The oldest you've ever been

When I was 5 years old, I fell asleep on the school bus one morning.

It must have been January. I remember that for two reasons: 1) it was cold and snowy, and 2) a girl in my class named LeAnne had recently gotten a pair of enviable puffy purple snow boots for Christmas which she relentlessly talked about and wore nonstop, even indoors. In contrast, I had a pair of hand-me-down canvas fake-Keds shoes which had probably started out white but by the time they became mine they had taken on that very special shade of drabbyshabbysadness. When I walked through snow, it would collect into the peeled glue seam between the sole and the fabric, then soak through as it melted getting my socks all wet.

I remember waking up alone, peeling my droolyface off of the brown plastic seat cover, and realizing that the bus was silent, frigid, and utterly empty. The kids had all been dropped off. The driver had parked the bus and gone. I remember instantly feeling like this unpleasant situation was most definitely my fault. Then, I recall realizing that the sooner I could fix the situation by getting off the bus and finding my way back to kindergarten, the less fallout there would be for my personal sin of falling asleep on the bus.

I had seen the bus driver make the door open countless times -- it involved some combination of magic knobs and switches and a gigantic lever. With trial, error, and herculean kid-strength, I managed to swing the lever and get the door open. The bus was parked in a large open-ended barn in a great big grassy field with all the other school buses, behind the Springerville Public Library where my Mom sometimes took us to check out books. I knew that up over the hill and down the other side I'd find the elementary school, so I just started walking. Uphill in the snow. Seemed like the logical choice.

It's almost a mile. Sheesh.
I'd honestly never mapped it until just now.

When I got to the school, I went to the spot on the sidewalk where the bus usually dropped off; where the playground gates were usually open; where the nice recess lady Mrs. Kasoose was usually standing with a welcoming smile. Instead, the gates were locked and the playground was deserted.

I climbed over the chain-link fence.  I stumbled my way down the hill and into the front doors to the school office. My shoes were icy, my sweater was drenched, my hands were numb, my ears were on fire, my nose was runny. I was crying with embarrassment, apologizing over and over for falling asleep and missing class and causing so much trouble.

Did I mention I was 5?
My 5-year-old self interpreted this whole thing wildly differently than my adult self.
My adult self sees a littlebitty kid without good winter clothes abandoned in a locked bus then walking a mile in the snow uphill in January alone. My adult self thinks that no kindergartner could possibly stack up to that.
My 5-year-old self just saw a problem and did her best job at fixing it.

Here's my hypothesis:
At any given moment, you are the oldest you've ever been. Thus, maybe in the moment you're more likely to perceive yourself as capable, whereas in hindsight (with the benefit of being even older) you aren't going to think you were even remotely suited to the task. Maybe you're doing things right now simply because you don't know you can't.

At the time, 5 years old was the oldest I'd ever been.
  The most wise.
     The most qualified.
        The most experienced.
I didn't know that I was a littlebitty kid who couldn't handle that. I probably would've sagely agreed that a 3 or 4 year old couldn't do it, but I must have been pretty certain that by the ripe old age of 5 years I was just supposed to take care of business.

Right now, I'm 34. It's the oldest I've ever been.
   The most "wise."
      The most "qualified."
         The most "experienced."
What should I tackle now, before I realize I can't?

 

Potluck Casseroles and the new breed of Wild West Outlaw

This is amazing! For the first 25 years of my life I engaged in criminal activity and didn't even know it. If you live in Arizona, you've probably committed the crime, too.

It turns out that according to a strict reading of the law it is illegal to have a potluck dinner outside of the workplace in the state of Arizona.  "Noncommercial social events" are only exempt from food safety regulations and health department inspections if they occur "at a workplace."  By extension, that means if a potluck is held in your house or a non-business location like a church, it's against the law. People who break this law can be fined or even arrested for the crime.

In 2013, a dude hosting a potluck in his trailer at Golden Acres Mobile Home Park in Apache Junction, AZ, managed to upset his neighbor somehow. The neighbor complained to the authorities that the little-known potluck law was being flagrantly broken, leading to an investigation into whether the dude should be punished for allowing TaterTot Casserole and Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise onto the premises.

There's legislation underway to get the law modified to something less ridiculously prohibitive. (Arizona House of Representatives bill HB 2341 ...you can't make this stuff up.)

In the meantime, beware all you scofflaws and church potluck goers!
Beware all the lawbreaking baby shower hostesses!
You are the criminal element, and you didn't even realize it!

Béla Bartók and Eating your vegetables

Classical music is beautiful. It makes sense to the ears.

20th century modern music, on the other hand, sort of makes me want to either fall asleep or run from the room in self-defense to keep the heinous pseudo-music from making my ears bleed. It's dissonant, rhythmless, and thorny. It makes me feel like I'm not smart or classy enough to understand and appreciate it; like I'm endlessly trying to "get it" but never even remotely close to succeeding.


Basically, this creepy piece of modern art looks
how 20th century composers' music sounds.
I don't understand it. Please make it go away.
Crud, I just insulted art. Why am I so closed-minded?
Maybe if I shut my eyes and plug my ears
it will be gone when I open them?

Here's the trouble: It seems like whenever a conductor plans a concert, there's a nefarious plot to lure you in with promises of Mozart (yay!) or Beethoven (heck yes!), or Strauss and Liszt and Brahms (swoon!), all while secretly planning to pack the program chock full of weird bizarro random modern stuff while you're not looking. 
It's as though they feel a compulsion to make you eat your vegetables (Charles Ives) and drink your codliver oil (Antonín Dvořák) before you can have dessert (Bach).

For Valentine's Day, I went to see Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. True to form, the first hour of the program was spent fighting off the unwanted advances of 20th century composers. 
But then a strange thing happened: they played a Bartók piece and I didn't hate it. There were even moments that *gasp* I legitimately liked!

Naturally, the shock of it drove me toward reading up a little to figure out why this particular Bartók piece was so tolerably un-Bartók-ian. It turns out that there are a few good potential reasons for it. 

1. European and American composers in the late 1930's to early 1940's were all trending away from modern and back toward populist music at the time. Maybe he was simply staying on-trend?

2. He had been ill for several years with polycythemia, a condition in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells and not enough of anything else. He likely knew this would be his last concerto before he died. Perhaps he wanted to leave the world with something that was a little gentler on the ears as his final legacy?

3. This reason is my favorite:  He and his second wife, Ditta Pasztory Bartók (a concert pianist), had arrived penniless to New York just a few years earlier and they had no assets; no realistic means to support Ditta after Béla died. He wrote the 3rd concerto with her in mind, so that she could perform it to support herself after he was gone. It had to be something that
(A) she would like,
(B) she could play, and
(C) people would pay to hear. 
Given the circumstances, I'm betting the last criterion may have been the most important of all. So he lightened up on the uncompromising dissonance and the prickly untrackable rhythms, and finally used his enormous musical talents to kindly write some melodies and harmonies for us.
     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

It gets a little sticky at that point if you think about it, though, doesn't it?
The composer lives his whole life with pretty rigid artistic integrity, trying to champion a type of musical progress that he believes in, only to backslide toward something more traditional at the very end?

 

Does writing something un-Bartók-ian for a final chance at financial security make him a sellout? Or a savvy business man? A good husband? Or a traitor to his own artistic cause?
Someone who has studied a lot more music history and theory would be better-suited to answer that. All I know is that I didn't hate it.

Unexpected Roses are red, Violets are blue...

I may run the risk of being expelled from the Female race for admitting this, but I've never understood the appeal of getting flowers.

For many years, it would've sounded like sour grapes to say that.
If (hypothetically, of course), this girl in red:

spends Valentine's Day sulking around muttering "What's the point of getting flowers, anyway?" it tends to smack of bitterness rather than honesty. (The story behind this picture is an entirely other blog post waiting to happen. Aren't those lovely sailboats in the background, though?)

But really, truly, honestly, with all the glorious adolescent years well behind me, I'm going to come out and say it.  What's the point of getting flowers, anyway?
If society has appointed a day, and created an expectation, and commercially done everything possible to coerce people into buying and giving flowers, doesn't that deflate the sweetness right out of the gesture?

But this week I think I finally understood it!
I came in to work after-hours to help a lady, and out of nowhere she gave me flowers to thank me.

These are them!
They're sitting on my kitchen table
causing happiness at this very moment.

There was no expectation, no social contract, no holiday obligation, no rule that told her she was supposed to do that. I didn't need them or anticipate them. I wouldn't have been resentful or embarrassed if she hadn't brought them.
And maybe that's exactly what made it so nice that she did.
I found myself walking home along a dark drizzling Seattle street, in possession of six beautiful roses in a delicate little vase, thinking how nice it is to get flowers.

 

Giant Cinderella

There's currently an epic battle between my rational adult self and my inner child who loved the rags-to-riches story of Cinderella and all things sparkly/delicate/glass.

First, the story:

This is an actual building recently completed in Budai township on the coast of Taiwan.
   Aside from being a 55 foot tall x 36 foot wide stiletto high heel...
   Aside from being a shiny homage to the structural triangle....
   Aside from reminding me of that episode of the Brady Bunch where Mr. Brady was supposed to design the factory headquarters for a cosmetics company in the shape of a lipstick...
   Aside from being a conspicuously expensive Sex In the City icon in the middle of an impoverished region...
   Aside from all that, apparently it is a church.

Not merely a church, but a church specifically intended to attract women to visit.
Not visit to worship (since it won't even offer regular church services), but visit to throw fancy weddings and serve as a "blissful, romantic avenue" for photo shoots. They serve tea and cakes inside.
----------------------------
Now, the internal battle between my thoughts:
A. It's like a freak tornado picked up a piece of Disneyland and dropped it off on a random beach in Taiwan. I can practically picture 200 little girls still packed inside that giant shoe shortly after the tornado touched down, wearing their Frozen costumes, wondering why the building was shaking, why the view out the window doesn't look like 'Merica anymore, and impatiently asking their parents when the Disney Princesses are going to show up to take selfies with them.

B. Ooooooh. Preeettty.  Clean lines. Great light.

C. Ewwwwww. Tacky.  Giant shoe. Giant freaking shoe.

D. It's a bit patronizingly on-the-nose, isn't it? Building a shiny glass slipper as a way to lure women to visit? Don't bother trying to draw us in with ideas, roads to personal growth, a sense of community, or a chance to be involved in something greater than ourselves. Just build us a sparkly shoe, and we'll show up in mindless droves, compelled by the Uterine Gods to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Highest High Heel.

Pilgims, all.

E. I have a deep and difficult-to-articulate objection to claiming this structure is a church. There appears to be nothing to worship there, except vanity and money.


In the name of the Dollar, the Yen, and the Holy Gulden: Amen.

F. The "blissful, romantic" building was apparently inspired by a love story. *swoon*
   ...except that it's more of a tragic horror story. According to local history, there was a girl who was hoping to get married but instead she developed Blackfoot Disease. Basically, the arsenic content in the local artesian wells was so high that it caused the arteries in her legs to shrivel up and stop flowing, so both her legs turned black and necrotic and had to be amputated. Poisoned by insoluble heavy metals, immobilized, and abandoned by any romantic prospects, instead of getting married she spent the rest of her life single, dependent, and living in a church.  NOT SWOON. What insensitive cad came up with this idea of building a DisneySparkleCommercialWeddingChapel in reference to her memory?

No. Seriously.
Epidemic heavy metal toxicity is a
reason to launch a public health campaign,
not a reason to build a Chapel O' Love.

G. This is a very expensive building ($680k) in a fairly poor region, whose stated purpose is to inspire women to dress up and come to lavish wedding parties. Will that be a source of inspiration? I do remember growing up without much money, catching glimpses of lovely inspiring things, and dreaming that someday I'd find a way to go visit beautiful places like this. Or will it be a source of social pressure luring impoverished people to go into debt buying things they don't need and can't afford?

"Sweetheart, if you'd go ahead and spend
$1.36 million for a giant pair of those pretty glass slippers,
you just might live happily ever after."

H. Other.


 

Big flavors, Big world

Walking into this little spice shop down near the Seattle waterfront is like stepping through a door to the entire world. So many colors and smells and flavors! So many things I've never heard of from places I've never been! It's a reminder that Earth is big and full of curiosities, and that there is so much left to see and do.

...Apparently, it's also the place to find Bilbo Baggins' long-lost brother:

Thank You vs Sorry

Last week, I saw this comic by New York City-based illustrator Yao Xiao and started trying it out the next day. It's already been a game-changer for me. I've been amazed by how many times a day the 'Thanks vs Sorry' decision comes up, and how much more positive the encounter feels when I say that I appreciate someone's (fill in positive behavior) rather than saying I'm sorry for my own (perceived personal shortcoming).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not to imply we should never say sorry. Sometimes, there is actual wrongdoing, fault, guilt, and the legitimate need to repair it with a sincere apology.
However, for me it's been surprising to realize that many of the times when I say sorry, I'm actually apologizing for situations beyond my control as though the personal guilt for them should belong to me anyway. Even more of a revelation has been seeing how thanking someone for understanding puts the whole encounter on different footing.

Instead of  "Sorry to bother you,"
there's "Thank you for being available to help out."

Instead of "Sorry I'm doing this so slowly,"
there's "Thanks for letting me take the time to do this right."

Instead of "Sorry I'm so clueless about this,"
there's "Thank you for teaching me more about it."

Instead of "Sorry this blog is lame,"
there's "Thanks for reading!"