. Like all vacations, though, this one has its price.
I dream every night and I always remember my dreams. I've heard people say, "Oh, I wish I could remember my dreams, but as soon as I wake up they're gone." I want to kick these people in the shins and pinch them hard on the back of the upper arm where it really hurts. My dream life is exhausting and demanding, and it becomes infinitely more so a week before my period, during times of incredible stress, and when I've stopped writing. So, fairly often.
When I'm telling stories, I frequently have to stop and ask myself, "Did this really happen, or did I dream this?", and all too often I've already started the story and end up having to ask this question out loud, which just kills my credibility. I've held days-long grudges against my husband for things he did in dreams (most recently he passionately kissed a hippie girl all over her face after she told him he had a nice aura). I've called up acquaintances to check up on them after watching them be devoured by crocodiles in my head only hours earlier.
My dreams are also enormously self-referential, and thus almost completely useless in waking life-- like pretentious grad students, they adore alluding to other obscure dreams I've had, and the whole point to them seems to be to obscure the point. This is understandably frustrating when you remember each in detail, like having to watch French art films every night with the final the next day.
Last night was one of the nights when the bill for not writing came due. I dreamed all night and woke up tangled in sweaty sheets and thick images. I won't lay out the whole 8-hour plot, but the main themes were motorcycles and my parents divorcing, two things which terrify me beyond reason, and about which I feel compelled to say a few words.
First, motorcycles. These emerged as a dream theme only after I'd taken my first ride on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja a couple of years after I graduated college. It was my friend Larry's bike, and we wore helmets and he never went above 50, but the whole time I dug my nails into his sides and screamed inside my head. Originally I'd been excited to try it out, but after an hour of watching the pavement streak by mere feet below my face and picturing myself wrapped around the chassis of ever passing truck, I'd had enough. A dream metaphor had been born. I end up on motorcycles on dark highways in the rain, with no idea how to work the brakes, and no helmet, at times in my life when I feel like things are going too fast. Every time we move I get motorcycle dreams, and I wake up feeling like I've spent the night in a wind tunnel clinging to the walls.
The second theme is harder. All throughout childhood I grew up with the specter of divorce. It happened all around me, and some ways it felt like what I imagine the early days of polio were like-- no one knew how it happened, but when it did, things were never the same. Plus, most of my friends solemnly agreed that I was way more at risk, since my dad had an unusual job that required him to be away from home a lot. The ones it had happened to had lots of advice-- get separate toys for each house and play dumb on the old rules, incite a bidding war for your affections. My parents' "inevitable" divorce was an old, persistent fear, right up there with dinosaur attacks and the nuclear endgame. I had back-up plans for all three.
These two themes dovetailed nicely last night in an episode where I had stolen a motorcycle to sneak out of my parents' house and go to some huge concert, planning to be back in the morning. But I chickened out of the late-night, helmet-less highway drive and instead went to friend's house to sleep on the couch and await the inevitable explosion when my parents realized I had snuck out. Here's the twist, though-- my dad is already sleeping on my friend's couch, and casually tells me I would have been in big trouble were it not for the divorce proceedings occupying him and my mom right now. And then he rolls over and tries to go back to sleep! My dream response is to sit down in the meadow I suddenly find myself in and scream myself hoarse. Each scream is different from the one before it, one for anger, one for betrayal, one for sadness, one for complete and all-encompassing fatigue.
(I can picture my dad reading this and being deeply troubled, and doing that thing where he pinches his chin and juts out his lower lip. Clarifying here: fears are fears, and these have taken on metaphorical, totemic weight for me, meaning they no longer mean what they mean. Motorcycles don't mean motorcycles and divorce doesn't mean divorce. Both just mean fear. Now who sounds like a pretentious grad student?)
Anyway, this is often the cost of being lazy for me-- someone turns up the volume and color saturation on my dreams, and I have to find a way to balance things out again, to make my waking life heavier and more invested.
Mornin'.
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