Queenjulia's Blog & Photos

Tuesday.26.October.04 We went on an old car field trip.

Tomorrow, we'll sit on the beach and watch the total lunar eclipse, weather permitting. It starts around 6:15 in the evening and goes on to around 10.

Read several more Norwegian fairy tales to The Spink. Man, those guys seem to operate almost totally in the realm of the unconsious. Either that, or they're nuts. A typical story goes like this: A couple is poor in everything but children. One day the husband goes off in a huff to chop wood because his wife is going to have a baby. The baby tells her that she should give him some second hand clothing and he'll be off to seek his fortune. So she does. Then she has another baby, who goes off to find his twin. Metaphoric, huh?

The babies try to part company but their separate roads keep converging (get it?). Finally, they divide up the world, and the older one goes east, and Shortshanks goes west.

Shortshanks meets, in sequence, three one-eyed old women. He steals their eyes and makes them give him magical gifts to get them back, including a ship that can sail on land or sea. He gets a job as a kitchen maid's gofer. Using the crones' gifts, he goes to the edge of the ocean, kills three ogres and wins the princess. Then, he goes to the bottom of the ocean. There he kills a whole clan of ogres and wins the princess' sister. He gives her to his twin brother. The end.

Just to emphasize the Norwegian flavor, watched Elling. It's a sweet little movie about two guys learning how to cope after some years in a mental institution. They retain their quirky character while mastering stuff like answering the telephone. There aren't any clever tricks of cinematography or music, but the tone is consistently right. That's a relief, since I've set myself the goal of watching it a few more times until I get a few of the phrases. And why?

Because last week, I got tickets to visit Norway in December to visit a dear friend. She consistently wins our Boggle games. The least I can do is learn a few words of her native language besides "takk," "ja" and "okay."

Monday.25.October.04

About twenty years ago, I sat in my parents' breakfast room, winding wool that I'd spun, with Vruba sleeping in the sling across my shoulder. "About how long did it take you to spin that?" asked my dad.

"Maybe an hour per skein," I answered.

"And now you're going to dye it?"

"Yeah. You boil the wool with the dyestuff and the mordant, then hang it with weights so that the yarn dries without kinks.

"And for this you went to college and graduate school?"

I thought about that this evening. The Spink was carding, and I was reading aloud from East of the Sun and West of the Moon whilst spinning. I got three skeins and a sore throat out of it. They'll be violet by tomorrow evening. The floor was covered with wisps of fleece with sweet cicely burrs or dead sheep ticks in them, and the wet wool drying in the warming oven made everything stink. Why bother?

I guess the answer lies in the fact that humans aren't logical. Logically, to make efficient use of my superior intelligence and education, I should only be doing high-end things. I should be in a think tank someplace being clever and useful and some third world body should be raising my daughter for me, and if I want to have a hobby, I should pick something portable and tidy.

The heck of it is, that in addition to having an expensive education and a mind worthy of it, I also have a body, an emotional and spiritual life, and, even, an instinctive life.

Most of the women I know love shopping. My mom, my sisters and I all go yard sailing in lieu of spending real money at stores where all the items for sale are new. Especially when we regard the men in our lives, we see that our love of shopping is some kind of feminine instinct.

In the same way, most of the women I know do some kind of fabric arts such as embroidery, knitting, sewing, or quilting. There's a great book called something like Women's Work: The first 20,000 Years which documents fabric arts going back 20,000 years.

It may be inefficient for me to spin wool from my own sheep (I also knit rather klunky hats), but I keep coming back to it. I can't even really say that I love it, the way I love playing music or going on walks. But I just keep on doing it.

Sunday.24.October.04

Well, there you have it. This week I was slightly sick, and slightly overworked. As a result, not only did I not post anything on this blog, but I had no thoughts that I wished I could have posted, if only I had had the time.

Today was sunny and clean. A couple days ago, David and I collected seaweed and I spent part of a lambent morning spreading it on the garden, putting the tomatoes and tomatillo beds to sleep, weeding the broccoli, and enjoying the oranges of the calendulas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. Fall brings such sturdy flowers!

The project to move the woodpile under the new shed is on my "gotta get at least a bit of exercise today" list. There's a complex series of struts and buttresses, so some parts of the pile are over my head. Little chorus frogs and wood lice live in the damp sections.

I asked The Fiddler, who just moved in down the street, to give me lessons. There's nothing he said that was new to me, but I seem to need to hear certain kinds of information from a person rather than from a book. Maybe it's because I read so extensively, and there seems to be an infinite spectrum of advice out there. "Use the whole bow; you paid for it." "Use as little of the bow as possible, or you'll be exhausted sawing away after two hours of a four-hour dance." The Fiddler said to practice variations systematically until I can call on the appropriate one when I decide that that's what's needed. That's the missing link that makes it all make sense.

Another suggestion that resonated was to sing pieces to myself until I understand what effects I want. If I'm clear about where I want to go, it's more likely that I can get there.

As a beginner, I just plowed along, knowing that my struggles with the physical mechanics of playing needed more attention than dynamics, phrasing, or intonation. There's a whole new world out there, though, of actually thinking about what I want the music to sound like! Wheee!

What's the difference between a chainsaw and a saxophone? The exhaust.

On the subject of school, I've got one more week to go until March. Friday turned out to be a model of why I like teaching. I had the kids all day. We just pooted along. Everyone pretty much did what I'd planned, but for each new subject, one, two, or three kids wandered off and did something else instead. Each time it was something that I thought was a wiser choice for that person. So, it seems like at least sometimes, there's a state of grace that can be attained in a school.

Tuesday.19.October.04 These have all been eaten by now.

Went to play fiddle at Ruby's place. We discussed giving kids free choice. What I've noticed, is that kids whose parents are most conscientious about making them do their chores and to be "responsible," seem to be among those with the most difficulty figuring out what they want to do, or how to do anything identifiably educational without an authority figure (that's me) physically present in the room. I think one can't draw too many dire conclusions from this. For one, it's not clear what's cause and what effect. A heedless child's parents might be more likely to step forward to help, for example. But my own gut reaction is that self-knowledge and self-direction doesn't come automatically. You need space in which to attempt it. If your life is managed too carefully, then you spend your energy trying to bust out, since no amount of exterior management is going to match your inner needs precisely and you don't know what does.

Ruby asked, "Would it help if community members came to school and did their own thing? Kids could join in if they wanted."

That was John Holt's idea, too. My own experience, though, is that that kind of thing only works if the adult is the only show going, and the kid feels that they could develop a deep relationship with them. But when there are other children present, the business of children seems to be each other. What most girls do is strongly related to what the most popular girl does. And what most boys do is bug the girls or each other or wish that they were somewhere else doing their own thing. There are video games, of course. Playing some kind of organized game such as Magic, chess, or soccer seems to be a way that boys can interact comfortably on school grounds. Luckily, for a game to be fun, it has to be somehow challenging.

I imagine in a tribal society, most herding, hunting, and gathering skills would be learned best by imitation. From what I understand (and I am not an anthropologist), tribal kids tend to be with their mother until they're weaned, and then they join a pack of other children. It's not until their official puberty that they undergo formal training. And, in the case of boys, who often seem to need to be hit over the head with a brick in order to be made to notice anything outside their own private interests, initiation into that training can be shockingly abusive.

In our culture, we've learned that formal training can start at any age. Kids really can learn some quite amazing things, such as reading, writing, and math (or picking cotton and tying carpet yarn), at a very young age. It's just that, the younger a child is when we try to teach them such wonders, the harder we have to work at suppressing their tribal instincts.

Tuesday.19.October.04 Balcony.

Parent meeting. I left early because The Spink's still sick. But I was there for the discussion on "how do we encourage student initiative?" To me, it seems that one of the most significant factors in implementing any philosophy is that school is compulsory. No matter how interesting or psychologically apt a program is, if the kid is required to do it, they're not going to take full responsibility for it. Not that anyone takes full responsibility for what they do; that's incredibly hard, and from what I've seen, unlikely to exist in pure form. But you know what I mean. A person who takes full responsibility for their own education would examine themselves now and then to see what they want to know, or what they need to know, and then set about finding out how to learn it. And then they'd learn it. I even think that it doesn't have to be in that logical order, either; you could get the inklings of learning something by chance, and then become more systematic about it once you realized what was happening.

Anyway, one of the parents said that the business of education is to find out where the weak spots are and then help strengthen them. A vitamin deficency model. You might be okay in everything but have a Vitamin C deficiency, and with that, no matter how sufficient the other nutrients were, you'd be sick. I disagreed, rather tentatively because I'm not sure how strongly I believe in my own position. When we homeschooled our boys, the emphasis was on their strong suits. Vruba wanted to learn about flight; we got him books, and took him to the Flight Museum at Boeing Field, and bought him model rocket kits. Bk wanted to read fantasy fiction; we took him to used book stores and he ended up with over a dozen running feet of paperbacks with pictures of boys with swords on the covers. It is not clear to me how they learned other things. I cannot tell you how it happened that Vruba is the kind of poet who gets you exhaling sharply, or why Bk is a philosopher with a rabbinical talent for splitting hairs; why Vruba can date advertisements and books by their design sense, or why Bk was a good soccer player even before we found out he needed eye correction. No doubt they have horrible gaps in their education. But, I think that since they mostly educated themselves, they are less reluctant than other people to tackle new fields fearlessly.

Last month, one of the speakers who came here gave the example of being forced to learn refrigerator repair, oboe, Italian, and golf, all of which are manifestly useful, even crucial to many people. His point was that you can't fill in all the gaps, you simply can't. You can hope that you've pinpointed important areas and teach them, but even there, things are subject to change. For example, he said that in his own career, speaking and writing are more important than reading, math is virtually useless, and he got his current job without having taken any of the courses that were listed by the government agency as a requirement.

This is not to say that I'm relaxed about education. Quite the contrary. It's just that all the logic in the world doesn't seem to match up with how kids are, nor with how the world is. I may be able to break the teaching of mathematics, for example, up into a logical sequence of concepts, each building on the last. John Saxon's textbooks do that very well. But the fact remains that Vruba understood scientific notation and powers of numbers and could add strings of digits in his head before he was able to count up to ten reliably (he kept forgetting eight). Similarly, I learned to read (it was Pele's New Suit, followed by Alice in Wonderland) the spring before I entered kindergarten, but did not understand or use the principles of phonics until I took Latin in high school.

It seems to me that as long as there's good will and a kid hasn't been traumatized, they're likely to learn a sufficient breadth of information on their own if they're given the time in which to do it. The biggest disservice a school does is to take that time away from kids, even if school is filled with worthy endeavors.

Saturday.16.October.04 Fall beach. Totally love weekends. Spent most of the day on the balcony writing Chapter 7, or moving firewood to under the woodshed. Ahh. In the evening, The Piano Player came and we not only played fiddle tunes but he agreed to accompany my attempt at klezmer clarinet. ("D minor. It's a way of life.")

I arrived at college from an all-girls high school. One of my two closest friends enthusiastically lost her virginity during high school lunch, but I didn't even know a single guy by sight. I treated the guys in college as though they were people, at least, as I understood people. Well, that was a faux pas! I ended up with a boyfriend, Isaac, whom I really liked but had no sexual feelings for at all. In an effort to keep our friendship, which I valued a lot, it took me over a year to break up with him, though I kept trying in a non hurtful way (little did I know!).

Anyway, Isaac gave me the clarinet he'd had in high school. I signed up for lessons through the collge. To my horror, my teacher turned out to be Kalman Bloch, the first clarinetist of the LA Philharmonic, about whom I knew nothing except for his godlike status. It was overwhelming. Despite barely hanging on by my fingernails in Physics, German Lit, and Differential Equations (Psychology was okay), I spent my time on the clarinet. During lessons, Mr Bloch, a short, crabbed looking man with no conversation, would pace back and forth. I sweated profusely, something I have never done before or since (except while splitting wood before a thunderstorm, but that's different), and played. Afterwards, he would show me the fingering for another note, assign a new set of exercises, and leave. And I'd take a shower.

But then David and I married, and we lived in a series of one-roomers in other people's space, and then we had kids who hated piercing squacky noises, and the clarinet slept until yesterday.

After that was safely over, we watched a Bollywood movie, something I've always wanted to do. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. God, it was awful! Maybe if I'd liked the music. For three hours, we watched raw archetypes interact; the stern but loving father, the wastrel with a heart of gold, the obedient and innocent but nevertheless passionate maiden, the perceptive old grandmother who weeps tears of joy when she sees her son, the perky younger sister who is so intelligent that she wears horn-rimmed glasses. Oh, puh-leese! The Piano Player and The Spink were quite vocal critics. Me too.

Friday.15.October.04 Midday nap. My dad was a mysterious and exotic force in my childhood. I adored him. He and I were totally entangled. I drove him nuts and he let me know that. He went to great lengths to set up interesting or educational things just for me. We would get into the car early, early on the weekends and he'd drive me to whereever I wanted to go, as long as he could figure out what I meant. Even then, I was lousy with names. And, occasionally, he'd come home from the Spy Store with strange items like three ring binders, litmus paper, cardboard tubes, carpet samples, or colored telephone wire. Much later, I guessed that the Spy Store was the dumpster next to his office but he never revealed his secret.

He dealt out stories about his past only by accident, when his guard was down for some other reason. I'd listen with every pore of my body, then rush to my room and write down everything I could remember of what he'd said. I collected them once, and there are about five pages of stories. That's it.

So when he told me that he had really enjoyed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Raspe as a kid, and gave me his copy with the Gustav Dore illustrations, I read and re-read it until the edges of the pages frayed. I still have that copy, as well as a couple of other ones from various used bookstores. The baron is a good ol' boy from the late 1700's. He hunts, soldiers, drinks, womanizes, and tells outrageous lies about his prowess.

This evening it seemed as though dinner would never coalesce. The wood stove was a long time heating and the house was too cold for the bread to rise until we got the oven going. So we lined up on the couch with the cats and watched Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchausen. It's a lot like the Monty Python show; intelligent, silly, and somewhat loose-jointed. We loved it, in a kind of avuncular way, possibly because it bore only a decorously polite relationship to Raspe's politically incorrect intentions. Dinner was good, too.

Oh. It wasn't really a false alarm yesterday. My iBook may have a shorted out ribbon to the screen. Or something else. But the symptoms, except that one time, are mild enough so that I still can use it whilst waiting to go to the repair shop.

Thursday.14.October.04 Rocks

It's late. Bob and Dogma have just left after a pleasant evening of Scrabble and refencing sheep. The Spink has a sore throat and fever, so I'm hanging out by the side of her bed, with its phosphorescent sheets, until she is well and truly asleep. Just knocked over her lemon, cranberry, and honey concoction. Thanks a lot, Mama. Luckily, she's asleep and isn't witness to this tragedy.

Vruba helped me find a Macintosh G4 iBook laptop in summer, and I've fallen in love. It doesn't suck too much power, it's fast enough so that I can do things pretty much as fast as I can think of them, it's portable, and there are features on it like GarageBand that I haven't even tried but look forward to messing with. BUT in the past week or so, its screen has been winking off and on, and this morning when I booted up to find out what had happened to Mt St Helens overnight, and see if I could find out some useful information on learning disorders, there was no screen light.

DESPAIR!

RUINATION!

ENDLESS WOE!

I was actually using two computers. We get Internet through the Starband satellite, and their modems only work on PC's. I've used both Macs and PCs for years now, and can't imagine why anyone would want to struggle with the loutish limitations of a PC. Last year Vruba set up a cheap PC as the Starband portal, and then he, Bk, and I could connect to it with our Macs via a hub. Now that the boys are gone, it kind of seems like overkill, but I actually am pretty comfortable going to extremes in order to be able to use my Mac.

HORRORS. I actually had to steer a PC around. The kind of computer where, in order to turn it off, you go to the START menu. A design nightmare. HISS SPIT.

Perhaps I am ranting just a little bit. Ironic, since it is the Mac and not the PC that is malfunctioning. David found out that other G4's have been recalled for the same problem. I'm not yet sure what has to happen to get it fixed, but it's possible that this blog will remain in Thursday for a while. I apologize, bowing three times and knocking my head on the floor whilst shuffling backwards out of sight.

Wednesday.13.October.04 School stove

Long day. I don't see how you wage slaves do it. I can be "on" for about three hours max. Then I need my own space and my own thoughts.

After teaching recorder class at 8:30, had one of those wear-two-hats conversations that happen so frequently in a small community. She is a valued friend but also a parent of two of my students.

Then, we were going to have a meeting with the facilitator of the Nonviolent Communications technique. But, it turned out to be a "fishbowl" thing instead, where we sat on chairs in a small circle, and the students sat on chairs around us, watching us model the technique. I don't get stage fright in front of people I know, but I do like to have a bit of warning so I can psych myself up out of private and into public mode. Yeesh.

Home briefly, then back to work, this time officially. Yoga, Spanish, Italic cursive. I worked this thing out with some of my more wiggly students, that they could go outside and wiggle when they needed to. It worked gloriously. The sun was shining, there was an apple crisp bite in the air, and the assasain beetles are out. I let recess go on for an extra 20 minutes. Then we scurried inside to work on Mt St Helens reports. Finished off with chores, and then after the kids left did a bit of writing in the kids' journals and a bit of library cataloguing. Then home to a pass-out-on-the-covers nap.

And a fifth (or is it sixth?) viewing of Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away, which we arranged for a friend who dropped in to talk about the Nonviolent Communication method, and for two of the cats, who really wanted to sit on the computer keyboard while the DVD was playing. At one point, there was a brisk cat fight, but mostly it was just a good movie.

Tuesday.12.October.04 Sunflowers

We suddenly decided to watch Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet after bedtime. It took a bit of doing to attach the electrical cord to the light in the studio, which is our only overhead light upstairs, and snake it into the bedroom and then plug the laptop in. David lit a candle on the window ledge so we could see. We didn't have popcorn in bed, but other than that, it was a great show. Somewhat like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but Chinese instead of Greek, and the groom was gay and the bride was an illegal alien.

I grew up in Hollywood but my parents were immigrants and didn't hold with watching TV nor in wasting money on movies. I more or less carried those values unquestioned into adulthood. But it's different when we don't live in town. The urban scene isn't a relentless pressure but is exotic instead, consumerism seems is a luxury rather than a vice, and popular culture is something we rather laboriously deduce from the stodgy pages of The New Yorker and The Economist. Watching movies is a newfound pleasure, without the guilty tang that a lot of urban friends report. It's fun to watch what those mainland foreigners think is entertaining.

We've watched several of Ang Lee's movies recently in addition to The Wedding Banquet; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Sense and Sensibility, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I'm an enthusiastic fan. His movies have simple plots with complex undercurrents; only The Wedding Banquet has spots of laboriousness (which is an artifact of the stilted English of the Chinese immigrant characters). The characters are well cast, the cinematography is aesthetically pleasing but not intrusive, and the dialogue is almost always spot-on.

Monday.11.October.04 Bullet proof glass.

Man, school is really sucking it out of me. I spend a lot of time either doing lesson plans or, worse, not doing lesson plans. And my plans are mostly how do I get the kids to run stuff? It ends up pretty chaotic. I don't like chaos.

So after work today, started cleaning the attic. Dust, dust, dust. Never read David Bodanis' The Secret House if you are cleaning. There are all kinds of goobers and hooky things living at just above microscopic level in the dust. Now there's a list of stuff I have to ask Bk about. Does he want the baseball mitt? What about the extra-large legos? What about the two four-year-old gift certificates to book stores?

When I was 27, a boxer dog named Boxer ate Bunny. I distinctly remember Omama holding me up to pick Bunny out from a rotating display at the hospital gift shop. I was maybe three, and, with a serious effort, had not cried when I got my tetanus shot. At the time, Bunny was upholstered in red, pink, yellow, and green checkers. He participated in endless farmyard fantasies, where he loomed over the little wooden sheep like a catastrophic dream, and he gave me someone to talk to when I had fevers and thought that he talked back, and he was just the right size to be a somewhat used-smelling pillow. He got recovered in green, then yellow. I still miss him.

So, if Bk decides that he wants to keep every single item in the attic, fine by me. Just not the dust.

Sunday.10.October.04 This is the ram that keeps jumping the fence. Mutton.

Much of a muchness. Sat on the balcony in the tepid sunlight working on Chapter 6, and found out later in the day that I hadn't saved it properly. That hasn't happened for years now, a reminder that you can't relax tooooo far. Went on a walk and had two encounters with neighbors, one in a newly refurbished chicken coop that was formerly the home of a gentleman who loved his bottle not wisely, but too well; and the other just outside the cemetery, where we were visiting a friend's grave. The cemetery conversation included the idea that Peter Jackson in Lord of the Rings missed a good bet when he made elves look like computer geeks. Instead, they should have been tatooed Maoris, or Japanese samurai.

Couldn't sleep. Got up at 3 a.m. and watched Tu Mama Tambien. I couldn't tell whether I felt uncomfortable about it because of prudishness, or because it really was as lame as I thought. See, these high school buddies think about sex a lot. You get to watch them and their girlfriends canoodle, and there's a scene where they jerk off together. They meet up with this hot chick whose husband just told her he was cheating on her. So, they go through the motions of an adolescent sex fantasy roadtrip but there's an edge. Things start falling apart. There's a zinger at the end, too, where you learn just how much things fell apart. But wait! Did they really? Or is there a lesson to be learned here? Yawn.

Saturday.9.October.04 Dock float.

I was sitting at the piano, trying out various accompaniments to a klezmer tango I am in the middle of, when The Piano Player walked in. We had a rousing good time over some French Canadian reels. Then Ruby arrived with chanterelles and The Piano player waltzed off.

Ruby has a much more sophisicated understanding of chords and their movement than I even suspected was possible. We worked on a piece I wrote for The Spink's birthday. The cool thing is that I think in terms of melody and Ruby thinks in terms of chord movement.

When The Piano Player returned, we shifted to playing Take Two. It's a Scrabble variant, where you take two tiles at a time and arrange them with the tiles you already have to try to get the most points. By the time they left, I had to hustle to get the sheep refenced and stack a few barrows of wood before dark.

The Carpenter came by to discuss our leaky roof and the addition of a bedroom and pantry. Afterwards, we had the chanterelles with butter and garlic.

Wednesday.7.October.04 Squirrels. Happy Birthday!.

We finished up The Spink's birthday party with X-Croquet. We set the wickets up in one of the flatter places under the cedars near the road, where we haven't grazed the sheep much and there are very few surprises for bare footed people. Younger children were allowed to move salal bushes out of the way. By the time we finished, we'd dropped the rule that using a flashlight was cheating, and everyone was allowed to take two shots at a time.

After the guests left, we watched The Shower, a sweet Chinese movie that wasn't exactly eye candy, more like eye comfort food. Everything was in blurry creams, blues, and wood tones. And it started with a car wash scene, only with a guy instead of a car. In the 1970's, my friends and I agreed not to read books (there were a lot of them) or watch movies that deleted women and children from the world. Tolkein was one. The Shower movie skims on the edge of this. The few women in it are mysterious authority figures with unpredictable agendas, but somehow I wasn't put off. Either I've grown up a bit in the past 30 years, or it was gracefully done. And, it's a totally awesome must see for everyone who enjoys O Sole Mio.

Tuesday.6.October.04

The Spink will be 12 tomorrow. She is very worried that David and I won't arrange the party favors correctly between us. It is hard to say whether we will or not. There's a deliciousness in giving her a surprise, but there's finding out exactly what she wants and expects. Sometimes people get that mix right, sometimes there are tears all around. Growing older includes letting go. It's not so much that you don't "care" anymore, but that you choose what you care about.

Last night went to a talk on nonviolent communication. The idea is that you try to connect with the other person by actually paying attention to them. You can't do that by assuming where they're coming from, so you have to learn the shift from assumptions to simple non-evaluative observations. There's more of course. I'd like to pursue it; it seems pretty sane (except for the annoying gerunds, or is it gerundives, that you are having to use when you are wanting to follow their pattern).

It's assumptions that seem to come between us and other people. Watch for them.

And, speaking of compassion and restraint, check out Garrison Keilor's in-your-face scolding of the Republican Party. As far as I can tell, he's right. It's interesting that the rather mild guy I think of him as has felt the need to take the gloves off. Is such passion more or less useful than a well-mannered article with occasional snatches of dry humor?

Yesterday I asked the school kids, "Why is our world round?" The most reasonable answers were "because of the spin," and "because of surface tension."

Today, the youngest kid said she had figured the answer out on her way home from school. It was gravity and the opposite of gravity (I think she meant centrifugal force).

After refencing the sheep and generally fussing around, we watched Super Size Me, a highly amusing and scarey film about a month on a McDonald's diet.

Tuesday, 5.October.04 Camera case.

As is usual when I work at the elementary school level, I'm feeling a dissonance between what I believe and what I know. What I believe is that people should be allowed and encouraged to find their balance, their voice and their center, and that this is best done by leaving them alone. What I know is that children at school do well when they are told what to do and do poorly when they are not.

So there I was, in the middle of a handwriting lesson. I'm teaching cursive italic, which is a fairly logical, fairly good looking script. I spent a bit of time justifying it to the kids (it's similar to printing, if you can write in italic cursive, you can read conventional cursive, but it's faster), but basically, I don't want to hear their opinions. I just want them to learn it. Everyone was fine with that, except me. The kids bent their trusting little heads over their iiiiii, llllll, jjjjj, tttttt exercise in silence. I couldn't let it be. I kept showing them exceptions, or talking about the origins of the letter j, or showing them the really cool way that I make my own "t," in a kind of loopy star. I want them to engage in their calligraphic excercises, but what I do is to interrupt their concentration to elicit a more obvious kind of engagement.

Yoga was satisfying. I have this theory that each pose probably has three or four counterparts; standing, inverted, stomach, and back. An example is the Camel pose, where you're standing up on your knees, bending backwards with your head flopped back and arching your chest up, holding on to your heels. The equivalent pose on your stomach is the Bow, where you raise your head and shoulders, reach behind yourself to grasp your ankles, and pull your feet up into the air. On your back, you can do the Bridge, where you face upwards, with your hands over your head and on the floor, your feet on the floor, and your torso arched up. Finally, you can stand on your head and let your legs drop back behind. Each of these poses stretches your middle and lower back intensely. The kids were able to come up with a compensating pose for the Camel (Child's Pose; kneeling and slumping forwards), and its equivalents. I hope that our sessions serve as a window into a process for them, and that they'll be able to design their own practice as needed later on.

But again, my internal philosophical tension. Ideally, on the one hand, only those students who asked to be taught yoga would get these lessons. But on the other hand, how could they know whether they wanted to or not without me leading all of them through a few week's worth of samples? I can think of compelling arguments on either side.

Sunday, 3.October.04 Ferry landing.

A lovely sunny day. The three of us kayaked along the beach we're surveying for the COASST project, peering at piles of kelp and ending up swimming in ridiculously cold water.

We moved our wood over to one side so the carpenters could build a woodshed in August. Well, now it's time to move it under the new shed. We wheelbarrowed and stacked and got splinters.

Sunday. A friend came by and we noodled around, discussing philosophy of education, Bush, logical vs. muddled thinking, and ostentatiously spiritual people. Tried to collaborate on a klezmer tango, but it was just too much fun to talk instead. We'll meet again, possibly with some music in hand, in a few days.

David came home with God is Great But I'm Not, a sweet French movie, and we watched it while eating homemade pesto with spaghetti and fresh caught crabs.

I had a bargeload of stuff planned for today, most of which was shunted aside in favor of the moment."Why do you have to do so much?" asked The Spink.

Seeing water makes me want to go swimming.

Well, it's because you can't live a creative life without either a wife, an independent income, or a horribly overdone schedule. In my case, I'm trying to keep the dishes washed and get the wood stacked, contribute to the family income stream, and also compose, write, and paint. The ancient Greeks justified slavery on the grounds that you can't manage as a thinking adult without a competent staff. I've got the luxury of being able to spend a Sunday kayaking, swimming, chatting, and watching a movie. And each decision to do one of those things crowds out something else that could happen instead. Like sleeping in or managing investments or studying Norwegian or spending quality time with The Spink.

Saturday, 2.October.04 A lovely sunny day.

The three of us went to Friday Harbor today to watch The Piano player's junior varsity team win a game; the PP scored, and left his uniform on after the game in case anyone asked him about it.

The Spink and I enjoyed ourselves in The Big City. We went to the bookstore, of course, where I found a Brecht play (our homeless musical is Brechtian, but I can't remember what that means), The Spink found a Tamora Pearce and a Jane Yolen fantasy, and David found a novel on the Chicago World's Fair. We bought meat loaf at The Market Chef, on the grounds that The Spink had never had any and wanted it as a literary experience. We watched the varsity team lose; it was a done deal from the moment we saw the two teams trotting around the field at the beginning; but the Orcas team gave those louts a good game for their money. We got passport photos for The Spink, who thinks she might go to Norway with me in December, and whose old passport shows a beet red screaming toddler. Nothing like her current suavity. We bought front-and-center tickets to The Battlefield Band's performance next week. We watched the jv soccer game. And we had a soda pop, chips, and ice cream, each one accompanied by disparaging comments from our fellow travelers. We agreed heartily and kept eating.

I asked a friend at the Farmers' Market if I could photograph her peppers. "Why would you want to do that?" she asked.

I said that I take dozens of photos every day, and post some of them here. "Why would you want to do that?" she asked.

Now there is a very good question. It's not for money (you are cordially invited to send cash, however). I think it has to do with the way my particular creative muse works. I'm no Emily Dickinson, who writes poetry and squirrels them away permanently in drawers. Part of the artistic impulse for me is expression; possibly in the same way that I tend to end up teaching most of what I learn; possibly in the same way that one would dress up for an event. There's something about knowing that your work is, or could be, public, that keeps you honest. And it seems to me that intellectual honesty is what moves civilization towards grace.

The Eclipse is a charter boat, if you must know.

My private journals tend to be pretty sloppy. They doodle around and whine. They go over points that are best left behind in the dust as soon as possible. Processing can be an ugly thing, and at least for me, can be quite dishonest. It seems to me that what I struggle against in my pursuit of truth is the tendency to fall into attitudes and assumptions. Of course, without them, everything would be of equal value and nobody could get through their day. But with them, the exquisite individuality of each atom gets lumped together into categories. And, when the categories are emotional or intellectual ones, they must be constantly re-evaluated. I try out ways of re-thinking my assumptions in my private journals that can be quite embarassing to re-read. Luckily, I almost never re-read them.

When The Spink was moving from toddlerhood to girlhood, she had horrible mornings. She had to evaluate each individual item of clothing that she possessed and decide whether to wear it or not. It was exhausting for her. Eventually, through preening in the mirror, observing other toddlers and ones in books, and her own taste, she was able to work out a consistent system of matching socks, contrasting jumpers and blouses, and shockingly clashing accessories.

The Spink was learning a system of categorizing the world. I expect that when she moves to the mainland some day, she will either choose to be an eccentric, or she will re-categorize her understanding of clothing.

The Spink makes an artistic statement with her clothes; that's like a daily blog. When she was working it out, that was like a private journal. And when she dresses to go to a party, I suppose that would be like art that's put up for sale; art that you particularly want people to notice.

I blog because I wear clothes. Because I'm a literary being. Because it's what I do.

Friday, 1.October.04 David's legs.

A good morning with the homeless play. There is now a love interest and a long-lost son, as well as cardboard signs. Luckily, Kathy and I work somewhat similarly, wanting to brainstorm a whole lot before doing the easy stuff, that is, writing dialogue.

Started teaching officially at the elementary school today. My mandate is to put out the school paper and to teach Spanish. The student body is diverse; heights vary from not much taller than a grasshopper's knee to look-me-in-the-eye.

I've got a lot to learn and re-learn! We did some yoga. Kids are much more limber than adults, but they're not so good at identifying body parts verbally. I have a precise practice, but I'm built a bit like a brick, with all the limberness that you'd expect of one. The kids ended up ludicrously twisted and tangled, but not in the poses I had in mind. It was amusing to one and all.

Brought a hammer to school to make stab-bound copybooks with. That, too, was far more complex than I allowed time for. Just positioning the nail on the spine of the books was beyond 90% of the kids. I forgot that a lifetime of crafts actually taught me something, and that if I want a kid to be able to do the same, I have to figure out how to understand what it is that's difficult about what I'm asking them to do, and lead up to it reassuringly. And, at the same time, not be patronizing.

The Spink and I decided to join David as he ferried afternoon passengers across a sunlit sea. He surfed a wake to get to the ferry landing, which had the double advantage of saving fuel and being fun.