August With Elephant
Archive for August 2009
August With Elephant
August 25, 2009Hypocrisy/Stress – A Sticky Wicket
August 24, 2009Lately, I chew gum on my subway home. I believe/hope this is mainly a sign of stress. (See e.g. post “From Rat Race to Rat Rut” about the increased formation of repetitive habits under pressure.)
It is also probably a sign of hunger. Prices and choices in midtown Manhattan lead to frequently skipped lunches. Even custom-made salads begin to taste like vinaigretted plastic (plus chickpeas) with enough repetition. (Although, frankly, this dullness in the lunch area may be another sign of stress, i.e. the shrinking of that part of my brain devoted to executive decision-making, or, in other words, my work-induced inability to risk blue cheese.)
On the one hand, the chewing is horrible: it looks completely dumb and makes my jaw ache. And the taste (like the wonder of many new-found delights) soon dissipates no matter how much I stuff in.
On the other hand, it also feels kind of good. As I chew (rapidly and with some determination), my wait on the humid, griddle-like platform seems somehow more under control. My chewing may not make the train come faster, but at least it makes me feel more purposeful. Or at least it makes my mouth feel purposeful. Purposeful and silent. (A benefit, perhaps, if you consider gum chewing preferable to babbling.)
The problem is that, while I have an instinctual distrust of babbling, I was actually trained to hate gum chewing. This training, however, seems to allow me to chew with great heartiness. Because, given the voices in my head, I simply can’t see myself as a gum chewer. No matter how many sticks (that is, squares) I jam in. (At least three or four at once)
I also know I’d never chew gum because of my paranoia of whatever makes it sweet. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to keep (i) sugar away from teeth and (ii) fake sugar away from my internal organs.
(Chomp chomp.)
I’m so confident in my non-gum chewing, in fact, that lately I buy a new pack almost every other day.
Even though it’s the kind of thing I never touch.
Anniversary
August 22, 2009
Catskill Mountain Wedding With Elephants
Mist
Mist rises over lake like fish jumping
like heart wishing like eye
blinking like memory crying like fir boughs
sighing like awe inspiring, like hope
dying (not needed, not even considered), like
dawn breaking like
love making like
water curling in its fall,
like head on lap on
lips on lips on hips
on you on me, like
fingers fingering,
brushing against a nipple,
or being brushed
like something somewhere
sure of joy,
like the thing itself.
All rights reserved.
Going On Somewhere
August 21, 2009Porch
The porch pulled them to its side,
invited nestling upon shaded planks,
recalled cool soft times, clover in fields,
the day she cut his hair, and then they picked
out smooth flat stones
and lined them along its surface, thick with
years of knobby deck paint. Against it,
the stones shone like perfect moons to plant upon
winter table tops, reminders
that nights sown by fireflies
were going on somewhere, some time.
All rights reserved.
Friday!!!
August 21, 2009
What I Hope To Do This Weekend
Single Parenting – A Bit Of A Lump
August 20, 2009What do you do when you turn around and realize that your truly wonderful, generous, sweet child has become a bit of a, you know, lump?
I’m not talking about weight gain.
I’m talking about sitting there. Or lying there. Curled around a laptop computer. Or cell phone. Surrounded by dirty dishes. A half-full cup of juice or tea balancing. A peach pit to the side.
Wait a second. Make that a laptop computer only. Because at about 1 a.m. the child realizes he or she has lost their cell phone.
They don’t know how it could have happened.
It being 1 a.m. you don’t feel like starting a lengthy discourse on the demerits of a bag (used as purse or messenger bag) that doesn’t close and from which you, as parent, have repeatedly witnessed things fall.
But seriously, how did it happen?
I’m not talking about the loss of the cell phone.
It’s possible that some single parents are stern taskmasters. They know they can’t do everything and make that clear to their children at an early age. They inculcate chores.
But some single parents (ahem) find it easier to just do the chores themselves. They hate to cajole, nag, fight. Such single parents value the household harmony achieved from separation from a mate; they can’t bear to disturb that peace with harsh words about undone dishes, unclean rooms, untaken-out garbage. “You’ve got to choose your battles,” such parents insist.
And then these parents are surprised by the sudden realization that there is a bit of a lump sitting on the couch. Texting or IMing into the night. Surrounded by food-smudged dishware. Who’s just misplaced something.
Boot camp is difficult to carry out. A maiden aunt may be useful in this area. Or a martial arts instructor.
Or maybe you yourself can muster the requisite sternness. Consistency can be hard to maintain for a single parent who has, historically, hated confrontation, but it’s worth a try.
Because here’s the point: one some level, the missing cell phone is actually the byproduct of the sofa’s dirty dishes. An extension of parentally-enabled inattention.
But how to impress that fact on a child, a truly wonderful child, who’s somehow gotten, well, just a little bit lumpy?
You may have to get really quite mad.
(At a certain point, this can generally be arranged.)
FINAL NOTE – Many single parents (i.e. people like me) have repeatedly through their lives lost cell phones, keys, wallets, keys, glasses, credit cards, keys, clothing, dog leashes, keys, important documents, credit cards, glasses, keys, etc., even when they pride themselves on their dish-doing, and would hate for people to characterize them as in any way lumpy. So all tongue in cheek, please.
Check out 1 Mississippi at link above.
Niceness – Writing – “Oh Plunge Your Hands In Water”
August 19, 2009I was thinking today about women from my generation–I don’t quite want to confess what generation that is, let’s just say that we are just old enough to actually remember when President Kennedy was shot–and the internal pressure many of us feel to be “nice.”
We are sometimes accused these days of being overly nice, or artificial or precious in our niceness, or just plain mamby-pamby. This really is maddening. Some of us are still too well-trained to get openly mad about these unfair characterizations, but they are still upsetting.
This piece deals with that issue indirectly. It was actually a writing exercise, written with my writing buddy, in a ten or fifteen minute session based on the phrase “Plunge Your Hands in Water” from the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” By W.H. Auden.
(The Auden poem is simply wonderful. Here’s a link to an online copy: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-i-walked-out-one-evening-3/.)
The piece has been slightly edited since the original exercise, but it really still is an exercise. (Sorry.)
(Final point re my Blocking Writer’s Block series – a line from a poem can be a great starting point for a writing exercise. While your exercise may be quite different from the poem, your work will may still get some depth from such an elevated jumping off point.)
“Plunge Your Hands in Water” – W.H. Auden
At my elementary school cafeteria, the tiles were blue green grey and the trash cans were an amalgam of ketchup and fishstick skins and small red milk cartons usually half full. The women were large and wore white stiff dresses like nurses. They served the food in surgically cut portions on brown cafeteria trays, which were topped with mauve or yellow plates, the colors of everything an illustration of the word “faded.” Their big rounded hair curved around their heads like the double breast that curved from their fronts, the hips from their sides. It was good food–we all knew that–good meaning solid. No one used the word nutrition much back then; what we knew was meat and starch, ketchup and pickle.
We sat at long tables, whose benches folded out; the tables were cleaned with vinegar water and the whole placed smelled of the Golgotha Christ, his side or head or thirst, a reminder that we were all there, undeservedly, to be saved.
We were supposed to sit still but I dreamt that everyone ran from gorillas who chased us from spot to spot–through the lunch line, inbetween the line and the tables, then from the tables to the garbage cans. They were big furry gorillas who ran on two legs, their forearms outstretched as they chased, while we ran, ran to do what we were supposed to do, and then sat where we were supposed to.
It was an old-fashioned school; ice cream did not appear for some years. When it did, all hell broke loose. No one would eat anything else and Scott entertained us all with taking the chocolate coating from his ice cream bar and spreading ketchup and mustard on the vanilla ice cream, then re-anointing it with its chocolate sheathe. The girls squealed in horror, the boys howled and scowled, as he took a big smiling bite, the ketchup/mustard smearing his lips with variegated orange like a fire-eater’s. The girls pretended to bend over in nausea, and Scott looked like he felt incredibly cool for a time, though he was a troubled boy, a sad boy, a boy on whom I felt somehow that belts had been used, and who, in first grade, sometimes peed in the little classroom bathroom with the door open. I felt it my duty to always smile at him, and he, in turn, sent me a letter covered in huge slanted writing I LOVE YOU.
I felt sadder than ever for Scott watching him eat that ice cream, thinking of his open-doored pee, and kept my head down, only looking up with the corners of my eyes, and even then trying to focus on the gorillas, the chase, and the fact that if I sat exactly where I was supposed to, they wouldn’t be able to get me, and maybe not anyone, no matter how they circled.
From Rat Race to Rat Rut
August 18, 2009In the Science Times section of today’s New York Times (August 18, 2009), is a great article about the effects of stress on brain circuitry. (“Brain is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop” by Natalie Angier.)
Ms. Angier reports a study by Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute in Portugal which described how chronically stressed rats succumbed to habitual and seemingly compulsive routines (like repeatedly pressing a bar for food pellets that they had no intention of eating). The study found that underlying changes had actually taken place in the brains of these rats, with decision-making and goal-oriented areas of the brain shrinking, and areas related to habit-formation swelling.
As Ms. Angier writes, the stressed rodents “were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race, rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers.”
In other words, the stressed rats got into a rut, dug, in part, by their own brains.
There’s no clear answer to why the stressed brain is so prone to habit formation. One possibility posited in the article is that the brain in crisis may try to shunt activities to automatic pilot simply to free up space for bigger questions. Which, because of the concomitant weakening of the ability to make decisions, the stressed brain just can’t deal with.
Ah.
This syndrome sounds familiar. Especially the compulsively pressing the lever part. (Although it’s a bit hard to imagine any kind of food pellet I wouldn’t eat when under stress.)
Still, after reading the article, I came up with the following list.
Ten Signs That You May Be A Rat in a Rut. (Or How To Know If Your Brain’s In Stress.)
1. When you are not sitting at a computer, you check your blackberry every few minutes, even on an underground subway train.
2. You check your blackberry when stepping out of the subway just to see how long it takes to get service back. You study the little flashing arrows as you climb the subway stairs, conscious of your breath.
3. If, after a while, no one’s written, you start to open spam. Just to clear it out. Just in case there’s something that’s not spam. You even open some of the messages for p*n*s enl*rg*m*nt. (Yes, you’re a woman, but you’re only checking those to see how they managed to get through your spam filter.)
4. When someone on the phone talks of an article they’ve read, you find it online before they finish their sentence. (At least you think they haven’t finished their sentence. You were doing a Google search so you’re not really sure.)
5. You convince yourself that your interest in Robert Pattinson is a sociological study of our media/youth culture. (Oh that RPatz! Oh those Paparazzi!) You are alternatively amazed at how little and how much is on Google News in the articles posted on Pattinson during the “Last Hour.”
6. You peruse the sales of online retailers even though you have no money, and (thankfully) no pressing needs. When you buy something, you congratulate yourself on how much you saved.
7. You check all the stocks that have gone up dramatically in the last few months but that you did not buy. (You studiously avoid checking stocks you own, hoping that you can not check those long enough to forget what they were.)
8. You find yourself reading the same books again and again. These books are fantasies in which unreal things happen to unreal people, ending happily. You don’t find the books especially satisfying after the tenth read, but, on the other hand, they are also not disturbing.
9. Your eyes are sore at night. When you wake up the next morning, they are still sore. Even so, you reach for your laptop and/or blackberry first thing. You decide that a glare screen is the only solution, and shop for one online, looking for sales.
10. Your daughter shouts from the other room at about 9:45 p.m, “are we going to have dinner soon?” You are working on a computer that has no glare screen. “Just a minute,” you tell her some time later.
(Wait, what did they say about food pellets?)
If you are more interested in elephants swimming than rats racing, check out 1 Mississippi at the link above or on Amazon.
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