Planning

Since I am a total foodie, I've been thinking for two weeks about our Christmas menu. Now we don't eat meat so the usual traditions were out. I found my menu looking through Cooking Light during one of our many forays to B & N. And since I do not do themes, I mix matched some things that look good. But there is a slightly Southwestern theme happening.

For the main course it's Red Chile-Cheese Enchiladas. This is more of a casserole than traditional Mexican enchiladas. It looks creamy and comforting. It also promises a bit of hotness. Too much creamy would be bad but creamy with a kick in the ass...perfect. I have definitely decided on the Ensalada de Noche Buena. This combines some interesting flavors including pomegranate and pumpkin seed kernels. Again creamy with some nice spices. Plus I am really coming around to fruit, spicy, and vegetable combos. I will be leaving out the grapefruit. Have not and can not even imagine ever coming around to liking grapefruit. I am making an appetizer not necessarily because I do the whole course thing but...Creamy Mushroom Phyllo Triangles. Not Southwestern but yum. I was thinking I could maybe do something with the spices though. Some cumin, coriander. I wish you could get spicy cream cheese. Now I have to figure out a soup. I was thinking some black beanish. And for dessert pumpkin pie because I just love pumpkin pie.

For Christmas Eve, we're going to my mom's. I'm making an upside down pear cake, and I have the Hello Dolly Bars. I really want something peppermint but I am getting a tad intimated at the amount of cooking I have lined up. I'm thinking about a peppermint cheesecake from Trader's Joe. But then again it maybe too much. Maybe I'll just grab a cheese plate from somewhere. We always end up with way too many sweet things at my mom's house.

Winter Food

Winter is a great time to cook. I love the heat from the oven, and the smells of spices when it's cold out. And conveintly enough we hit a cold spell just as our break started. It had been in the 80s which makes it very hard to make winter comfort food. This weekend I made some sweets: Hello Dolly Bars which came out awesome. I made one pan to eat and another to freeze for Christmas Eve. I also made some Cocoa Cookies which tasted good but looked horrible.

Mostly though I've been in a tad of a rut with cooking. I need some new cookbooks but we're low on money until January but I might try to talk H into at least one:) Right now I'm lusting over two: Veganomicon and 125 Best Vegetarian Slow Cooker Recipes. I admit that the first one attracted my attention with its title. I mean how could I resist? I can't imagine Cthulu as a vegan. But the recipes look so good: Samosa Baked Potatoes! Chickpea cutlets! And the slow cooker...well I decided I needed to get past my intense terror of burning the house down, and utilze a slow cooker in my very busy life. I enjoy cooking but there are times when I really don't have the time to enjoy. A slow cooker would really be perfect.

I'm also wishing for good cooking equipment. I wonder if I could talk H into this? Doubt it. I did get a free stainless steel wok with steamer from Harris Teeter (the grocery store). I was pretty excited, and can't wait to try it out. Definitely going to be doing stir fry this week.

Tonight I made Quinoa and Potatoes Casserole. I found it on a new blog I've been reading: My Aim Is True. I made a few changes. First, instead of dill, I added thyme and rosemary (I love rosemary with any kind of potatoes). Second, I cut the potatoes smaller. Third, since I am not a vegan, I mixed breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese for the topping. Thumbs up from both H and I. It was prefect for a cold day. Even Piper liked it! I also made up a vegetable soup. Very simple and good with the casserole.

Here's the recipe:

Quinoa, Leek & Potato Casserole

1 cup quinoa

1/2 tsp olive oil

1/4 onion (I used a sweet onion)

2 cloves garlic (I used four but we're nuts about garlic here)

1 tsp rosemary
¼ tsp. thyme

1 leek, chopped into rounds (just the white & light green part)

3 small red potatoes, sliced into bite size pieces

1 can pinto beans

1/4 cup breadcrumbs
¼ cup Parmesan

salt & pepper

Preheat your oven to 425. Meanwhile, cook the quinoa (just like you cook rice). Get an 8x8 glass dish and line the bottom with the quinoa.
Saute the onion and garlic with the olive oil in a small skillet. Add the pinto beans, leeks thyme, rosemary and let simmer. Add salt & pepper to taste.
Boil the potatoes in water for a few minutes to soften.
Now layer everything up. The beans & leek mixture goes on top of the quinoa. Then drain the potatoes and layer them on top. Then cover everything with a generous sprinkling of breadcrumbs/parmesan. These will toast and give it a crunchy texture.
Bake for about 15 minutes. Serve up hot.

Winter Break Movies

I finished up school on Wednesday, and vowed to take a few days off before diving into my thesis. Thus I spent a few days basically playing on the computer (note the million pictures I posted) and watching movies.

We spent a thoroughly enjoyable couple of evenings watching Big Love. I love this show. It hooked me right from the beginning....likely due to my interest in "Mormon Fundamentalism" but even beyond that it's good drama. I've really come to like the characters even Niki who I kind of hated during the first season. Now I have a "love to hate her" kind of relationship. She's wonderful conniving but also strangely loyal in her own way to the "family." I also love Roman, the patriarch at the compound. I know total bad guy but still love him. I just took a quiz to see which sister I am, and it's Margene! LMAO. Now she's the last one I would have picked.

We also saw "This is England." It was good. I can't say I got very excited about it. It was disturbing in parts. I thought it interesting to get a glimpse of the National Front which one of my theory books centers around. But...well it just seemed like such a typical story about racism and nationalism. I mean, for someone who cares about this stuff it just seemed like "Well yeah." I've seen a lot of good movies that make me think this. I felt this way about American History X and Crash. Both were good movies and I thought they were well-done but they just seemed to lack a bit of complexity. They didn't make me uncomfortable nor did they make me examine myself in any kind of profound way. They made it too easy to say "That's not me nor could it ever be me."

Maybe it's because H and I watched a movie called "The Believer." This movie was amazingly complex and incredibly disturbing. It is about a Jewish man who becomes a Neo-Nazi. It explores his entrance into this extreme group, and the intense self-hatred he struggles to reconcile with his heritage. It made me realize that racism is an intensely internalized kind of thing, and it's something that makes us do really crazy shit. I don't know if I can even begin to put into words how this movie made me feel. It was the most painful, hardest movie I have ever seen on racism. More importantly it made me question how racism lives in me. What ways am I racist without even necessarily being aware? It made me question how racism becomes self-directed. I think this movie makes that a dramatic move but I think in reality it is often much more subtle. I know for me this happens with class. There ways that I hate myself, ways that I mock "rednecks", etc that come from this intense conditioning that being low class is a very bad thing. Basically, this movie made it impossible to exnogerate yourself from hatred. That's a hard kind of thing to sit through.

Tree Decorating

Tree Decorating
Originally uploaded by gstick61

New Publication

My creation
Originally uploaded by gstick61

Things

My creation
Originally uploaded by gstick61

Some things that caught our attention Sunday afternoon.

Us In December

My creation
Originally uploaded by gstick61

So Today Is Saturday

I went to the WW meeting.

All was good at first. I really do like my leader. She's reasonable. I like the women who go to the meeting with me. They understand me. They understand that one person can eat an entire chocolate cake...in one sitting. There is something nice about being with people who get this. It really is like an AA meeting or something. Hi I'm Ginger, I can eat whole cakes in a single bound. And everyone kind of nods in understanding. It's safe and comforting. It's one of the few places where my eating habits don't make me feel like a freak.

But, remember there's always a but, there is a nine year old at the meeting. A FUCKING NINE YEAR OLD. She's chubby yeah but shit does she need to diet? I mean is there anothr way to teach a child to eat properly? Hell I guess if WW is at it proclaims not a diet...I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it. I mean, I go. I know it's a diet. On other hand, it has helped me to eat better. To make better choices. But isn't there some other way for a nine year old? And what's sick is that she can't be there without a Dr.'s note.

Where I am today: Okay I am not fat. I know that. I realized today that I don't think I'm fat. I can look in the mirror 90% of the time at this point, and feel pretty good about how I look. I always can see where I lose some more weight but it's not like it's unbearable to see myself naked. And yeah this isn't all the time. There are times when I feel like I'm fat. I have those days.

What's making me neurotic is the fear that I'm going to be fat again. I realized today that as I was sitting in my car that what terrifies me is the thought I'm going to lose control and wake up 196lbs again. But underneath all this is that if that happened I would be gross. And it really bugs me that I think this. I mean, I don't think overweight or obese people are gross. But if it happened to me I'd feel this way. I admit it. What kind of way is this to live life. It bothers me a great deal to think that my life could be spent with this fear. But today I feel more hopeful. It feels good to know what I fear. It feels good to day "I am not fat." And it feels good to be working towards thinking "Hell even if I'm fat, it's okay."

Funny that on this cold, gray Saturday...with a sad friend who's marriage seems to be ending...I have managed to find a tiny piece of hope

A Weighty Post

I'm in a very strange place in regards to my weight. I made my goal. I feel much better without the extra weight. But....there's always the but isn't there? This week I binged liked crazy. I ate tons of candy, and way too much chocolate cake. But it was a small binge compared to some of my past binges. And there wasn't as much guilt upon waking up. However, there was some unfortunate incidents that came a little too close to bulimia for my tastes.

And then the other day, I was dressing Piper and calling her my fat baby. I love her baby fat. But she looked at me for the first time and said "Don't call me that." "Don't call you what?" I asked her, thinking she meant "baby." "Fat." She answered. And I really almost broke down in tears. What the hell am I passing onto my daughters? Obviously, I was not as careful as I wanted to be about calling myself fat in front of them. I was really angry with myself. I don't want them to ever feel like fat is some kind of defining value in their lives. I don't want them to go through the intense self-hatred I feel towards my own body. And yet there was my beautiful, sweet, chunky little girl telling me to not call her fat.

I realized that even if I don't say anything, they are surrounded by my food obsessions. There are the WW books where I record everything I eat. They know I go to meetings every Saturday morning. They watch me calculate points for every bit of food I put in my mouth. I found myself thinking today at supper, "What am I teaching them?" "What do I want to teach them about food?"

Couple this with a horrible article I read in "People" (okay I soo don't read it but it had an article on Joe Olstein and since I am interested in prosperity gospel, I had to look). Some absurdly thin actress was saying her new thin look was due to monotony: "When you eat only to sustain your body, you don't see food as anything else." Argh. I mean, I love food. I love the pleasure of good food. I love the taste of spicy dal and crisp samosas. I love Godiva chocolate cheesecake. I love preparing vegetables and sauces. Food is about pleasure for me. But there is also this other side where food is about addiction, and trying to drown out uncomfortable emotions. But food as only sustaince? Is this where I really want to go? I think no.

What I want for myself is to have a relationship with food that is based on pleasure not desire. Desire seems to me that elusive thing you can never have. For me food has become that thing. If I binge food is the enemy. That love that you desire but hate at the same time. When I diet food is still the enemy. The things I want but that I feel I can not have.

What's made me realize how problematic WW is becoming for me is when I started craving a hamburger this week. I mean, I wanted red meat so bad my mouth watered. But I started thinking about why I became a vegetarian. I thought about all the political reasons why this important to me. And the craving went away. But this week I was also craving some Chinese vegetable fried rice. I denied myself this because I thought of it as a "bad" food. Then today, I am thinking, "Why? Why would it be bad for you to eat some rice?" This craving didn't go away and still hasn't.

I'm not sure where this leaves me. I know that WW did get me to this place where my body feels very good. I still think I'm ugly. And I knew as I did WW that being thin was not going to make me love myself anymore. I've been thin before and it's never helped with the loathing. But on the other hand, I really hate that WW works off feeding into often unfounded fears about weight, and from the obsession of American women to be thin. I looked at my meeting on Saturday and was astonished at the women who were just joining. They were all thin. And then there was this 15 year old girl there, and it really broke my heart. I love my leader, and I have become friends with many of the women who go but I don't know if I can do this anymore. And I'm afraid of what I'll do without it. Something is going to have to give.

Ideally, I would get concealing since it's pretty apparent that I am really fucked up. But I don't think I can afford this. I keep thinking about how when we lived in Mexico I lost a ton of weight without dieting. I ate really good (Juanita made the best rice on the planet). We went to the bakery by H's parent's house almost every night. But I walked everywhere. I started running. And I didn't much processed foods (way expensive in Mexico). And I also lost weight when I was following Dr. Weil's Optimum Health plan. I realized that a lot of it was about conscious eating. I ate what I wanted but I thought about what I ate. Mostly I just took a lot of pleasure in eating healthy well prepared food. But I admit that there is a part of me that is scared that I can't maintain that without WW.

What do I want for my daughters? Not that they are thin. They will be beautiful no matter what weight they are. I want them to feel pleasure with food. I want them to enjoy food period. I don't want them to turn to food for stress or as a drug. But I also want them to see food as more than just sustenance. How can I give my girls these things when I am having a hard time doing it for myself?

Nightmare

Yesterday afternoon, I laid down for a nap with Piper (I'm sick I have an excuse). I started this bizarre nightmare but managed to pull myself out.

I was not me but a teen age boy. We, my mother, little sister (about two), and I, had moved to this huge deserted hotel. My mother had been hired to start the process of refurbishing the place. There was a very old lady that lived there but some reason my mother did know she was there. I knew that I brought her food but me doing that was not part of the dream.

In the dream, I was sitting on a floor in one of the rooms. It was dusty but the carpet was this brilliant white, and it was not dusty or dirty. Sometime was trying to push its way into my head and I was fighing to keep it out. My little sister came in, and sat beside me. Whatever it was strarted to try to get in her mind instead. I was pushing against this thing so hard, I was sweating, and one point in the dream, the sweat turned into blood. It feel in slow motion on the carpet in these perfect droplets. When it hit the carpet, the rug did not soak it up, rather it the carpet was fluid, and the drops hit, refracing up before being absorbed. I knew that I had to make my sister move to my other side and just the effort to talk was painful. She moved finally to my other side. The old lady came in, screamed, and ran. I managed to fight the thing off long enough to grap my sister and run.

Done and Toasted

I just emailed the Foucault paper to professor. In a half hour, I will give the grades to the professor I TAed (this really should be a verb), and then I'm done. Wow. I sort of feel there's something that didn't get done. Maybe because it's I usually have two papers done by this time of the year. But I did get out a graduate application, and I wrote my proposal. I also did a fuck of a lot of reading for my thesis. My overacheiver self just needs to chill out.

After I sent my paper out I wandered over to the library for some winter break reading. Nothing really caught my interest though. There was a biography about Bukowski but I thought: You're already depressed do you really think this would be light reading? Answer: No. I put it back. Maybe over the summer. I also thought about getting out Frued's correspondence but agian just not really what I'm looking for. Basically everything looked kind of blah. Now I know I'm depressed. I thought about launching right into my thesis as I wandered the stacks but that nearly me put me on the floor. Guess I'll be picking up the second books in "The Golden Compass" series. And what I really thought I'd like to read besides though two books is the rest of "A Thousand Plaeteaus," Butler's "Precarious Lives" and the book of Foucault interviews "Ethics." Go figure.

And of course I'm sick. I did yoga last week. I tell you doing yoga makes me sick. It's one of those crappy colds where you just feel totally blah. My head is stuffy, my nose is full. Everything tastes like crap (and I LOVE Christmas food). I just sort of feel like I'm walking through life in slow motion. Hopefully the cold will end before Christmas.

Good thing is that I have very little shopping to do. The kids are done (except for Umberto's SuperMario Bros. 6 for Gamecube). I only have gift cards to purchase and send now. I'm afriad that my family is rather dull in that all they want are giftcards. How unfun is that? But I guess it's good that I don't go through the agonzing process of trying to find the perfect gift for everyone. I did get to pick out gifts for H. It was fun, and I think he'll love them.

And last night I actually came in second on MarioKart, and am even managed to beat GrandMaster Umberto in one race. He was pretty astonished. Hell so was I.

Christmas Insanity

Sometimes they get just a tad too excited about Christmas...

Do try to see who's on the T. V. screen

Xmas Pictures

I thought my dear readers would get a kick out of my attempts at a good xmas picture of the kids. H thinks it's hilarious. Every year I attempt to get them to pose. It's always a mess. Whenever people tell me I should model them, I laugh. Yeah right. I'd like to meet the photographer who could pose these kids.

Perfect except for Camille who is looking at her fav. peron on earth....H.

Nearly there but Umberto has what H refered to last night as a "duck face." Plus there's something wrong with Camille looking demur.

Okay not demur now. This is defintely typical of our kids but Piper's look of adoration for U. kind of ruins it for an xmas card picture.

PERFECT! But umm...we're missing a kid....

This is the one we used. They're all looking at the camera, and they look like themselves. I do try to avoid the GAP picture.

Titles For Poems Never Written

I'm not a poet but I do come up with these titles that I think would wonderful headline poems. I have actually tried a few times to write poems to go with the titles but they were awful.

Here's a couple of my favorites, complete with origin stories.

"Sean Meets the Devil in Old Port."

My friend...Sean....once told me this story about meeting someone he was determinded was Satan in Portland's Old Port. It was a great story, and I think would make a wonderful poem. And yeah I did try but I just couldn't do it.

"Drunk Mexican Archaleogists."

This story is amazingly convulted. It invovled H and I talking tonight about various things. First, H wanted to know if I remembered a movie where someone painted eyes on their eyelids so that it looked like they had thier eyes open when their eyes were closed. I couldnt' remember that but I did remember the girl in Indiana Jones who wrote "I love you" on her eyelids. This lead to a conversation about wanting to be an archelogists when we were little. H was trying to tell me a story about some hills around one of the places where he lived in Mexico. I kept interpretting with "Oh was there some digs going on? Was everyone drunk?" This came because one of my fav. undergrad profs. Dr. O always cracked jokes about drunk arachelogists. Not sure what this poem would look like.

If I think of some more, I'll throw them up.

Sundays Suck

This Sunday is worst than usual. Last night Piper and I created some kind of dominao effect which resulted in a big bottle of water being spilled on my laptop. Right now it is laying on the desk in the study. H turned it on this morning. It did come on but turned off immediately. We'll try again later this afternoon. Everything is on that laptop. All my thesis notes, the start of my Foucault paper. I really almost cried last night. Thank god I don't great soda.

Now if that wasn't bad enough I have to finish my Foucault paper which is, you guessed it, on the wet laptop. I told my professor I'd send it out Monday. Even if my laptop is working, I'll not have the paper ready. I think I can finish it today (if said laptop actually decided to work) and edit it tomorrow and Tuesday. No not much time to edit. I don't know what happened this semester. It really was like one minute I woke up and it was December. It took me so long to get into the rhytym of school. Normally I have all papers done at this point, and am editing. This semester all I had to write was thesis proposal and a ten page paper. And there is a price to pay. I will be writing my thesis over my winter break. So fun. So relaxing.

In other mundania type news, I reached my goal in WW. What this means is that once I maintain that weight for six weeks I get lifetime. Lifetime means that I don't have to pay for meetings if I keep my goal weight. And my goal weight isn't tiney I assure you but it's a lot smaller than I was two years. Since the moment when I could really feel my body falling apart two years ago, I've lost a totaly of 54 lbs. and 8 inches of my waist. My body feels better. I feel stronger. All of which does make feel more confident. I'm also a weight I feel I can maintain. I think if you set your mind on a weight that is too small you end up not being able to either get there or to maintain once you're there.

Coffee and Chocolate

Last night I had another random encounter with humanity. In the Starbucks line, waiting for my desperately needed Americano, and cookies for the beasties, I feel into joking with an older man. He had a box labeled "Coffee and Chocolate." "It just didn't get much better than that I told him." We ended up joking with his wife and the clerks. I know, cheesy, but I really feel warmed by those encounters during the "SEASON."

Coffee and chocolate are really true of the earth's loveliest delights. Right up there with sex. I was thinking about pleasure yesterday. In the class I'm TAing for, we had our final discussion for year on Neopaganism. The book we read is a wonderful book examining Pagan festivals. We were discussing why Neopagansim is one of the fastest growing religions in the U.S. (along with Pentecostalism). Several students kept pointing to how good people felt at these festivals. S, my professor, mentioned that this is not work that has been done in sociological/anthropological religious study work but that this question of pleasure seemed important. And this had me thinking all day, on the drive home, throughout the evening but yes pleasure! Why are we so scared too look at the pleasure religion provides? Would it make religion easier to dismiss for those of so "enlightened"? And I'm not talking pleasure in the Marx, opium way, but pleasure...the kind of pleasure we get from sex, a good glass of wine, fine music, etc. Does anyone have recommendations for books on pleasure? I'd great appreciate some call outs.

And today I was also thinking, as I prepare to send out the secondary materials to UNC (I'm sick to my stomach on this one) that I greatly appreciated all the encouragement from everyone. In particular, I wanted to mention a certain friend, from the lonely Isle, who asked important questions about my thesis proposal. Those questions really forced me to hone in what I was trying to say. I love that I get this kind of critical feed back here. I won't lie...sometimes it makes me grumpy but most of the time I get past that to see the spirit it was offered in. Critical discussions, not polemic discussions, are ways that only make us better thinkers. I appreciate that not only do I get encouragement but the pushes that I often need to just be better.

And yes, I will be finishing up editing my sample paper, then all this will be sent out to UNC. I am feeling a terrified. I have too much riding on this application. And deep down I know my chances are very very slim but I keep hoping that I'll slide in on that slim chance.

Depression...still there but I no longer feel like I'm drowning. Talking to someone earlier, I realized that writing about my dad all summer brought up some feelings I have about Christmas. Maybe I can find some time to write about those memories and feelings later.

Piper told me that when we got a cat, she wanted to name it Morrissey.

Sinking

Now closed in by a chilly night, with the sounds of the dishwasher and the Christmas cartoon on the TV, I am sinking. I do not know what I am sinking into but it feels like darkness. Not the warm comforting darkness of a clear night sky but a cold black hole. It's a darkness I know. A darkness I used to be intimate with.

But only now have I recognized it. I thought maybe I was pregnant (horrors). When that wasn't the case, I thought stress. But despite everything the stress isn't unmanagble this time around. Yet I walk around in tears all the time. I can't sleep. Food is totally uninteresting to the point where I don't want it or I want to just inhale everything in sight. I walked around feeling so disconnected from everything around me. Every move felt like I struggled against a heavy blanket to accomplish.

Then sitting here, I realized..."It's depression." Shit I haven't been depressed like this in a long, long time. I think the last time was post-partum with Camille. It's a scary feeling. But for me being able to look the darkness in the eye, embrace it, helps me in learning to live with it. And yes I will live with it. No drugs. Those who know me know this. Perhaps it's time to write these dark fantasies out.

Monday Mourning

Despite a life trying to consciously avoid stereotypes, I do hate Mondays. They slay me. Today was no exception. But there was good news...and for the most part I remained my happy chipper self. Bullets in the life of Ginger....who yes, John, is alive so very alive.

1. H and I think that being so in synch might not be a good thing. Yesterday I woke up with horrible pain in my left shoulder. I think I pulled a muscle while doing my free weights on Saturday. H came back from studying with intense back pain. We spent the rest of the day moaning and groaning unable to bend over, sit, or stand for too long. All this in the last weeks of classes--papers due, finals to grade. Yes, Ginger has a body!

2. I've been horribly bitchy lately. I got so pissed off at the dumbest thing yesterday. I feel a tad bad about my reaction. I mean, I don't feel bad about what I said but just that it bugged me so much. I suspect the recipent of my bitchiness thinks I'm a tad crazy. Sigh. I am crazy. But everyone has been the recipent of my nastiness. I think I need a hut to go when I'm unbearable. I really don't know how H stands it. Hell, I don't know how most of my friends stand it for that matter. I know what's wrong but there is no need to share everything with you, dear readers!

3. My shoulder still HURTS.

4. I found that I'm going to TA for one of my favorite professors. I'm very excited about this. He's teaching an intro. class on Christianity which is good experience for me. In addition, he wants me to teach a couple of classes.

5. I still have NOT written my Foucault paper. Not that I have any idea when it's due but I suspect soon;P Yes, I do need to write that and not work on my blog.

6. I overslept today and still managed to get a good parking spot. In fact, not only did I get a great spot, I managed to not get a ticket (I forgot my parking pass).

7. Had a great bitch session with fellow female TA. We're getting along well despite both being alpha females. I'm playing nice.

8. Did I mention I have a body?

I may erase the last post I wrote. It's too scattered and needs some work. I think there are like six stories buried in there.

It's Not You, It's Your Body

Imagine if your body was you. Where would I hide? I've spent so long thinking that beneath my layers of fat there laid the true me, safe from the world. Periodically I'd let her out to play, shed the tower, and ended up wounded--bleeding on the side of the road. Then I'd imagine I could lock up her up, and hide her in the armor that fat seemed to bring. But it is lonely in exile. No one wants the fat girl, and sure that if safe but it's not a really happy life either.

There were days when I could convince myself that it was okay. I had lots of friends, and there was certainly satisfaction in those relationships. But at night, alone, there was no one to hold me, or to touch me intimately. No one to whisper "I love you" before sleep came. And it really did seem that as long as I was fat there wasn't going to be anyone to do those things. When I did fall in love, finally, the person rejected me because of my body. "It's not you, it's just your body." And again there was that idea that this body was somehow not the real me. And the pain...because supposedly I could do something about this body right? I could reshape it, change it, make it somehow more reflective of me?

And I was lucky. I meet someone who thought the fat was sexy. Well who though I was sexy. All of me. When we first dated people would say things like "It's good that he sees your mind." And what that really meant is that someone as hot as H must love brains over beauty because look at you girlfriend. It continues even now where people will say sort of incredulously "Why do you think he loves you." with that slight emphasis on the you. There are so many implications there: he was looking for a green card, he must see something in you the rest of us don't. It's funny because I kind of love that H at times loves me solely out of lust. There are times when I someone to see only my body...because maybe just maybe it's not just my body...maybe it's me.

I should end it there...what a great ending line but I can't. When I lost a large chunk of weight last time (40lbs), I gained 20 of it back very quickly. I freaked out to be honest. The thought of myself as this thinner version was very wacky. And WW really emphasises that this is supposed to be a lifetime thing. I was going from always being the fat girl to being the sort of in between girl (no one is likely to ever call me thin). And I felt like I was losing myself. In a way, I was....

Reading Foucault has made me rethink my attitudes towards my body. He claims in Discipline and Punish that the soul is the prison of the body. Maybe it wasn't the real me I was keeping trapped in those layers of fat. Maybe the real me were the layers of fat. And if Foucault is right in that we can stray afield of ourselves, then maybe me is also this person who's not wrapped layers in fat.

In my head over the last few days, I thought about those moments when I loved my body, when I felt proud of my body. I started to think of the things I love.

1. When I practiced S & M. You end up being incredibly intimate with your body. In order to keep this on a safe level you have to be able to read your body. I could take, initially, incredibly high amounts of pain but it was because i was able to disconnect from my body in ways most people can't. I'd wake up the next day, dying, aching, bruised, and barely able to move. If I was going to continue in this world, I had to learn to read my body better. S & M was a pleasure (and God, what a pleasure) that brought you center to yourself, your body.

2. Bearing children....not the pregnancy part, I hated that. That was like having my body possessed. But the actual pushing out, labor part. Yes, it hurt like hell but the strength it takes to do something like that is not something you realize you possess. It was powerful. It made me trust my body in ways i never had before. Afterward, I felt this quiet pride.

There seems to be a theme here...pain...maybe it's just me...But for me at least pain made me aware that the surface of my body was me. It was not something that didn't belong to me but it was me.

This time around I didn't freak out as much about losing weight. I didn't go into some kind of identity crisis or who I would be if I was fat. I think it's because, through reading Foucault, I am starting to see my body less as an object and more as a subject. As silly as this sounds, I am beginning to realize that my body is me. Maybe there is no duality. I don't even know how to begin with this new ethics but I do know that it involves having to respect and care for my body.

Riding in My Car...

This actually happened last night. As if it wasn't bad enough that I'm obessed with Morrissey...

We're in the car last night, and H has brought along a CD to play for the kids. Said kids are okay about the first song but as H starts another:

Piper: I want to sing Morrissey! (happy insistence because she's thinking "OF COURSE they have Morrissey in the car." We don't).

Horacio: This is Morrissey, hold on. (He's totally lying because we don't have any Morrissey in the car. It's Belle and Sebastian who sound NOTHING like Morrissey). Whispers to me: I can totally fool her. B

Belle and Sebastian fills the car.

Piper, screaming: "That is NOT Morrissey. I want Morrissey. (At this point, she begins to sob hsyterically because we don't have any Morrissey. We discover she would rather have silence than listen to anything else besides Morrissey).

At least I'm starting to listening to other things....

Corrupting Our Kids

We're in the car last night, and H has brought a long a CD to play for the kids. Said kids are okay about the first song but as H starts another:

Piper: I want to sing Morrissey! (happy insistence because she's thinking "OF COURSE they have Morrissey in the car." We don't).

Horacio: This is Morrissey, hold on. (He's totally lying because we don't have any Morrissey in the car. It's Belle and Sebastian who sound NOTHING like Morrissey). Whispers to me: I can totally fool her.

Belle and Sebastian fills the car.

Piper, screaming: "That is NOT Morrissey. I want Morrissey. (At this point, she begins to sob hsyterically because we don't have any Morrissey. We discover she would rather have silence than listen to anything else besides Morrissey).

Saturday Morning Musing

Randomness from Ginger's Saturday morning:

1. Why the hell am I up? I'm exhausted. I can FEEL the bags under my eyes. I laid awake last night for something like two hours. When I did sleep, it was a strange sleep that felt like being awake but because of the dreams I knew I was sleeping. All in all just not a restful night.

2. As if I needed something else to feel guilty about....now I feel guitly about losing weight. Sigh. Am I betraying my feminist self? Is this weight loss really all about self loathing? Should I just eat my fucking head off, and chalk it up to my principles? Hell, there is a part of me that would love to say "Fuck it" and go eat an entire big bag of Hershey kisses (the cherry coridal kind...god yum). But there is that part deep in me that says "You know that it's an excuse to eat until you barf." And I don't want to do that to myself to anymore. I abused my body for a long time...I abused it with food. But again...sigh.

3. I've kind of decided I'm done my SOP. I have heard nothing from said adviser who I know has some intense weekend plans. This means that I will not be seeing my SOP until next Wednesday. I need to get this stuff sent out, adn by next Wednesday I will be knee deep in TAing duties, and editing a Foucault paper. Plus I just feel that it's as good as it can get.

4. Not feeling as restless, or uncontent as I was a few days ago. I just need to accept the feelings I was having and move on. I'm moving on....

5. Had my monthly reading group yesterday. It was ok. Sometimes I'm not sure why the hell we're meeting so it's hard to critque who we read. There seems to be this kind of "Well this isn't the revolution I want" Mentality, as well as critques about academics not doing anything in general. Do acadmeics really do ANYTHING? I mean, we sit and write papers taht noone reads. And the prof. who seems the most upset by this is the one who really seems to think we can maintian soem kind of dsitance or neturality. All in all it was a fustrating session. I really think the group misread the reading, but no one was listening to me, and I didn't feel really capable of aruging why I thought this. On a nice for the body image level, the older phil/rel. prof who came actually chekced me out and not hte skinny TA who everyone else checks out;P I'd like to think it was my mind but I think it was my boobs. Ahh..well, he did listen to me, asked me good questions, and tried to talk me into taking his class.

Umberto Growing Up

There are these little things that let you know your child are growing up. For me it is often not the obvious things--like Umberto needing deodorant this summer (no joke). It's the smaller things, the gazes, the hand gestures, the consciousness of things.

Last year, I bought all the kids Santa hats in some kind of cheesy attempt to get decent xmas pictures. I never did get the pictures because it's nearly impossible to pose my kids. But the kids loved the hats. Last year, Umberto wore his everywhere--to the park, the store, the library. He was made fun of a few times but it didn't bother him. Last night, the kids wanted me to buy them Santa hats, and I remembered that I had these ones packed away. I pulled them out, and they all wore them with glee. Umberto had his on this morning as he played Gamecube. We were going to the park to meet some friends, and right before we leave, he pulls off the hat saying "Oh man, I almost forgot I had this on." He grabbed his Yankee hat and left the Santa hat home. It made me a bit sad that he's gotten to that point of feeling self conscious about what he wears.

Then at the park today, he was with his two friends, the Hs and a girl they sometimes hang out with, C. We, the mommies, were watching them, and wondering what they talked about. We were laughing about they never tell us. Today as we drove home, Umberto told me. C had heard a ghost in the woods, Umberto told me. It said "Get out now before something bad happens." C ran from the words, the boys following her because they hadn't heard the ghost. Umberto said when they went back in he saw a shadow of a person who wasn't there, and then heard someone say "ouch."

I remember as a child being fascinated with ghosts, and seeing, hearing them in the woods. But it does seem to happen at a certain older age. And Umberto is reaching that age in some many ways. It feels a bit like mourning but with a twinge of excitement about what comes next.

Camille the Sculptor

These are not the best pictures but...Camille is pretty good at scuplting. These are her first two figures (after having played with Play-Doh in a long while).

Thesis Update

Monday...was despondent. Or should I say Monday found me despondent. Mondays are usually like this anyway, right? I don't know why but I just felt weary of school. There are times when I feel like all the hoop jumping might not be worth it. As I said to a friend that day "Why do we have to do what we hate to do what we love?" And that really sums up my feelings when I got back yet another critique of my thesis proposal. I just felt so done with it. It had been helpful at first but had reached the point where it was no longer helpful. It was just busy work I had to do in order to please other people.

I came home rather down. IMed with a friend, well, I bitched and moaned to a friend over IM. H came back from his study time, and pep talked me. Normally this would really piss me off. Monday, however, it worked. I went into school today, finished the 8th draft of my thesis proposal and the eighth draft of my SOP. My advisor had told me on Tuesday that the SOP was getting really good. And this afternoon I got back the thesis proposal draft with the comment "VERY good, and very concise. I think you're done." Hurrah.

Piper also cheered me up last night. We had a few minute of Piper craziness. She ran from the bedroom to the living room while we were getting ready for bed. I followed her to find her doing some kind of odd walk. She had her legs spread and was taking these big steps rather like a sumo wrestler. It was so random.

I laughed for a bit, and felt better.

My dreams have been very intense lately, and unsettling. There are emotions in them that I'd rather not think about right now. I wake feeling this intense longing. It makes me sad as if I can't be fully content with my life. Why is there always that desire for more? It bothers me when I have so much already. And I'm not even sure if I can put a name to that which I long for. I suspect that what I long for in my dreams is something that I would not want if I were to grasp it. I know this makes no sense but it's not something I fully want to disclose, nor something that I can fully articulate. Sometimes my life just gets complicated in unexpected, and unwelcome ways.

But mostly I'm happy. My thesis is ready to be written. The books are read, the notes taken, the proposal nearly complete. My kids are joyful (most of the time) and funny. My husband is beautiful, smart, funny, and kind. I am not forgetful of my blessings.

Writing

"I would like to write in such a way that people feel a kind of physical pleasure in reading me. I would almost say that that this is the writer's sense of courtesy."--Michel Foucault--

Can I write words that touch, lick, nipple a long your skin across distances made of megabytes and electronic components? What ghostly hands rises from the grave to move along the length of spine? On my bookshelf sits hundreds of lovers. They are patient, waiting, waiting for me to feel their words to embrace me, move me. Are there orgasms in the these words? Orgasms in any words? What is this new pleasure? Is it something beyond the law of sex? Or is it sex? Sex with words?

Perhaps I can touch you. Can you feel it? Do you feel the hand that types this line. Imagine: the hand streched out towards you in your distance, one finger outlines your face, your lips. If you can close your eyes long enough you may just feel my breath against your ear. Listen.

Pleasure and Learning--The Umberto Verison

Certainly, learning can be made an erotic, highly pleasurable activity. Now, that a teach should be incapable of revealing this, that his job should virtually consist of showing how unpleasant, sad, dull and unerotic learning is--to me, this is an incredible achievement. But it is an achievement that certainly has its raison d'etre. We need to know why our society considers it so important to show that learning is something sad; maybe it's because of the number of people who are excluded from it. Imagine what it would be like if people were crazy about learning the way they are about sex. They would knock each other over in a rush to get into school.
Michel Foucault

When I read this morning, I smiled, and thought about in many ways this is what I want learning to be for Umberto. I take great pleasure in my own learning. I want Umberto to feel this pleasure. Right now he does. He's so excited to learn new things. You can see him quiver sometimes. I love coming home from school or work and having him rush up to me, thrilled at a new bug discovery. Right now he's passionate and open to knowledge. I watched this being sucked from him in school. He started to tell us that he hated books. He said he was stupid. He knew that he was getting left out of something. There was even a moment when I started to worry that he wasn't smart. I'm ashamed to say that now but I started to get anxious because the school was anxious. I got caught up in the game.

Now we're out, and last year, I got caught up again. He was behind, he wasn't reading, he wasn't doing such and such. I realized at some point that this anxiety was driving us both nuts. I wasn't stopping to see that he got pleasure from learning new things. I wasn't helping him to discover that pleasure in greater ways. I wasn't sharing with him my own pleasure in learning.

This year, I've opened up to him. I've learned to let go of my own inhibitions, and to let my own joy out. I've started to laugh more, and to let his joy infect me as I let mine infect him. If I'm getting frustrated or impatience, I let go of our plans and follow something new. No we don't always get through my lesson plans but it's okay because we always learn something and we usually have fun doing it. I remember once thinking that fun wasn't what it was all about. And then I realized that this is exactly what it should be about. We've divided the world into fun and unfun things. Why? Why does it have to be this way? I have FUN at school and I have FUN learning. Why shouldn't Umberto? Why does he have to learn that the world is about work that is not fun? And why in the hell do we think fun is such a bad thing anyway?

I say yes to pleasure! Onward to fun!

Learning and Pleasure

Certainly, learning can be made an erotic, highly pleasurable activity. Now, that a teach should be incapable of revealing this, that his job should virtually consist of showing how unpleasant, sad, dull and unerotic learning is--to me, this is an incredible achievement. But it is an achievement that certainly has its raison d'etre. We need to know why our society considers it so important to show that learning is something sad; maybe it's because of the number of people who are excluded from it. Imagine what it would be like if people were crazy about learning the way they are about sex. They would knock each other over in a rush to get into school. Michel Foucault

Foucault's answer to an interviewers question made me smile this morning. What a wonderful image...people pushing, shoving, fighting to learn something. But no, my students never rushed to school eager for learning. They trudged in, heads down, tired, grumpy, bored before anything even got started. They were definitely much more excited about sex then they were about learning. For golden year, I got them excited. I was excited. It was contagious. But then the higher powers forced me back to drudgery. Excitement, pleasure is dangerous when you're trying to hold people down. And that's really why I had to stop teaching. I couldn't be a part of that kind of system anymore.

And I think Foucault is right on with this assessment.No one is going to continue on when they find learning so dull and boring. And not only that but what happens if learning becomes pleasurable. What kinds of discourses will be unmasked? In my experience, many. Discovering that learning was an exciting, pleasurable, freeing was a shock to me. I didn't know that learning could move me in such a physical way. But even with this knowledge there is a sense of loss always on the horizon. I still have to play within a system based on keeping people out. And yes I understand all the crap about standards but what is a standard when it excludes those who don't get a high enough fucking number on a test? Excludes someone who finds learning to be one of the finest pleasure?

In the same interview, Foucault says

"The degree simply serves to create a kind of market value for knowledge, to make those who don't have degrees feel they have no right to knowledge, are not capable of knowledge. Everyone who gets a degree knows perfectly well it's useless, it has no content, it's empty. But those who don't have degrees are the ones who set great store by them. Degrees are precisely for those that don't have them."

He acknowledges that his degrees have gotten him to where he is now but I think he offers a point to be taken here. All too often we assume that those who hold degrees hold knowledge. Is this necessarily true? And does this knowledge constitute all knowledge? I think too often, and I am guilty of this, I make these kind of assumptions about knowledge. It reminds me in a way of the video E posted earlier today. I see the degree as the carrot on the stick. Sometimes it gets in the way of the pleasure. I'm going to write that first quote and hang it up in my office as a reminder.

Knowledge as pleasure. Like sex. Something I look forward to each day. Something I savor. Something that rocks my world, shatters my universe, fragments my being. This is the way I want to know.

Another Link

To why we homeschool. E posted this video from YouTube, and I just thought it was so true, and so important. It's expresses one of the many reasons why we homeschool. Here it is.

Missing the Goose

Umberto is in Maine with my mom. I miss him dreadfully. He's gone with her before, and I know it's okay to let him go. But oh I miss him still. I miss his funny little ways. I even miss his tantrums, and sobbing "YOU HATE ME!" Having him absent...well it makes the house emptier. There's something missing.

And the girls have been awful without him. Really awful. They've hit, clawed, and screamed at each other since we dropped him off my mom's on Monday night. It's been a nonstop bitch fight. I never knew how much Umberto buffered between the two of them. I think they miss him too.

But he's having a great time. So much so that he wouldn't even talk to me on the phone tonight. He's playing in the snow, having fun with his cousins (who adore him as we all do), and getting spoiled by his aba.

Distance...funny how it makes love more known. I know I love Umberto but sometimes when he's driving me nuts, it's not the think I think of the most. But when he's gone, I realize how much he's a part of my life, how much he's a part of my soul. I don't know how parents who lose children do it. And I don't know how in 7.5 years this little person has laid such a claim on me.

My Nose

My nose...well, what can I say. It works. It's boasted a few piercings over the years. Oh yeah, it was the bane of my existence when I was a child. I was called "Pig nose" from most of Kindergarten on until high school. I hate my nose. Oh the hate isn't as bad as when I was a teenanger. I suspect if I had the money I would have had a nose job as soon as I turned eighteen. But alas I was poor so I just got used to it. I won't say that I developed a love of my nose because I didn't. I grew used to, I guess...or perhaps resigned is the better word.

When I see pictures, my nose is the first thing I see. And the picture usually gets delted.

I've always figured my nose was something Native, or African-American. I became a tad obessessed with finding out where the hated nose came from. My family is a bit sketchy on the whole family tree. I know that there's a lot of Scottish and some Native American. But my nose didn't really look like any of that ancestory. Yes, I admit it, I observed people. Looked at pictures--trying to find my nose. I think that I thought if I could locate my nose is some kind of history maybe I could come to love it.

H has been telling me that it's a French nose. But there couldn't be French in my family. Could there? Tonight we're watching Paris, Je T'Aime. It's a movie...sort of. It's shorts of different directors filming love and loss in the great city. And there's a short with Juliet Binoche. And holy shit, she has my nose. H has commented on this before...I always thought he was trying to be complimentary. I mean, what woman would not like to be compared with Juliet Binoche? But no, she does indeed have my nose. Maybe not so large but it's still there...the wide nostrils, the slight uplift at the top. So my nose is French. There's something my family isn't telling me...

Word Invention

Umberto likes to come up with new words. Our
budding Shakespeare. His newest is "cooshi." I think it's a combo of crowded and squishy. He uses this word whenever there is a crowd of bodies in a small place. So the other day I swear we were all in the bathroom which is not big (for those of you who do not have kids once you have them you will NEVER go to the bathroom alone again), and Umberto yells "It's getting cooshi in here!" And he's right, it was.

Words and Violence

This is the first paragraph of my new SOP.

Veena Das begins her book with a question “What it is to pick up the pieces and to live in this very place of devastation?”[1] From my work with a Latino Pentecostal church to my work on a woman who left a Mormon Fundamentalist group, this question haunts me. The people in these studies have survived various violent experiences both physical and emotional. And always this experience comes to me, the audience and scholar in the form of words. Das argues that violence returns and remains in the presence of everyday expressions. This suggests that violence is not something one can leave behind. Words in this descent become animated through voice, and it is this relationship, the relationship between words and voice, that can provide both the means to expression and the silencing of certain stories. Words provide a means of telling but what they tell are not always the stories one expects. Violence becomes something that in Das’s book that is not separate from how people conduct their lives. It is not something that happens and ends. Rather it is something that becomes entwined in life, and in the rebuilding of lives from violence. But the violence does not ever go away. It is always there, always waiting to emerge in words not expected, and in the silences forced upon people who created new tales for the violence. How does religion fit into this equation? How does religion both offer words and create silences around stories of violence?


[1] Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, 6.

Notes of the Day

1. Can I tell you how fucking annoying it is that I have to pay $30 to have my GRE scores sent to to two universities? And in addition to that amount I have to pay $6 to do it over the phone. And this is what universities in the U.S. use to gauge who's worthy of grad. school? I mean, really. Let's support the testing business shall we? Ahhh..capitalism. Love it.

2. I really like my new SOP opening. I'm going to post it in another post to see what my dear readers think (yes I just love that totally pretentious affectation from the 17th century novel). I just finished number 5, and am really hoping that it will be enough except for maybe some polish so I can get it out. I've submitted my application to Chapel Hill, and now just need to send out all the supplementary items (SOP and sample paper). But anyway, I'm scared as hell because there is a part of me that feels that there is no way I'm going to get in. I really have no clue what I'll do if I'm not accepted. There's just nothing I really want to do besides this, and while it might only be a year...it's a year of being unhappy. I remember when I was little I'd want something so badly (like seeing my dad), and I would force myself to think that it wasn't going to happen so that wouldn't hurt so bad when it didn't happen. Of course it never helped...it always hurt no matter what I thought. I only got to save a bit of face if I acted like it wasn't going to happen (the on the time I acted excited, and my dad didn't show up, my mom turned to me, and said "See I told you he never comes."). I still do this, knowing that I get rejected, it's going to be very hard to not take it personally.

3. I'm starting to outline my thesis in greater detail, and have been making notes for my introduction. I'd like to have the introduction hammered out by the end of classes (Dec. 10). My proposal feels as good as it's going to get. I doubt if my advisor feels that way but after 7 reworkings, it just feels done. I'm sending it out to two secondary advisers, and hopefully will get their approval. Once this is done, I can submit it to our director where it will be signed and made official. With any luck I can finish it over the winter break, and then work on rewriting and editing over the Spring semester.

4. Excited about next semester. I decided to take a class in ritual with our new professor. It's a pain in the ass time which was why I wavered. I'll have to drive the kids to campus to meet Horacio on Thursdays (we've done this before so it's nothing new). But a couple of incidents occurred which made it really the only choice. But it will be good. I know little about ritual so good. And this class appears to have a theoretical emphasis so even better.

5. Thursday...Thanksgiving. Blah. Umberto went to Maine with my mom (I already miss him). We were going to just hang out here but H decided he'd like to go hang with some friends of his. They're having an "Other Family Thanksgiving Potluck" so it should be fun. We need to get out more. We tend to be a tad homebodish during this part of the semester.

Unpolitical Leanings

One of our favorite things to do is to take spontaneous trips to Barnes and Nobles. Horacio gets home at say 8:30, with us waiting, dressed, and eager to go. Why Barnes and Nobles? Well, it has attractions for each of us. I get to have pumpkin lattes. Horacio gets to read music magazines, and the kids get to play with stuffed animals and the Thomas Train table (oh, can't forget the peppermint brownies). And since we live on a pretty loose schedule, we can go at anytime and hang out until their 11 p.m. closing time.

Usually we only purchase coffee products but this time we got the kids some cheap books, and I picked up The Golden Compass. While Horacio was paying, Camille had wandered up the aisle to look at the magazines and books they had up front. She started laughing, and Umberto wandered up to see what she was laughing at. He started howling. They were both pointing and laughing hysterically by the time I got up to see what was so funny. It was this:

And while the situation in Pakistan is horrible (two crooks on either side vying for power), the cover is a tad funny. And maybe really what it shows is how amazingly ridiculous all these politicians are. Through the eyes of the child....

Families

When I was pregnant with Umberto one of the things that excited me the most was the idea of read a louds. I had this vision of us, sitting in a rocking chair, or lying in bed, Umberto on my lap as I read to him. Before he was born I began to acquire children's chapter books. I read the Harry Potter series while he was still a newborn. I could not wait until the day he was old enough to begin this tradition.

Perhaps this desire grew from my own childhood. One of my happy memories involved read a louds. My mom, for all her faults, was a wonderful reader. She read to us all the time: C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Dickens. I remember lying on the bed when I was sixteen listening to her read to my youngest brother. It was a rare moment of closeness and connection within my family. No matter how angry she was, or how depressed, she would always pull us to her and read.

Thus my son's told resistance to being read to was a tad disappointing. He could sit through picture books so long as they weren't too long but unless they were over in a few minutes he was gone. I persisted but after realizing it was really bothering much more than it should, I let it go for awhile. But last year I started to work him into chapter books. I began with comic books which he loved. They had length but lots of pictures. Then we moved to middle books: chapter books with a picture every couple of pages. Now we're at chapter books that have about one picture per page. Better yet Umberto loves our read alouds. The other day he trotted over our newest book in hand, and silently placed in my hands. I almost cried. It's funny how important this little thing is to me.

What it is I think is that I don't have many models for family. My own family was a mess, and there was very little that I wish to bring into my own family. But my mom did good when she read to us. It wasn't just that she introduced us to books. She opened herself up to us in ways she didn't during the day. She held us to her, and created each evening before a bed a safe place. Here no one was angry, or fighting. For an hour everyday, we were the family I longed to have. My favorite books when I was a child where things like the Happy Hollisters, the Little House books, anything with a happy family in it. And at night, I had that perfect family.

I have no illusions that my family is perfect or ever will be. But the one good model I can fall back on is creating a safe magical word each night. Everything else I cobble together.

I have a post about the actual books here.

Memories and Meat

Umberto has finally reached a point where not only will he sit still for a chapter book read to him but he enjoys it. So far this year we've read The Little Prince and Witches by Roald Dahl. The former was a bit much for him, and I think at times he was bored, but he listened. He curled up beside me and listened. At the end, when I was crying (as I always do during that book) he looked up at me.

"Why are you crying?" he asked.

"Because the Little Prince has died." I answered.

"Umm...no he hasn't. He's going back to his planet. He's just pretending to die so that he can get up there."

And really that is the point of the book isn't it? That adults just don't get it and children do. Umberto got it in ways that I couldn't. I found this to be a poignant reminder that I shouldn't underestimate what my children "get." Sometimes they see things different from they way I do but it doesn't mean that difference is somehow less sophisticated or wrong. It's just different.

Witches was just a good time. I love Dahl's books so much. These I came to as an adult. I had never read him until my mom began to read him in her second grade class rooms. Her children were always a tad horrified at his complete irreverence towards adults. He is delightfully naughty, and Witches was no exception. Umberto ADORED this book, and begged me to read it to him all the time. He was a tad confused as we use the word witch to refer to mama sometimes (in a good way of course) so I had to sort go through this whole thing about good witches vs. bad witches. I felt vaguely uncomfortable with this distinction but I know he'd just unfocus if I were to make it more complicated than that. But we will definitely be getting more Dahl books out. What's funny is that Umberto was not at all horrified in the ways my mom's students were. He loved the irreverence towards adults. I wonder if it's homeschooling or if it's just that parents are nuts, and really into self-mockery?

But the books I was most excited about where the "Little House" books. These were books I LOVED as a child, and reread often. Of course I watched the TV series but really I loved the books the most. They lead to wonderful games of covered wagons, log cabins, and other adventures. I remember how my cousins, friends, and I would pretend to go on the journey West. We'd cross the field behind my grandmother's house, and then end up on the woods. There was a tiny clearing bordered by four or five great pines. We would make that our cabin. It was great fun. So when the kids were all excited over a PBS show about log cabins, I suggested the books.

We started Little House in the Big Woods last night. It was very sentimental for me. I actually remembered the pictures and felt this rush of nostalgia as I looked at them. Then I started reading. The first chapter is basically about storing food for the winter....which involves a lot of animal killing. We're vegetarians. We're vegetarians because we don't want to kill or eat animals. Umberto was a full part of this decision. Each page kept worst and worst. First there were the dead deers in the trees accompanied with a description of the skinning, gutting, and carving up of the meat. Horacio's groaning at this point. Umberto is just looking at me, suspicious, a tad confused but finally says "This is deer that were once a live right?" "Umm yeah." "Gross." And it on it goes, until we get to "Butchering Time" which is when they kill the pig. At this point, Horacio is laughing just from the sheer horror of it. Umberto is totally upset about the poor "pig." And we are all begin treated to a graphic description of the pig's death, carving up of the carcass, etc. And then I read "He was blowing up the bladder. It made a little white balloon, and he tied the end tight with a string, and gave it to Mary and Laura to play with"(15). Horacio just lost it, Umberto's looking at me with his huge eyes asking "That's what they played with?" For me the worst part was how Ma made head cheese. Argh. I said to Horacio "Maybe this wasn't the best book for a vegetarian child." We talked to Umberto about how it was likely they didn't really have a choice because of hard the winter's were, etc. And then I told Horacio that it wasn't quite as romantic as I had remembered.

Memories are funny like that. I honestly did not remember that part of the story from when i was a child. And I would have been horrified as my dad slaughtered a pig on his farm when I was six. I was horribly upset as I loved the pig and saw him as a pet not as food. But when I used to think back on the book, I remember how the family relied on each other, Pa and his fiddle, Ma's hard work to make a home. I never remembered all the death.

Waiting

Ursula often wondered what else she waited for, besides the beginning and end of the school week, and the beginning and end of the holidays. This was a whole life! Sometimes she had periods of tight horror, when it seemed to her that her life would pass away and be gone, without having been more than this. But she never really accepted it. Her spirit was active, her life like a shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground"(D. H. Lawrence, Women In Love)

I remember having moments of panics when I was in my early twenties. Suddenly, I feel this intense fear that I would die, and that this is all my life would have been. It seemed that I had nothing to show for the few years I had been on the earth. It was such a crushing feeling that I'd lay on my bed and not be able to move for a bit. So much, too much, of my younger years were spent in longing and waiting. Always waiting for love, for excitment, for hate, for passion...always something that I didn't have. And then when I had those things I'd always feel like I was waiting for them to end. I could never enjoy them because of this tight feeling that it would all soon end. It was a physical feeling too not just somethign I thought about. My chest would tightend, it felt like my ribcage was pushing in on my lungs, and I couldn't breath. And as this tightening imprisoned me, my limbs would feel get heavy, so heavy that each movement was exhausting.

Breaking the Law

Some pictures of the kids during our Atlanta trip. There's more here.

One From the Show

Of course I didn't take it...but it was him from the show.

JellyFish