School Gardens!

Oh, I've been feeling badly about my school gardens posts. I take it all back: I'm FOR school gardens! Almost all the time! But I'm also so tired (sometimes one of my kids gets up at four in the morning and doesn't go back to sleep) that this is the most I can say about it or anything else and if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, you didn't miss a thing!

Johnny Weir: Level-headed Super Hero

Thanks to the Fug Girls for pointing me in the direction of this Johnny Weird story. I didn't even know his gender had been questioned on air by French Canadian broadcasters, but his response to the controversy was pitch perfect. He said, among other good things: “There’s a whole generation of people that aren’t defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with. I think as a person you know what your values are and what you believe in, and I think that’s the most important thing.”

I Am Not A Guest

Yesterday, I was in Michael's craft store. It's a new-ish Michael's fairly close to where I live. I'd only been there once before. To be honest, the place makes me kind of tense. The bright aisles, the piles of cheap, cheap, cheap stuff that looks like nothing so much as landfill fodder that I nonetheless find myself buying because who can resist sparkly mosaic tiles for $3.99/bag? Plus, if I got them from Oriental Trading, there'd be shipping! The experience of being in there is something like a cross between a sense of anticipated salvation for a rainy day (art projects!) and deep depression. It's not like being a guest. No one offers me cookies when I get there, there's no place to sit, I don't even know if there's a bathroom. Not only are all the regular hosting functions abandoned, but there's hardly anyone around to help, and there are problems with my stuff at check out, meaning my kids and I have to wait around for too long while the cashier tries to solve the problem of pricing moon sand. She seemed very committed to solving the moon sand scanning and pricing problem, much more committed to the scanning, in fact, than to my comfort. So why does she insist on calling me a guest when, really, I'm just in the way when it comes to scanning moon sand? What ever happened to being a customer? If I were a customer, would I always be right? Would my needs be better considered? A customer looks for and buys things, a guests eats things and offers nice conversation. When I go to a store, I don't like to chit chat, I like to buy my stuff. Who's the marketing wizard who decided the experience of a person buying something would be improved by telling that person she's a guest and not a customer? As double speak goes it's not as dangerous as, say, "the death tax," but doublespeak is never good. Anywhere. Really, it makes me miss shopping online, where I can be a guest in my own home.

Suddenly It's Friday

I haven't had the best week and now, out of the blue, it's over. My kids are home from school because it's been snowing for two days. My son is using a mixture of flour, cornmeal and rice to establish a construction zone in the kitchen and my daughter has a Playmobil gymnastic situation going. At some point, we'll head out, but for right now, we're ll tucked in while the storm stalls above us. Sometimes, things stall.

Knitting as Golf

Last night, I set to work assembling a sweater I'd made for my daughter. This morning, I told my husband that, after thinking about it, I'd have to take out and redo much of what I did last night. When he heard this, David gave me a kind of quizzical look. Gentle, but quizzical. After a minute, he said to me, "Knitting is like golf for you. It's like you have to really master it but it's intricate. That's the way people get about golf when they decide they want to do more than just show up."

I want to think of knitting as this fun, cozy thing I do while watching TV. I can not only make nice things for people I care about but also enjoy the feeling of making something (that's not edible). But I'm not a very good knitter. Worse than that, I want to be a very good knitter. Which means that David is right. Knitting for me can be, if I'm not completely exhausted, very serious business. I hope that means it can still be fun. I mean, if it's not going to be edible, it should damn well be fun.

The Winter Olympics

I have yet to be entirely caught up in the Winter Games. Usually, the Olympics appeal to my most basic TV-loving instincts, the part of me that worships the creators of Hulu and would gladly spend hours lost on the couch. At its best, like in men's figure skating finals or women's downhill, watching the Olympics sends me back to the childhood years I spent immobile and rapt while Wide World of Sports brought me news of Ironmen Triathalons, off-year figure skating championships, rowing regattas, and various other competitions that in the pre-ESPN audience brought niche sports to the masses. What could be better than to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon inside watching the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat? That's what I think when I'm watching the Olympics and enjoying them.

When I'm not enjoying the Olympics, though, when commercial after commercial for cars and beer and highly packaged juice products take pride of place, all I can think about is how they had to ship the snow to Vancouver and how the weird weather guy from the Weather Channel told Bob Costas and the rest of us that what we were seeing "weather wise" was "March in February." At those moments I can barely keep images of Canada's now slushy tundra filling my mind's eye and blocking off the smiling faces of all the pretty people selling things on MY TV. You can see how this could seriously keep someone from falling in love with the Olympics, even if I did kind of fall in love with the Norwegian guy who won the Super G last night. He was one tall drink of fresh clean water. Who doesn't love that?

So Long, See You Tomorrow

I just finished reading William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow. I'd never heard of it and got it out of the library when someone described it as "masterful" and noted some of it is told from the perspective of a family's dog. The book is masterful, it's short, it captures the loneliness not only of childhood but of the act of remembering, and the use of the dog is just brilliant. The book is short, and it's worth spending some time with.