The Harsh Realities

Dreams are so easily overrun by economic realities. Why does it have to be that way?

I've been pouring over landscaping ideas from magazines, books, 'make-over' shows and my own little imagination. I want a Garden rather than just a yard. I want wide beds of flowers and variegated foliage surrounding lovely winding paths that lead to garden swings and benches. I want pots overflowing with plants, little surprises around every corner; a 4-season garden with all my favorite colors and plants. A pergola would be nice. With vines. Roman.

And a miriad of pretty birdhouses scattered around.

But what I HAVE is standing water and grass-covered mud that you sink in up to your ankles. What I HAVE is a drainage problem to end all drainage problems - we are talking about the volume of a hillside's-worth of water here - and 3 huge tree stumps that need to be ground; a very scary process. The water problem is more than the landscape designer could handle. We'll need to bring in the experts. (Who are these 'experts' and where can we find them?) And maybe a constant sump pump, she says. Good grief. We don't know where the water is coming from, and we're not even sure where it is going to... but she thinks we should probably peer under our house a bit. Here and there.

There's going to be huge expenses to fix the problems before we can plant a single rose or vine.

We'll get started. But I suspect that my days of lolling around in a hammock are a long way off.

Wonders of the Deep

The recent landing of a colossal squid from the depths of the ocean started me thinking about Things My Father Caught At Sea. And that prompted another perusal of the old photo albums.

I don’t think my dad had ever fished before he came to Alaska to visit. (Maybe my mother, or Judy’s mother, can correct me on that if he had.) And I think his view was that it was likely to be boring, but ‘when in Rome…’ And so we outfitted him, and off we went, on our first little boat, into the cold and vast Alaskan waters.

In those days (that makes us all sound old, doesn’t it?) fishing around Wrangell was pretty good. We usually were going for halibut, although we’d also drop a crab pot somewhere, on a line and buoy, to check on when we went home again. My dad didn’t really want to be bothered with the whole ‘bait your own hook’ stuff, nor was he interested in the tackle, or in proper ‘technique’ or any of the other things that ‘real’ fishermen obsess over. (He really wasn’t keen on the ‘you catch ‘em, you clean ‘em’ notion either.) I think at first he just wanted to dangle the line so he could stand there and gaze out over the water in hopes that a whale would wander by and put on a show. (And they obliged us just often enough to reinforce that!) But then he started catching things.

Mind you, they weren’t often edible things. His ‘personal fishing technique’ allowed him to pull up the most amazing creatures. He’d bring things up with the hook stuck in the tail fin – things we’d never even seen before. Sometimes there would be brightly colored sea anemones that he’d pulled right off the sea floor. Often we ended up fighting manta rays of some sort, or Big Mouth Uglies, starfish, eels, the occasional crab, or simply Unidentifiable Organic Matter – animal or vegetable. And over and over, in my photo albums, there he is, grinning somewhat apologetically while holding up the latest ‘catch.’

I have to add that The Big One didn’t elude him entirely. His 200 pounder made him proud!

There are many wonders of the deep. And my father was one of them!

P.S. – also in those photo albums are some pictures of Render and Jill and Cousin Judy hanging spoons on their noses at the dinner table. Hmmmmm. (Speaking of odd specimens…)

Taking a geographical cure

We've had nothing but rain. Rain, rain and more rain. Mark thinks I'm having Seasonal Affective Disorder but I just think I'm just getting a little moldy. So we decided to take a geographical cure. It seems that sunshine is just a short trip across the Cascade Mountains for us - a weather phenomenon that is the "rain shadow effect" that we probably learned about in high school.

The rivers on either side of the mountain peak are rushing. The mountain pass is still covered in snow but you can see from the picture that, on the other side, the sky is clear! Sunshine all day!!

And yes, our valley is flooded again and our bridge is closed. And looking at all that snow on the mountain we are thinking that as it all continues to melt we are in for more of the same.

Tulips should be blooming soon though! There's always something to look forward to. If we can just get out to them.

Silly Stuff About “Memory”

Some things are so set in my memory patterns that they don’t seem able to be overridden. Spelling certain words, of all things, will always, ALWAYS, be with the same pattern:

• Mississippi – emphasizing each ‘i’ – with a certain cadence.
• Encyclopedia – according to the rhythm of the Jiminy Cricket song.

Other things I'd hope would be long gone from memory will come back to me, in their entirety, with just a slight reminder: The whole “brusha brusha brusha, get the new Ipana” song, for example. (It’s dandy for your teeth!) They stopped making Ipana toothpaste in 1970-something but there it is, playing itself over and over in my head long after I can remember what pulled it out in the first place. (Wait! According to Wikipedia, Ipana is still a leading toothpaste in Turkey. Who knew? Maybe I’ll have a use for that song someday after all!)

I once won a trivia game with the knowledge that ‘007’ stands for “license to kill” in James Bond-speak. It just popped right out. That's valuable information, in storage there...

I wish I could remember my own son’s phone number, but I can’t. I can, however, still remember my high school locker combination and my college Student ID number. I certainly don’t have a need for them any longer, but there they are, taking up what I’m sure is prime real estate in my brain.

I had some friends years ago who were from Texas and were mortified every time their retarded adult son started talking about ‘wet-backs’ – which he did as soon as someone mentioned Mexican food. Very politically incorrect, but there it was. Indelibly linked subjects in his memory. Pavlovian, stimulus/response sort of thing. (Mark has a bunch of those that just drive me nuts! Probably he does that for his own amusement, because he can always trigger the same response in me then too, and that is just too ironic to pass up.)

I will always cry, automatically, every time I hear “Pomp and Circumstance” or the “Wedding March,” whether I hear them in an emotional context or not. The theme music from Disney’s “Dumbo” movie does the same thing. They are simply stored in my memory under “things to cry about” and so I do.

I can’t remember a dream when I wake up, but when I go to bed again the next night, with the bed, pillow, darkness, position etc. all a duplicate of my ‘dream state’ I can recall exactly where that dream left off. And dreams aren’t really even memories, as such.

Is it just me?

Silly stuff.

Advertising 'misses'

I'm off on another tear about advertising. Sorry. I can't help myself. Some things just need to be said.

The Super Bowl ad with the rejected car-manufacturing robot committing suicide was almost the last straw. And the perpetual parade of cleaning and cooking products sold in the 'formula' ad that just inserts a new name, feature and function into the same old script, volume and price ("But wait! That's not all!! Order now and you'll receive this ___ absolutely free!!! A $100 value, all for only $19.95!!!!") is enough to make anyone mad. Or the 'personifying' of things such as soap scum and phlegm just so we have yet another thing to KILL as if there isn’t enough violence in our lives already... Well, I could go on and on.

We’ve started receiving text messages on our cell phones that are nothing more than ads – and we are probably paying the cell phone company for the privilege of getting them besides. And several TV channels now run ads during their regular shows and over top of the scheduled program, for other programs – covering up the bottom quarter of the screen, or more. Infuriating. Telemarketing isn’t dead yet either, as we are not safe from the political or ‘charitable organization’ sectors. Particularly ‘not-dead’ is the ubiquitous Recorded Message technique. (My mother said she felt guilty for hanging up on The President several times during the last election season but he really had no call to bother her relentlessly with his political statements while she was trying to eat breakfast or read her book. He just wouldn’t stop talking.)

We have a whole sector of the economy hell-bent on annoying us with both their ‘in your face’ advertising and their ‘subtle’ product placement strategies, and then another whole sector trying to help us rid our lives of their constant intrusion. We have TIVO and pop-up blockers and ‘phish-filters’ and, yes, even psychologists on the one side and, seemingly, all of Big Media on the other. (Or actually I’d guess that there is a lot of crossover, as I think there might be in computer virus makers and computer virus fixers.) Why can’t they all just find a way to not be so obnoxious?

And who was it who decided that ‘obnoxious’ sells in the first place? I’d like to think they are missing the mark. Surely the school of thought that ‘any publicity is good publicity’ is overrated. There are many products that I simply will not buy because of the advertising. But I’m guessing that there are also many high-priced ads that I hate but can’t remember what they are advertising at all – and I probably buy those products anyway. Obnoxious it may be. But if it wasn't effective, they probably wouldn't keep doing it.

It’s not going to change, is it?

(And actually, that didn't NEED to be said. I just thought I would.)

More ‘Exploring the Earth by Satellite’

All this GPS stuff has inspired me to play around with the Google Earth program on my computer. If you haven’t downloaded this and looked to see what the Empire State Building in New York or the Great Wall in China or the Nazca Lines in Peru look like from a satellite, you are really missing some prime entertainment.

But I have to wonder, when I can see the Eiffel Tower’s incredible detail, the way that even the color of the water at Niagara Falls is pictured, or the sheer number of yellow taxis on New York City streets: what is NASA really up to?

You can practically see in the windows of the White House, but all of North Korea is a blur.

(You can’t see Bill Gates’ house with any kind of detail either. Rats.)

Knowing where you are, exactly

Mark got a GPS gadget for his birthday recently – Todd’s great idea – and now we know exactly where we are. We also know how fast we are going and at what elevation, how much time we spent stopped, and what direction we were going in when we were actually going. This has been particularly useful on the perfectly straight old-railroad-bed trail we walk on now and then. We walk at a 3.2-mph pace and when my feet start to hurt sufficiently we simply turn around until we get back to our car, so it really hasn’t been critical that we are using GPS but… Mark likes gadgets. Mark REALLY likes gadgets.

It appears to me, the uninitiated and un-geek-y, that all that the GPS screen really tells us, out in the boonies as we are, is that we are in the middle of nowhere. As in: a dot on an otherwise blank screen that says “you are here.” Uninformative, to say the least. Remember that Mark and I are the ones who walk around cities with a compass and a map and invariably head off in the wrong direction anyway because we have the map upside-down or have managed to reason that the compass is being affected by some powerful, unknown magnetic force and that North is really the way we ‘feel’ that it is, instead of the way the compass says.

Perhaps with the correct download of data this GPS thing will help us but right now it is just a conversation piece. Although I have to say that I thought our discussions were brighter and more entertaining before, with topics other than “how fast do you think we are going now?” Even smart remarks about latitude can leave me wondering how to hold up my end of the conversation.

And Mark keeps insisting: “You have to admit, it’s much better than a PDA.”

I do?

OK, they're right pretty anyway

Daffodils and Dandelions

So. The great daffodil project has come to this. The flowers are finally starting to open, but the rain and wind caused them to droop immediately to the ground and that, it seems, is where they want to stay. The weather got too cold for the pansies to fill in through the middle and, all in all, the effect isn't quite what I'd envisioned. It isn't even close.

(Even after I photo-shopped the dandelions out!)

Life is like that sometimes. I'm feeling a little sad.

85% Shinier!

My new shampoo promises to make my hair 85% shinier. In small print, actually, it qualifies that with the addition of “Get up to…” before the big claim but, still. I can’t wait to see.

But, you say – see what exactly? How will I know?

I won’t, of course. There is no practical way to determine if your hair is 35% or 50% or 82% different this week than it was last week unless it all falls out. Good grief.

Advertising hair products with un-verifiable claims is one thing, yet our news is full of equally soft “data” designed to alarm us, inspire us to some action, or justify some new social policy or law.

Recently I’ve seen reports of how “3 out of 5 children on the internet” are subject to some predator or other. How could that number have been determined? Is someone anonymously surveying children on the internet about sexual predators? I sure hope not! The end really wouldn’t justify the means, would it? Wouldn’t the ‘survey’ be part of the problem? And we know there are huge problems with ‘self-reporting’ from children – problems related to peer pressure, confused definitions, hiding other issues. Access to children for such inquiry is an ethical problem as well. Then just determining how many children are actually ON the internet is a researcher’s nightmare given variations in access, scheduling, location and probably several dozen other variables. I can’t imagine a reliable way to get at this information. And frankly, it just doesn’t pass the ‘believability’ test. I’ve been on the internet a lot myself, after all. (This is yet another set-up for policing and monitoring and 'controlling' the internet, isn't it? The end justifies the means?)

Or, we hear that “3 of every 4 people with HIV aren’t wearing a condom” because they don’t know they HAVE it, and then they are unknowingly passing disease on to their partners. Do we have a way to know, ourselves, when a person has HIV if they don’t know their own selves? I mean, huh?

These sorts of things can’t be verified; the issues can’t be quantified. Yes, we do have data collection methods that are sophisticated. But even complicated multi-variate statistical analysis has to have a starting point. Doesn’t it? Am I missing something here?

Try looking at the news in that light. We’ve made an awful lot of policy decisions - political, social, economic, medical decisions - based on ‘information’ that probably wasn’t information at all.

I’m worried about this. I don't think we are really getting shinier.

How much more can we take?

You simply can’t get away from it in the news. There are no fewer than 4 programs on TV right now with this as the subject. It is in commentary, documentary, news, and entertainment, but it is none of those things. It seems to be low comedy, high drama, legal tangles, soap opera angles and gossip fodder. It is not worthy of our attention yet the whole country’s attention would seem to be drawn to it.

Poor dear Anna Nicole. Just try getting away from her story.

Our media attention sure is drawn to the tawdry. Give us the low-class, the cheap and the pointless and, evidently, ratings will skyrocket. Those making determinations about what America wants to watch think they have our number, and they are delivering it in abundance. But even understanding that, I don’t get the single-mindedness of it all. Why are we wasting this amazing amount of brain-power cycles on THIS crap when there is so much other crap out there to choose from? Why are all the ‘choosers’ choosing Anna Nicole ALL the time?

I’m not above it entirely. I’d just like to have some choice about which crap I watch.

Isn’t anyone else tired of this story?

Dysfunctional People

Researchers have declared the new crop of college students to be more narcissistic than their predecessors.

(Well, maybe, and maybe not – I think the research was flawed but that’s another story. It is actually the conclusions that were drawn about ‘cause’ which are of interest to me here.)

The researchers blamed the ‘self-esteem movement’ in education for the change. According to Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, "Kids are self-centered enough already" and we should stop endlessly telling them how special they are. I agree. And I’d go a step further.

I think we’ve overemphasized “respect” as well as self-esteem. In the greater Seattle area there have been 4 murders committed in recent months with, incredibly, this as the reason: “He was disrespecting me.” (As in, for example, “he wouldn’t shake my hand” or “he looked at me funny.”)

Why don’t they know that respect is given by someone else, not demanded by ourselves? We can certainly be pleased when we get it, but we have no reason to be incensed if we don’t. Yet our schools have been emphasizing ‘respect’ over practically everything else, as if it is an Absolute Right, unattached to our personal responsibility. No wonder these kids – these same kids who are so Special – are off the deep end over “Disrespecting.” These are complex concepts, not simple ‘rules.’

Here's the thing: We aren’t all Special. We can make ourselves special by developing to our potential, but we aren’t the center of everyone’s universe just because we exist. And we don’t deserve respect, we earn it. Why aren't we telling our kids THAT?

Aren’t we missing some Balance here? There are hundreds of things, not just 3 or 4 things, which need to develop in our personalities as we grow up. When too much emphasis is given to a short list of politically favored and simplistically rendered themes, we end up with bulges where there should be well-rounded personalities. We end up with dysfunctional people.

And after reading the news every day, I don’t think we can afford any more of them.

Elementary school teachers and soccer moms – what WERE you thinking?



A Clinical Definition: Narcissistic people have a grandiose sense of self-importance. They are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. They believe they are "special" and unique and can only be understood by other special people. They feel entitled to things, particularly admiration. They lack empathy and they often take advantage of others to achieve their own ends.

Flexibility

I was admiring Frik – my cat – some time ago for his sense of style and for his flexibility.

Frik settles on a spot in the house to sleep and it becomes his favorite spot for days, maybe even weeks. You will always find him there, in the lap of whatever luxury he has discovered to be The Spot. Then suddenly he forsakes it entirely and finds a new favored position. It might be the chenille throw on the living room chair with the sun shining on it. Or the laps of the Raggedy Ann dolls on the guest bed – another sunny spot. For weeks it was the Pendleton wool blanket on the rocker in the bedroom, and then the basket on the table by the window overlooking the front yard, followed by the plump throw on the bottom of our bed. Fine places, all of them. Yes, he has a knack.

But there is method to his change in preferences. I tend to forget, but…

I found a near-petrified cat’s hair ball (and the accompanying, now-dried mess) on the guest room bed yesterday. The mess had spilled over onto the laps of my Raggedy Ann dolls, and onto the pillow shams, as well as the quilt. So that’s why Frik was no longer sleeping in the sun on that bed! And when I started to think about it, I realized that, with the possible exception of the chenille throw (and I will re-check that thoroughly now!) he had presented a hair ball to be cleaned up in each of his favored spots. Then they aren’t favored anymore. In fact, he won’t go near them again – resulting in his continued careful selection of Good Spots.

There is much to learn from this. Good things are to be found everywhere. When something gets ‘not good’ anymore, simply move on until someone cleans up the mess and it becomes ‘good’ again. Don’t dwell on past embarrassments or lapses of grace. Always look good, because much is overlooked when you do.

And finally: Be Flexible. This whole posting actually started out as a rant about roofers rescheduling over and over, and pictures and shelves needing to be moved because of the new window and draperies, causing a chain reaction throughout the house… All ridiculous stuff. Now I am feeling flexible and in control. All will be Good again.

I, too, have style.

And in a Post Script, we have snow again – so I had to include a picture. Will my daffodils survive?