I dreamed a dream

I woke up at about 4:30 this morning with just one thought: "Hey!  I don't even HAVE a basement!"  This was such an enormous comfort that I fell immediately back to sleep for an hour or so; quite unusual, because a 4:30 wake-up usually means that I'm up for the day.

Some backtracking: I had awakened from a dreadfully vivid and realistic dream about a waterbug infestation in my basement.  They were everywhere, and I was paralyzed by indecision about what to do about them.  Panic and just refuse to ever enter the basement again? No, because in this dream, the kitchen happened to be in the (nonexistent) basement (and this made the infestation that much more horrible.)  Call an exterminator? Well yes, because I wanted to be rid of the bugs, but no, because I was afraid of the pesticides and I was embarrassed to invite an exterminator into my squalid, crawling home.  So I spent the entire dream entering the basement over and over, closing my eyes and turning on the light, and then opening my eyes always a moment too early to avoid the sight of the bugs scurrying for the cover of darkness.

(I realize now that this is at least my third post about bugs or insects, and readers might make the mistaken assumption that I have a particular interest in or particular fear of bugs.  Neither is true.  I have no interest in any bug or insect except to react as necessary to get them out of my way; and although I'm certainly not fond of any form of insect or bug life, I'm also not really that afraid of them.  I have more weird phobias than the DSM-IV even knows about, but I'm pretty bug-neutral.)

So, back to the dream.  My house, as I mentioned, was both vermin-infested and utterly wretched, to the point at which I'd have been ashamed to have anyone see it.  This is far from the case in actual real life.  My house is simple and not especially luxurious, but it's quite clean and pleasant.   Anyone's welcome to visit, any time.  Mi casa es su casa.  I also don't have any particular fear of or aversion to pesticides (although the smell of Raid nauseates me) so I don't know why my dreaming self was so afraid of the exterminator.

One thing about the person in the dream that I did recognize, all too clearly, was her panicked inability to make a decision and take action. I am often paralyzed by indecision about the most minor everyday things.  Decisions about what to wear, what to cook for dinner, what to do during the thirty minutes before I have to pick a kid up from school or an activity can and often do send me into a hair-pulling tailspin of anxiety.

Anyway, I woke up and have had a fairly productive day, more so than average.  I'm even less interested in dream analysis than I am in bugs, but perhaps that one served as a cautionary tale because I dithered a bit less than I usually do today.  Even a waterbug has its place, and they're welcome to settle in my imaginary basement.  Mi casa es su casa.

I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name

Dear Claire,

We are potstickers.  Aptly named, we stick to pots.  Show us a pot, and we'll stick to it with a tenacity that would put a bulldog with a bone to shame. None of us even finished elementary school, let alone a university degree in the English language, but we're smart enough to know what something called a "POT-STICKER"  plans to do. 

Here's the thing:  We didn't deceive you.  We didn't try to conceal our true nature.  With our name, we made our intentions quite clear.  So when you cook a bunch of us and then leave us in a big bowl while you go off to chop vegetables, it seems rather foolish (one might even say "asinine" or "idiotic") that you would then react with shocked and outraged chagrin when you find that we have, in fact, stuck to the pot.  The name is not symbolic in any way; nor is it an ironic, postmodern challenge to would-be deconstructionists.  Honestly, we are just not that sophisticated.  The name "potsticker" was meant to be interpreted in the most literal sense.  "Potsticker" = "That which sticks to the pot".

We apologize for any misunderstanding.  In future dealings with us, do try to remember that when confronted with a pot, any pot, we will stick to it with single-minded determination.  Barnacles will be scraped off the hull of a shipwreck more easily than we will be separated from the pot to which we stick.  It's called a raison d'etre.  Look it up, genius.

Yours sincerely,
The Potstickers
(we stick to pots)

Version control

There's this thing, see, called NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.  It starts on November 1 each year; the idea is that you should commit to writing every day during the month of November, and by the end of the month, you should have a 50,000-word novel, give or take.

November, first of all, is just a hideous month in which to try to do anything major.  I suppose that writing a book would fall under the heading of "Something Major."  It also falls under the headings of "What the Hell Am I Thinking?" "I Need My Damn Head Examined," and "Bad Ideas: Part Ten Million"  Since, however, easily half of the things that I have done in my life also fall under all these last three headings, I won't be deterred.  What could go wrong?

Perhaps, if you're reading this, you have looked at a calendar and correctly observed that it's not November just yet.  In un-typical fashion, I'm thinking ahead.   I started this project last year, on November 1, and ended up with many pages of draft material that in no way form anything resembling a novel, but which contain quite a few salvageable bits and pieces that I can work into this  year's magnum opus.  Silver linings are everywhere, and while I'm almost entirely lacking in focus and concentration, I do possess better-than-average organizational skills and an excellent memory.  So I can find, pretty quickly, the pages of dialogue and the street scene descriptions from early novel chapters from last year, and part of a story that I wrote for my last class at UMUC, all in different folders, each with several individual versions, and copy, paste, and rework the parts that will be useful for this latest attempt. 

Meanwhile, a POV change from first-person to semi-omniscient third-person has revolutionized the whole thing, and so now, I might have not only snappy dialogue, but an actual story, in which things actually happen.  If not, then at least I'll get to re-read some funny things that I wrote last year.  I should be ashamed of this, but I laugh uproariously at my own jokes.  I might or might not have a novel by the end of next month, but at least I'll be entertained by my funny funny self.  I really might need my head examined. 

I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me

We went to the KORUS festival last Saturday.  We're a hybrid family (Korean-American husband, Caucasian wife, mixed children) so we fit right in.  This particular festival, though, was far more US than KOR, and more weird than either.

The top-level parking deck at Tyson's Corner Center is first of all a less-than-festive venue for a festival, particularly on a hot day.  Almost all of the tents belonged to corporate or political sponsors; small-time electioneering ahead of the mid-terms was in full swing, and my sons collected stickers, pens, and shopping bags from council, register-of-wills, and judicial candidates. We can't vote for any of them, of course; we live in Maryland.

The stage was occupied by a Korean girl rapper who was accompanied by a Black rapper and backing band. The rap was in English, and Christian-themed.  Both rappers claimed to be former thug lifers, almost lost to crack and the street, but now redeemed, having found the Lord. I didn't fact-check them. The audience regarded them with a mixture of puzzlement and curiosity.

We wandered around to see the other exhibitors, who were mostly food vendors. My husband waited in line for bulgogi and kimchi, while I took my two-year-old nephew for frozen yogurt. Disregarding my advice to enjoy the female attention now when it's readily available, he ignored the two halmonis who smiled and waved and made faces and tried their hardest to get a tiny smile or giggle from the Toddler of Nope. He ate his yogurt and barely deigned to turn his head toward the ladies. When he did, he gave them no more than a baleful stare.

After an hour or so, we'd seen all of the exhibitors once and had just begun one last circuit to make sure that we hadn't missed anything.  Anyone in the audience who had thought that witnessing the rap performance had moved them into "Now I've Seen It All" territory had only to hang around for a few minutes, when they'd have heard a Korean version of  "Country Roads," made even better by a Korean dance team dressed in rhinestone-studded satin cowboy dresses.

My Korean husband, born in Seoul and raised in the close-in suburbs of Washington DC, has always claimed that he should have been a country boy. He's more urban than a subway pass, but that doesn't stop him from rhapsodizing about country living.  He'd bale his own hay, and he'd grow his own food, and he'd live off the grid, if only he were in the country.

"This is what I'm talking about," he said. "See? My people know that I'm a country boy. They're singing my song."  On a sun-beaten blacktop parking platform connecting one wing of a suburban mall to another, just off one of the most heavily traveled Capital Beltway exits, surrounded by high-density mixed-use development, which is surrounded by traditional suburban sprawl, an all-American Korean longs for the place where he belongs, which is apparently West Virginia. Meanwhile, the heat reflecting off the blacktop beneath our feet and the relentless sun overhead were finally enough. "Take me home," I said.

One of these things is not like the other

I'm reading one of those books of funny essays written by popular bloggers.  This one focuses mostly on modern suburban motherhood; the author is a renegade who just doesn't fit in with the Botoxed, superfit, Pinterest-pinning, organic/gluten-free, hypercompetitive, pumpkin-spice-latte supermoms who are apparently EVERYWHERE in the town where she lives, sharing homemade muffins and passive-aggression with the lesser mothers (like the author) who can barely manage to (Fill in the blank: put a meal on the table, comb their hair, shower, wear non-stretchy clothes, etc.)

It's funny, I suppose.  As a person who is inept at all crafts, hates (REALLY HATES) to bake, finds Pinterest ridiculous, and believes that pumpkin should be consumed only within the confines of a pie, I should probably feel a more robust sense of tribal affiliation with the author.  She's one of my people.  But although I know more than my share of the other type of suburban mother, I don't think I've ever noticed that any of them bake or decorate or overexercise or garden or push their children to excel for any reason other than that's what they want to do.  I don't recognize the smug, superior Mean-Girl mothers described semi-hilariously in this book, and I can't summon the appropriate resentment against their supposed tyranny over the rest of us.

There's a huge irony present in the very existence of this book, which is based on a blog that revolves around a similar theme, which is very popular with readers who often comment about their oppression at the perfectly manicured hands of the  bitchy queen bees in their own neighborhoods.  It's us against them, the author seems to assert: the slightly frumpy, just-holding-it-together mothers against the Little Miss Perfects, damn them.  But of course, we have the words on our side.  Most of the people who write or blog about the alleged raging Mommy Wars are in the former camp, and we can write stuff that makes us look cool and funny and down to earth, and that makes them look humorless and uptight and lacking in all decent human qualities.  Who's the mean girl in this scenario?

*****
I was watching Morning Joe this morning; just a short break from the All-Pope, All-the-Time programming that has constituted my only TV consumption this week.  Rick Perry was a guest.  I'm not very political anymore, and I don't have much of an opinion of Rick Perry one way or another.  Joe Scarborough finished the interview with Perry by sharing a story that Rick Santorum had told him.  Apparently, at a Republican debate (I missed a few words, so I don't know if this happened in 2012 or 2015), Santorum noticed that of all the candidates, only Perry wasn't taking notes throughout the debate.  Perry did, however, make a quick note when Santorum was speaking about his daughter Bella, who has Trisomy 18.  At the end of the debate, Santorum made a point of looking down at Perry's notes when the men were shaking hands, to see if he could see what Perry had written.  He had written three words: "Pray for Bella."

It was a touching story, and Perry didn't react to seeing Scarborough tell it on TV the way I'd have expected him to.  He was neither embarrassed nor piously smug.  It was just something that had happened.  Perry said that he remembered making the note, and that he still prays for Bella Santorum. He also prays for Barack Obama.

*****

There should be a better segue between those two stories, some neat metaphorical connection between the mommy blogger and the conservative Texas politician.  I'm not going to bother looking for it, though.  Ten years ago, I'd have been nodded my head in recognition at snarky portrayals of Mommier-than-thou types who apparently rule suburbia with iron fists.  I'd have also rolled my eyes at Republican politicians who claimed to pray for anything.   Maybe my politics have changed, but I think that it's a shift in something other than politics.  Us versus them in any context, which has always been unkind, now seems downright boring.  A Texas Republican could maybe teach me how to pray for my enemies.  A supermommy could maybe teach me how to make a nicer dinner.  It doesn't matter who's teaching; I have plenty to learn.

Shelter from the storm

I have these black Kork Ease sandals that I bought in, I think, 2013.  They're very comfortable.  Last summer, during a family trip to Korea, I wore them almost every day, for seven to ten miles of daily walking, often uphill (I climbed Seongsan Ilchubong in these shoes.)  Because I'd worn the sandals for most of the summer, too, my feet were accustomed to them, and I didn't have so much as a callus at the end of the trip.

This summer, I worked only from home for the first time, so even the Kork Ease were dressier than I needed for my daily routine of copy editing from my kitchen table and hanging around at the pool watching swim practice.  I wore them to church, and out here or there, but most of the time, I was in flip-flops.

We spent this weekend in Baltimore.  After seeing one of the craziest baseball games ever on Friday night (I looked it up; the Orioles' two grand slams in a single inning was not a first-ever feat, but it's only happened six times in modern baseball history), we spent Saturday walking and riding the Water Taxi around the waterfront, seeing sights and eating food.  My Fitbit recorded over 19,000 steps.

It was 6:15 or so when we returned to the hotel.  My feet were blistered raw in four places, and black from leather dye.  We were all damp and chilled and ragged from the rain.  After a swim in the hotel pool, though (I scrubbed my icky feet first), followed by a few minutes in the sauna, followed by a shower, we were all clean and dry and warm again.  Then we ate more food.

*****

Because I follow what the young people are doing on the social media, I have learned that college-age kids now advise people to "check their privilege."  If some juvenile social justice warrior told me to check my privilege, I think I'd suggest that she check her manners.  I do not think that word means what they think it means. 

Manners aside, though, I'm actually checking my privilege now. My relative privilege versus that of most of the world can be quantified by the word "shitload."  I enjoy a shitload of privileges.  When my children are hungry, I always have something to offer them, even if it's not exactly what the children want. ("There's nothing to eat in this house."  I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.)  Filth is a temporary and easily remedied condition.  Shelter from the storm is always within short walking distance. 

I think that I might have said something that afternoon about refusing to take another step until I had clean feet and dry clothes.  I'm sure that refugee women, on a hot and dusty road from Damascus or Asmara, also sometimes threaten to refuse to walk one more step in their dirty shoes or ragged clothes.  They keep going, though, and so would I if I had to.  I don't have to, though.  Most days, I don't have to. Privilege. 

Arachnophobia

That title, while relevant, is somewhat less than accurate, because I'm not particularly afraid of spiders (though I'm certainly not fond of them, either.)

So, this morning, I found what I'm pretty sure was a brown recluse spider in my kitchen sink.  I know that the brown recluse has the distinctive violin marking on its back, but I didn't have my glasses or contact lenses, having just awoken a few minutes earlier, and I certainly wasn't going to get close enough to it to examine and identify any pattern that might or might not have appeared on its back.

It looked up at me, calmly and expectantly.  It seemed to be waiting for me to offer it a cup of coffee, or maybe some orange juice and toast.  As I said, I'm not particularly afraid of spiders, and perhaps this one, accustomed to human encounters accompanied by shrieks of terror, mistakenly thought that my silence indicated welcome.

The thing was already in the sink, not far from the drain.  Problem solved, I thought.  Instead of the hoped-for coffee and Continental breakfast, the spider got the business end of the faucet hose.  Then, after a few minutes of the deluge, I turned on the garbage disposal, just for good measure.  I thought for a moment that I'd probably be remembered among the brown recluse community as a monster, a fiend so cruel and wanton that mere drowning of an innocent spider wasn't enough to satisfy me; I had to torture the poor dying thing, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, when 20 minutes or so later, I found a spider in my sink again.  Notice that I didn't say "another spider" because I'm not sure, in fact, if it WAS another spider, or the same one, tougher and more resilient than I could ever have imagined.  What doesn't kill a spider might make it stronger, I thought, so this time, I squashed it.  THEN I ran the water and turned on the disposal again.  I tried not to think too hard about either of two distinct possibilities:

1.  A new breed of bulletproof, kill-resistant, super spider that can withstand all extermination attempts
2. Spider infestation

No sightings since.  Maybe word of this morning's incident has spread, and the spider community is wisely avoiding my house of death.  Or maybe they're plotting revenge.  I'll find out soon enough

PS--I thought to accompany this post with a photo of a brown recluse, maybe with a funny caption ("Actually, do you have soy milk?  I'm lactose intolerant.") but if you've never done a Google image search for brown recluse spiders, then do yourself a favor and don't.  It's not the spiders, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all.  Necrotizing spider bites, however, are all different and each is more gut-wrenchingly disgusting than the last.  You can't unsee some things.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Today was a surprisingly productive day.  I crossed a larger-than-expected number of things off my unrealistically long to-do list, kept work on deadline, and serendipitously timed my swim to end at the very moment the thunder rumbled, prompting the lifeguard to whistle swimmers out of the pool.  Success on every front.

Not every day is like this, because I have the attention span of a fruit fly.  Yesterday, for example, I was working peacefully as clean clothes tumbled in the dryer. When the timer buzzed, I got up to fold the clothes, then I noticed some dirt on the family room floor, so I abandoned a t-shirt mid-fold and plugged in the vacuum cleaner.  As I vacuumed, I wondered what the family room would look like if I moved furniture piece A to spot B, and then furniture piece B into spot A.  It didn't work as well as I thought it would, so I moved the furniture back to where it had been.  Not, however, before vacuuming the spots where the pieces had been, and then moving a few other furniture items to vacuum underneath,

Back to work.  But wait, the clothes weren't folded!

The report that I was copyediting contained a discussion of a country whose fiscal position is untenable; however, that country continues to increase spending and cut taxes ahead of looming elections.  The day of reckoning will come, I suppose.  As I worked, I thought that I saw a metaphor for my life amid the talk of debt-to-GDP ratios and impending fiscal collapse.  I should have written it down, but at just that moment, I noticed some dirt on the kitchen floor.  The kitchen floor, once clean, made the countertops look pretty squalid by comparison.  By the time I had brought the countertops up to my standard, the metaphoric connection between my life and a South American economic disaster, which was already tenuous to begin with, had evaporated altogether.  All wasn't lost, though.  The laundry was done, the kitchen was pretty clean, and I met my deadline.  South America should be so lucky.

 

Transition

It's almost dark at 8:04 PM.  We have weeks of warm weather left, but only a few days before school starts and 10 days or so before the pool closes and summer, by my definition, is firmly and finally over.

I predicted months ago that I'd be sitting on the couch one late-August night, sadly wondering where the summer had gone, but I'm actually not as sad as I usually am.  After a week of vacation and another few days of little work, I'm ready for a return to a more structured schedule. I don't manage unstructured time very well.  I'll miss my kids, though.  I could reconcile myself to the end of summer if I didn't have to send them back to school.  As for homeschooling, see earlier reference to unstructured time.  Left solely in my educational care, my children would have read hundreds of novels and spent many hours swimming and playing music.  They would also be unable to count past ten.  I know my limits.

******

It's 8:45 AM now.  Today's really the last day of summer, REAL summer.  High school orientation is tomorrow morning at 7:45, which means that I need to wake a 14-year-old up at 6:45.  I'm always up early anyway, but being up myself and dragging sleepy teenagers out of their beds are two entirely different things.  School doesn't start in earnest until Monday, but once a kid enters a school building at 7:45 in the morning and returns home with reams of forms for me to sign, the spell is broken.   And now, it's time to work.

The personal is political

I suppose that should be modified somewhat; what's really true now is that everything is political.

A few days ago, I was on Facebook.  A Facebook friend (a person whom I've never met personally, but we connected at some point through blogging, I think) posted a sad lament about how she'd been forced to unfriend someone, an actual close personal friend, because the former friend had revealed a political opinion that the poster found offensive.

It's probably not all that remarkable that someone would drop a friend (remember, this was an actual friend, not just a social media connection) with whom she disagrees politically.  I think that happens all the time now.   What made this particular post stand out was the tone of genuine grief and anguish, and the person's deep conviction that she had been forced to drop this friend; that she had absolutely no choice but to end a treasured friendship because the friend holds distasteful political opinions.

I suppose there are situations in which it would be reasonable and even necessary to end a friendship or friendly acquaintanceship because of politics.  If you learn, for example, that your friendly and courteous neighbor or colleague, a person whom you once liked and respected and considered becoming better friends with, is actually a KKK member, or a Holocaust denier, or an ISIS recruiter, then you'd obviously want to end your association with that person immediately.  But how is it possible that a person with whom you've been close personal friends for many years is suddenly revealed to be a Nazi or a white supremacist or a terrorist?

The point, of course, is that the political offense that ended this particular friendship was probably of a much lesser magnitude.  There is a small, but vocal (and growing) cohort who genuinely believe that perfect conformity of thought and opinion on every social and political issue is not only desirable among friends, but necessary.  This group of people feel absolutely obligated to end friendships, cut off family members, and shun neighbors and acquaintances who don't adapt quickly and completely to new modes of thought on everything from gender theory to income inequality to the real or perceived privilege of one group of people over another.  Those people, who either cling to opinions that were not all that controversial 25 years ago, or who just aren't aware of how quickly and completely their friends' outlooks have changed, are not given the smallest amount of slack.  Once someone reveals herself to be slightly behind the curve socially or politically, she is cut off, cast out into outer darkness where there is, presumably, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Aside from the obvious cruelty of an approach to relationships that places politics and ideology over people, you have to also wonder about the futility of this approach.  If you're convinced that your understanding of humanity is the only reasonable and correct one, wouldn't you want to try to convert others?  Wouldn't you respond to perceived errors in thought or speech with persuasion rather than ostracism?  Something about flies and honey; I can't remember.  Maybe Frog or Toad would know.

Off-task

Well, that's no way to build an audience, is it?  After several weeks of stunning circulation figures (as many as 40 readers in a day!) production levels dropped to zero posts per week.  I shall have to account to my superiors for my lack of productivity.

Today has been something of an exercise in futility.  I've found that multi-tasking is far overrated; however, the habit of trying to do multiple things at once is so deeply ingrained that I can't break it now.  Just during the course of this post, I've clicked over to other tabs at least five times; I'm working on vacation-house searching (note: don't start looking for a beach house for August in June) and finishing a weekly newsletter.  Mild OCD and extreme ADD are not a good combination.  I'm always on task; it's usually just the wrong task.  Back to work.

Paved with good intentions

Isn't that how the road to hell is always described?

Yesterday, I was embroiled in a slight controversy, involving someone who said that she thought that I was trying to push her out of a job, when I thought that I had been helping her.  So much for the good intentions; they paved a one-way street to all-day minor-drama hell.  It all worked out; emails and texts were exchanged, and a long, emotional phone call put everything right.  

I think it did, anyway.  The other person said that she felt much better, and everyone else involved seemed relieved and satisfied at the resolution.  And I guess, after I washed off the tire tracks and then removed the clothespins that were holding me on to the clothesline where I had hung out to dry for a bit, that I felt better, too.  There's really no particular reason why I'd feel compelled to write about it in a veiled and mysterious manner the next day.  It's not like my feelings were hurt or anything.  

Fiction

I don't check my stats very often, because no one reads this bilge, except that apparently, a few people do.  24 pageviews in a day is nothing, of course, to real bloggers, but since my average is zero, it was pretty astonishing to see that 24 people had actually landed on this blog and possibly even read some of it.

Of course, I used to have readers.  I blogged regularly between 2007 and 2010, and lots of people used to read and comment.  Because of an unusual work situation, I had time to write and to read and comment at other people's blogs, which brought readers to my blog.  Then, in 2010 or so, I dropped off the face of the Internet for a while, not to return until late 2013.

Now I'm wondering if any of my literally dozens of readers noticed my rash threat to write a novel.  I'm not sure if I can live up to this or not.  I might need to be more careful about what I put in writing.