Goods and bads.

Todd and I briefly discussed Senator Ted Kennedy's death at dinner this evening. Todd has absolutely no use for the man because of Chappaquiddick. I have more ambivalent feelings--knowing that he committed negligent homicide and got away with it, and yet knowing all that he did for this country and the groundbreaking laws that he worked to pass, it's pretty hard for me to say how I feel about the guy.

It's been interesting to read and hear from people who actually knew him as a friend and who testify to Kennedy being someone who wanted desperately to help other people and to give his friends and family anything they needed that he could give.

I said to Todd that I certainly wouldn't want to be remembered only for the worst things I'd done in my life. Of course, I haven't committed anything quite as egregious as some of Kennedy's sins. (Not yet, anyway, but hey, I'm still young.)

I've wondered before, and thought of it again today, whether the biggest sinners out there might not also (if they've experienced grace and taken it to heart) be the most compassionate people out there, too. It's easier to have compassion for other people's failings when you're all too aware of your own tremendous failings. It's easier to see people's pain and regrets when you carry around a huge pile of your own. Maybe it's easier to see people as human beings who deserve rights and respect when you've been in situations where you had to take an uncomfortable look at your own humanity.

I certainly don't know if any of this is true of Senator Kennedy, but some of what I've heard and read today makes me think it might be. The Kennedy men have always interested me--such inspirational public lives, such degraded private lives. It fascinates me to read a biography and look at a life and try to balance the good and the bad in it, and Senator Kennedy's life has much larger goods and bads than most people's, that's for sure. If it's not fair to laud him without remembering Mary Jo Kopechne, I also don't think it's fair to condemn him without remembering civil rights, voting rights, rights for the disabled, OSHA, COBRA, FMLA, Title IX, AIDS research and care, Head Start, WIC, Meals on Wheels, and a host of other things that have made the U.S. a better country.

Just some stuff I was thinking about today while cleaning out the closet and listening to NPR.

I've always found this eulogy he gave for his brother Robert to be extremely moving.

Stuff.

My local thrift store mostly carries new-ish dull stuff. I usually just stop in to check out the books (they have TONS of books!) and then take a stroll around the edges and find nothing. Once or twice I've found some cute old saucers...that's about it.

But yesterday I found this for 95¢:

The frame is dinged up, so last night I taped off the middle gold bit and the outer gold bit and tried to just paint the wood part. But I ended up having to paint the inner gold edge, too. Here's what it looks like--I also rubbed it with some walnut ink on paper towel.

I honestly can't tell if I improved it or not. Paint frightens me. It's so...irrevocable.

I was thinking about sanding it a tiny bit, applying some antique gold leaf pen over that gold edge, and then hitting the whole thing with a coat of sealer. What do you think?

It looks really nice on my teal walls here in the study! I love the little cottage. There was a matching one with a barn in a snow scene, but the colors weren't quite right for my house. I may go back this morning and give it another look, though.

I'm going to ponder now...you may want to step back and put on your safety glasses....

I was talking with my friend Cheryl several weeks ago, about decluttering and getting rid of stuff, and she was saying that she could get rid of an item and still keep the memory attached to it. She didn't need to hang onto things to still have the memory.

I wish I was a little more like that! My whole house is full of things that spark a memory and that makes it harder and harder to purge or to get rid of things (esp. furniture) that don't work in this house.

That thought led me to this thought...I recently bought a couple of small vintage items from an Etsy seller, and it was a dissatisfying experience. I clicked on the screen, and they came in a box in the mail--I didn't have to go out and look for them. There was no memory attached. I still like the items and will use them, but there's something missing.

And those thoughts both came to mind in the past week or so, as I've been very heavily surfing around looking for home decorating blogs for remodeling ideas. I was honestly starting to get a complex because so many of the homes looked so grown-up. So well-coordinated and professional. Lots of bits and bobs from T.J. Maxx and Home Goods and Target, and expensive-looking Pottery Barn-ish decor. Tablescapes and little vignettes on foyer hutches. My home started to feel like a kid's house to me, like it's full of random things I've grabbed and squirreled away with no plan.

Actually, that's exactly what my home is--my DH and I are basically large kids, and our home IS full of random things we've squirreled away. That's what makes it cluttered sometimes and kind of goofy and full of memories from all our treasures.

So I decided to try not to feel bad about other people's grown-up houses. I like old stuff. I collect old stuff and books and yard sale things. I put it together the best way I know how, but it's definitely never going to look like a Pottery Barn ad.

I always like reading about the houses in The Shell Seekers by Rosamund Pilcher--there's a London house and a Cornwall cottage and a house in Majorca, I think, and she describes them all in much the same way--full of comfortable furniture and beautiful old things and good food and flowers. Sounds good to me.

This is not to say that there can't be a memory attached to a Target tchotchke. I'm sure there can. But since I like old stuff and have to make trips off the beaten path to find it, there's more of a treasure hunt aspect to the memory, and there's more likely to be a person along with me on the hunt, who then becomes all wrapped up in the memory and the warm feeling I get when I look at the item.

I really do own stuff from Target and even a duvet cover from the Pottery Barn outlet. Which isn't enough to make me hang with the cool kids, but I'm not completely averse to big-store stuff! I've started to feel uncomfortable with the "Made in China" label that's on so many of those things, though. That more than anything is what's driven me more and more to look at different sources for home items. We've gotten rid of all the unique and beautiful things that we used to make here in the U.S. But that's a pondering for another time...

Sometime soon when I have more time, I'll show off some of my favorite home decorations that have a memory. I think that might be fun!

Remembrance of technology past.

Today I was at the grocery store and my friend called me. I pulled out my cell phone, the cell phone I had just taken off the charger and placed in my purse less than 24 hours ago, and it was almost dead.

So when I came home I searched around for the closest landline phone to call her back. It was sitting on the coffee table, and it was dead, too.

So I came upstairs and searched through two rooms for another landline phone. Finally found one that was charged.

(The third landline phone gave up the ghost entirely about 6 months ago and is sitting on Todd's study shelf waiting to be assumed into the heaven of useless plastic things.)

More and more lately, I find my thoughts turning to the bright and lovely days when I had one phone. It was 1992. Todd and I had just returned from our honeymoon and one of the many things we needed to buy for our crummy Pittsburgh newlywed apartment was a phone.

We bought a fun, cream-colored plastic phone with oversized number buttons. Remember when phones had big buttons? These were even bigger than normal. It had a nice chunky handset that you could wrap your whole hand around because it was narrow in the middle and wide and round at the talking and hearing ends. Remember that nice shape? You could tuck it between your ear and shoulder and it stayed put, so you could talk while you washed a couple of dishes or stirred a pot on the stove. And the cradle could go on the wall or on a table. (I liked the wall mount, personally.) And it had a nice long springy cord that you could absentmindedly wrap around your finger while you talked.

Every time you picked it up, it had a dial tone--unless there was a power outage or some other problem out of your control. Nothing you had to do about it, nothing you could do about it, just wait till the power came back on. And you never had to search for it--it was right there, on the wall, where you put it. Since you couldn't walk all over the house with it, it stayed where it was supposed to be and you didn't have to cock your head like a dog and try to figure out which direction the ringing noise was coming from.

And it was cheap. I don't remember what we paid for it, but since we had virtually no money, I can't imagine it was more than $20. And that phone lasted us about ten years, and I'm sure would have lasted longer had we not upgraded our technology at some point and gotten fancy phones.

Well, I want my old phone back. And the answering machine that went with it. I'm tired of these tiny phones that I have to pinch between my fingers to hold onto. I'm tired of having to dial into voicemail. I'm tired of having to sit motionless and not get anything done while I talk on the phone because I can't hold it on my shoulder and use both hands to do something. I'm tired of all these complicated calling plans and contracts that I can never remember the details of.

I have warmer feelings toward my cell phone, but I want one that will last ten years and not become obsolete every six months. I want one that will hold a charge. I want one with a less-annoying beep when I miss a call, and it would be nice if it would catch every voicemail and not inform me I have one that's six months old, and then not inform me of another that I don't catch till six months later.

Why do we race headlong toward owning so many things that add more and more layers of frustration and annoyance to each day? I was in a terrific mood this morning, and then all my phones started failing me, and now I want to smack somebody upside the head.

I wonder if we ever threw out that old big-button phone? Maybe it's in a box somewhere...

Steamed and pressed.

I hate to iron. Lord, how I hate it!

Wouldn't it be nice if men's shirts came with a tag that said, "WARNING: Although this shirt looks perfectly wonderful hanging on this hangar, it has been constructed in such a way that the minute it is exposed to a washer and dryer, it will immediately curl into a tight, wrinkled ball of Rubik's Cube-ian impossibility. At that point, it will vanish into the depths of your closet, never to emerge until your semi-yearly clean-out at which point it will proceed directly to the nearest charity thrift shop. So don't waste your money!"

Because you can't tell. You just can't tell! We've bought 100% cotton, we've bought cotton/synthetic blends, we've bought cheap shirts, we've bought expensive shirts, and there is absolutely no way to determine which ones will be wonderfully wrinkle-free and which ones will, well, not.

My home economics training was sadly lacking on all counts, but never more than in the ironing department. I had a toy ironing board and a little iron, but somehow that early indoctrination failed to translate into real-world expertise.

I know my mom ironed, and I can remember ironing a few skirts and dresses in high school and college when I absolutely had to (in college, on the floor on a folded towel, as I recall), but I never learned how to iron a man's shirt. I guess that's because my dad's good shirts all originated in the Era of Polyester, also known as the 70's. They were made of the same indestructible substance as his sport jackets and dress pants, which not only never needed ironing, they could simply be hosed off when a stain occurred, as the plastic fibers were impermeable to liquids of all kinds.

Now I have a husband who works a white-collar job that sadly does not require white collars, which could just be sent out to the dry cleaners. His casual-dress job calls for Dockers and casual long-sleeve dress shirts in plaids and dark solids, hardly worth a dry cleaner trip and fee.

So after two weeks of dawdling, I finally ironed the shirts that have been draped across the chest at the end of our bed. And they honestly don't look any better. I try re-tumbling them in the dryer, sometimes with a damp washcloth, but as our dryer is responsible for much of the wrinkling because it's a small stackable, that doesn't really do any good. And it doesn't help those awful buttonhole strips on the front at all. Why do they always, always wrinkle up like the ruffles on a pirate shirt? Some of Todd's shirts don't wrinkle one little bit, except for the buttonhole part. Why???

I always burn myself at least once, too, which doesn't endear me to the job at all. And I can't figure out how to iron sleeves, or that flat part across the upper back.

We've managed to get our wardrobes to the point where they need virtually no ironing, but every now and then a wrinkly shirt sneaks through. I'm always hearing about people who iron sheets and underwear and I cannot fathom the depths of boredom a person would have to sink to to consider that a worthy pastime.

So now Todd's ironed shirts hang neatly in his closet. He's not allowed to wear them ever again.

My late-night problem.

Barenaked Ladies:

There's so much joy in life,
so many pleasures all around
But the pleasure of insomnia
is one I've never found
With all life has to offer,
there's so much to be enjoyed
But the pleasures of insomnia
are ones I can't avoid

And the flipside of the problem--R.E.M.:

I see today with a newsprint fray
My night is colored headache grey
Don't wake me with so much.
The ocean machine is set to nine
I'll squeeze into heaven and valentine
My bed is pulling me,
Gravity
Daysleeper. Daysleeper.

I have to be up at 6. I've just come to accept that I'm an insomniac, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Time to toss.

I finally figured out why it gets harder and harder for me to conduct my periodic purges of all our excess stuff--it's because the older I get, the more things I have that have memories attached to them, and the less I want to toss either the item or the memory.

Even things that might not have meant much to me when I acquired them develop this coating of meaning--where I bought them, what I was doing then, places they've lived with me.

Knowing why doesn't make it any easier to figure out what to keep and what to toss, though. In particular, since we've moved to this house, I've disposed of things that I'd held onto for years. Most of it went without a backward glance on my part, but now after three or four clean sweeps in 2 1/2 years, we're getting down to the nitty gritty.

The crazy thing is that this house isn't small--I mean it's certainly not on the level that most people seem to be living in nowadays, but it's a three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath normal medium-size house with the requisite amount of closets and whatnot. But with no basement and a one-car garage, we lose out on a lot of storage space that people in other parts of the country take for granted. Oh, for a basement!

And we're losing storage space, if you can believe it--the new bed is too low for all my under-the-bed storage boxes, and the vanity we've chosen for the guest bathroom, when we get around to tackling that, has drawers instead of cupboards, so all my little boxes and our games will have to find a new home someday. So silly!

So, like I said, it's nitty gritty time. Time for all those projects that never got done and all those bits of things I've been saving to be hauled out and disposed of. We're planning a yard sale in a couple of weeks, and I plan to go through every closet and box!

It's funny to contrast our situation with what my grandparents' lives have been like. Married for 65 years, and in the same house for all of those years, they both went to an assisted living facility this spring, and my parents and various other family members have been slowly emptying the house of years and years of accumulated stuff. Grandma and Grandpa never had to throw anything away--they had six bedrooms, an attic, a basement, a barn, Grandpa's old auto body shop, and a few other outbuildings to store things in.

Even if they could have thrown stuff away, they probably wouldn't have--growing up in the Depression years, raising eight kids on very little money, they hung onto everything because they never knew when they might need it. Mom found boxes full of Styrofoam peanuts and plastic bags in one of the bedrooms. I've personally witnessed the fortress of National Geographics in the attic over the kitchen.

Part of me wishes I could live my life that way. Although I don't like clutter, and I get weighed down when my belongings start to pile up too much, it would be interesting to just live in one spot forever and hang onto whatever I wanted. We've moved seven times in 16 years of marriage, and we still haven't gotten to a house that can hold us and all our hobbies comfortably!

On the other hand, maybe it won't be as hard for us when the time comes for us to purge our stuff once and for all and move into whatever old age facility we can afford. (The way the 401k is looking right now, that may be a cardboard box!) Having moved pretty regularly, having gotten used to assessing what to keep and what to toss, maybe we're gaining a flexibility that will be a benefit to us later on.

Now if we could just curtail our yard sale addiction...!

Truth, and siding, for sale.

So I'm downstairs this morning, tidying up the kitchen, eating a nice late breakfast, just getting ready to sit down with a cup of tea for a minute, and then I spot them out the window, coming up the street.

The Jehovah's Witnesses.

At least I assume they're Jehovah's Witnesses--three African-American ladies, nicely dressed, a couple of them pushing strollers. They were through here a couple of weeks ago and I hid then, too.

Yes, I drop what I'm doing in mid-tea sip, close the front door which is standing wide open, and pop upstairs so they can't spot me through the windows, ignoring their knocks.

I have lived in many different neighborhoods in my adult life, and never have I been subjected to as much prosetylization (is that a word? Blogger says no) as in this neighborhood. If it's not the Witnesses, it's the Mormons, and if it's not the Mormons, it's the home improvement companies. What is it about this neighborhood that makes these people think I might be even remotely open to buying their religion or their storm windows?

There's enough daylight crime in this town that I've simply stopped answering the door when I'm home alone unless someone I know is standing there. But it still feels like an invasion of privacy when they come up on my porch and can see me through my front door and windows unless I run and hide.

What's the solution? It's so irritating!

Como se llama?

Just poking my head in to say...there's only one reason I wish I'd had kids. Not for the companionship or the joy of knowing my genes will carry on forever, or the hours of potty training, homework and driver's ed.

I wish I'd had kids so I could have named them. I have some strong opinions on weird made-up names, and I always felt that parenthood would be my chance to strike a blow for nice, normal, pretty, traditional names.

(I know my name isn't exactly traditional, but I do think it's normal and pretty. Now my parents did make up my sister's name, as far as I can tell: Jenita. I think it's pretty, too, and maybe not totally normal, but not crazy, either! And at least they didn't give it one of those semi-literate spellings that are all the rage nowadays. Today my poor sister would be named JyNee'tah or something worse.)

Anyway, I stumbled across this site the other day and it's given me such reading pleasure I thought I'd pass it along:

Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing

A chicken in every crockpot.

Was it Herbert Hoover that promised a chicken in every pot when he was running for President? Maybe it was Coolidge...

Anyway, maybe that's something today's candidates should get behind. Or maybe not. Because chickens are gross.

I don't cook a whole bird very often, but I just wrestled one out of its skin-tight plastic and into the crockpot. And it was soooo grooooosss! Jamming my hand down in to get the little gizzard packet (shudder) and rinsing its slippery little body off and then cramming lemons, onions and celery up its butt, and then dusting it with spices. It's like handling a dead baby. (shudder again.)

I feel bad about being ooked out by poultry, since I am merely one hop on the family tree away from people who butchered, scalded, plucked and cleaned their own poultry routinely--my mom and her parents, my dad and his parents. Seems like I'm not far away enough, genetically, to have developed the aversion so soon.

But come to think of it, my dad avoided eating chicken for years and years because he claimed he could smell the chicken yard stink even on a cooked bird, so maybe my aversion isn't that irrational.

Todd says that a dead chicken carcass is nowhere near as disgusting as a freshly killed rabbit carcass, and that when the intestines are pulled out of a dead rabbit, you can see all the little rabbit poop pellets inside them. Ulp. That sort of makes the unlaid eggs I once saw inside a freshly butchered chicken seem almost sweet and wholesome.

I know there's a lot to be said for knowing where your meat comes from, especially in light of all these tainted meat scares and nasty corporate farming practices. But there's a lot to be said for neat, cut-up bits of meat from the grocery store, too.

Anyway, we're having chicken tonight--want to come over??? There should be plenty, because I think I lost my appetite!!

Pants rant.

I've got these yoga pants that I mostly love. Except when I have to do any actual exertion in them. It's cooled off here the last few days, so I've been wearing pants instead of shorts for my daily walk, and I don't know who decided that exercisewear should be as unabsorbent as possible, but I'd like to smack him. Because you just know it was a him.

My yoga pants are rare and prized possessions, because if you think plus-size exercise clothes are hard to come by--and they are--they're nothing compared to plus-size petite exercise clothes. It's apparently crossed very few people's minds that there may be some short pudgy girls out there in the world and that they might want to get some exercise to rectify their pudginess, since there's obviously nothing they can do about their shortness.

So I got a wonderful pair of petite XL yoga pants at Land's End several years ago, and then because Land's End stopped making the wonderful yoga pants before I could get any more (of course), I also have two slightly less wonderful pairs from L. L. Bean.

I checked the label on my Land's End pants after my walk today and they're apparently 39% cotton, which you'd think would have some sort of cooling effect. However, they're also 48% nylon, and that's where the problem lies. These pants feel exactly like the navy blue polyester bellbottoms I used to wear in grade school, when I'd go out and play a hearty game of kickball at recess and then come inside and sit in a damp, gooey waist-to-ankles mass of man-made "fabric" that never dried.

That's exactly how these pants feel. And grade school flashbacks are seldom enjoyable for me.

I just can't understand why clothes made for sweating should be made of the worst possible material for letting sweat evaporate.

If you know of any flattering black petite XL exercise pants made for short pudgy girls who actually sweat, let me know, won't you?

Tagged.

I'll stop itching (and bitching) for a couple minutes, since I was tagged by Lora, who has a lovely little blog called Sketch Shak with some great sketches for scrapbook pages--and incidentally, she's running a RAK challenge over there right now, so go check it out. Thanks, Lora! This one's been making the rounds of the blogs, I think...

Seven Random Facts about Me:

-I love old (pre-1965) movies. Some of my faves: Casablanca, The Manchurian Candidate, Laura, To Be or Not To Be, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

-I can't curl my tongue.

-Spelling and grammar mistakes drive me nuts, especially in published books or magazine articles.

-I have the same middle name as my mother and my grandmother, and I asked my brother to pass it along to his daughter when she was born, to keep it going.

-I love to sing, absolutely love it. I still have those fantasies where I stand and sing into a mixing spoon and pretend it's a microphone and I'm on stage in front of an adoring crowd!

-Part of me secretly wants a really old fifties car to tool around in, a convertible with big fins.

-I am dying for the next Harry Potter book to come out, yet I don't want to read it and have the whole thing be over with.

I won't tag anyone else, but if you haven't done this one yet, do it!

A more perfect me.

The weeks after Christmas always follow the same script: Janelle tugs worriedly, hand over hand, at the skinny rope attached to the household that is slowly, slowly teetering on the brink of collapse.

At least that's how it feels. In the lead-up to Christmas, I neglect the house even more than I usually do, thinking that when January 1 comes, that will be the perfect time to pull everything back into shape for the New Year. January 1 is like my magic "do over" date.

So after Christmas, there are presents to shoehorn into storage spots, and closets to go through, and always complete rehaulings of at least one room if not more, while trying to pick up the clutter that has gathered in every room, and maybe scrape a layer of dirt off stuff, too. Oh, and all the Christmas decor to put away, which is always horrible...all the magical wonderful holiday stuff that has brightened your month, now just another loathsome chore to be added to the long list.

This is the time of year we often buy furniture or new storage set-ups, which require lots of rearranging. Last year at this time we were dismantling one household while trying to prepare a new household for habitation. I've been thanking God on bended knee every day lately that I don't have to do THAT again this year.

Finances always need attention after Christmas too--enter the receipts, bring the accounts up-to-date, file the last of this year's paperwork and set up folders for next year's paperwork. Shudder at the sums you've spent on Christmas and, worse, on after-Christmas sales, and calculate how many months into 2007 you'll be paying off your spending orgy. (The past couple weeks have been abnormally hard on my credit card.)

Now I'm up very late tonight feeling some major anxiety pangs...not quite sure about what. Just everything, I guess. I have such a long list of chores for the next couple of weeks, and an even longer list of goals for the upcoming year. Spend less, eat less, clean more, walk more, get organized, get life figured out. It's making me twitchy.

Bad housewife.

There's a thread at Two Peas this morning about towels and how frequently you wash them. I'm dumbfounded at how many people wash them after each use, because they don't want to dry their face with the section that dried their butt the day before. Or because skin cells and dust mites give them the heebie-jeebies. Or whatever.

The lone guy on the thread said:

Um, WHAT?

People do that?

I guess I better not reveal here how long my bath towel goes between washes...

I have to go sit next to him...because there's no way I'd reveal how long towels go between washes around here.

I always have to lurk in shame on these kinds of discussion threads...when the wives and moms on the board start chatting about how often the sheets get washed, or the best way to dust blinds, or how to wash baseboards.

People do that? Wash baseboards? Really?

In my defense, I come from a long line of haphazard housewives. I mean, we all do our best, and there's no out-and-out filth in my house, but cleaning is at the very bottom of my daily necessity list. I try to give things a swipe as I go along, or else just ignore them until Todd gets fed up and does something about it--an excellent scheme, particularly with vacuuming, which I hate.

Part of it is that we don't have kids or pets, so things don't get as dirty here as they do when kids are smearing things on the walls and grinding them into the carpet, or when pets are leaving pounds of hair on every flat surface and vomiting nasty things up.

Still, I fear it says bad things about me that I was shocked to hear someone say she has four bathrooms and what a pain it is to clean them every day.

Every day?

People do that?

Stranded.

Many bloggers are talking about the Kim family right now, and their ordeal. I was so happy to hear that the Kims' little girls were safe, but it's terribly sad about their father. At first I was shocked that in the twenty-first century, a family could still get stranded and exposed to the elements for a week, and that a dad could die in the cold trying to get help...then I started thinking about the years we lived in Idaho.

Here in the east, being in such an isolated place seems almost unreal, but out there it's all too real. I started remembering the weekend day trips Todd and I would take into the hills, through mud and snow drifts, down dirt roads and up over ridges. If we'd gotten stuck, no one would have known where we were or where to look.

Todd would also head into the mountains to pan for gold, usually alone, and an accident could easily have been fatal since I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint exactly where he was.

And in our trips to and from Salt Lake City in the fall and winter, if we'd had to take back roads for any reason, we would have been just as isolated, and again, no one would know where we were. We used to just take off and never inform anyone where we were going or that we were leaving town.

It makes me shiver a little now, thinking about it. We manage to close Nature out most of the time, but it certainly doesn't take much to remind you how little control any of us have.

Monday stuff.

Today's blogging challenge at Two Peas:

1- your worst habit? Procrastination.
2- your best feature? I guess my toes are kind of cute.
3- what you like most about your significant other/spouse? To keep it G-rated, I'll say...his big brown eyes with long lashes.
4- if you could travel anywhere, where would it be? Switzerland/Germany/Alps.
5- what do you admire most in a dear friend you have? I'm going to pick two friends--I admire my friend Bev for her twisted sense of humor, and I admire my friend Cheryl for her outgoingness (is that a word?).

Now, a holiday PSA:

I picked up Wintersong at Target today, which is Sarah McLachlan's new holiday album. It's lovely. LOVELY.

When you were a kid, did you ever lie under the Christmas tree at night and stare up through the branches at all the lights and squint your eyes to make them all flow together? This album would be the perfect thing to have playing softly if you were to relive that memory this year. Very soft, very quiet, a little melancholy as all of Sarah's stuff is, but melancholy in a nice way. And oh, that voice. I recommend it!

Learning to think.

This is a rough piece I wrote a few weeks ago...it was sort of a late-night insomnia session. It's not polished, but I wanted to get it out there before I forgot all about it.

Learning to Think

The strangest memories come into your mind at night when you’re heading toward sleep. Tonight I found myself thinking about some of the people in my early life who taught me how to think.

In eighth grade, I attended a fundamentalist Christian school, and we got a new and different teacher. For one thing, he was male. For another thing, he was from outside the church’s little community. I think he was a Christian, and I know he was at least a religious person, but he wasn’t part of the fundamentalist evangelical group of teachers I’d always had. Mr. French was my homeroom and history teacher that year.

I was lucky to have many good teachers in my school years, but Mr. French looms large. He talked to all of us like we were adults, which was a heady and novel feeling for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. (I vividly remember sitting in the cafeteria talking with him about the 1984 presidential primaries, and this fabulous feeling of being listened to and respected for what I had to say—which couldn’t have been all that profound.) He had a tremendous sense of humor, which was also a new thing in a teacher. More importantly for me, he was the very first teacher I had who showed me the glimmering of a new idea: that I could listen and assess everything that was told and taught to me, and that I could question it.

I was a very serious and…I don’t want to say gullible...child, but I definitely took the voice of authority as truth. And elementary education, and religious elementary education in particular, is all about learning to follow rules, to trust in authority, to believe what you’re told. Mr. French was the first person I remember in my entire life who punctured that bubble for me, and encouraged the questioning and skepticism I was already starting to feel.

A year or two after that, our church hired a support minister for the first time. This was a unique hire, because David Byer was a backsliding sinner from way back. Brought up in the Mennonite Church, he married and put his family through a lot of miserable years of wild living. His kids were roughly my age, and around the time we all entered adolescence, he came back into the fold, pulled his life together, and entered the ministry at our church. I believe he had some formal education, but I think he was also working on more seminary education while he worked at the church.

David became our youth group Sunday School teacher. This was around 1985-86…I was in tenth grade. One of the prevailing issues in the Mennonite Church at that time was the Reagan administration’s military build-up, the arms race, our attitudes toward the Soviet Union, and how a peace church should respond to all that. David had a unique perspective because he’d grown up in Canada and saw the United States more critically than many of us were raised to.

As I was still attending the fundamentalist school, I was hearing a lot of hyper-patriotic, hyper-conservative stuff in Bible class and chapel. The religious right was flexing its muscle for the first time, and there was a quasi-religious belief in Reagan and the U.S. and our military that seems familiar now but I think was a new thing then. New to me at 15 and 16 years old, anyway.

Sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs in the church library, David challenged all of us to look at the things we were hearing in school and on the news, and again, to question the things that so many people around us took as Truth—the ultimate rightness of the U.S., no matter what our actions, the glory of our military power, and the supreme evil of our enemy. What were the reasons for this attitude? What could be the benefit of making everyone believe in it? And what would be the result if people chose not to believe it?

It wasn’t very long before David backslid once again…his job and marriage dissolved, and a lot of people were hurt by his betrayal. But I always appreciated the perspective he gave me at a time when I really needed it. Like Mr. French, he saw the world I lived in from the point of view of an outsider. As an outsider, he was perfectly positioned to help me see my world in a new light. I’ve always felt like an outsider in my own life. Both of these men helped me see the value in that, and helped me to think critically about what passed for truth all around me.

A couple more years passed, and I ended up at a small liberal-arts college…an insulated community with its own set of truths and rules. As a freshman history major, I landed on day one in European History 115 with Dr. Bill Hartel. I will never forget those afternoons hunched over a desk with the fall light pouring through the window, and this feeling of absolute giddiness as I learned things I hadn’t known before, and looked at the things I already knew in a whole new way. I remember it so clearly because it was the first time I’d ever felt that way in a classroom.

Dr. Hartel was all about making connections, cause and effect. He taught European history backwards…we started in the present-day, which was the beginnings of the collapse of the Soviet Union at that point in time, and worked our way backwards through that semester and the next. I learned to read critically, and even though many of our texts were biased toward his own left-leaning point of view, he was able to help us see through the bias in everything we read. He was one of the professors who taught me, at age 18, how to read. Really read.

Again, Dr. Hartel was an outsider…an elderly holdover from the radical sixties, right down to his sandals and his bicycle. Sporting a tank-top and shorts most of the year, he was a complete anomaly on our buttoned-down preppy campus. And his classes were scary—but I remember the feeling of exhilaration after closing my blue-book and walking out of a final exam, and knowing I had not only given him what he wanted but woven a lot of my own thoughts and conclusions into the exam essays, and done it well. Which was probably what he wanted even more.

I had Dr. Hartel for several more classes, including American Foreign Relations, which was a semester full of knocking down accepted truths, and although we didn’t part well, I have always remembered him with tremendous respect, as I think just about every history major from that time does. He passed away a few years after I left college, and now has a program in his name that provides mini-grants for students who want to pursue activist causes.

It's interesting that it was primarily male teachers who taught me how to think. I had so many wonderful female teachers, and learned so much from them, but these three men are the ones who taught me to question, and thus, to think.

Thursday night musings.

We're in the glory days of fall down here, and I'm loving the gorgeous trees. Our backyard keeps getting prettier everyday...I need to take a bunch of pictures and figure out how to stitch them together to give the scope of it. Here's a glimpse, though.

Soon the leaves will all fall and the houses across the ravine will magically be revealed again. And soon we'll have been here for one whole year. Amazing.

I get so impatient to overhaul this house and get things exactly how I want them...it's easy for me to forget that we've already done a lot and that it will just take more time to get to the rest.

I was poking around on Ali Edwards' blog last night and she had a list of books she was reading. I checked out one of the books on the list and found a link for another book that sounded like just what I need. So I went to Borders and picked it up today.

The book is The Creative License by Danny Gregory. It appears to be a book where you draw your way toward a more general creative renewal. Tons of drawings and hand-lettered text. I brought it home and read on the back deck in the last few moments of daylight tonight, and I'm already inspired.

I used to draw. Not a lot, but I took a couple classes, and I had a knack for it. Then when I was doing paper-piecing patterns for a company, and teaching my own classes, I had to do simple drawing for that, too. But it's been years and years since I just sat down and drew something.

There's one book that taught me how to draw, and one book that taught me how to write. The drawing book is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Right brain/left brain is a more familiar concept now than it was 15 years ago when I first read the book, but her descriptions of the right-brain shift still inspire me. It's bliss, sheer bliss, when you're cruising along comfortably in right-brain mode. It's Nirvana. It feels like ages since I've been there!

The book that taught me how to write was the classic Writing Down the Bones, which is actually a book that can teach you how to live if you let it. I encountered both those books at about the same time, when I was newly-married, newly dropped from college, and trying to pull myself out of a depression. They helped.

Anyway, this new book is one of those books where you read a little, do an exercise, read a little more, do another exercise. I'm terrible about just reading the whole book and not bothering to get around to the exercises. (The Artist's Way is one of my guilty books...such good stuff but such a feeling of failure for not trying the system!) I am really going to try not to do that this time!

I've mentioned here a few times that scrapbooking and paper crafting has lost its pleasure for me, and that trying to forcibly re-capture it is not enjoyable. If it were only that one thing, I think I could just move on, but the fact is that I seem to have lost much of my creative impulse. I used to decorate for holidays, decorate my home, switch knick-knacks and pictures around, write for myself, make cards, make gifts...that impulse just feels dead inside me now. When I think about doing anything, I get very anxious and just go turn on the TV or come to the computer and lose myself in reading about other people's creativity. If I do finally accomplish something, it's after weeks and weeks of putting it off, studying it, doing a little bit, putting it off some more...I used to just plunge into stuff! I don't know what's wrong with me.

Some of it is laziness, for sure. Some of it is that I don't want to make any kind of mess that I'll have to clean up...I feel like I'm teetering on the edge of chaos a lot of days, and I fear that a mess will push me and the whole household over. Some of it is money--I am terrified to spend it and feel guilty when I do. That definitely saps the pleasure. Not that spending money is always essential, but a lot of ideas require at least some outlay.

And I think some of it is that wayward part of ourselves--a part that seems especially well-developed in me--that resists doing what we know would make us feel better. Why are humans so contrary?

Gregory puts a brutal quote in the beginning of his book:

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses."--Henry Miller.

Why do we do that? Why do I do that?

So I'm going to draw. I'll let you know how it goes.