not for really religious people

Narnia did make me think. It was, all in all, a pretty good flick. As one who has read much by and about C.S. Lewis, I could not separate my awareness of the story’s Christian underpinnings from my viewing experience, so I was forced, as always, to confront my discomfort with what many consider fundamentals of Christian ideology.

In particular, the notion, beloved by many Bible thumpers, that that which we call God requires a blood sacrifice as due payment for human foibles. (Hence, of course, if you follow this line of thinking, Jesus stepping in as the killee.)

I’ve had some pretty good talks with that which I think of as god in my lifetime, and have never gotten a sense of its being that sort of blood-demanding tribal chief. But the language of the film’s analogy got me to thinking. (I’ll note that I was a great fan of the books as a young adolescent and read them all, despite my mild annoyance at the way Lewis glibly and callously wrote Susan out of the story toward the end.)

When young Edmund, one of the four principle Narnia kids, screws up big time, the bad witch points out to Aslan the lion (the Jesus counterpart) that there is “deep magic” in the land which dictates that Edmund’s life/blood/what-have-you now belongs to her, and it is for this reason that Aslan arranges to sub for Ed on the chopping block.

This is why allegorical stories can be a fine thing. They give you another vista on an archetypical theme. So in Narnia, the thing that’s going to get you is deep magic. What might that translate into in the universe as we know it? I honestly cannot envision a deity standing there, foaming at the mouth, as it demands blood be spilled because you stuck those lifesavers in your pocket (without paying) when you were seven. If the archetype of sacrifice works for so many people of religion there has to be a less primitive explanation.

I would suggest this: The human is a rare beast in its existential self-awareness. I have walked through (for example) the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and felt the weight of human guilt on my shoulders, and I’ve no doubt that many of my species have also experienced similar guilty pain at their awareness of the depths of atrocity to which people can sink. If the sacrifice archetype works for you maybe it’s because you yourself need someone to say “It’s ok, you can let go of the guilt,” and maybe, if you’re of the Christian persuasion, the person of Jesus fills the bill. I think we sear the red A for Accountable into our own forearms with a hot iron. Nobody named God condemned you to death.

Personally, I have no particular conviction that Jesus was actually thinking of this stuff when he was executed for what looked pretty much like political reasons. But I have a sort of sense that like the ten avatars of Vishnu, god can fill a great variety of needs, and for someone in need of salvation theology, god can be that shape.

bleeping beep

It is one of the inexplicable but inarguable givens of living in this house that things won’t work right. For the last few months it has been (among other things) the refrigerator. This is a big hulking hulk of a fridge. You could not go to Sears and find a reasonably priced model to fill the gap it will leave if I give the executive order for its condemnation. I do not like it beeping at me. There are enough things that beep at me. The oven beeps when you set the timer. It beeps when it finishes preheating. The dishwasher more than beeps. It sings--in beeps--when you open it. It sings--in beeps--when you change its settings. It beeps when you start it. So I really don’t need to be beeped at by the fridge. Because there are, as I’ve stated, enough beeps, and because it’s trying to alert me to the fact that it doesn’t work. Shut up I tell it. I don’t want to know that the fridge is running at 43 F and the freezer at 16. I push buttons (which beep) and insist that it go back to 37 and 0. It doesn’t believe me and beeps back. I turn it off, hoping that a brief respite from electricity may make it forget that it was acting up, and it will return to normal fridge behavior when I push the on button (to much beeping) again. That actually worked for a couple months. Today it just beeps. Three beeps actually. beebeebeep. A third repair company is coming Thursday. The first two didn’t fix it right even though they thought they did. I doubt if a more clever muse of circuitry will follow repairman #3 in the door. I do not want to buy something that would fill the gaping hole that fridge would leave. But I might have to.

Looking

I really did it for myself anyway. Pulling pics out of photo albums that date back to 1984--ones that he was in. Pics which I could see him in and remember what 100% looked like and felt like. I squished into the chair beside him, and showed them to him. I had the stupid magic idea that he’d see himself and things would clear up like the fog of amnesia lifting. He said, “That’s your brother.” I said, “No, that’s you.” He said, “Who’s that? Becca?” “No, it’s Olivia.” He remembered lots of things, but not, I guess, what it was like to see through those eyes in the pictures. “Thanks for showing me those,” he said.

Great house--free to good home

In my dream I suddenly found myself to be the free and clear owner of a lovely, clean, light-filled house (for the purposes of the dream, my sister had given it to me--but I don’t think that was relevent in the interpretive sense,) and the thing is, I didn’t want it.

Why am I supposed to want this house,I thought to myself, and what am I supposed to do with it? I was quite certain that my real life was somewhere out there--as in not in that house--and staying there, keeping it, would be an impediment. But not to worry--it was just a weird dream.

games and monsters

Of course I want to run away from the beast. It’s not a pretty animal. And it’s certainly not a member of a species I ever had thoughts of engaging, or would have wanted to engage had I known about its existence. But, the bummer--if it is a bummer, because bummer may just be the word I’m applying...one girl’s bummer may be another girl’s dream come true--the bummer is that it’s mine, and I’ve got to figure out how to wrestle it.
Or, to completely change metaphors midstream--What if you spent 20 years playing a really cool game of Parcheesi, and they suddenly yank the gameboard out from under the pieces, slip in a Monopoly board instead, and insist you go on playing as if nothing weird had happened? (So far my best guess is you learn to play Monopoly, even if you never really liked it.)

good stuff to drink

Here’s an ailment that doesn’t play fair: Parkinson’s disease. So now they’re telling me that fewer years of education and a smoking habit lower your risk? I don’t think the news will induce me to stop studying Spanish, but perhaps I’ll jog the stairs with greater diligence, and...

...keep up the coffee habit. It’s encouraging that something so decadently addictive has Parkinson’s inhibiting properties in addition to its growing reputation for being chock full of antioxidants. Yum to coffee. And cheers to the nightly glass of vino.

back to fiddling.

The pursuit of a working fiddle has taken me to some interesting places. This summer it was the third floor of Lexington and Calvert, downtown Baltimore, to the Perrins’ violin shop--a bank headquarters in its former life, where now the walk-in safes in every room house spare pegs and bows. The Perrins guys gave me a nice fiddle set-up, for which I paid nice fiddle set-up rates--but still I had problems.

When, after a couple months of cranking out the five tunes I’ve learned well enough to not break your ears, my E and A pegs reverted to shameless and relentless slipping, I decided to try something else. I called Thomas Melton, whom I’d gotten wind of via the Acousticopia music shop in Annapolis.

It was a forty-five minute drive south, to a cul-de-sac at the tip of Churchton, Maryland, where the Chesapeake Bay took off in every direction but west. My sad fiddle and I walked into a cluster of houses and outbuildings where a back stair led to Melton’s second-floor shop.

Retired in name only, Thomas Melton has done well enough in construction to feed his hobby/business/obsession with violins. He also makes hand-turned wooden bowls, waterfowl decoys, and goes rockfish fishing in the Bay--interests which were all reflected in the tools and artifacts covering every spare inch of his shop.

It seemed that the Perrins guys hadn’t thought to clean out the 150+ years of rosin, oil, and peg dope which were gunking the insides of my peg holes. Melton did it, then rummaged through a drawer which must have represented a 200 year history of fiddle pegs, before finding me an E peg fat enough for my fiddle’s old holes. He noted that my chin rest was not only higher than average, but seemed to do me no good at all based on my hold, and traded me for something more suitable. I bought a shoulder rest that he had on hand, having never much liked my old standard-issue music student model, and he got me put back together and, at least for the moment, in tune.

He does it for fun, not money, which was evidenced by his charging me 25 bucks for some careful, meticulous work, and even then instructing that I should tell him if that was too much. It wasn’t. He has numerous music teachers who are both friends and customers to whom he’ll donate half and three-quarter-sized violins he’s acquired and patched up, when they have eager but needy pupils. I’m glad I met him.

The earth is not always firm

When life takes off in a direction that runs contrary to assumptions you’ve held for years, it can take a really long time to adjust. Especially if you’ve had a shaky sense of self-definition all along.

Oh, and here's a problem with shaky senses of self-definition: I just picked up a Title Nine catalog. I basically like Title Nine stuff even though I don't need rock-climbing clothes. The catalog is sprinkled with vignettes featuring real-people models engaged in active pursuits while spiffily clad in Title Nine items.

This is typical of the profiles they print under the pics: "Juliska weaves prairie grasses into her own line of sleepwear while teaching Mandarin Chinese to her two toddlers. She enjoys striving for her personal best in 20K marathons, and leads yoga classes for the NYPD in her spare time." Sometimes I want to look at the clothes, and sometimes I want to take a bottle-opener to Juliska's stylin' spandex britches.

I guess I could be a Title Nine model. I would wear whatever they told me to, and the caption would read thusly: "Emily sucks dog fur out of corners while trying to convince her kids that she really didn't fix anything for dinner. She can dodge a teenage verbal zinger clocked at 60mph while hurdling a chopsaw. Her personal motto is 'get your own spoon.'"

Clements' EZ Park

There’s a small sedan blocking our front walkway and paperbox today. While I appreciate that the guests at the neighbor kid’s beer blast didn’t encroach on our yard, being three feet into the road makes the car an easy target for sideswipes. And as our entire front footage was parked in last night, I’ve been mighty tempted to re-institute our “Welcome to EZ Park--25cents/hour for pretty cars, 75cents/hour for ugly cars” tickets. (Plus, these guys should be charged extra for Jeff picking up their empty Bud Light cans.) I think it’s that we’re the people on the block least likely to get petty about sacrificing our border to other people’s parties. And I don’t want to be petty, but I’ve been trying to think of a humorous way to suggest that they might not want to leave the car there all weekend.

a dog walk

In the true spirit of a blog, here are a few themeless rambles.

Fred-fred and I took a very nice walk today. Odd, that since I live two blocks from Severn School, I’ve never seen the new academic buildings from closer than across the football field. Now, the fact that I don’t send my kids to the local private prep school is a matter of philosophy, economics, and handy public schools which are, all in all, not bad.

Still, I’ve continued to think about it as if it were the same venerable institution with creaky, ivy covered buildings. It’s not. Wow. Someone’s Harvard endowment contribution must’ve taken a wrong turn in New Jersey and ended up funding a couple academic buildings worthy of Bill Gates. The buildings are huge, the lounges are college caliber, the lunch room is enormous. And get this--there’s a pendulum in the entry way. That’s right. A big one too. Swinging from a ceiling 3 stories up. Severn School thinks its the Smithsonian now.

And then I noticed this plaque on one of the brick columned colonnades connecting an old building to the mega-new one. A plaque stating that the colonnade was a gift of--people I know. People whose kid Gabe used to go to school with at Summit. A kid whom he still considers a friend despite the fact that his attempts to interest this kid in a get-together over the past couple years have not panned out. Which I’m ok with since every time I used to have to wait at the electronic community gate to transport him to their chateau I was gripped by an unattractive surge of counter-snobbery and wanted to say to the speaker-box “No thank you--I’d best send Gabe up to entertain your child while I wait here so as not to bring cooties into the neighborhood.”

The truth is, they’ve never behaved snobbily toward me, nor has anyone else who sends kids to prep school--I must just get some kind of weird kick from playing inadequacy mind games.

can you think?

Remember these three words: Apple. Nine. Climb...Spell “world.” Now spell “world” backwards...Start at 100 and count backward by 7’s...Take your left thumb, place it on your right ear, and stick out your tongue...Copy this figure on paper. (um...it’s 2 interlocking pentagons.)...What were those three words again? Howl at the moon. Draw a diagram of the Nordstrom shoe department. Assign new names to the Gods of Olympus. Spell your mother’s maiden name in Pig Latin. Go home with a big headache. (The three words, by the way, were Lemon, pi, and soup.)

somewhere else

I believe that I want a small, in-town house with at most a postage stamp of a yard. Lawns are for gardening hobbyists or the commited suburbanite. I am neither.

In fact, I’m experiencing a huge resistance to the suburban life. It’s for other people. People who like external socializing. People for whom that’s easy. People who want to be hostesses, or whose needs are so met by their nuclear family unit that they don’t need to see and hear passersby just to know they’re not alone.

Olde Severna Park kind of fools me. I can walk up Riggs Avenue or Avondale Circle and almost pretend that if I turned around and went the other way that there would be a welcome busyness, the hum of commerce, and people to see in action. Then, my street could be the place of quiet escape..

I think suburbs are designed to isolate people. I’ve also read that introverts only make up 15% of the human population, which means that, for many or most other people this isolation is not troublesome--they will find a way to connect because they are natural connectors..

But I’m not. So I want to run away and join the town.

Out of Body

I put on my usual chipper morning face.
The bearded cowboy on the tv says “Yew don’t recall ‘im? Or yew don’t wanna recall ‘im?”
Jeff has been up since whenever, as he does not have a circadian rhythm.
“What you watching?” I say. I’m friendly. It’s supposed to show.
“Um, actually it’s not a movie, it’s Gunsmoke,” says Jeff.
I didn’t ask if it was a movie.
“Can you tell I’m trying to be extra friendly to help you feel good?” I ask. In a friendly way.
“Oh,” says Jeff. “Ok.” He shuffles upstairs for today’s 6:15 am bedtime. Gunsmoke was evidently not all that compelling.
Becca and Olivia have actually woken to their alarms. Olivia makes only one reference to wanting to punch somebody, so I take her stress level to be low today. Becca breezes through, makes some toast and jam, has it all together. Her hair is floofed. She is Marilyn among the Munsters, with one exception: Sometimes she gets embarrassed by us.
Gabe, at my urging, staggers into the shower for a nap. After I bang on the door 5 or 6 times and say “wash your hair,” he stumbles out and scarfs some Honey Bunches of Oats. Then he squishes the dog into the corner of the couch. He is trying to occupy the same cubic footage as the dog. He is trying to defy the laws of physics and the dog knows it.
“I had an out of body experience in math yesterday,” says Gabe. Yesterday was the first day of school. It’s his last year in this school. Next year--high school. Of some sort. I’m not sure I want to be hearing about out of body experiences in math class.
“Do you think you could save out of body experiences for lunch or recess?” I ask. I’m silly. He tells me, and I already knew this, that you can’t control out of body experiences.

Good thing they can't fire me.

Two of Rachel’s friends from St. Mary’s stopped by here with her briefly yesterday, after a day in Annapolis. I don’t know why this kind of situation can make me feel so ill at ease--it’s related somehow to my domestic misfit syndrome.
One of the nice young ladies said “you have a lovely home.” Luckily, I knew the correct response and replied “thanks,” even though I was thinking something like this: Why would you say that to me? Do I look like the kind of person who would have a lovely home? Do I in any way resemble Martha Stewart? Is it not obvious that my rightful habitat would be a barn?

It’s probably good that I didn’t say those things. It might have confused them. They, after all, were following the script, and I was off on a wild tangential head trip. And I think I displayed ample awkwardness as the 3 of them (2 friends + Rachel) sat at the kitchen counter munching tortilla chips and hummus while I sauteed chard, Olivia made mac and cheese, Jeff pulled a Flatbread pizza out of the freezer, while I apologized for the fact that “we don’t really fix dinner here--we just kind of randomly eat stuff.

Gadzooks. Any reasonable mom of teens would be able to offer something on the spot. I think it didn’t matter. I think they’d eaten and snacked in town and weren’t really hankering for a mom-figure to lay out a repast.

And then they got ready to leave. The other nice young lady made a point of sticking her head in the kitchen to say “Thanks for having us.” I was thinking: Having you? I didn’t even do anything. I didn’t even get you a drink. (Luckily Rachel did!) You must have a real professional mother at your house who taught you what to say...which means--yikes! You know a bogus imposter when you see one! But I didn’t say that. I think I said something like “sure.”

I am Salieri.

I'm several chapters into book #3, and my confidence and resolve flag with distressing regularity. Is it the right project? Does it stink as much as everything leading up to it? Unanswerable questions. There's a faction that has suggested I stick to essays, but I don't have an essay project clinging tenaciously to my brain the way the story does. All signs, all portents, all the cosmic nods which I've so annoyingly requested have pointed to this ridiculous effort to channel Roald Dahl. Or something like that.

So I'm at it. Because to not be at it guarantees that my comfort with life will tank. Weird process. It's so easy to be distracted. Often, I would vastly rather squeak out a few tunes on the fiddle. And I wouldn't rather clean the bathroom, or see to it that there's food in the house, but those are necessities and hard to ignore.

Here are two categories of people whom I envy.
Category #1: J.K. Rowling
Category #2: Anyone who is engaged in a pursuit which keeps them calm and satisfied.

The thing is, I have never had an avocation for which I have received so many...as I've said--cosmic nods...as this book thing. I have also never wanted a job in the way that I want the writer job. Never ever. And I've wanted to want something. This is the only thing that's ever been right.

So I do feel--and this is kind of stupid, but I'm serious--I do feel that to continue charging at the gates of publishing success is one of my purposes for now. However, this conviction does not keep me from railing at the Cosmos for assigning me a task for which I feel completely inadequate. I mean, cripes, if I must feel compelled to write, at least send me a gifted muse. Instead, I got Clarence the crappy muse, and it's up to me to try to earn him his wings since he clearly is a muse in name only.

Thanks HAL.

So today we did it. Both our local McD's have recently sprouted red kiosks on their fronts, and today we rented "Ice Princess" from the Redbox DVD automated rental station. Seems a decent deal at a buck a night, and is a pretty slick process if you can overlook that you have to touch a screen all sullied by deep-fry grease fingerprints. It's basically a big atm that spits out your selection in a tougher than average case, and will, theoretically, suck it back up tomorrow. Ah, the joys of automation.

baseline middling

There's something I've noticed. And I'll comment on it because of a couple things--One is that there's at least one person who finds my musings dismayingly negative. The other thing is an observation made by Rachel. She asked whether I used to enjoy the process of getting several small children ready for and into bed. (She was asking, I think, to compare her feelings about babysitting smalls--mainly positive feelings-- to how it was for me.)
I responded that I "kind of liked it. " She then correctly observed that for me to make that statement was the equivalent of her saying "I really, really love it!"
And I think it's true that I am given to understatement, even when I find something gratifying. The flip side of the 45 is that if my tone seems to be hovering a bit below neutral, this is unlikely to be indicative of serious negativity. Or at least not anything I'm wallowing in. Don't like wallowing. Maybe I can relate to Lou Grant when he told Mary that her first try at producing the news herself "didn't stink." Mary, of course, knew this was high praise and took it as such.
Anyway, go here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/peachkabob/ if you've an appetite for effusive enthusiasm. It is fortunate that curmudgeonliness is not always inherited!
(I'll get back to that thing about meaningfulness soon...)

You Don't Pick

There are people in my life.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Sometimes I would have the people be another way. Or at least I think I would. Maybe.

Here’s one: This guy can annoy. I would say that he does it without half trying but I think he often does try, and more than half. Probably 3/4 or better. You cannot tell him anything. You are wrong, I’ll just let you in on that right off the bat. If you are silly, you can try to tell him that he probably can’t build a robot out of random parts he’s extracted from what used to be a functional clock radio and a broken telephone. You can try to tell him that it would take years of studying before he’d even know where to start, but, as I’ve already informed you--you’re wrong. At the moment I’m trying to get this guy to write a good paragraph on the conflicts found in the storyline of The Golden Compass. He is on refreshing break number 10.

(edited out a part here. Just because. There are things you should say, and things maybe you shouldn't say. ) I had a little online tarot reading recently, that spoke to [the edited out thing] with unexpected clarity. A great deal more clarity than my memory, in fact, but it said something like this:

I had 10 jars, all full. I’m not sure what they were full of but it was something good--it was the essence of goodness. Several spilled. Dumped. Gone. I have maybe five or six left. The reading went on to advise that I make the most of the remaining jars as opposed to going all cranky about how I used to have 10.
Anyway, if I want to personally extend the metaphor, I’d say that I have quite a few other types of vessels as well, in addition to those jars. I’ve got some amphoras, several pitchers, a number of coffee cups, and quite a bit of tupperware as well. All the more reason not to make life a shrine to the spilled jars.

So, I said I would have people be another way. But then I’d have to be able to suggest an alternate storyline. Which means it would be boring, and most likely trite. Which is another subject.
(next: My damnable need to have a meaningful life, as defined by my personal, inadequate comprehension of meaningfulness.)

something fishy

With a pet-load of 4 cats and a dog, and a houseful of bipeds who haven’t evolved too far from our Cro-Magnon days, I’ve seriously resisted all new pet entreaties.
But there wasn’t much I could do when the college freshman came home for the summer with two goldfish in a tupperware tank...refugees from the St. Mary’s bio lab where their alternate destiny was to serve as hors d’oeuvres for the big fish.

Rachel calls them Barbie and Tip. I prefer to think of them as Audrey and Audrey II. It’s not that they actually have audible voices, but their attitude, every time I walk into the room screams “FEED ME!” (This is not supposed to be my problem, but Rachel has approximately 3012 friends, all of whom must be visited during the next 2 months, so I’ve inherited fish feeding detail as often as I might have guessed it would happen.)

Barbie, (or Audrey,) is actually fortunate to be around to scarf the yummy goldfish flakes at all, seeing as how she decided, on day two of her residency here, to take a swan dive out of the tupperware. She owes her life to Freddi the dog, whose barking and sniffing alerted Olivia to the orange and seemingly lifeless body on the floor. I picked her up in tissue, in a quandary as to what to do next with Rachel still asleep, when the fish wiggled and I hastily redeposited her in the water.

Since then we’ve acquired a small tank with a safety lid, and a couple types of fish antibiotics to treat the black splotch disease which indubitably the little piscean’s near death experience made her more susceptible too.
But all’s cool now, if only I can resist those little sucky mouths making o’s at me through the tank walls every time I go in the room.

offering

A week into May, nine letters left my house. Some were one-page queries, several included 3 short chapters, and a couple packed the whole 87 pages of the breathtaking work of fiction Breakfast of Scallywags.

Ok, I’m overstating the breathtaking part by a sizable margin. Truth is, it’s a pretty silly little yarn. More of the truth is, that if it weren’t for encouraging words from a couple of the girls around here, those nine letters might never have happened.

Completely truthfully, I only cranked out the full 87 pages by dint of stubbornness. There was the one of me who didn’t believe in the project at all--the me who wholeheartedly loves the cast and crew of my completely unsuitable-for-commercial-publication first book, The Legend of Logjam, and has never felt the same level of devotion to Fay LaFarge and Barnaby Hootsman--hero and anti-hero of Scallywags.

So, that I submitted at all is due to the prodding of the me who knew very well that, regardless of my personal “belief” in the project, there was value and integrity in seeing it through to completion.

So I completed it. And those nine letters were more or less an ethereal offering to the Universe. An offering. Not something from which you expect a tangible return. Maybe some kind of karmic harmonious (but undefinable,) return will cast a beneficial glow on some aspect of my life sometime somehow.
The first envelope, immediately recognizable because it bears my own handwriting, came today. Surprisingly fast, but Clarion is huge and can process thousands of submissions deftly and efficiently.

I was curious at how little I cared. Maybe I’ll care more as the other eight trickle in. But I might not. It was a little heartbreaking when I had to acknowledge that Logjam was unfit for the market--because I cared so much about it, and wrote it with a sense of destiny and conviction. A sense that was missing as I wrote Scallywags. Scallywags is an offering. May the Universe treat it kindly, and may I continue to feel completely zen about whatever form that kindness takes.