Queenjulia's Blog & Photos

Thursday 28.April.05:

The subject yesterday was integrity. Here is the Anti-Integrity Man, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, speaking (just over a week ago in an interview in the Washington Times):

I blame Congress over the last fifty to a hundred years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

So, if he has such a limited understanding of the Constituion, of the separation of the three branches of government, and of why fascism isn't a good idea, why is he in Congress? This strikes me as a gross lack of integrity.

Wednesday 27.April.05:

One of the wisest people I know is also wrong. I was hanging out with him recently and found myself in awe of his presence, a kind of contagious serenity. Compassion is his middle name. At the same time I disagree with his politics a bit (not as much, say, as I disagree with Tom DeLay's, but a bit). I think of managed capitalism as a good thing, of aesthetically sound prosperity as an aid, not a hindrance, to a healthy humaan society and natural environment. He, on the other hand, is a life-long union activist (which I don't exactly disapprove of, I just think he's barking up the wrong canoe) and Socialist. We have a few other areas where we simply don't agree.

What I've been marvelling about is that my less than utter admiration for his life principles does not stop me from utterly admiring him. It would seem that for me, wisdom does not lie in wiseness. Same goes for well-known people: I'm definitely not a Baptist but think of MLK as wise, I'm not a Catholic but admire Mother Theresa, and you can probably think of people you feel that way about.

Perhaps the key is that these people walk their talk. They've got integrity.

Tuesday 26.April.05:

Apart from warm fellow feeling, which is too private to dissect here, the good thing about houseguests is that you behave as you would like to appear to others, instead of the normal shortcutty way. I've actually served a sit down breakfast two days in a row now. And packed a picnic lunch. The old sheep fence is cut into 64 foot lengths and rolled up. And the table is still cleared.

We jumped in the water at the cove. We played Pounce, Hearts, Mexican Poker, Texas Hold 'em, and Blindman's Texas Hold 'em.

I spent the morning trying to figure out iMovie. They're studying the Great Depression at the school, and Mom seemed like a good subject even though she grew up in Germany, where there was a sort of perpetual depression. My interview of her is 50 minutes and I'm trying to cut it down to 10. Most of it is coming along, but I don't get how to save the movie onto the external hard drive. It claims I can't save the funny iMovie icon that labels all of the iMovies, and because of that, it won't save any movie. But the movies are what take up the major gigs on the computer, and that's why I got the hard drive in the first place. I don't want to just burn a DVD to get rid of the data because I'm hoping to save up a lot of Mom interviews and do a longer piece some day.

Mom's got two stories that hit me as I edited. First, she was talking about the reparations paid to France after World War I, when the milk cows left Germany and Kathe Kollwitz did her wrenching drawings of starving toddlers. After that was influenza which claimed more lives than the war, and a zillion percent inflation where people rushed to the store after payday so they could eat. And then rioting and Hitler's coup. When I worry about our country being bankrupted and the perpetual minor wars we fight and fundamentalists taking over the political arena, it helps to hear stories like Mom's and realize it isn't that bad, yet.

Her second story was about scrounging. After World War II, Mom was a refugee in a spa town in southern Germany where a lot of the American Occupation forces were based. She had a job in the US Army newspaper office. One day a battalion got to go home, and the commander piled up their holey socks and football uniforms to be burned. With the commander's permission, Mom got the Protestant minister to come with a wheelbarrow and cart the debris away. Her neighbors washed and unraveled the wool and soon everyone appeared with new khaki and tan sweaters.

Monday 25.April.05:

We strolled around the point, went tidepooling, and ate hard boiled eggs.

Klezmer night.

Sunday 24.April.05:

This was one of those eventful days where I forget what happened in the morning because it was so much stuff ago. I started by cleaning the house. David came home and we caught the ram. He was supposed to go to the guy up the road, but he was in the middle of installing a sink and his helper refused to even consider dealing with a ram. Okay. We took him back to the place he'd escaped from last week. I have a bad feeling about this.

Kept cleaning. Cobwebs. Carpenter ants. Cat vomit. Sheep ticks. Sometimes I miss my nice suburban tract house.

Read The Importnace of Mending, a very nice novel about the family member who didn't fit in. I liked the insight that children can be like chickens, who peck at blood. It's very common to persecute or ostracise children who are already suffering. I think it's a way of distancing yourself from the problem. If you hate the unhappy child, it's like hating unhappiness yourself. And then you will not be unhappy. If this kind of common magical thinking were explored fully, we might be able to prevent genocide.

Might as well bite the bullet and try connecting Starband again. If you want to vicariously experience technological frustration, you may read the following, which I will send to my case manager as soon as I can get to an Internet Cafe:

Dear Myrna and Casey, Myrna sent me a new software disk. I started up the PC and turned the modem on and went to Starband�s help menu. Modem is now at ID: 1362 Cluster 7 Subcluster 3 (67) Message window: The satelite modem operation reconfigured successfully! I reboot the PC. Mozilla Firefox cannot be found. Modem lights on are top two and bottom light. PC asks if I want to re-install software? I put in Version 5.1 and say yes. I uninstall what the Starband software asks me to. Window: Starband Model 350: Please wait while Windows configures StarBand Model 360. ... Computer reboots. Throughout, the top two and one bottom light are on. I enter the information asked for: Window: Computer Input Wizard: Modem ID 1362 Cluster 7 Subcluster 3(67) Window: �There already is an Internet Explorer, system is shutting down.� Everything reboots. Preparing to install Window: Starband Model 360 Installation: Recomends I close programs, there are none open. Next. Window: Your starband software is being installed. Please wait. Congratulations, you have successfully ... System reboots, during which I remove the 5.1 installation CD. Message: www.mozilla.org could not be found. Modem has same two lights on. Time passed. Then I went off-island to the Internet Cafe (Will Starband reimburse me for their fees?) and found advice from Casey Murphy: Please allow me to answer this one on at Myrna's request. Browse your C: drive and go to C:\Program Files\StarBand\SatModemConfig\Marconi\SatModemConfigMarconi and use the configurator in this folder to configure your modem to the parameters you tried last time. Yours, Casey Murphy When I finally got back home, I tried it. The address does not exist. However, a similar one does, C:\Program Files\StarBand\SatModemConfig\SatModemConfigMarconi I went to this address, which was �StarBand Satellite Modem Setup Wizard.� All the information was already in place. I clicked �Apply Configuration,� and got the message: Cannot perform the operation - Modem is disconnected� (which it is not, I checked), followed by �Modem configuration failed - No response from modem.� This was followed by a message instructing me to reboot and turn the modem off. I did that. I turned the modem back on once the computer was rebooted. The three lights came on at once. I repeated the above steps with the same result. Okay, I thought. Maybe the problem is in the cable. I replaced the cable connecting the modem to the PC with another one identical in every way except that it was gray instead of white. I rebooted the PC and tried to log on to the Internet. �www.mozilla.org could not be found....� Fine. Maybe the modem is now connected but I have to reconfigure. I know how to do that by now. I used Casey�s advice and browsed the C disk and reconfigured from there. �Cannot perform the operation - Modem is disconnected.� Please advise as to my next step. Sincerely,

Saturday 23.April.05:

The Spink and I cleaned the cabin in the morning and painted pictures in the afternoon. This would be heartwarming if we had a maid and a houseboy. As it is, I pity the houseguests.

When everyone was safely asleep, I answered a questionnaire from the school like this (skip if you're not interested in education or parenting):

This is in response to Glenda�s request for further thinking about next year.

Emotional atmosphere: My child lives in a multicultural world and I don�t expect that to change. She has been exposed to a wide range of �emotional atmospheres� in her life, including being patronized, being respected, being mistrusted and misinterpreted, being listened to, being hero-worshipped, being held up as a bad example. While some of these experiences have been uncomfortable, she would not be the resilient, wise person that she is today if she had been shielded from anything that did not seem ideal in the moment. That said, of course I do think some emotional atmospheres are better than others. I wouldn�t actively recommend a difficult emotional atmosphere. At school, I would like to see: Teachers who are confident in themselves without being arrogant. I would like them to treat children as whole, multifaceted people. I much prefer teaching which helps students grow into their powers than teaching which tries to correct weaknesses, although of course some of the latter happens naturally as children expand their strengths. Teaching in a multi-aged classroom is very difficult, I think. Younger children need tenderness, safety, and reflective listening. Middle-aged children need clear rules against which to test themselves. Older children need access to mainstream society through discussion as well as academics. Younger children need to make noise. Middle-aged children need to bicker. Older children need to verbalize ideas about sex, violence, and other highly-charged subjects. In a well-run multi-age classroom, each age group and gender should sometimes have the chance to explore in their own way and to be protected from others whose style is disruptive and from those who might be harmed by full expression of their own style. I think that people, that teachers, have individual characters and that children are capable of learning from a wide variety of expressions of character. However, there are basic skills that every teacher should exhibit regardless of their penchants. These include keeping abreast of the subjects they are teaching, understanding the mental, emotional. and educational needs of children at various ages, observing the same proprieties with children (of all ages, genders, and physical appearance) that they would with adults they respect, and knowing not only the legal curriculum requirements, but also the expectations and desires of parents and their students. Over and above the basics, I would also want a teacher to be at once confident in their own character and knowledge, and be able to notice and adjust when students have needs outside of the expected ones. I would want a teacher to be passionate about a reasonably wide range of academic subjects and to be able to convey that passion to students. I would want a teacher who is able to notice when a student already has a passion and to give that passion room in the school day. Most of all, I would want a teacher who listens carefully to students, both in direct conversation and in passing. They should be able to directly address things which need attention, and to use less urgent information to help enrich the school program.

I would like to see children who continually accept more responsibility for the emotional atmosphere in their environment as they grow. It is easy to teach in a classroom where children have done their homework, where they approach their studies with eagerness (or at the least, neutrality), and where they observe basic proprieties such as not having tantrums in school, not shouting or cursing at people, and doing their classwork without excessive fuss. If students take responsibility for a pleasant school environment, it will happen even when there is an emotionally clumsy teacher.

I would like to see parents who understand that in a small school especially, each child is a major part of the emotional atmosphere. This is in contrast to seeing the smallness of the school as a way of �fixing� an imbalance in the home or something that wasn�t right in a previous school. Parents can enhance a good emotional environment by speaking with their children about going to school with a fresh attitude towards learning, with a cheerful tolerance towards their teachers, and with compassion and curiosity towards fellow students. Setting a good example doesn�t hurt but explicitly verbalizing expectations is probably necessary.

Academic day: Since I watched my boys give themselves an academic education without an external academic framework, I am not that concerned about requiring that a certain amount of time be spent on any one thing. I recognize that my children chose academic pursuits partly because they had a lot of free time and very few social distractions. As long as the natural joy in learning isn�t lost, I think that anything that�s supposed to be learned up to about the fifth or sixth grade level can be mastered in a couple of months. Academically, here�s how I want my children to look as adults: - they understand the academic approach and use it when appropriate. - they understand conventional ethics and have developed their own life principles. - they write clearly and do a lot of it. - they are able to think analytically, compassionately, artistically, or in a goal-directed way as the situation requires. - they understand and use the scientific method. They understand the scientific views on matters of daily interest such as astrology, evolution, psychology, and the environment. - they can use a computer and the Internet. - they read from most of the larger Dewey Decimal categories and from a variety of magazines and websites. - they�re comfortable with a foreign language. - they�re familiar with some other cultures and periods of history. - they play music or do some kind of visual art. - they eat and exercise in a healthy, intentional way. - they have at least one area of expertise. In my opinion, just because you want adults to have certain skills does not mean that children should learn those skills as early as possible. At the same time, I think that the raw human child wants to embrace everything. Because of this, as long as the teacher is delighted with the subjects and skilled at teaching them, I think a wide variety of teaching approaches would be just fine. For example, I am comfortable with the traditional way I was taught, since the elementary school I went to was a teacher-training school and my teachers were all master teachers. Our days were divided into distinct segments which seldom varied. We did reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and math in the morning. We did art, music, science, P.E. and social studies in the afternoon. Teachers with a special feel for something integrated it into the rest of the day. I was bored out of my mind a goodly amount of time, but I had confidence in my teachers and trusted that I was being educated. It turns out that I was. My favorite way to teach is on the other end of the spectrum. It�s called, I think, emergent teaching. You leave enough space in the day so that the kids start to move in some direction (in my experience this is usually a group thing). You can either enhance the classroom environment with books or equipment that addresses the student interest, &/or you can directly teach it. Usually, quite a few of the academic disciplines are needed to do justice to the subject. I personally have never been able to see how to teach basic math facts above the fourth grade level this way, but as long as there was time set aside for math, I would be happiest with this approach at the school.

What is important for your child: There�s �important� in a global sense, and �important� in the idiosyncratic local sense. Overall, my child needs to be fed regular meals, she needs a stable set of loving adults in her life, she needs shelter and clothing, a stable economy and government and a good education. More particularly, she needs a predictable but not inflexible schedule. She needs pets. She needs friends she can trust and who trust themselves. She needs classmates who don�t have meltdowns in class. She needs vast amounts of time to read, dream, draw, and climb trees. She needs to understand the basic parameters of whatever she�s studying before she�s asked to analyze or create. She needs to trust her environment before she feels comfortable exploring, and she loves to explore. She needs plenty of noncompetitive play. She has a capacity, an eagerness to think that has never been awakened in school. I�m not sure what it would take, but would like to see it happen. I think it has to do with the very strong social dynamic at school, and with her need to be clear about academic ground rules before she is comfortable moving forward. One way to address this might be to have age-appropriate discussion/study groups such as the puberty education group.

Approaches to teaching you�d like to see: I think just about any approach would be fine, as long as the teacher was a person of integrity and was good at teaching, or willing to improve.

How much of certain subjects: As I said, I think this is an irrelevant question. It would depend on the passion of the teacher and the interests of the students.

The ideal school for your child: My child would rise in the morning eager to go to school and return home in the afternoon bubbling with excitement (well, sometimes she�d be merely warmly content). She would want to carry over whatever she�d started in school at home. She�d look back on each school month and realize she�d learned stuff that she wants to try again. Over a few years, there�d be no glaring gaps in the subjects that had been covered. For her personality, the ideal school would have well integrated teachers who are competent, confident and kind with a touch of flambuoyance. There would be an emphasis on the subjects she likes such as art, writing, track and field, and certain periods of history. Subjects that she is interested in but wary of such as science and math would be taught exactly as would work for her (that is, to teach the basic facts directly and then leave room to explore). As far as I know, she only dislikes school subjects according to whether one of her fellow students has meltdowns during it, rather than according to what the subject is.

Friday 22.April.05:

The onion dome is finished. It got a small snow goose instead of disappearing sea gulls. The Spink and I painted the guest room walls and rather than putting out clean linens and stuff, I seem to be painting a still life of tulips for that room. If you're going to be my houseguest, you may have spiders crawling up your nostrils and a moldy matress, but by god you'll have something to look at while you sneeze.

Jazz this evening, my second attempt. I've never listened to jazz and that turns out to be a handicap. To me, the stuff all sounds like some stoned guys dinking around and forgetting to stop. I've heard so many people admire it, even get ecstatic, that I know I'm missing something big. Aside from not enjoying the sound (but I expect I will, once I understand it), the two major handicaps are that the actual music is difficult, what with the sharps and flats and odd rhythms, and that my natural approach to new stuff is through analysis, not "feel."

My plan to get better at jazz includes:

1. Learn all the notes on the clarinet. Play chromatic scales and the jazz scales, which so far have been Bb, Eb, G, and A.

2. Learn chord names. Like, what is a diminished chord? And what is a nine chord? Learn to automatically play the notes of any chord. I'm fine at improvising, but not so fine at improvising to specific chords.

3. Listen to CD's.

4. Visit my neighbor Fred who's willing to teach me some theory.

Thursday 21.April.05:

The Starband folks gave me another thing I could try. I'll try it.

Wednesday 20.April.05:

I dreamed about a saturnine guy who offered me a balalaika and a koto. There was the sense that if I accepted, he would own my soul. I'm considering it.

COASST bird walk, nothing dead. Live birds included: great blue heron, juvenile bald eagle, harlequin ducks, oystercatchers, gulls, cormorants, kingfishers, and northwest crows.

Onion painting is difficult. I might put the disappearing gulls into it.

Finally finished the fourth fence section and, with David's help, moved the sheep into it. Sheared the sheep that looks like a bolster. Now she looks like a sheep.

Read The Grapes of Wrath out loud to The Spink. It seems rather inappropriate as a homework assignment. Steinbeck wants to portray po' white trash in a sympathetic light, but there is a lot of talk of women as prey that just doesn't seem right to expose a 12 year old to. We talk about it, but I'd be just as happy if we waited a few years before she learned how dysfunctional some of the male-female stuff can be. And no, it is not likely that a whore would waive her fee because Tom Joad was such a good lay. Sorry.

Tuesday 19.April.05:

I dreamed about seagulls that flew into cracks in the sky, leaving four large droplets of water as they vanished.

I'm working on a painting of an onion dome church in Novgorod that I found inspirational because of the scaffolding around it. Not that I am that enamored of the strict, heirarchical, insular Russian Orthodox religion, but that those churches have such an idiosyncratic beauty. Who would think of putting huge wooden onions on their roof?

Klezmer night with all the rest of the musicians was much more musical than last night. The main klezmer instrument used to be fiddle with brass back-up, and now it's switched to clarinet. Our band has everything, although if you know of a cembalo player, send her our way please.

Monday 18.April.05:

David glued together a few PVC pipes and I wheelbarrowed five loads of that rotting sheetrock under the alder tree to backfill the waterline trench, which has been emanating bad feng shui here for over ten years. The entire trench, of course, is not ready for backfilling. Just a part of it.

The bass player came over and we did a really lame klezmer session. Practicing alone, of course, is easy since you call the shots. And playing in a group is harder but relatively okay because the group energy carries you along. But this evening we made dreadful music, me with adding and deleting various dotted quarter beats, and the bass player trying to compensate. Oy vey!

Sunday 17.April.05:

Left Portland 9:00, arrived Seattle 12:30. Took Tyko to Pike Market but my computer is full and you will have to wait a couple days before I can download the photos. You will have to make due with yesterday's.

Today is the birthday of a dead friend. We visited his widow and were determinedly cheerful. Grieving with friends seems so difficult to me. We each have our own ways of expressing it and for some, if you strike the wrong note, great damage can be done in that vulnerable time. The widow, though, is an extravert and wants people around her who either remember her husband, or who can cheer her up. To each their own.

Speaking of grief, today's been quite melancholy. Meeting and parting from my mother, my sisters, my niece and nephew, and my two sons is not easy. I have an image of how things ought to be in my heart, and that image includes everyone that I love being alive and in good health and just over in the next room. The world fragments.

Same with places. I remember, I remember scents and textures and the warmth of people long dead and places that are no longer any way the same.

I went to a lecture once on God and Creation, in which the speaker made a case for God experiencing every moment of Creation as the present. Vruba quoted somebody, maybe Garrison Keilor, who said that time is so that everyhing doesnt' happen at once, and space is so that it doesn't all happen to you. That system has built-in tragedy, though. People you love are so seldom in the same time and place as you. I still miss my grandmother, who died in 1966 I think, and wish I had known my other grandmother, who seems a kindred spirit. But I'll never know.

Saturday 16.April.05:

Uwajimaya and Trader Joe's are my two favorite grocery stores, and we went to both today. Also to the zoo.

Friday 15.April.05:

Mom and I went to Art Media where I bought out their supply of 14x20 canvases. At Joanne's Fabrics I got a small stack of pink calico for the graduation skit in June. Shopping and the arboretum with Vruba and one of my sisters in the afternoon, family dinner and no-holds-barred card games in the evening.

You could probably have told me that very few of the things I packed are getting used. I love the people I came down here to visit and don't want to miss even a mnomentito of their company. But, as a mostly introverted person (Meyers-Briggs INTJ), I end up somewhat nutz at the end of these visits. I like to think that that's the real reason that my birth family seems to regard me as the Black Sheep. Not because of actual things I have actually done ... Never mind.

Thursday 14.April.05:

Drove to Portland in exquisite weather and woke Vruba up. We went downtown and wandered around, buying books and puzzling over things.

Interviewed Mom for the school project on the Great Depression. Being in Germany, Mom's experiences were more extreme. Cabbage soup.

I took 212 pictures, many of them in Vruba's company. I hate to delete any of them. It's like deleting a piece of life. The same magical thinking that makes people dislike it when strangers know their name; a substitution of the symbol for the reality. I've gotten the April 14 file down to 159 pictures, so far.

Wednesday 13.April.05:

Mailed off the school newsletter. Packed for a brief mainland trip. I used to pride myself on just taking a toothbrush. No more. After 21 years of diaper bags, snacks, and crafts projects, I've realized I like the same for myself (not the diapers.)

This time I brought a bone and a curly stick and a sleeping bag for the stay in Seattle with an artist friend. The video camera to video Mom's stuff for the insurance people. The still camera because I take lots of pictures. Clothes. Tapes for the car so I can bypass the froth-at-the-mouth stations that we seem to get along the I-5 corridor. A genuine Chinese Go set for Vruba. Dribs and drabs of paperwork, letters, half finished books, music, addresses, and of course, the laptop.

Saw a 66 member Swedish choir, Kor med Kor on Orcas. They had a varied presentation, wtih a few simple movements that added humor or drama to the songs. People left the theater grinning.

Met Andy (who is now Tyko) at Seattle U and hung out at The Noodle Bowl. Excellent garlic pancakes!

My hostess and I were talking about carpenter options. I told her, and then realized it was true, the following: that since I began menopause I suddenly lost the ability to churn up an interest in something I'm not interested in. In the past, I taught and grew interested in subjects like American Citizenship and Natural History. But nowadays, possibly with the hormone changes, I just want to do the stuff I want to do. I do not want to learn carpentry (although I expect to swing a hammer under the carpenter's direction, if & when I find one)..

Tuesday 12.April.05:

I feel crappy. Usually, there is an clear reason for feeling bad; I didn't eat enough protein, I have PMS, I'm sick. But today, no. I filled the morning with stuff I hate to do on the theory that it won't ruin my day, after trying to move a painting forward. Painting is so fragile. If I feel dumb, the painting is dumb. The cat thought so too.

Planned to go on a long walk in the afternoon but The Spink came home early, feeling crappy and needy. Okay. Now I know that I'm sick. I can spend the rest of the day stupiding around without feeling like I'm betraying an obligation to myself.

Monday 11.April.05:

Two of the four sides of the new sheep pen are done. A lot of sawing, hauling, burning, fence-post sinking, measuring, and pulling on the fence. The ram came back, trailing a broken clip. He hopped back in to be with the ewes. He's not interested in being re-caught, especially since the neighbor we gave him to will slaughter him this time around. The lawn mower idea didn't work. Like humans, sheep are a lot less predictable when they act as individuals than when they are part of a herd.

For klezmer night, the sax player brought over his three grandkids, the piano player brought her son, and a formerly Jewish grandma came to listen and dance, bringing along her guitar-playing sweetie.

The carpenter is now 14 months overdue to start the addition. He was going to start last week but got the flu. I'm not sure what to do next. The logical thing would be to either give up or bring somebody on-island to live here until the job is done. But off-island carpenters take a while to get up to speed, not being able to drive to the lumberyard every afternoon and not having all their power tools available.

Sunday 10.April.05:

Six of us boated to Friday Harbor in spitting weather to learn, we thought, about cleaning oiled birds after an oil spill. Instead, it turned out to be one of those courses that you have to take to keep your certification current, taught by a person who no doubt knows her stuff but is an indifferent teacher.

I was trying to figure out what made it not work for me. The main thing, of course, is that I was primed to learn about helping birds and didn't.

There were two easily improvable parts to her presentation. The first was something I've seen a lot of in tight-knit groups. Because most of the participants were already part of the "in" crowd, she got lost in the cameraderie and forgot to bring us outsiders up to speed. For a good two hours of the five hour class, I couldn't figure out what she was trying to teach. We learned how to recognize benzine exposure symptoms, we were briefly shown many, many preparedness forms used by various agencies involved in toxic substance manufacturing or transportation, and we watched a gut-wrenching bootleg video of a military boat transfering personnel to and from a submarine and then unexpectedly sinking with all but 8 hands. And it was not until I got home a few hours ago, ate a frozen pizza, and watched Kiki's Delivery Service with The Spink, that I realized my own interest in hands-on wildlife rescue is incidental in her organization. The main idea was to certify people to be able to assess marine hazardous waste spills and to interface with the agencies such as Coast Guard and Fish and Wildlife who have enforcement and oversight powers. An introduction and agenda would have solved this confusion.

The second thing thing (or maybe this is the same) was that she was neither a big-picture nor a detail person, but a bureaucrat. We didn't get an overview, but neither did we get many juicy details of exactly what it's like to work at a spill site. We saw a lot of different forms on protocol used by different agencies and companies, though. If she had made like a zoom lens and occasionally drawn in or out to give us an overview or details, that would have helped.

The best tip was to fold a tab of duct tape over when you tape down your rain gear to your boots so you can pull it off easily later. (Three hours later, we saw when and why you are doing this taping; it's because when you're on shore at an oil spill and netting distressed wildfowl, the duct tape keeps oily water from splashing up onto your ankles and wrists.)

And, I finished knitting a hat.

Saturday 9.April.05:

I've been working on a simple four-hand piano piece by Beethoven for two weeks, with no apparant progress. Today the music lesson started in that raw stage, but when I could hear how the second part fit mine, all of a sudden it was easier to place my fingers.

In general as a learner, I'm analytic first, then visual and kinesthetic, and then, far back in the dust, auditory. If I can't figure it out, I don't trust it. And if I can't see it and do it, there's very little chance that I'll remember it. So this auditory breakthrough was a real surprise for me.

Later in the evening, I went over to the neighbors for my very first jazz session. I hate jazz. I associate it with the worst of testosterone, the Charlie Mingus attitude of "If your fingers aren't bloody at the end of the session, then you're not worthy," the instant critical judgement that happens as people solo, apparantly not to share beauty but to strut their stuff; the alcohol, cigarette, and heroin soaked culture where it's an admired thing to die young in a knife fight or of an overdose.

Whenever people have an attitude as strong as the one I have about jazz, I become suspicious. If you've read the last few months of this blog, you know that the main reason is that I think most of what people observe is their own psyche projected onto the outside world. If I see that kind of stuff in jazz, it's because it's a magnet that attracts those elements inside me, metaphorically speaking.

Another more extraverted reason is one that's become viscerally true for me since living in this small community. It's quite clear here that one person can make a huge difference, especially if her mission is clear. Whatever jazz is without me, with me it might be different.

I therefore decided to keep firmly in mind that jazz is just music. What I sense of its culture is out of date (my last extensive reading about jazz was in the late 70's) and likely a projection anyway. Taking it as just music, to learn to play it and possibly like it, I need to approach it from my personal strengths, which are analysis, visuals, and physical participation.

So I took the sheet music (that would be the visual part) and the clarinet (that would be the physical participation) over to Bill's, where there was a sax, a drum set, an electric guitar, and a bass. Luckily, I can sight read pretty well because much of the music moves right along. Well, you can probably guess what happened. I liked it. And, true to form, the one I liked best was a totally intellectual piece that my fellow players, who are all more intuitive and apt to do things "by feel," thought was unreachable. The two things in my recent musical history that made it accesible to me were Bach and those Norwegian polsks that are in 2 1/2 time. And that would be the analytical part.

Thursday 7.April.05:

Our dinner hostess is around 65, and went to grad school in Michigan. Everyone in the Russian department, she said, had hair-raising stories. One of them lived in St Petersburg before it became Leningrad, and remembered Lenin standing on balconies and haranguing the crowds. Once there was a terrorist attack which killed at least a hundred people. The funeral cortege went up that wonderful broad boulevard that defines St Petersburg, with people lining the sidewalks. Somebody shot off a gun and, fearing another terrorist attack, everyone dropped their coffins and ran for cover. The guy remembered standing on an empty street, with a row of coffins stretching off in either direction down the middle.

Our hostess recommended that we read the Science News article on scale (I didn't, yet). She says it explains how larger animals metabolize slower and live longer. I had a sudden vision of all the things on Planet Earth living as though the physics of time were different for them. A mayfly's universe is stuffed into one day, and a doug-fir breathes at the rate of one in- and ex-hale per day. We gaze out from our eye sockets at beings whose lives intersect with ours at vastly different speeds.

Wednesday 6.April.05:

We had a short discussion today on the subject of our school's failure. One of the students said that, sure, they were reading a lot of books, but it wasn't literature because they didn't get it in a textbook with questions at the end of each chapter. Other students tried to point out that they do read a lot and have to respond to their reading, but it looked as though the idea had too much emotional charge to be addressed.

Years ago, I read a kids' book in which the evil guy kept making the kid swallow a pill with his gruel. The kid was convinced that he was being poisoned. When he finally escaped from his bad situation, he found out that it had been a vitamin pill.

There's a balance between explaining everything you do, which can sometimes seem like pushing an agenda or simply get tedious; and forcing your good ideas on people. In this case, lack of trust is probably what makes communication so difficult. It's particularly hard to locate because there doesn't seem to be anything on the school's end that's triggering the lack of trust. It's the student's comparison of our small alternative school with other, semi-mythical ones, and unvoiced fears about the future.

We had a wild and silly contra dance at the end of the day. (Beware: it's 6 MB).

Tuesday 5.April.05:

Funny. Today, teaching Spanish was like teaching puppies; fun, cute, but it didn't really seem like anybody's heart was in it. Later at a staff meeting, one of the teachers said that everyone had been complaining that they aren't being taught enough. "When I tried to think of what I'd learned in school this year, I couldn't think of anything," said one of the crossed-arms, eye-rolling students. And no wonder.

If she were homeschooled, she'd feel responsible for that kind of remark. Just whose fault is it that she hasn't learned anything? (Not that anyone completely believes her; it was an emotional statement made to express that she's nervous about re-entering a more conventional school system next year.)

Given that she's in school, what can she do about it? Complaining does serve the purpose of making all us teachers re-examine our ministrations. But as a life strategy, it sucks. It gives eveyrone else too much power.

Controlling other people is a losing battle. They keep on pursuing their own agenda. It's maybe naive to say that you can mold yourself to order, but you're certainly a locatable target.

Very small children appropraitely do not take responsibility for themselves. It would be fatal. As they grow, our ideal is that they assume exactly as much responsibility as they're capable of and no more, until, at the age of 21, they step into full ownership. What I see is that the process is patchy and never complete. Children demand autonomy in areas where they're idiots (say, eating dessert instead of vegetables) and refuse it in areas that nobody else can do for them (say, keeping a fresh mind while studying math until it makes sense). We can all think of examples of other adults (never ourselves!) who blame outside influences for things that they have daily opportunities to change. (It's my spouse! It's how I was raised! It's lack of money! I'm too old!)

A strategy that sometimes helps me change my own dysfunctional attitudes is to step outside of myself, look at me and the problem at hand, and then step back into my own world with that fresh viewpoint. Sometimes it's quite clear where the change should be.

And usually, it's not a very big thing that needs to happen. Just a subtle attitude shift, or a slight tweak of how I spend my time. Nothing I can't do.

Monday 4.April.05:

Back to school. We started Spanish with a discussion of reading techniques. In Hispanic countries, they use logic to teach reading. Kids don't start until they are 7, which is good, since younger than that their Piagetian stage makes logic a bit of a joke. First you learn ma, me, me, mo, mu, and words like mama and mimi. Then other syllables are added, always with the a, e, i, o, u pattern. Finally, they add double consonants, syllables that begin and end with a consonant (con, las), wierd stuff (ca, que, qui, co, cu), and then you know how to read.

But books that are written for American Spanish speakers are designed with the idea of transitioning to reading English. So they stick in words that you have to memorize right from the beginning. That way, a kid has strategies other than logic to tackle words with. I taught using that method 20 years ago, and it seemed to me that it worked very well. Kids who could read well in Spanish learned English reading much more quickly than kids who were Spanish dominant but started to read in English.

Klezmer night with flute, piano, sax, clarinet, bass, accordion, and an audience.

Sunday 3.April.05:

Some kind of mild flu.

Saturday 2.April.05:

Found the needed Internet connection in Friday Harbor at the lavendar place. I am going to associate high tech with the smell of my grandmother's pillowcases and bedsheets.

Met Vruba on IRC. It's actually more contact that I sometimes had with him when he lived at home. As we're both far more oriented towards writing than meatspace, this makes a kind of geeky sense.

When we got to the dock, David said "That dinner for twelve? Well, it's on."

I said, "But it's 5:10."

He said, "Better hurry."

Friday 1.April.05:

We missed a wonderful chance to be silly when we did our COASST walk and photographed no frozen turkeys, photoshopped no dodobirds. Maybe next year. What we did do is kayak because the tide was too high to walk. A rainstorm worked its way from Sydney, BC around to Vancouver, trailing rainbows.

Went to Eastsound in a very churny sea in the afternoon, hoping to get on the Internet. But I didn't. Have I mentioned that this is frustrating?

Notice:

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