Covers (DO YOUR OWN WORK)

[deleted rant about work]
I love my job at the store so much, I need to stay within confines where I am not afflicted with Terminal Annoyance.

Again (again! again!) I think:
For godsake, DO YOUR OWN WORK!!!

I want to take more photos of book covers!!!
(And innards.)
Here are a few:

1. Dog Days

2.

3. Powers was a department store in downtown Minneapolis. The library date-stamp sheet on the inside cover of this book is dated 1951.

Work & Home

A pro photographer came from a local business council to shoot the thrift store a couple weeks ago. When I saw his photo of me at work, I thought, frustrations aside, this is the perfect job for me.

(This is about a quarter of my BOOK's space.)

And then, there's the happiness I come home to:

Also, the other evening, I came home to find

my summer-roommate (Marz) making pasta!

Home & Away

 Home (with Low)

On vacation

"How We Know the Earth Is Round"

I suspect people who say Earth is flat are more interested in and motivated by socio-political factors than by science, but I do wonder how they explain simple phenomenon such as this? From the 1972 Hammond's Space Atlas.

(Of course in historic terms, it's only relatively recently that humans agreed on a Solar system...) 

Someone described the Moon shot almost fifty years ago, in July 20, 1969, as being like sending astronauts to space in a souped-up Chevy, the science was so rudimentary.

I remember the assumption that far-flung human space exploration would keep on going. I only realized it was an assumption when it stopped. Of course we have other spacey things--the ISS, and satellites for telecommunications that were almost unimaginable.

The book imagines "Special nylon fiber strips"--hey, that's Velcro. It was invented in the 1950s.

It's easy to scoff at the original Star Trek for being square and dated, but in 1966 the show imagined a starship staffed with a fuller spectrum of humans (and other intelligent species) than this science book could.

The Sanctuary of Plain-Spoken Toys

I was feeling insufficient last night because so many of my toys have unimaginative names such as Red Bear, Work Bear, Bed Bear, Farmer Bear (though his full name is now Pepperidge Farm Chocolate Cookies with Sugar Sprinkles, thanks to a comment from Michael on the post Bear appears in), etc.

Mz, who has moved back in for the summer, said, 
"This is the Sanctuary of Plain-Spoken Toys."

Someone put a headdress on my work bear!

This makes me so happy. This bear hangs up next to my desk at work, and someone put an Afghan (?) horse (camel? human?) headdress on it today.

Happy Dance

Here's Farmer Bear doing a happy dance––happy to have eyes, a clean coat and fresh stuffing, and attached limbs once again.  It's probably been decades since he had a bath.

This handmade wool bear, lumpy with matted sawdust, limbs dangling, was listed last summer on ebay by a seller who specializes in Minnesota goods. She told me later he'd come in a box of stuff at a farm sale. He was not just household-dirty but dirty with dirt from the ground. She was going to toss him but her husband said someone would buy him for five dollars. 
That someone was me.

I'm glad I had vintage glass eyes for him. I'm going to experiment with stitching a nose too. Not sure if that's a good idea, but I can always unstitch if it's not.

I don't like having to undo my work. 
That's a nerve-wracking thing about making or remaking things with no plans––knowing, as I work, that it might not turn out. 
If I'm lucky, I can un– and redo it. 
If not, I just have to live with a botched job. (I suppose that's one reason people like kits and patterns--you may complete them poorly, of course, but at least you know what you're aiming for. )

Why does it take me so long to finish a bear? That's why, I realized. Taking them apart and giving them the spa treatment is fun, and I often do it right away, but I have to screw up my courage to make final design decisions.

I'm feeling braver lately.
Even with all my fretting about work, I've continued to be in a Possible mood---feeling that life is opening up, or could... or will, in time.

There's so little I can do about the larger picture at work, it's just not worth worrying about. Not that being pointless ever stopped worry! but after that flare up the last couple weeks, mine has settled down again.

Half the time, I can't even convey how intractable some of the problems at work are. I phoned my auntie Vi yesterday––
[she got hearing aids this spring, so we can converse again--I wish she'd gotten them ten years ago at 83, as it's been a decade of dwindling spoken communication, but for some reason she utterly refused--when I pushed the subject, she even became angry with me, which is very unlike her]––
and I gave the example of no hand soap in the bathrooms to represent the way the store works (or doesn't).

She told me her local coffee shop has a schedule posted in their bathroom, with boxes for workers to tick when they have done a spot-check. Wouldn't that be a good idea for my store?

Trying to describe how useless that would be felt overwhelming,  so I didn't. Work doesn't even have the communications channels to put such a plan in place.
Do you remember when I was hired last June, I asked Big Boss how he would announce that I was the new Custodian of Books?
He looked a bit baffled, laughed, and pretended to call out, 
"Hey, guys . . .!"

On my first day, I went around and talked to all of my new coworkers (who I knew from volunteering), to make sure they knew. Some of them acted like, OK, but why are you bothering to tell me this?

It's just another world from my usual one. When I ordered something online for a coworker, my sister understood that this coworker didn't know how to use a computer. 
But why did I put it on my credit card? she asked.

"He doesn't have a credit card."

"Well, couldn't he use his bank card?"

"He doesn't have a bank account."

Anyway, I'm feeling restored, and I'm ready to look for a second very–part-time job. I have the time. If I'm not working off the clock (which I did a lot last summer), and if I'm not pondering during my days off ways to improve the store (I'm stopping NOW), I actually only work 20 hours/week. 

I used to work every Saturday as a receptionist at a nonprofit––I want to add something low-key like that. When I'm making more money, I can consider if I want to move. That can wait.

Memorial Day

ABOVE: My father's sister Vi and brother Tony (US Navy), Milwaukee, WI, 1945. She was twenty, and Tony was eighteen.

My favorite uncle, Tony, was a US sailor in World War II and served in the US Air Force during the Korean War.

Tony wrote this email to me [below] in 2008, when he was eighty years old, telling me how he met his life partner, Hal (Harold), in 1950. (I posted it at the time, and am reposting it now, eleven years later.)

Hal (b. 1910) had died in 2006, at ninety-six years old. [His obit.]
Tony (b. 1927) died in 2012, at eighty-five. 

I exchange emails daily with Vi, who turns ninety-four this summer. I just wrote her, asking whose shadows are in the bottom of the photo.
[She replied, their older sister Carmella and little brother Gabe. They are also gone now.]
____________________
Uncle Tony wrote:

Once upon a time there was a gorgeous butch guy who went with a few of his friends to the local area elementary school playground to play touch football on an early fall afternoon in 1950.

After we had proved our masculinity, we went to the house of one of the guys to quench our thirst. While there, we were introduced to a doctor who was making a house call on the father.
We were with the doctor no more than 5 minutes and I didn't see him again for 8 years.

That fall the US went to war with North Korea and either having a death wish or wanting to surround myself with young studs, I enlisted in the Air Force.
(Mind you, I had already spent a short hitch as a sailor in the Navy at the end of WW II.)

After spending 4 years in the military I decided it wasn't for me so at the end of my enlistment I took my discharge and went home.

After wandering around, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I even married a gal during this period (lasted less than a year). I was talking with this guy I had played football with so many years ago.
I don't recall if I was having a health problem at the time or not but I asked him if he still knew that doctor we had met at our mutual friend's house. He told me his father was a patient so got the name, etc.

I must have been brave and called for an appointment and he had remembered me. Come to find out later, he had been keeping track of me, all these years, through this guy's dad because this guy and I were still writing to each other during that period.
Anyway, I think that is when the courtship started.

I never had so many X-rays and blood tests in my entire life.
I guess I passed because we started going for dinners occasionally. Don't know if it was because of the X-rays or the blood tests.
No matter, it worked for us.

The following June after about 8 months of hanging out and, can you believe, no hanky-panky, we moved in together.

It was funny, my mother and my sister had gone to St. Louis to visit a relative at that time and my sister told me later that our mother said to her, "I wonder if your brother got married while we were gone, he looks so happy."

Well that's part of my story.
He gave me 47-plus years of happiness.

 BELOW: Tony (left) and Hal, 1978

Walking Tall

SweePo in her new dress (by me)

Sweets for the Sweet

bink was looking for Mexican oilcloth for her and Maura's new patio table, and this morning she took me along to the funnest fabric store* in town. (Actually, across the river in St. Paul--same difference.)
Independently owned, they specialize in unusual (and kinda spendy) fabrics.

Most fabric patterns are too big for small dolls, but I had that use in mind and found one wonderful, soft cotton fabric from Japan. An eight of a yard was only two-something dollars.

Can you see? The tiny bears are saying, "Do you care for sweets?" and "These sweets are really good."
For SweePo, obviously.

*Oh, the fabric store has a Blogger blog: treadleyardgoods.blogspot.com

I am not thinking about work.

Really, after two weeks of fretting, I'm not thinking about work.
Big Boss and I had a good talk yesterday about the future of the store that left me relieved and hopeful when I headed out for this three-day weekend. (Closed Monday for Memorial Day.)
It'd been really helpful to vent about work here, but I decided I didn't want the record making it solid, so I reverted a few of those posts to drafts.

Today the weather is perfect (partly sunny, 70º), and I have doll clothes to make and bears to repair, and new Hidden Brain podcasts to listen to while I do it. 
All is well.

But I did want to post this photo I snapped yesterday--the volunteer who does computers had left for the day, fencing off his work area with a baby gate, which pretty much illustrates the threat level...

Book Juxtaposition

I set these starry Wolfes up at work.

Penny Cooper's Campaign Slogan

Penny Cooper is waiting for the correct signs (actual printed signs, not mystical signs) before announcing her candidacy, but she now has her campaign slogan.

 Penny Cooper 2020

Dolls help.

SweePo and Red Hair Girl were helping her try out the slogan last night, to see how it fits.  Penny Cooper says it is perfect.

Miniature Wall

Small pieces of art in my house, most by friends––a couple of you are here.
BELOW:
Left, Book art by Art Sparker;
Top-right: black and white print "Turning Points", by Jody Williams;
Bottom-right: "Crow with Oak" linoprint by GZ

ABOVE, left: charcoal drawing, "Greendale Bridge",
by Auntie Vi (Violet B. Konkel);

Right, color ink drawing, "Francesca's Dream", by Barrett S. Newhall;
Tucked in gold frame: small ink drawing of Kirk and Spock, by Art Sparker.

Better

Play, that was the ticket.

"We are the FAST children!"

My crankiness started to abate as soon as Penny Cooper piped up, demanding she be let out of the shoulder bag at the lake to puff at dandelion clocks.

She in herself cracks me up, but also, taking this photo cheered me up by reminding me that I want to figure out how to use my iPhone camera:
I wanted to show the fluff blowing away, but that takes two hands. There must be gadgets I can use to stand the phone up and to press the shutter remotely.

["Press the shutter"? I suppose that's like saying "dial the phone." I  want to learn the new terms.]
I'm excited to learn how to do toy photography better.

Penny Cooper is the only Orphan Red whose voice I can "hear".
That's because when bink and I took Mz to an Ethiopian restaurant for her birthday last month, a little girl about Penny's age (eight) came in with her family and started piping in a high little-girl voice, 
"Is that chicken? I smell chicken." And she added, authoritatively, "I know what chicken smells like." 

Mz said, "That sounds like Penny Cooper."

Anyway, it makes sense that Penny Cooper is the one who talks to the humans. She, a Gemini, is the Communications Officer.

I grok what the others want, and "say", but they don't actually talk to me. 
They're really only interested in one another––"We are dolls" (obviously the best thing to be, in their minds). They are basically uninterested in human comings and goings, except as transport. 
I find that refreshing.

SweePo played in the crab apple petals that had blown into piles like snow drifts. 

(I could catch petals in the air because the wind was blowing.)

Another thing to do: 
finish SweePo's jeans. (I'd had to stop sewing in Duluth when I lost my needle--I'd dropped it, I'm sorry to say, in the grass under a picnic table. I felt all over but couldn't find it--hope no one steps on it...)

Also, the Advocate for Bears (that would be Penny Cooper) points out that lots of bears here are still waiting for the Bear Beautification Program (that would be me) to get its act together.

So, I have lots of good work ahead of me. Yay!

At my paid job, I am going to keep trying to focus on my actual, limited sphere--the BOOK's.
My frustration grows whenever I step outside that sphere. So I just deleted a couple paragraphs I wrote about the latest bit of quicksand there.
I don't care.
(You know I do, but I am practicing not.)

I like these instructions from the BBC on what to do if you find yourself in wet quicksand [which, this interesting article says, is not as dangerous as it appears, as it frequently does, in 1960s movies--dry quicksand (such as grain) is the stuff to worry about]:

"The idea is to stay calm (which might be easier said than done), lean back and spread out, to spread your weight more evenly, and wait until you float back up to the surface."

Wait till you float! OK, then.

Crabbiness Abatement

I want to record for the record that am I crabby this morning. 
Boy am I ever. 
 I dredged up this GIF I've found calming in the past, but right now it's just irritating me. 
I'm posting it anyway--for the me who will find it calming in the future. (Probably even soon.) Or for you!

This crabbiness is like the head cold of emotions.
It's not terminal. It'll pass.
I am standing back and witnessing how crabby I am, and while I can laugh about it, which is good, I have to say, it's pretty thick and sticky right now.

This is partly because I haven't been doing my own work for a while––toys, sewing, writing. Today is my day off, and work annoyance has opportunistically seeped into the space left open. 

I want to leave work at work, and do my own stuff on my time. But when you're crabby, it's hard to even want to start something creative. A bad loop.
I decided at least I could blog about my annoyance--that's mine!
My annoyance is my creative output of the day.

There, I made myself smile.
I can't get up to making something, but I can get up and go walk around the lake. (The first of a chain of three lakes starts a mile away, with public land and pathways all around.)
It's been a rainy May: outside is washed, and flowering trees at the lake will be in bloom--lilacs and crab apples.
I will take some Orphan Reds along.

I've mentioned haven't I, that Penny Cooper is planning to announce her candidacy, Penny Cooper 2020?

She is working on slogans.
I like Penny Cooper, Super Duper, but she thinks it's not dignified enough.
She likes the jingle Mz wrote:
"Penny Cooper, She's a Trooper".

OK, enough of this. Thank you for listening [as it were]. I am going to go outside now.

Bwahaha

Reality (or something) is really yanking my chain lately.

I went into work feeling all zen, as I wrote about this morning. It's raining so I take the bus. I get to work and take off my rain poncho (I did have a second one at home when I gave one away--it just has a rip at the neck repaired with duct tape), punch in, put on a fresh pot of coffee in the break room, drop my stuff at my desk in the back donations warehouse, and walk up front to the BOOK'S section. And . . .
OMG. 
Yesterday after I left at four, someone had taken it upon themself to tidy the fiction section. Ignoring the sign "In Alphabetical Order by Author", they had organized the books . . . by height.
 
From tall to short, on each shelf. They look so nice and tidy, don't they? If only people shopped for books that way. 
"Here's a tall Toni Morrison, but I really feel like a shorter one. Oh, good, here's one further down the shelf."

None of my coworkers ever touch the books, so I was mystified how this happened. I asked around, and Big Boss told me it was a new staff member from the federal program that places and pays the salaries of hard-to-place older workers. 

Luckily, BB had seen what she was doing and stopped her before she'd tidied the entire BOOK's area. The other areas wouldn't have mattered as much, since it's only the fiction that's in alphabetical order, but I appreciate BB stepping in.

It really wasn't the biggest deal--the books mostly stayed in the right section, and it only took me a couple hours to alphabetize them again. I'd been meaning to do a quick clean up anyway. 

But once again the disarray is indicative of the Wild West way the store runs: newcomers aren't trained-in so much as released into their new environment. Often they don't do much––this worker showed admirable initiative.

I felt like crying, or laughing, hysterically. Uncle!

"Calm down, Crazy!"

"Calm down, crazy!"
My friend John likes to quote that from Silver Linings Playbook, and I say it to myself sometimes when I'm all wound up.

In the movie, Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) says it to Pat (Bradley Cooper). They are extraordinarily attractive, but their characters are fairly realistic--they do not stop being "crazy" (he's got bipolar disorder, she's been crazy with grief) through the power of positive thinking. But falling in love while working together for a shared goal does help them untangle their knotted thoughts.

Reading Crash (J. G. Ballard, 1973) last night did help me calm down.
I should say, skimming Crash. It would be better as a short story--one graphic sex scene between people who have mutilated themselves through car crashes for pleasure makes the point. I got bored, like you do with porn--it's too mechanistic to hold your interest, once it's delivered its load.

It's well done though, well written and impressively imagined, throughout. For instance, the main character says a car engineer could tell the kind of car he was in by deciphering the injuries on his body, and  Ballard has a bizarrely gifted imagination in the realm of body fluids.

It's so over the top, I ended up being weirdly cheered by it. No one in the book has much more personality than a car does, so you don't feel involved in their pain, or even the pain they cause.

It's so outrageous but so deadpan, by the end I was suspecting, Wait, is this supposed to be funny? Like eating babies to solve food shortages is?*

Come to think of it, perhaps it needs to be novel length, needs to go on and on, for that suspicion to dawn.

It's a cruel book. It takes how I feel when I'm utterly disgusted with humanity, and amps it up. That's why I was weirdly cheered:
oh, here, this is like me at my most disgusted, and it's just too ridiculous!

By the end of Silver Lining Playbook, Tiffany has helped free Pat from his obsession. He says to her,
"The only way to beat my crazy was by doing something even crazier. Thank you."

Crash was a corrective like that for me. 
I'd been feeling outraged and despairing about our human limitations that I see at my job, 
and this book took that to its ill-logical extreme.
"Oh, you think people are stupid and self-defeating? Well, look at this!"

Well, OK, then, we're not that bad. (Or, ha––we're not that clever.)

Back to the Lab

I said from the beginning that I was going to treat this job like a spiritual psych lab. 
Lately all my familiar distresses and discomforts and disgusts with work/life are appearing, as I'd expected, but in new, unexpected disguises. (They're crafty that way.)

This workplace's culture is different, but my frustrations are much the same as they were when I worked at the college art library or in-house at the publisher's.
No matter where I've worked, the bosses by and large have not been up to the task of good management.
(I wouldn't be either!)

It's like college professors. PhD programs don't teach how to teach. You're just supposed to... I don't know, intuit it?

So. I don't know. I'm not talking myself out of my distress, but trying to attend to it thoughtfully and lovingly––and with a little levity?
Is it as bad as a car crash?

I could certainly find a job that paid more money, but could I find a job I liked as well as this one?

Coming home on the bus yesterday, I saw a woman with a book from my Cool Old Books shelf––an old copy with a distinctive dust jacket of a book by John Buchan (author The Thirty-Nine Steps--though it wasn't that one).
The woman looked physically burdened, disheveled. Poor? Ill? 

I suppose anyone could put that book out at the store, but the case is, I did. I felt happy to see it going home with her. 
More than happy--I felt useful.

A job with a purpose. That's worth a lot. 

___________
* I googled, "Is Crash satire?" and found this article at the British Library site that says yes:
www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-crash

Reality Is a Stage Set

It was nice to be back at work today––loads of good books had been donated–––and it was also, sigh, also a little depressing because––sure enough, the bathroom was dirty and there was no hand soap... 
(I went and found some.)
I find this indicative disarray so disheartening. 

Oh, well.
I always have fun with the books & things, no matter what.

I'd set aside a bunch of vintage figurine planters, meaning to make a display, and today we got a bunch of small fake plants, so I put them together. Yay! 
It tickles me to set up these little scenes.

[Signs by ArtSparker]

I brought home a copy of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash [British Library (BL) article--with further links]––the one about autoerotic automobile crashes?  
I've heard of it, but can't quite imagine what it's like, how it works...
 (It was made into a movie in 1996––totally different than the 2004 movie of the same name.)

I'm interested to look closer at Crash because I always think it's so very strange––and a good key to understanding how humans work–– and it bothers me that we moderns mostly, in my experience, blithely accept cars as ho-hum, everyday things.
The main objection I hear to cars is that they burn fossil fuels.

Really cars are like frightening science-fiction creations--massive metal machines that move at unnatural speeds, easily and frequently destroying people, animals, trees, things...

Don't most of us know at least one person who was killed in a car accident–– at second hand, if not first? 
I can think of several––the worst I was close to being the teenage son of a coworker (in a former job) who was hit in the street after school. 
I was at work the day he was killed, and the weird twist was that my coworker, a lovable, brassy lady, had come in that morning freaked out because driving in to work, she had hit and killed a deer.

___________________

I was surprised to see that Crash was published in 1973––seems so modern––and to realize it's the same J. G. Ballard (of course) who wrote Empire of the Sun, about being a boy during WWII in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

The intro to Crash includes this quote from Ballard that explains why he might see through the mundanity of cars:

"One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set ... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, and home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight."

 That––reality being "a stage set"––better expresses what I was thinking on my trip than the phrase I wrote yesterday, that "life is a joke".

Looking around the BL site on Ballard, I found this text collage he made in 1958. "Let's get out of time."

In on the Joke

"If you want stability" my physical therapist told me, "practice with instability," and had me stand on one foot on a squishy, half-orb bosu ball.

Travel is practicing instability.
I'm home from my 48-hour trip to Duluth.

I've been there many times, and I didn't do anything new this time, but I still got that Trip Effect--the feeling of being lifted from my life, seeing it from far away as arbitrary, wobbly, unstable:
All this could be otherwise. 
All this is otherwise.

On my phone in my motel room, I watched a snippet of Stephen Colbert interviewing RuPaul in relation to an exhibit "Camp: Notes on Fashion" at the Met in NYC. 
"What is camp?" Colbert asked.

It's a fine line, RuPaul said, but an outfit is camp if the wearer is in on the joke.

In on the joke.
Taking a trip gives perspective on my life, reminding me, "Oh! This, life, is like a joke." 

I don't mean life is a joke as in, "ha-ha, nothing's serious", but a joke as in, "clearly a made-up story"--a reminder that everyday reality is unstable.
Like fashion. 
The biological reality may be that we need some sort of clothing to protect our bodies. Fashion is the joke. Jokes are not necessarily fun or harmless, of course.
(Blackshirts.)

The clothes we dress in, especially the stories we wear––are made up by us humans, but sometimes I see myself gripping a scrap of cloth as if it had a stable, objective reality, as if it will keep me safe.

Taking a trip is a good shake up. I want to be flexible, in on the joke, when nonnegotiable realities (like the weather, or illness) hit me.

Jousting Pencils

I got this vintage Faber Castell pencil case illustrated with Knights of the Pencil for $3 at the Duluth Antique Mall.
The winning green pencil is the Faber.

Babes in the Woods

First, I had to sew jeans for SweePo. She tested them out at the Duluth motel.

Then we walked to the estuary of the St. Louis River that flows into Lake Superior, West Duluth, MN

SweePo tried to convince Little Brother to join her on a spot on a log gnawed flat by a beaver.

I think she may be bolder than he is––she had them playing Babes in the Woods. Here they are, Fleeing:

That story doesn't end well, but SweePo & Little Brother's did.

In Need of a Restorative

Well, that was brutal.
I got off the bus in Duluth 40 minutes before the first showing of The Public, Emilio Estevez's movie about homeless people taking over a public library as a place to keep from freezing one winter night.

"You know this is going to be upsetting", I said to myself. "Do you really want to go?"

I did, so I went, and I'm glad. I just left the theater.

In many big and glaring ways, The Public is not a good film.
Among other problems, his female characters make me wonder if Emilio has a bone to pick with women--did they let him down or something?
But it is an excellent snapshot of the current seemingly no-win situation between the enormous bare-naked need of people with nothing, and the lack of ...comprehension? will? compassion? on the part of the powers that be.

I feel flattened on the one hand, and yet lifted up on the other--the way you do when your point of view is validated.
This movie is what I see every day––at the thrift store, but also just walking around the city.
I am stepping over people lying on the ground, and I am having fantastic snippets of conversation with the same people (when they are able to stand up).

How has it come to this???

Of course human misery is hardly  a new thing in history.
Still... 

Anyway, the movie theater Zinema, where I saw the movie, is part of a nonprofit arts complex that includes a restaurant/bar, Zeitgeist.
I am there now, taking Mr Linen's advice and drinking hard liquor.
Hard, but boutique---seems fitting:
a Cedar Negroni, made with cedar vodka from local Vikre Distillery (+ Aperol, sweet vermotuh, and orange bitters).
It is, indeed, restorative. (Also, delicious.)

The Superior Team are too young––you can see Little Brother is concerned SweePo might inhale too many fumes--but they approve of the color.

Next stop--the Salvation Army thrift store, then checking into the motel. If I am not too wobbly, I will take one of their bikes for a ride. 
Maybe, though, a walk along the river would be better...

Unintentional R& R

Yesterday I mentioned "deep resting" (v. depressing). Googling to find the term's origins, I came across a website, Intentional Resting.

OMG. I do believe we who are Americans might need reminders that we should not treat our bodies and souls like machines that can run nonstop, and I feel tenderly toward us humans who get caught up in the machine.
Still, I didn't click on the site, but it sounds ridiculously precious to me, like Artisanal Napping.

I like [the spirit of] my coworker Mr Linens's advice better.
"You are too SERIOUS!" he told me the other day. "After work, you should have a drink. Not that white wine either. A REAL drink. Whisky!"

Oh, and Mr Linens, as I'd guessed, has no truck with the Royal Baby.
He reads the newspaper, so I knew he'd know about baby Archie, but when I asked him if he'd heard about it, he said,
"What's that got to do with me?"

None of my coworkers seemed to care much.
"Did you hear Meghan Markle and Prince Harry had their baby?" I asked one.

 "Oh, . . . was she pregnant?"

Evidently so.

The baby's name did evoke some responses. 
A volunteer who used to do stand-up comedy hollered, "Edith!" in  Archie Bunker's voice, and another said, "Harry looks like Archie", meaning the comic book character.

Going to the Movies in Duluth

Anyway, I have some Unintentional Resting coming to me. 
This morning when I punched in at work, I checked how many hours I've worked this pay period––I knew I was close to my allotted 40 hours, which is why I could take the next couple days off and go to Duluth.

Well. In fact, I was over: I've already worked 41.75 hours, due to a couple special projects. So I have today off too, which means I can do my laundry and dishes without feeling rushed.
I catch the bus at 7 a.m. tomorrow.

I like going up north alone––have been many times.

I'm super excited to see that a movie is playing in Duluth that I'm eager to see––The Public [NYT review]––it's not here.
Director Emilio Estevez was here in town, however, and I'm kicking myself for missing him--he came and spoke at the downtown library. 

The preview looks pretty good, but reviews are mixed--"overly sincere". Still, come on! A movie about homeless people refusing to leave the public library in a cold snap???
Librarians + Poor Rebels? I must see this.

(Also, I loved  Repo Man (1984) starring Estezev when I was in my twenties. [Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLGrXGEMOSo]
Plate of shrimp, anyone?)

Finding out that I can see the movie tomorrow is good timing for me. 
I've been fretting about needing a second job. 
Working two jobs takes much more than twice the energy. Each workplace requires complete social engagement, no matter how many hours you're there, right?

I like being around people––I'm fairly extroverted, I guess?––but I am also fairly easily drained emotionally and intellectually.
Engage with one set of people for four hours, then go engage with another set of people for another four hours? Or even two?
OMG. 
Sign me up for the Intentional Rest Home.

(I think I'm about average for social energy, actually, and that it's the American expectation of how much people are supposed to engage that is waaaay out of whack.)

So, I was thinking, maybe I should quit the thrift store, which pays me around $650 take-home a month, and get ONE job that pays enough to live on.

But, you know, that would be sort of a tragedy.
I LOVE my work.
It is deeply meaningful. And, unlike other meaningful jobs I've done, like activities with people with dementia, this workplace itself is FUN. (See, Mr Linens)

I know I'm always complaining about the store's lack of effective management, but I'm also always saying, the management's heart is in the right place.

Getting out of town is a good way to get perspective, but I think I've made up my mind. I will need more money eventually, but I'm going to stick with my plan to keep using up my savings from my father for a while longer.
If I project myself five years ahead and imagine future-me looking back, I think I'd kick myself for giving this up.

The Superior Team

After I posted that photo of me heading off on my bike to Duluth in 1984, when I was twenty-three, I remembered what a big deal it had been. I jumped all in!

It wasn't just a vacation:
I'd quit my job as a grill cook, not enrolled for spring quarter classes (I was a come-and-go, part-time student at the U), and given up my one-room apartment, intending to bike all the way around Lake Superior. 
I carried money––all the money I had in the world––in traveler's checks. I had no credit card, which I think was normal for young people at the time (not having one, that is).

I had no idea how lonely and boring it would be biking and camping by myself in rural Minnesota and Wisconsin. And how scary the many logging trucks were, on the narrow roads. 
After ten days, I put my bike on a bus and went to visit friends in Madison, where I'd grown up. 

I ended up spending the summer there, cashing in my traveler's checks, at loose ends... It was a little depressing. Or, was it  a "deep-resting" *?
I don't want to romanticize that summer, or my young self--I was unhappy and uncertain, scared of a lot of things.  But I think it really was a rest, because while it wasn't a very nice summer, I came back energized.

At the end of the summer, I took the Greyhound back to town, slept on a couple couches until I got a house sitting gig; signed up for a couple classes at the U (gee, it was casual--and affordable--back then), where I also got hired at a university library.

That Christmas, I contacted my father for the first time in five years, feeling that it was childish not to at least send Christmas cards. I felt that I was more grown-up than he was and could make the first move. (I think I was right.) 
He sent a card right back, so that was nice, though really, the rip was never really repaired...

I am so encouraged to remember my younger self, who is still me!

So... just now I decided to go to Duluth by myself in a couple days--taking the bus, not biking.

These are my traveling  companions, The Superior Team.

They are, L to R: an animal of the Traffic Guard species, SweePo the Protector, and Little Brother.

________________________

* I want to acknowledge I got the idea of "deep-rest" v. "depressed" from Martha Beck––I think from her book Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (2002).
She has some great insights, but her boutique life-coaching makes me cringe--the  weekend workshops at expensive retreat centers.

"There are no instructions for garlic bread soup."

On Mother's Day, my auntie Vi, (b. 1925, Milwaukee), who emails me every day, wrote that she'd made garlic bread soup, in memory of her mother, my grandmother Rosaria––I called her Ama (née DeNicola, 1900, Monreale, Sicily).

"My mother made it for us on schooldays," Vi wrote, "when we came home for lunch during the Depression. 
I don’t know where she got olive oil and cheese when she didn’t have three cents for yeast nor a nickel for a bag of salt. Perhaps grandma DeNicola brought it to her."

I wrote back asking for instructions, and she replied, "There are no instructions for garlic bread soup".
Then she told me how to make it.

Garlic Bread Soup

Warm up garlic (chopped, sliced or grated) in olive oil.  
.

Add torn pieces of stale or dried bread.  Hopefully baguette or Italian.  The crusts are the best as I like the solid chunks.  

Add water to cover and cook 5 or 10 minutes. (If you want more flavor, you can use chicken or vegetable broth.)

Bread soaks up lots of water. You may need to add more as it cooks. 
.

More oil for taste?  Salt and pepper. 

Serve with lots of Parmesan and fresh-ground pepper.

 ______________________

Me in Palermo, Sicily, April 2007 (trip sponsored by Uncle Tony), outside the Dante Bookstore. 
Tutta un'altra storia is a saying meaning variations on "a whole other story".

An article about this pan-Italian (and Spanish) soup, called pancotto (cooked bread):

food52.com/blog/12144-italian-bread-soup-pancotto  

Reading in Bed, Bear Version

This is Bed Bear, who lives in the bed.
The other day I came home to see this bear engrossed in the copy of A Tale of Two Cities I'm reading.

Has Bed Bear been reading all along, or is there something about this particular book?
Are there bears in it, unbeknownst to me?
Or is it that Penny Cooper has been parading around as Sydney Carton, ever since she got a ride in a tumbril on Easter?*

I simply don't know.

I can't usually stand Charles Dickens and his drippy sentimentality, but Two Cities is fascinating so far. I read it once, more than forty years ago. I only remember the opening and ending lines ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times/It is a far, far better thing that I do....").

The book has all of Dickens's shortcomings––unbelievably angelic females, overly colorful side-characters (I skim those parts, I find them so distasteful)––but it's fascinating because Dickens is writing about the French Revolution some 70 years after it took place--about the same distance in time we are from World War II.
The political picture is gripping––I don't think I understood it when I was a teenager.

*P.S. Penny Cooper also says she wants to enter the US presidential race--she is lobbying for the procurement of signs:

PENNY COOPER 2020

May, 1984

My mother, Lytton Davis (left, 49 years old), seeing 23-year-old me off on my 10-day bike trip up to Duluth and along Lake Superior.

The photo has yellowed and faded, but I didn't want to color-correct it. It's old!

Born in a Human Body

I started blogging in 2003, and the guy who inspired me to launch out (blogger of the long defunct Primate Brow Flash) used to say, 
"Blog regularly, and if you can't think of anything to write, link to a New York Times article."

(Before Blogger had icons, I used to know the html to create a live link.)

I don't know how often I've done that, linked to a NYT article.--Rarely. 
But that old advice comes to mind this morning--not because I don't have anything to say (also rare), but because I'm sharing an article  posted on FB. (Posted by guy I used to babysit forty-five years ago, when he was a little boy!)

Here's the link to the article:
"My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me."
--By Wil S. Hylton [a man] It's about "toxic masculinity".

This article reminds me of my father, who worked hard to smother his violence, usually, but not always successfully. Silence and withdrawal was his main tool.
I felt his silence as punishment, and it surely was. 
Reading this now, two years after my father's death, it occurs to me he was also using silence, a kind of emotional violence, to protect us from his capacity for physical violence... 

Mostly it worked. 
His own father had beaten his wife (my grandmother) and my father and his siblings, sometimes badly–-with a 2x4 board, once. 

My father was much more restrained, only "spanking" us with his belt, and not often. I can see now how frustrated, trapped, and rageful he felt in a marriage where, among other things, he carried all the financial responsibility.

That doesn't matter to a kid. I was afraid of him––and I avoided him.
I think the tragic, pathetic result is that now that he's dead, I never miss him.

The author of the article writes:

"My father aspired to a model of masculine reserve that he saw in cowboy movies. I mean this literally:
With our first VCR came mandatory screenings of “Stagecoach,” “High Noon” and “The Searchers,” each one followed by an impromptu disquisition on the virtue of restrained power.
With time, I came to understand this as a reaction to the volcanic forces in himself. I lived in fear of his temper.

“Masculinity is a religion. It is a compendium of saints: the vaunted patriarch, the taciturn cowboy, the errant knight, reluctant hero, gentle giant and omniscient father. Like Scripture, each contains a story of implicit values. Fraternity, dominance, adamance, certitude — these are the commandments of male identity.
Maybe in societies deep through history, those qualities helped organize a world of chaos, but the antediluvian constructs of masculinity are easily weaponized in modern life."

And, Further...

The ideas of "masculinity" and "feminity" are cultural, of course; 
but having a human body isn't just "an idea"--it's biological.
This article isn't about that angle.

When I was a teenager, feminists used to say, "Biology isn't destiny."
I know what they (we) were getting at, trying to loosen up social strictures--- but it's the cultural reading and rules on biology that are fluid, not physical biology itself. 

To take the most basic example, biology dictates that we're going to die.
That's destiny.

It's biological factors that require that if you want to go all the way in transitioning/reassigning your body's  gender [I'm not sure the current terms for this]–-especially if you want other people in your society to read you as a certain gender––
you inject naturally occurring biological chemicals into that body.

Because it works.
A transguy told me that once he was on "T", people started asking him how to fix their car, and they started listening to him, a diminutive man, in meetings... "I didn't realize as a woman, but I'd never had anyone stop talking and listen when I spoke up."

Social constructs, maybe, but he said he also couldn't believe the physical drive T gave him--especially sexual. "Now I realize that testosterone-driven sex drive is a problem," he said. "Now I feel sorry for men!"

It's great that people are playing with gender, and gender roles. (Even if sometimes the politics get pretty bonkers.)
But the baseline biological questions of being a human in a body remain:
How can humans (of any gender) use the drive for power? What to do with rage and impotence? 
People like Trump make hay out of that.

This article does touch on the power of testosterone, but it doesn't suggest alternatives. How to direct churning hormones?
 That's fine––that's not what the article about. It's a good picture of what NOT to do... and I'm grateful for the insight into my father.

It's not an easy question, what to do instead of the wrong thing? After all, author himself hasn't figured it out--wearing a sarong for two years didn't prove to be an answer.

Silence is power. As the AIDS activist slogan of the 80s said, Silence is also death.

It's a HUGE question we all share: How to be alive in these bodies???