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January 29, 2008

Some People Eat for a Week on Less than We Spend on a Single Cup of Coffee

Apparently links to this photo essay documenting "What the World Eats" have been circulating for a good long while.... A few weeks ago someone sent me an email message about it, with only SOME of the photos--one of the most important photos was missing, one depicting the Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp in Chad. The email message included no information about the photos' provenance, so I finally got around to tracking it down.... Turns out the photos are from a new book called Hungry Planet. Make sure you look at all the photos.... Originally I only saw six of the photos, which were interesting, but you need to see the whole series to realize how horribly unjust the distribution of wealth on this planet is. I mean, I knew this already; I've seen the Care ads and sent them money.... But every so often something helps you confront again those uncomfortable facts in your knowledge you've somehow learned to ignore, and these photos did that for me.

Posted by Holly at 12:30 PM | Comments (8)

January 28, 2008

Why I Don't Blog That Much about Knitting

I don’t blog much about either relationships while I’m in them or knitting. There are a couple of reasons for this reticence about relationships, one being respect for the privacy of whoever I’m with, another being that blogging about a relationship is a form of commitment that I’m not always ready to make. I don’t blog about knitting so much because, well, for one thing, I’m not the most hard core knitter out there. For instance, I have yet to knit a sock, a fact which raises the eyebrows of more serious knitters, who assure me that is a life-changing experience. I have heard enough people tell me this that I’m pretty damn curious to see if my life will be changed this way. I even tried to take a class on sock-knitting last fall, but it was full.

But another reason I don’t blog much about either knitting or being in love is that they’re among the few things that, if I have the choice between doing them or writing about them, I’ll almost always do the thing itself. That’s not true of shoveling the driveway or being homesick. It’s not even true of making cookies--lately I’ve been hankering for my favorite chocolate chocolate chip cookies but it just seems like too much bother to make them. It’s certainly not true of having sex--some sex I’ve had was way better than anything I could write about it but some wasn’t. It’s not even true of reading Jane Austen or watching Buffy.

Lately I’ve been knitting a fair amount, and maybe that’s one reason I’m more willing to blog about it now--perhaps I’ve reached a certain saturation point. I guess I’ve also found a project I’d rather write about than work on: this lace shawl.

It’s just the most annoying pattern. It’s so intricate that I have to stay very intent on each stitch, but the stitches aren’t so interesting--just lots of increases and decreases--that I really enjoy what I’m doing. And if I drop a stitch or forget a decrease or something, it’s a real pain in the ass, which is why there are those strands of yarn in there: they’re called life lines, because if you end up having to rip out stitches on something this complicated, you’ll have to rip out clear to the beginning unless something keeps stitches secure at an earlier point in the work. I was supposed to have it done by Christmas 2007; I think I’ll be lucky to have it done by Christmas 2008.

I’m also making a basic cardigan, nothing too fancy; the challenge in this project is that I’m designing it myself. I want to see if I understand sweater construction well enough that I can come up with gauge and a look and make something that fits me. Elements will be borrowed from patterns in books I own, but it won’t be based on any single pattern already in existence. This is due partly to the fact that I couldn’t find a single pattern that was what I wanted--if I had found one, I would simply make that pattern. And that’s one of the differences between knitting and sewing that I find hard to adapt to: in sewing, you just change patterns. You just alter things and substitute fabrics and it all usually turns out OK. That’s not true with knitting. It’s much more complicated.

Anyway, here’s a photo of the back of the sweater:

the bottom border is seed or moss stitch, one of my favorites. The body of the sweater is in a very easy stitch I just discovered. The book I found it in called it “the woven knit stitch,” but I can’t find any other references to that. Anyway, I think it looks cool, and it’s very easy. It’s worked with an odd number of stitches, and goes like this:

Row 1: knit 1, * yarn forward, slip one stitch, yarn back, knit 1; repeat from * to end.

Row 2: purl.

Row 3: knit 2, * yarn forward, slip one stitch, yarn back, knit 1; repeat from * to last stitch, knit 1.

Row 4: purl.

It is, of course, almost stockinette, but this slight and very easy change to the stitch gives it a subtle increase in texture and visual appeal.

I like the way the purl side looks too:

I have one other major textile project going, but it’s really special and I think it deserves an entry all of its own.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)

January 27, 2008

Because I Had Nothing Else to Do

Late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, I finally completed a draft of a writing project I’d been avoiding/ preparing for for weeks. I agreed in November to have this project done by the end of January, but I just couldn’t make myself start, really start. Oh, I did things like research Chinese characters, and try out different beginnings in my head, but I just couldn’t sit down in front of the computer and write it write it. I don’t know why not, because it was a project I’d wanted to write for years, and I was glad to have a reason to do it. I don’t know why not, because it wasn’t beyond my capacities or outside of my creative focus. I don’t know why not, because I certainly managed to write other things--blog entries and emails and journal entries and so forth--instead of the one thing I had promised to write.

Not only did I write other things, I got other tasks out of the way as well as I geared up to do this piece. The reason I finally watched that documentary on the Mormons was that it was a way of avoiding this writing project. In fact, in the ten days before I finally sat down and wrote this thing, I was super-duper productive. I worked hard on all sorts of projects--I even plan to post photos of a few of them tomorrow. It got to the point where, by early Tuesday evening, I really didn’t have anything else to do but this writing project.

So I sat down and drafted a letter informing the editor I’d promised to send the piece to why I couldn’t write it. And then I just said, “Fuck it; I’m gonna try; it won’t kill me; if I don’t write it now, I don’t know when I’ll ever write it; blah blah blah; ick ick ick; type type type.”

And in not that many hours I had a really solid draft that I liked a lot. I went to bed, got up and started fiddling with it the next day because I am a compulsive reviser; sent it to a friend who agreed to proofread it and give me feedback; got the feedback; made a few more changes; printed out a hard copy and wrote a cover letter. It all goes in the mail tomorrow.

And I just don’t know why I had this problem. I’ve had writer’s block before but that wasn’t what was going on here; I knew I could write the piece, I just didn’t want to. I didn’t used to have much trouble starting projects, but lately, I do. I don’t like it. That sort of shows in my performance here lately; my work ethic just isn’t what it used to be.

I have to think about this some more.

Posted by Holly at 9:06 AM | Comments (1)

January 25, 2008

Boring the Saints

A few days ago I finally finished watching the Helen Whitney documentary on The Mormons. I know, I know: this is old news; most people watched it months ago and I could have done so too if A) my tv got decent reception of PBS, but it doesn’t, or B) I was willing to watch it on my computer screen, but I wasn’t, or C) I had moved the disk to the top of my Neftflix queue weeks ago, but there were other things I wanted to see more.

Anyway, I watched it, and it was pretty good, I guess--it seemed balanced and reasonable and accurate. The voices presented included those of the faithful, the dissenting, the ambivalent, the scholarly, the mainstream, the extreme. There was nothing particularly objectionable about it, aside from this Terryl Givens guy, who embodies so many things I despise about a particular type of Mormon and set me teeth on edge every time he appeared on screen or opened his mouth. What a sanctimonious, prissy prig! How pig-like in his appearance, how like a mosquito in his intonation and speech. Ick.

But aside from that, nothing upset me, or moved me, or challenged me, or informed me. Watching it was like watching “The Trouble with Tribbles” and a few other episodes from the James T, Kirk series of Star Trek: OK, they were pretty good to begin with--at least, I enjoyed watching them at the time--and it has been a long time since I last watched them, but STILL, I saw them so many times in my youth that they remain really familiar and not that fun to watch. All that’s different now is that my TV is a lot newer and the commercials are more sophisticated.

So that’s my main reaction to the documentary: It bored me, not because it was badly made or anything, but because I already knew everything it contained, even down to the Reed Smoot hearings. Which is fine: it means I had a decent education about the church in the first place, that not that much has changed since I left over 18 years ago, and that I haven’t missed all that much by being gone.

But it did make me reflect on just how little most people outside the church really know about it. The documentary had to be so basic and and rudimentary because most non-mos don’t know much about the church except that A) the Mo-Tabs are a really big choir housed in a really funky building and B) the missionaries are annoying and C) Mitt Romney probably can’t get elected because he belongs to it.

And that lack of information has made it hard for me to write about Mormonism for a non-Mormon audience, so I am actually quite grateful that Helen Whitney chose to bore the saints.

Posted by Holly at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)

January 21, 2008

Why I Need Glasses, At Least Tonight

A million years ago--OK, 16 or so months ago--I posted a picture of the reading glasses I finally had to get, because right on schedule, I began developing mild presbyopia in my early 40s. I like my glasses OK and wear them when I remember to put them on, which isn't that often. I keep them by my bed, so about the only time I remember to wear them is when I read before I (try to) go to sleep.

But tonight I tried to read something and there was just no freakin' way I could do it without glasses. Here's a photo of what I was trying to read:

My fingers mark the particular character I was looking for. Just for the sake of scale, here's another photo, including not only the book but my cat, so you can see how tiny the text actually is:

Looking up a character in an Chinese-English dictionary was always a challenge, particularly with older dictionaries in Taiwan, because to use them you had to know one of three things: 1) what the character's radical is (sometimes hard to determine even if you're thoroughly literate, and I never was--I was merely fluent), or 2) how to "spell" it with bo-po-mo-fo, a system I never mastered, or 3) how it is romanized in the wacky Wade-Giles system of romanization (which I didn't learn--at the MTC, we only learned Yale, which, despite being the easiest system for actually learning to pronounce Mandarin, is not the most popular system).

It was always an adventure to find a character even when I could read the tiny print of the dictionary, but now, well, it's quite the challenge. I finally found the character I needed, using a bo-po-mo-fo chart to help me sound out the phonetics of the character. It's this, ku, meaning suffering, bitterness, pain, a word I know well from my mission, because we were always being admonished to be "sying ku," to "toil bitterly."

Just thought I'd share.

Posted by Holly at 9:21 PM | Comments (4)

January 20, 2008

A Typical Kid Picking Her Nose

Via Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex, I have learned about a way of depicting young girls as sexualized known as “lolicon,” a bastardization of “lolita complex,” which (I am not making this up) “has a nicer ring to it than pedophile."

I have three things to say.

1. GROSS.

2. Ditto to everything Figleaf says in his response to the topic.

3. Have any of those people proclaiming their interest in lolicon ever read Nabokov’s damn book? Because it doesn’t make sex with a budding pubescent (a.k.a. nymphet) particularly appealing.

Ten years ago or so, I got an email from one of my friends, who’d snagged an easy gig writing up a piece on “the ten sexiest novels of all time” for some women’s mag. She wanted suggestions. I don’t remember what I told her she should include, but I do remember telling her two books I thought SHOULD NOT be on the list.

The first was The Story of O. I said something like, “I know everyone thinks this is all sexy, because it has fetishwear and fucking and bondage and total submission to sexual servitude, and that turns a lot of people on. I just don’t buy it. I don’t see why O goes along with the whole thing--why she doesn’t say, ‘Look, I really need to get back to my apartment and feed my cat, and oh yeah, I promised to call my mother this weekend.’ What happens to all her stuff back in Paris? Who pays her rent? Don’t any of the people she knew who didn’t want to turn her into a sex slave ever wonder what happened to her? I realize I’m not staging much of an argument for why it’s not sexy, except to say that I’m more persuaded by fantasies I can believe, so for me, The Story of O is just too impractical to be genuinely erotic.”

Of course my friend included it in her list anyway.

The other book I said shouldn’t be on the list was, of course, Lolita. I defy anyone to find a passage from that book that is really truly sexy. Consider this example in all its euphemistic obscurity and see if its depiction of a young girl's reaction to sex is hot--or not:

I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.

Yeah. A naked adult man in a leather armchair, straddled by a girl he has had to bribe into allowing him to touch her, and even still, the only way she’ll tolerate sex with him is if she can read the comics while it’s happening and completely ignore what she's sitting on. I don’t think that’s hot, and I don’t think for a second that Nabokov wants us to find it hot.

There’s a way in which Humbert Humbert doesn’t even LIKE Lolita. He complains that “Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl.... She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” And she doesn’t much care for him--in fact, he realizes very early on that to her he was “not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn” and she hates sex with him. OK, he claims that the first time they have sex, she seduced him. But aside from that one time, he has to bribe or blackmail her in order to get her to consent to anything at all.

How sexy is this?

Her weekly allowance, paid under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start....and went up to one dollar five before [the] end.... She was, however, not easy to deal with. Only listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during one schoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks... she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot.... then I would burgle her room.... what I feared most was not that she might ruin me but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away.

He knows just how much she wants to run away, because he would hear “her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.”

He knows this. And he keeps her prisoner anyway, until she is lucky enough to escape him. And Nabokov wants us to know that HH knows this; wants us to know that HH understands what his question and her refusal mean when, after he finds her, married and pregnant, he asks her to leave her husband and go with him:

“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. "You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”

“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”

She had never called me honey before.

“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean--”

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally. (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”)

This isn’t a book about the tragedy of being a monster in love with a nymphet. It’s a book about how tragic it is to be the nymphet a monster makes captive. HH is intelligent and articulate, a very compelling narrator, far more articulate and sophisticated than Dolly Haze could have been. But at crucial moments, Nabokov undercuts HH’s lust and ecstasy with the very real and poignant grief of a little girl who has realized “during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.” And Nabokov has HH state this:

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Which is why I always think people who worry about whether or not HH loved Lolita sort of miss the point. I personally think he did love her, as much as he could love anyone, but SHE HATED HIM.

I love the novel Lolita. I think it’s amazing, and compelling, and brave, and wise. It’s one of the few books narrated by a monster--Grendel by John Gardner is another--that I really admire. But how someone can read it in any but the most superficial way and think it’s sexy, I don’t understand. I told my friend all that. But of course she found something to quote from it, and included it in her list of the ten sexiest novels, and earned about $4,000 for 1,000 words, most of them written by someone else. (Yeah, I admit, I was jealous of that.)

Anyway. All of this has to do with this larger meditation on lust I’m working on. Humbert Humbert’s lust is overwhelming, all-consuming; Lolita’s lust is either non-existent or irrelevant--the one person she wants, Quilty, wants only to watch her screwing someone else.

I’ll continue with this later.

Posted by Holly at 10:07 PM | Comments (12)

January 16, 2008

A Really Good Reason to Take a Bath

In my last entry, I talked about the history of bathing, having just read a book on the topic. I mentioned that in various times and places, people managed to live six or seven decades without ever washing their hair or taking a bath or brushing their teeth. Admittedly, living this way meant that they were far more prone than we are to things like carbuncles (something Ashenburg doesn't mention but which I briefly found fascinating ten years ago or so in that "Oooh, how disgusting!" way) and being toothless by age 40, but it didn't necessarily kill them, or cause their flesh to fall off.

(That is, not washing one's hands or body didn't necessarily kill the unwashed one. It did sometimes kill the people that one touched--for example, the many women who died of pueperal or childbirth fever, contracted when they were attended by doctors with unwashed, germy hands. Ignaz Semmelweiz, the doctor who suggested that his esteemed colleagues should wash their hands before touching a woman's filthy nether regions, was ridiculed out of the medical profession by men who greatly resented his outright assertion that they were somehow unclean; he died in an institution, a broken man.)

But here's that something can make the flesh fall from your bones, and might potentially kill you: flesh-eating bacteria, transmitted by skin contact and resistant to antibiotics.

ICK!

You can contract it from sex with an infected person, but you can also get it from contact sports. It's common in kids.

The article doesn't say how it is eventually cured for the people who contract it, only that "One in five infected patients in the US required hospital treatment."

But it also mentions the best way to avoid infection. That's right: "probably [probably! They don't know for sure] to wash thoroughly with soap and water, especially after sex."

I have a pretty good immune system and the ailments that tend to impair my health aren't usually infectious, aside from a mild cold from time to time, or the occasional bout of food poisoning, but I tend to recover very quickly. Normally I'm not the least bit hesitant to shake someone's hand but this is REALLY gross. Then there's the full-body massage I get every three or four weeks: I don't suppose I'll stop, but I might have to talk to my massage therapist about this. But how do you say, "I'm mildly concerned about contracting a gross infection that causes my skin to rot from the outside and my lungs to rot from the inside?" It's not a conversation I'm used to having.

Posted by Holly at 9:53 AM | Comments (2)

January 14, 2008

Dirty Christians, Over-Scrubbed Americans, Soap, Advertising and You

I feel dirty right now, and nauseated, having tried to read one of William Kristol’s editorials in the NY Times. Loathing and revulsion don’t cover the reactions I have to that man. I have despised him since he first came to my attention, back around 2002 when I started paying attention to the fact that there were evil people with power who really, really wanted us to go to war. I would say that I can’t believe the Times hired the guy, were it not for the fact that the Times credulously accepted the kinds of arguments Kristol and his ilk offered for why we should go to war.

Something else that made me feel dirty and nauseated was this article about the evil that is Facebook. I resisted Facebook for a very long time, but finally joined a few months ago, after people convinced me it was one of the more benign social networking sites out there. Wrong! It’s owned by some really dreadful people who are glad to give the CIA access to all your information. I looked into deleting my account, but it turns you can’t do that--you can only “deactivate it.”

But this is not a post about Kristol or the Times--or Facebook or spying. It’s a post about dirt and dirtiness and cleanliness, and Kristol et al is useful in that they show the way dirtiness and cleanliness are states of mind, the way things we think about can make us feel, genuinely (not just as a figure of speech), that we need to take a shower.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s covered quite well in Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, a book about ritual filth and purity that I had to read in grad school and liked well enough that I read it again later, just for fun. I’m looking forward to rereading it this summer, both just for the fun of it and as research for an essay I want to write about that concept of contamination ever so important to childhood, namely, cooties.

As research for the same project, I recently read The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg, which also made me feel I needed to take a bath--and then made me acknowledge something I already knew: I have more exacting bathing habits than most people, though I’m not afraid of germs: I just like being clean. Here’s another connection to Facebook: my profile there announces that “I love the simple, transient pleasure of cleanliness, as in crisp, freshly laundered sheets; hair washed so recently it's still damp; the minty freshness of just-brushed teeth. I especially love going to sleep in a clean bed with just-washed hair and well-maintained teeth.”

I like being clean so much, in fact, that I feel slight psychological and physical discomfort if I violate my own idiosyncratic ideas of what is clean and what is not. Emphasis on slight discomfort: my attitudes aren’t extreme enough to constitute a phobia or a compulsion, but they do require an adjustment whenever I visit people, as I also feel uncomfortable answering the question “Why do you need to take a bath before bed if you’re going to take a shower in the morning?” and guilty about using up my host’s hot water.

I recommend this book, though it has a considerable ick factor: it’s just not that cool to read about people who never once, NEVER ONCE, washed their hair, who, in fact, had a grand total of two baths during their entire time on earth: one at birth and one as preparation for burial. But all in all, the history of bathing in the West from the time of the Romans (who loved being clean almost as much as North Americans do) is a fascinating topic, and Ashenburg does a good job with it.

A rough overview: the Romans loved bathing and cleanliness, but early Christians hated it. That’s right, Christianity is the only major religion that has no real interest in physical cleanliness. This is not an entirely bad thing on one level; Jesus was willing to hang out with people others shunned, and argued that there was nothing intrinsically “unclean” about menstruating women or people with various illnesses; he also maintained that it was silly to worry so much about purifying your exterior if your interior was somehow defiled. But his followers took this argument to an illogical extreme, claiming that to be filthy was a sign of holiness. It wasn’t until Victorian England that people were taught in Sunday school that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

Then, long about 1000 a.d., people in Europe started to discover that it felt good to A) take a bath and B) hang out with your friends who were also taking baths (because few private homes had bathrooms, most baths were taken in public facilities) and C) be clean after the bath. Bathing and cleanliness were on the rise until the bubonic plague hit; ideas of disease at the time held that bathing made you more susceptible to the plague, because it opened your pores, and so bath houses across Europe were shut down, which was a bad thing plague-wise, since it meant people didn’t get rid of the fleas actually causing the plague, but a good thing forest-wise: having enough fuel to heat all that water was a major cause of deforestation back in the day.

The Renaissance was filthy, just filthy, but it wasn’t that people didn’t care about cleanliness: it’s that they believed bathing could kill them. Instead, if you wanted to be clean, you changed your shirt (which was the basic undergarment most people wore) a lot, because a clean linen shirt was thought to act as a wick that drew impurities out of the body. However, plenty of people put on their shirt or shift and left it on until it fell off in tatters--or until it had to be taken off for medical reasons, which could involve pulling away chunks of flesh as the garment came off. The court of Louis XIV seems to have been particularly dirty, since Louis didn’t like to bathe and had really bad breath. (In fact, for centuries, it was considered bourgeois to worry about bathing: only the middle class needed to care if they stunk, and until the mid-20th century, a lack of indoor plumbing was a sign of wealth in the grand homes of the British landed gentry: why install pipes to carry hot water to a little room if you were rich enough to hire men to carry a fancy-ass bathtub into your bedroom, set it by the fire, fill it with warm water boiled downstairs in the scullery, then haul the whole thing away after you’d had your bath?)

Baths began to make a come-back in the 18th century, for reasons of health, not cleanliness: medicinal waters were thought to cure disease. But once again, when people started taking baths, they discovered that doing so felt good. Along the way to the present day love of bathing was a debate about cold vs. hot water for bathing (Charles Dickens LOVED a cold shower every morning) and concerns about the use of soap.

Soap. We are so reliant on it now that it’s hard to believe people once advocated doing without it, and that a real battle was waged to convince people of soap’s necessity. It’s something of a truism that the goal of advertising is to make you feel insecure, and it turns out that was true from the get-go: modern advertising was created as a way to sell soap, and the way to do that was to convince people they would stink without it, and would therefore lose out on love, friendship and success. The same technique was used for mouthwash: No one would tell you have halitosis; they’d just avoid you, and you’d never know why. You know that saying, “Often a bridesmaid, never a bride”? It comes from an early ad for Listerine.

North Americans bathe more than anyone else, and care more about our teeth than anyone else; neither of which is necessarily a good thing: it is possible to overbrush your teeth, causing gums to recede or creating holes in tooth enamel, and this whole business of bleaching them white as snow them is bad for them. As for bathing too much, or using too many products; well, it may or may not hurt us, but it’s bad for the environment, something I acknowledge to my pain because I LOVE very hot, frequent baths. But I am determined to cut back--take short showers instead of long baths, for instance, and bathe only once a day instead of twice, as I really prefer to do.

In fact, after reading this book, I resolved that early in the summer, after the academic year ended and I’d no longer have to interact with people daily but before it got so hot I’d sweat a lot, I’d go a week without bathing at all, just to see if I could and what it felt like, though of course I still planned to brush my teeth and wash my hands after using the toilet or scooping out the cat box. I thought this was a very daring experiment until a friend sent me a link to this article by a woman who went six weeks without washing at all--including her hands or her teeth--with some very interesting results. She felt dirty, her kids refused to cuddle with her and she didn’t want to see people, but the quality of her skin improved and her irritable bowel syndrome cleared up, both of which she attributed to the fact that she was no longer putting all these gross chemical compounds on her skin to maintain or improve it. The one real physical ailment she suffered as a result of the experiment was a cavity from not brushing or flossing.

Anyway. This is, as I already mentioned, a quick overview of Ashenburg’s book. I hope I have piqued your interest, because it really is a good treatment of a fascinating and important topic.

Posted by Holly at 12:48 PM | Comments (8)

January 6, 2008

A Blogger’s Work Is Never Done (Unless You Quit Blogging)

So, I have blogging homework. I know it, and I’ve been avoiding it. I still have not finished working out whatever idea I started to write a week ago about friendly interactions with strangers. Hell, so much has happened in the meantime that I’m not even certain what my final point was going to be, though I know it involved the cute bartender who garnished my drinks with extra raspberries and gooseberries (I’d never eaten a gooseberry before that night) as well as this other attractive man who chatted me up in order to ask me what I was talking to myself about (which sort of embarrassed me because although I know I talk to myself a lot, I thought I refrained from making that obvious when I’m someplace like a crowded bar). I might even have planned to mock outright the guy I teased gently when he started complaining to me about how he was emeritus and therefore “obsolete”--at Yale. “Oh, wow, yeah, that’s tough,” I said. “Being ‘obsolete’ at Yale. Though being obsolete there means that you were, at least, once relevant. It’s not like being put out to pasture after four decades at, oh, say, Boise State or Wabash College.”

Anyway, I think whatever I planned to say was either amusing or interesting, and may even have been slightly insightful, so I’ll try to remember.

Then there’s the whole topic of sex and lust that I raised back in mid December.... I actually do remember where I was going with that, and I’ve had more thoughts on the topic. I want to get back to that thread, not that I plan to exhaust it, but I think I have something worthwhile to offer on the subject. Plus it’s a topic most people are willing to read about.

And then there’s always the book about shoes I wanted to write all about, though I never got further than discussing my favorite chapter on military footwear back in August. I still hope to get in another post or two about that....

Plus there was this whole thing I was going to write about how I hate wrapping paper and the efforts I make to avoid it. I took photos in preparation for the entry I was going to write but never got around to posting anything.... Maybe I'll manage to get it done before Christmas 2008.

So yeah. I know I have hanging threads. I’m not going to cut them off or tie all of them up any time soon. But at least I finally took care of one of the most pressing blog-tasks I’d been ignoring, and that was to respond to a slew of comments I’d let accumulate. I know it’s really obnoxious not to reply to comments when people are kind enough to leave them, and my only excuse is that I was either A) traveling or B) still traumatized by the minivan ride with the farting teenager and the bossy pre-pubescent. But comments so increase the rewards of blogging--as I was reminded earlier today when Saviour Onassis brought to my attention an entry he wrote a year ago, and the really great comment I then left (it's under my old blogger name--scroll down far enough and you'll find it)--that it’s really inexcusable for me to wait so long to reply. I didn’t make many New Year’s resolutions, but one is to reply to comments more quickly.

And now I’m going back to ignoring the other blog homework I’m not yet ready to do.

Posted by Holly at 9:06 PM | Comments (2)

January 5, 2008

Sartre Was Right

You know my last entry, the one about my New Year’s Resolution to convince myself that “a stranger’s a friend I just haven’t met yet”? Well, I’ve already revised that resolution, because I’ve already seen the limitations of that attitude. And it all has to do with travel, with the fact that getting back from Chicago was as stressful and difficult as getting there in the first place.

I didn’t go into the whole rigamarole here, because it was painful and not that interesting, but it took 48 extra hours to get to Chicago. Mercifully it was the first leg of my journey that was canceled or delayed each time, so I just ended up leaving two days late, sleeping in my own bed each night. This is what you get when you travel so close to the holidays, I thought, and vowed to avoid it again in the future if I could. I thought about canceling the whole trip, but I’d made my plans and had stuff to do, and anyway, I wanted to go. Given how much fun I had, I’m really glad I did.

But then there was the trip home.... I left on schedule, got to Detroit on time, sat down to wait for my connecting flight which was scheduled to depart at 10:10 p.m., and was informed at 9:30 p.m. that it was canceled.

There was one agent at the gate to rebook flights for every last passenger on a completely full flight; it took her 25 minutes to deal with the first stranded passenger, a young mother with a very unhappy, tired baby. No one begrudged the fact that this woman was taken care of first--that poor baby was really tired--but we all resented the fact that no one else showed up to help the rest of us too. Some of us called the 1-800 number, because spending 20 minutes on hold was still quicker than waiting in that line, and learned that there was not another available seat for the next 48 hours, not on any flight into the airport closest to home, or, for that matter, into any surrounding airports.

So my choices were: spend two days in the Detroit airport, or do something like fly to Atlanta on standby then fly to LaGuardia on standby then fly to Buffalo on standby and rent a car. Yeah. And then a woman in line near me said, “I guess my husband and I will just rent a car here, because we’ve got to be back tomorrow--he’s a doctor and he has to see patients. It’s not that far to drive; just four hours.”

At that point I turned to the woman next to me, who was trying to get home for her grandmother’s funeral. “Want to split the cost of a rental car?” I asked.

She paused. “Sure,” she said. “If you drive.”

Then the woman married to the doctor said, “Maybe we could all go together, if you don’t mind riding with our daughters.”

And that’s how I ended up sharing a minivan with five strangers on a four-and-a-half hour trip through some very bad weather. It beat the alternatives, I admit that. I was glad to get home. And I was also glad I’d thought carefully about how I wanted to interact with strangers.

Everyone, including me, was really nice at first. The husband took care of renting the car and also volunteered to drive. That left me time to chat with the daughters, who, at age 9 and 13, were the same age as two of my nieces and even reminded me of them in some ways. The youngest had a fearless curiosity I found charming, in part because I’m not really bothered by snoopy questions: Where were my children? If I didn’t have children, did I at least have a husband? How old was I? Wow, I was a year older than their mother. What did I do all day, since I didn’t have a family to take care of? The older one was excited to learn that I was an English professor and talked about her plans for college.

The weather was awful, and the younger one had this thing about black ice. She was fine as long as the road was so covered with chunky white snow that the rest of us were gripping our arm rests and wondering when it would be safe to exceed 30 miles an hour, but as soon as the road cleared a little and her father resumed the actual speed limit, she shrieked, “Daddy, slow down! It’s black ice! It’s dangerous! I hate it when you drive too fast, just like I hate it when you drink too much!”

Then the older one took off her shoes and socks. Her feet smelled TERRIBLE, which I know as well as anyone because she kept putting them on the back of my head rest. That was upsetting, but more upsetting was the younger one complaining, “Mommy, Sister took off her socks! Her feet really stink!” Then the farting began, silent, deadly farting.... Yes, the older one had a gas problem, and it was profoundly unpleasant, much worse than the foot odor problem. But equally unpleasant was the younger one yelling, “Mommy, Sister farted on my Nintendo!”

And then there was the Nintendo! Why do these electronic gadgets come with sound events?! Why does there have to be a dreadful repetitive jingle while you play some stupid game? Why can't people who play the stupid game hit the mute button?

And there was an argument about whether Topaz was the birthstone for November or December, and what it even looked like, and the older one was wrong, insisting that Topaz was a blue stone and the birthstone for December, but even though everyone told her that her information was incorrect, she refused to accept the possibility that she might be wrong. And then she insisted Carnegie Mellon was in Cleveland.... it’s in Pittsburgh, but at 1:30 a.m. in the middle of a blizzard, who freakin’ cares, which is one of the reasons I didn’t say a word. And then we got a spelling competition: the older one wanted to show that she was smarter than her younger sister, so they’d spell words like “hydrogen” and “nitrogen” and “dioxide” and the father would say who spelled it right.

I’ve only hit some of the highlights here--the drama was pretty much constant from the moment we got onto the interstate until the girls finally fell asleep about 2 a.m. (Though falling asleep does not tend to interrupt farting--if anything it can make it worse.) Every so often the mother would say, “Girls, no more talking. Only grownups can talk. Go to sleep. You have school tomorrow.” And the older one would say, “I don’t want to be quiet, and I can't sleep in the car.” And only after three hours did either parent say, “OK, that’s it: when we get home, you’ll get a time-out.” Which wasn’t much of a threat since we were going to get home at 3:30 and at that hour, a time-out is the same as going to bed, which is pretty much what you want to do.

And I thought, Sartre was right: hell is other people. To be stuck in that minivan forever could serve very well as a form of eternal torment, perhaps not the worst one ever devised, but still effective. I kept telling myself, It will end; it will end; I will get home, and then I will never have to see these people again as long as I live. They’re not new friends; they’re just strangers who have kindly helped me out; and I’m grateful and I wish them well, but I really want to spend the rest of my life as far away from them as possible.

The whole thing was so traumatic that I hardly left my house the next two days. I am not sorry I got into that minvan, because it beat the alternatives, but still, it sucked. I am only now starting to recover. And I have also remembered something from Fight Club about single-serving friends, people with whom you have brief, unrepeated pleasant encounters. I like that terminology. Some strangers turn out to be life-long friends; some turn out to be single-serving friends, some turn out to be people you interact with as long as you need to and not a second longer; and some turn out to be assholes you avoid at all costs. This family fell into the “interact with as long as you need to” category; they weren’t assholes, just not very good at accommodating outsiders introduced to their family circle. Still, had we met under different circumstances, I might have liked them all very much--or rather, I might have continued to like them all as much as I did when I first met them. But the situation played an significant role, and that’s important to remember too. It’s more fun to meet people at parties than in a long line at the airport, and I hope a long time will pass before I have to do that again.

Posted by Holly at 1:14 PM | Comments (3)

January 1, 2008

More on the Kindness of Strangers

My sister really sort of hates New Year's Eve, mostly because it's her birthday. Some people think December 31 would be a great birthday, because there are always lots of parties--but the thing is, they're almost never for you. People usually have their own agenda on New Year's Eve, and they don't want to come to a birthday party for you every single year, plus if you host a party on December 31, people expect it to go til midnight and so forth. Then there's the business of birthday gifts: Only people who really love you and think ahead manage to buy you a present and send it to you in time; a lot of people do that whole horrible "This is both your birthday AND Christmas present" routine, or else they send you stuff in mid January. At least, this is what my sister tells me, and I believe her.

I don't dislike New Year's as much as my sister, but it's not my favorite holiday. Part of it is that there's no prescribed activity, aside from having fun, and I generally resent forced frivolity. I prefer holidays with clearly defined activities: eat turkey and pumpkin pie, or go door-to-door asking for candy, or give and receive gifts. The activity is dictated by custom; whether or not you have fun is entirely up to you.

I've had plenty of spectacularly forgetable New Year's Eves, and I've had several that genuinely BLEW. I want to talk about that, but before I do, I must say that last night was just about the best New Year's Eve I've ever celebrated in my whole life.

Probably my worst New Year's ever was 1988. I made travel plans to meet the family of the man I was in love with, and when I bought my airline ticket part of the plan was that I'd get an engagement ring for Christmas. Instead I got dumped, but for a variety of reasons I stuck around for the whole holiday. There were two other New Year's where I began dating someone after I'd already made plans to spend the holidays with my family, so I didn't have that kind of close-proximity misery to deal with, but there was still romantic drama and tension via email and over the phone.

Then there was New Year's Eve 1986/ New Year's Day 1987, when I got pulled over by a cop who was convinced I'd been drinking, and thought I was being cute when I said I hadn't had a drop all year. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "It's 12:30. But what about before midnight?"

"No," I said. "I meant all of 1986. I don't drink."

He shown his flashlight into the car. I had three passengers. "Looks like you were having quite a party," he said.

"Not really," I said. "The guys in the back are my little brother and his best friend, and they're not old enough to drive, which is why I had to go pick them up from the church dance. This person is my friend Ellen, whom I haven't seen since I went on a mission for the Mormon church in May 1985. I got home three weeks ago, and I'm still not recovered from my jet lag, which is why I'm wearing a flannel nightgown, a bathrobe and slippers: as soon as I get home, I'm gonna crash. You want me to get out of the car so you can see?"

But New Year's Eve 2007 was nothing like that. As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Chicago doing all sorts of fun stuff; the past couple of days have involved hanging with my friend Z. Also in town is Saviour Onassis, who is here meeting the friends and family of his new man, BG. SO was going to a party hosted by BG's best friend, and BG was cool enough to invite me and Z. He told us the party started at 6 p.m., so Z and I thought we'd be fashionably late, and arrived at 7:30.

But the party was actually supposed to start at 8, so we were the first to arrive, and nothing was ready. The hosts were complete strangers to both of us, but they welcomed us into their home, provided us with alcohol and all the queso we could possibly eat, including a really stinky Italian cheese that turned out to be lovely, even though I used to think I didn't like stinky cheese. Z and I sat and played Holiday Mellencamp until other guests showed up ("OK, Christmas gifts: a real bicycle or an exercise bike?" Real bicycle. "Jewelry or a negligee?" Jewelry. "A dozen red roses or a really powerful handheld vacuum cleaner?" The vacuum cleaner.)

And then other people showed up, and even though I'd only met two of them before in my life, and even though Z had never before met any of them, they were all lovely and welcoming and generous and cool. The food was AMAZING: the hostess was a professional chef,and she provided quite a spread. But as my grandmother liked to say after a very pleasant meal, "the food was good, but the company was better." The guests were really diverse: there were neighbors and friends of friends and children and even a Masai chieftan from Kenya who is in the US trying to promote measures to bring economic stability to east Africa. Z and I had originally planned to go early and leave early enough to be in bed and asleep at midnight, because the roads weren't bad, but we had so much fun that we didn't leave until well after 1 p.m.

Now, this is not the continuation of my previous post on good-natured strangers that I had originally intended to write. And it's not like I have never before been to a party where I didn't know many people and still managed to have a good time. But like so many things, the ability to do that is a skill, and one I had to cultivate.

As a freshman in college I drove half an hour to get a big bash held at the home of one of my favorite professors. She lived out in the foothills east of Tucson, and a wash ran through the back of her property; every semester she invited every student who had ever been in one of her courses to come to her home, where she had accumulated a stash of wood to build a bonfire in the wash, and then she facilitated a good time. This was 1982; I was 18 years old; and the drinking age was 19, so I knew there would be booze there. I didn't plan to drink, but I also knew I'd have to make conversation with people I hardly knew, and that I'd have find common ground with people who were nothing like me and who might be drunk.

I pulled into her driveway, found a parking space, took a deep breath, then backed my car out and went home. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't make small talk with strangers who might consider me a hick. Oh, I could stand up in a room of 120 people and offer my opinion on the textbook we were reading; I could stand in front of an audience of 400 people and give a 20 minute talk on any pre-assigned topic anyone wanted to give me. But I couldn't imagine strangers being nice to me or being interested in anything I had to say at a party.

That attitude came partly from the fact that I grew up knowing people from kindergarten on; you didn't meet people at parties; you already knew everyone, so you played games or danced or ate or something; you didn't mingle and introduce yourself.

Am I the only person who had this experience? I'd like to think I'm not; I'd like to think that I'm not the only person who had to learn adult party etiquette.

But aside from that, I'd like to thank SO and BG for inviting me to that great party, and I'd like to say how great it is for me now to know that it's cool to make new friends. I realize that sounds like the kind of advice many people's mothers gave them in high school; I didn't really get told that. But being nice to strangers and believing that strangers actually have the ability and even the desire to be nice to me back is a really cool way to approach interactions and one I wish I'd adopted sooner.

So one of my New Year's resolutions is to follow the example set for me by my friend C and by BG's friend the professional chef and to assume that--and I cringe as I write this, because it's so cliched and smarmy, but right now it really does encapsulate how I feel--"a stranger is a friend I just haven't met yet."

Happy New Year.

Posted by Holly at 12:41 PM | Comments (5)