Life Failures in all seriousness

The trim on my house needs to be painted. I can’t do it and get it done in one summer.
Which is why the trim on half the windows is yellow and half blue. And some of the white parts aren’t any more. They are flaky. Those parts are too hard for someone without lots of experience in high places. So I have to get bids and pick a painter. This is anxiety producing. Mainly because of money. The last time I checked this out the painters wanted $3000. That is THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Hence the half-finished look which reproaches me every time I drive up to the house.

It looks slovenly. The yellow windows imply laziness, poor financial planning, and a general unworthiness. IF I had only WORKED HARDER at my career, I’d have money. (Or I would have finished the damn painting.) OR I could have married money but I didn’t. So I don’t have pots of money to throw at painters. If I had done those things, one or the other of them, I’d be able to afford a painter without stressing about it. I could call, get bids, pick the one I think most suitable and they would arrive with brushes and ladders and my chosen color of paint. They would scrape and scaffold and paint, and in a few days, I’d have have new looking trim. Some, I”m sure, would need replacing. Go ahead, I’d say. Fix it. And not sneak in the house to fret over the cost.

Painters will arrive. The work will get done. I will fret over the cost, over where the money will come from, while the primary breadwinner in our family goes off to even more over-time shifts and I feel feckless. This is the deal we have made in our marriage, but I am no longer comfortable with it. At my age a serious career is not looming over me. So I am stuck feeling that I should paint. I should do the work I can’t pay for. In future this could and probably will get worse, as lawn mowing and snow shovellng become more challenging.

Solutions? I have none. Who knows when or if we will ever be able to retire. The economy has twice fallen out from under our retirement funds, leaving the future precarious and anxiety producing. Panic inducing actually. Anxiety doesn’t describe it.
A house is a money sink. I have lived in a condominium and hated it. What to do? An apartment makes having a dog and even a cat, a challenge. A condo has no resale. A tent perhaps, though in my climate that would certainly put the challenge of pets and apartments into perspective.

Today, it is raining. You can’t paint in the rain. I suppose I could make a few calls. The painter won’t get cheaper. And if we get it done now, we won’t have to think about it for years. Perhaps never again. And it will be one less thing to obsess about.

More on wedding pie.

Pie

Wedding pie to be specific. Not cake. They decided to serve pie. Fruit pies, apple, strawberry/rhubarb, cherry, peach/blackberry, apricot. With gold dust and pastry cutouts on the top. Egg wash made them golden. Nine pies on a table, glorious in their
goldeness and sparkles.

Inside. No corn starch and not much sugar. Mostly fruit, so they were not the cloying, pasty things one finds in stores. The fruit was in big chunks so when it baked and shrank a bit, it remained recognizably fruit and IN NO WAY resembled the typical apple pie filling, for example, that is always waaaay too close to the Ritz Cracker fake apple version. Mush in the mouth.

For my taste the apricot and the strawberry/rhubarb were the best. Maybe a teaspoon short of sugar but a nice change in their tartness from the baked beans and mac and cheese of the wedding food. Salade Shirazi and the bean salad were sharp and crisp and offered palate cleansing. The pies, after a suitable procession from the house, offered rich flavor, sweetness and tartness at the end of the wedding feast.

The Tyranny of Green

The tyranny of green

This isn’t an environmental rant. Or maybe it is. After a week in Los Angeles, surrounded by flowers of eye-popping color, I am home again in upstate New York enveloped by trees, grass, bushes, weeds, all in brilliant green. Green everywhere. The tulips and daffodils are gone. The roses and peonies not yet out. Spirea drapes its whiteness across green lawns, an echo of winter when snow drapes itself across evergreens. Is white a color? I learned in school that it wasn’t. It is an accent, perhaps, to other colors, a background but not much in itself.

In California, color engages or assaults the eye. Blue sky, pale brilliant blue in day, darker and richer in the evening. The browns and grey-greens in the xeriscaped yards and surrounding hills provide an understated background to the flowers. Along the roads, in right-of-ways, wildflowers add yellow and orange. The jacaranda trees were in bloom, pale purple glory arching over the streets and giving canopy to the other flowers: roses in the usual reds, pinks, and white. Other roses in yellow, yellow and orange, corals in various intensities. Jasmine flows everywhere. It was blooming, its scent almost too much to bear on some streets. Lavender and speedwell spike up, giving texture to gardens. And then there are the hibiscus, again the usual colors but also a deep creamy yellow so lovely you could taste its yellowness.

Flowers enchant any landscape. And I love the colors, but the real beauty of the hills and landscape are the colors I have no name for. Greys and greens that are neither. Browns, tans, ochers both more and less than those words imply. They force the eye to work; it can see millions of colors. The brain registers them. Language unfortunately has not kept pace. The colors tease at the eye; the brain searches for the right words. Greynish doesn’t do it. Is that more grey than green? What about the greens that are also grey? I think there are numbers for them, but how romantic is that? They need dry names, in keeping with their desert home. Something spare and whispering. It’s the desert landscape, the mix of beauty and danger. The desert is beautiful, and much more lethal than where I live, despite the hard winters. Yet its beauty moves me almost to tears. Or beyond them. My soul wants clarity, spareness that untangles the messes of life and gives pure answers. Both arctic and desert landscapes call to that longing. Both are deadly as life. Softer climates, where there is water and perhaps easily available food, crowd the eye and soul, deceive perhaps, that there is no danger. There is, of course, but the landscape cheats the eye and heart. One thinks, I can live here, I can relax, perhaps Eden was like this. IF Adam and Eve had been created in the desert, or even in drylands, that serpent would never have got so far. We who live in green persuade ourselves that beauty is safe, is meant for us, is believable.

All those flowers in California are cultivated to defend against the desert. As with so much else in Los Angeles, they provide a set, a scene to inhabit. But here, where I live in the east, I am enfolded by green. My half-joking fear of being strangled by vines that creep in my windows is only that. Half a joke. Grass, vines, shrubs, trees will take me back in the end, quickly, never leaving a bone exposed.

Reactions to the wedding

Wedding Pies

Go for and be fruitful,
the Lord commanded

The garden provided rhubarb
southern California yielded
cherries, white and deep red,
strawberries, bulbous blackberries,
and sweet apricots
orangey-gold velvet.

Sliced strawberries fall heart-shaped
among cubes of baked rhubarb.
I dig stones from cherries,
quarter apricots. Lemon
juice goes in,
not too much sugar,
perhaps not enough,
but these are wedding pies
and should not be too sweet.

We sand them with gold and silver sugar,
from the pastry, we cut hearts, lay them
on the tops.

Juice bubbles up and runs out,
tart and spicy. Eat it warm or cold.

Spring

A thing I need to speak to God about when I get to the place where one can do such things, spring. I love spring, especially in the abstract. Flowers come up. Snow goes away, a great boon where I live. First it smells muddy and new, then green and sweet. It is sunny. Sunny, after the grey of winter, of which we have a lot. The red-wing blackbirds arrive, right after the robins. Boy robins have black heads, their breeding plummage. They stake out territory and squabble, just like human boys. They are cute.
The daffodils are up and blooming, giving a serious lesson in microclimates. The daffys in the village, a mile away, bloom about a week before mine do. For the past few months, seed catalogs have weighed down the postman and my sagging mailbox. I have ordered the tomatoes. And joined a CSA. We plan other veggies, but this summer my heart has turned to flowers. Tulips, zinnias, dahlias, peonies. Things to scent the outside. Things to cut and bring in. I am hoping for wild pumpkins from the ones left out last fall. The snow came so early we never finished cleaning up the garden. My co-gardener looks askance at wild pumpkins, but I plan to move them up back next to the blackberry canes and what is left of the old lilac. I killed half of it and spared the rest.

So spring. Why do I want to talk to God about it?
Sex. Tree sex that is. Thousand of trees spewing pollen all over. The wind fills with it and carries to my nose, eyes and bronchial tubes. It makes my head ache. I cough and sneeze. This year I sneezed so much and so hard I burst a blood vessel in my right eye. People then had to go around saying "ewwww, what happened to your eye?" And I had to say, "No my husband doesn't beat me." Then there is the asthmatic phase, where I don't breathe well and have coughing fits. I lose my voice (not an altogether bad thing). Worse I get whiney and kvetch. In the south I hid in air conditioned buildings. But here? I've been in all winter. Who could stay in now? I can't. I take pills and use inhalers. I go outside. I garden. But I wish the Unmade had come up with some other means of tree reproduction. And I plan to complain when I get wherever.

Movies

Movie notes

First Milk. Excellent film and a terrific performance by Penn. He does passion and nuance well and never chews the scenery. The film documents that period in the 70s, when the gay movement appeared in the national news like a slowly swelling wave. It asked the question “Do you know someone gay?” And Milk was correct. Gays need to come out so that the rest of us could see them as people Obviously, it took a while. But when the AIDS epidemic hit, despite all the ridiculous reaction to that as a gay disease, the idea that we all knew someone who was gay was easier to take in, to absorb as a culture. The cinematography is good, the set dressing spot on. Especially the geek glasses from the 70s.
A good score, lots of opera. So I turn to my husband and ask “What’s a straight guy to do?” I mean all that opera in this film and in Philadelphia. And the stereotype of gays and opera. How does a straight guy ‘come out’ and admit he likes opera?
This has been keeping me up.

Second Twilight. Egad what a dog of a movie. It stinks from the beginning to the end. The acting is dead. Maybe it is supposed to be that way? A joke I missed? “Vegetarian” vampires who only drink animal blood. Oh please. Bella is so unreactive to anyone or anything, despite her protests that she adores Edward, that she could be a stick with hair. Edward is funny looking and the Indian boy who would be a good match for her and is hot, is simply disregarded. Her mother is about as emotive as a teddy bear. And her father, who is supposed to be taciturn succeeds marvelously.
Oh did I mention the feud between the vampire people and the vampires? Some hint at myth there, but it goes nowhere, beyond glaring, that is. Lots of glaring between the Indians and the vamps. And why is the Indian dad in a wheelchair?
There are scenes of Edward carrying Bella on his back while he climbs trees and leaps about in treetops. After Crouching Tiger, no one should try that. They just look silly. The scenery is good, though it would be hard for it not to be out there in Washington along the coast.
I know, I know. It is aimed at 13 year old girls. That is the real evil of this film which is otherwise just stupid. It replays, albeit chastely, which I do applaud, the old love at first sight, girl in need of rescue, story, that no young woman needs to fixate on. I am not against love. Or crushes. Really they are fun. Vampires as the ultimate high school outsiders are a great metaphor. But how many 13 year old girls get metaphor? Bad boys, even good bad boys, don’t get better just because a girl loves them. The Vampire as good guy is fascinating metaphor in our time. Didn’t they used to be soulless and un-redeemable? Apparently this is changing, e.g. Spike and Angel. There appears to be a scholarly reaction:

Margaret L Carter , a scholar of vampire literature, has defined good guy vampires as vampires who act morally when dealing with mortals, and, as a whole, conform their moral perspective to a human ethical perspective. They obtain blood without killing or "raping" their victims, and generally acquire their blood from animals, blood banks, or willing human donors. A few use synthetic blood substitutes. Carter also maintains that the good guy vampires retain personality and freedom of choice, and are not so consumed with blood lust that ethical decisions become impossible. Good guy vampires tend to emerge in one of two situations: First, they are basically good people who discover themselves trapped in the evil condition-vampirism-and are forced to continually fight against it; second, vampirism is pictured as an ethically neutral state, in which vampires could make ethical decisions on how to find their needed sustenance ... blood.


The moral dimension is hinted at, but not really explored. Bella just accepts that her dream boy/man, love for all time, belongs to a mythical group of mostly nasty folk. And wants him to make her part of the group. Again I believe some 13 year old girls could be so love struck. Bella, however, is not 13. She is smart and independent. Until Edward spurns her in chem lab and she turns into a dishrag, overcome with love, and wants to become the undead? And what I seriously don’t like is that the movie emphasizes this transition, even if Edward doesn’t. Movies have few enough smart girl characters (don’t ask about Hermione, I am cranky about the way she is treated by Rowling throughout). Still this series was written by a Mormon woman, so perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps this old feminist should just stick to gardening and not watch movies made more recently than 1945. :-}

Grinding my teeth flat.

Rage in the Classroom 4 March 2009

To quote Jane Austen, I am all astonishment.
Yesterday, fully half of my Global LIterature class, a 300 level class, confessed that they had yet to hand in one paper. Three of which were due by 5 March. Without them, one could not take the midterm.

Silly me for putting such draconian threats in the syllabus. What to do? I have two dilemmas. The midterm, obviously. And then there is the revision class I scheduled for the day we return from spring break.Students think revision means fixing the commas and handing the paper back in. And for this they should get an A. I will be gone to the south to visit family for the first time in three years. But, being a responsible person, I arranged to get the class covered. And in doing that to give students a chance to revise one of the papers they have already handed in.

Somehow, when I started out, it all seemed benign. Now. It is a nightmare. I asked who hadn’t handed in a paper and clearly there were so many I would have to shift somehow. Or not. And my rage is about that. More later. Add to the mix of slackers, two women who are in the midst of personal tragedy. Three actually but she wasn’t in class and I got that news later in an email. One’s partner was having some breast cancer complication. She starts off, loudly proclaiming that giving any accommodation to the slackers is unjust to those who did their work(despite enormous personal cost, in parens to me). I mean she is loud and says she is going on a rant, looking defiantly at me. And she is very red in the face. Did mention loud?

After years of aikido training, I finally manage to use it. I sidestep the attack.I look her straight in the eye. I hold up a hand “Five minutes,” I say. “You can have five minutes.” She stops completely and says very softly, “I’m done.” I breathe and say “That still leaves us without a solution.”

Says the woman next to her, who unbeknownst to me was crying throughout class, “Well how about if people get what they can to you tomorrow by 3. And those who don’t, don’t get to rewrite.” Everyone agrees that might work. Notice no one has mentioned the midterm. Nor have I. Hence the rage at my own cowardice. I should have brought it up. I should have said no last minute papers that I have to print and rush to grade while I am fasting, running my own kid around and trying to get ready to leave on my trip tomorrow. I should have just left every last one of them swinging in the wind.

So why didn’t I? Fear. Cowardice. Not wanting to face the hassle of a pack of angry students who think the world revolves around them or are so scattered about the work they are at that they can’t read the syllabus. At the moment I hate them. I hate myself.

Oh and then there is the student who wasn't in class but emailed me a paper. She was a wreck because her partner had recently become disabled and suddenly the burden of that, school, work all fell on her. She’ll be ok.

Me. The last term I ever teach, I swear I am going to say whatever pops into my head.
For now I have to go file points back on the teeth I ground down.