A Succesful Ad Campaign

Yesterday I went to Walmart and plopped down $12.84 (+ tax) of my hard-earned cash, bubbling over with excitement. This is what happens when I watch TV (two nights ago, approximately one hour).

I pride myself on being impervious to advertisements, but random samplings of evidence (i.e. what I happen to remember at the moment) suggest that I am actually highly suggestible. I have not found myself wondering how my life would be improved by a vacuum-seal food storage device, but have wondered if it would be "fun" to sign up on eHarmony, and—when very tired—have even thought that the CD compilations (Dance Hits of the 80s, Country Western Songs that Tell Stories) might be a helpful supplement to my overall happiness.

But the fatal commercial this time was a lavender-and-white concoction featuring beautiful feet. A voice-over inquired whether I was troubled with stubborn callouses on the sides of my feet as an invisible pen marked Xs along the exact mountainous regions which have obstreperously refused to be pumiced away. (Apparently this can be a rare—read unique and exquisite—form of athlete's foot). In one moment I had been shown the evil that lurked at the bottom of my soles, and in the same instant shown the remedy. Little wonder, then, that I was found, within 24 hours, solemnizing the union with a WalMart checker officiating.

Now that I have the darn thing, I would like to say that the lotion is kind of messy and annoying to apply twice a day for the next two weeks. A spray would have been preferable. And I hope that the cream does not entirely transform my feet into those of the commercial, as it would be awkward to have cartoon feet on a purple background.

Fruit vs. Vegetable

Mrs. Bear brought up the "vegetable or fruit" controversy in a recent post, which reminded me of a theory I've been wanting to get feedback on.

People always talk about how tomatoes aren't really vegetables, but fruits—when in fact, about half of what we normally call vegetables are technically fruits. Cucumbers, all squashes, all peppers, and eggplants all contain the seeds of the plants. But I've never heard anyone talk about how pumpkins are really fruits. True vegetables would be leafy greens (lettuce, rhubarb) and roots (jicama, onions).

I think that in common usage, the difference between a fruit and a vegetable actually depends on the sugar content. Tomatoes are very sweet, which might be part of why they grab all the attention here. Of course, bell peppers and carrots are also pretty sweet, but they have some sharper flavors as well which may mask the perception of sweetness.

What do you think?

Sing On, Sweet Soother of Souls

The last few days have been difficult. I had to work seven days straight, then today (my first of two precious days off) had to work two hours in the evening, and it so happened that these were the two hours marked off for talking with a dear friend whose son goes to bed at the beginning of them and who goes to bed herself at the end of them. One of the residents has a pimple in a place not ordinarily seen which she earnestly desires to show me, another is upset at living with "low-functioning" people who cannot cook for themselves (and is also upset at not being allowed to cook here), and a third is jealous over the second's accomplishments. We assistants seem to interact on a similar level.

But today's mail brought a used copy of The World of Mr. Mulliner, and it has already soothed my soul.

The man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to point the moral of the story which he had just told us.
"Yes, gentlemen," he said, "Shakespeare was right. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."
We nodded. He had been speaking of a favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show, had taken first prize in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.

I may or may not have laughed in a manner ill-suited to a house where others slumber.

Five Things

Courtesy of Mrs. Bear and writer's block (my favorite duo).

Five things in my closet:
1) library tote
2) craft totes and projects
3) appropriately trendy clothing
4) suitcases
5) drying rack

Five things in my fridge (N.B. It's not really my fridge, and I do little of the grocery shopping, so I can't be blamed for many of the items.):
1) fat-free American cheese (no comment)
2) cantaloupe
3) grape jelly (YECH! I always thought parents bought this to plague their children, but it turns out that it is preferred by some.)
4) free-range eggs
5) juice watered down to half-strength (almost enough to make a right-thinking person declare holy war)

Five things in my car (N.B. See above):
1) Drew's Famous Party Music CD (you would not believe how much dancing can be done while seat-belted into a 14-passenger van!)
2) wipies
3) step-stool
4) bench seats
5) steering wheel (Okay, it's pretty barren--or tidy, depending on your point of view.)

Five things in my purse:
1) a small notebook for brilliant (ahem) thoughts (a total of one [1] pages used--it turns out that brilliant thoughts have to be written on napkins, backs of envelopes, etc.)
2) wallet stuffed with old receipts that I need to enter in my check register
3) digital camera
4) small day-by-day calendar/appointment book (with lots of brilliant thoughts scribbled on random pages)
5) Cucumber-Melon disinfecting hand gel

Five Good Things about Today (because there ought to be five entries in a "five things" meme).
1) guiding a blind developmentally-disabled man around a carnival
2) riding in bumper cars with this man as the driver
3) making it to the bathrooms on several occasions without Disaster striking a member of my group, despite the dream-like slowness of our progress
4) watching The Great Mupppet Caper
5) going to sleep in a couple of minutes

I tag Helene, Sapientiae Amator, and Guy Crouchback. (Hey, impossible things are happening every day!)

Won't you come out to play?

Most of the cool kids have disappeared. It's okay, I don't need you. I'll just stalk Mrs. Bear's friends list (it's almost like having friends of my own!)

Envision a Black Border

Somewhere a book entitled (I think) My Life as a Burmese Princess exists. This book was brought to my attention by the admirable catalog, A Common Reader, which was to books as J. Peterman is to clothes (but more so). The J. Peterman Company went out of business while I was in college, which was much lamented as it provided a beloved dance entertainment, read by Mrs. Bear and acted out by young men who may or may not have had a beer or two to prep for the role. In looking for something to link to, I just discovered that the catalog has renewed its fountains of strangely inspired prose, which is good for the world but bad for my proportion.

A Common Reader also entered my life while at college, and in the same way, in the form of a catalog addressed to a former student, abandoned in the mail room. (I sometimes wonder what bulk mail addressed to me is spicing up the life of the current students.) Almost every book in it was wonderful. It had, among other things, the full Bagthorpe saga. However, it sold books at list price (plus shipping), and although the worthy publishers of the catalog deserved every penny of that exorbitant amount, I still got the books from the library or amazon.com. Which is probably why the catalog no longer exists.

I've also noticed a dramatic falling-off in used bookstores since amazon.com hit its stride about five or six years ago. My adolescent favorite was in the basement of the Magic Lantern Theatre, a short walk from the downtown bus station--now a mere memory. Remaining used bookstores tend to have ridiculous prices, and generally send an outraged me back to my computer. So although I regret some of its effects, I can't say that I regret amazon.com's existence--the most I can say is that I sometimes feel guilty over it.

The book in question is actually Twilight over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess. (Information and link courtesy of amazon.com).

I have totally wasted my life...

...For this never occurred to me.

File under coincidence *Updated*

Watch the PA System get hit by lightning (repeatedly) as Rudy Giuliani tries to explain why his position on abortion is not like Pontias Pilate's position on crucifying Christ. (A short summary of his explanation is: "Well, yes, but I feel that an elected official has no other choice.")

Interpretation of Dreams

What does it mean if you dream about trying to get the poetry-book-guinea-pig hybrids (envision a fat Robert Frost book with little orange and white paws) off the floor and safely on the shelf (and in alphabetical order) before the exterminator comes to get rid of the horrible disease-ridden mice that are also running around the floor?

I'm hoping it means that you're about to get a million dollars.

Wipies

Another resident (in her early thirties) has very specific bathroom needs, particularly in the matter of "wipies" (baby wipes). Even when the supply is abundant, her hand ends up being substituted, and we have frequent sessions of removing the evidence from the soap dispenser, sink, towels, and so on. We talk a lot about germs, and about how ladies always use toilet paper (or wipies), and all the rest. She's usually interested in the cleaning procedure and proud of herself for doing it, so much so that I've wondered if there should be a slight punitive overtone to my manner. I don't want her to think that cleaning is evil, but it would be nice if she decided to avoid these sessions by avoiding the initial behavior.

One evening, just a couple hours after we had washed the towels and cleaned the bathroom, I overheard her in the bathroom admonishing herself in lively terms to "be a lady" and be careful of germs--but the evidence of the bathroom afterwards was the same as ever. Her explanation: "I lost my head!" It's really terribly cute (though I can't let her see that!), but I was still perplexed over how much of this was willful.

A couple nights ago I made a grocery store run, getting cleaning supplies (disinfectant spray and clorox wipes, both new to the upstairs bathroom, but necessary given how often it needs to be cleaned), general groceries, and wipies. I got the refills (far cheaper), and asked the resident to let me know when she needed new wipies, as I had gotten a new kind and needed to put them in the dispenser for her. She nodded and agreed, pleased to be provided for.

Now I should have seen it coming, but the next day when I found the old wipies box empty and the clorox cleaning wipes next to it, it was like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. Thank God they were the bleach-free kind! I got the resident, explained that I had refilled her wipies, and that the things in the round box were NOT for people but only for cleaning. Some of my distress must have been clear, because she looked sweetly at me and said, "I'm sorry! I lost my head!"

I think she wants very much to please us, but finds herself in a world of baffling rules, none of which make enough sense to be followed. For now I'm keeping the clorox in the very back of the cupboard!

Eight Random Things about Me *Updated*

I was tagged for this meme by Mrs. Bear, who has been gently prompting me to resume blogging.

1. I sometimes know the day of the week, and sometimes believe that I do, but the two rarely coincide.

2. I just finished a Wodehouse book (Jeeves in the Offing), am reading a chapter a week of Community and Growth by Jean Vanier for a reading group, and just started the complete works of St. Teresa of Avila. The Wodehouse book has been pure delight—I’ve been bubbling over with joy from it, and am seriously thinking of cutting out all treats so that I can afford to buy a new Wodehouse book every two weeks or so. The Jean Vanier book is very interesting, but annoyingly fuzzy at times. Drama easily seduces him away from clarity of thought, which is Not Amusing in a Ph.D. of Philosophy. He keeps defining things, but rather than being a true definition, it’s simply one of many formulations that he grabbed from the penumbra surrounding that concept in his mind. The end result is that flights of inspiration caused by his seemingly profound absolute statements are restricted to no more than six inches altitude so there’s not too big a bump when he makes an alternate “absolute” pronouncement. I’m still in the Introduction to St. Teresa’s life, and am totally in love with her. At the end of her life, her doctor said that it was impossible to find a focal point to her illnesses, as her body had become an arsenal of ailments.

3. I’ve had to spend a lot of time recently talking about poopy and why hands should not be in contact with it.

4. The peeling skin from an enormous blister on my foot revealed peeling skin from the blister under it.

5. I daydream a lot, too (see Mrs. Bear’s post), but am entirely unwilling to reveal the subjects. However, in times when hope is painful, I restrict myself to impossible daydreams, which has in the past meant Life as an Intergalactic Superhero Happily Married to a Royal Werewolf. (The setup was provided by an actual dream that involved visiting Catholic bookstores—for obvious reasons).

6. I’ve lived in three different states, five different cities, and eight different houses (counting “living” as staying two weeks or more in a row) in the last year.

I’ll add the other two later (I'm assuming that I'll seem more interesting to myself at a later date).

I tag Helene.

7. I love watching HGTV, especially "Design on a Dime," although it makes me wish I had a lot more energy.

8. One of the hardest things about living in community for me is giving up freedom in the area of food selection.

It's an investment

There’s a number of new condos being built downtown, and they’re all trying to pre-sell the units—one even offers “Hard Hat Tours.” It would be a wonderful idea if it weren’t for the undertone of “for prospective buyers only.” I’ve considered showing up for one anyhow, but the guilty consciousness of subterfuge would probably lead me to such an exhibition of blushing, stammering, nervous giggling, fidgeting and toe scuffing that the striking view of the Seattle skyline through a grey mist would be immediately followed by an impressive barred window seen through heavy sedation.

Ads for at least two of these buildings promise that, if you buy a condo, you will be turned into a beautiful, young, naked woman the instant the ink dries on the contract. I wonder if they have an exemption clause for handsome, successful, devout men—why bother otherwise? But then, these men, being exceptions, would be a minority, which isn’t a dramatically pleasing setup (well, the folks who wrote the bizarre closing scene for “The Gnomemobile”—in which hundreds of young women chase a terrified youth through a soap-sudsy forest—thought otherwise, but even as a child I felt that these writers had, like Homer, slept). The best is brought out of men when they have to compete for a girl to be fond of, and rather the reverse when there are a number of girls being fond of them.

So I gave up the idea of stopping by the convenient Pay Day Loans shop in order to immerse myself in this transcendent and prosperous luminosity. Not so my fellow bus-rider, who wished to “buy out his roommate” for next month’s rent, and who stepped off the bus bubbling “Money, money, money,” after a promising call to the usurers.

Books and Movies Meme

Helene tagged me for this meme. I guess this means that I don't have to feel like a stalker when I look at her blog--though I have it on the highest authority that if someone starts a blog and doesn't tell you, it's only because they don't want you to know...

The instructions are to bold the books you've read and put an *asterisk* next to those whose movies you have seen.

1. Heidi (Johanna Spyri)* I think I've seen the movie, but it was some time ago.
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)*
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)*
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)*
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)*
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)*
9. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
10. Anne of Avonlea (L.M. Montgomery)*
11.The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
12. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)*
13. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
14. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)*(the old movie)
15. Chariots of Fire (Clarence E. MacArtney)
16. 1984 (Orwell)
17. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)*
18. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
19. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
20. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
21. Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz)
22. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)*
23. The Robe (Douglas)
24. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
25. The Story of A Soul (St. Therese)* If you count the movie Therese, which I would rather you didn't.

Simple Pleasures

The all time best snack of the moment is dried tart Montgomery cherries (from Trader Joe's, of course), eaten out of an espresso shot glass (being the only shot glass I have because I'm That sort of girl).

Peace be with you

The street was dark with rain. A slowly blinking red bicycle light, then beyond it the neon yellow helmet covers of two men standing next to the wall. I glanced back and forth between the bicycle (which looked like it belonged to a student) and the two men, trying to remember if this always meant a cop, or if they were simply safety conscious, environmentally friendly commuters. My glance was carefully unfocused, as I’m learning the trick of never making eye-contact downtown. The policemen were doing an excellent impression of "The Men Who Weren't There." At their feet was a crumple of clothes.

I perceived the deadness first, then realized that this poor huddle had been a young man moments before. His head, covered in a bright orange stocking cap, was pressed deeply into the concrete; his two hands lay precisely on either side. His knees tucked under him as he rested absolutely in an extreme kowtow to a violent god.

Early Childhood Spirituality

One of my dear roommates from Texas introduced me to Maria Montessori’s philosophy of childhood and education four years ago, and I have been entranced. Montessori joins St. Therese of Lisieux in proclaiming the readiness of very young children’s souls for a deep spirituality. There is a Catholic program, Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, which provides curricula for children from preschool age through twelve years old. It is only because this program is so remarkably sound that I want to take issue with their introduction of the Last Supper to preschoolers.

In a Montessori classroom, there are quite a few projects which the children are introduced to over time, and which they can then go to whenever they wish. These projects are called Works. The Last Supper Work is a diorama with a long table, eleven little men and one little figure for Jesus, a paten, a chalice and two candles. The child goes to the work station, takes the objects out of their box and arranges them the way he has previously been shown. Children of that age delight in rituals and doing things the exact same way every time, and there are just enough details to capture their attention. In the end the little scene looks quite a bit like the Altar Work (where they get to set up a little altar as though getting ready for Mass.) If I remember correctly, the candles are even lit at the end. Then when the child is ready to move on, he puts the objects away and goes to another work.

Now the problem here is that there are only eleven disciples rather than twelve. The thinking behind the omission is that preschool children are really too young to wrestle with the problem of evil and free will, so Judas is left out of the Last Supper work. If a child asks why there are only eleven, the teacher is supposed to tell them, “Judas left earlier.” The problem here is that it is not necessarily the case. The Last Supper sequence in John’s Gospel doesn’t line up exactly with the synoptic Gospels, but at one point Judas is given bread by Jesus: “So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him.” (John 13:26-7). These are fundamental verses for understanding what it is to be loved by Christ—he always offers himself to us, but it is actually better for us to receive the devil if we want to than to be forced to receive Christ. Love resides in the will and yearns for the will of the beloved, and cannot accept anything less. Love is the most profound respect possible.

It seems to me that a preschooler is more likely to notice that there are only eleven disciples when other works have twelve than that a child would see the twelve and think “Wait a second—how can Judas be there if he betrayed Jesus?” And either way it seems like it would be infrequent, while every single child that does this work is having his imagination formed. Even if they don’t remember this particular bit of preschool, they will retain a strong impression that there were only eleven disciples at the Last Supper, which will make it harder for them to understand the reality of evil and free will when they get around to tackling it—and the grandeur of Love will be diminished in their imaginations.

The Shadow Knows

Today is laundry day which, as those of you who know me can easily guess, is a sacred day.

My uncle and his friend are kindred spirits in this matter. Their washer and dryer are not so much appliances as altars to the laundry gods. Never have I looked upon such greatness as exists in their basement back room.

In the basement back room of my apartment complex there is another grouping of washers and dryers. Shortly after I moved in, I did my first load of laundry and was astonished to find a full half inch of lint in the dryer. This was noteworthy even after years of dorms and community laundry rooms. I cleaned it out and dried my clothes, which came out of the dryer smelling of nothing in particular. This is odd, since the whole point of doing laundry is to luxuriate in the warm fresh-smelling while folding or ironing. In fact, usually your whole room smells lovely, even if you didn’t use fabric softener.

I ironed my disappointing yet clean shirts and hung them up in the closet, but by the next day they smelled perfectly foul. A horrible stale smell, part boy’s-locker-room and part homeless-person (similar to the man who sat down on the crowded bus proclaiming, “Ah don’t know if yer wanna sit too close, cuz ah don’t know what ah got.”) Unfortunately, I didn’t have dryer sheets and really didn’t have enough money to go re-washing perfectly clean clothes that just ended up smelling funny. And I wasn’t certain of the source of the funk. I live in an older apartment building, and you know not what evil odors lurk in the shadows of this building’s heart. Eventually, though, I pointed to the dryer as the culprit.

So I bought the strongest smelling dryer sheets that I could find, used Oxy-clean in the wash cycle to remove the old smell, and went on my way eagerly anticipating the fresh clean smell, thinking how lovely it was going to be to be met by little wafts of “Meadows and Rain” instead of horrible nastiness. I cleaned out the lint again (again thick, but not quite as bad as before), loaded in the clothes with the dryer sheets—and was met by the exact same smell. I can’t tell you how horrible it is. I poured out quarters like water so that I could wash ALL of my clothes, and now this. The lint filter was caked after each load, leading me to believe that the entire dryer has been packed full of lint by month after month without cleaning the filter.

There is no escape. The slovenly habits of my fellow apartment-dwellers have destroyed a whole bank of shiny new dryers. The neighborhood is relatively affluent and quite free of Laundromats.

I face weeks of going about my tasks at work with a junior high wrestling team as my intimate companions.

Desperate Plea for Help

I am running dangerously low on reading material. I've tried Sir Walter Scott, since there is so much of him, but found that there is very little to love in all that bulk. The library has a pitifully small collection of Stevenson and Caroline Gordon, as well as most other classics. I tried branching out into more contemporary fiction with P.D. James, but the following sums up both why she had to be jettisoned and why I am leery of further contemporary fiction--yet that seems to be all the library stocks.

Studies of a Contemporary Author

She’s like an old bitch who, having lost the scent shortly after being let off the leash, blunders on unaware that her earnest snufflings among the leaves tell her nothing.

All the pretension, none of the substance.

Out of her depth in the shallow end.

I don't think I'm quite up for another Mark Helprin yet, and my current library list (Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Dickens, Willa Cather and G.K. Chesterton) will probably yield about six books, after the library's selection has gone head to head with the list of their books that I've already read.

So please help me. I just want something light to read when I'm tired, and don't want to come across things about fathers and adopted daughters having an interesting experience in bed and then returning to discovering their roles as father and daughter.

A Diminished Helprin

Some time ago I wrote a short post on reasons to love Mark Helprin. My opinion of him has not changed, but there are also reasons to mourn when reading him. He is so close to being great that the sense of loss at his failure often outweighs the admitted beauty of his writing.

There are two reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of form. Because his sentences are often beautiful and always literate, he seems to have exempted himself from the need to edit. At times he seems to believe that if 3 yards of brocade on a lovely woman make a gorgeous evening dress, 30 yards of brocade ought to be ten times more beautiful.

But the second reason is much more grievous. From the quality of the language to the preoccupation of the main characters, his books attempt to be an homage to beauty. And a person able to write so well clearly does have some understanding of beauty. Yet he explicitly divorces beauty and truth. The falling off here is tragic. He of anyone ought to know that beauty must be true. Beauty demands not just a response, but love. And love is a relationship, a calling forth of the self to the other, refreshing and ennobling the returning self. If beauty is not true, not real, it is not other, and cannot be loved. It is not beauty but merely a chimera of false self-love.

If beauty is not true, we are trapped:

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

- I Wake and Feel, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Highlights from Ratzinger

Today was so lovely that the only suffering was finding that someone had marked up my library book with a highlighter. This has always distressed me, even in these memory-challenged days of occasionally highlighting texts myself. The difference is that those books belong to me, and my choice of emphasis will not necessarily be annoying others. I have even refrained from highlighting books that I own if I considered the book very likely to be borrowed.

But the previous borrower of this book, Salt of the Earth by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was not so inhibited. Although the book is a delightful piece of light theology—and has already made me love the Pope more—I find myself distracted by the erratic yellow marks. Sets of words have been chosen, so it is unlikely that the marks were made by a monkey or a two-year-old child. But the choices—what is the system of thought behind them? Is there a system? The choice of phrases which are coherent within themselves—“right path” rather than “man on”—argues that thought was involved. Occasionally a new vocabulary word was highlighted (sclerotic), but that was fairly rare.

The following are taken from the page I was trying to read when I paused to write this rant (p. 24). Highlighted words are in bold.

This [a pagan religion leading someone to God] is not at all excluded by what I said; on the contrary, this undoubtedly happens on a large scale. It is just that it would be misguided to deduce from this fact that the religions themselves all stand in simple equality to one another, as in one big concert, one big symphony in which ultimately all mean the same thing.

…in the figure of Christ the truly purifying power has appeared out of the Word of God. Christians do not necessarily always live this power well and as they should, but it furnishes the criterion and the orientation for the purifications that are indispensable for keeping religion from becoming a system of oppression and alienation, so that it may really become a way for man to God and to himself.

Now the reader was obviously not simpatico with the Pope, but he also does not seem to have been deliberately perverse in his markings. These are also not the markings that one would make in order to refute the book. The first example does give the opposite impression from the text, but the second seems to be a highly conventional but pious resonation with the idea of coming to God.

Then the light dawned. The reader had chosen the exact phrases which, if focused on, would keep him firmly in the world of clichés, safe from encountering the author’s thought.

The other words may seem to have fallen dead while all the while they have been germinating, ready to bring forth their shocking fruit at the chosen time.