I feel the need to break the ice on my own blog...

But instead of doing that, here's a scribbling that doesn't really count for anything, except that it's there.

The air! The air!
Unfair! Unfair!
I try to breathe,
And can but sneeze.
Despair! Despair!
Despair!

The good, the bad, and getting-less-ugly.

The good: For the last week or so I have kept to the following rule: "Whenever you're about to exit a room, pick something up that doesn't belong there and put it away or in the trash."

The bad: That I need this rule.

The ultimate good is that it usually leads to a more thorough cleaning or putting away of things, or at least makes the eventual cleaning much less daunting, but, seriously?

And no, I still haven't found my flash.


As an aside, I started this blog as a place to be thoughtful, mainly about writing, theories of learning, and to occasionally general psych and cognitive science stuff that made me geek out. Under the rare circumstances that I do post these days, the theme seems to be, "Beth attempts to live in a house that's trying as hard as it can to get away from her. (By sinking into the ground. Parts of it, anyway.)"

Food Photography Fail

At the start of this week, I had the brilliant idea to cook up a bunch of food and take pictures of it. I could practice my cooking, my aesthetic arrangement of food, and my photography all in one go, and at the end, I'd end up with something to put on the walls in my kitchen and/or dining room. Good idea, right?

Wrong.

So, I made the shopping trip, and bought everything I could conceivably need... except butter. Butter is important, so I tabled the project for another couple of days. I bought butter a day or two ago, and tonight I came home, made a simple dinner, and started setting up the dining room table.

Problem the first: I didn't look closely at the packaging on my new tablecloth. It's not a table cloth at all; it's a shiny vinyl “table pad.”

Problem the second: The table pad isn't shiny in the center of it, because the center of my light fixture lacks a light bulb.

Problem the third: The light socket in question is the width of a standard light bulb, but accommodates less than half the length of the threaded portion of a standard light bulb. I have a feeling that this is yet another fixture in my home that will earn me laughter from Home Depot and Lowe's employees when I try to explain to them my conundrum. (Seriously, it happened when I gave them the dimensions of my stove. How was I to know that it's 2 to 3 inches smaller than a standard stove, and the same number of inches larger than a compact one? Creative soldering fixed things in the end. [Thanks, Dad!])

Problem the fourth: I seem to have misplaced my flash. I'm more than a little freaked out about that, truth be told, since I can't recall seeing it since I was in San Francisco. In May. Of last year.

Problem the fifth: My homemade bread is a little too home-made-looking, if you get my drift.

So, the new plan for the evening: I skipped out on Bragg Jam with the intent of being productive. Productivity for the evening now means tearing every inch of my house apart and putting it back together (cleaner and neater) until I've found the flash, or determined it's somewhere far, far away. And then, maybe, some wine, some ugly bread, a book, and a bath.

Snow in The South

Southerners can be pretty naïve, and, yes, a little stupid, when it comes to snow. I'll admit, as the first big, puffy flakes poured down, I was outside revelling at the novelty and beauty of the experience. I even got up at dawn this morning, without the assistance of an alarm, to take pictures of what snow remained. I made some stupid mistakes of which I'm ashamed, but none of them were related directly to the white stuff on the ground (I instead wondered, “Why is everything over-exposing?” when I'd left my aperture set to F2 with 400 ISO film in bright sunlight).

But, friends, this morning, I saw an entirely opaque white Toyota Camry. Yes, opaque, even in that part most critical to visibility, the windshield. And it wasn't parked on the side of the road, nor was it proceeding with caution along the slippery trespasses. No, it was hurtling at what appeared to be well over 45 miles per hour down Pierce Ave, a major, and curvy, thoroughfare; with its driver lolling his head out the window like an over-stimulated puppy, simply to see the direction in which he was travelling.

An epistle to the past.

Dear men of the early 20th century,

Stop wearing checkered suits and plaid shirts. Certainly never combine the two. If you do choose to commit such a fashion sin, see to it that your grandchildren don't rip, burn, or expose to sunlight until nearly completely faded your likenesses.

Seriously, I'm not sure which will send me to an early grave first, my OCD, or my carpal tunnel.

Love,
Your friendly 21st century photo-restorer.

Divisive/Decisive and Dogwood Trees

Dogwood trees, for whatever reason, hold a special place in my heart – they, along with cherry trees, are one of the few things about spring that don't make me grumble. Like most things near and dear, they have stories attached to them. I recall a dogwood in my grandmother's front yard with particularly low-hanging branches. It wasn't strong enough to climb on, certainly, but it formed a great, semi-enclosed space that I could pretend was my own.

I don't know if the following stories are the result of an overactive imagination and a hazy memory, or if my great-aunt Mimi actually told them to me, but here are a couple of myths about dogwoods that I remember from my childhood:

Myth #1: The four petals of a dogwood blossom symbolize the cross upon which Christ was sacrificed, and the green seeds in the center represent the crown of thorns.

Myth #2: Christ was crucified on wood from a dogwood tree, and the tree, seeing the use to which it had been put, begged God to never allow such a thing to happen again, and ever since, dogwoods have grown thin and spindly.

And yes, because of the above memory, I had a very conflicted relationship with dogwoods during the militant atheism of my adolescence – but really, what didn't I have a conflicted relationship with then?

I mellowed out, and really never gave the trees a thought beyond, “Oh, how pretty,” for quite some time.

This year, though, I had occasion to reconsider the dogwood, when one fell across my parents' driveway after a particularly blustery storm. They made a valiant effort to re-root the tree, an effort that I'm told involved car jacks, ropes, my father's truck and many hours. The tree had continued to grow healthily for the past few months, bolstered by supports, and I had taken to calling it “The Nietzsche Tree,” because the thought of the effort it took to re-root it conjured to mind a cartoon image from an Intro to Philosophy text, with the philosopher in question bending a tree in illustration of man bending his world to his will.

The world bends back, you know. Especially when you don't put enough soil over the roots. So, the tree is down again. I offered my assistance in re-re-rooting it, which was turned down almost immediately. Still, I decided after work to stop by and observe, if not attend, in the process.

As is the wont with my family, nothing happened. My mother had led me to believe, and genuinely believed herself, that the plan was to re-root the tree. My father, as is his wont, had/claimed no knowledge of this plan, as he ascended the driveway with a chainsaw. My mother asked if he was planning to cut it down, he replied in the affirmative, and she said nothing more, but glared and went back inside. I decided that I wanted no part in destroying the green leafy thing, declared as much, both calmly and loudly for once, and got in my car to go home. My father called after me, “So, you don't want me to cut it down?”

“No.” I replied simply, baffled as to how he hadn't gotten that impression from his wife moments earlier, and went on my way. My brother later called to inform me that, according to Wikipedia, the average lifespan of a dogwood is 25 years, and that since the tree was of an appreciable size when I was born, it likely had few years left anyway. I asked him if he'd called because Dad thought I was upset, and he said yes. I assumed that meant they had cut the tree down, but he told me they hadn't decided yet. I told him that, at this point, it really didn't matter what I thought – it's not my tree; it can't just sit there healthily; and furthermore, they can't continue driving across the yard to get out of the house – they needed to make a decision, regardless of whether or not I supported it.

Then, I made a decision, after weeks of mulling over my options – it was time to replace my laptop. I don't need all the things I think I need – all I need is something on which I can write, access the internet, and edit the occasional image – and I bought a machine that is capable of doing just that, and that fit my budget.

On my way home, I drove past my parents' house again, to see what they had chosen. As usual, they'd chosen inaction, and the poor dogwood remained draped across the concrete driveway, making everyone's life a little more difficult.

Athena, I am not

So, it's embarrassing confession time: As a child, I listened almost exclusively to piped-through-the-radio pop country music. Right before I hit my teens, or maybe right after, but regardless – as breasts and hair grew in places where neither had existed before, Pavement, Built to Spill, and The Pixies (and others) began to replace Reba, Garth Brooks, and Shania Twain in my music collection.

Recently, though, I thought I had been returning to my roots, as I have acquired a fondness for good alt-country music, and today, while listening to Neko Case's “The Virginian,” I thought that surely I could stomach the twang of my youth.

It turns out that the twang should have been the least of my worries. The ridiculously over-produced vocals are next in line, but that's largely a matter of to what one grows accustomed, so I forgive even that. What I can't forgive is the lyrical content. Behold, an excerpt from Shania Twain's “Any Man of Mine:”

“Any man of mine better be proud of me
Even when I'm ugly he still better love me
And I can be late for a date that's fine
But he better be on time.”

An alternate title might be "Any Man of Mine (Needs to Have a Fetish for Being on The Losing End of Double Standards)". The rest of the song continues in that vein, with the same formula for each verse – formula being: Lines 1 and 2 = Ok, that's sweet and cute enough, but certainly not a feminist battle cry. Lines 3 and 4 = What the hell? You're a bitch!

I remembered this song as a happy, bouncy, “yay women!” song that I bounced around my room to when I was ten, before anyone ever told me that I couldn't dance. I really wanted to give it a chance today, but I couldn't. Instead, all I could think was, “Why did my parents let me listen to this?!” I firmly believe that this kind of message fucks kids up just as much, if not more, than the expletive used previously. Owning one's dysfunctionality is well and good, mind you, but it's like owning the electrical problems in your house – you're going to fix that, right? Shania owns her dysfunctionality, then throws a square dance in it. The song celebrates the kind of petty, emotional manipulation towards which girls and young women are already inclined to engage, and it tells boys and young men that they need to lie back, accept, and enjoy the abuse.

And I danced and sang along to it when I was ten.

I'm a little bit shocked that I did, if you can't tell. I'd like to believe that, in every moment of my childhood, I was an adult in a small frame, wise-beyond-her-years, and all-knowing – the kind of kid that didn't need parenting or teaching. But the fact remains that I had no basis for knowledge of how to interact with that song. I'd hardly even had a healthy friendship at that age, and I had never seen, up close, a good, strong romantic relationship and known what I was seeing. Maybe a little teaching would have done me some good.