Spiders

I want to be a friend of the earth.

But some of the other earthlings want to kill me, so I kill them first.

I was reading about the Jains the other day, and then they came up in conversation -- you know, the religious sect in India that's ancient as the mud and believes in harming no thing, even dust mites. Adherents walk around with coffee filters on their noses so they don't breathe in and kill bugs.

Of course, it is fitting that I was reading about Jains after getting so mad about my inability to avoid harming things because of mass production and contamination, etc. I feel like I'm a Jain trapped in a Jane Doe of America's body. I want to be one of those animals in a Disney film, who, instead of eating that tasty-looking antelope, performs a duet with her about the circle of life while tap-dancing on a talking tortoise.

Life is, unfortunately, messy and bloody, no matter how many coffee filters you smother over your face. And there is the sin of omission pestering about, too.

So yeah, I killed the spiders on our porch this afternoon. I'm pretty sure I saw white on the belly of that one. I suppose we could have just moved it somewhere else, but I was holding my baby in my arms, and like most mothers, I'm murderous when it comes to protecting my children.

Just like Kali, the Hindu mother-goddess...

The Tongue of Cherry Avenue

Typical of Charlottesville, when you turn onto Cleveland off of JPA, the road jerks to the left and becomes Cherry Avenue. It's very confusing. But typical.

Not quite so typical is that at this jerk or jag or curve, whatever you want to call it, two other roads jut off, one which is a dead end, and may also be called Cleveland (hard to tell), and the other is Willis, which runs into Harris (sounds like a British joke in there somewhere). It's not the safest intersection in the world, because it's not really an intersection. There's a pedestrian crossing that only two of the roads affords vision of, making most pedestrian activity in this area risky at best. For drivers, there's the confusion of the turning road which is the same road but now a different name compounded with the stress of other traffic from two others roads and that sort of vague question mark lingering around a memory of a driver's test that didn't seem to cover much other than speed limits around trains and schools.

So several months ago, the city built a 'tongue' of concrete that cropped off some of the access of the dead end road. The effect of this was to make it a little bit safer and less confusing if you were staying on Cherry/Cleveland, but if you were turning onto Willis, there were some harrowing moments when oncoming traffic looked threateningly close.

But I got used to it. THEN, a month or so ago, the city started to dig up and cut off the tongue. Rumor has it that "the neighborhood" didn't like the tongue. They protested, and the city said 'oops' and took it back.

I have several questions and problems with this scenario:

1) I have no idea why the tongue was installed in the first place -- but if there was good reasoning behind it, why was it removed?
2) Who is 'the neighborhood'? I'm in the neighborhood; I didn't have a problem with the tongue.
3) Is it really so easy just to complain about something the city has done and have it removed like that, so swiftly and perfunctorily? Is it??
4) How much did this thing cost?
5) Why doesn't the city install a three-way stop or something else instead of willy nilly adding and removing concrete tongues?
6) Aren't there more pressing items on the agenda for traffic issues that should take precedence over this ridiculous juncture? Just up Cherry, for instance - right before it randomly turns into Elliot - the city's been messing with the timing of the lights, so that traffic is stuck on Cherry, and they've installed more concrete to keep drivers from getting in the left lane too soon. It's a bum rap and very annoying. Why not stick a tongue there? I definitely feel like sticking my tongue out when I'm suffering in traffic, watching the light blip on and off at a higher speed than my Adelphia cable internet connection.

Cville Radio Commercial Guy

Is there only ONE radio commercial guy for Charlottesville?

You know who I'm talking about. His voice is fairly ubiquitous across the airwaves. Almost every commercial features him.

Not only is it boring to hear the same "deep male authoritative" voice over for every spot; but some of the writing for these ads is so BAD that the very 'authority' his voice is supposed to convey gets completely undermined.

I'm surprised he doesn't refuse to do some of them, quite frankly. For him to use slang, for instance, and to try and sound casual and intimate, is almost creepy. It doesn't work. One of the worst is for the car-cleaning place, where people are supposed to be treated like a king. It sounds SO ridiculous in this guy's voice. UGH.

I'll try to get the exact words the next time I hear him -- though to be honest, my ears cringe at the hint of him these days.

Isn't there any other voice over talent in the area? And don't businesses realize how awful it is to keep paying the (I'm guessing) big bucks for the same dude?

Does anyone else get as annoyed about this as I do??

the Chippendales are coming

There's so many great acts coming to Cville these days... Eric Clapton, the Flaming Lips... it's like we live in a real city all of a sudden...

but, hey ho, here come the Chippendales! I just about died when I heard the ad for this while listening to Kid Kraddick in the Morning on Mix 107.5, which advertizes itself as "the best mix of - EVERYTHING."

This station is not a mix of EVERYTHING. It is your standard pop-music mix station. Despite the exaggeration, I am not complaining, because at least it is not the lousy soft jazz they had on that station before that. That SUCKED. I'm not afraid to say it: I hate jazz. I know that this means I can never be inducted into the Liberal Hall of Fame. I know it means that people will think I'm stupid. But I don't care. I love the blues. I love beebop. I love scatting. But jazz, especially the kind they used to play in the middle of the night at Denny's when I was a kid, is TERRIBLE.

I can't believe we don't have a Denny's in Charlottesville. But we're getting the Chippendales!

Right after I heard the ad, I came upon a colleague at work saying to some others "... it will be a really energetic show, a high-energy experience..." so I walked up and said, "oh, you heard about the Chippendales?" And she said, "No, I was talking about the Wiggles!" Then we agreed that maybe the latter would someday take it all off, maybe when there current fans get older. Or maybe the Chippendales could do a kids' album.

Anyway, I can't imagine being in a crowd of drooling women watching ridiculously buff men take their clothes off and dangle their parts around. But I know that men do this all the time when they have lunch at strip clubs and the like. Apparently watching women in high heels and a bathing suit jyrating on a pole helps the digestion. I don't know.

It's not that I'm a prude. I've been to numerous strip clubs. I wouldn't mind swimming on a nudist beach. I like sex. Etc. It's just that there's something really grotesque about Chippendales, part of which has to do with the 'tux' look, part of which has to do with the Chipmunk's Christmas Album, and ... okay, maybe I am a prude.

How to Deal with People Who Hate You

We're vegetarians, but we know some vegans who hate our guts. Because we're not vegans.

It is not clear how best to deal with them.

Currently, avoidance therapy -- but I wonder, is there not a better way? Is there a way to mitigate their disgust? Is there a diplomatic approach that would ease the tensions?


Listening, of course, is always a good strategy. But what if all you hear is abrasive derision? Is it even worth trying? I only ask this question because, while this instance is personal, we face this kind of challenge as cultures, as nations, with opposing ideological beliefs, every day, with more than friendship on the line...

I thought I was going to have some brilliant or at least facetious answer to this question. But I find that I do not.

Flip Flops Taking Over the Known World

I am not pleased about all these flip-flops flipping around.

It is very annoying.

When I was growing up, jelly shoes were 'in', and my mother would not let me wear them because they are bad for your feet. Likewise with moccasins and Chinese slippers, however much I yearned to adorn my feet in ethnic splendor.

Now here I am, an 'adult', (the world needs more dolts! my dad would interject), and I am just as indignant against this flip-flop fetish as my mother was with the bad shoes I longed for years ago.

Not that there aren't cute flip-flops out there, or times when it's appropriate to wear them. But at an art opening? At work? To school? I don't think so. They are informal attire meant for beaches and gym bathrooms. Plus, I always associate them with the dirt-encrusted feet of the hippies I grew up with who had yellow, jagged hippie toenails. Gross.

At least the Chinese slippers have some cover to them! Am I becoming conservative in my advanced age???

Why People Let Their Kids Do Anything

I finally figured out why it is that you see previously intelligent and authoritative adults turn into permissive, pathetic parents.

I had to have one of my own to truly empathize.

Children, right from the start, know their own minds/bodies all the way. When my baby cries, she doesn't question her need to do so -- she goes for it with all of her might. She doesn't wonder to herself if she's hungry enough to warrant a scream -- she just screams. When she's happy, she smiles and laughs. When she's cranky, she whines. She likes what she likes, not caring what anyone else likes. She turns away from scary people, even if I want her to like them (sorry Mom).

By the time you get to be adult, you've been broken down from that initial state of pure knowing by the social niceties you've been trained to uphold. You've learned to intervene between your instant responses and gut feelings with your intellect. My mother, for instance, had to teach me not to tell people when they gave me presents I already had, even though that was the truth and I didn't mean anything by it. "Just smile and say thank you," she instructed each Christmas. And I did -- and I eventually distanced myself so far from the immediacy of my instincts that I now find it difficult to know how I feel about certain things.

To a child, there are no such quandries. And there's an authority with that assurance they exhibit -- which often bests your own questioning and lack of confidence as a parent. You don't know what you're doing, as a parent, as a person on this planet -- so you're at a disadvantage to this tiny, fiesty being who has no self-conciousness to wrestle with at all.

So you find yourself giving in to the baby or child, because he or she feels strongly about something, and you yourself are wishy-washy, unsure, wanting to do the right things but not totally sure you know what those are.

What parents and all of us have to remember is that this kind of self-doubt is really more advanced and enlightened than the child's will, as long as we're willing to work with it and let it lead us to deeper knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world. We may not be pure, but we do have experience; we may not know all the answers, but we do know more than a baby. So when that youngster wants something, like a lollipop or a gun or whatever is not good for her, it is okay to say No and put your foot down.

It's okay to draw boundaries. Just remember, you might discover at some point you were wrong, or you might change your mind. But that's okay, too -- your children will learn it's okay to be fallible and to keep learning throughout life. Which is a great human lesson we all could use.

Even more angry now... WIC

I was listening to sports radio. I love the commercials on AM. They all seem directed to senior citizens who need to lose weight or get it up - or to poor people who should eat right, stop smoking, and quit abusing their children.

So there's this WIC commercial that basically says, "You're pregnant? Eat right: put some milk in that fridge, and some carrots, and cheese. We'll help you eat right..."

And I'm thinking about my last post about contaminated foods and how, if I were a social worker for WIC reading it, I'd probably say, "Organic? I'm just trying to get these young mothers to stop putting Coca Cola in their baby bottles." (True story.)

So yeah - the level beneath eating "right" and "healthy" but all of it is polluted is eating like crap -- fast food, soda, packaged/processed foods at every meal, chips, no water, sugar-infused beef -- which is the kind of food usually stocked in food pantries for the poor... and it's cheaper and easier to cook... and from that perspective, the whole food situation, not to mention clothing, etc., is REALLY screwed up.

By the way, my mother's farmer-military Texas husband always manages to tell me when I visit that anyone who eats organic foods or believes there's hormones in milk or drinks bottled water is an IDIOT. "Organic foods are made with human excrement," he tells me, giving me his evil city-person-hating eye. He grew up eating watermelons right there in the field, making his own peanut butter, tending the cows that became the dinnertable's meatloaf. Because he's a farmer, I want to trust him - his hands are dirty with facts, his experience literally grounded, you could say. But like anyone else, his intent is extremely subjective - he distrusts scientists as a whole for being ignorant academics because they aren't farmers like himself. So anytime I cite a study or a book, he guffaws at me for buying subjective bull. It's very hard to have a discussion when you can't even get close to agreeing on what information to trust.

Which is a larger problem, I know.

GRRR...

The American Indian Museum in DC

Talk about disappointing. The outside was beautiful -- symbolic water spilling around the loose, earthy structure in a sacredish spiral, evoking nature and life and all that, and then you go inside to any one of the exhibits and -- bang! you're crammed into a claustrophbic warren of crowded, cluttered, cacophonic cubicles lacking any coherent structure or narrative...

It's not only difficult to breathe , it's difficult to orient yourself , to know what you're looking at,... which I can only suspect is because

a) the curators/designers are postmodernists, hellbent to avoid any linear-type, directive structure for the information being presented

and/or

b) there were so many tribes to include and please, the curators/designers got stressed out and scatter-brained, finally tossing all the plaques into a pool and pulling them out to display at random, so no one could accuse them of having a bias toward any one tribe.

That, or they just lacked basic skills of organization. Which I hate to believe. There's obviously a lot of cash infused into the museum. There are pieces that are haunting and beautiful -- for instance, a large, black wall covered with the luminous, white names of every tribe that existed. The effect is stunning, chilling -- like looking at a million stars and being told that each one was inhabited and loved. Unfortunately, coming at the end of the exhibit "Evidence," with little coves and no direct path to follow, the impact was not as fully felt as it would have been had a cogent narrative been established for visitors to follow and move through.

The funny part was that the designers were very consistent with their chaotic, haphazard design -- in the cafe, the same structure persisted, and it was a madhouse, people running into each other left and right, confused families scattering between various lines, unsure where to go, which lines meant what... It was ridiculous! Sure, the traditional single cafeteria line is boring -- but good God, it works! Everyone gets in line and is forced to follow an orderly path from salads to main courses to deserts to drinks, and then you pay, and then you eat. When herding crowds of hungry people -- or informing ignorant white folk or tourists about a forgotten/unknown and tragic history -- order, guidance, and clarity is necessary for a satisfactory result.

I hope this museum gets better. Like many other caucasians in this country, I have some American Indian blood in me, and the story of how my people were stabbed in the back by the conquering Europeans, the genocide that occurred, is terrifying. And it's something I don't want anyone to forget.

So angry at this contaminated world

I am starting to get really angry. Really, really angry.

Everything is contaminated. We live in a contamination zone. All of us. In the US and beyond.

1) The food we eat: If we can afford, time and moneywise, to grow our own food or buy locally grown organic food, maybe we have a chance at not downing pesticides and other harmful toxins on a daily basis -- but even organic food can be toxic, and we wouldn't know it. How the heck am I supposed to ensure that what I eat and drink is pure? When Dasani water is full of salt, when labels aren't always forthcoming, when the FDA lies all the time, when GM foods abound, when even soy could possibly be full of harmful hormones, when milk is full of hormones definitely... What the hell are we supposed to do??

2) The clothes we wear: Not only does the production process resulting my baby tee involve possible cruelty to humans and other animals, but the harvesting of cotton and other raw materials usually produces environmental hazards. Again, to dress only in fair trade, organic clothes would be optimum -- but who can afford it?

3) Cosmetics, cars, plastics... all of it, from baby teething rings to lipstick to the gas in our cars, is full of chemicals, toxins, hazards to our health and the environment... If I tried to live my life by doing no harm to others, just mammals let alone anything else, I could not live...

What makes me so mad is
a) how expensive it is to have morals
b) how hard it is to get the right information
c) how much our government agencies lie/conceal truths about everything
d) how reluctant our government is to legislate, label, etc. on harmful things

It's not that I think my one lipstick will cause cancer -- it's the CUMULATIVE affect of all of these things around and in and on us working together that destroy us and the world around us...
I feel dirty and soiled, not just with the physical contamination, but with the pain and suffering of others, with my own hypocrisy, my own inability to sacrifice so that I wear one organic sack the rest of my life...my own poverty of imagination, conviction, courage...

Even getting the daily Ideal Bite can be depressing...

And I keep hearing this quote I saw the other day:

What you do is of little significance; but it is very important that you do it.
-M. K. Gandhi

Musing on Food

Eating baffles me. The act of, I mean. It's something we tend to take for granted, because it's something we have to do, it's routine. I've always thought "Foodies" kind of stupid for that matter. Who isn't, at heart (or at stomach - at all the organs) a 'foodie'?

To be honest, I was so bored learning cooking from my mom, food was never a specialty of mine, either the preparation or consumption of. I like mayonaise a lot.

But when you have a kid, the act of eating becomes so crucial. You think about food all the time, whether it's in your boob or something you're making yourself or buying... whether the kid eats and how often become the Hot Topic of the Day... it really is life or death, how much and what your child is putting in her mouth... And then there's the ritual of sitting down to eat together that you don't want to do because you want to watch TV but suddenly there's this impressionable creature you have to pretend to like eating at the table for or you'll ruin her life...

Which is what sparked this: thinking about the Paradox of Eating: it is so intensely personal, and yet it's a ritual you tend to do in groups. (Kind of like women going to the bathroom.) I mean, you don't eat off the same plate with other people, usually, and even if you do, each person has his or her own mouth...

And each morsel offers a subjective taste experience to each individual... you and I may each stuff a wad of blue cheese and you may say yum and I might puke... But all of our holidays have dinners in them, we commune together to eat in a religion, it's the way we join together our extreme loneliness as human beings with individual consciousness and our social animalism... in a very concrete fashion, every meal is a communion, every food is a transubstantiation that transforms us, that creates us - you are what you eat, literally.

It's just so wierd that we don't just fuel up like cars - inject ourselves with proteins - vitamins are great but don't cut it - you need real food, real plantlife, real fluids, going through your body, to be totally healthy. That's why computers, robots, cars, are not humans... We experience pleasure when we eat... we make art of our fuel...

I have no conclusions -- it's just that I'm suddenly amazed by this... by life.