David said, "I like subtlety and you're more of a bald-faced person."

It's so true. I have far less beard than he does.

I'm not sure what he meant or why he said it. That, of course, doesn't stop me from staring at it ... not the part about David because, as his wife, I can't judge it at any useful level. I suppose that there's a way that I agree whole-heartedly. I do tend to think that a lot of what passes for subtlety is mere chicanery. "Well, it's not really stealing" sort of a thing. I suppose that if you have defined your terms clearly and you understand how your situation falls then you have achieved such a victory that if you stop right then, you're okay.

And then in another sense, I suspect that there's a gender thing going on. I am often surprised at how oblivious David seems to me to be to distinctions that I find crucial. No doubt there are corresponding distinctions on his end that he relies on, and finds it jarring when I don't even notice them.

And on the third hand, there are indeed things that I just don't have the patience for. Too much worrying about certain topics just looks neurotic to me. I have approximately zero time for a certain type of brooding - the German Romantics as I remember them from college, as an example. There's a whole world there that I know I'm missing.

Too bad.

I'm mostly a thinker: I'm analytical and think first in pattern and structure before I consider details or emotional meaning.

I can't remember exactly why this came up today (see yesterday's post) but it seems worth nosing around at. I've been looking at how, from my point of view at least, emotions tend to get in the way. I understand that, as a thinker, my emotional side is underdeveloped; I don't really care what my emotions are nor do I think that they're to be trusted.

This is partly because I have a depressive physiology. It would be suicidal to listen to my emotions because they are usually grumpy or glum. I learned long ago not to believe that there's an objective truth to these moods. I note them, of course, because all information is useful, but usually I'll decide they come from a faulty brain chemistry and set them aside. Then, I can proceed with life with reasonable good cheer and vim.

This is in sharp contrast to what I've noted from people who think with their heart, who go from the gut. President Bush lives there, of course, but a lot of the dysfunctional parenting I've seen in my years as La Leche League leader, neighbor, and teacher comes from there too. (I'm not even going to visit the toxic land of marital discord here.)

It is a blessing and a curse that our children remind us so much of ourselves. The faults and virtues we ourselves have are mirrored tenfold in our children; if not exactly then in a disturbingly distorted way. People who trust their emotions and act on them in the arena of parenting ... well.

"My child is perfect and can do no wrong. It is the school's fault if they are having trouble in school." All of us parents feel that. Logical thinkers take the next step, "Maybe some responsibility lies in my mostly but not entirely perfect child. Maybe there is some parenting strategy I can try that will help my child take responsibility for the effect they have on their surroundings."

"My child is irritating beyond belief and can do no right. It is the child's fault if anything is wrong in their or, in fact, in my life." All of us parents have felt that at one time or another. Logical thinkers take the next step, "Maybe this is me reacting to my child as mirror rather than me actually seeing an evil in my child. And if there is a genuine flaw, one that others also have remarked on, maybe it is my responsibility as a parent to help my child learn better strategies ... through effective modeling first, to see if it really is possible to change that flaw."

I am always a bit wary when I write a post such as this one. We can all find ourselves in it. Possibly I've insulted you horribly. It's not intentional, and I'm very sorry. I don't have any particular parent/s in mind. I'm talking about patterns, not details.

It's a bit of a puzzle. I could stick with the bland or continue to use myself as a dissection subject; both will be forthcoming. But today, I feel like ranting. And I trust that feeling.

Am I losing my memory because of

Overload?

Menopause?

Alzheimer's?

Don't like what I'm supposed to remember?

Shorter day length?

Could be any of those. One of the effects of not being able to remember as effortlessly as I used to be able to, is that blogging is harder. I can't remember that interesting thought I had earlier in the day.

I can't do much about some of the things on the list. As for overload, external aids seem to be what I keep coming back to. I've scheduled in an hour of personal housekeeping in the morning, which means that vast piles of "to do" crap is gone, mostly as fire starter. And I put one of those little sticky note pads on the newly cleared desk. (Of course, once I cleared out the room, The Spink decided she needed to use that space for her stuff, and also my desk and laptop for her homework. Which is true.)

Still talking about yesterday's encounter.

Shallow, surface things are trivial. Deep things are important. Right?

For me, the ideal in almost everything is intelligent balance. In social encounters, the surface level would correspond to cultural pleasantries such as a relaxed, attentive posture, observance of introductory and closing greetings, and so on. Without that, too much effort is wasted on trying to interpret what deviance from the norms means.

The depth level would be that you would actually be talking about something that could make a difference to your life; recipes, politics, philosophy. Without depth, of course, you might as well have another drink or three.

I've been thinking about surface vs. depth a lot recently because of painting pictures and because of studying marine natural history.

When I paint, I take a photographic or mental image that's three-dimensional and flatten it. There are tricks of paint to give it a kind of depth but you can't move your point of view and see stuff previously hidden behind a painted image. Nevertheless, I find paintings more interesting than film or sculpture. It's possible that the flatness, the surface nature of it, is evocative of unknown depths. If the depth is already there, as with sculpture, there's no secret.

My understanding of Natural History is that at the boundaries the most diversity is found; tidelands, current edges, ocean floors. Things gather at surfaces and edges.

An awkward encounter led me to wonder what it is about social interactions that puts people at their ease, or not. This person, let's call him "Zork," didn't look at me ... or, more accurately, didn't directly look at my face. I assume he snuck glances with peripheral vision, but maybe that's one of those assumtions that leads you astray.

The conversation had pauses that were too long. As an ex-Quaker, I'm mostly comfortable with long silences in conversations, as long as they seem to me to be communal; that is, as long as both of us seem to be either enjoying each others' company or contemplating the wholeness of the conversation or doing something that has the joint experience in mind. Whereas, in this conversation, I felt myself being put in the role of interrogator. Zork did not say anything unless I asked him a direct question, and then he answered minimally.

I found my own thoughts churning doubly fast, as though trying to generate enough for two. Is Zork autistic? Is he just shy? He can't hate me because we are the barest of acquaintances, but perhaps he has some kind of hang-up about people I remind him of. Yadda-yadda. If he wanted to be left alone, the opposite happened. Like a scab, I couldn't stop picking at our encounter. Bland social pleasantries would have served him better ... assuming that anonymity is what he was after.

I spent the day working on the Balkan music unit of my ethnomusicology class. It was informative and fun to do, but it felt like I was shirking my real life. Real life? Aside from the correspondence course work, I did bake a couple loaves of bread and spread seaweed on another garden bed. That's frill, though. Real life would be stuff like prepping for class tomorrow or painting from a photo of the gnarly roots we saw yesterday.

I suppose what makes the distinction is what furthers my life goals and what is merely cool stuff along the way. Obviously, I don't really think this. It's just a knee-jerk first reaction, an artifact of too much serious self-evaluation.

But I can't shake this feeling of having spent the day on fake life.

We found our first dead bird in a long time today. Its head was eaten off and the key we were using had us thinking it was either an albatross, a murrelet, or a Canada goose. Further contemplation is required.

Later in the evening, we played klezmer with a classically-trained pianist at the keyboards, a beginning accordionist, the bass player, me on clarinet and Plumosita on flute, and the usual pianist switching back and forth between flute, pennywhistle, and recorder. With a small switch in personnel, we found ourselves hopping from one tune to the next, and really stretching ourselves as far as difficulty. I had no idea I could play something with 6 sharps in it, but since B was the only note that wasn't sharped, it was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. It was a slow (of course) gypsy hora full of those left-turn twists that I love.

Then in a sudden flurry of ridiculousness, we all rushed off to the dock. Four of the kids went swimming and the rest of us looked for the school of fish that David had observed earlier, feeding on a new hatch of some kind of dot sized larvae. He said that he keeps realizing that it's the plankton that determine whether the fish will be there, and the fish that decide whether the seals will be there. Simple logic, of course, but our conservation politics have yet to legislate with this in mind.

Mother harbor seals park their babies in likely spots. Nowadays, it's been in Cowlitz where the fish are. One of the babies loves swimming upside-down. We watch her and laugh out loud.

We have been reading "Thud" out loud to each other.

I suppose grown-ups aren't supposed to enjoy comic science fiction, but Pratchett is in a class of his own. He manages to be funny at the slapstick, parody, pun, and subtle level at the same time (or at least, on the same page), and presents social and ethical issues in some depth.

The carpenters are reading Annie Dillard and Robert Graves to each other. It is true that the roof was not replaced before the start of the rainy season, but clearly the balance of the universe requires that it be this way.

Celebrated the Spink's thirteenth birthday with a trip to Friday Harbor. David took her out to breakfast at a very New Yoik bagel place, and then we shopped. Makeup at the drugstore, used books at the used book store, screen to sift clay at the hardware store, new books at the new book store. It was the perfect day, she said.

Went to the Point to gather clay from the cliff with the eight schoolkids (we added another part-time one from the elementary school). Sat in some seagrass and discussed barnacles and cults.

During class, which we hold in the cabin, the carpenters started in on replacing the main house's roof. First step was to brace the ceiling and then remove the ridgepole, which was too small for the load it was supporting and sagged. I feel as though the ridgepole in my head has been extracted. Women, I hear, identify with their house and I see it's true.

I was talking with a guy who had a difficult childhood. Through art, he's able to access the ur-child within himself, the unself-conscious spontaneous child who informs his true identity.

"Bullshit," I said, in my tactful way, while yanking insulation out of the ceiling of my house. "Kids, at least in my experience, aren't like that. They tend to be quite self-conscious, trying on roles, or trying to act in a way that they think will get them something; approval, or attention, or something. It often looks really fake, because it's still in the beta-testing stage. The people who seem to me to be the most spontaneous and the most in touch with their inner selves are often fairly old, like 50 or 70 or 90 years old."

I think that everyone can sense that there is a state of inner harmony that they want to get to, and that ought to be possible. We remember moments in childhood that we think were like that. But in fact, having watched many, many children, I'd say that those nostalgic times are so unconscious and instintual, that they hardly count as human moments. It's not bliss that's felt, but instincts unfolding, willy-nilly. And, as an adult, I don't aspire to that. I'm happy to have instincts (ah, yes!) but I want to consciously be there when they happen, and to nudge them so that they are expressed creatively rather than destructively. It's what Jung called "individuation." I understand that to mean, in part, that your inner core is becoming more powerfully manifested than the false self based on expectations of others, on your neuroses and attitudes, and on habits borne of childhood instincts. Wanting to go back to the simplicity of childhood is like wanting to fall asleep.