Category: blog

Family is good

I have a mother, father, stepfather and stepmother, and I love them all, and I’m lucky that they love me too. I’m lucky that I was a wanted (even if unplanned) child (who is still surprising her folks on a regular basis 49 years later, grins at parents through the internet). I’m lucky that all my parents have always done their best to understand me, accept me, support me, help and comfort me when I needed it. I love that they love Nicola so much.

I have a family in England who are not mine, but they love me for the sake of their daughter and sister, and for my own sake, and have made me welcome as if I am theirs.

Some families are horror shows. None are perfect. So many families, like mine, have made and unmade and re-made themselves. I hope that you have found a family, whether based on blood, choice, or a little of both; that you have people who scratch their heads over your wackiness and your flaws and will still give you a hug and a cup of coffee, or the last beer in the fridge. Because that’s where it starts, you know? And sometimes that’s all it takes.

And so I know it’s Father’s Day, but I think I will eschew the greeting card companies’ calendar in favor of my own. For me, it’s Family Is Good day.

Thanks, Dad and Mum, for always making me feel loved and wanted and smart and as safe as you could, and for making sure I had so many chances that you never had. Thanks, Art and Celeste, for making a place for me in your hearts. Thanks, Eric and Margot and Anne and Julie and Carolyn, for all the love and care you have shown me. Thank you to Ronnie who has been my sister for (omg) nearly 30 years. Thank you always to Nicola. And thank you to my friends, without whom I would be less than I am, and who are my family too. Love to you all on Family Is Good Day.

Because I can bake

Every once in a while, someone gets an idea that Nicola would be much better off with them instead of what’s-her-name-Eskridge. Fair enough, I guess, although it’s a notion that comes with a built-in disappointment factor of seven million zillion (and about a trillion million zillion if you are a guy). Sometimes, these folks actually think they can get Nicola’s attention by being rude to me: we’ve been in situations where the Hopeful Other, upon being introduced to both of us, looks straight at Nicola with a melty-mouth smile and says, “Oh, I’m so glad that you could make it” — emphasis hers — and then utterly ignores me. Snort. Just so you know, if you do this kind of thing, we laugh at you on the way home.

In fact, here is my best advice to those who would impress my sweetie: if you cannot make Rhubarb Apple Crumble, girlfriend, pack your bags and move your ass out of line.

RHUBARB APPLE CRUMBLE
adapted from a recipe by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

    Filling

  • 3 cups diced green apples (1/2-inch to 1-inch pieces)
  • 3 cups diced rhubarb (fresh or frozen)
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • Grated zest of 1 small lemon
  • Generous pinch of salt
  • Generous pinch of ground nutmeg
  • 4 tablespoons cornstarch
    Topping

  • 10 tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature
  • 1/3 cup white sugar
  • 1/3 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (spoon into measuring cup and level, don’t scoop it in or pack it down)
  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (also spoon and level)
  • Heavy whipping cream (for serving)
  1. Butter a shallow 7-cup baking dish.
  2. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  3. Combine all filling ingredients in a bowl and turn them gently into the baking dish.
  4. Using an electric beater, cream the butter, both sugars, salt and vanilla at medium speed until very light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
  5. Combine the two flours and sift half into the butter mixture. Then beat on low for just a few seconds. Don’t overdo it.
  6. Work in the rest of the flour into the butter mixture with your hands until large crumbles form. Be gentle, don’t beat, and don’t overmix.
  7. Spoon the crumbles over the filling in the baking pan. Don’t pack it down.
  8. Bake at 350 on center rack for 45-55 minutes or until topping is golden brown and filling is bubbling.
  9. Remove from oven and allow to cool. Serve at room temperature or re-warm gently in oven.
  10. Serve with heavy whipping cream to pour on top.

Enjoy.

Get happy

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years. — Bertrand Russell

This seems so true to me in so many different ways right now.

It’s easy to see all the ways in which people seem to desire the unhappiness of others, and to actively work toward it. We all, whatever our politics or religion or particular beef with the world, have our litany of things that other people shouldn’t be, shouldn’t do, don’t deserve, and ought to be ashamed of.

And it’s easy to see all the ways in which our culture discourages us from actively seeking our own happiness. It’s selfish to put our own needs ahead of others’. It’s wrong to enjoy things that other people cannot have. It’s better to go along with the party, the church, the family, the crowd, and squeeze ourselves into little one-size-ought-to-be-enough-for-all boxes so that we do not make others uncomfortable. It’s good to make other people happy.

But what about making ourselves happy? When are we taught that our own happiness is fucking essential not just for our survival, but for the survival of others?

I believe that love and fear are the two most powerful forces in the universe. I believe I can trace every choice I make, large or small, back to one or the other. Sometimes the love is the kind that compels me to put my own needs aside; sometimes it’s just the general “golden rule” sort, the social-compact default. Sometimes the fear is the very sensible Run away from the person with the knife kind; but other times, it is fear of difference or risk or having to look too hard at myself, and it disguises itself as common sense, as necessity, or (gods help us) as maturity and duty.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the ways in which parenting is often focused on making the child feel special and “a winner” whether they have done anything worth noting or not. There are certainly a lot of folks who seemingly grow up feeling entitled to praise no matter what; they need it to be “happy,” and we all “deserve to be happy.” Bleh. That’s just a different way of being afraid, a different way of defining our own happiness as something we expect — or demand — from other people. It’s not a very big a step from that to seeking the unhappiness of others when we don’t like their choices, or when they don’t give us the validation that we want.

When we make choices out of that kind of fear — when we demand our happiness from others, or think the only way to win is to prevent their happiness — we die. A little or all the way, in our heart or soul or body. But I want to live. So I’m figuring out these days that my biggest duty is to adjust my own oxygen mask. And I find that the more I focus on making myself happy, the easier it is to share that wealth with others. It turns out that a big part of acting from fear is wanting to make other people feel afraid too; but when I make myself happy, then I’m more ready to help other people make themselves happy as well.

Perhaps that seems obvious or naive to some folks. Oh well. For me, like most simple truths, it turns out to be much deeper on the inside than the outside.

More Peg Halsey

In today’s excerpt of With Malice Toward Some, Peg and her husband Henry have settled in a village called Yeobridge, close to Exeter where Henry is teaching for a year. They have been getting to know the local gentry, and are now at dinner at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Vinnicombe, where Mr. V is about to surprise Peg:

Oct 26th
…When we had finished the music, he suggested whiskey-and-soda, not to Henry only, but to me, moi qui vous parle. In middle-class England a woman is offered a drink with the same degree of frequency with which she is offered deadly nightshade, and at English dinners, when it gets on for ten o’clock and you are numb with cold and half hysterical from hearing about English weather, the gentlemen all have whiskey-and-soda and the ladies, God bless them, have tea! A woman who wants hard liquor at an English dinner has to ask for it, and then her host (nice and warm himself, of course, in woolen clothes, long sleeves and the radiation from a quantity of port) glances questioningly at her husband, as who should say, “She’s a little minx, but I don’t believe a tiny bit would hurt her.” It is a discouraging state of affairs, for (quite aside from the cold storage dining) probably no class of people in the world could do more handily with a little of the stimulation and release of alcohol than well-bred Englishwomen. However, a visiting American does better to refrain from proselytizing, to do her drinking in large batches (if possible) on the maid’s day out, and on other occasions to remain silent and stoically let the pleurisy fall where it may.
 
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And here’s a bit, from the summer, about a holiday in Stratford:

June 28th
…The countryside around Stratford is green and plenteous and full of repose. Cushioned with trees and padded with hedgerows, it runs up into little mattress slopes which fade imperceptibly away again. In the villages, the thatched houses rest on their gardens like cuff-links on jeweler’s cotton. An aimless walk through this engaging landscape, on which we started out this morning, ended by taking the whole day. We turned down whatever paths looked promising; crossed empty, sunlit fields that were rough underfoot and hard going, for all their smooth-looking grass; and followed wavy lanes which perpetually unfurled new arrangements of trees and cows. Occasionally we passed farmhouses, sheltered with barns and looking like people who have the covers pulled up to their chins…
 
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I am thinking a lot about the difference between rest and relaxation, and picked that passage because it sounds so beautifully restful to me. But today I am not resting: I am organizing, thinking, cooking food for friends who need it, and looking forward to dinner out with my sweetie; an early anniversary celebration because next week is very busy, including a Neighborhood Shindig on the street outside our house, about which I am sure I will have much to say and for which I know I have much to do. At least I will be allowed to drink, moi qui vous parle…

Enjoy your day.

Jukebox

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

To use the E-Phonic MP3 Player you will need Adobe Flash Player 9 or better and a Javascript enabled browser.

These are random happy songs: not particular “favorites” that I seek out, but songs that always make me happy to find them by accident in the world — on the pub CD player, in the supermarket, on the car radio of the guy next to me at the red light. It’s as if I passed someone familiar on the street who suddenly takes me by the hand and says Come on, and walks me to some happy place inside myself.

Happiness is physical; I don’t hear these songs as much as feel them, their rhythms and resonance. I see them, as if they were memories or stories I’ve told myself so often they’ve become something like memory. They don’t make me ecstatic or fierce or electric or take the top of my head off with existential joy, the way some music does. They simply make me happy; although as I get older, I realize that as simple as it is, happy isn’t a door that opens to everyone. I am grateful to this music, and to sunshine and rivers and laughter and cats and my mom’s tuna casserole and the soft ice cream cones my dad bought me in summers when I was a kid, and to so many more simple things that make me happy.

“Hitchcock Railway” by Jose Feliano is one of my oldest music-memories: my parents played Feliciano a lot when I was a kid. Whether it’s true or not, I associate it with parties: our very small house stuffed with loud, laughing people in bell-bottomed blue jeans and fringed vests, or miniskirts and sandals, or golf shirts and plaid sports jackets (we knew lots of different folks) who put their beer in our bathtub (full of ice for the occasion) and ate the artichokes that were constantly boiling in huge pots on our stove, while music played in the background. When I was about 10 or so, my dad started letting me bartend behind a piece of plywood set up on stools across our kitchen door: I served Canadian Club and water, as I recall, and got every whisky-drinking man in the place absolutely hammered. It was one of my first experiences of power over men: in the 60’s South, it was pretty much a time-honored gendered strategy for women to carefully gauge a man’s capacity for alcohol and then use it in whatever way worked best. Since I didn’t have any particular goals at the time, the lesson was simply that if I gave those men a strong drink, they’d sip it, raise a wry eyebrow, say Larry, she’s learning early! and then laugh and wander off to find someone to flirt with. And come back for another, possibly with a conspiratorial Now don’t you tell my wife you’re getting me drunk! It was all very instructive. And boy, those parties were fun.

I became a huge Police fan in college. By this time, I had fled Northwestern University and come home to finish my education at the University of South Florida, and live with my mom. It was generally my job to wash the dishes, which was often a special horror-movie experience in our poor little decrepit house: the kitchen ceiling had partially fallen in, the windows were drafty, the baseboards gapped and it was Florida, kids — every open space was a bug highway. I am not sure I ever washed an entire set of dishes without a close encounter with a Rhode-Island-sized cockroach.

But I had a fifty-foot headset cord that easily stretched from the turntable in the living room to the kitchen sink: so I would put on happy music and stomp bugs to the beat when I had to. I listened to The Police all the time, and “Every Little Thing” always made me feel as though I was moving forward, transcending the dirty dishes and the bugs, going to a place where whatever I did, even this, must be magic in some way. I felt the same way driving to acting classes, or driving home late at night from rehearsal, when the song would come on the radio: hopeful, looking for magic.

I was out dancing last month and DJ Stacey rolled us into “China Grove” and oh my goodness, I thought I would levitate. Some people actually left the dance floor (huh?!!!) as if to say, Well, how can you dance to this? So I showed them. This song is all about the Southern childhood that I never actually had, in a small town full of funky folks who lived their lives to Southern rock and (in my story) made each other pies and fixed their own cars and gave each other space to be (and gossiped like hell about whatever you did with your space).

So here’s some of my happy for you, with the hope that you have some happy today in whatever way works for you.

What if…

There are the big crossroads moments, of course, when a doorway blasts open between the life you’re in and another that will inevitably be very different, and the universe does everything short of hanging up pink neon arrows that flash “PAY ATTENTION NOW.” When I saw my first pictures of St. Paul’s and realized I had to have it, even if it meant going a thousand miles from home at age 13. When I was accepted at Clarion and had to decide whether to quit my job and take out a loan. When I met Nicola. When I said yes to the big job at Wizards of the Coast because I knew it was my shot at someday being able to write full time, even if I had to stop writing while I did the job. When I asked the executive producer to give me the screenplay work, and found myself suddenly, passionately in love with writing again. Those were doors.

It’s easy to play the game with those big moments: Oh my god, what if we’d never met, what if I hadn’t made it work, what if I’d been too scared or too sensible or too damn stupid to (any number of things)? But writer/columnist/yoga guy Mark Morford plays a more subtle game in this post over at SF Gate: not Monday-morning-quarterbacking the life you have now, but rather trying on a life that you see walk past you on the corner, or at another table in the restaurant, or in a parking garage… shrugging yourself into it for a second not because it’s so different from yours, but because somewhere inside is that tiny voice of recognition, of connection, of There I am again.

And he’s right: it’s a good feeling. It was nice to be reminded of it; and to imagine, for a moment, what it was like to be Morford standing there watching that guy and his dogs, seeing all those other ways that he — that any of us — might have lived this life.

(Thanks to Jeremy for the link.)

True Blood

Nicola and I are currently re-watching season 1 of True Blood on DVD. I love this show. Great writing, acting, direction; a strong story line; a lot of attention to detail; and a real sense of Southern rhythms and mores (you might be surprised how many people get this wrong). The South of this show is televisualized, and in many ways idealized, but I’ve never seen anything on television that better captures the layered essence of Southern culture as I experienced it growing up. The open acknowledgment and subtle systemic practices of racism between individual people, whether they are friends or not. The ways the local bar serves as the commons. The complicated rules of gender in which women can be strong without gaining power and men can be weak without losing it — that strength and weakness are part of what keeps the power imbalance from blowing up all over the boys, and it’s beautifully played out over and over again in great examples of “show, don’t tell.”

I’m a fan of good series TV because of the longer-term, deeper storytelling that is possible; the novelistic qualities of taking more time to explore characters and relationship, establish backstory, wander through the physical and psychological terrain. True Blood does all this and more: it’s emotionally complex, socially true, a huge amount of fun and occasionally very shocking and icky, and the people of Bon Temps are fantastic — I haven’t met a TB character I didn’t want to know more about, even the unpleasant ones. Sookie and Bill; lonely, loyal Sam; Jason, the world’s most cheerful horndog; Tara and her terrible tragic mother; Terry, the sad war veteran; Pam, the vampire bouncer; and the fabulous Lafayette….

Well, see Lafayette for yourself. This is one of my favorite scenes in the season (and is absolutely Not Safe For Work):

And here’s the scene that sets up the romantic relationship between the show’s protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, and the vampire Bill Compton. Here’s what you need to know: Sookie can hear people’s thoughts, although she mostly works hard not to. Vampires now move more or less openly in society (one of the underlying themes of the show are various explorations of “being out”). But Bill is the first vampire Sookie’s ever met: he has just come into the bar where she works, and she’s overheard some people thinking Bad Thoughts about him. When they leave, she follows them outside, and finds them draining Bill of his blood (which has become a popular street drug called “V”). (And this clip is also NSFW.)

Enjoy! And if you like what you see, I can highly recommend season 1 on DVD.

When something’s broken

Earlier this year, our beloved Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down, and since then we have been taking the Seattle Times, which I find much less interesting as a newspaper. Although I appreciate very much how hard they are working to make PI-orphan readers feel welcome; they even added many of the PI comics to their comics page, which is exactly the kind of thing that matters, you know? Any measure of control and input and respect that we can give one another during times of change makes a difference.

The Times, like every other newspaper in the US, has cut back on its arts coverage in general and its book reviews in particular, and so I have taken less pleasure of late in my Sunday paper reading. But I enjoyed last Sunday, not so much because of the specific content as because of the internal conversational trails it led me down. Perhaps I’m just in a mood to personally connect with ideas. Hmm, which one might simply read as a less obnoxious way of saying It’s all about me!, but perhaps you will make the kinder assumption. These days I tend to be both harder on myself, by which I mean more truthful in my self-analysis, and also more accepting of those truths. I’m guessing that acceptance is necessary to stay relatively coherent even as I become more and more aware of my own fractures.

And so I was struck by this review of a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. The reviewer didn’t like the book, and it sounds as though I might not either; but I was struck by the truth (in my perception) of the pull quote:

What ordinary people once made, they buy: and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.
 
— from Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

And it occurred to me this is one more way in which we have contrived as a culture to give ourselves less control of change, and to… how do I put this? To deify expertise to the point that in order to be “special” by the standards of our culture, we have to be experts at something. We achieve standing in our communities by having something specific to contribute; but within my lifetime the standard for being a fully active member of a community was that we all pitched in with whatever was needed, because to some extent we all could.

Recently, members of my high school class have been talking about taking on a community construction project (building a free dental clinic) as a way of giving back to the town where our school is based. I think it’s a great idea; and I am struck by the number of people who want to participate but “don’t know one end of a power tool from the other” or “can pull nails with the best of them!” Et cetera. No disrespect intended to those folks: what I’m pointing at is not Oh, they can’t build stuff, but rather the readiness with which they downplay the general knowledge they may have, and/or the lack of assumption that if they turn up and someone shows them how, they can probably do a lot of what is needed. These are smart people: so why the apparent lack of confidence in their ability to become successful students once again?

I myself do know one end of a table saw from another. I’m no master carpenter or electrician or plumber, but when something breaks in my house, I try to fix it; and often I’m happy to find that I can. I was going to say happily surprised, but that wouldn’t be true: I go into these situations with the expectation that I can learn enough to decide fairly quickly whether I can fix it or not; and if I think I can, then I try. I’ve made a complete mess of a few things (let’s not talk about the time I tried to replace the motherboard in Nicola’s computer, thank god she’s a forgiving person), and a complete success of others (I fixed a Horrible Grinding Sound in the dishwasher just last week).

The internet is an enormous blessing in this regard; you can find out how to do just about anything if you’re willing to spend a little time with Google. But I grew up with an engineer father and an artisan mother; they fixed things, assembled stuff, made things from scratch, and taught me enough theories to make me feel confident that I could do it too. And so when I was offered a job in a theatre shop one summer, I took it; when the furniture comes all in pieces in a box, I put it together; and when my WordPress upgrade completely breaks the back end of my website to the point that I cannot access a single administrative function (that was yesterday’s fun), I figure out how to get in the side door and fix the problem.

This is not because I’m so special; in fact, the point is that I’m not. Mine is the attitude of the generalist and the student. I don’t try to fix stuff because I think it’s nobler or more authentic, I do it because I want to manage my own changes if I can. I want to know that I can control my own environment if I choose to. Sometimes that’s a fool’s game, for sure; and some of it comes from insecurity on my part, my knee-jerk response in crisis that no one else is going to take care of me, so I’d better be able to do it myself.

But I can’t do everything myself. And I’m part of a community, finally, of family and friends and neighbors for whom pooling skills, pitching in, doing what we can, is just part of the deal. We don’t have to all do everything well; but it’s not enough to just do “what we’re best at.” If that were the case, I guess I’d be writing everyone’s term papers for them, or something. But I cook for people when they are sick; I collect their mail and put out their trash when they are on vacation. I drive them and their dying cat to the emergency hospital. I paint trim, I weed, I run errands. I give communication process advice. I do what I can to help people manage their changes. And they do that for me.

And I think that if I didn’t have the attitude that it’s worth a try to fix things myself, maybe I wouldn’t have the impetus to try to help other people when their things need fixing. Maybe I’d learn to be helpless, to depend always on expertise as opposed to intelligence, or kindness, or community. Maybe I’d stop trying to fix myself too; maybe I’d assume that I couldn’t, or that having parts of myself be broken was the opposite of being whole. I don’t know: I am who I am, and so the rest is just guessing. But it’s something I’m thinking about.

Human politics

From The White House website, here is a slideshow of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East and Europe. If you take the time to look at the photos, you’ll see both public and behind-the-scenes moments. You’ll see the President of the United States out in the world with the sun on his face, looking calm and confident. It makes such a change from watching GWB carry his fear around him like a toxic cloud.

I think White House Chief Photographer Pete Souza and his staff are doing an amazing job. I enjoy visiting the White House photostream sometimes. I enjoy the idea that I have a window — even a controlled one — through which I may see glimpses of the people of my government doing their jobs.

I am happy that the administration is doing so much to be transparent, and to provide as much of this kind of access as possible. If you haven’t visited the White House website and blog, I encourage you to check them out. Great resources. The government is busy: and even if you don’t like everything (or anything) they are doing, when did you ever before have a nearly-real-time clue about the process, the input, the decisions and the people responsible?

I’m thinking about writing a letter to the President. Not about what he should do with health care or federal marriage rights for everyone or the environment (although I certainly have opinions) — but rather to tell him what being American feels like for me right now, and what my hopes are for my country and the people who live here, and all the people who are affected by what we do (which is pretty much everyone in some way, no?). I have never been moved to communicate with a President in this particular way — as if he were an actual human being with whom I feel much in common: someone who is as smart as me, as committed as I am to being the best people we can, who takes as much joy from parts of his life as I do from mine and would like other people to have that experience too.

I don’t know — it sounds arrogant, put like that, as if my standards for myself are somehow relevant to the political leadership of a world superpower. People don’t have to be like me in order to run a country well: there are a zillion reasons why I’d be a crap president. And yet, it’s extraordinary for me to believe that the person in that role might actually have some of the same standards for himself that I do. It makes him real to me in a way that no politician has ever been for me; and it makes the politics more real, too.

The Obama administration is working overtime to humanize themselves to us and the rest of the world. Imagine if politics could become a human thing again. Imagine what we could all do.