Queenjulia's Blog & Photos

Sunday20.February.05:

Another freezing but brilliantly sunny day. I could get used to these.

At dinner last night, we got to pick through old photos of fishing boats in Alaska and such. Today, started a painting loosely based on one of the photos of a glacier, except with a naked woman in it (I was going to take a photo of myself and use it but the electrician was here all day. Even I draw the line somewhere. And besides, I don't have a glacier to stand on).

Watched Divided We Fall, a Czech movie. Joseph and Mary (get it?) are hiding a Jew during WWII. Trying to eat an entire contraband pig so it wouldn't dangle over the guy's bed, singing about gorillas to distract the Nazi collaborator from kissing the hand of, not Mary, but the guy hiding under the duvet. Black humor is sort of a specialty of Czechs.

The Czechs have a lot of history to struggle with. As far as I can piece together, a relatively large percentage of their population was Jewish. World War II emptied them out, and in the aftermath, they expelled their also large German population. Then there were four decades of Soviet domination, during which everyone became an informant on everyone else. Divided We Fall, it seems to me, addresses all those tragedies. Yes, everyone you know is either a victim or a bad guy or, most probably, both. And they're your neighbors and part of what that means is that you keep having to forgive them.

Saturday, 19.February.05:

Videotaped a neighbor who demonstrated chainsaw maintenence, and another neighbor who gardened. Burn pile. Schmoozed with the electrician (no doubt at $75 per hour). Dinner with an old friend and his fiancee. They strongly recommended a Japanese video store in Portland on 5th and Davis, but when I called David and The Spink to tell them, they said they'd found it earlier today. Are they hot, or what?

Finished the painting of island cliffs. I always thought it looked like the cliffs had faces in them, but only found them twice; once about 20 years ago, and the second time while planning this painting.

I'm dying seven skeins of homespun turquoise on the wood stove. The house smells like boiling wool. It's the price one pays for being so awesomely quaint.

Friday, 18.February.05:

David and The Spink left early today to spend a few days on the mainland. I rushed off to see the bald eagle. It was still dead, only more so. The sea lion was gone, buoyed up by blubber and a high tide to float off somewhere downcurrent. But a fat harbor seal baby was muttering and twitching in its sleep along the beach, thus tritely but cutely illustrating the Great Cycle That We Call Life And Death.

The electrician was at the house, and I helped him pull wires through the pipe so that people can use computers in the cabin. A visitor stopped by while we were having lunch. "I get so irritated with him," he said of his alcoholic neighbor. "He just lays in bed all day with his ear muffs on because he's too lazy to chop wood for the heat stove. And he won't get up unless someone's gotten him a bottle of wine. I've been feeding him and his cats."

"Does he ever get to the doctor?" I asked.

"Not since he ran his truck into that tree," said the neighbor. "He hasn't even left his property since summer. He just lays around in bed."

"It sounds to me like he might be depressed. An antidepressent might be better for him than wine," I said, in my giving-unwanted-advice mode. You've got to wonder how many tragic situations could be solved with medicine like Prozac, birth control pills, penicillin, or what-have-you. And in this case, what are the ethics? Do we barge in being helpful? As far as I know, this particular guy has only been well cared for when he was in jail for growing pot (the rest of us were impressed that he'd gotten it together enough to water the plants). Otherwise, nobody has the stamina to keep him fed, get him regular dental care (alcoholics, including him, tend to get scurvy, and my neighbors did pitch in to pay for false teeth for him a few years ago), and keep his house relatively hygenic. My visitor does a lot, but he's got a life to lead too.

My own opinion is somewhat mixed. I know he needs help, and know I don't want to be the one to give it to him. Some part of me then wants to make up for my calculated callousness by feeling guilty.

When I'm standing on the dock, looking at the 45 degree water and trying to nerve myself to jump in, I ask myself, "Am I going to do this or not?" And if the answer is yes, I jump. No point in wasting my valuable lifespan dithering about it. In the same way, I ask myself if I'm going to help this alcoholic or not. And the answer is no. No point in wasting valuable guilt feelings over it, either. I should save them for something equally tragic but more close to the edge of whether I will help or not.

There's a seemingly endless supply of people and things that need help. Both on a philosophical and on an emotional level, I want to help them all, but I understand that I'm not infinite in capacity. While recognizing that even hopeless cases need compassion, for the most part, I try to leverage what I do so that it will make a difference. Kind of like triage during an emergency, where you separate out the people who will get better on their own and those who will die no matter what you do, and concentrate your energy on those who will recover if they get your help but not otherwise. It's yet another example of a principle that makes me uncomfortable, but with which I agree. Of course, then you actually do have to take the step of helping the people you think you can benefit.

Finished off the evening by watching Comrades, Almost a Love Story, about two mainland Chinese, one cute and innocent, the other cute and ambitious, who cross signals in Hong Kong and then New York. I really liked the jerky cinematography, the flattened color tones, and the contrast between the freshness of the scenes and the poignant melancholy of the plot.

Thursday, 17.February.05:

We had a friend over for dinner last night, and I found myself whining about not having studio space. Our carpenter has another couple weeks to go and then he will be one year behind his scheduled date to start building. I declined a teaching job at the school next year based on having a workable art space.

So, after listening to myself and being rather embarassed at the defeatist sound of it, I spent this morning ruthlessly cramming things into boxes and stacking the boxes in inappropriate but out of the way spots. Now, I have a cramped and dark but possibly adequate studio in the cabin that Vruba used to live in.

So, just to prove it could be done, even though there is no electricity to the cabin (the electrician disconnected it for reasons that I am not privy to) and hence I had to read the labels on the paint tubes to see whether that dark stuff was purple, black, or brown, I started a painting. It wasn't the one I woke up with a couple of days ago, but I've forgotten what that one was. That kind of stuff is elusive, like dreams. I've lost hundreds of paintings in the past few years for lack of time or space to bring them to life. But this one is worth doing, I think. I'll let you know in a couple of days.

Filmed my Commie neighbor again. He'd cut down a maple tree and decided to make a chair out of it. While planing the rungs, he talked about carpentry school, in which he mostly learned how to add and subtract, skills that he had already learned in elementary school. He learned carpentry on the job, he said.

David and I went on the COASST birdwalk just before dark. For the first time, we did find a bird, a dead Bald Eagle, with everything intact except that the body cavity had been completely stripped of meat and guts by some other bird. It's a bird eat bird world out there. Also, we came across an 8 foot sea lion carcass.

And then, capped off the day by a delightful visit to another neighbor regarding the school. It seems like we've been having endless meetings about how we want next year to be structured, but it's because we want consensus before we commit to anything. I'm grateful to live in a place where the consensus model is preferred.

Tuesday, 15.February.05:
The hills above Hollywood where I grew up, by my grandfather.

The District Superintendent came over to "observe," which is a formal, state-mandated event. He has a clipboard and sits in a corner while the teacher being observed teaches a lesson. I'm not really sure what-all is supposed to happen in Washington, but in California, you had to submit a lesson plan with clear objectives and techniques, and then teach exactly that plan. Your superior was supposed to evaluate certain specific things, like whether your classroom environment enhanced the learning experience (read; are the bulletin boards tidy?), whether your lesson clearly addressed the objective without extraneous stuff, whether the objective was appropriate for the students, and how well you kept discipline.

Personally, I'm conflicted on a lot of levels. First of all, I homeschooled two of my three kids. We did "unschooling" which, in my family, basically involved throwing resources at the boys but not actively teaching them much. I'm satisfied with how they turned out, and I think that, for the most part, they are too. And my daughter does go to school (her request), and HATES it (don't ask). So, the first internal conflict has to do with institutional, compulsory education vs letting the natural urge to learn have free rein.

Secondly, there's the notion of a lesson plan. On the one hand, if you have a clear objective and a solid understanding of the subject, you're pretty much sure to be able to teach it. On the other hand, some of the best classroom experiences I've had were when something led us off on a hitherto unsuspected path. The most obviously wonderful example of that is the Natural History book that two of my students wrote with me instead of doing what we set out to do, which was to have a standard Biology I class.

Thirdly, there's the appropriateness of the objective. Vruba was fascinated with powers of ten long before he could reliably count up to 10 (he kept skipping eight, and often forgot seven as well). I frequently re-read beginning textbooks, especially language and music ones. I may "know" everything in them but I find that my understanding is much more solid after a seemingly pointless review.

And fourthly, there's classroom discipline. I never was much good at that, although usually there's a good feel to my classrooms. But even though I personally can't work well except in solitude and silence, I've noticed that most children are social learners. Their most interesting subject in school is each other. Who am I to put a lid on that?

Anyway, the Head Cheese was there with his clipboard, and I was ruefully noting that even though I consider all men (and even women) to be equal in the sight of God, and even though I like the guy and even though I think it's mutual, I was nervous. The kids knew that. They decided to chose the more straight-laced aspect of each of the points I made above. So did I. So, I handed the man a somewhat funky but clear lesson plan, explained it to the kids, and then they bent to their essays, in a rather eerie silence. Everyone finished just about at the time that they were supposed to stop. Some read theirs aloud and they were really good.

I'm grateful to the kids. And continue to mull over all these dang options.

Monday, 14.February.05:

Pizza and Poetry day at the school. The Spink read:

My cat is an omelete

as she lies decadently

and undisturbed

in the ancient ruins

of a mattress.

Then there was a THREE HOUR staff meeting. David rescued me and we went off to the beach to clear out a pipe that drains the swamp for a number of beach houses. After the Northeaster plugged all the pipes, the swamp turned into an ever larger lake, flooding toolsheds and threatening the houses. Various people unearthed one of the pipes and broke the other one. Although the working pipe gets blocked after every high tide, someone usually clears it out, and there hasn't been much rain this week anyway. It's fun to do, though.

Saturday, 12.February.05:

Filmed my neighbor this morning, talking about being in the Communist Youth Group and being in a biracial marriage. Came home to that same burn pile (one of the two stumps now looks like a molar with cavities, and the other one like a pair of glowing shark teeth). Later, gave a klezmer lesson to a flautist. The blind leading the halt. But, you know, we both got better.

I've been munching away at an insight on human behavior and finally got it in a coherent form so I could write it here. But I can't remember it at all, just that I was doing the dishes and watching the burn pile through the window as I was thinking.

Different people interpret these "brain farts" differently. A lot of my neighbors would say that the reason I forgot the insight was because it wasn't really a good one, and on some level I knew that and saved myself the embarassment of posting it prematurely by forgetting it. This kind of explanation is often useful for me. Even if the reasoning seems slightly suspect, often the second draft of any enterprise comes out better. And I do think that my unconscious knows a lot more than just the conscious portion of my brain.

David would say that I'm juggling too many worlds right now. He's right, of course. As I'm writing this, I'm also downloading the morning's film footage and doing my music class homework. It's possible that, the next time I stand at the window doing dishes, that particular world will snap into focus and I'll remember what it was that I was thinking about then.

Most people would just point out that I'm getting older, and I can't expect my short-term memory to be as flawless as it once was. That's certainly true. I've taken university correspondence courses for years and notice a clear fading of my ability to remember facts the first time I meet them.

And I forget what my fourth point was.

Friday, 11.February.05:

Day trip to Orcas to visit Westsound Video. The owner was a systems engineer and has a rather intimidating knack for hardware. I'm grateful that some of what he does is available in software such as GarageBand and iMovie.

At home, found out that my video camera doesn't come with the cable that would connect the video tape with my computer. I mean, why on earth would a customer want one of those?

In the evening, we went to a Readers' Theater performance at the school, driving a neighbor's truck back to their place for them. The headlamps don't work, so David drove us along the dirt road with the emergency lights flashing. Oh, also, the truck has neither doors nor a back window.

The play was thought-provoking, I suppose, but I'm too selfish to be that interested in being provoked by somebody else's obsessions. Not those, at least. Afterwards, one of my neighbors came over and said that her color-blind son was feeling cuddly last night. He was fondling her hair, and said, "Mom, you have such beautiful brown hair with golden highlights. But it looks green to me."

Thursday, 10.February.05:

Mitch and I walked around the NE part of the island today, taking video shorts. I found out that my tripod is too cheap for outdoor work; it needs to have an up-down lever, and a bubble level, and less tendency to wobble. We'll use it as a table tripod.

I was doing my Wise Naturalist thing (very annoying) and talking about the harlequin duck pair that lives at the point. They migrate east/west, and go to the Cascades or even the Rockies to raise their families in whitewater streams, and then back out here to hang out. They rest just at the water's edge, so their rather silly formal wear acts as camo rather than as a screaming advertisement. The proof is that there's a bald eagle nest overlooking their favorite hangout, and they're still there.

In '97/98, I was the high school teacher for Vruba and the neighbor girl. We wrote a natural history book, and in the course of doing the research, we hung out amongst pelagic flocks of buffleheads, cormorants, grebes, goldeneyes, and what have you. I've never seen the birds as thick since, a very depressing observation. Well, today the harlquin duck pair had turned into five of them. And then later, as we rounded the point and worked our way into another little bay, there was a flock of seven harlequins. They are so cute! They bob around in the water where the color changes, probably where the tidal eddies bring up fish. Then, all of them dive at once. A bit later, they all surface at once and quack at each other, checking to make sure that everyone made it up safely, and is there any news about eats? I have about 10 minutes of wobbling tripod stuff which includes duck tails, duck heads, no ducks, duck bottoms, duck blurs, and no ducks. It was all very edifying.

Then back home to discover that I still have no clue about how to put the movie into iMovie. What the heck am I doing wrong, may I ask? I HATE being a beginner.

Tuesday, 8.February.05:

Parent meeting here in the morning. We have to have another one. Opinions are not exactly divided, but we need to have time to let things jell. The water line is frozen, so washing dishes was a bit of a chore.

A former student came by for help with his application to Brown University. It's an odd thing, explaining why you need to go someplace you don't know too much about, and explaining what you want to do with your education once you get it. People change so quickly when they're open to change and actively working on themselves.

Just as I was getting a burn pile going around one of the two remaining stumps that I want to remove this winter (out of about fifty that sprinkle the property), another former student wafted in. We worked on a klezmer tune, he on flute and me on clarinet. The Spink was quite nice about it. Later, she and I sat around reading in companionable silence. David was off at a Marine Resources presentation. The boat ride home must have been lovely, with this mild outflow crisping up the starry sky and the sea polished flat.

Monday, 7.February.05:

Motored north with spectacular skies and a relentless diet of jazz and country. At Seattle University, looked up Bookwyrm and poet Sam Green but neither were about. So I bought The Glenn Gould Reader, which I paged through while waiting for the ferry. That guy is a hoot! Here's a somewhat butchered paragraph for you, from Advice to a Graduation, 1964:

"I happened to be practicing at the piano one day ... and suddenly a vacuum cleaner started up just beside the instrument. Well, the result was that in the louder passages, this luminously diatonic music in which Mozart deliberately imitates the technique of Sebastian Bach became surrounded with a halo of vibrato, rather the effect that you might get if you sang in the bathtub with both ears full of water and shook your head from side to side all at once. And in the softer passages I couldn't hear any sound that I was making at all. I could feel, of course--I could sense the tactile relations with the keyboard, which is replete with its own kind of acoustical associations, and I could imagine what I was doing, but I couldn't actually hear it. But the strange thing was that all of it suddenly sounded better than it had without the vacuum cleaner, and those parts which I couldn't actually hear sounded best of all. ..."

There is also a quite testy interview with himself. Tim White, the editor, says that everyone thought Gould was strange (even when they enjoyed him). But to me he seemes authentic. He's got his interests, and it doesn't occur to him to waste time on fluff. So he doesn't. It's disturbing that people think of that relentless pursuit of morality (and yes, he does call his musical philosophy a morality) as strange. I'd rather hang out with people like him, than with, say, religious fundamentalists, who relentlessly pursue a morality that's external rather than internal. Just as a random example.

Went home in the dark on a silvered black sea mirroring the crisp stars above. At home, a mountain of dirty dishes awaited me.

Sunday, 6.February.05:

As part of my ongoing struggle with what ought charitably to be called an artistic temperament, I forgot my camera, sketchbook, and similar in Deer Harbor. And, some months ago, David got a new cellphone from AT&T, which canceled our home phone under the impression that David's new phone was a replacement. Well, it wasn't. And AT&T no longer has the software to reinstate our phone. They gave us a new one, but the new ones are digital rather than analog, and don't get reception where I live. So I couldn't call home to ask about my stuff, thus giving me a couple sleepless nights. But today David called and said yeah, my pack was where I thought, and he's got it.

What the heck is an artistic temperament, anyway? I'm not really sure. As a kid, it included living in a kind of fog. I had a rich inner life but barely noticed the outside world. I was constantly losing sweaters and my little sister and whatnot. As an antidote, I worked in Dad's office as a bookkeeper and clerk for a bit, and majored in mathematics in college, which helped to organize my life enough so that I got really good at keeping track of stuff. At one point, I realised that I knew where every item in our house was. Those were the years when I did our tax returns by January 2 and polished the furniture. But this kind of focus on exterior details came at the cost of pretty much steady low-grade anger, and artist's block. Deciding to give more mental room to art was personally crucial, but a disaster in terms of keeping track of external details. I'm realizing that, for me at least, it's either/or.

Mom agreed to several very short videotaping sessions. She's been a willing interviwee in the past, but came out wooden in front of the camera (I typed "in front of the cannon" by mistake; this was a Freudian slip on Mom's behalf). The last few minutes were more relaxed, and I'm hoping that she'll agree to more interviews next time I visit. She has a wide-ranging, wholistic intelligence that jumps from seemingly unrelated topics in a rather disconcerting way. Just before I get confused, there are a few deft phrases and everything falls together. It's like she's knitting with eighty-seven colors, or composing an orchestral piece one staff at a time.

We had a heartwarming family get-together in the evening, with ground buffalo meat, chocolate cake, and "Pictionary." Alas, I didn't feel up to driving to get Vruba from the other side of the river. Time is so relentlessly unforgiving.