The Wild Winds of Fortune

Yesterday, I was sitting at a stoplight in the van.  It was a perfect day, warm but not too much so. I had the window open to catch the gentle breeze.

A car pulled up.  The music was blaring, making it difficult to hear my own stereo.  I have always waited for this situation, but heretofore been too chicken to react.

I turned my music up, drowning out his. He turned his louder.  I responded.  He cranked his still louder: I could feel the bass of his music throbbing through my door.  I cranked mine until it was painful. Had a cop been around, both of us would have been cited for being a public nuisance, although I would have been willing to go to court on this one.

He had just turned his even louder when the light changed and he burned rubber getting away.  I smiled gently, turned my stereo down (and waited for my ears to stop ringing), and eased away from the intersection.

His music? Some sort of rap, in Spanish.  It was nothing I recognized. Mine was …

Tony Bennett and Michael Bublé singing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

As I said, I’ve always wanted to do that.

Homemade bread just out of the oven spread with softened butter is a good reason to go on living.

I’ve been cooking this week.  I understand that that might not sound like much, but I don’t cook all that much (as opposed to simply making something to eat), except for holidays and special events and the occasional set of brownies or pie for my family.

Monday, I made something, and I do not remember what.
Tuesday was trivia, hence no cooking.
Wednesday was quesadillas.
Thursday was leftover turkey (at Easter, the local market had turkeys at 39 cents a pounds, so we bought two), fresh string beans sauteed in garlic butter and homemade garlic bread.
Last night was chicken breasts pounded flat and cooked in lemon and garlic butter (think lemon piccata without the capers) and a sauce of the drippings plus white wine, more butter and ground savory; watermelon and mint salad dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and topped with feta cheese (oh, my God, so good); and oven roasted potatoes.
Brunch today was homemade peach coffeecake, scrambled eggs with fresh-laid eggs from a friend’s chickens, leftover salad, orange juice, and homemade espresso.

My plans for dinner tonight include homemade french bread (if it lasts until dinner — Mr. “I should eat my weight in carbs,” a.k.a the Red-Headed Menace, is around), ham and cauliflower.

Everyone in my family is happy about this. Even me. Now, time to go taste test one of the loaves of French bread (this is a new recipe for me).

If I keep going, maybe next week sometime I’ll try my hand at croissants.  We have a marble board that is criminally underused.

That should be fun.

Having finished watching all episodes of Ken Burns’ Baseball (including the extra episodes he did in 2007), I am struck again how angry I am at Barry Bonds.

It is not that he is a private person and snarls at the press.  I have never asked of my sports heroes that they be particularly media-savvy, and he is right — the media are generally out to get you.

No, I am angry at how selfish he was.

First, let me just say that Hank Aaron is one of my sports heroes. Another private man, he was nonetheless gracious. He went through an incredible amount of nastiness in the run-up to breaking Ruth’s record, and handled it calmly and professionally.  He was also dedicated to baseball: after he stopped playing, he ended up working for the Braves as vice president and director of player development and in many ways is responsible for the greatness Atlanta enjoyed in the 1990s. It would have been hard for me to see anyone break his record.

I also question whether Aaron got the iconic status he deserved.  When Bonds passed Ruth in the home run standings, the San Jose Mercury News had a columnist who wrote about being at the ballpark watching Bonds “break Ruth’s record.” (I wrote a snarky letter to the editor, suggesting that the columnist walk across the office and talk to the sportswriters.)

Bonds used steroids. I think there is little to no doubt of that. Writer Daniel Okrent suggests that there should not be an asterisk after his name because everyone was doing it; it was just one of the conditions of the game.  He is right, sort of, but it was not a condition of the game the entire time Bonds was playing.

Before the time Bonds is believed to have started using steroids, he had already hit 400 homers and stolen 400 bases, the only player ever to have done that.  He was already being called perhaps the greatest position player of all time. He did not need the home run record to cement his status as a Hall of Fame member-to-be. He was as good as settled in at Cooperstown.  He was a greater player even than his godfather, Willie Mays.

He could have not used steroids, and he still would have ended up high on the all-time homer list.  But no.

He is the kid at the party who is bigger and stronger and who gets the most candy from the pinãta, but is not happy until he gets it all. Well, he did get it all; and in the process, along with Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clements and all the other players who used ‘roids, trashed the good name of the game he claimed to love.  He tarnished the greatness which he already had shown.

It’s a damn shame.

From my written meanderings during Tuesday’s trivia game:

“Pay no attention to the pink elephant(s) standing in the corner shouting that the theater is on fire.”

There are mixed metaphors and then there are mixed metaphors deluxe.

I realized this afternoon that I wrote a (rather over-the-top) post on Monday about making the butterfly earrings, stating that they were the first jewelry I had created in a year.  This morning I wrote a post in which I said that I created a bracelet in April to match the necklace I had made years ago.

Obviously, those statements are inconsistent.

Except they don’t feel so to me.  The bracelet did not feel like creating jewelry, merely stringing beads together.  There was no wire work (the handmade clasps were already in my stock) or even design involved: I simply took a few beads I had which matched the necklace and strung them on beading wire.  It almost immediately broke — I ended up restringing it on Friday.  It never felt like making jewelry.

Maybe this is emblematic of how I discount so much of what I do.  Food for thought, certainly.

I am sitting in the coffee shop the Resident Shrink frequents, having succumbed to the siren song of a slice of lemon meringue cake and a large decaf iced mocha, waiting to drive to Trivia.  The cake is, unusual in such things, absolutely as delicious as it looks, moist and not too sweet.  I am being good: I did  not tell the young man behind the counter that he looks and sounds like a cross between Emile Hirsch and Jonah Hill.  He is too young to overtly flirt with.  (Yes, I know.  I never flirt. I am trying to learn.)

I keep forgetting to ask R.S. what determination she arrived at about the tax-deductibility of coffee.  Not that that matters to me, as I have no business from which to deduct expenses, but inquiring minds want to know.

April was a very difficult month, we say with great understatement. Nobody died, nobody went to jail, so I guess in the end we’re all going to be okay, but damn, I don’t want a month like that anytime soon. As April had no interest in going out quietly, last night required a trip to Urgent Care. Pro tip: don’t show up at Urgent Care just as they are closing when you have what may be a serious condition (it proved not to be), when you have driven yourself.  You find yourself with being threatened with the ER and an ambulance ride to get there, unless you can present someone within fifteen minutes to drive you.  For God’s sake, just run the damn EKG already.*

It is May Day, and I should write something about the workers of the world and politicians, and how in America so many have been screwed over by the same system that too many of them want to protect. But I am tired, in body, mind, and spirit, so I think I’ll let someone else try to change the world today.

And last, but not least, my family rocks.  Just sayin.’

*They did, and I am fine. The concern was a potentially fatal side effect of new meds.  As I said, it turned out to be nothing, but it could have turned out to be something, so I went.  Everybody told me I did the right thing. A previous post notwithstanding, I really should give up consuming large amounts of caffeine.

Google used its Street View project to possibly grab emails?  And they used a car to do it? Seriously?  Why not snatch whatever they wanted off people’s GMail accounts?

Democracy is not a spectator sport.  Lotte Scharfman, former president, Massachusetts League of Women Voters.

For all my California friends, you only have twenty days (until May 21) to register for the primary election on June 5.  This year there has been a very important change to the rules: the top two vote-getters move on to the general election regardless of party preference or whether one of the candidates got a majority of the votes cast.  

It’s not only the presidential primaries that matter, you know, nor the House and Senate races, as important as they are.  The people who sit in the State Legislature, county commissions, city councils, and school boards have as significant an impact (if not more) on your day-to-day life.  Your representative does not decide teachers’ salaries or whether you can get the variance you need to build your house if it exceeds the prescribed maximum footprint area.  That judge you voted for  may sit on your neighbor down the street’s drunk driving case.

So participate. Be part of this country. Don’t stand on the sidelines and watch.

Register and VOTE.

My father once told me that there is no such thing as coffee that is too strong.  Generally speaking, I believe this to be true: I have made coffee probably forty times since the beginning of the year, and only twice have I made coffee too strong for me to drink, although others have often complained about it.*

Unfortunately, I also adulterate my coffee with enough sugar and cream to choke a small Welsh pony.

Dad would have never let me live this disgrace to our family name down.

*It is always better to make coffee too strong: the faint-hearted in the family (i.e., everyone else) can cut theirs with hot water. 

I  made a pair of earrings today.

Not repaired, made. I have not made new jewelry in almost a year.

A year ago, I was prolific enough I considered selling my work on more than an ad hoc basis.  Then life intervened, in the form of illness and other crises, and jewelry-making seemed so much less critical than anything else. I still have a lot of pieces from that period languishing — tarnishing — in my jewelry bag.

The other day I was in Michael’s getting beading wire to restring an already designed bracelet, when I was snared by a pair of platinum-plated butterfly-shaped connectors.  I do not believe in totem animals, but if I had one, it would be the butterfly. Many years ago I had a cotton shirt with a butterfly that I had painted on the back, and I wore that shirt until it fell apart.  It was a part of me, the way that particular pieces of clothing become part of you when you are too young to know how foolish that is.

I bought the connectors, not quite knowing why, thinking sourly that it was simply another thing to lie dormant in my beading box. Today, I took them out.

I did not have sterling silver earwires. I used stainless.  I had to remake them twice after I changed my  mind on the color scheme. I ran out of silver wire — being able to finish only because I found a piece not quite long enough in my metals scrap bag. I made it work. There is a facile parable in there somewhere about life handing what you need, but I think I’ll skip it.

I remade them because I decided the amethyst color was wrong; wrong for me at any rate.  I chose an indigo blue that is the color of the ocean at the horizon on a clear day.  I only had hearts, not baroque drops, so I sighed and used them anyway, sort of wishing the whole endeavor was not turning out so cutesy.  Hearts and butterflies. Teenagers wear them, not women with my years under their belt.

The wirework — the craft I have always prided myself on — is awful.  (Please do not even think “It’s better than I could do,” even if it is true: I have sold my work before and know what I am capable of.  This is not it.)  The wraps are uneven and the wires have not been snipped closely enough.

The new meds I am on make it difficult to work: they cause hand tremors and blurry vision, as well as drowsiness and occasional vertigo. I have been assured that the last three will correct themselves in time; the tremors (a certain level of which I already had) I am probably stuck with. I did the work anyway.

There is love there.  The feel of the silver wire in your fingers, the flash of the crystal as the light hits it, the silly shine of the platinum-plated connectors.  I can work only slowly, and badly, as of yet.  I have lost the muscle memory that once made making a pair of earrings such as this a matter of minutes, not of an excruciatingly slow hour.

Love is when you know whatever you are making will turn out badly, and you do it anyway.  That is true of jewelry making, of tennis, of pottery.  Of writing.

It is a daydream of many people that someone might show up and simply pay them for being themselves.  Not me.  I can’t stand myself much of the time, and being paid for that would be a burden.  My daydream is that some one shows up and pays me to create.

Pays me to feel the slick wire in my hands, with the tools that shape them into earrings or necklaces; or pays me to hear the click of the keys under my fingers and see the words escape from my brain. Pays me to create. Pays me to live.

Because that is what creating is: life. Writing is half that, but not the whole.  I am glad that I have rediscovered the other piece.

Living life imperfectly — is there really any other way? — is so much better than the alternative.

…remember, the one who sends you all the emails, whom you then have to reply to with “Check Snopes before sending me this stuff,” and who still sends them to you anyway?

A  flash drive disguised as a tampon.

I am restless, at least when I am not zombified.*  I keep thinking I should change the name of the blog.  Broadway songs and their lyrics offer a lot of options, for both blog titles and subtitles:

“All That Jazz” [from Chicago]
“Corner of the Sky” (“I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free…”) [from Pippin]
“Just Another Day (“I’m livin’ on a latte and a prayer…”**) (Edited to add: there is also “what doesn’t kill me doesn’t kill me…”) [from Next to Normal]
“Pandemonium” (Life is random and unfair; life is pandemonium…”)*** [from The 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee]
“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” [from Spamalot]
“Being Alive” [from Company]
“By My Side” [from Godspell]
“I’m Still Here” (“I got through all of last year, and I’m here…”) [from Follies]
“Follow Me” from [Camelot] (nothing like the direct approach of begging for an audience)
“It’s a Fine Life” (“If you don’t mind having to like or lump it….”) [from Oliver!]
“No day but today….” (from “Life Support” from Rent)

And so on. (I would like to note that I only have two Sondheim titles on here.) I have not even tapped other music sources.

Changing the title of the blog would be a bad idea, though.  I know! I’ll start another blog!

Or not.  But what do I do with all these titles?

More importantly, what do I do with all this restless non-energy?

 *Is “zombified” even a word? I guess so, since  “zombification” crops up in the Wikipedia entry on zombies, and Wikipedia is the source of all wisdom and knowledge on the Internet, and in a lot of high school term papers as well. [/sarcasm mode]
**This last line should look familiar: I like it so much it is on my sidebar.
***I like this so much that title and lyric are the title and subtitle of my Live Journal.