"That's not writing - that's typing." --Truman Capote
Imagine, if you will, a fat "plokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplok" sound from the kitchen.
Me: "What are you doing in there?"
John: "I’m filling the olive oil container. I kind of like the sound it makes."
Me: "Are you going to end up pouring olive oil all over the counter because you like the sound?"
So, what would you do if your cute man, the fixer of household brokenness, the chef de cuisine , the guy who cheerfully accompanies you to Maryland Sheep and wool (next weekend! yippee!), the fellow with the big booming laugh you just adore – yeah, that guy – what would you say if he asked you, "So, want to spend three hours on a Saturday stuffing bags for a library conference?"
If you’re me, you say, "Sure."
And you don’t just say yes because you know it scores points with the guy who already asked you to marry him, the one who loves the cats as much as you do despite the fact that they mean he has to take prescription meds just to breathe properly, the one who has never once yet said, "Do you really need more yarn?" Well, not just because of those things. You do it because you love tasks that can be finished. You love to be a cog in that "getting stuff done" machine that tends to whip up around big, intellectually undemanding, multi-volunteer projects. As far as I’m concerned, these kinds of things are fun. And in a world where too many tasks are constant, never-ending palavers with too many people having weird turf wars, it’s very cool just to show up and look around, see something that needs doing and just do it.
Yes, I may well be clinically insane. And yes, once in a while there is a really annoying person who whines or moans or gets bossy and tries to manage everyone else or who decides to monopolize the worst job in the place the better to reach their inevitable martyrhood that much sooner (and more vocally). But in this particular instance, there was nobody who did any of those things. There was just a big hotel conference room with long tables and a sort of endlessly evolving assembly line of stuff going into conference bags and people figuring out different ways of getting everything that needed to get into the bag into the bag with as much cheerful efficiency as possible.
The conversations were funny and fractured – I learned little snippets and bits about the people who were working my assembly line (I ended up assembling little packages of advertising cards that put me at a mostly static point, while other volunteers shuttled up and down the rows of tables). I learned that Len from New York is also an only child, has worked in three Catholic institutions, thinks that his work history is funny because he’s Jewish, and was a chemistry major in college. I learned that Corey has an autistic child, lives in Michigan, used to travel a lot, and has an outrageous sense of humor and a larger-than-life personality. The rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing, together with the short bursts of conversation, reminded me strongly of the way conversations during country dances are constructed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeSKfEY3NEAnd best of all? I got to go home with the cute house-fixer, cat-lover, chef de cuisine and have steak for dinner and watch Battlestar Galactica . I win.
I have a real fascination with Rube Goldberg machines. I don’t have the right sort of brain to come up with them, but I love them. When I was out visiting Marie and her family, and her kids were playing with their Mousetrap game (as opposed to playing Mousetrap, which is a very different thing), I totally understood what they were on about.
That being said, this is mind-boggling:
I am in awe.
Okay – this one’s for the serious Milo fans…
…or the serious knitting content fans (“Look, ma! Knitting!”). I’m very lucky that none of our cats are terribly interested in playing with, eating, or otherwise molesting my knitting. So here’s Milo, modeling the current status of the “Bee Fields” shawl.
And just because I’m geeky enough to want to play with Flickr video for myself, here’s the Tiny Dictator demanding his dinner in a laid-back, yet acrobatic manner:
We have both here today. It has been pouring out for most of the day – a storm system stretches from north of us in the DC area down to Savannah.
For Milo, born in a summer drought, and having lived through one almost snowless winter, this is a novelty:
For Dash, who is terrified of thunder, this is a very, very bad day. He has been clingy and moan-y, sticking close to anyone or anything who can give him comfort:
Poor little guy.
Mischief managed, as the Harry Potter fans say. My friend Daisy’s superior WordPress-fu has moved me off of Yahoo (which does some wonky things to WordPress installations) and on to her own hosting service. Dang, but she’s a fast bugstomper. We still have some odd characters showing up in old posts, courtesy of some database incompatibility and my old-fashioned insistence on a double-space after a period (what can I say? I learned to type on a typewriter), but I have WordPress 2.5 now (oooh – shiny!), and even better, I have the benefit of Wendy’s experiences in transitioning over to 2.5 and Daisy’s hosting.
Look for exciting new technological goodies in this space.
“Theres only one reason to choose a wireless company”
Good thing that reason isn’t spelling. I can tell you it’s definitely not customer service.
Ever have someone who articulates things you have been thinking about forever? Ever have someone who does this on a fairly regular basis in an incredibly eloquent way that puts your own thoughts on the subject to shame at the same time as you sigh with relief and say to yourself, “Ahhh – yes. Exactly.”?
Marissa Lingen is one of those people for me. I’ve directed my readers to her previously on the subject of only children. In her latest post, she discusses the high school experience, advice from adults on dealing with same, and how navigating the difficult waters of adolescence might not just produce a happier teenager, but a more sane, happy, whole adult.
I’ll include a few gems to whet your appetite, but if you like what you see here, please go read the whole thing. First:
Of course it’s useful if you can simply not care whether people around you are being hostile and nasty. But really, how many of us as adults can, by sheer force of will, make it totally not matter that we’re spending forty hours a week with people who are willing to be as unpleasant as they can get away with? Not many.*
and:
The win condition is that you can only remember the names of the ones who were kind and/or interesting to you. The win condition is that when you get news of something terrible happening to someone who smeared Ben Gay all over your friend’s locker or pushed another friend down the stairs or any of the other lovely things that happened in high school, you are not glad. Because you’re not just a bigger and better person than that, you’re so much bigger and better and have moved on with your life so far that you had to stop and think why that name sounded familiar. That’s what winning looks like.
and last:
But sitting down and thinking to yourself, “What would be interesting to me apart from graduation requirements and college applications and dodging the jerks at school? What do I want to be able to do?” might be a good start. Everyone has to build a life that’s irrelevant of the structures of high school eventually. Everyone has to find an identity that doesn’t involve where your locker is or who you sit with in the cafeteria. No reason not to start as soon as you can.
I was pretty lucky – I didn’t have to deal with the kind of toxic jackassery that Marissa details (in high school, at least. Middle school was another issue). But her advice and musings are instructive beyond the adolescent experience, beyond the confines of school and work. They reach to the core of a human being’s need for dignity and individual identity. I don’t know if I would have been smart enough to heed her advice then. I know I will at least try now.
*I would actually extend that statement beyond “people who are willing to be as unpleasant as they can get away with,” to a much lower bar of “people who can’t be bothered to extend the barest minimum of basic human courtesies.”