I'm Back . . .

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Things have piled up, and I’ve let my responsibilities to friends and even myself slide. Loads of illnesses, crises, and just plain laziness have kept me away.

I’ve started attending church, a local Episcopal church, after about twenty-five years away. I grew up in the Methodist Church but left once I got too big for my parents to drag, and haven’t been back except for weddings and funerals – and few of them. Maybe not even a few – I went to my brother’s wedding in 1995 and my maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I refuse to go to any of my parents’ weddings (there have been three, I think) on the excuse that I didn’t go to the one where they married each other. That’s not really the reason. I’m suspicious of anything that requires new clothes, to paraphrase Thoreau. The church I’m going to now has no dress code, so I can get away with jeans and t-shirts. Perfect.

My mother is married to a Lutheran minister, so naturally she wants me to find a Lutheran church. I don’t think they’re quite as gay-friendly as the Episcopalians, and, in any case, they’ve got prayer books, too, so I might just as well learn the ways of the Episcopalians as the Lutherans. At least the church I’m attending is gay-friendly without being a gay church.

I’m still baffled as to when to stand up, sit down, and find my place in either the prayer book or the hymnal, but I’ll learn. I’m starting a new blog devoted strictly to church questions, debates, and what-not, so I’ll leave that for now and give you the link once I have a post on it.

The great news is that Kaye is finished teaching! All she has to do is give two exams, grade them, and post the grades. She should be done for real by Thursday, at the latest, although she doesn’t officially retire until September 1st as there is some rule somewhere that you can only retire on the 1st of a month. (I assume months where the 1st falls on a weekend let you retire on the 2nd or 3rd.) We’re both looking forward to her well-earned freedom after teaching for some forty years. She’s been at NCSU since 1970.

Hope everyone (and everybody’s cat) is well. See you in the funny papers.

Flying vs. U-haul

My mother is in Minnesota (a long way from North Carolina) this week because her husband’s daughter is graduating from St. Olaf’s. (Well-done, Katie!) When I saw that my mother was to be out of the area for about a week just for one graduation ceremony (I didn’t even go the less than two miles to attend my last two, but that’s me), I asked her if they were driving, thinking maybe they were moving Katie out or something. No, they’re flying. You could not get me to fly to anywhere you couldn’t drive to. Before 2001, my flying experience has been expensive, hectic, uncomfortable, and unreliable (lost luggage, etc.). Since then, I’m not even going to try. Somehow I would be detained as a terrorist because I have screws in my neck that I could no doubt take out and poke somebody to death with in my last remaining seconds. Too much trouble. But no, they’re not driving that far. How crazy am I? (I thought maybe they were bringing Katie’s stuff home with a U-haul or something.) So I asked why she was staying all that time away from home, since she and her husband are flying. Her response was weird to me. She said she’d never been to Minnesota before and wanted to see as much of it as possible. What, she’s going to a giant mall? I always thought that the whole point of flying was that you could leave North Carolina Friday, see the ceremony Saturday (let’s say it’s a Saturday), and be back home Sunday.

Weird.

I’m feeling better but a bit butchered after Tuesday’s minor surgery. They always make it sound as if it will be just a little “discomfort” and not screaming pain -- and I always fall for it. Some of us never learn.

Recognition and Thanks

Kaye and I have been together for twenty-three years today. It’s never something that’s noted by anyone, though at least my mother has known the date for a good many years now. I feel pretty sure that she’s sent my brother and his wife anniversary cards since September, 1996. It’s not that I want any fuss. In practical terms, I’m somewhat relieved that it goes unnoticed. I’m somewhat reserved, and in this case, Kaye is more so. I’m happy, proud and lucky to have Kaye, and that’s the important thing by far. It’s just maddening somehow that other people don’t recognize us as a couple like any other. I guess that’s because there is no couple to match us.

If there is someone out there pulling the strings, I would like to say thank you.

Room to Make Big Mistakes

I think I can say with some confidence that I can now play “Frère Jacques” on the guitar, at least the embarrassingly easy version I have. Still, I’m not getting the buzz on the chord that I was originally getting. I’m still struggling to move from A7 to D (the reverse is pretty easy). If I can do that by Wednesday, I will consider the week a success. I believe there’s a G chord in one of the songs I haven’t looked at much yet. You have to start somewhere, and my problem was more knowing where than being willing to practice. The will to practice so far comes from an intense desire to play anything but what I’m playing. That, and the fact that my mother doubts I’ll be at this for more than a couple of months. That’ll do, for a start.

Borrowing from the Dixie Chicks, I now have a room to make big mistakes in.

Please Don't Make Me Go

The Atlantic has a great article out, “Caring for Your Introvert” that explains what it’s like to be shy to all the normal people who don’t know.  I don’t mean just shy.  I mean, have to work my way up to an event (which can be going to the grocery store) and recuperate the rest of the day.  I talk other people’s ears off when I get an attentive ear; I just don’t like conversations about nothing, aka small talk.  If I start talking about something real, it scares people, and if I don’t say anything, they are afraid of me (I’m pretty sure) and see me as the neighborhood Boo Radley (forgetting that he actually saves Scout in the end and was just shy).  I think Bob Dylan is shy, for instance, and probably not as much of a jerk as he’s come across as sometimes.  The guy probably just wants to be left alone.  At least I’m going to assume that’s the situation.

Diddums and driftington have already brought the subject of shyness up, but I’m going to add to it so that the three people who read my blog will see it even if they don’t check out their posts. 

My name is not Snark, and I am an introvert.

I have gotten myself into a nasty spot within my own family, just because I can't stand the idea of being with all of them at once.  It isn't any one person.  It's the zoo aspect of it.  I don't like to go to movies; I wait for the DVD to come out.  I love the Harry Potter series so much that for book 6, I think, I went to the bookstore at midnight to see if I could get the book earlier than 1:30 PM.  I had a real panic attack.  I had a similar reaction at Disney World (my mom took me one year) when they started the parade.  When I went into Home Depot, I almost lost it between the number of screwdrivers available, the vastness of the place, and the number of people who wanted to help me.  

So if there are any normal people out there, just don't assume that the loners are all potential terrorists.  Some of us are just shy.

Studying the Guitar

I’m hoping to begin guitar lessons next month. It’s really prohibitively expensive, but (potentially) priceless. And I’d do it on a month-to-month basis, so if I don’t like it or start living on couscous, I can bail. It’s just these four nice guitars I have staring at me, and twenty years of music I’ve bought – and sometimes learned – with the idea that sooner or later, I’d have time for it. When I was programming, I didn’t have time for it. Sometimes I went in at 6:00 AM and left at 11:00 PM. Once, I even got called at home at 11:30 PM after working until 11:00. The message was waiting for me when I got home. Grad school and teaching didn’t leave me with loads of free time, either. Now I have loads of free time and am overwhelmed by all my choices. I don’t expect much sympathy here. But I think I need guidance to move from classical to folk guitar.

Of course, my mother said that I was just always starting new things and never finishing them. I beg to differ (yes, we’ve been down this road before) – who comes up with the finish lines? I can read English better because of having studied French, Spanish and Italian, however sporadically. The cognates help with the words I’ve never seen before (mostly these came up in a few of the “Play for Rice” questions). That’s not nothing. All learning is good, if sometimes painful. I may never be able to speak these languages – and that’s never been my goal: I want to be able to read them and maybe understand them. My mother knows nothing about living in the moment. Funny, I talk to a former teacher who’s now a friend, and she always encourages my ventures. There’s never any of this “What happened to your conversion to Judaism?” or whatever. I learned something going to Temple. I learned a lot trying to piece things together. I could whine on, but I just want to say in really big font:

I DON’T HAVE TO BECOME AN EXPERT AT SOMETHING FOR STUDYING IT TO BE WORTHWHILE!

Is this a mother thing, or did I just get lucky? If she had her way in this wicked world, I’d do one thing for my entire life. Rant over. For now.

I Know It's Somewhere in the House . . .

Thanks to msnbc.com, I have discovered that I have a newly-defined psychiatric disorder, and so does Kaye: hoarding. Apparently, it’s genetic, which makes sense, knowing Memaw and Kaye’s father. We haven’t approached their level of “but this might be useful someday,” but I’m loathe to throw things out (except when I go on a purge and inevitably wind up throwing away something I have to buy again later). Kaye is more likely just to bring home some “perfectly good” something that’s being thrown out. Well, it may not be “perfectly good,” but it’s certainly functional and a waste to throw it out. “Kaye!” I say. “We are two people! We don’t need seventeen office chairs!” Well, I guess we’ll both have to be medicated and counseled into the neatness of Mom and Chris. I don’t know whether anyone on her side of the family can keep house, having only been to her brother’s house once, in 1985, and our place was neat then. I am relieved that we have not been able to pass this gene on to any children. I do take solace in that.

Happy Birthday, Chris

On this date in 1970, I became a big sister to a baby boy named "Chris." I was a little put out that he wasn’t a sister, but I could tell Mommy liked him, so I suggested going back to the hospital the next week and getting a sister. Somehow, that never came through. Anyway, to start with, I thought he was interesting and he grew to think I was important. We’re both pretty much over that phase now, I think.

Happy Birthday, little brother.

I Wonder as I Wander

I talked with my mother this afternoon. I talk with my mother on a more-or-less daily basis. She is willing to take my calls once a day. It sounds worse than it is, I guess. I mean, if I had to listen to me go on about nothing every day, I’d never answer the phone if it could possibly be me. Today, I was going on about the guitar and methods to try to use to learn it. She said, basically, that I start a bunch of things but never finish them. To a certain extent, this is true. To a certain extent, it may be a neurological quirk. Whatever the case, though, it is a characteristic my mother believes I should work to get out of. And, I might add, it is characteristic that she believes it. She is very goal-oriented.

“Say something in Italian,” she says, mocking the fact that I have worked at Italian (to read Dante), Spanish (because it’s everywhere) and French (because I am of French descent, actually have college and graduate credits proclaiming that I should know something, live with a French teacher and am close friends with a French woman). I also went through a short-lived Hebrew phase when I was considering converting to Judaism. That venture is a story in itself. “Ciao,” I said. What’s it to her, I ask, if I shift gears now and then? I’m not a great multitasker. I tend to take to one thing for almost my entire waking hours and really immerse myself in it. I am trying to make myself do at least a bit of this or that unless I have a really good reason not to, but I’m not expecting to win a Nobel or anything at this point. The thing is, my mother hasn’t done anything like play the guitar or learn a foreign language. She went from high school to marriage and business school to motherhood to bookkeeper/secretarial work to college to teaching high school to retirement and remarriage. I’m not saying she didn’t accomplish anything; I’m saying she’s lived a normal life, worked very hard, and kept two kids and a husband under control. Well, I never burned anything down or got arrested, anyway. No one’s had much luck keeping me under control, which is what this is about, I guess.

The fact that I earned a BS, BA and MA mean nothing because I am not using them to make money (because I am disabled). She hasn’t said that, but I think that’s what she thinks. My brother and sister-in-law have said as much. While I did expect to be working after graduation (and I did work – for five years as a programmer and seven as a college freshman composition teacher), I went to college primarily because I like to learn. I had hoped to keep learning and helping others learn.

What I devote my time to now is learning. What I try to do is observe and learn the mechanics of things I appreciate so that I can create something. To me, the observation is at least as important as creation. Anything tangential that comes from it is purely that: tangential. To that end, I’ve played at the Personality Forge building chat-bots and becoming obsessed with how other bots work, am studying and gradually putting into play Internet languages and trying to learn usable programming languages, since what I know won’t get me anywhere in Windows, and I did enjoy programming. I was actually good at it once. I’m working on and off with paints, charcoal, pencil, digital camera and camcorders, guitar (leaving banjo, sax, flute, clarinet, piano and recorders on the back burner due to the passage of time), doing close readings of various literary works as well as reading for knowledge and perspective. (I consider pretty much all reading fun.) I play at chess. I watch movies on DVD, and, once every twenty years or so, I go to a concert.

The thing is, I’ve felt pretty bad about the whole “you can’t do everything” situation since about the time I turned forty. Click here if you want to see a typical self-centered English major take on the situation. Suddenly I realized that time is passing and I’m all over the map. I am working on and culling a lifetime to-do list. But I think my mom, who is a responsible, decent human being – don’t get me wrong (she might read this) – needs to have an itinerary for everything, whereas I start off somewhere and explore. For instance, I might start off with the Arlo concert to reading a book about Woody to learning more about Huntington’s disease. Then I might volunteer some time for an organization about Huntington’s disease. I never know what I’ll be up to from day to day.

But what is life for? I wonder as I wander . . .

My New Guitar

I’ve been reading Ed Cray’s Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie the past couple of days. Somewhere in the house is another Woody biography that I read a few years back when I “discovered” Arlo. Having neurological problems that cause psychiatric problems and problems with fine motor skills, I’m drawn to his plight. His time and place on this earth didn’t help any. It’s a good read. I may finally read The Grapes of Wrath, which I was supposed to read in high school. Instead, I got my mom, who was then the bookkeeper at my high school (mortifying, but it had its perks) to get me the Cliff’s Notes, and I copied them in the teachers’ lounge for everyone in my class. Fortunately, we were a special GT class, so I only needed seven copies.

Yesterday, I was seized by an insane desire – no, desperation – to buy a twelve-string guitar, having seen Arlo, read about Woody, playing around on my other guitars (classical, acoustic, electric and now twelve-string). I will be paying for this whim for the next four months or so. Ah, well. There are worse things to throw money at. And I’m working on building up calluses. So far all I’ve got are near-blisters. The problem is that the only lessons I had were in classical guitar, but that’s not what I want to play. I want to play folk music. So what I know now is how to read music and play it on the guitar. Unfortunately, most folk music is written in tablature or chords, which I have yet to learn. I understand the concept; it’s just that I can’t understand why tablature was necessary when we already had a perfectly good musical notation system in place. So I guess I’ll be keeping myself motivated. Oh, I’m left-handed, too.

I’ll be off of the Guthries and onto something else soon enough, in case you’re sick of it. I get hell-bent on something and then get distracted by something else. Wonder why I haven’t achieved what I’d hoped to in life?

You Made Me a Pallet on the Floor

My conscience has been bugging me lately. My mother and her husband, a Lutheran minister, just had someone neither of them knew spend the night at the parsonage because he was going to speak to the congregation Sunday about some Christian something-or-other. I said, “Mom, you cannot let total strangers spend the night in your house just because they’ve heard of Jesus!” I mean, who knows, he could still be a lunatic. I know a lot of lunatic Christians. Fortunately, everything turned out fine, and my mother promised never to do that again. I think there must be a Motel 6 or something in the vicinity. The church could pay for the room. That way, the probably nice person could have a place to stay without being inside my mother’s house while everybody’s asleep. I was flashing back to when Memaw let some people stay with her because they were from Panama. Memaw and Gran-Gran were in the Panama Canal Zone during World War II, as my grandfather was blind in one eye and therefore not eligible for military duty. He was in the Civil Service, teaching ESL to the Panamanians while Memaw worked as a nurse and then had my mother. Anyway, the fact that these people were from Panama was enough for Memaw. She let them in. They stayed forever. We weren’t sure that they were actually taking anything (except food), but they were starting to make even Memaw uncomfortable, so my uncle Carl had to show them the door. I e-mailed my brother, Chris, suggesting he do the same for Mom. He’s more dangerous than I am. I would never let strangers spend the night in my house, yet . . . it goes against my principles. One of my favorite songs is by the Weavers, and it goes like this:

You made me a pallet on the floor.
Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

I was broke and so dissatisfied.
I was broke and so dissatisfied.
I was broke and dissatisfied and I nearly died,
And then you made me a pallet on the floor.

Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
You made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

I don’t want to see this town no more.
Don’t ever want to see this town no more.
But if I ever do, it’ll be on account of you
Because you made me a pallet on your floor.

Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
You made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

So don’t turn a stranger from your home.
Don’t you ever turn a stranger from your home, oh no.
Don’t turn a stranger from your home.
The day may come when you’ll be roamin’
Looking for a pallet on the floor.

You may be looking for a pallet on the floor.
You may be looking for a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

Apparently, my humanity flies out the window when it threatens not merely my safety but my privacy. The fact that Kaye also thinks we shouldn’t let total strangers stay here overnight lets me tell myself that even if I were the kind of person I wish I were, it wouldn’t do any good to the poor people with no place to stay. But it is nagging at my conscience. What kind of person am I? I don’t much like the evidence. Seems I just want to make myself look like a nicer person.

I Don’t Have Time to Do That

I have just blown the whole day, pretty much, sleeping in and trying to shake the migraine I’ve been semi-ignoring for seven entire days now. It’s not working, so I’m still pretending it’s not there. I suppose there’s the off chance that I have a brain tumor or something real, but that never occurs to me with these headaches. Those things just live for people like me. I don’t know what “like me” means, exactly, but what I’m saying is that I have decided that they are sentient beings and they hate me. Maybe because in the past I have successfully killed them off with one narcotic or another and they see me as genocidal. But my migraine’s probably not why you stopped by.

I called my mother this afternoon. Whenever I mention something that I think is interesting or that she should do because no one should go without it, about 99 percent of the time, she puts on her exasperated mother voice and says, “I don’t have time for that!” You know, when people say this to me, somehow I take it personally. It’s like she’s saying it must be wonderful to be me because “most people just don’t have time to do things like that.” She has time. I checked, and, sure enough, she has the same twenty-four hours a day that I do. And she’s retired! She just thinks I do stupid things, it sounds like to me.

She does some weird things herself, but somehow I don’t say, “Mom, I don’t have time for that” nearly as much to her as she says it to me. I mean, she’s retired and does these sorts of things: go to Lutheran Women’s meetings, go tape next week’s children’s sermon that her husband does for the children, cook, clean, watch news constantly, and, most annoying of all, she substitutes in the schools. To do this, she has to keep up her teaching certificate and go to dumb Mickey-Mouse education workshops (trust me, I’ve been in them and they are pointless). She actually seems to like this. So she doesn’t have time to do whatever I mention.

To be fair, she did give me a hint as to what I could do to get the paragraphs back in the “Here’s to Bill” piece. That’s what was wrong with the layout of my blog today. It was one big chunk of prose, and I had included paragraph breaks. So I went in the html and surrounded the paragraphs with paragraph tags, and that fixed it. I understand those tags. What I don’t understand is why they suddenly became necessary.

So between the migraine and the format issues, this being a new blog and all, I’m haven’t had much time to have a life worth writing about. I hope this trend turns around soon.

I mean, I don’t have time for that.