Interesting article in The Stranger a couple of days ago: "United States of Anxiety." Although it contains a few words of strong language and a larger quota of rambling personal anecdotes than I tend to like, some parts made me stop and reflect. Namely:

"We have reached the end of what author Philip Cushman in a 1990 article in American Psychologist called the "post World War II empty self" era. Cushman writes about the change in America from the Victorian era of saving money and restricting impulses (sexual and otherwise) to the consumer self who is "soothed, organized, and made cohesive" by being filled up with food, objects, and celebrities.

[ . . . ]

"In all of this, aren't we losing the intrinsic value of just being an awkward human being who wants to eat a half-decent burger and drink a glass of water? It drives me nuts, especially because we're heading into the straits of value-diminishing times. If my whole function is to acquire and consume, and my means to consume and my ability to consume are diminished, then who am I?"

This concept -- of the empty self that needs to be filled from the outside -- explains so much about modern-day America, as I examine it; but it feels fundamentally foreign to me. I have to admit that I was raised with the more Victorian model of self, that of keeping myself in a constant state of denial.


* * * * *
I think everyone can agree that from a broader, societal perspective, the recent American culture of consumption can't continue indefinitely. Eventually, people are going to quit buying stuff they don't need and start finding their authentic selves, which (it turns out) don't depend for their worth on cute clothes or SUVs.

I would hope for a shift away from the "empty self" / consumerism mentality, but not back to the Victorian model of endless self-denial and repression, because that fosters its own problems (and don't ask me how I know this!).

Maybe, as a culture, we will work towards something new -- something similar to a can-do pioneer community in which the members of the network connect with and help out each other.

I would hope for something that embeds people more firmly into their network of family and friends. This is one thing I love about role-playing games like D&D: It fosters a long-term connection with a small group of like-minded people.

And it's one thing I really like about the internet. For all the talk about the internet as a harbinger of endless alienation, it's really just a tool that can be used either one way or the other. Many miniature communities created online -- like the community of people reading these words -- aren't about consuming any particular good, service, or celebrity gossip; they're about connecting with other people. That's something I think we can all approve of. 

Sometime during grade school, I became semi-obsessed with numbers. Not as much as my Aspie younger brother was obsessed with penguins, but still, my obsession for numbers blazed brighter than the interests of anyone else in my class.

One was for God, two was for humanity, three was for heaven or divinity in general, four was for earth, five was for Ideal Womanhood (not sure why), six was-- well, I'll get to six in a bit -- seven was destiny, eight was law, nine was triply divine, and ten was perfection. I forget what twelve and thirteen were, but they had meanings. Beyond that, I loved numbers that were perfect, or prime. In general, I preferred even numbers over odd.

I remember spending lots of time doodling numbers, counting grids of graph paper, and mentally assigning various bits of data that came my way into one or more of these assigned numerical meanings.

Six was (and still is!) my favorite number.

• Part of it was because the majority of kids in my class claimed seven as their favorite, so to me, six seemed different, strange --honestly, a bit queer.
• Part of it was that I felt sorry for six, because everyone assumed it was an "evil number" (because of the whole 666 "number of the beast" thing). Didn't six deserve someone to love it?
• Part of it was that six is a perfect number.
• And part was that I was born in June, the sixth month.
• The fact that it was half of twelve, and also two times three (humanity x heaven/divinity), added to six's charm for me.

My second favorite number, 22, gelled for me a few years later in grade school. Also not surprising -- my birthday is on the 22nd of the month.

• I liked that it was two, twice in a row -- like, whoah, dude.
• I liked that in the little Columbia animation that begins some movies -- you know, the one with the woman and the torch and the mountains and the stars that float up around her head -- there are 22 stars. (Go on, count, the next time you see it. 22.)
• The digits in my birth year -- 1, 9, 7, and 5 -- add up to 22.
• And I liked that except for 2 and 11, nothing else goes into it evenly. It, also, seemed like a weird number, strange, rejected by its peers. I could picture it hanging off on the side of the room as all the popular numbers milled around in the center, dancing and chatting and having canapes.

A few years later I found some online fortune-telling site that told me that my "Life Path" number is 22. I thought that was kind of neat, and blogged about it at the time.

During grade school I started noticing whenever the time was 6:22. It was usually right when we were preparing or having dinner. I started noting it to my mother: "It's 6:22 again!" My mom would smile at me and wonder what on earth I was going on about.

Once I started doing it, it seemed that I happened to notice it being 6:22 almost every day. This may contribute to my very accurate sense of time even today.

A few minutes ago as I was vacuuming, I glanced up and saw that it was 6:22 again. "It's 6:22 again, Mom," I thought, and smiled to myself. :-)

Andrew took off at 7:35 this morning (!!!) to attend the release party for D&D 4.0 downtown at Neumo's. While I'm bummed to have missed out on breakfast with friends beforehand, and on viewing a 13-foot tall Beholder statue, it just wasn't practical to take both girls downtown for this. Maybe for the release of D&D 5.0 in a few years! :-)

Grocery shopping for the week with the two of them along for the ride was a bit of a challenge. Even though I timed it for after the wren's morning nap and lunchtime, she still started crying partway through and needed to be held. Try steering one of those giant blue 2-kid combination cart / racecar contraptions -- bigger and longer than a regular grocery cart by far -- while holding a 20-lb.+ baby. Go on, try it. I'll wait.

But we survived, and she was fine, and now there is food for the week, and they are both napping. Hooray!

Was frustrated with myself because it seems that no matter how hard I try to keep the grocery and household spending to under $100 a week, I just cannot manage to do it.

On the bus ride in to work this morning I was thinking about my post from yesterday, on the same recipes I use and reuse right now.

"Why was that post so negative sounding?" I asked myself. "Isn't it good that you've figured out how to cook food that works for you right now? Who could want more? Whom are you trying to impress?"

I started thinking about Expectations -- the Expectations that others had of me, the Expectations that I have of myself, and (most dangerously) the Expectations that I only think other people have of me.


Maybe I am good enough, after all. :-)

Was inspired to post about what I think the world will be like in 500 years, assuming we have not blown ourselves up by then.

Assuming we as a species get through this awkward, self-destructive adolescent phase of ours, I predict:

• A smaller overall world population that lives more lightly on the earth, leaving vast tracts of nature completely alone and policing its reproduction rate in one way or another.

• Tall cities hooked together with sophisticated communication, set in the midst of jungles and forests.

• Robots doing a lot of the work, and people with lots of free time to garden, dance, do traditional crafts, tinker, play games, etc.

• Instead of nations, alliances of city-states, a la Renaissance Italy.

• Some city-states owned and operated by corporations; others by religions or other associations / groupings of people.

• Since this wanton shipping-everything-all-around-the-globe thing just can't continue, resources-wise, I predict more local, small-scale productions of goods, and the withering of worldwide brands on products, especially heavy products like wine or soft drinks. Branding on intellectual properties / ideas, however, could still flourish.

• Widespread mining of the landfills that we are currently creating. People of the future will develop sophisticated techniques for extracting value from the landfills we're creating today. They will have to!

• I predict the development of very disparate cities, culturally speaking, but a world in which it's easy to move from one city to another. Skycars! Pack up your life and move to Edenia, the City Without Shrimp!

What do y'all think the world will be like in 500 years?

If you're sufficiently invested in your predictions, feel free to place a bet on the matter over at LongBets.org. Read their rules on how it works, and how your bet could pay off long after all of us are gone. Neat stuff!

I love Yelp.com. It has a large and constantly growing number of recent reviews of all kinds of things around my fair city. I've used it to find restaurants, cool places like Scratch Patch and Banya 5 -- or at least I think they'd be cool, although I haven't actually gone to either one yet. I have even used Yelp to look for a new doctor.

This morning I saw something I'd never seen online before, though: A "review" of Juan, the homeless guy who stands at Pine and 5th yelling "Seattle Police are Communist!"

The joking, affectionate tone of these "reviews" may trivialize the problems of this man's life. He is a mentally disturbed homeless man who spends all his time ranting on a street corner; he is not anyone's pet, or novelty. To me these reviews almost seem like e-slumming.

Then again, the reviews may affirm that Juan is a fixture in downtown Seattle. So doesn't that elevate him from beggar to performance artist?

It all has me thinking about homelessness and begging, and my changing responses to it over time.

* * * * *



Anyway, no conclusion to this post. There is a problem in the world, homelessness, and I notice it, but I can't fix it, and I'm not sure what to do, and it bothers me.

I lost my mom 11 years ago today.

I still miss her every day, but her spirit is still very much with me.

As I look back, I see that I have spent the last 11 years trying to learn and put into practice the lessons she taught me.

• By how she lived, my mom showed the value of compassion, cheerfulness, thriftiness, and practicality.

• She taught me how to dress for my body type, and how to feel beautiful on the inside, no matter what is happening on the outside. Because of her, I know how to step back from stressful situations, regroup emotionally, and take small, positive steps to refresh my spirit.

• She taught me the value of making and sharing food with people you love. From how to stuff a chicken to how to make pie crust, she taught me everything she knew in the kitchen; and she knew a lot.

• She taught me to read voraciously and to keep an open, inquisitive mind. She taught me to take a deep interest in other cultures, other languages, other cuisines, and other ways of doing things beyond the merely familiar.

• She taught me the value of having a strong inner spiritual life, rooted in prayer, ritual, music, and a shared community. Because of her, I still say the Rosary when I need to calm myself down, even though I may not believe all the words anymore.

• She taught me to love music, and carry it with me in my heart wherever I go. Because of her advice, I was in choirs all four years of college, and then joined a choir when I moved to Seattle. Choral singing has given me a rich inner vocabulary of music, and also helped me make friends when I was new in Seattle.

• She taught me to admit it when I am wrong, apologize, and try again. Equally importantly, she taught me not to gloat when I am right.

• She taught me that relationships with other people are what truly matter, not possessions or prestige.

For all you taught me, Mom, both in your good examples and in your bad examples, I thank you. I am who I am because of you.

It feels like spring today, which amazes me. In Minnesota, there is no such prodigality of spring. Springtime there is hard-won, the result of a bitterly contested guerilla action against Winter. There may be buds in April, maybe March. Here's in Seattle it's only mid-February and I already have buds in my yard, green grass, happy-sounding chickadees chirping away, a gorgeous view of the mountains and blue water with sailboats on it, and shoots of perennials poking up towards the increasingly-warm sun.

This morning we had a friend and his 4-year old over to rampage through our house, yard, and then our local park (Carkeek). At the end, not only was the 4-year old seemingly exhausted, but the hypermuffin was, too. They exhausted each other.

In the car on the way back from Carkeek, she remarked, "I want to nap." Andrew and I exchanged A Glance. Saying she wants to nap?? Her saying she wants to nap?? In-freaking-credible. She had lunch and went down for a nap quickly and easily.

After she was down, Nikki and Ryan came by with some raspberry canes they are generously donating to our estate, and they even broke out their competent-looking tools and planted them for me while I did very important things like "standing around" and "entertaining them with my airy badinage." I was vital to the process, I tell you, vital. Someday we will have yummy raspberries in our very own yard. Maybe even this summer!

Then while both girls were sleeping, Andrew and I had some spinach-mushroom-tomato frittata and herbed red potatoes from the crockpot, and some fancy raisin-studded bread. Now Andrew is off to work and the hypermuffin is up again, peacefully watching "Blue's Clues." Dishes are going and later I will do blue laundry, because the wren got my jeans after her lunch (from both ends, bleh). Oh, and the friends this morning brought us a gift -- a "Crawl 'n' Flutter Bee," and it's pretty much the cutest plastic thing since the iPod.

The beautiful, sunny gorgeous weather outside reflects my mood inside. This is known as "the pathetic fallacy," but today it doesn't feel very pathetic. It feels awesome. :-D

So, with the end of the Year of the Pig, another twelve-year cycle has come to a close.

It's been a good cycle for me. Twelve years ago, 1996, I was halfway through my junior year of college, just back from Interim in Greece, and just figuring out that Robin and I really needed to break up.

This morning as I drove to the Northgate Park 'n' Ride I heard a medley of '80s songs that brought back my young adulthood in a bittersweet rush. Not that "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant should be bringing anything back for me, except perhaps my lunch... but it reminded me irresistibly of Robin, who was my first boyfriend, lo these many years ago.

We started dating the first week of college, and stayed together two and a half years. For some reason he liked that song. I remembered sitting with him after a College Bowl tournament in a Perkin's somewhere in the deep black of a Minnesotan winter night, eating bad pie and listening to that song over the Muzak system.

Robin had some strange tastes. Televised golf, for one thing. And sitcom theme songs. He had a compilation. I don't miss any of those things. I still hate televised golf, and I can still sing the theme songs to shows I have never watched. Curse you, Robin! :-)

Time keeps passing, though. Someone in the seattle LiveJournal community posted today, "I burst into liverspots last week when I realized that Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" was the #1 song 21 years ago. THAT SONG CAN NOW BUY ME BOOZE." Amen, scearley.

With the Year of the Rat, another cycle begins, as with the season of Lent which is now upon us.

Whichever way you look at it, now seems to be a time for fresh starts. Lots of fresh beginnings, lots of new roads waiting to be traveled, and nothing to get in our way except our own self-sabotage.

In a lot of the end-of-2007 quizzes I'm seeing on my friends' pages, they list something like "Best book" or "Favorite book" of 2007.

I thought back... racked my brains... racked them harder... and realized that I read ONE book last year, as far as I can remember. One.


(EDITED 01-06) I just remembered that I also read "The Five Love Languages" in 2007. As a how-to fixit-type manual for relationships, it doesn't count as a novel, but I'm relieved to have increased my 2007 tally by 100%.

TWO books isn't quite so pathetic. Is it? Is it?

:-P

All my life, I have focused on the bad things. Did the teacher compliment me 10 times and then, almost as an afterthought, happen to say 1 negative thing? Well, guess what I would obsess about for the next week.

Over time I have learned to focus on the good things in life a lot more. Now, I will give equal time to mulling over the positive and the negative things.

Still, at the end of every calendar year, I find myself getting depressed as I cast my mind back and mull and brood endlessly over all the year's missed opportunities, crossed signals, social awkwardnesses, times I was gauche, things I should have said or did but did not, things I said or did but should not have, times I was selfish or stupid or weak... and then I spend the last 3 days of the year feeling low about it.

So, to combat this depressing habit, I have made a list of my personal "20 bests of 2007."

Now as I get my resolutions for 2008 in shape, I have something positive to look at and remind myself that I really did come a long way this year.

So without further ado, I present --

I was going through the attic the other day and came across a big expandable folder of letters from my grandmother, Marjorie Anderson, to my mother Joan, from the years 1979 - 1984.

My grandparents lived out on the Olympic Peninsula, in the Hoh River valley. When he was a young man my grandfather was a logger; check out this picture of him and a giant spruce tree. He also hunted cougar for bounty every so often. He and my grandmother had a smallish herd of cattle and a couple of huge gardens, and lived waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. And then the bridge washed out and didn't get rebuilt, and it took even longer to drive around the long way, so they were even farther out in the middle of nowhere.

So there they were, stuck away from civilization, one mile from the nearest neighbors and half a day from the nearest town. There was no television, because the surrounding hills are too high to let the signal in. The newspaper was always one day late, and they got their water from a creek and their electricity from a generator under the house.

The bus tunnel underneath downtown Seattle reopened today! I was so happy to resume the commute I used to have in 2005.

The tunnel closed around the time I had the hypermuffin. And now I also have the wren. So I can truthfully say, "I could bear two children in the time it took them to upgrade the tunnel!"

It felt strange to walk through those vast, cavernous stations again, seeing the same gray and white marble angles that a different me saw, all that time ago.

Being reminded of your own former self is a funny feeling, at once comforting and disturbing. I wondered what Former-Me would have made of Present-Me. But honestly, she would probably have been way too caught up in her own concerns to have made much of me one way or the other.

Went through my closet the other day and made up about 5 bags to give away at the local thrift store. Also tidied the attic before Andrew's parents came to visit.

Although both areas of the house need a lot more work, I feel quite satisfied when I look at the large expanses of empty floor where before there was a jumble of STUFF.

If acquiring things gives us so much pleasure, how to explain the vast pleasure I take in un-acquiring things?

Last night after GMing his every-other-night Harmonium game, Andrew sighed happily and said that the biggest problem in his life right now is not finding the time to watch the last 24 minutes of the recorded "Naruto" movie we started watching the other week. We're always too busy having fun, or taking care of the children, or working alternate shifts from each other, or sleeping. We don't have much time together that isn't already spoken for.

It's really not a bad problem to have. If that's the worst problem in his life right now, then I would say he's doing pretty well. :-)

I was up at 3:30 yesterday morning nursing the wren, and remembered that right then would be during the "totality" of the lunar eclipse -- the second total lunar eclipse in 2007 so far. The first was in March, and we didn't get to see it here in the Pacific Northwest.

I do remember that particular full moon as being especially beautiful, however. I went to a concert with autumnbottom the night of the March full moon, and there was a misty "moonbow" of diaphanous colors surrounding the full moon like a halo on our way there.

Anyway, yesterday morning I was pretty tired, but I stepped out to gaze at the moon. How often does this happen? Not all that often.

It was rust-red and high in the sky, and its center was marked with a darker circle: the umbra. The color and the shape reminded me of the center of a bull's-eye. Or an old penny. Or a drop of blood flattened between two rectangles of glass.

I was reminded of the bit from Revelations 6: "I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red..."

With its associations with waxing and waning (like pregnancy), its blood-red color during total eclipses, and the circle-within-a-circle pattern reminiscent of a nipple and areola, it's no wonder the moon is considered feminine in most cultures. I always thought it was odd that Tolkein made the moon masculine and the sun feminine in his mythos. It seems he took this from Norse myth. Here's a source I found on the subject:

One of the more interesting features of Old Norse literature - at least on the poetic and linguistic level, is the apparent gender role reversal of sun and moon. In Old Norse, the word for "Sun" (ON - sól) is feminine gendered and "Moon" (ON - máni) masculine. Throughout the body of Old Norse poetry, the sun is consistently referred to as "she" and the moon as "he." This contradicts, somewhat, a notion of the solar man and lunar female which recurs throughout Western literature, language, mythology and folklore.

(from http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20060826081954436)

From the August issue of the online magazine Vocabula:

"To throw an apple at a tree on a warm day after an exam when you are in love and you have an upcoming baseball game produces a different emotion than if any of those ingredients were not present. It is the essence of being human that we can build a single feeling — an answer to the question "how are you" — from an utterly heterogeneous set of factors that define our experience at any given moment...

"If we have an infinite variety of possible emotions, then each of us may have a genuinely unique personal selection. Instead of the ten or so emotions that we all share (commonly suggested in modern psychology), each of us may experience 100,000 different emotions. If novel sentences mean things never meant before, then beyond language, each of us has emotions that no one in the world has ever had before."

(from "Grammar's Gift to Our Image of Human Nature," by Tom Roeper)

When I was in grad school at the UW in 1999 or 2000 or 2001 sometime, I opened an account with the Washington State Employees Credit Union. I was eligible because I was a grad student, and figured I might as well take advantage of it and open the account while I could. But mostly I opened it because they were offering a free 10-pack of ramen noodles with every new account.

I clearly remember leaving the old WSECU on University Avenue with my 10 packages of ramen noodles and running to catch a bus. Of course, I dropped the ramen and had to dive down and pick up the scattered packages. I made the bus, though, sweaty yet triumphant...

In the 6 or 8 years since, that piddling amount of money sat there completely untouched.

A week or two ago I got a letter saying that since the account had been inactive, it would be subject to forfeit unless I did something with it or cashed it out. I decided to cash it out.

Just got a check for $7.09 -- the original small amount of money plus the tiny, penny-small chunks of interest that had accrued.

That seven dollars and nine cents has stayed almost exactly the same in the years since I opened the account. It serves as a kind of time capsule -- my life is almost completely different now, while that amount of money has stayed pretty much static all this time.



Overall, my life now is So Much Better.

At first I thought this was a joke, but after thinking about it, I see that the Detacho Doll House could be a useful toy for a child whose parents are divorcing or have divorced.

"It starts as one big house, then can be split into separate houses for mom and dad. You can even make a house for one of the parent's new partners! Even the figurines are true-to-life; there are magnets in their heads so that the smiley-face sides will attract and the frowny-face sides will repel each other."

Still, it's sad.

I wonder what other crappy life situations could be simulated by toys. How about...

Today is the anniversary of the death of our friend Karl Ed Johnson.

Some of us wrote heartfelt posts about our memories of him shortly after his death. (Here is a link to tatterdamelion's, with our friend John's as an anonymous comment partway down. Here is a link to mine.)

Every so often over the past year, one or the other of us would chuckle and say "If Ed were here, he'd totally say" (fill in the blank), or "That is such an Ed thing to do."

It makes me happy that memories of him live on so vividly with his friends. We talk about him more than we talk about some friends of ours who moved away years ago.

Just today, polytrypos broke open Ed's copy of "Spelljammer" and cut out the cardboard pieces for spaceships to use in a game tonight.

Sometimes I feel as though he's just in a different room, about to walk back into this one at any moment and pick up where he left off.