Category: deep thoughts

  • a neighborhood expression of care

    Please take a moment to watch this. It’s powerful and well-worth the few minutes it will take:
    Fred Rogers testifying about the need for children’s programming on PBS.
    “Because there’s no person in the world who’s like you and you are special just the way you are.”

  • I’m a voyeur

    So I’ve always been fascinated with the way people decorate their personal spaces–not the fake sort of decorating a la Martha Stewart in rooms that are museums rather than living spaces–but the real rooms where people hang out.

    When I was in China I often craned my neck around corners to get a glimpse inside the small spaces that held so much life. Here’s a website of 100×100–one hundred 100 square foot abodes in China captured on film. The results are amusing, at times sobering. Perhaps you will, like me, ponder these photos and marvel and the beauty and humility of ‘living small.’

    Thanks to wen for this link. A favorite image is below, simply because of the McD’s wrappers hung as crown molding on the far wall….

  • an xray blanket on my chest…


    From Jen’s powerful post about her bout with depression.

    “all i knew is that i was crying….alot…for no apparent reason.
    i was exhausted but i couldnt sleep. i couldnt eat. i was losing interest in everything. i was moody and couldnt think clearly and tried to find any reason to explain away the feelings i was experiencing. loud noises sent me through the roof and crowds made me want to scream.i didnt want to kill myself, but i wasnt going to be disappointed if the moon happened to fall out of the sky and land directly on my head. i felt like i wanted to crawl out of my skin. but mostly, it was the heaviness ~ as if someone had dropped one of those x-ray blankets the size of a house upon my chest.”

  • sacrilegious..or not?

    So help me decide…is this sacrilegious or is it funny? Would you wear this t-shirt?

  • the life you had planned…

    A friend asked this question:
    “Are you living the life you had planned for yourself?”

    My reply:
    My first impulse is to say “No, I’m not”, simply because my life, for so many years, was lived in the moment. My brush with death (in the form of a cancer diagnosis) left me feeling that life was much too tenuous to plan for. I can distinctly remember getting to college and feeling overwhelmed with the victory of having lived so long–much longer than I had really anticipated. I sat on the plaza near the library looking over Aldich Park nearly overwhelmed with the joy of actually ‘being there.’ At the same time I realized that I was in process of making some important decisions–college major, future career path, etc–and I really didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t really planned on making it that far.

    BUT…

    As I reflect on the question more, I think that I _am_ living the life I planned for myself. Since I was a little girl I dreamed about being a mother and having lovely, intelligent chidren. I’ve always wanted to get a Ph.D. like my Dad–those three letters held such promise and prestige. I expected that my life would be filled with passion; I wanted to love someone desperately and have that love reciprocated in generous amounts. I wanted to eat good food, play hard, and wear myself out every day. I wanted to write books, to teach, to help others feel better about themselves.

    All of these things I have either accomplished or they are within a few years’ reach.

    I am a lucky girl. I say this with a feeling of restlessness, though. A huge part of me still expects that I will die soon. A huge part of me wants MORE. But then I take a deep breath and realize that life just can’t get much better than this. No matter what the future holds.
    :)

    What about you, dear reader. Are you “living the life you had planned for yourself?”

  • Because people sing to me

    Some workers are trimming the trees around our apartment. I suspect that if today wasn’t a Portland-style drizzly day that this would actually mean that a ray of light would be coming in our windows. This will totally change our lives, I think. To actually be able to open the windows and have sun streaming in.

    I have the back sliding door wide open (with the screen closed) and the front door open (again, with a screen). The 5 or 6 workers who are hanging from the various trees are serenading me in Spanish right now. Well, I have to admit that they might not necessarily be singing to me, but considering that I am sitting in the LR at the table working, and they are less than 10 feet away from me and there is only a flimsy plastic screen between us, they ARE singing to me. I tried hooking up a mic to my computer to record their voices, but all I got was some odd mechanical sounds from my processor (no music). Grrr.

    These are the same workers who, when I came home from class yesterday afternoon, had made nests of burlap sacks in the bushes and were catching a quick nap after lunch. When I rode past them on my bike one of them tipped the brim of his hat at me and winked. I’m suspecting that The Winker is the one who’s singing the loudest right now.

    John never believes that people sing to me when I am at home during the day. It’s often the neighbors, and not men in trees. But it happens. All the time. Promise.
    ;)

  • because you can’t have your hands in your shirt…

    Today I biked over to school for a meeting. I dropped off some overdue books at the library on the way, and because I had a few minutes to kill I crashed in the grad reading room for some moments of quiet reading.

    But it was humid today and the bike ride left me feeling a little itchy. Mostly in the area where the underwire of my bra was rubbing against my skin. If I’d been reading at home I would’ve just reached into my shirt and pulled the offending fabric away from the raw parts of my skin. But sitting there in that super-quiet room full of dutiful grad students, I got more and more uncomfortable as I realized I couldn’t reach into my shirt and readjust. And then I couldn’t concentrate on my book because the itchiness was that bad…

    Guys are lucky that way. No one blinks when they scratch, tug, pull, and yank at various parts of their clothing and bodies. Girls, we have to keep our hands off ourselves in public…

  • what i learned from city council

    [Note: coming soon will be a picture of E w/our local mayor–as soon as I find the cardreader for my dig camera]
    –you’re supposed to wear black to City Council meetings. Black suits. with a button down shirt for men and pastel blouse for women (unless you’re Christina Shea, then you wear a pale green suit). me, I was really glad I had changed out of my jeans and t-shirt and was at least wearing the requisite black pants.
    –not saying the pledge of allegiance feels weirder there.
    –the mayor has her own on-call photographer to take PR shots w/schoolchildren being recognized at the beginning of the meeting
    –when E is in front of a large audience, she completely freezes…with a cute, rather lopsided grin on her face
    –E’s award-winning drawing wasn’t her most artistic creation. rather, it fit the event theme better than other submissions–a lesson E learned well in the PTA Reflections contest, too.

  • open circles

    When I was a kid and we had to underline and circle various parts of speech on a ditto page, I used to hate the circling part. Because inevitably there would be a word I would need to circle that was hypehnated and carried over to the next line. I would be confused about whether I should make a complete ring around each separate section of the word, or whether I should draw an open-ended circle around each side of the word.

    I usually settled on the latter but it never quite felt right. I hated the feeling of the open-ended circle. It mocked the other neatly-ringed and underlined words on my page. It just sat there. Open. Unfinished. A gaping mouth expressing my own uncertainty.

  • memory lane

    It’s weird to stumble across a picture of my high school self on the Internet.

    In 1988 I attended a journalism summer camp at CalPoly, sponsored by the LA Times. The photo they took of me and my cohort that year is on their website. I remember that camp well, and the little portable manual typewriter that I used in my workshop classes….

    [Do you see me in the picture? Hint: I’m on the end of a row]

  • mirror, mirror

    So John just bought a mirror for our shower so he can see himself when he shaves (if he doesn’t use a mirror he ends up with weird stubbly patches on his chin). It’s a small fog-free mirror that hangs nicely in a hook on the over-the-showerhead caddy where I store my shampoo.

    The first time I took a shower with the mirror, I thought it was cool–I was looking forward to amusing myself with shampoo mohawk hairdos.

    But now I think it’s not-so-cool. I’d forgotten that I’m scared of mirrors. So there’s something about looking in the mirror as I’m standing in the closed shower stall that completely freaks me out. It has nothing to do with my naked body in the mirror–it’s the space behind me that’s frightening. I don’t quite now how to articulate this fear, but it’s that I am totally scared that I will look in the mirror someday and see that I’m not alone–that there is some strange scary person standing behind me. Does that make sense? It’s that same irrational fear that makes me not want to look in the backseat when I’m driving alone at night, or that doesn’t want to get up and lock the doors before bed because, somehow, if I’m standing near the unlocked door–and even touching said unlocked door–that makes me totally more scared that standing three feet away from it.

    I am, overall, a huge scaredy-cat. A few times, when John and I were first married, he hid somewhere and leapt out to surprise me. Okay, sure it was a surprise, but inevitably I ended up crying. Heavy hot tears of total fear and terror. Even though I knew it was John who had jumped out at me, and even though I knew the scare was over, for about 10 minutes afterwards I cry just out of the sheer emotional release. To be scared like that is so jarring, makes me feel so vulnerable, that life just can’t go right back to normal afterwards.

    I _don’t_ like horror or suspense movies. When, a few years ago, my Mom convinced me Sixth Sense was a must-see movie, I realized about half-way thru that I’d made a huge mistake. For weeks after that I couldn’t even use the bathroom by myself–John had to accompany me so I would feel ‘safe.’ The scenes with the arms coming out from under the bed and with Bruce Willis trying to get into the basement are so chilling to me that I still shiver just thinking about them.

    I don’t know why I scare so easily, but I suspect the moment-of-no-return happened one day when I I was a teenager and I was using a public restroom. I was sitting on the toilet and for whatever reason looked up. When I did…to my horror I saw a creepy man in the next stall looking down at me. He must’ve been standing on the toilet so he could get a view of the various women using the bathroom. What’s crazy to me about this memory is that I don’t remember exiting the stall, I just remember feeling paralyzed. I couldn’t think rationally, I couldn’t tell anyone about the strange man. After I hurriedly left the bathroom I found a chair in the corner and put my head to my knees for about 20 minutes.

    I guess what I’m most afraid of is that it’ll happen to me again. I’ll look up and see that man’s face, with his scraggly grey beard and greasy headwrap. I’ll see him again and I just won’t know what to do.
    [Note: I’ve taken to turning the mirror around whenever I shower. For some reason the back of the mirror isn’t scary at all]

  • once in a millenia…

    On Wednesday of this week (tomorrow), at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

    I feel I must commemorate this somehow…any suggestions? (Other than I celebrating at 1:02 PM rather than AM)???