Say what you will about the Germans, but they're brilliant at coming up with complex emotional words. Here are a few of my favorites, (some courtesy of this BBC article):
Schadenfreude: n. pleasure derived from the misfortune of others
ex.: "And there she went, flying headlong into the muddy puddle in all of her Prada finery; I had to admit to a bit of schadenfreude.
Kummerspeck: n. literally translated, "grief bacon." The weight gained from emotion-related over-eating.
ex.: "What you're seeing here [grab tummy flab and wiggle it] is a bit of the ol' Kummerspeck from when Axle dumped me."
Drachenfutter: n. translates literally as "dragon fodder." The gifts with which guilty husbands try to appease their wives.
ex.: Sanjay's roses after the extended business trip to Thailand were immediately recognized for what they were: mere Drachenfutter."
Today I challenge the Germans to come up with a multi-syllabic humdinger for a brand new, highly complex emotion I have only recently experienced for the first time: the sickening feeling that comes from the realization that a friend, a confidant even, harbors a whole set of deeply held, deeply whacky, deeply uninformed political and social opinions that run completely counter to the pillars of your own moral identity.
If possible, Germans, include the element of not being able to say anything in reaction to this friend's crazy diatribe for fear of setting her off, or encouraging her to reveal her plan for widespread ethnic cleansing. If at all possible, this word should include a kind of meta-awareness of oneself while in the act of discovering this craziness, as in, "Does my face register the horror I'm feeling? Can she tell I'm about to fall off my seat into a pool of my own panic-induced vomit? Make a neutral face, make a neutral face..."
In addition, I turn to the Far East for help: Taiwan, would it be possible to develop a kind of purse-sized Roman candle that could be quickly and easily lighted as a distraction when conversations get way too heavy, way too fast? "Well, I think as far as Iran and Syria go, we should-- Whoa! Look! Fire!" They could even come in packs, like cigarettes. Maybe Marlboro would go in on this. "Social Distraction 100's: Create a diversion, escape, and then have a real cigarette."
In other news, I damaged our camera over the weekend. Accidentally, but still. For a childless couple like Pants and I, this is the equivalent of saying "I dropped our newborn on its head." We reacted accordingly. If I were in kindergarten today and the teacher encouraged me to draw a picture of how I feel, I would draw a giant gray thunderhead spewing lightening bolts into a huge pile of poo.
I'm going to send the camera off to a place in Illinois to see if it can be fixed, but since it hit a concrete patio (since I hadn't put it in its case and wasn't watching out for it while it perched all lonesome by itself on the edge of a table at a wild party), the prognosis is sketchy. It still takes pictures and downloads them, but it won't zoom, scroll through previous pictures, or allow me to use any of its four (crucial) function buttons.
I once knew someone who broke his digital camera. He was a nice guy, but he was also much too confident in his own ability to fix tiny precision electronics, and I watched in tight-lipped anxiety as he ignored my warnings and took the camera apart. There are screws in these things that you could inhale and not know it, there are springs that look like electron shavings-- in short, there's no way in hell you would know whether you're looking at splinters of a broken part, or a perfectly fine, perfectly whole part. By the time this young man had finished his "repair" job, the only thing the camera did was flash, and even that was heroic.
So when I'm envisioning this repair facility in Illinois, I'm picturing a zero-gravity environment lit by massive klieg lights, everything else a brilliant, sterile white, with goggled technicians floating around wielding giant precision tweezers, and then a huge filtering apparatus for sifting the spare screws out of the piles of DNA sloughed off by the workers at the end of the day. Shit can't be cheap, in other words.
Showing posts with label liberal whack job. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberal whack job. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Dad Gum, that's some good public radio
We're mired in one of the thrice-yearly fund drives for the public radio station down here in South of Everywhere, and it's really got my moral compass all torqued up.
My problem is this: I am a devoted, dorked out fan of NPR. Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep of "Morning Edition" are my erudite a.m. commute buddies, and Michelle ("Mee-shell!") Norris and Melissa Block use their soothing, caramel-textured voices to bring me the day's bad news on "All Things Considered" during my afternoon commute. Meeting any one of them, or, my God, Terry Gross, who's been doing "Fresh Air" since I was a kid, would be like anyone else's meeting Jennifer Aniston or Lance Armstrong. Naked. On Christmas.
So it's not that I don't want to support public radio with my generous financial contribution... I just... don't.
I've been listening to public radio since I was a wee little thing, though initially it wasn't by choice. My mom would blast it in the car in the mornings during our crosstown commute to school, and then in the afternoons on the way home. Often it got turned on again on the little kitchen radio while she fixed dinner. In fact, the theme music to "All Things Considered" still doesn't sound right to me without the chattering of a pressure cooker gauge in the background.
By the time I was old enough to figure out what was going on during the pledge drives, the idea would panic me. They need money? Or else what-- they'll die? Go off the air? They need money from US? This was a problem. As a kid, I worried about everything, and always at the top of the list was our family's imminent descent into abject poverty, and I was always sure we were teetering on the brink. I squirmed in guilt and angst during the pledge drives. Part of me wanted to make sure we'd contributed because it was good and because we were supposed to, but another part resented the pressure and pathos being applied to solicit the donations. I can recall a particularly obnoxious pledge drive take-off of Willie Nelson's song "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," where the public radio host sang something like "Give Us Your Money, Honey, and We'll Give You Our Time."
Over the years, I've come to appreciate public radio stations in the various places I've lived as reliable sources of un-Fox-ified news, and welcome respites from the rampant commercial pandering that marks everything else I see, hear, and touch. The various local stations have done a great job of promoting cultural events (when there were any to promote) that have added depth to my understanding of wherever I was. NPR programming has also been a merciful constant when we keep relocating.
But, like anyone in a longstanding relationship, I have my complaints. Once I drove from Pensacola to Austin listening to public radio the whole way. I noticed that the further you get from a major city, the more brutal the transition from local programming to national programming.
Biloxi, Mississippi (a brief case study):
As I navigated the town's mini-marts and Quickie Stops looking for a coherent set of directions back to I-10, I got to hear a local reporter deliver a story on the oyster shortage resulting from a recent batch of hurricanes. The interview consisted of a long list of ways one can eat oysters, delivered at a snail's pace drawl from a toothless-sounding old woman ("way-ull... you can have 'em shcalloped, you can have 'em shtewed, you can have 'em shteemed, you can have 'em on a half shell..."). Seriously, nearly two full, unedited minutes of oyster variations. It was like the shrimp scene from Forrest Gump. This brilliant monologue was followed by an exchange with the proprietor of an oyster bar called Shuckers, where the interviewer breathlessly asked him what he would say if he was told he couldn't serve oysters anymore (!).
"Well," he replied slowly, "I guess I'd say that wudn't any good."
End of piece. Then, a brief shuffling of papers, a few metal crunching sounds, a high squeal, and then a late connection into the NPR feed. I tried to imagine what the Biloxi studio must have looked like in those moments, and all I could come up with was a frightened animal bashing its forehead into the array of blinking lights and dials in front of it.
Here in South of Everywhere, the situation isn't quite as bleak. There are even a few local hosts I've come to like. Unfortunately, the one I can't stand runs the station, and is currently running the pledge drive. A former TV news broadcaster quite enamored of his own halting, folksy delivery, he loves to reminder us, "Remember, we are your ONLY source of NPR programming in this area!"
I know it's supposed to make me feel grateful, but instead I hear it as a hostage negotiator might. This cheeseball guy who laughs long and heartily at his own jokes has his arm hooked around the neck of my NPR shows, and instead of a gun, he's wielding a microphone and threatening to talk MORE, share more excruciating cutesy anecdotes from his own life and career, unless I call and give him money.
I could go on at considerable length about what I consider to be the blatant abuses of air time that the South of Everywhere public radio station regularly visits on its listeners. Let it suffice to say that as much as I love NPR programming, I hate with equal fervor at least 85% of the local programming. That, more than anything, is the reason I haven't called in my pledge of support. I can only imagine how it would go-- some poor volunteer would pick up the phone and have to hear my reverse-hostage negotiation:
"I will pledge my generous financial support if, and only if, your cheeseball station manager promises right now to commit hara-kiri on the air. This offer has a time limit: five minutes, and I close the wallet forever."
My problem is this: I am a devoted, dorked out fan of NPR. Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep of "Morning Edition" are my erudite a.m. commute buddies, and Michelle ("Mee-shell!") Norris and Melissa Block use their soothing, caramel-textured voices to bring me the day's bad news on "All Things Considered" during my afternoon commute. Meeting any one of them, or, my God, Terry Gross, who's been doing "Fresh Air" since I was a kid, would be like anyone else's meeting Jennifer Aniston or Lance Armstrong. Naked. On Christmas.
So it's not that I don't want to support public radio with my generous financial contribution... I just... don't.
I've been listening to public radio since I was a wee little thing, though initially it wasn't by choice. My mom would blast it in the car in the mornings during our crosstown commute to school, and then in the afternoons on the way home. Often it got turned on again on the little kitchen radio while she fixed dinner. In fact, the theme music to "All Things Considered" still doesn't sound right to me without the chattering of a pressure cooker gauge in the background.
By the time I was old enough to figure out what was going on during the pledge drives, the idea would panic me. They need money? Or else what-- they'll die? Go off the air? They need money from US? This was a problem. As a kid, I worried about everything, and always at the top of the list was our family's imminent descent into abject poverty, and I was always sure we were teetering on the brink. I squirmed in guilt and angst during the pledge drives. Part of me wanted to make sure we'd contributed because it was good and because we were supposed to, but another part resented the pressure and pathos being applied to solicit the donations. I can recall a particularly obnoxious pledge drive take-off of Willie Nelson's song "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," where the public radio host sang something like "Give Us Your Money, Honey, and We'll Give You Our Time."
Over the years, I've come to appreciate public radio stations in the various places I've lived as reliable sources of un-Fox-ified news, and welcome respites from the rampant commercial pandering that marks everything else I see, hear, and touch. The various local stations have done a great job of promoting cultural events (when there were any to promote) that have added depth to my understanding of wherever I was. NPR programming has also been a merciful constant when we keep relocating.
But, like anyone in a longstanding relationship, I have my complaints. Once I drove from Pensacola to Austin listening to public radio the whole way. I noticed that the further you get from a major city, the more brutal the transition from local programming to national programming.
Biloxi, Mississippi (a brief case study):
As I navigated the town's mini-marts and Quickie Stops looking for a coherent set of directions back to I-10, I got to hear a local reporter deliver a story on the oyster shortage resulting from a recent batch of hurricanes. The interview consisted of a long list of ways one can eat oysters, delivered at a snail's pace drawl from a toothless-sounding old woman ("way-ull... you can have 'em shcalloped, you can have 'em shtewed, you can have 'em shteemed, you can have 'em on a half shell..."). Seriously, nearly two full, unedited minutes of oyster variations. It was like the shrimp scene from Forrest Gump. This brilliant monologue was followed by an exchange with the proprietor of an oyster bar called Shuckers, where the interviewer breathlessly asked him what he would say if he was told he couldn't serve oysters anymore (!).
"Well," he replied slowly, "I guess I'd say that wudn't any good."
End of piece. Then, a brief shuffling of papers, a few metal crunching sounds, a high squeal, and then a late connection into the NPR feed. I tried to imagine what the Biloxi studio must have looked like in those moments, and all I could come up with was a frightened animal bashing its forehead into the array of blinking lights and dials in front of it.
Here in South of Everywhere, the situation isn't quite as bleak. There are even a few local hosts I've come to like. Unfortunately, the one I can't stand runs the station, and is currently running the pledge drive. A former TV news broadcaster quite enamored of his own halting, folksy delivery, he loves to reminder us, "Remember, we are your ONLY source of NPR programming in this area!"
I know it's supposed to make me feel grateful, but instead I hear it as a hostage negotiator might. This cheeseball guy who laughs long and heartily at his own jokes has his arm hooked around the neck of my NPR shows, and instead of a gun, he's wielding a microphone and threatening to talk MORE, share more excruciating cutesy anecdotes from his own life and career, unless I call and give him money.
I could go on at considerable length about what I consider to be the blatant abuses of air time that the South of Everywhere public radio station regularly visits on its listeners. Let it suffice to say that as much as I love NPR programming, I hate with equal fervor at least 85% of the local programming. That, more than anything, is the reason I haven't called in my pledge of support. I can only imagine how it would go-- some poor volunteer would pick up the phone and have to hear my reverse-hostage negotiation:
"I will pledge my generous financial support if, and only if, your cheeseball station manager promises right now to commit hara-kiri on the air. This offer has a time limit: five minutes, and I close the wallet forever."
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Sir David, my fearless octogenarian knight
It's a breathtaking day outside, the kind of day fabric softener companies use to pitch their "Spring Breeze" scents, and I'll spend most of it in a windowless office listening to moronic cell phone conversations taking place right outside my door. By the time all the white-gold brilliance has faded out of the air and everything's draped in exhaust-colored shadows and the world begins to cool again, I'll emerge to drive Pants' comic book rally car back home, where two hungry animals will immediately begin howling at me for dinner.
Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.
In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.
Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.
Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!
Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.
Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.
I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.
If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.
Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.
In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.
Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.
Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!
Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.
To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.
Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.
I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.
If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Wind Farm
1200 miles. That's the grand total of the mileage involved in our holiday road trip. Starting on December 20 and ending on January 2, the husband and I wove a giant lopsided spiderweb all over Texas. The bulk of the web, and therefore the likeliest part to catch small insects, was built over the hill country between San Antonio and Austin, but a long filament stretched out to West Texas and then way back south towards what'll serve as home for at least another couple of months.
Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.
Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*
(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)
The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.
And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.
I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)
We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.
Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.
Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*
(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)
The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.
And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.
I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)
We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Sea Change
Last night on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed a Lebanese TV anchor named May Chidiac who survived being blown up in her car by Syrian militants, an attack which cost her her left arm and left leg. I was listening in stunned silence as I drove through the streets of the tiny, tiny town, on my way back from a mission to collect the ingredients for my very first spinach mushroom quiche.
I'd left the house in a buoyant mood, having been thoroughly busy and needed and ful of answers all day at work. I'd even spent a long tense moment in the HEB weighing the prospect of making my own crust from scratch or going with the intoxicatingly easy Pillsbury pre-made option (I went for the latter). Out in the parking lot the trees were covered, every inch of every branch, in clouds of chattering grackles, and I remember feeling triumphant that even though my car was smattered in bird shit, I'd made it safely inside without being hit. Then I turned on the radio.
There are some stories that, while I'm hearing or reading them, I get this weird feeling of moving inescapably forward with the momentum of the events, like I've suddenly stepped on an airport moving walkway and no matter what I do, even if I were to stop and stand completely still, I would still be caught and drawn forward in the current.
Last night May Chidiac described the day she went to a Beirut monastery with a friend to pray, and then got into her car to go meet her mother for coffee. The yards that passed by in my headlights, their tall scraggly grass, their Virgin Mary monuments and tilted concrete bird fountains, stood out in stark relief as she described turning around to put her prayer candles onto her back seat and then registering a sudden bright flash. I crept forward through a darkened four-way stop as she described seeing "black snow" falling all around her, and how she realized she was now in back seat with the candles and that she couldn't breathe. She described crawling out of the car and into the street, and then looking back and seeing her left hand resting on the ledge of the driver's side window. The last thing she registered was her own screaming, and how it took a long time for anyone to come and find her since it was the middle of the day, and the equivalent of a Lebanese siesta.
By the time May Chidiac's story ended on a note of dazzling grit and defiance-- she has prosthetics and continues to broadcast her show despite further threats-- I had been parked in front of my house for ten minutes clutching plastic bags of warm milk and wilted spinach. My mouth hung open. My eyes felt glazed. As I struggled out of the car, I heard a tangled melody in the air, tinny-sounding and almost obscured by the wind, and for a heartbeat I almost thought it was one of the prayer calls I'd heard in the evenings in Saudi Arabia, but it was actually an old Hank Williams, Sr. song coming from a handheld radio in the neighbor's garage. The moment was startling, and definitely like coming to the end of the moving walkway and nearly stumbling over your own feet as the world's momentum snaps back into real proportions.
Ever since I read Like Water for Chocolate, I've wondered if it's possible for the cook's emotions and preoccupations to end up influencing the taste of the food. (I especially think about this when I'm pissed off and making dinner for my husband and myself-- "Ta da! Spaghetti with resentment!"). If that notion has any truth to it, then last night's quiche was a world weary one, laden with questions about how the hell a completely destabilized Middle East can possibly untangle itself, and where our own country, its international reputation in tatters, will stumble to next in search of comfort and purpose and the remnants of a vision lost.
I've wondered and worried all day about how the elections will turn out, but even though it's my day off I've been careful to avoid the news. In this town, it's not hard to do. I offered up my complicated quiche at a breeders' brunch-- it turned out surprisingly photogenic, but its flavor was underwhelming and over-complicated by the recipe's curious addition of cream cheese-- and chatted about upcoming military-related festivities. Beneath the surface though, I've been pensive and restless. What's at stake for me has become drastically less abstract in the past two years, and I find myself calling on tenets of nature for hope-- surely there must be a sea change, surely in times of trouble there is a tipping point.
I'd left the house in a buoyant mood, having been thoroughly busy and needed and ful of answers all day at work. I'd even spent a long tense moment in the HEB weighing the prospect of making my own crust from scratch or going with the intoxicatingly easy Pillsbury pre-made option (I went for the latter). Out in the parking lot the trees were covered, every inch of every branch, in clouds of chattering grackles, and I remember feeling triumphant that even though my car was smattered in bird shit, I'd made it safely inside without being hit. Then I turned on the radio.
There are some stories that, while I'm hearing or reading them, I get this weird feeling of moving inescapably forward with the momentum of the events, like I've suddenly stepped on an airport moving walkway and no matter what I do, even if I were to stop and stand completely still, I would still be caught and drawn forward in the current.
Last night May Chidiac described the day she went to a Beirut monastery with a friend to pray, and then got into her car to go meet her mother for coffee. The yards that passed by in my headlights, their tall scraggly grass, their Virgin Mary monuments and tilted concrete bird fountains, stood out in stark relief as she described turning around to put her prayer candles onto her back seat and then registering a sudden bright flash. I crept forward through a darkened four-way stop as she described seeing "black snow" falling all around her, and how she realized she was now in back seat with the candles and that she couldn't breathe. She described crawling out of the car and into the street, and then looking back and seeing her left hand resting on the ledge of the driver's side window. The last thing she registered was her own screaming, and how it took a long time for anyone to come and find her since it was the middle of the day, and the equivalent of a Lebanese siesta.
By the time May Chidiac's story ended on a note of dazzling grit and defiance-- she has prosthetics and continues to broadcast her show despite further threats-- I had been parked in front of my house for ten minutes clutching plastic bags of warm milk and wilted spinach. My mouth hung open. My eyes felt glazed. As I struggled out of the car, I heard a tangled melody in the air, tinny-sounding and almost obscured by the wind, and for a heartbeat I almost thought it was one of the prayer calls I'd heard in the evenings in Saudi Arabia, but it was actually an old Hank Williams, Sr. song coming from a handheld radio in the neighbor's garage. The moment was startling, and definitely like coming to the end of the moving walkway and nearly stumbling over your own feet as the world's momentum snaps back into real proportions.
Ever since I read Like Water for Chocolate, I've wondered if it's possible for the cook's emotions and preoccupations to end up influencing the taste of the food. (I especially think about this when I'm pissed off and making dinner for my husband and myself-- "Ta da! Spaghetti with resentment!"). If that notion has any truth to it, then last night's quiche was a world weary one, laden with questions about how the hell a completely destabilized Middle East can possibly untangle itself, and where our own country, its international reputation in tatters, will stumble to next in search of comfort and purpose and the remnants of a vision lost.
I've wondered and worried all day about how the elections will turn out, but even though it's my day off I've been careful to avoid the news. In this town, it's not hard to do. I offered up my complicated quiche at a breeders' brunch-- it turned out surprisingly photogenic, but its flavor was underwhelming and over-complicated by the recipe's curious addition of cream cheese-- and chatted about upcoming military-related festivities. Beneath the surface though, I've been pensive and restless. What's at stake for me has become drastically less abstract in the past two years, and I find myself calling on tenets of nature for hope-- surely there must be a sea change, surely in times of trouble there is a tipping point.
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