Finished up the paper for my technology class. An easy three credits.

Wayne taught me to use the skilsaw yesterday. I have been cheerfully not chopping my own fingers off, cutting studs for the walls. I unexpectedly enjoy being a carpenters' gofer.

Right in the middle of it all was a trip to Friday Harbor and the bank. Then back to sawing.

Speaking of chopping off fingers, we watched the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, a sort of stoner meets Raymond Chandler thing. Watch it.

Rain.

Some people came by to help me pick canvases for the art show on the 3rd. This is the second group to do so; the first picked a somewhat different batch, and I have my own favorites list.

I think I know why my favorites are different. I had something more interesting in mind when I was doing those canvases and I don't yet have the distance from them to tell whether anything came through. My guess is that they look less skilled, but I like the contents better.

After years of listening to David's opinions on my work, I think I understand that although what people want out of art might be similar at bottom, their idiosyncratic tastes only allow them to find what they want in certain canvases. David, for example, tends to like things with deep blues, reds, and greens; and crisp lines. I tend to go for garish peasant colors and ambiguous lines that hint at something not quite said. A great work of art will punch through these prejudices and we find agreement. But mine are not skilled enough for him to enjoy.

Spent the morning on the house addition, the afternoon barking a log, the late afternoon hanging out with the kids at the beach, and the evening hanging out with neighbors at another beach. I think I have a sunburn.

In the morning, Wayne told me about macho carpenters taking the safety guards off their tools. In the evening, my neighbors remarked on butt-crack pants. "How can you even walk without them falling down?"

It's the peacock tail. How does a peahen know which mate to choose? She wants one that doesn't have feather mites, that is robust and will have strong babies. If he can support the unnecessary load of a huge tail, he must have lots of extra mojo. I think human males' displays are for the same thing, even though it seems that they are aimed at other guys.

Here's a little housekeeping quiz I prepared for my kids in case I ever go to another four-day workshop while they are home:

Which of the above shows something GOOD? Which shows something BAD? Think carefully before you answer.

Now, which Vruba is eating at a GOOD table? And which Vruba is eating at a BAD table?

Fourth day of workshop. Not enough sleep.

Home to more "Samurai Champloo". Refence the sheep.

Third day of workshop. Not enough sleep.

Home to a "Samurai Champloo" marathon. I have such strange children. I wonder where they got it from?

Second day of workshop. Not enough sleep.

Today we started out with Powerpoint. My colleague (see May 1's smiling piano player) noted that it's a very seductive program but you end up being driven by what you can put into it instead of by what you ought to be saying. I found this to be true.

I was putting together a presentation on what a prospective high school student could do in the way of natural history research. I listed things like hooking up with the Whale Museum, or a native oyster restoration project, or the like. But, in watching my presentation, it became clear that there was too much text. I kept deleting information until I ended up with a snappy, sound-bitey thing that moved along smartly and left you with the feeling that you'd just watched a commerical.

Up at 6. Boat over to Orcas at 7. Drive to Eastsound at 8. Eat a very greasy breakfast. End up at the School District at 8:30 in a rather bleary crowd of teachers. Back to dock at 7, cross the channel, home at 8.

Our technology workshop lasted 9 and a half hours today. Our cheering public passed a bond issue giving the district money for technology in the classroom. We had a lot of meetings about how best to spend it, and decided on things like computers, digital projectors, and .. very intelligent of us, ... training in how to use it.

The downside of getting training is that you have to show up for it.

We're working with Microsoft's Office Suite, concentrating on Powerpoint and how to put hidden text into Word. The tech stuff is easy for me, the people stuff hard. I truly do not see how people could prefer PC's to Macs. My own Mac almost never crashes; the brand new PC I was issued today crashed twice. Mac programs are intuitively set up so that having to read instructions almost never comes up; the people around me who already use MS Office had no idea it could do the things we were taught today. Things on a Mac are labeled logically so that, for example, you don't have to go to "start" in order to stop as you do on the PC. Most things that you want to do on a Mac are only one command away from happening instead of having a counterintuitive tree to navigate. And the right click left click thing, which I find bogus complex, is not necessary.

It seems that my spiffy new code doesn't go well with Explorer. I use Safari. You can also use Mozilla. They're nicer in many ways, one being fewer pop-up viruses. Another being that you can read my blog as intended. Maybe I'll learn how to make my blog multilingual.

It's like cleaning out the closets. Vruba walked me through the process of spiffing up the code for this site, although he did say, "Mom, you're trying for something different than I would. Clean code doesn't have to be your end goal."

So, if my goal isn't clean code, what could it be?

Houseguest Pseudomammal brought The Wizard of Space and Time for our late-night movie fest. It is mostly lime green and features an efficient yellow suitcase and a bureaucracy to be proud of. I heartily recommend it to anyone who laughs so hard at their own jokes they snort involuntarily, but not to anyone whose closet is mostly grey or taupe.

A girl-trip to Friday Harbor to shop. I got lime-green beads for The Spink, a box made out of a Chinese vase shard shattered during the Cultural Revolution, and buckwheat flour for crepes. The Widow got a beach umbrella, lettuce, and pink beaded slippers for her trip to Fiji. All in all, a successful splurge.

Back home, I worked on a painting while listening to cutsie songs designed to teach four-year-olds Japanese, scythed thistles in the sheep pasture and refenced them, made crepes, and watched Good Will Hunting, with a strangely mature Robin Williams and Matt Damon. I liked it but not enough to put on my favorites list.

COASST walk. As usual, no dead birds but we did find a dead otter. The Widow said, "Oh, it must be that geezer otter we had around here, with a gray muzzle. It would go under the front deck and Tigger would attack it, that stupid cat. Then it went into the generator shed but I put a raccoon zapper there and it disappeared. Maybe that's why we had eight bald eagles circling around the beach today."

We also found nineteen eagle feathers, but no eagle corpse.

The day after the last day of school. Like going on a hike with a 50 pound backpack, and then taking the pack off at the end of the day. You feel like you're floating, but also as though you're missing something important and weighty.

A rather disconcerting afternoon. Went to a potluck at the farm where I chatted with various interesting and admirable former students who remembered our years together with fondness. Then had a phone conversation with a person who was pretty emphatic about my failings. It was the contrast as well as the content that jarred.

Graduation night. The kids were amazing in "Much Ado About Nothing." The Spink and some others pointed out that everyone was typecast.

The New Yorker had an article about Eyak, an Inuit language which now only has one native speaker left, as well as the ageing linguist who studied it. What is the point of learning such a language? The linguist says it's because each language sets up a framework from which you see the world in a particular way. When you lose the language, you no longer have access to that way of seeing.

One of my neighbors sneered at this. "There's too much to do that's real," he said. "Why study something dead?"

A similar argument is made against the space program. Why spend money on Mars if Earth needs so much cash?

It seems to me that people are always sloshing around between chaotic possibilities and calcified tradition. For each aspect of life, we ought to have access to viewpoints all along the scale. As the universe changes around us, we need to be ready to improve our position as necessary.

If you only speak English, you can slide along between poetry and prose, perhaps, but you basically have to stick with the SVO word order. I've heard that described as "patriarchal," because it sets your framework of thinking up so that you see things as acting on other things.

Eyak is aggluginitive, in that you tack syllables on to verbs to get more and more specific about what's going on. The example given was a single word which means something like, "how long are you going to keep on tickling me on the face like that?" You can imagine that if you spoke Eyak, you might think in terms of situations happening in one of a kaleidescope of possible ways, rather than in terms of people doing stuff to things.

If you lived in a colony on Mars, you might think of life as fragile and remarkable, as utterly dependent on other people and on a limited supply of materials. A culture like that would have a lot to teach the rest of us.

I guess I'm unwilling to give up any kind of way of knowing (although, to be brutally honest, I'm neither planning to learn Eyak nor to move to Mars).

In the past weeks, my camera's light meter has started to act up, giving me pictures that are either very under- or very over-exposed, as well as the usual perfect ones.

I went to Seattle today to pick up my beloved son Tyko from school. Here are some unedited shots, taken within a few minutes of each other, without adjusting the exposure at all. They're of the Frye Art Museum and the nearby cathedral.

It's been a dizzy round of rehearsals, deadlines, and dinners with newly arrived summer folk. The Waldron Times came back from the printer today, looking disappointingly fuzzy. But there it is.

Today, we had a rehearsal at a neighbors', with several amusing changes to the script that led to fussing at the laptop, copier and mailroom. Then I nipped up to the school where we played some Renaissance dances and practiced the segue from the jazz tune, "Take Five," which is in a laid-back 5/4 time, to a swirly, peppy klezmer tune that's in 4/4. The difficult part for me and the sax player was in making the change without smirking in such a way that we lost our embrochures. Then rushed home and did my share of the report card grades and did evening chores and rushed off with David to a neighbor's for dinner and returned home to pack so I could leave at 7 tomorrow morning to get Tycho home from school in Seattle.

In the past few days, The Spink and I watched "Much Ado About Nothing" so she could study her role of Beatrice. We watched "West Side Story" so I could learn and write a parody of the "Gee, Officer Krupke" song. We watched "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" so we could indulge in her newfound love for Jane Austen.

One of the summer people told me, "It's so relaxing out here. We never have to do anything. We just sit around all day."

Worked on the school yearbook all day. It's a part of my brain that is socially retarded, physically slothful, and intellectually acute. I keep marvelling over how compartmentalized that stuff is.

When The Spink came home from school, I'd been working five hours. Her voice came as a physical shock to me. In my socially retarted state, I was a little puzzled about what to do about her. Because I have a deadline, I didn't make the effort to snap out of it, so I was woozy and only half-attentive to her for the rest of the evening.

So, exactly what happens when one decides to "snap out of it?" I presume I call on other parts of my brain to fire more than the part I'm using. I'm not that interested in it at the synapse level. But, as it plays out in my psyche, I am. Does it have something to do with the different people that inhabit my dreams? I think of them as representative of different aspects of myself, which presumably are neural pathway constellations. I definitely change personalities when I go from introverted writer to extraverted caregiver.

One way to refer to Enlightenment is "integration." I think of integration as walking your talk on all levels. Some people clearly are closer than others to this elusive goal; they have fewer glaring blind spots and are freer to be compassionate.

Now, does integration include seamlessly connecting your different abilities? Zen masters are reputed to have little inertia, that is, they react to each situation as though it were fresh. Unlike what I did when The Spink came home. But I suspect that I'm trying to compare things that live at different conceptual levels. I wouldn't think it was admirable if a person were able to instantly switch from distance running to cradling a baby, and I certainly wouldn't admire anyone who did both at once. Some transition time is appropriate.

I suppose that I was hoping for the possibility of zero brain inertia; being able to switch mood and intention instantaneously as appropriate. Dysfunctional versions of that are called immaturity, or ADD. The key phrase is "as appropriate."

At the best of times, I'm able to change course when I have to if there's no attitude in the way, that is, if I don't have some kind of stance that's preventing me from flexibility. But ordinarily, there's a certain baseline mental rigidity and slowness that is built in. I stay on track because of it, but sometimes I also miss the chance to hang out with The Spink.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

The thing about writing a roast is that it's not studio comedy where you can walk out if you don't like it. This is for the graduate, and everyone wants to do him proud. But since he is 14, something sentimental would not fly.

We watched Funny Bone a couple weeks ago. It's about a failed comedian who finds his roots and success in a seedy English beach town. The secret to comedy, he learns, is edginess. You have to go further than the audience wants you to. That line between hoping you won't and seeing that you did is where the laugh happens.

I sort of think that's true, though this is just the beta version of my opinion. Think about puns. They get groans because they're too unexpected. But when the puns are flying and you're in a punny atmosphere, you start to laugh. Or, I do.

And I tend not to find slapstick funny because I already know the actors are going to go that far. They're actors. It becomes funny when the silliness gets an edge. The scene in Shreck where Fiona and the robin on the nest sing together, and as she gets shriller, the robin tries to match her and finally pops. And then Fiona fries its eggs.

So, here I am with a skit that can't go too far because it's a school, and it's for a kid. I can't fry his eggs.

Part of the humor is suspense; he won't know which of the embarassing incidents from his past we'll dredge up. Part of it is throwaway lines that refer to something else. Like, we mention official US government sanctioned torture in a couple of places. Torture is always a good subject with teens and we can get a few uncomfortable yucks from our largely liberal audience mentioning no permanent damage to tissues. And there will be the props. The graduate is fond of referring to pink and fluffy stuff as a kind of emoticon. Naturally, we'll all be decked out in pink and fluffy. Some of the hulkier guys will be expecially humorous, but only because pink on a guy is an edgy reference to cross dressing, still somewhat taboo.

Maybe I'll go pracice being edgy.

Got cauliflower and pumpkin starts in Friday Harbor today and cleared out swathes of red poppies to plant them. Four pink tuxedoes are finished and four need final touches. The carpenters came and laid the correctly sized joists on part of the addition. After a pleasant evening talking about movies ("How to Draw a Bunny," "Chinatown," "Delicatesse," and "The Triplets of Belleville" came out on top), with the carpenters at The Widow's over champagne, shrimp, salmon, and chicken, came home to find the sheep dismally wandering out of their pen, nibbling disconsolately at apple trees and wishing they knew how to get back in. After helping them with that, we blocked off the cat door to keep the stray from sneaking in, knocking over the compost bucket and spraying the pink tuxedoes with cat graffiti.

Things continue to scurry along at breakneck pace. Houseguests next week. Much of the costuming is done. I spent the morning nailing straps to beams, and then nailing the joist rims to the house. Fun, but carpenters' hammers are heavy. I took a break from nailing by scything the area near the work site, spewing pollen everywhichwhere. A lovely nap, followed by photographing at the school for the yearbook and viewing "Much Ado About Nothing" with the girls, who are trying to get into their roles. Polished it all off with Charlie Parker tunes at jazz night, whilst clandestinely recruiting the musicians to play at the graduation skit. The drummer is the graduate, and so we had to, in a most natural and casual way, send him far away to look for a mike for the bass in order to weave our plots.

For part of the day, I sewed six pink tuxedos for the graduation skit. For another part of the day, I nailed straps onto the beams for the addition. Also refenced the sheep, went to a parent meeting at the school, went to a graduation planning meeting, and wrote part of a Norwegian dance tune.

On the road, met a person who is entirely disaffected with a housemate, and who told me a story about how that housemate failed yet again to behave decently.

I have a very conservative personality in some respects. I dislike big changes, for the most part. When it comes to relationships, I want to find ways in which people can work out their difficulties instead of washing their hands of each other (not that I haven't done that myself once or twice). I guess I was made for village life rather than urban life, in the sense that I would be happy to have the same old neighbors forever, and just keep working on how to be able to stand them and maybe even how to have a happy and useful relationship with them.

In the case of the disaffected person I met today, I automatically jump to the conclusion that the housemate's behavior may or may not be a problem, but the complainer definitely has a problem. I believe very strongly (and I know that it is a belief, not a logical conclusion), that every bad situation has some kind of key which can turn it from bad to good. If you continue to be discontented, you are missing the key.

The key isn't fixing the other person. It's fixing your own attitude. Often, fixing yourself also has the effect of fixing the other person, but that's just a side benefit. And yes, I include if the other person is a violent abuser. In that case, part of fixing your attitude would include realizing that you don't have to set yourself up for abuse nor put up with it if it happens.

Inquiring minds would like to know how to adjust oneself? So kind of me, I shall now tell you how to do it. Look at what drives you nuts about the other person. Write it down as a list of qualities: "1. Can't carry a tune in a bucket. 2. Ugly way of bugging out eyes. 3. A whiner." And so on (Yes, this is a random example, based on random gossip rather than on self-analysis. I don't feel like being totally self-baring right at this moment). Now, read the list as though it were describing yourself. Don't recognize yourself in it? Bullshit.

Aside from sheer cowardice, I find that the usual reason I can't recognize myself in a list of what I hate about an enemy is that certain qualities stand for something in myself that are metaphorically represented by the shadow's disgusting qualities. I may be able to carry a tune just fine, musically speaking, but may be off-key in a major way in some other aspect of life. I may be physically gorgeous but have a longstanding self-image of being ugly, or may have an ugly way of seeing things. I may whine too, but on a different subject.

Humbly and honestly and persistently identify where you are like your nemesis. You can tell if you've been accurate in a couple of ways. There's a difference in feel between honest realizations and self-protective realizations. After a while, you recognize the sensation. I can track my progress through my dreams - if I have toilet dreams, I know I'm getting rid of my shit. I think this disgusting dream metaphor is pretty basic to people. Look for it.

Sometimes that process of honest identification is enough to defuse your unreasonable rage against the other person. They may still not be able to carry a tune with both hands in a really big bucket, but you won't want to kill them because of it. You'll be able to summon compassion, or at least resigned tolerance. If you're lucky, you'll be able to rejoice in it.

If you still need the other person to change, you'll be able to try from a position of compassion rather than of rage. Your chances of success are greater. If you need the change because of some basic life situation (abuse, failure to thrive), you'll be able to tell more honestly if your impulse to bail out is because of your own failings or because there is a genuine insolvable incompatibility.

Following these instructions will make you perfect. Count on it.