Lady Heathen Soul

Sleep Tight, Little Bloggie

2011-10-26T11:25:00.001-07:00

Remember Diaryland? Remember how solipsistic blogs used to be? Remember what solipsistic means? I can say "yes" to all three (thank you David Bowie!)

Diaryland was one of the first "web logs" that was accessible the general public. A few clickity-clickities, and you had a "blog." Most of us used it to post half-assed ramblings about how we were slouching towards adulthood. "Social media" was also moving in the same direction. Now we are all more mature.

Blogs have ripened into real places for robust and often righteous commentary. With Tumblr and its brethren we can post all the crapola we've ironically scanned. Twitter has evolved from the pointless chatter we thought it would be into a digital megaphone. And Facebook lets us keep up with our high school friends. Bless you, Facebook!

I created Lady Heathen Soul to help me work out my feelings about spirituality and culture. It often veered way off that path, but that was the intention. Since then, I have used this blogging format to create a site that highlights my freelance writing skills and experiences. I have also, as part of my work on my novels, created a blog for the fiction writer part of me. This blog, called simply Care Morency, will now be my main blog outlet. While it will focus on writing and books, I promise it will not be solely about those topics.

Lady Heathen Soul will join our Diaryland forebearers and exist somewhere on a server farm. Its spirit will be transferred, quietly and invisibly, like cybercash on Paypal, to Care Morency. It's been fun writing this history of the online world, but there is much more to come.

At the Heart of the Matter

2011-09-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

I don't know if any high-energy physics laboratory will eventually discover and explain the mysteries of the universe, but I do know that I am one-thousand percent behind spending the money to try. Unfortunately, my home country has decided to sit in the back seat and let the Europeans drive the search for the origins of everything.

Today Fermilab, the particle physics laboratory outside of Chicago, is shutting down its largest tool for high-energy exploration, the Tevatron. Those familiar with Fermilab (my mom works there and I worked there summers during college) call this three-mile round feature "The Ring," and on the surface it makes a great bike path. Underneath, it smashes protons and anti-protons together and studies the results. Fermilab itself is not shutting down, as they do many other experiments. And the Tevatron is no longer the world standard for high-energy physics -- that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider on the French/Swiss border.

Physics, like many man-centered areas, prefers the newest, biggest, and shiniest, and the Tevatron is no longer those things. But it does have work left to do, at least for a few years. However, the bass-ackwards political climate in our country makes it hard to squeeze pennies out for disaster relief, so you can imagine where an atom smasher (in an indigo-azure-cerulean, true blue state) falls on the list of priorities. We should have told them Jesus told us to keep it open.

Speaking of Jesus, or men who look like him, there are people Occupying Wall Street this week. It's ironic that this is occurring at the same time as the killing of the Tevatron, and indicative of Failure All Around. Wall Street has failed, not just because of its focus on derivatives and other bullshit financial card tricks but because the titans fail to realize a basic economic principle: you need to spend money to make money. If I were protesting on Wall Street, my demand would be More Investment in Research and Development. That's not a sexy sign, I know. And it's spelled correctly.

More Failure All Around: our government, for being pussies and not telling the people the truth, which is that we need to spend money or we will implode. Our Supreme Court, for the monstrous Citizens United decision. And then there is We, the People. We have failed to care and to suck it up and demand the hard changes and now we are in decline. Nice going.

One more failure, although it pains me to say this. I have to ding the physics community for failing to find a new Leon Lederman. Lederman was the man who coined the term "The God Particle" and got everyone talking about physics in a way that was both intellectual and down-to-earth. Lederman had not only a way of talking to people who couldn't remember the basic parts of an atom but also the moneybag holders in government. Finding another someone like Lederman is a tall order, but it needs to be done (and if it was a woman, even better). We need people who can eloquently and passionately argue for America's future as a place where things get thought up, figured out, and done. Dare I say that today might not be last call for the Tevatron if our new physics standard-bearer were on the job.

Thank you for In These Times for the photo. I remember many days sitting in my library's quiet reading room with Mother Jones and In These Times.

Crossing Borders

2011-08-11T08:13:00.001-07:00

I have avoided visiting my local Borders bookstore since it was reported that the chain was packing in its books and music (and magnets and journals and small candies) and closing up its remaining stores. Knowing that those who swoop in on ailing enterprises tend to be kind of vulture-like in their pursuit of bargains, I did not want to either see this or be this.

Also, I was feeling some guilt. I don't purchase many books. There are a few reasons for this. First, while we in my family are voracious readers, we have never been book buyers. Second, we live in a small condo that suits our needs well but has little extra room for books. As it is, I have a few piles around that I have not yet figured out what to do with. Third, I am a seasoned reader and aspiring published novelist, and I am really, really picky about what I read. A book has to change my life for me to actually buy it.

In addition to my miser-like ways with my cash, I am fortunate to live in an area blessed with access to information. My local library is stellar, and through the wonders of interlibrary loan, I can get my hands on almost anything. Literally across the parking lot from my library is Anderson's Bookshop, the quintessential independent bookstore. Most of the books I buy, I buy there, because the taxes I pay go back into my hometown.

But when Borders opened in the suburb of Oak Brook just north of me twenty years ago, it filled yet another role in our area. The store quickly had to relocate to bigger quarters in a newly built mini mall across Route 83. Just to prove that our area could support many bookstores, a Barnes and Noble opened about two blocks to the south of Borders. I mostly shunned it, though, for one really silly but extremely practical reason -- their parking lot was too small.

As I mentioned, I do feel some responsibility for Borders' demise. At the time Borders opened, I was in college, and, as an English major, I was looking for as many sources of books as I could find. Many times, I would stretch my student budget by reading a novel at Borders. Recently, I used the store mostly as a high-end magazine library, paging through the thickest and glossiest of British Elle and Vogue Italia, and only rarely purchasing one. I would always buy something to drink, because I wanted to alleviate my guilt at least a bit. Often, I could not even do that, as every seat in the store's lounge was frequently occupied.

The Borders story is one riddled with the kinds of miscalculations and lack of risk-taking that characterizes American business right now. If upper management had been smart, they would have made room in their large stores for every new technology that came along. For example, Borders could have gotten rid of the overlarge compact disc area and installed a download bar. Teach people how to download MP3s and movies and recorded and eBooks, and sell them what they download, along with the technology to go with it. Any borders executive who visited a busy library could see that librarians are scrambling to help people do these things, and could have envisioned a plan to monetize this.

Also, while at the libraries, Borders higher-ups could have seen how people are begging for help with computers, resumes, crafts, cooking, etc. Libraries give away this information for free with community programs. Borders could have charged a nominal fee for how-to and do-it-yourself programs and directed patrons to resources in the store. Again, make better use of all that space to give customers what they need now.

And if I were in charge of a company, I would be hanging out at Borders, bugging their highly educated and customer-service oriented employees to come work for me. There is so much potential in our economy right now, but it is trapped by fear and small-mindedness. Let's hope we have taken advantage of the bookstores in our community to read up on our history, our economics and our literature and learn how to function again.

The Sacking of Printemps

2011-05-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

Chicago-area azalea adorers are having a happy 2011. Lilac lovers, not so much. After a slice of spring just before Easter, cool weather plopped its haunches down on us and just sat, keeping the early season blooms going and going and going. I am just so-so on tulips but crazy about wildflowers, and this has not been my year. Nor is it Lombard's – this suburb famous for their Lilac Festival is having a party even though the guests of honor are taking their sweet-smelling time showing up.

And then, a few days after Mother's Day, it's 80 degrees. Did you enjoy spring? Because it's summer now.

Just as women are now able to ditch menstruation, I believe the Earth may be done with The Four Seasons. She'll be a whiny bitch about it, for sure – going on about our carbon footprint and telling us that fracking is super-destructive, etc. She's pissed, and to get back at us, she's outsourcing Spring and Fall. Winter and Summer will pick up the slack, putting in overtime if necessary. Nuances and slow transition are the climatological version of a rotary phone.

So now that you have figured out what grows best in your garden, get ready to watch all it all change. There is a lot of garden wisdom out there about to be rendered useless by extreme weather. At least you can endure the cool gloom of May knowing that the novice and the expert are both baffled and no one really knows anything about plants anymore. Enjoy the magnolias, y'all!

The Flatlander's Curse

2011-04-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

It's rare to hear of more than a few deaths from tornado outbreaks, but a large swath of the south has been devastated by twisters, and the death toll is at 200.

Keeping in mind that the recent storm outbreak from Texas through Virgina has been deadly, video we are seeing also indicates that some of the tornadoes have been just about perfect. Thanks to this brave soul in a mall parking lot, you can even hear the "freight train" that everyone always talks about.

Hundreds dead is hundreds too many, but sometimes the toll does not need to be that large for tornadoes to take on a mythic quality. The 1991 Plainfield tornado claimed 25, but also leveled a high school and a church, as if the storm felt the need to leave an extra sinister mark on Chicago history. And then there is the story of the tavern patrons in Utica in 2004, who did everything right and hid in the basement when the warnings came. But the old building around them collapsed, and six died.

Along with the endless sky, enormous pragmatism is a mark of a Middle Westerner, and we are getting pretty good at reducing the number of deaths from tornadoes here in the great center of America. It helps that our weather is pragmatic, too. A prairie storm is as obvious as Godzilla on the horizon, and it moves through fast. We don't have to escape up the coast, or close our business for three days, and the storm leaves us the rest of a dry and often sunny day.

I have always said that I like living where the land is flat because I can see my weather coming, and today I feel that more than ever. While only the gods and the ions in the air really know if the scary clouds you are watching in the west will convene and swirl and turn into a tornado, it all unfolds in front of you, giving you plenty of time to react. From April through October, every flatlander should be at least moderately aware of where one can seek shelter should the need arise. For example, the basement at Macy's at Oak Brook Center mall is really secure -- I've been herded down there by store management twice myself.

The great irony for weather geeks in the Chicago area is that this is the weekend of famous forecaster Tom Skilling's legendary Severe Weather Seminar at Fermilab, a multi-hour extravaganza of bow echoes, lightning injuries and vorticity. You have sympathy for those who make their living when the weather turns evil: you know they don't want people to get hurt and property to be damaged, but their evident excitement at killer weather can't be contained.

It's Personal and It's Everybody's Business

2011-02-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

Since I rarely have time for good television shows, I have never seen "Two and a Half Men." It's not just the lack of proper punctuation in the title, but I have heard it is odious. Speaking of odious, Charlie Sheen has been on the express train to Crazytown lately, most recently telling the world that he has cured himself of his addictions and that he has "spent, I think, close to the last decade...effortlessly and magically converting [the show's producer's] tin cans into pure gold."

That last sentence almost makes me love the guy. But this is not a post about aging Brat Prackers and their problems. No, I just want to think a little about anyone who has ever had a mental illness or addiction and pulled it together every day and gone into work. Because this is what Sheen has done, even though he seems to have a boundless appetite for drugs and hookers. He wants to be acknowledged for this ability, and this makes me wonder if he is largely free of "addiction" and is now simply a loony jackass with an appetite for drugs and hookers (insert "Now he can run for Congress" joke here).

If you have a problem that you are trying to hide from the world, the last thing you want is to say out loud that you should be congratulated for hiding said problem well. You probably say this to yourself at night in the bathtub as you contemplate offing yourself (again...uhh...so I have heard....), but the rest of the time you are engaged in Hiding the Problem, and that is a full-time job in itself.

For awhile, I hid my anxiety and subsequent depression, and went to work every morning hoping the day would bring some catastrophic medical crisis (a brain hemorrhage was a favorite wish) that would relieve me of the job of holding myself upright. I never had the type of depression where I could not get out of bed, and that made me really angry. And it took me a long time to get help, because we still live in a society that communicates the message that if your illness can't be seen, you can't take a sick day.

Today I am one of the few people who won't shake my fist against Big Pharma, because Big Pharma (wielded by some smart medical professionals) saved my life. And, on the few-and-far-between bad days, I am not afraid to tell people that I need a nap. What I am afraid of is actors from bad sitcoms with Messiah complexes and long lists of conspiracy theories.

We All Want to Change the World

2011-02-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

Have I told the story about the Ayatollah Khomeini piñata? If so, well, you are going to hear it again. In 1979, I was in fourth grade, and back then you only learned about other cultures when there was time at the end of the school year. So that spring, we had a short unit on "Mexico."

Thank God for television and adults talking, because we kids were keenly aware of what was going on in the world. In February, there had been a revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah and installed an Islamic government. Even ten-year-olds knew that this was not a positive step forward, although I bet it was another twenty years before most of us learned why the revolution happened. As we grew, we watched many leaders in the Middle East try theocracy. We watched women lose their rights, we watched Sharia law be implemented in different forms, and we watched young men pledge their lives to a form of Islam that rejected the future. In America, it can be said that the 1979 revolution did not affect us until September 11, 2001, but that is a ridiculously parochial view. The whole world has lost decades to an experiment in Islamic law and government that is failing because it is working against the tide of time. People only move forward, and to attempt to turn back the clock is just a waste of time and lives.

So back to "Mexico" (sorry, Mexico, but you are just a detail in this story). The culmination of our extensive week-long study of Mexico was a piñata project. Since this was in the dark ages, kids were still divided into groups based on ability (yes!) and of course I was with the "smart" kids. And we showed off our superior abilities by creating an Ayatollah Khomeini piñata and then delighting in bashing it to pieces.

Today is the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, but more important, today Hosni Mubarak resigned as Egyptian president after thirty years. It's hard to post links because as I write this I am listening to coverage of the event on Al Jazeera (here's something on Mubarak). After all we have heard here in America about Iran, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, Egypt, until last month, was rarely mentioned. Now I understand why. Egypt and Israel are in strange positions in their region, and it has been in our interest to be slightly deaf and blind in dealing with them.

But Americans have to remember that our interests are of little interest to the people in other parts of the world who have to live their lives, too, and want to do so in both freedom and security. To the people of Egypt I say please understand that American leaders (especially those who started the war in Iraq) do not always represent us. We are watching you and all of us are thinking today how far we need to go to make our voices heard, too. Most of all, the future is inevitable, and we will meet you there.

Cooking with Shame

2011-01-09T18:38:00.001-08:00

I am not a cook. This is not a joke rephrase of Nixon, it is the truth. For this, I refer to (rather than blame!) my mother, who never enjoyed cooking. We are Polish, and some of those of our persuasion see cooking as a chore, like laundry, rather than a joy. When you are from a northern climate and your culture and country has been overtaken by your neighbors multiple times, you probably welcome the ease and blissful nothingness of fast food. Hence my undying love of Culver's (oh, their cod sandwich, in all its golden crispiness, with crinkle fries!)

Every few months I go through a phase where I decide I want to be a cook. Usually, it is after watching a few cooking programs on television, and it is usually a negative reaction to strange things that chefs with contracts try to foist on us (fried rice with cranberries! Dishes with cooked iceberg lettuce!!).

As mentioned earlier, I am Polish, and so I have cabbage where many of you have cartilage. This week, my husband (who CAN cook) was making pork tenderloin and asked me to pick up some jarred red cabbage to go with it. I was at my local ethnic fruit stand, and strangely, could not find the jar of red cabbage we usually have with Eastern-European influenced meals. So I said "Can't any idiot make red cabbage?"

I am here to tell you that yes, any idiot can. I found a recipe online (from Rachel Ray, proving the 'any idiot' theory) and I have now made sauteed red cabbage twice in one week, and no one has died.

My husband and I have discussed my inability to cook many times, and he has told me that I need to cook with love. My feeling up until now has been that when I purchase, chop, braise, brown, drain, serve, and clean up after cooking, love is not the first emotion that comes to mind.

But standing in the middle of a store, not able to find what I wanted, I was overcome with another emotion, one that gripped me harder than love: shame. Certainly anyone can wilt a vegetable in pan. This week, I proved that yes, anyone can.

If I Were a Wise Man

2011-01-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

In the early 1990s, if the earth had rotated just slightly faster or slower, or perhaps if the wind had blown a little more or a little less, or, most likely, if I had not read one book or another, I would be a Medievalist. That is to say, if my life had gone a certain way, I would be an expert in Medieval literature somewhere. When I entered college, I was fascinated by the pre-Renaissance world, and still have a CD of songs by Hildegarde Von Bingen to prove it.

But I attended a liberal arts college, and they were determined to show me more of the world. In a class on poetry, we studied works by Christina Rossetti, and it is at this woman's feet that I lay the end of my career in academia.

Rossetti is best known as the author of the lyrics to "In the Bleak Midwinter," and perhaps also as the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a flamboyant painter and one of the founders of the dramatic Pre-Raphaelite movement. Christina spent her life in a High Anglican religious fervor that reportedly prevented her from marrying and also contributed to the deeply felt poems she wrote. Dante was more of a Byronic figure, pledging his devotion to Elizabeth Siddal, a woman who died an early death due to a laudanum addiction. Dante buried some of his poems with her, but later decided he wanted them back, so poor Lizzie was disinterred.

It is because of the Rossetti clan that I decided the medieval world was actually of little interest to me because it lacked the one thing that makes life worth living: stories. We know so little about lives before widespread literacy and the printing press, and we have to be cautious about forcing our narratives back in time. Maybe a serf from 1100 was as psychologically developed as any one of us, but because he or she could not write, and in fact would not have anyway unless it was in service of the church, we don't know, and never will.

And so, my interests sprang forward, and I started loving Modernist art and film and design. But I can still appreciate Christina's words as sung in hymn form, the description of the frozen world, the stirring evocation of the Nativity, the prayer for worthiness. May God continue to give us writers the means and ability to tell all of our stories.

The Year in Motion

2010-12-28T11:31:00.001-08:00

Each year, Sinterklass visits me on Boxing Day to remind me that I have once again failed to see one Normal Person movie in the past year. Quiz: Did you see a movie released in 2010 in 2010? Then you are a Normal Person.

I am not one of those writers who wants to impress you with the obscurity and inscrutability of the movies he views (one of which was in Kazakh, the other pieced together from celluloid found at the bottom of a trunk in an attic in Houghton, Michigan...). Mostly, I just take a long time to see things. I also rely on serendipity, and, more and more, my husband, to fling movies my way.

So here is a list of movies I saw in 2010. Needless to say, they are in no particular order.

Xanadu (1980): Despite the fact that this was the first movie I wanted to rent when we first bought our VCR in the early 1980s, I have only seen this movie once. That, many say, is twice too much. I was cleaning out my pile of media acquired from the book sale cart at the library, and decided to watch my VHS copy one more time before donating it back. You know, despite the lack of plot, crappy dialog, and completely unappealing leading man, it's not a bad movie. It has spunk -- and roller skating, and groovy light affects, and it features the now-demolished Deco Moderne masterpiece Pan-Pacific Auditorium. But I am still donating my tape, as I will wait for the Criterion Collection version.

Stranger than Paradise (1984): Did you know that in 1988 I wanted to study film at New York University? But, unlike everyone else who said the same thing that year, I was not influenced by Jim Jarmusch's first full-length film. No, I wanted to make movies like "Desperately Seeking Susan."

Les Mystères du Château du Dé (The Mysteries of the Château of Dice) (1929): From a collection called Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s. A film by the artist Man Ray, who was kind of a proto-surrealist and experimented with photography and film. He projected images on living things (like women), exposed paper with objects on them (now a Photography 101 assignment) and worked with shadows, speed and splicing. Not so avant today, but think of Man Ray when you upload your You Tube of your cat playing the flute.

The House on Haunted Hill (1959): The only time I did venture into an actual movie theater this year was to see grown men make fun of an old movie. The guys at Riff Trax, one of the two spinoffs of Mystery Science Theater 3000, ripped this movie a new blowhole in October in what we used to call a "stereo simulcast" but we now just call "live."

The Films of Tom Palazzolo: My husband found these in the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, and we watched the whole cycle of four films now on display there. Two document obscure corners of Chicago life, but one, "Love It/Leave It" reminded me very much of Robert Altman's "Nashville." Palazzolo's film came first, and during a lecture in January where he will be featured, I may ask for his reaction to my observation. Palazzolo will be at the AIC, fittingly, on January 6. Epiphany!

Holly Jolly Oh Dear Golly

2010-12-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Here, we see Laura Petrie's sister, Babs, the manager of a Hertz office in Murmansk. Most of the year, she's renting Land Rovers to longshoremen, but tonight she had a special request. Some guy named Nick needs to make about six billion sales calls before midnight, but he wants a sweet ride for the job (he's some sort of big shot in the toy industry). Supposedly NORAD is tracking him, but, because Babs is known for her quick service (ahem) she makes with the cherry-red Chevy right quick.

From my half-observant house to yours, we wish you a wonderful 2011.

To Excel or Not to Excel

2010-11-22T12:20:00.001-08:00

One of the symbols of the Great Recession is seasoned office workers wondering if they should bother updating their skills.* Specifically, the question is asked thousands of times each day across America: "Should I learn Excel?"

Since I began my career about the same time that Microsoft Office became a standard workplace tool, I have never had to ask myself this question. I have, to put it simply, always known Excel. Do I know how to do intricate calculations? No, but I can create a spreadsheet and make all the numbers add up, and that's about 80 percent of what you need it for.

In fact, I have to admit to some bratty kid thoughts here, as I have often wondered why some people seem to have a problem learning new software. Never mind that I learned Excel, Outlook, email, drawing and publishing programs, and how to use the Internet almost by osmosis, just by being a certain age at a certain time. I never had a formal software class until I had to learn the web design program Dreamweaver, and I went into that already knowing a simpler version.

Kinder people than me have told me that it is not uncommon to fear new experiences, and having to figure out how ones and zeroes make rows and columns is, for many, a scary thing. Not everyone came of working age at the exact time that Microsoft was taking over offices across the world. I try to put myself in their shoes, but admittedly, my empathy well has been experiencing a drought.

But God sometimes decides to poke your shoulder and then look the other way, suppressing a giggle. For fun and some extra cash, I am working this holiday season behind the fine jewelry counter at Macy's, and I have been experiencing a new feeling: inadequacy.

I can work the cash register. I know to look for the 24k gold stamp. I know freshwater pearls are the lumpy ones. But that was about the extent of my knowledge when I started a few weeks ago. Now I have to learn about grades of diamonds, how to log purchases to please the auditors, and how to sign people up for credit cards. I have to know how black diamonds get that way, where the necklace boxes are and which keys go to which cabinet. I might even have to learn how to send a ring out for sizing and how to take links out of thousand-dollar watches.

And a few days ago, I realized I felt really stupid.

It's not my co-workers or my manager -- they're great, and encourage questions. No, it's me, coming up to a chasm in my knowledge and trying to decide how to bridge it (that's another thing to know: what is "bridge" jewelry?). So yes, now I know how people who do not know Excel feel when they sit down at the computer the first time and click on the icon with the spreadsheet.

But I also know this: after a certain age, you know more than you think you do. It may not be knowledge you access everyday, but it is there. Excel newbies realize that the same basic skills they use to email their friends apply to other programs, and then perhaps get a bit excited when they see the software do a bunch of tedious adding for them.

As for me, I love jewelry, so all of this learning will be done in the presence of pearl rings, gold bangles, and diamond solitaires. One day last week, I watched a limp pearl necklace and a tired-looking woman transform each other. Her face lit up, and the necklace seemed to glow as well. Sometimes learning new things leads to surprises, but you don't know until you try.

*This post is dedicated to Annie J., who teaches people to use computers and will be eligible for sainthood in about fifty years.

To Excel or Not to Excel

2010-11-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

One of the symbols of the Great Recession is seasoned office workers wondering if they should bother updating their skills.* Specifically, the question is asked thousands of times each day across America: "Should I learn Excel?"

Since I began my career about the same time that Microsoft Office became a standard workplace tool, I have never had to ask myself this question. I have, to put it simply, always known Excel. Do I know how to do intricate calculations? No, but I can create a spreadsheet and make all the numbers add up, and that's about 80 percent of what you need it for.

In fact, I have to admit to some bratty kid thoughts here, as I have often wondered why some people seem to have a problem learning new software. Never mind that I learned Excel, Outlook, email, drawing and publishing programs, and how to use the Internet almost by osmosis, just by being a certain age at a certain time. I never had a formal software class until I had to learn the web design program Dreamweaver, and I went into that already knowing a simpler version.

Kinder people than me have told me that it is not uncommon to fear new experiences, and having to figure out how ones and zeroes make rows and columns is, for many, a scary thing. Not everyone came of working age at the exact time that Microsoft was taking over offices across the world. I try to put myself in their shoes, but admittedly, it did not work.

But God sometimes decides to poke your shoulder and then look the other way, suppressing a giggle. For fun and some extra cash, I am working this holiday season behind the fine jewelry counter at Macy's, and I have been experiencing a new feeling: inadequacy.

I can work the cash register. I know to look for the 24k gold stamp. I know freshwater pearls are the lumpy ones. But that was about the extent of my knowledge when I started a few weeks ago. Now I have to learn about grades of diamonds, how to log purchases to please the auditors, and how to sign people up for credit cards. I have to know how black diamonds get that way, where the necklace boxes are and which keys go to which cabinet. I might even have to learn how to send a ring out for sizing and how to take links out of thousand-dollar watches.

And a few days ago, I realized I felt really stupid.

It's not my co-workers or my manager -- they're great, and encourage questions. No, it's me, coming up to a chasm in my knowledge and trying to decided how to bridge it (that's another thing to know: what is "bridge" jewelry?). So yes, now I know how people who do not know Excel feel when they sit down at the computer the first time and click on the icon with the spreadsheet.

But I also know this: after a certain age, you know more than you think you do. It may not be knowledge you access everyday, but it is there. Excel newbies realize that the same basic skills they use to email their friends apply to other programs, and then perhaps get a bit excited when they see the software do a bunch of tedious adding for them.

As for me, I love jewelry, so all of this learning will be done in the presence of pearl rings, gold bangles, and diamond solitaires. One day last week, I watched a limp pearl necklace and a tired-looking woman transform each other. Her face lit up, and the necklace seemed to glow as well. Sometimes learning new things leads to surprises, but you don't know until you try.

*This post is dedicated to Annie J., who teaches people to use computers and will be eligible for sainthood in about fifty years.

Raise a Glass for Everyone

2010-11-18T10:39:00.001-08:00

Many know that I have issues with the holidays. I do not consider myself a Christian, and I battle anxiety, so from Thanksgiving forward the weighty press of prompts to be cheerful and giving and set all activities around a holiday celebrating the birth of one religion's main protagonist is really hard for me.

However, I will reveal a little secret that you can use if you absolutely need to get me in the holiday spirit immediately. Play Band-Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" When those deep bells start to chime against that effects-heavy drum, I stop and smile widely, my head tilting upwards (waiting, no doubt, for a kiss from Simon Le Bon). In two lines, Boy George reminds us that he could have been remembered as a great soul singer and not a picker-upper of roadside trash (the same goes for George Michael). Bananarama's uber-slouchy sweatshirts stand against the short skirts and booby tops that the record company would have made them sport today. And my favorite part is when Bono practically elbows his way in between Sting and Simon Le Bon to sing his line.

As you may know, the whole project was an attempt to raise money for starving children in Ethiopia, and despite the problems associated with this project, I count it as truly the beginning of the idea that service to others was an integral part of people's lives. I can testify that before 1984, the idea of community service was never something expected from the general public.

But now that I am aware of how much Christianity dominates the latter quarter of each year, there are a few things about the song that bother me. It's not really the geographic ignorance expressed in some of the lyrics ("No rain or rivers flow?" Really? What do you call the Nile?). It's the suggestion that the poor Ethiopians are so damaged that they can't celebrate Christmas as we do.

Statistically, 60 percent of the country is Christian, but about 30 percent is Muslim, and the rest practice traditional religions. And of the 60 percent who are Christians, 40 percent are Orthodox, which means they celebrate Christmas in January, when Western Christians have already gone back to work and exchanged their gifts. So I am bothered that a song that has meant so much to me is actually quite insensitive to the actual religious practice of the country it claims to be helping.

One could argue that the important sentiment is not when in the calendar year the holidays of the needy fall, but that others decide to use the occasion of their religious holiday to help the less fortunate. Oh, but you have walked into one of my carefully laid logical traps if you do! One of the most insidious holiday stress-inducers is the feeling of guilt we get as we shop and sparkle and Champagne and sweet ourselves into a stupor. To atone, we decide, around December 18, to volunteer somewhere. So we call around to women's shelters begging for a family to "adopt."

I say, save the giving for May or August, when the needy have been forgotten about for the year. Or, give all year-round. Show up a few times each month at the homeless shelter, have Habitat for Humanity debit $20 per month out of your account, or make it a practice to only buy free-trade coffee. Heck, get really wild and support universal health care for all. Perhaps the idea that anyone is hungry at any time of the year will soon become as unacceptable as the desire to just jet away to Tahiti for the last two weeks of December.

Do We Know It's Not Christmas?

2010-11-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

Pizza, Nails, Tattoo...Repeat

2010-10-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

As one might expect after forty years, I have a love-hate relationship with my hometown of Downers Grove, Illinois. I love the location. I hate that it's boring.

The location is an indisputable asset. We have three stations on a major urban commuter train line and are bordered by three expressways. In 30 minutes (assuming no traffic) you can be in downtown Chicago or in the middle of a cornfield. Downers Grove has other positives. There are a lot of lovely trees. The library is stellar (disclosure: I used to work there). And our residents are the type of well-educated, genuinely nice people that are the Midwest's best export.

Now for the hard stuff. Despite all of the above, we have a hard time attracting interesting businesses and cultural amenities. Considering that we are the home of teachers, scientists, financiers, IT professionals and other propellers of the economy, we don't have a nonprofit community arts center. Considering that we are more than 150 years old with stories to tell about the development of the Chicago area, our museum is small and staffed mostly by volunteers. And our dull businesses seem to replicate their dull selves in a disheartening way.

Take the pizza, nails, tattoo mercantile triumvirate that has infected Downers Grove. If you wanted to have a 16-inch cheese, get a French manicure or carve a dragon on your bicep, there is no better place on earth than Downers Grove, Illinois. I am convinced that there is some alien spore that impregnates mini malls, causing a nail salon to bloom. These salons then asexually germinate pizza places. The two shops then mate, producing a tattoo parlor. Either that, or these businesses do not need a lot of square footage but do need high visibility locations, both of which are plentiful in my hometown. (And this is clearly a problem elsewhere).

Now, our village staff does a good job of making businesses keep themselves tasteful and tidy (the photo I chose above was NOT taken in Downers Grove). Nor do I fault business owners for choosing Downers Grove for their commercial endeavors. There must be a reason these three businesses seem to do well here, and I admire anyone who tries to make a buck providing services people seem to want.

Yet, I admit to having crushes on other suburbs that seem to have broken free of the pizza-nails-tattoo cycle. Suburbs where you can walk multiple blocks and encounter delightful little shops that all have their own personalities. Places with a strolling focal point, so that you don't have to just spend money to have a good time (but probably will buy something, even if it's just an ice cream). Towns that have engineered a way for pedestrians and transportation to coexist safely. I am not going to mention any names, because I don't want Downers Grove to feel bad.

The real facts of life are these: people need to eat, wear clothes, entertain themselves, buy gifts, and get their cars fixed. They need vacuums and earrings, dry cleaning and yoga, insurance and caramel java pumpkin skim lattes. A good place to live may not always be pretty, or crime-free, or layered with ample parking. But it should be clean, safe, and pleasant. My hometown is mostly that, most of the time. But we could always use a touch-up, a fill-in, or a whole new set.

Let Us Now Praise Other Great Men (and Women)

2010-10-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

I suppose it would be kind of annoying -- you are a major urban symphony orchestra and your loudly trumpeted and glitteringly celebrated new maestro gets "severe gastric distress." He drops out of a bunch of performances, you have to rearrange your season, and your staff has to find out the extent (and perhaps, yikes, nature) of said "severe gastric distress" because a lot of people are asking a lot of questions. The whole thing would make a seasoned musician long for his or her old day job.

This is what is happening in Chicago right now, as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra faces a medical crisis featuring its brand-new conductor, Riccardo Muti. This cannot possibly be an unusual situation in the art world, even the classical music world. Beethoven is thought to have died of some combination of cirrhosis, syphilis, hepatitis or lead poisoning -- surely one of those ailments resulted in a day in bed here and there. And Leonard Bernstein made his conducting debut -- without any rehearsal -- after the New York Philharmonic conductor came down with the flu.

The issue is that today, major cultural institutions depend on their star talents to sell subscriptions, get international press coverage and prestige, and, oh yes, make great art. I am currently reading a biography of the great Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, the man who brought us the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Diaghilev would last about five minutes in a contemporary arts administration position -- he was constantly in debt, hopelessly impolitic, and cast his young lover, Nijinsky, in many starring roles. Of course, Diaghilev was also extremely successful. But we only know that in hindsight. If you had invested in one of his productions and he was giving you the Russian run-around about its progress, the view from 2010 would be of no comfort.

Diaghilev did one thing that current arts producers can take advantage of now: he was always on the lookout for new talent. The situation with Riccardo Muti seems to me a reinforcement of this lesson. Art that will survive in the future is always re-cultivating itself. This is not only a hedge against the inevitable (everyone dies) or the highly likely (everyone gets sick) but a way for perfectly healthy artists to remain innovators.

I am told by the Chicago musicians I am lucky to know that Muti conducts certain types of music, and that to continue on with a certain season's program without him is just not done. That is fair, but there are other conductors and other pieces of music out there. There is a Leonard Bernstein waiting in the wings somewhere. Arts producers have the responsibility to keep the art alive no matter the health of their players.

Have a Birthday

2010-08-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

While our fair society wrings its hands over the "Ground Zero Mosque," (no link -- it's not even worth it) I am preparing to celebrate my 40th birthday. Hold your applause: it wasn't too difficult to reach this milestone. I just woke up everyday and kept breathing. Because I am surrounded by kind people who love me, everyone wants to know what I am doing to celebrate.

I have this dilemma every year, not just this year. Let me say right here that I am not at all melancholy about turning 40. I am actually quite happy about it, as I am finally at an age where I can pretty much do what I want, having proven that I can't mess things up too much without backing up and starting again. No, my annual birthday quandary has more to do with weather than time.

By late August, it is almost guaranteed that we have witnessed one or more damaging phenomena of summer. Hot weather kills, in many ways. Gun violence increases, old Polish ladies die in their homes, and sharks and other water nasties have claimed victims. And then, there might be a hurricane.

My touchstone hurricane until 2005 was Andrew in 1992. Sweeping across south Florida, Andrew came after a summer of riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict. Andrew has, of course, been replaced on my perch of bad weather memories by Katrina.

If you want to read about Katrina, I would recommend either Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" or Josh Neufeld's "AD New Orleans: After the Deluge." Neufeld's book is a graphic novel, Eggers' is not, although the cover makes it seem like it is.

Perhaps I am burying the lede here, but I think Katrina was a worse disaster for us Americans than September 11. Both could be seen as attacks from outside, but I believe that Katrina's horrible impact and legacy was ultimately our fault and exposed how divided and ignorant we can be.

The truly terrible part of the Katrina story began the day after my birthday, when the storm made landfall in Louisiana on August 29. But when you are watching people die on television, actual dates are irrelevant. My birthday always tastes like a stale season at best, and yet another example of how far we have to go to make a truly sane and just society, at worst.

It's hard to celebrate something so easy as a birthday when you have spent the last few months watching tragedies and knowing that many people won't see their next year. I think Katrina was especially powerful for me because it forced to me to ask myself what I am doing to help create a world where people don't have to die because of ignorance, neglect, or fear. I understand that death is inevitable, even death by natural disaster. But man-made disasters are hard to take in a world where clearly the will and the brains exist to create wonderful things. By August, I have had my fill of watching the human race fail to live up to its potential.

So perhaps you can see that by the end of August, I am pretty much ready for fall. Bring on the cooler nights, back to school, Oktoberfests, long sleeves, and casseroles. And when it comes to birthstones, I'll go with September's sapphire, thank you very much.

Thanks to CakeWrecks.com for the lovely image.

Pissing on Summer Lawns

2010-07-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

I am embarking upon a major change in my life, and I can do so because of one large thing that I lack: a lawn. In the next few months I will be pursuing my dream of becoming a published novelist, and while there are many other aspects to the logistics of the situation (we are childless, nearly debt-free and live in an 800-square-foot space), to me, a lawn would be a true burden on my precious time.

Growing up, I wanted to be a novelist, but I also wanted a lawn. This is probably because I grew up in a happy home with a front, middle, and back yard. The middle yard was the most wasteful, and therefore the place where I played. When I was little, we played whiffle ball or badminton in the grassy area between my father's vegetable garden and row of apple trees. When I was a teenager, I would take my towel and lay on the lawn for hours, reading or watching the clouds pass or the contrails turn from sleek to smeary. It was a great place to let your mind expand, and to look for four-leafed clovers or tiny violets.

Now, I never had any part in maintaining this lawn I loved so much. I was afraid of the lawnmower, and my parents were afraid I would break the motor chain or spill gasoline or hack off my foot, or spill the grass clippings on their way into the trash bag. So the feeling was mutual across the generations – I was relieved of lawn care duties.

My parents were not, and as soon as I was in college, they sold the house (to make a long story short) and went condo. Like parents, like daughter: after college, I bought a condo as well, just not in their building. They have since moved on and have a lawn once again, but they do not maintain it. That's what association fees are for.

I pay association fees too, as we live three stories above our common lawn that looks lovely from my balcony. I would prefer a little less faux-astroturf and more native prairie plants, but I really don't have the time to go to the maintenance committee meetings.

Many things look lovely from my balcony: my container gardens, the pool, the clouds rolling in. And, more metaphorically, the choices I have made. When I was younger (and by that I mean “until I was 30”) I had a list of things I would like: a house with a deck, patio, garden, and bar in the basement, a boat, a second home, towering ambitions. Today, because I live in a town that offers its residents nice amenities, I have a garden in a community plot. It turns out that, of that list, all I really wanted was the garden. And thanks to our park district, I get all of the tomatoes, and none of the lawn.

I can write you a paper about how I believe the lawn is a symbol of what is wrong with America, especially since many of us pay for public parks that are, essentially, lawns. It's the “public” part that we still wrestle with. And I suppose if I had children (kids would have eventually been on the list I started for you above, but no where near the top...) I would have to have a lawn. We are led to believe that kids need lawns as much as they need milk and books. I do not buy this, but I also would not have the energy to be the only mom in the Kindergarten PTA to be making this argument. Hence, the babies have always been very far down on my wishlist.

But on the top of that list is being a writer. This is something I have known for a long time – right after I learned to read, I learned to put words together. For the next forty years, I kept doing those two things over and over, and one day, I had a novel. Now, it's time for me to finish and sell that novel. I can concentrate on these tasks because I don't have to mow or worry about soffits or fascia or tuckpointing or sealcoating the driveway or re-sodding that part of the lawn that never grows right. No, those are things for our maintenance guys to worry about, while I dance and sing my way into an agent's heart. And remember to pay my association fee.

Boys, Take it Outside

2010-06-15T19:31:00.000-07:00

I try to get some work done on my three-quarters complete novel, and this happens. A gigantor Jesus statue, posing as either a football ref or someone who just started his lawnmower on one try, was struck by lightning last night and burned to the ground. In Ohio. Oh yes, you cannot make this shit up.

Although, as I thought about this unholy spectacle, I realized that there is a clash of the titans of sorts going on in my neighborhood. We have your typical array of affluent suburban churches, but we are also presided over by Thor, the God of Lightning. Our town's parks are equipped with ThorGuard, a lightning detection system that sets off an alarm any time Thor sticks his magic finger in the air and senses the presence of swirling electrons that might move together just right to form a lightning strike. Or not. But since we prefer our kids unharmed by contact with airborn fire, we let Thor tell us when it might be a nice idea to step away from the baseball mound. Or put the driver down.

Now, some of my neighbors complain that Thor has an itchy finger and he sets off his alarms way too much. But that is the point of the system -- it is the lightning you can't see coming that is the most dangerous. This is Chicago, and we respect both weather and fire, so you can see that ol' Thor has a captive audience in this locality.

But last night in Ohio, Thor took on Jesus and won. I have to plead to assorted God and gods: why? What we need is a nice thumbs up from the powers above, a pat on the back, a popsicle and a sticker. We do not need the guys on the spiritual executive floor to be duking it out like a Republican and a Tea Party candidate. We know we get on the nerves of the gods with our earth-trashing, child-exploiting, selfish ways. We really need leadership here, not drunken beer brawls. Do you really need to bring your bar fight down here, in front of the kids? What kind of example are you setting, anyway?

Deconstruct This (But Only If You Want To...)

2010-06-04T12:24:00.001-07:00

Ah, this takes me back: a debate about what college students should be reading. I was in college during the waning years of the Great Deconstructionist Debates. I knew our fifty minutes was almost up each session when the question of "What is text?" would arise.

The literary hotseat for me was a class called Survey of the Novel, and it came after Survey of Poetry and Survey of Nonfiction. We read a novel called, I think, "Oh," by someone who had an "M" in her name. My equivocation comes from the fact that I can't remember anything else about it, except that it was slim and brown. I am clearly not the only one, because Google can't produce any memory jogs. But the story was appropriately, for 1991, deconstructed (messy, for you non-English majors). It also had the other hallmarks of postmodern fiction: written by a little-represented minority, involving working-class characters, not involving a plot. It did not change my life, but nor did it hurt me none.

Now the trend is to have incoming college Freshmen read the same book and discuss it during their first weeks on campus. This practice builds community, sparks debates, and offers introductions to other points of view. But, say some, the list of books that are routinely assigned are left-leaning and not always written at a college-age reading level.

One book students encounter a lot is Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. God bless Mr. Mortenson for his efforts to build schools in the Middle East, but I found the book to be a terrible read, suitable for a gifted fifth grader, or at best a slow high schooler. It should come nowhere near a college classroom, and if I was paying $50,000 per year for my kid to read it, I would seriously rethink sending them to cosmetology school. What a great opportunity to throw something at them that will not only make them think about their world, but will show them how words can be used by talented practitioners to -- literally -- create something out of nothing. My suggestions: The March by E.L. Doctorow, To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, or even Candide.

But is the point of Freshman reading assignments to expose students to great literature? No. Should it be? Probably not. Freshman orientation is a highly fraught exercise, as it serves not only to acclimate students from wildly different backgrounds to a new environment, but also for staff and faculty to gauge the abilities and interests of the incoming class. It is not the time to talk about why the author chose to use the third person omniscient. However, it would be wonderful if two kids, one from a farm, one from the city, turned to each other during a discussion and agreed on something: "This book sucks."

Walk On

2010-03-24T18:16:00.001-07:00

I was flipping through channels tonight when I caught part of an episode of Burt Wolf's Travels and Traditions on pilgrimages. He was watching the giant censer swing and emit incense over the nave of the cathedral of Santiago, Spain and I was thinking about how the idea of a "pilgrim" is very different here in America, and if I had ever made any pilgrimages myself.

Pilgrims are such a specific visual for us American kids -- brown clothes, tall black hats, buckled shoes. Growing up, they were rather politically neutral, but in recent decades, we have questioned the stories we were told, and we have considered their voyage from the perspective of those who met them on the New World shores. We have also rethought how others came to our land, especially those who arrived in chains after the evil tribulations of the Middle Passage.

In Europe, it seems the concept of pilgrimages carries one distinct but important difference: those making the journey are supposed to return home. A pilgrimage is akin to what many of us here consider a "retreat," or a short-term concentration on one's religious experience. The concept also connotes some hardships. You walk, you rely on others for food or lodging, you don't bathe (in fact, Burt told us that the large quantity of incense in the Santiago cathedral was needed to mask the stench of stinky travelers. I think it could be as helpful after cooking salmon).

As a spoiled and areligious suburban brat, I have never made anything resembling a pilgrimage. Once, during a trip to Minneapolis, I made my mom drive around an office park to find the headquarters of Best Brains, the production company that created Mystery Science Theater 3000. I accompanied my husband to Quebec, as he has les racines de Quebequois.

But I also made sure, during my short visit to Barcelona, that I visited La Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudi's unfinished fever-dream of a church. I wanted to see this place in person, to see if the stone facade really looked like it was melting up close (not really) and if there was any detail in the carvings (oh yes).

Since there was no hardship involved, and since I did not go specifically to Barcelona to see the Sagrada, is is perhaps not a pilgrimage in the real sense. But it gave me a small idea of what it would be like to travel someplace far from home to experience a bit of religious mysticism in a place devoted to just such a thing. It is now on my to-do list.

Demographically Challenged

2010-01-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

I applied for a writing residency today and had to begin my own game of demographic truth-or-dare. Should I tell the truth about myself or dare I try to shoehorn my life into a more advantageous storyline? The truth is that I am a white, affluent suburbanite – not exactly the background that gets editors and critics excited in these days of abounding globalism. The marketable tale these days is of the immigrant trying to make sense of his/her place in the world, given that he/she presumably has one foot in one culture, one in another. This is, to me, a much better storyline than the previous best seller, the often only semi-true memoir of (pick one, two, or three and stir): incest, childhood neglect, alcoholism, drug abuse, cult membership, evil corporate doings, etc.

Let me say here that the last paragraph was supposed to sound as horridly cynical as it did. I was speaking from the perspective of marketing one's art, which is, in the end, simply marketing. You have to be aware of what sells, and the stranger in a strange land tale has been doing well lately. From the perspective of a global citizen, I am supremely thrilled that so many formerly marginalized voices are getting paid to speak, even if sometimes those voices have to be channeled into a salable product.

As I was preparing my application for the writing fellowship, I had to check off those damned demographic boxes. Because, I assume, it was aimed at artists, the income options topped out at “$80,000 +” annually, the box I had to select. And then there was the dreaded “White/Caucasian” box. I am so white I burn after a few minutes in the sun. I did, however, check the hell out of “Female.”

A riskier constitution than mine might try to play up my Eastern European roots. I am Polish, and, well, talk about marginalized. My ancestral country ceased to exist for hundreds of years, and was one of the first offered to Hitler on the altar of Peace in Our Time. Poland was also one of the largest solidly European countries to be swallowed by the Soviet system. And then, in the miraculous nineties, Poles elected their hero president. And then swatted at him until he was a mere stub of a leader. Anyway, you can see the rich history I can choose to tap into, if I wanted to.

But I was born in Chicago and have lived 99 percent of my life on a tree-lined street in a safe, boring place. I have always had enough food, money, and clothes and have had continuous access to education, housing, and democracy. I would be five minutes into my first big interview on public radio and my sham would be exposed.

Rather than try to paint myself as some sort of outsider when I am not, I should perhaps decide what about my perspective as a storyteller is valuable. Maybe my writing can be seen as a window into the American psyche as the country falls from its century-long position as a superpower. Or, I am a woman trying mightily not to let that affect anything she does, which, if you get all existentialist about it, affects everything I do. Or, I can play up suburban guilt in a world where millions have at best a marginal existence. All of these would work as selling points of my writing, and they all have a great advantage – they are true.

Little Red Ribbons

2009-12-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

When I worked for a local newspaper, I interviewed a science teacher at a local high school who had won an award. She talked about how her subject had changed over the years, and what kinds of information she was passing on to her young students.

"They can't remember a time when AIDS was a killer disease," she said, talking about the pharma cocktail that is now administered to those who are HIV-positive.

For me, the feeling is almost completely reversed. It is amazing to me that a combination of antiretroviral drugs can now allow those who test positive to live almost normal lives. A recent story in New York Magazine pointed out that those living with HIV may be experiencing a kind of rapid aging process. Sad, but yet, in the late 1980s, none of the people profiled in the article were expected to survive at all.

Today is World AIDS Day, but if you were a teenager during the Reagan years, every day was AIDS awareness day. AIDS was like troubled kid in the back of your classroom that you had to get used to, and who was also an object lesson. Sleep around, stick needles in your arms, and you'll die.

Looking back now, the perspective is different. Reading about gay men (among others) who did not survive the end of the century is like reading about Jews who did not survive World War II. Just like knowing that the Allies are coming to liberate the camps, you know researchers are feverishly working to develop AZT, and so the deaths are particularly heartbreaking.

What is heartening is how our compassion grew with our awareness. Andy Warhol starts writing in his diary about people he knows having "the gay cancer" in the early 1980s. Soon, kids were learning about how HIV was and was not transmitted. I believe that because we 80s teens, for our own survival, had to be introduced to homosexuality in a way that allowed for empathy, we are helping to turn the tide against the last of the civil wrongs of our society and toward kindness. AIDS helped me realize that the world is made up of all kinds of people, that no one deserves to suffer, and that hatred is a waste of precious time.

Dumplings Will Save Us All

2009-11-22T16:52:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, my husband and I experienced the exhibit Bauhaus: 1919 to 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. I have been thinking about it almost constantly, although if you know me I have probably said little about it. That's because the exhibit has been rolling around the cogs of my head like Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times."

Bauhaus was a style, a movement, a school. It was a workshop, an ideology, and a proto-Ikea. If you have a piece of furniture with little or no embellishment, that's Bauhaus. If you want to create a Utopian subdivision, that's Bauhaus, too. Chicago architectural titan Mies van der Rohe was the last director of the Bauhaus. He had to shut the school down before it was forcibly closed by the Nazis. So if you feel that your ideas about improving the world are getting trampled by people who think things were better in the olden days, that's Bauhaus, too.

I have always been fascinated with the period of time between the world wars. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a flapper and loved to watch silent films. I have no idea why these things interested me at such an early age, but they did. Then, I developed breasts, which ended my career as a boyish gin-swiller. And also, for much of my adolescence and early adulthood, silent movies were just that -- left alone, by themselves in vaults.

Now, so much more is accessible to the everyday scholar. Accessibility is always a good thing, for it reminds us of and constantly proves our similarities. Wanting the world to recognize that we are all in this together, and wanting to come up with a system for living that allows us to do our best -- that's also Bauhaus.

But this scares some people, who think systems are just fronts for control by a totalitarian force (and yes, many Bauhaus-ites were Communists, which did not make them popular with Nationalist Socialists).Perhaps I was just born with a bent for this stuff, but when I look at the idealism of a lamp constructed to be not just affordable but attractive, or when I see Helvetica, a typeface designed to be clean and readable, I think of dumplings.

Every culture features some form of filled dough in its cuisine. It's as if God sent pierogi and samosa and empenadas to remind us that we are all made of the same stuff. Bauhaus may not be everyone's taste, but the sentiments are, to me, unassailable. Let's design and create in a way that lets us live together. You like meat in your dumplings, I like cabbage, but we can agree that we like what they're wrapped in.

Bauhaus did have its faults. You can blame the school's thinkers for some very brutally minimal modern architecture, including housing projects. Lesson: don't impose a design from the top to the people on the bottom. Also, not everyone wants metal legs on their chairs.

There will always be movements that try to find the best way forward, and there will always be those who try to kill those movements. The seekers and the scaredy-cats, the creators and the critics, though, are all made of the same flesh, with the same needs and underlying desires. And everyone loves dumplings.

Walled Off

2009-11-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

By the time I was old enough to learn about the Berlin Wall, its days were numbered. Of course, that was not known in the early 1980s, when the average person believed the Cold War could continue indefinitely.

Then again, if I think about the questions I was asking about the Wall, perhaps the end was in plain sight. I did not understand the logistics of the Wall and wondered why people just did not go around it. I also did not get why the residents of the city and of the two German countries would stand for this ugly concrete separation covered in graffiti. Even as a teenager, I was already used to government-by-squeaky-wheel, where a few cranky phone calls to city hall can get a stop sign put up or an unkempt yard mowed down.

What I did not yet realize was how attractive inertia is to both sloppy democracies and right-angled totalitarian regimes. It's easy to fall into a pattern, even if it's a bloody and oppressive one. I can imagine that for the East Germans, knowing that your movements are being tracked and that you can't go anywhere to escape this eventually becomes more comforting that the unknown on the other side of the Wall. Just like today, here in America, a health care system that is literally killing both individual people and our fabled ingenuity is regarded as better than a potentially difficult transition to something better.

Until, that is, it isn't. One day, the known evils become more oppressive than potential but unknown freedoms. One November, a critical mass, helped along by confusion at high government levels, pushed over the Berlin Wall. Was it that enough young people had come of age to strike out forward, no matter the risks? Or was it that those who had been working for freedom saw enough pores in the concrete to finally put their long-brewing plans in place? These things are interesting to contemplate, but in the end not as important as the desire to keep moving on, to buck inertia and the way things have always been and dare to think that things must improve.

Letter from Washington

2009-09-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

At the request of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, President Obama last month delivered a letter to Pope Benedict XVI. The letter was read at Kennedy's funeral:

"Most Holy Father...I am writing with deep humility to ask that you pray for me as my own health declines. I was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, and although I continue treatment, the disease is taking its toll on me. I am 77 years old and preparing for the next passage of life.

I have been blessed to be part of a wonderful family. And both of my parents, particularly my mother, kept our Catholic faith at the center of our lives. That gift of faith has sustained and nurtured and provided solace to me in the darkest hours. I know that I have been an imperfect human being, but with the help of my faith, I have tried to right my path.

I want you to know, Your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office, I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States senator...

I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings of my faith. I continue to pray for God's blessings on you and on our church and would be most thankful for your prayers for me."

What strikes me about Kennedy's words is that he speaks from the humbling position of one who is seeking atonement, who is facing his final days still unsure of how his legacy will be seen in comparison to God's plan for his life. I would never dare try to imagine how Kennedy's presentation of his life was received by God, but I can say that it gives me back here on earth something to hold on to, a ruler or a scale against which I can measure my beliefs. To me, I will refer to this quote from the letter: "I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war."

Thank you, Senator, for these simple words that this citizen can use as a succinct list of political tenets as well as a statement of faith. You are by now, I am sure, engaged in many discussions with your Lord about your life and accomplishments. Please know that the ideas you championed still live in our hearts and minds, and their continued role in our national discussion will be shepherded by those you inspired.

Thanks to Cindy Kline for the inspiration for this post.

Not Another Mother

2009-08-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Once in awhile, I am enveloped by loneliness, a feeling that I am by myself on some tall cartoony crag watching the happy hordes below me going about their normal daily business. This has to do with my decision not to have children, and my biggest worry about it: that it will close off my conversations with the rest of the world.

Moms and non-moms continue to debate the effect of motherhood on women. This article proposes the following question of mothers who are writers: "Would you trade (your) baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth?"

I decided long ago that I would. Yes. No question. And that is why I am not mother material.

But my confidence in this decision has not closed the issue for me. If I do write a novel that enjoys one-fifth of the success of any of Edith Wharton's books, I will die happy. But I will also live perpetually in the corner of the party, asking a few questions here and there about people's kids but never fully participating in the feeling of having them. I am not worried about regretting this decision, but I am worried about standing apart, forever.

So, perhaps I will move over to the men's side of the party, and hope they are not talking about football.

Marriage and Diplomacy

2009-08-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

I can't yet figure out how I feel about Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea to secure the release of two journalists. Obviously, I am glad the women are home and out of the clutches of the little dictator who rules that place. But how does Bill Clinton's mission affect the daily work of his wife, Hillary, the Secretary of State, who's job includes the diplomatic eggshell-walking that Bill just did?

Is is a portrait of a completely contemporary partnership, a man and a woman who are married, know each other completely, and presumably spend their time together discussing worldly issues in-depth? And then why not use this power couple to get things done, even if it goes outside the boundaries of traditional job descriptions?

Or, is Hillary once again a woman being shouldered aside by her husband? As a woman who has to go to work everyday by herself (even though some days I could really use my husband by my side), part of me is asking, "Can't she do this job on her own? Does she have to call the Big Dog in for the hard stuff?"

Then again, maybe it is like when a woman sends her husband with her car to the mechanic's. She knows what's wrong with the car, she can explain it, but she also knows that the garage is one of the last true bastions of male dominance in the world and that no matter how smart she acts (or perhaps because of it) she will be talked down to and charged an ovary tax for the repairs. Sometimes, yes, it is just best to send in the Big Dog. It's called realpolitik, and it's a game we play everyday, us girls and boys.

Who You Are and What You Do With It

2009-07-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

Here is why large family gatherings can be brutal: you meet a long-lost relative, a great aunt or your mother's cousin or something. She's dressed in a yellow dress with great big blue cabbage roses and wears a big rhinestone broach near her shoulder, and she tells you all about her days working for Western Electric and her trips to China and how she once met Mike Royko in a bar. And you think, "How did I go this far in life without knowing this person? She's great!" And she keeps talking to you through dinner and slowly, you get a new suspicion. She'll say something that kind of nags at you, and then she'll say something else that gives you a twinge. And then once more, she drops a phrase or an opinion into the conversation and it hits you: she's a racist. Or an anti-Semite or a homophobe or has some other nearly vestigal prejudice that makes you glad you don't ever have to see her again.

This is how I feel about my Aunt Irene Nemirovsky. She is only a relative in the sense that we are all part of the family of man. And, let's put this out right now: she died at Auschwitz, so any further criticism must be tempered by that fact. But I have just finished reading her highly-lauded Suite Francaise. When I first closed the back cover, I was stunned by this fragmentary novel of occupied France in 1941-2. Along with the book, my copy included letters written by her family and friends after her arrest in 1942, and these provided a nearly 360-degree perspective on the novel and the circumstances of its birth.

It's a complex picture. The characters in the novel are everything from true patriots to self-centered collaborators. The most compelling and sympathetic character is a young wife of a French prisoner who finds herself attracted to one of the German soldiers occupying her town (and her house). It's as if Nemirovsky is sending text messages from the center of the war to the future. Its about as real as mud on the boots of a soldier.

And Nemirovsky's story comes with its own dirty reality. Her family immigrated to France from Kiev after the Russian Revolution, knocked from their affluence and connections by the Bolsheviks. She never took French nationality, and converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s, after it was obvious that her Jewish ancestry was going to cause her problems in France. She never denied being Jewish, and she certainly had no reason to be sympathetic to Russians or Communists.

Still, her husband's letters to the German authorities after her arrest tried to argue that Nemirovsky had no love for the Jewish people, and in fact used many of her other writings to support this. Nemirovsky herself associated with right-wing newspapers and thinkers during her life.

The tangled nature of her stories, real and created, are both confusing and heartbreaking, but absolutely necessary. Poking through all of this, I can begin to see threads of thinking: how people can deny their ancestry in times and use it to their advantage during others. How a writer's works can be used to prove a wide range of points. But mostly, I am reminded, again, that prejudice of any kind, is, in the end, pointless. It's the rope that we pull that eventually tangles around our own feet.

Old Blogged Cross

2009-06-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

On a hill in Southern Illinois sits a massive cross. It is the kind of thing that even if you are standing in front of it you are not sure of what you are seeing. In fact, the 110-foot structure has been there 50 years. If you had visited it twenty-five years ago, it would have looked majestic, its white panels spreading out against the skies of the Shawnee National Forest.

Today, it is looking quite ragged. Many of the panels have been removed as part of an ongoing restoration project that has been hindered by lawsuits and bad feelings. I guess God's work on earth still needs too be carried out by flawed humans.

But the infighting that is marring Bald Knob Cross has not negatively colored my perception of it, because what I remember from my visit there in the late 1970s is how my parents lead the visit. I know now that I was brought up with respect for all religious symbols, and this has been one of the most valuable lessons I have learned from my parents.

We are not religious people -- we are not churchgoers and we keep our spirituality to ourselves. I cannot locate the source of this feeling on either of my parents' sides of the family, although I hear my paternal grandfather was invited to leave the seminary in Poland because he was an independent thinker.

But the origin is less important than the everyday practice, especially in a world where religious expression is a major point of contention. Again, I am lucky because I grew up in a rather diverse area, populated by many who were born in Asia. I am very used to seeing saris, sikh headwear and Buddhist meditation centers, all of which may or may not be a religious expression for any particular person.

However, no matter why or how something with religious origins is expressed, I believe it is important to respect it. The only religious expression I will step in to protest is that which harms another human being.

I am ever grateful and amazed by how we Americans express our multitude of spiritual beliefs. In driving around Chicago, I can see a mosque with minarets, billboards asking Jesus for forgiveness, or young ladies in not-quite-fashionable long skirts and high-collared blouses. We may not have universal heath care or wonderful public transit, but the United States is really a kind of paradise for religious expression.

The Road to Righteousness

2009-04-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, "You can't be both Catholic and Pro-Abortion."* Perhaps I am just itching for spring and ornery, but I almost got out of my own car and shook a finger at the bumper: "Oh YEAH?!? I'll show you!"

Let's assume the sticker meant "practicing" Catholic, which I am not. Therefore, I am not a living rebuke to its assertion. But for a few hours I considered going back to church just to prove that I can be any kind of Catholic I want to be.

My Catholicism, dormant as it may be, is something I still hold in reserve, like buying stock and holding it, or like keeping empty margarine containers in your garage workshop. Someday, it will come in handy.

That day, however, should not be the day I get challenged by the back of a minivan. And, also, I suspect the sticker's premise is that the church and many of its members would not recognize my Catholicism if paired with pro-choice sentiments, no matter how many holy days of obligation I showed up for.

But if I went to church, I would not go for accolades or for new friends or for potluck dinners. I would not go to be a part of a community of like-minded believers. I would go to be in a space dedicated to allowing me to talk to God, and for the chance to hear some interpretation of His mysteries, which I could take or leave. And right now, I can do these things in other places. A forest, for example, or in my garden.

Clearly, the bumper sticker's owner and I have different spiritual needs, and perhaps we should continue to stay out of each other's ways.

*Ten years ago, I would have also started arguing that I am actually "pro-choice," not "pro-abortion." But those linguistic battles are tiring. And anyway, if a woman decides she needs an abortion, then I can say that I am pro-abortion.

Pre, Present, Post

2009-04-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

Finally, I might be in the right place at the right time. All of this Twittering and Facebooking makes me feel like I am in the East Village in 1978, or San Francisco in 1968, or Paris in 1920. Perhaps I am actually in the middle of something wholly new that we will look back on with some fondness in 30 years. Or maybe we'll think it was all just silly. That's the gamble you take with history.

When the Internet came to my desktop in 1993-ish, I remember the sense of exhilaration I felt that I could communicate with like-minded people from around the world. Kids, listen here: we posted to text-based message boards that developed threads that looked like a letter-snakes were eating your screen. There were no pictures. There was no video. We did not know it then, but the interactivity was pathetic. And if we were talking about a musician, television show, or actor, the talent themselves never jumped into the conversation themselves.

I lurked and joined in on message sites for Mystery Science Theater 3000 and communicated with all types of fans, but the closest we got to talking with the writers and performers was when their publicity person posted an answer to a question (I remember you, Juliewa!).

This morning, I checked my Facebook account, which is my virtual locker, street corner, or stammtisch (choose your own metaphor) and then browsed my Tweets. Along with keeping in touch with friends old and new, these social media outlets have offered me some surprising connections. On Facebook, I am "friends" with Frank Conniff, one of MST3K's supremely talented players, and I am both following and being followed on Twitter by Chicago radio legend Steve Dahl. I wonder how long this online erasing of the boundaries between the talent and their followers will remain.

I feel like I am living a version all those stories I hear of people buying Iggy Pop a drink in some dive bar in the late 70s or writing a letter to Flannery O'Connor and actually receiving a handwritten response. And the walls are still up for many celebrities, some of whom likely use ghost-Twitterers or otherwise see all their social media obligations as the PR person's job.

All these venues are free for us users, but for how long? This is all fun -- for now. I have to resist the tendancy to take these things for granted, and begin imagining how I will describe this strange time in 2030.

Burning Desires, Part 2

2009-03-04T08:59:00.001-08:00

So I found a new supply of matches. Target is too tony to sell something so banal, but I did find a three-pack of 250 matches in the kitchen implements aisle at Wal-Mart. And then we went to Wisconsin for the weekend, where I "borrowed" a few boxes from the bar where we ate lunch. The trick: follow the smokers.

Nothing Like a Dame

2009-02-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Dame Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon for almost three months now. At this point, it's not just a book: it's a relationship. The thing is 1,200 pages long, so it's not that I am a slow reader. And I am reading a little bit almost every day. And in those days upon days, I have not only come to learn more about the former Yugoslavia, the book's theme, but I feel as if I have invited the author to stay with me.

Rebecca West published this book in 1941, at a time when she probably thought she had seen too much of history already. My tackling of the book is part of my studies of the world between the wars, as I attempt to create what can loosely be described as a foreign policy philosophy. Specifically, I feel the need to answer the question: When should the U.S. intervene in another country's affairs?

West has long since taken me off that track with her descriptions of churches and mosques, valleys and cities, and lunches of various types of cheese, bread, and brandy. She can go on about a Serbian monk or a Macedonian king for pages and pages. But the book also has a heart and a soul, if not an author I would like to spend much time with.

One of those lamented, lost "public intellectuals," West was an author and liberal thinker, espousing socialist and feminist views. Devistatingly learned, prolific, and able to cross literary genres, she also had a son with H.G. Wells. What she was not, I suspect, was a fool-sufferer of any stripe.

I could simplify things and tell you that I find West to be a bit of a snob. But that is not true. I am not sure I would want to have a beer with her (or, more likely, a sherry). I am sure she would find me tiresome and my education lacking. I could combat that by just shutting up and letting her talk.

Career Driven

2009-01-25T09:10:00.001-08:00

Yes, it's true: women are held to different standards than men. But thank God, for perhaps things, then, can actually get done.

So, what do you know about Ukraine? A so-called Russian satellite, its last starring role in U.S. news was during its Orange Revolution a few years ago. You may recall that one of its politicians carries on his pockmarked face what is likely signs of poisoning.

But then there's the beautiful Ukrainian, Yulia Tymoshenko, the country's Prime Minister. You perhaps have seen her severe crown of braids and well-tailored clothing...and sighed at the idea that a woman in power needs to be so calculatingly womanly.

Then I saw her on television after a meeting that would make anyone's day stressful: negotiating gas pipeline issues with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You know those meetings at work that you dread, that you think about with not only your head but your stomach acids for days before? The ones where you wonder what feminist pioneers were thinking anyway, subjecting you to years of mindless corporate gruntwork? Now, when I have those days, I will think of Yulia in her awesome black dress.

Yes, it is about how you look. And it's not for them: it's for you. You need to be groomed in workplace manners, you need to be prepared ("In what respect, Charlie?"), but in the end, the one thing you have control over during the toughest moments of your career is what you wore. And that can give you confidence, and in turn success, and, if you want it, power.

As for the braids, Tymoshenko has joked that they are the steering wheel she uses to drive the state. Whatever works, ladies.

Sara, Rick, and Lidia Walk into my Living Room

2009-01-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

We gave very little thought to digital television. Our TV is too old to receive a digital signal, and we don't have cable or satellite. We don't watch a lot of broadcast television, so we briefly considered not even having a set after the Great February Analog Drop-Off. We thought about just getting a monitor for the living room and setting up a wireless network so we could stream movies in two rooms...but then our heads started to hurt. And I watch WGN Morning News every day, and need my daily dose of snark from Robin, Larry, Paul and friends.

So we bought a converter. I have not staked out a position on the whole digital conversion issue. I am somewhere in between these three ideas: "One does not have a inalienable right to television," "the airwaves are a public domain and should be regulated in the public's interest," and "geez, let's upgrade something in this crumbling country!"

I really had no idea what would change when we plugged in the converter. I suspected nothing, really, as I thought all we were doing was preparing for the disappearance of something. I did not know we would gain these quirky "point" stations: 7.1, 9.2, 11.3,20.4. Now we have a constant broadcast feed of a local weathermap, a few more public television stations and fun infomercials for quick cookers, exercise contraptions, and Jesus.

My favorites are WTTW's artsy little sister, Create, which broadcasts only travel, cooking and home shows, and MHz Worldview, or televison for people who really want to know what's going on in Copenhagen this weekend.

Create features cooking and travel shows familiar to public television geeks. I am only a semi-fan of Rick Steves, as he really scared me about crime in Rome, quite unneccesarily. And Lidia Bastianich dresses up way too much to be truly cooking with all that flour.

I have small girl crush on Sara La Fountain, who is, strangely, Finnish and such a hottie. She narrates her programs in an adorable accent and cooks meat on balconies and in parks.

I do not mean to imply that the world exists for my amusement only. Actually, when I am sitting in front of the television, I still want to be absorbing information I can use later while I am being entertained. I'd rather "travel" to Stockholm than watch an aged Phyllis Lindstrom dance. I'd rather watch someone cook something than watch someone try to lose weight. And with my new converter box, I have found a cheap source of new ways to waste time!

Matches: Made in Heaven?

2008-12-22T13:44:00.000-08:00

Just about the only bad side of Illinois' public smoking ban is the fact that we are running out of matches. For about thirty years now I have not had to purchase matches (unless you count the extra long ones I had to buy to light my Our Lady of Guadalupe candle). I've taken for granted the easy availablilty of free matchbooks. Now, we are down to our last few. Thank you Country House, not only for your great hamburgers, but for giving out matches in little boxes rather than the fold-over books (they last longer).

But as pop culture archivist James Lileks has long noted, this is not the first great tragedy to befall the great free social giveaway of small fire and art.

(And no, I do not lament the passing of smoking. Filty habit. Most disgustingly, it gives you wrinkles).

Public Stories, Private Beliefs

2008-12-17T06:11:00.000-08:00

On the bus this morning, a passenger was relating details of the Christmas story to another passenger (who, I am broadly assuming based on his looks, was not Christian). Passenger #1 mentioned the special census, the Epiphany, the fact that the magi were not kings but astrologers - elements of the story familiar to any older child who happened to grow up Christian. Then he told Passenger #2 all of what he believed were problems with the Christmas story, as a way of explaning why he was not a Christian and therefore December 24 and 25 were not holy days to him.

I still at this point in time do not consider myself a Christian, although not because I think there are fallacies in the Christmas story. I have no idea what is true and what is not. Nor do I have any need to find out or to "prove" my position with "the facts." I do have beliefs about things, however, and these beliefs are ultimately what guide my faith. I simply do not at this time believe in the divinity of Christ, and therefore cannot call myself a Christian. I do know that there are those who share my belief but do still say they are Christians, and this is just fine with me.

I have a few other beliefs. I believe the Christmas story, no matter your faith, is a great one, with elements of law, sociology, astrology, history and politics. Something for everyone. I also believe that public transit is excellent for eavesdropping on conversations. Yesterday, for example, Passenger #1 was telling Passenger #2 about his office's computer vendor issues.

Up to Our Necks

2008-11-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

What's with the vampires? Kids these days love the blood-suckers, but really, they're nothing new. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire was kind of about mortality, kind of about New Orleans, kind of about how good bad can look. Now, we're all about Twilight, which adds to the vampire canon but is also about the first blush of teen lust. Once again, the vampire looks good. The mummy and the werewolf, I think, need some hair product and a better PR person.

But there is also a spiritual aspect connected with vampires. Anne Rice is now a devout Catholic, and is writing about how her beliefs have evolved since writing Interview, describing how she eventually "lost faith in atheism." (Thanks to Mary Jane for this interview in The Liguorian). Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, is a Mormon.

Anything that gets us talking about the murky corners of faith is a good thing. Desire, immortality, immorality, and original and acquired sin are all topics for your vampire-related book discussion. It helps if it is a rainy day in a woodsy northern town or you are in a musty room in a humid, moss-drenched city. And if your vampire is hot.

Consider the Writer

2008-10-02T11:59:00.001-07:00

I wonder if writing his article about lobsters in any way contributed to David Foster Wallace's suicide? I don't mean to demean his tragic end with any uninformed speculation, but for someone who is depressed, small things can mean alot.

In his article "Consider the Lobster," Wallace wrote about how lobsters are boiled alive, and if they feel it, and if they scream in pain. When I was depressed, stuff like this could set me off on a few days of wretched rumination. Bad things happening to animals were especially tender areas (yeah, I don't like when bad things happen to kids, too, but depression also gets me started on topics like original sin, which doesn't help).

A few days of a mental stone like this rolling around in your mind's shoe wears you out. You're already tired when you're depressed, and therefore prone to illogical thinking. The reason you would consider the lobster in the first place is due to an extra sensitivity to stories and to the details that make a story and to the constraints that keep a good story from being a great one. Especially when it's yours -- your work, your life, your legacy.

I am so sorry DFW decided to end his life. But American literature is stronger because he was able to write what he was in the time he was here -- and with the illness he had. He need worry no longer about his stories, our suffering, and his legacy.

Lady Galician Soul?

2008-08-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

If you know more than a little about your family history, I'm jealous. Most of my history on both sides of the family has been forgotten, sometimes on purpose. I tell people I am Polish, and in Chicago, worldwide capitol of the Polish Diaspora, that suffices. But, as I increasingly apply my knowledge of history, even that can be questioned.

Both sides of my family came from an area on the European map that can now be described as southern Poland. However, because this country has been torn up over the centuries, my family records could be in Poland, Germany, Austria, Russia or Ukraine. And then when both grandparents arrived in America, they assimilated quickly, and expected their children to look only forward.

Being selfish, I am actually less concerned about the particulars of my family than knowing about where I am From. But history has played a geographic shell game with this information. It seems now that the best description I can apply to myself is Galician, a word used to describe an area of southern Poland while under Austrian rule. Of course, there is a Galician area of Spain, too, which has nothing to do with Poland but does muddy the waters even more.

I just finished A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka which really isn't, but then again kind of is. The novel presents the idea that you might not have heroes in your family, but if they are Eastern European and survived the twentieth century, that was enough. Which seems to sum up my family's attitude towards their own story.

As for my story, I am still making that up as I go.

What It Is

2008-07-29T10:43:00.001-07:00

I have a hard time with labels, especially for the arts.

Dubstep, true crime, expressionism, fringe, documentary, trance, prairie style, bluegrass, romance, chamber, dada, ballet, easy listening, gothic, nonfiction, acid jazz, essay, collage, drum-n-bass, international style, contemporary, orchestral, drama, arte povera, ragtime, folk, neo-classical, rococo, Black Mountain, dancehall...

Absurdism? Yes.

Since I work in a library, labeling is important. After all, how else would people find things? And now that all information is floating around out there in the Internet ether, much time is being spent on ways to better locate what you want.

But really, it's all random, and my idea of a Mediterranean cookbook is not yours. The person in charge of the label maker is the one with all the power. Librarians and search engines both want to make it easy for me to find what I am looking for. But when do I ever know that for sure?

Sometimes the only thing that makes any sense is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And even then, only the first paragraph.

This is all a long way of saying that I intend to pay more attention to the labels on my posts...although it won't be easy for me (see above).

(My first attempt at labeling below was rejected because I included all of the second paragraph and that apparently was too much. So HA on your labeling, you lemmings!)

Embarrassment of Riches

2008-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

We recently bought a rug from our rug seller in Istanbul. He came to our house and sold us a rug that cost us, oh, thousands of dollars. Now, I can't tell anyone about it because the price embarrasses me. Also, the fact that I have a rug seller in Istanbul.

But wait! I'm only a lowly cruise ship passenger who bought a rug in port and the guy kept my name and called me when he was on business in the Midwest! And I don't have kids just so I can spend money on whatever I want! And it is beautiful!! And we wanted a rug! And it was still cheaper than the worst rug at Bloomingdales!!

Mostly, I am grateful for my shame. It means I am very bad at conspicuous consumption. Recently, I heard two people talking about how all their rich neighbors are gone on the weekends beacause they are at their summer homes. I could hear the eye-rolling in their voices. My in-laws have a summer home...but now you certainly won't know when I am going there (and why should I go anywhere when I have such a NICE RUG at home?)

Lake Gonaway

2008-06-10T11:37:00.000-07:00

If it was 30 years ago, I would be in Wisconsin Dells right now. This perennial family playground is where we went the week after I finished school for the year. It was perfect for everyone -- my dad and my uncles fished, I got to play mini golf and buy t-shirts, and my mom and my aunts could cook us dinner (she says with a post-feminist roll of the eyes). It was also about three hours from the Chicago area, which was a just-perfect amount of time in the car.

This week, though, we hear of a great tragedy in the Dells. Lake Delton is gone.

No one goes to the Dells for geology anymore, but if not for the geology, there would be no Dells. The glacial eroding of sandstone cliffs is what brought people there, and, as the family unit took to cars for vacation in the mid-20th century, Lake Delton became the Dells' resort area. It is a man-made lake, a damming of the Wisconsin River.

The dam has held. But recent torrential, unyielding rains tore away at an isthmus of sand that separated the lake from the river, and the lake drained in a matter of hours.

For me, this is heartbreaking. The Dells was my childhood Utopia. No work (or school), the family together, ice cream everywhere, rides that tickled your stomach. The colors were bright, the scenery was great, and there were waterslides. We had just-caught fish for dinner and made bonfires outside the cabin.

Is this on the scale of Hurricane Katrina's takedown of a major American city? Probably not. But it is a huge blow to the Wisconsin economy. It is also an engineering disaster, and perhaps, yet again, a reminder. Nature wins, people.

I Want a Clean-Shaven Man

2008-06-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

Guys, I may not be in the market for another partner/spouse, but I am still alive and not immune to the charms of the male species (my apologies for the purely hetero bent to this post). Or, at least I was, until y'all started wearing beards, faded t-shirts and thrift store pants.

Now, it must be acknowledged at this point that this is the male ideal I grew up with:

and wow, it still works for me today. So when I see men who look like this:

my heart sinks. Other parts of me fare just as badly. Men, I do not expect you to mow the lawn in your suits as it seems your forefathers did in the 1940s. I know we like to show our individualism through our clothes. I know shaving is a pain. But women have to do so much just to stay minimally attractive. Please meet us halfway. And for God sakes, comb your hair.

The Thing Called Loss

2008-05-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

There is no reason for me to be thinking of River Phoenix today, except that I had a dream about him last night. Maybe the reason, convoluted as this may seem, is that the release date of the fourth Indiana Jones movie is approaching and something seems to be missing. I always figured River would inherit the Indy role, as his tryout for it in The Last Crusade was spectacular. But fate intervened.

I spoke to someone recently who is an author escort on the day she took Chris Farley's brother around to Chicago media outlets to promote his book on the comedian, and maybe this, too, prompted the dream. As far as I know, no one this close to River has written a similar book. I think that's just fine. Silence is in keeping with the singluarity of River's presence on this earth. I know he was human and complex. I'd rather only his family and close friends know the details.

Sometimes I marvel at just how talented some people are. I was listening the other day to a live Rolling Stones album from the mid-1970s and was amazed at a version of Tumbling Dice that included both Keith's guitar and Billy Preston's organ, and I once again thanked God that these men met and were paid to play music. Once in a while, a David Bowie song will just shake me up with its genius -- the lyrics, the chords, the musical and literary influences he has harnessed. And then I think of River's performances in Running on Empty or The Thing Called Love and mourn for a career cut short and thank God that we have what we do from him. Every person's death diminishes me, especially those who touched me in some way. Today I am feeling that space where this actor was.

So what was my dream? It involved some sort of action movie set on a cruise ship. I was mostly watching it, but as the movie ended, I jumped in to shake River's hand and kiss him on the cheek, because I knew he would be gone soon.

Je Me Souviens Iran

2008-04-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

Finally saw Persepolis, which is not at all about religion (then again, with "polis" in the title, it wouldn't be). Marjane Satrapi's film version of her graphic novel is in some ways the other side of my story. A little girl in the late 1970s/early 1980s reacts to the uphevals in Iran. Except Satrapi did not just hear about these events in fourth grade. She lived them in Teheran. So let's talk about her story first, then I will briefly mention mine.

Little Marji watched as her country went from a dictatorship to war with Iraq to rule by Islamic revolutionaries. Two things seemed never to change: people getting executed and her family's loyalty to their country (rather than their country's politics). The idea of leaving Iran did not seem to be an option for her parents, although in the end they urged Marjane to move to France. Marjane's family was free-thinking and even included men who went to prison for their beliefs. Remaining in their country was not only an act of defiance but also a statement that they were as Iranian as those who demanded that women wear the veil and that martyrs die for the cause.

Marjane's bawdy grandmother chastized her for turning someone in to the police. Marjane argues that she had no choice. You always have a choice, her grandmother tells her. Even under opressive political situations, an individual's actions matter.

The movie was interesting to me because in 1980, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran, my ten-year old self and my kiddie friends all were egged on to "hate" Iran and its leader. This was prompted, of course, by the hostage crisis, which was exhaustively (justifyably so) covered on American television. But Satrapi's work shows me what was going on in that despised country during this time. Little Marji, who was about my age, switches political beliefs hourly, and tries to get her friends to beat up on a kid with family connections to the Shah. I joined my classmates in making a pinata of the Ayatollah (we were involved in a study of Mexico). Unfortunately, it seems that the world is full of people whose political outlook has not progressed beyond that of a ten-year-old.

"Heroes"

2008-03-26T07:15:00.001-07:00

Two of my favorite men, together at last.

Thanks to marabou2005 (whoever you are..)

If It's A Clever Marketing Ploy, It Just Might Be Working

2008-03-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Yikes. I might have, well, feelings for the Catholic Church. They've just updated the list of deadly sins, and I'm on board with most of them. Accumulating unnecessary wealth, pollution, human rights violations -- who runs the church, a bunch of socialist liberals?? And who do they think they are, bringing their theology into the modern world?

The only one I have a slight question on is genetic manipulation. Does this rule out any gene fix we discover that could end cancer? Or is that perched precariously on the famous slippery slope? I guess that's for Catholics to discuss, hopefully with other faiths.

Also, globalization -- good or bad? Good, if you're making more money than ever in a call center in India. Bad if your job used to be in a call center in Rapid City. But who is more worthy of that chance to make a living?

I think the answer on globalization is: it's here and that's that. How we deal with its effects? Perhaps the Catholic Church is offering some answers.

The International Museum of Me

2008-03-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

I am the executive director of a museum with a world-class collection of art. The Art Institute of Chicago's website lets you build your own collection. So for those of you who lack an art degree (or the scads of money that would let you boss those who do have art degrees around), you can now show off your taste and sophistication online.

My collection is heavy on modernism with some contemporary thrown in. Right now, many of the works I have chosen are not on display (presumably because the AIC is in the process of updating their 20th century galleries).

This sure is a lot easier than hanging and insuring all this stuff myself!

Less Nice, More F*#&K You

2008-02-12T11:16:00.000-08:00

Only current and former journalists may know or care that ubercapitalist Sam Zell now owns the Chicago Tribune. He's been making news lately not only because of the creativity/rapaciousness of the deal by which he acquired the plodding paper beastie, but also because of his, uh, unconventional corporate behavior. Like murmuring obscenities at a pesky photographer who asked one too many questions at a staff meeting. Zell has been keeping journo-bloggers panting from the exhastion of chronicling his many zany antics.

Well, to this I say it's fucking about time that we in corporate America (especially newspapers, for Christ's sake,) stop being such shitheads and start letting people be people, not workerbots. Swear a bit, tell a nasty joke, have a hot girl/boy/he-she on your desktop. Let a fish curry sandwich fester on your desk for three days. Don't think out everything you say before you say it. Dare to offend someone in the process of telling the truth.

Or, just take your meds, like a good girl.

Most Peculiar, Mama

2008-02-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I am bored, I try to come up with a hierarchy of Religious Figures on Earth. This usually ends with David Bowie somewhere near the top, but not at the top (for many reasons, one of which is the fact that I don't think he'd approve). George Harrison ends up somewhere there, too, as more of a sacred poet than prophet. I see Mick Jagger as Gabriel (he's the fallen one, right?) and Robert Plant as some sort of Methuselah tree-type thing growing in the California desert.

And then I feel I have to include John Lennon, although I am not historically a fan. We just watched The US vs John Lennon, which was very thought-provoking. First of all, did the goverment feel they really had to work that hard to discredit this guy? After all, the conservative right has taught us that all you have to do to make us suspicious of anyone or anything is play on our prejudices and fears. It's a lot easier than having J. Edgar work overtime.

Also, I really have more respect for John Lennon, the man and the artist. He seems like a smart, sweet, if naive, guy who had an eye and ear for the Next. And he could talk so intelligently off the top of his head! But we seem to have developed a strange blind spot about his relationship with Yoko Ono.

Soon to be released is a book of photographs by May Pang, who is described in the blurb I read as "the woman (Lennon) lived with while he was taking time off from Yoko Ono in the 1970s."

Taking time off? From your spouse? Can we do that?

If you change the world, I guess you can.

I Mythed That Day in School

2008-01-29T07:30:00.001-08:00

Travel does things to you, like spark an interest in Greek mythology that was never there before. I was always bored by stories of Greek gods, who seemed to be petty and spiteful and clearly made up by people who did not understand nature.

These characteristics can of course be seen today in the average person and presidential candidate. So gods, therefore, might have a hard time of it in a contemporary city. That's the premise of Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips. Imagine that the "major" gods are all living together in a townhouse in London, conserving their dwindling powers and sniping at each other. Along come two mortals who get mixed up with Apollo et. al., and you get a quick primer on mythology and a cute story.

At first this book seemed too clever-clever for its own good. But Phillips managed to make marbly deities into flesh-and-blood characters, if that's possible. The mortals were quirky enough to hold me, too. The dialogue is astringent and often vulgar, and seems pitched quite right for millienia-worn supreme beings.

Artemis is the closest thing to a hero, here, with Apollo daring you to find him attractive. My only quibble now is that my fave god, Athena, is pretty two-dimensional, but Phillips did have a lot of them to deal with. Also, I think in the days of pagan past, one would probably favor three or four gods, much like Catholics have their favorite saints. Otherwise, how would you handle all these all-powerfuls competing for your attention?

Mummified and Placed Next to Stalin?

2008-01-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

If you are someone who randomly blurts out strange but somewhat familiar sentences, or sings clever but stupid songs on some unknown except-to-you prompt, or you never understood why people get so mad about other people talking during movies, you may be a MSTie. We never went away, we just have trained our expensive but useless knowledge elsewhere since our Masters left us. But now, they're back, and it's faaabulous!!

I'm talking about Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I'll let others explain it. As a quick wrap-up, those of us addicted to/obsessed with this series have been floating about uselessly since it went off the air a few years ago, shoving our pennies toward periodic DVD releases (my library offers them, too, so check yours out). While we fans have been sating ourselves with vintage product, a few of the talented people involved have moved on. There's RiffTrax, featuring Mike Nelson and a few others from the cast and crew. I like Mike and think RiffTrax is awesome.

But I like Joel better, and so I am really pleased to see him and some other former MST geniuses getting back to the game of making fun of terrible movies. My husband and I recently ordered the first Cinematic Titanic release, The Oozing Skull, from an online DVD retailer that they're working with. Which is how we found Symphony of the City...

There's Nothing New

2008-01-14T10:29:00.001-08:00

Last night we downloaded our first movie. Now, this is not a new thing anymore, I know, but we don't watch a lot of movies (or, let's say, we listen to music more than we watch movies). We have been almost totally reliant on our hard drive for music for some time, but now we are download-to-burn movie watchers.

So what was our maiden voyage into digital video? A documentary from 1927.

If you know my husband and I, you won't think this is too strange. And actually, Berlin: Symphony of a City was quite an appropriate way to inaugurate new technology. The movie is one of many that took advantage of three emerging trends in the early 20th century -- motion film and rapid industrialization and urbanization.

Therefore, Symphony featured many images of trains moving, gears grinding, trams sliding along streets, hordes of people walking quickly to get to jobs. You can almost hear the director and cameramen saying (in German) "Wow! We can really see this stuff move now!!" But while the movie was accompanied only by music, the directors did comment on the changes in society. We saw horses losing their footing among motor cars, the poor begging amidst commuters, a suicide jump off a bridge, animals and people fighting.

I did not like the movie as much as Man with a Movie Camera, a Russian/Ukranian film from 1929 with the same focus on the rhythms of city life. Not only did it focus more on people than mechanics, but the orchestration, by the Cinematic Orchestra, was better, stranger, and more fitting to the subject.

So how do we find these things? That's the next post...

Where I'm at...

2008-01-02T08:48:00.001-08:00

...on the day before the Iowa caucus. Acknowledging that any posts here about politics risks forever placing this blog in a particular place and time, I still feel the need to say, briefly, who I am supporting as 2008 dawns. However, MissLaura at DailyKos also supports the same candidate, so let's just let her say it, shall we?

The Great Science Debate

2007-12-10T11:27:00.000-08:00

I may believe that there are more than two sides to the global warming debate. I may wonder if pulling out all non-native plant species from your local forest preserve is really a good idea. I might question spending quadrillions of dollars of taxpayer money on building bigger and bigger atom smashers. But, having said all that, I do believe that we need to hold our leaders accountable to the findings of science, and we need to make them tell us how we will work with the rest of the world to ensure we all don't get our sunburnt selves washed, blown, or wasted away.

Leading scientists are calling for a science-related debate among presidential candidates. It would be nice to see what candidates have a working knowledge of scientific concepts and which ones believe that the world was created in six days.

Begin the Pagan

2007-12-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

So, how would it work if I decided I wanted to be a pagan? Not a witch or a wiccan but a Greek- or Roman-style multiple-god worshipping pagan...?

It was a recent visit to the Acropolis that prompted this train of thought, this re-evaluation of my current worship of only one God, not even of his purported Son, and certainly not of the woman who birthed this Son under, some say, strange circumstances.

The Acropolis is dedicated to Athena (but also to Athens' prominence as a city-state, but that's a less interesting discussion) and so I wondered what Athena could do for me that, say, God alone could not. Athena, being a woman, might seem more approachable, but that would assume that God has man-like characteristics, which I believe is more of a convenient construct than article of faith (yes, I call God "he," but I'm using the word as more of a universal pronoun). Athena also is the goddess of, like, everything: wisdom, war, the arts, industry, justice and skill. What couldn't she help me with?

But then there's all that mythology to wade through: her dad cheated on her mom, she sprung from his head, she tussled with her uncle for Athens, she, too, participated in a birth with strange origins. If I am skeptical of the Christian backstory, certainly I can't throw Athena's baggage aside, too, just because she's a woman and comes complete with helmet and sword (some days you need those). I could take that from the mythology which makes sense to me -- justifiable, since times have changed since her myth was constructed.

So does anyone still worship pagan gods -- all, or some, like Athena?

Nobody's Business But the Turks'

2007-11-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

I was recently in Istanbul (how long have I been waiting to begin a sentence like that!!) and used, for my pre-trip study, my favorite, photo-laden DK Guide but also Orhan Pamuk's book Istanbul.

For some strange reason, I have always been intrigued by the city. I think it had to do with a book I read a long time ago on Empress Theodora (a book I recently re-discovered and now think is simplistic junk). I hate to say I was attracted by the city's "exotic" nature, because that is so 1950s to put anything "Eastern" on that shelf. Istanbul is, however, very simply where East meets West, as part of the city is in Europe and part is in Asia.

So when I read Istanbul, I was captivated by Pamuk's description of the city as the only home he has ever known. Suddenly, this strange place could now be equated with my hometown outside Chicago, the only home I have ever known. As Pamuk took me on a tour of his city and of his life so far, I tried to envision the place in 3-D. I also struggled to pronounce the names of the neighborhoods, and even tried a Turkish tutorial with the help of an online pronunciation site.

As my cruise ship glided into the port in the Karakoy district, I pushed away thoughts of the "exotic," but they stood on the side, waiting to creep back in. They took their big chance when, at 5 p.m., I heard the call to prayer from the mosques. I tried to think of it as exactly like the church bells that ring at 6 p.m. at the church down the street from my apartment back home, but still...

Is is so bad to be intrigued by difference? Or is difference always an illusion? Pamuk writes in Istanbul about a culture still reeling from the end of the Ottoman empire, looking for its place in a world over which it once (twice, really) held dominion. Ataturk offered a secular, Western-looking alternative, but now, religion is asserting itself again. How much of this is really truly "exotic" to me, today, as an American?

God's Customers

2007-10-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

One thing that fascinates me is the fact that churches nowadays seem to feel the need to "market" themselves (and libraries, and goverments, too. Why the need to tell people about things they should know about? Because they don't know.) My parents recently received a CD from a local church, one of those nontraditional churches that doesn't have a spire or an ages-old theology that sprout up along with new subdivisions in former cornfields.

This place, called Community Christian Church (CCC), has a few locations in the exurbs of Chicago. Its mission is right there on its homepage: Helping People Find Their Way Back to God. Since this is obviously not a church that your grandmother went to, one can see how marketing would help.

The CD spoofed a recent commercial but at the heart were testimonials from a seven-year-old, two teens, a family and an older man. They were very well-spoken and all had different reasons for attending CCC. If I was someone who had an emptiness in my life and was looking for a place to find God, I would seriously consider CCC, just based on this CD. Sure, it's very well produced and slickly edited, but the people who spoke were still genuine, and that's what I would look for in a place to worship.

It's this genunine-ness that so many churches are missing. Watching the Catholics go to mass in the morning, it seems we have mistaken sloppy dressing for true down-to-earth spirituality. How many people feel they can actually express their true ideas about their faith in church? How many churches encourage people to think their faith through and talk about it? Maybe CCC does; maybe, in reality, not. Maybe most people don't look to go to church to question. They go to belong. Maybe that's why I don't go to church.

Gemutlichkeit, with a Knowing Wink

2007-10-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of my grammar pet peeves is when People capitalize Nouns. I see this a lot in older people and the clueless young. The only good explanation I can muster for these folks is that they learned German at a very young age (just like I pronounce all foreign words with a French accent).

Lately, though, I have noticed pointed capitalization as part of the Culture of Smirk. A spin-off of this culture, actually -- a grammatical attempted sincere-ing of what previously had been a thought conveyed with an eye roll. I guess I am not the only one who has noticed this. In a NYT review of George Saunders' essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone, Will Blythe points to Saunders' use of capitalization: "These locutions resonate with Wiseguy Knowingness and serve as the literary equivalent of People Making Quote Marks With Their Fingers," he says. But he also counts the capital letter thing as proof of Saunders' inherant Midwestern sweetness (I have not yet read Megaphone but am a fan of Saunders' fiction).

I agree, as those of us from the Midwest (high-plains Swedes and urban Warszawans alike) like to temper our hatred with peace (as Liz Phair once sang). We think it unseemly to bitch without qualification (and envy our New York countrypeople their unabashed squawking).

I have also used capitalization as a kind of verbal description (which is kind of tricky and requires well-placed emphasis): "I'm not Mad mad" or "She's not Tall tall, but just tall."

The difference between capitalization as a sign of intelligence and as a lack of it can be nuanced, granted. JUST DON'T USE ALL CAPS IN YOUR EMAILS, PLEASE. STOP YELLING AT ME.

I'm going to go read some e.e. cummings...

Thanks for the Lifesaving Advice...You're Fired

2007-09-24T17:35:00.001-07:00

My husband had a very strange experience the other day, one that I think encapsulates Our Strange Times. He had to break up with his pharmacist. No, Mr. Gower didn't box his ear. He just wanted to save some cash and time.

If you have health insurance (OK, I know I've lost about 47 million of you) with prescription drug coverage (there goes another few million) you know that the companies really push mail-order drugs. Rather than fill your prescriptions month-by-month, you can order 90-day supplies by mail. It saves you anywhere from some to a lot of money and you can usually order refills by phone or online.

But ordering your meds via mail also means have to end a relationship with what we used to call the Corner Druggist, forcing you to either save money or ditch personal contact (now we know how large corporations feel!).

Your pharmacist has not only dispensed meds that either clear up the infection or stop your heart from beating too fast and everything in between, but he or she also seen you buy some very personal items. He or she has taken your late night phone calls asking (again!) if antibiotics interfere with birth control.

On a larger scale, your pharmacist is also the white-coated equivalent of those orange-vested ones who stand with the "Slow" sign in front of highway construction. They're on the front lines of the health care crisis. Who was it who talked all the old people through the new Medicare choices a few years ago? Not their kids, the Baby Boomers, who were too busy ordering leather seats for their second yachts. Who advises you on an over-the counter remedy before you blow the co-pay on a doctor's visit? If you've at all been paying attention, you know.

My husband's former pharmacist -- whom I will call Dennis, because that's his name -- was a quiet, calm guy, which is what you want when you need a Klonopin refill. The change from a monthly visit to the store to a big white package with three months' worth of pills really weighed on my husband's mind. I thought he might have to blow all the savings from the change on a therapist.

But, then again, we can look on the bright side. Maybe one of us will get bronchitis!

(The photo is of Dennis' Pharmacy, in Key West, reportedly the inspiration for the song "Cheeseburger in Paradise," but also a great place for a Cuban Mix)

Oh Goody Goody

2007-08-31T13:56:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Public Library is promoting Arthur Miller's The Crucible as part of its One Book, One Chicago event. My high-school junior year English class read The Crucible and I would not read it again. It's not that I am adverse to tough topics (Suite Francaise is on my to-read pile). And while I'm really not interested in Colonial America, The Crucible is about as Colonial as an Eames chair.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it. It's because it's a play. Plays suck as literature. They need to be performed. Ask any college student who sees As You Like It performed and they'll slap their heads and finally get Shakespeare. On my to-do list is to see Raisin in the Sun on stage, because it was not impressive to read.

Chicago is working with Steppenwolf to present The Crucible, which is a great idea. Because it's really, really boring to read stage directions and stilted dialogue. But in the hands of a great director, a talented crew, and well-trained actors, what is bad to read can become magic to see.

As for my preferred source of post-war hand wringing, I'll take The Stranger.

There you are, Judy

2007-08-12T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a photo that proves that the world can spin itself into right, once in awhile. Here's Judy Blume enjoying herself in Key West. One of my favorite authors in one of my favorite places.

(Photo thankfully borrowed from the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts.)

Blue Nuns

2007-08-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

I was with a friend at lunch and we were talking about joining a convent. I, for one, would need an order that was a bit forgiving on the belief in Jesus thing. But I would wear a habit, for sure, and I would even do vows of silence and poverty (hey, I already work at a library!).

On the way out of the restaurant, we saw, yes, a nun, in a blue-and-white, old-school habit. In the middle of her chest was a red-and-white patch that said something in Latin. Not wanting to stare at an old nun's chest, I could not imprint the word in my mind. But my friend remembered it -- Magnificat. She was so freaked out that a nun showed up at the end of our conversation that she Googled for the order. This is what she found. Not sure if the nun we saw is of the same order, but "magnificat" does mean "hymn of song or praise," according to my "Catholic Columbo" friend.

This is not, I believe, to be confused with Blue Nun wine, which was advertised incessantly in the mid-1980s.

For other pairings of alcohol and religious orders, please see my husband's web site.

Sweet Home

2007-08-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Chicago was the center of the universe this weekend. Lollapalooza was here, as was YearlyKos. The "alternative" music show that now features a kidzone in the same city with the very traditional convention of very untraditional media -- wow, my brain has a hard time keeping up. (The photo to the side is Pearl Jam, not the presidential candidates at YearlyKos avoiding answering direct questions.)

When I become anxious about the state of things, it's usually because I don't feel the world is changing fast enough. To me, rock and roll (please, somebody, think of a new name for this genre!) is one long lament for what is not or not yet. It's about why can't we sleep together and when will I be old enough and when will the drugs kick in (and also about when will the aliens come and when will Mary Lou or Johnny want me and why can't I just drive my car all day).

Liberal blogging (of which DailyKos is the Meet the Press and the Woodstock) is about these same kinds of longings for a world to be, except instead of sex and drugs, substitute health care and a president who's read the Constitition. Last weekend, when rock and politics converged in my city, I realized that I am not the only one who longs for what she hopes is a better world.

In the Midwest, many people I encounter want to hide in a past that never existed (which is one of the reasons Kos took off for Cali, it seems). Better, I feel, to look for a future that still can be. Perry Farrell and Markos Zuniga are around my age, and each were the nexus of last weekend's events. So what's my role here?

The Stars Must Be My Friends To Shine for Me*

2007-07-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

Whatever our views on a supreme being, we can all gaze up at the stars together. Heavens Above will tell you what's over your head tonight. You can even watch the International Space Station fly across the globe.

*Christine McVie, 1979

Hitchens is Not Great

2007-07-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

I finally finished with Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Great. Despite the fact that I was enjoying the Colonial pamphleteer tone of the thing, I eventually had enough. It's really hard to argue against God because it's really hard to argue with faith, the way it's really hard to argue with taste. Why does one have faith, or like Ikea, or Laura Ashley? Because, that's why.

Hitchens makes great points about various religions and their little story burps and quirks that, to the disbelieving, disembowel any faith. For me, questioning Jesus' "virgin birth" was the first step on the road to rethinking his divinity -- an inevitable conclusion, it seems now.

Really, though, the book should be called "Religion is not Great." Hitchens dismisses God, but mostly, it seems, because his followers on earth -- of all beliefs, at many, many points in history -- have often chosen to be bloodthirsty idiots. God is a neutral force and whether God exists to me is my business. Now, when I make whether God exists to you, and how God exists to you, my business too, that's where the heads start to roll.

Of course Hitchens mentions The Passion of the Christ, the pornographic violence of which I still can't get my head around. But the movie wasn't made for me, so I don't really have to. The movie was made for people like the dear woman in my Pilates class, who said the movie, to her, was the story of the greatest act of love in history. I can't argue with that, and I don't want to.

Boo-coo de Bow-tay

2007-06-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I am addicted to Avon. This is a recent development with seeds in my past, as my mother ordered a lot of Avon in the 1980s (it would be so fun to look at those catalogs!). I think my recent affliction is due to the fact that I am now in my late 30s and I am obsessed with aging well. I have a few goals in mind: I want to look as good at 37 at Princess Diana did (right before she died, sadly) and I want to look like Sophia Loren in my 60s.

This takes attention. This I did not realize in my 20s, when I never wore sunscreen, never moisturized, drank a lot, never flossed and basically used paint thinner on my face (well, a commercial astringent, really). I also slept poorly, worried, bitched, moaned, frowned, and otherwise was real nasty piece o'work.

Now I am old. If I was to have a baby, I would be considered "of advanced maternal age." Yet, I am just starting to feel like I am no longer a kid. I am not only aware of the work it takes to keep skin looking good, to keep the innards in good shape, and to keep the muscles stretched just right, but I realize that this is all part of a process of living in a body, which takes adjustments.

First, at age 11 I got glasses. Then a period, to which I had to adjust many things, including my weight and the number of undergarments I put on each morning. Moving along, I began taking birth control pills, not just for the obvious reasons but for mood swings, regular periods, and acne control. Off and on, I've taken pills to regulate my blood pressure. In my 30s, the skin concerns began, and, a few years later I added more pills -- for anxiety and depresssion, with a nice side of sleeping meds.

All of this, I think, is evidence that God and I have to work together on this life. In my theology, God is not in the details, but rather, he's the architect and I'm the contractor. I also believe in evolution as part of God's plan for his little experiement here on earth, and all of my actions are contributing to how a woman in her 30s will look and feel a million years from now (if we don't dry up and blow away by then). Perhaps we will have to take pills to have periods. Perhaps the age at which women's bodies are best for babies will rise. Maybe something will be done about the eyes and the knees and the other parts that give out too soon.

Anyway, lady of the future, you're welcome.

What's your History?

2007-06-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since my husband and I returned from a vacation to Quebec City, and I have spent the time processing the experience. We went there because my husband is partially French Canadian (Quebecois, we now say), but also because we wanted to go somewhere European without going to Europe. Quebec City is a little like Paris, a little like New Orleans, a little like Galena, Illinois, and a little like Duluth. It's French, French-American, on a hill, and has a working port. It's also old (400 years next year) but there was construction work going on everywhere.

It always amuses me when I travel and there's construction in progress. When I visited Paris, the Arc de Triomphe was covered in scaffolding. The same summer that my hometown tore up all its streets, Duval Street in Key West was also in the midst of upgrades. Quebec was reconstructing the area along its port and along the Terrace Dufferin outside the Hotel Frontenac.

What amuses me less is how bad we Americans generally are at working the new in with the old. Much of this is a consequence of our worship of private property rights. Someone can buy the oldest building in your town and tear it down tomorrow. It's something we hold sacred.

In Quebec, the government owns many if not most of the important things, and taxes the populace mightily so that the museum in the 350-year old building has an elevator and really nice bathrooms as well as multi-media exhibits. Americans don't want to pay taxes for anything, let alone nice bathrooms in a government-run museums. That's why we get private citizens putting on well-meaning but generally useless fundraisers to save this house or that theater.

We will never have one collective identity -- that's what makes us Americans. It would be nice if we had a collective history, though, a story that we wanted to share with the world and were willing to pay to do so. If you love history, I'd say a trip to Quebec City would thrill you -- and then break your heart.

Grabbing On to Letting Go

2007-05-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

I usually peruse the latest Best American Non-Required Reading. Sometimes I find interesting stuff, sometimes not. The 2006 edition has an excerpt of a Julia Sweeney piece called Letting Go of God. When I get a free minute (well, another free minute, as I am obviously writing this) I'm going to buy it from her website.

I feel compelled at this point to mention that Julia Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live once and played a character called Pat who was either or neither man or woman. Anyway, to now connect Sweeney to that part of her career is like remembering Ronald Reagan as a GE spokesman. Sweeney has become a public spiritual skeptic, a very funny and articulate one, which is something we desperately need.

Sweeney iis known for her show God Said "Ha!" detailing how she handled cancer. Now she seems to be exploring the existential crisis her illness inspired. Sweeney has "come out" as an atheist after doing something most self-described religious people rarely do -- actually reading the Bible.

The Old Testament, with its child-killings and slavery and angry God, disturbs her (as it did me, having to present it to kids as a Sunday School teacher), and she hopes for some solace in the New Testament and its leading man, Jesus. But no dice. Where the Old Testament is bloody, the New is cruel. Even Jesus.

"I have to say," she writes, "one of the most deeply upsetting things about Jesus is his sense of family values. Which is amazing when you think how many groups say they base their family values on the Bible...He seems to have no close ties to his parents. He puts Mary off cruelly, over and over again."

Sweeney makes many observations like this, which, I understand, to the faithful, can be annoying, silly, irrelevant. Sweeney's priest quotes Proverbs 3:5: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding."

"So God gave us the gifts of reasoning and intelligence and curiosity...but we aren't supposed to use them?" Sweeney asks.

It's so good to know there are people out there, people more talented than me, with the gift of a recognizable name and great speaking skills, to give life to our struggles with faith. This, to me, is more proof of a God that wants us to think.

And thank God Julia did not go the way of other SNL alumni. How much is Tina Fey doing for our souls?

UPDATE (10/3/09): Pox me for dissing Tina Fey!! How things change...

Enough Already

2007-05-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Why is everyone complaining? I don't mean political prisoners or people living in tin and cardboard shacks on a hill outside of Rio de Janeiro. I mean affluent first-worlders who may have momentary concerns but are really lucky, as far as the history of humans is concerned.

You will live long, uncomplicated lives in a place of your choosing, probably one with nice trees. Yet you complain. You want everything perfect all the time. You want your doctors to know what's wrong with you on the first try, even though you're not clear about your symptoms. You get noisily cranky when your photos aren't ready in exactly an hour. You make a big deal about the fact that the speaker started ten minutes late.

You make it very hard for me to want to do nice things for you. You make me want to ignore you when you are waiting to cross the street. You make me not want to buy your kids' fundraising candy. You make me want to swear loudly in a restaurant just to piss you off more. You are re-igniting my compassion fatigue. You are the reason I might have to up my dosage, because you are making it difficult for me to push through the day.

Stop it!

The Anglican To-do

2007-05-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

Looking for a good explanation of what's going on in the Episcopal Church and why it matters? This guy can tell you.

Cabbage and Exile

2007-05-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

We saw the wonderful Lira Ensemble last night, a Chicago-based troupe that offers traditional Polish dance, music and dress. I am one-hundred-percent Polish, but I really don't know that much about my culture. When my mother's and father's parents came here in the early 20th century, they shut the door on their homeland and almost completely assimilated into American culture.

I knew both my families came from southern Poland, and I learned last night that many Chicago-area Poles did, as well. I also learned more about Polish history and the various regions of the country. I know for sure that "my people" are from the Tatra Mountain region. My husband now calls me a "highlander." My mother says we're "Polish hillbillies." Either way, I don't suddenly feel a strong connection to the high country.

See, I'm a flatlander. I love prairies, big sky. I like to see my weather coming. My heart is not on a Polish ski slope but in a thick summer growth of rattlesnake masters and compass plants. So now I am thinking a lot about the fluidity of culture.

Culture is fluid 1) because so many of us really don't know much about our heritage, and therefore can change as we learn more. Also, culture is fluid because 2) its similarities across lands are striking. So many people eat dumplings, or cabbage, and so many people make religion a central aspect of their lives. So many folk dances have the same moves, and tell the same universal stories.

Also, many, many cultures have tales of exile that the diaspora tell, pining for home, longing to return. Poland has both an immigrant culture and a stationary one that, while still on home soil, was occupied by so many for so long (Austria, Prussia, Russia, the Nazis, the Communists -- am I forgetting anyone?)

I am absolutely not an exile. I live five blocks from where I grew up, fifteen miles outside the city I was born in. I think the unwritten tale in my family is that we were planted in a good place, which was much better than the place we came from, so why look back? It's a very out-of-fashion idea right now, but that's OK.

(I also live practically across the street from the best Szechuan restaurant in Chicago, where my favorite dish is spicy cabbage.)

And then...

2007-04-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

At my library, we have a teen group that meets monthly. They write brief reviews of books that we post on our teen web site. Recent reviews noted of two books, one classic, one recent, that the endings were less than satisfactory. So, these kids have figured out the writer's main dilemma: how to end her story (a dilemma even the ancients had, judging from the need for the deus ex machina...). This applies to writers of their own lives, as well.

I have been thinking about this lately as I consider how much life I have left (assuming a normal life expectancy). What am I going to do with the next forty-odd years? That's more time than I've been alive! I am told I should take one day at a time, but that's clearly impossible, as I am always being asked to plan ahead. If I stay at my current job for three years, I will be able to collect a full pension...when I'm 65. That's thirty years down the road.

The secret is that the ending should flow naturally from the action, I think. The problem with fiction is that the action does not flow naturally -- it's made up. The problem with life, often, is that there is no action, or at least none visible from the daily perch.

I am actually half-hoping for some dramatic religious conversion to overtake me and direct me toward some life-altering spiritual goal, something to occupy me for the next few decades. I imagine it's like getting hit in the head with a volleyball in gym....WHOMP! and I'm off to Namibia or Mississippi, with an aura of pure goodness around my face and no need for clean feet.

So far, so close, so much, so long

2007-04-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

To make it through the horrors of the 20th Century, just to be gunned down by the future of the 21st...

Those who discuss religion with me know that one of my issues with the divinity of Jesus is that he is, in the grand scheme, not so unusual. Why do we focus on this one man who died for what he believed?

Christians will tell you that this man was chosen to die for our sins. The theologies seem to diverge from there, and some require us to acknowledge this sacrifice by being "born again" while others believe that Jesus' act alone saves us from eternal flame (not the Bangles song, although to hear this boring song forever would be Hell).

The killings at Virginia Tech this week added another name to my "Just As Good As Jesus" list. Professor Liviu Librescu survived the Holocaust and Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania just to be shot by some well-armed depressed kid while helping his engineering students out the window. Did he decided that, at 76, he'd lived, and his students deserved a chance to? Or, did he figure, after living through so much already, that he could take the chance?

This man's life seemed to be haunted by governments without restraint, allowed, yes, by the people to become totalitarian regimes without public conscience (when the people do not participate, their values and experiences are not part of the equation.) America was a place of refuge for him, but only for so long.

I have no time for the theological debates about the details of the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth's death when every day a new martyr makes his or her final decision and humanity is the better for it. Anyone can decide to make a stand for good, and may lose his or her life in the attempt. (Kind of makes those of you unwilling to put up an election sign in your yard look like morons, huh?)

We need to remember as many of these people as we can, not focus on one guy a long time ago. Each act is a reaffirmation of God and of His hope for us in this world, and each act is a reminder that the good placed in us is more powerful than the evil -- but only if we decide it is.

Entrez-vous

2007-04-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

Rarely in a church newsletter do I read something that offers an intellectual challenge (sorry to all those who work so hard on these missives, checking the spelling of ushers' names, getting the date for the potluck in Fellowship Hall right, tracking down the Sunday School teachers for the next months' topics...) Thanks to my cousin who's a dedicated patron of the National Shrine of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos in New Orleans, I have found something to think about in a homegrown religious periodical.

The April 2007 issue of Seelos Center news contains an article about doors and doorways as indicators of death and ressurection. It wasn't just post-Katrina that New Orleans doorways were marked with indications of misery. Yellow fever plagued the city a few times in the 19th Century, and infected homes were marked with flags. Of course, the Passover story is about God instructing the Israelites to mark their doors with blood to indicate that they were believers and to ward off evil.

The newsletter reports: "The Good News of Easter is that the Lord has passed over the threshold of death so the destroyer no longer has any permanent power to strike down one's household. Alleluia!"

I don't know who wrote this but there is a graduate thesis of thoughts in there to unpack. Thanks to the Seelos Center for giving this questioning heathen something to think about during your sacred time of year. I may join you yet...

Golden Rule

2007-04-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

In an antique store in Monroe, Wisconsin, I found a stash of Little Golden Books. These small, well-illustrated books taught me to read. For $1 each, I acquired one I loved (We Like Kindergarten), one that will inspire me to plant my onions (Two Little Gardeners), one for my cat (Cats) and one that is now my spiritual guide. My Little Golden Book of God very simply states what I believe. And I didn't even have to write it. (Thank you Jane Werner Watson).

"God gives us everything we need -- shelter from cold and wind and rain, clothes to wear, food to eat...He sends the sunshine to make things grow...God makes us grow, too, with minds and eyes to look about our wonderful world, to see its beauty, to feel its might."

There is nothing in here about a virgin birth, or complicated ideas of salvation, or arguments on faith versus grace. No Christ, no Allah, no Yahweh, no Buddha. Nothing about abortion, contraception, war, gay marriage. There is mention of the environment, of it's beauty and might (a reminder, perhaps, that Mother Nature should not be toyed with, like the old margarine commercial).

There is this: "God gives us a small, still voice in our hearts to help us tell right from wrong." I believe this voice talks to all of us and tells us all basically the same thing about how to behave. Many of us, though, have souls knotted up with sickness, and think this voice much too naive, or that this voice is a wus, or that this voice doesn't understand the situation.

It's a kids book, but why is it that it can't be an adult's book as well?

Hot Guys who Love Jesus

2007-03-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of my job (I work in a library) is that I have access to media: books, magazines, CDs, DVDs...I recently read a review of the A& E documentary God or the Girl and was intrigued by the premise: following four young men as they decide whether or not to become priests. Our library actually had a copy (I work at a great library...)

Using the now-familiar reality-television formula of intercutting the stories, heightening the drama by slowly pacing the action, teasers, recaps and, probably, much editing, the show tells the story of these 20-somethings "discerning" their intentions (that seems to be a standard phrase). And the title is pretty sensational, but "Choosing Between the Spiritual and the Worldly Life" would not be as catchy (my proposed alternative title, the title of this entry, is pretty accurate, though).

But despite the hackneyed production techniques, the stories were riveting. Can editing make dull people interesting? I suspect not, so these men are probably as thoughtful, introspective, and caring as they seem. You start to try to figure out how each story will end up. One man lets you off easy and decides early. One lets you see his evolution from executive-on-the-rise to someday-missionary, a transformation that is breathtaking. One makes a surprising decision, but one that you feel will work not only for him but for those he wants to serve.

And then there is Joe. I am in love with Joe. Joe is a wholesome, milk-fed Midwestern man (he's from Cleveland), a "cradle Catholic" with a huge family who drinks and eats well on their affluent farm. Joe is the one who has the hardest time with his decision, as he has been wrestling with being a priest for ten years. He's a tall, blonde sweetie who would make any woman a fine husband.

Joe, like all the men, display not only an advanced spiritual development but also a touching love of God and Jesus. Joe gets excited when he thinks the Pope has looked him in the eye during World Youth Day. Dan has a collection of religious icons in his dorm room. Steve has ditched a high-paying career for the administrative minutae of campus ministries. And Mike, attending his pastor during a wedding, longs to be a groom. Their decisions come down to a pretty simple one that many of us have to make: do we have to give up personal relationships to devote ourselves to the thing that makes our life worth living? Artists, parents, and entrepreneurs all ask the same question. The stakes are higher for these men, and the rewards, one could say, are greater.

God bless all four of them. And ladies, go get that Joe!

Oh My Science!

2007-03-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

One of my minor struggles now is what to use as an all-purpose curse/expression of disbelief. Can you still say "Jesus!" if you don't believe in his divinity? Maybe yes, because, to you, the word has lost it's shock power. But if it has, then why use it? Because for most people you encounter, the expression runs a spectrum between distasteful and blasphemous. Do I use the word for myself or to communicate something to others?

Is this too much thinking? (yes...) Is there an acceptable substitute? Considering that I believe Jesus is one of many martyrs who died for his beliefs, can I just substitute another name: "Romero!" "Moulin!" "Medecins Sans Frontieres!" Sure, and be even more of a wierdo than I normally am.

As usual, one of the only sources of critical thinking on this subject are Trey Parker and Matt Stone...

Roma Bizzaro

2007-03-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

Gotta stop watching Fellini before bedtime. Marc and I are making our way through his works and Roma was next in the queue. It's like Amarcord after too much Vicodin, although your favorite Fellini elements are all there: parades, insipid Catholic educators, virgins and whores, Italian food that you don't get in American checked-tablecloth restaurants, yelling fathers, hysterically pious mothers. And, of course, the Church, a bejewled, byzantine (small "b") cult of pope-worship and intricate socio-religious customs. I smelled something the next day, something dusty and musty and sort of sweet, and I think it was an old Catholic lady's bedroom.

The scene that gives nightmares is the sacred vestments fashion show, starting out with old-time nuns costumes and getting stranger and stranger as models float down a runway in decked out in lace, lights, satin and skulls, until a wax (I hope) depiction of a dead pope rises in a gold proscenium. The audience wails for the pope to return to them. (Want to get people returning to the Church in droves? Have the popes from now on be hot young women and men. I can see prostrating yourself in front of Pope Beckham the Yummy).

At this point, we are reaching saturation point on Fellini's obsessions. I think that's why I still say La Strada and 8 1/2 are my favorites. La Strada's naivete, in the scheme of his films, remains suprisingly fresh. And 8 1/2 is about art as work, so it's a great theme for me to meditate on right now.

An aside from way outside: a New York Times article reports how elderly people who have paid their long-term care insurance for years and are now using it are having their claims denyed by the insurers (can't make any money actually paying a claim!!), destroying any hope that these people had that their aging would not be a burden to their family. Perhaps we should return to a Fellini-eque idea of sloppy families where people yell and cry and put up with each other and eat big meals (sans the offal, please) on Saturday nights in sidewalk cafes.

What a Post-Christian does for Easter

2007-03-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Every year it's the same: the ham, the butter in the shape of a lamb, the much-too-sweet Cadbury eggs, the re-questioning the divinity of Jesus...What does a former Christian do on Christian holidays, which are built into not only our calendar but our culture?

I guess one option is to become a cop or a nurse and volunteer to work the holidays that everyone else wants off. Another is to pretend I believe that Jesus was wholly human and wholly divine -- to go back to my old belief system. But that's almost impossible to impose on myself now that I've questioned it to such a degree.

The current default is to participate in the non-religious parts of the holiday. I fee like a fraud, but in America, a fraud is better than a spoilsport. Or a non-Christian.