Month: November 2013

Reading the Riot Act … in poetry time

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“Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind —   with one thought less, each year.”
-Ezra Pound, “Portrait d’Une Femme”

I recently used the expression “reading the Riot Act” and then felt compelled to think about it and where this expression came from. How many expressions are we using every day without really having a clear answer as to where they came from? Many months ago, I referred to “Big Brother” watching us, and, if I remember correctly, the colleague to whom I was speaking replied with something about reality TV shows. (I made sure to inform her that Big Brother comes from the must-read book, Orwell‘s 1984, and months later supplied her with a copy, which she devoured and loved.) Actually the same woman and I had a talk the other day in which she described the stereotypical (and yes, it’s totally derogatory) “Shylock”, so I mentioned “Shylock” – and again got to explain the origins of this reference (as well as the reference to the oft-cited demanding one’s pound of flesh). Oh, how much of this language and its complex web of references is attributable to Shakespeare? Okay, not Big Brother, but … the English language is practically sewn together with Shakespearean expressions and imagery.

I never consider myself that literary. I am not the kind of person, in my imagination, who makes literary references (neither the highbrow kind that only certain people will “get” nor the everyday “everyone should know this” kind – lately it seems that the only reference anyone makes that anyone gets is from pop culture rubbish “lit”). Despite this self-evaluation, I tend to find a poem or line from a poem (or at least a song) that fits to every situation. And so much of it ties into memories.

I was thinking for example of a former classmate, Frank. Someone I genuinely liked and respected, but one among several of the high school era people I knew who just decided to go away and live a life disconnected from the past. I gave a lot of thought today to how much he despised being forced to read and analyze poetry in our senior lit class. Symbolism seemed the most ludicrous thing ever. He was profoundly … almost disgusted by William Carlos Williams and the reverence our teachers afforded this guy and his red wheelbarrow and white chickens (not to be confused with the chicken that my current company dubiously had in some of its ads).

We had an assignment in which we were assigned a poet to research, and Frank was given Ezra Pound. (He could have chosen another poet but probably would not have wanted to invest the time to select one.) I distinctly recall Frank claiming that there was a reference in one of Pound’s poems that read: “the monkey screams”. Where did he get this? Perhaps from Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (“The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.”)

One year in high school we also had to analyze Pound’s “Portrait d’Une Femme” as a part of our (nerd festival, in which I participated willingly and gleefully) academic decathlon competition. At the time the poem held very little meaning for me, but over the years has assumed a bittersweet kind of importance, as I recognize in it bits of myself. Poetry and music both have a way of reaching me (and probably all people) in different ways at different times. This poem seemed so remote when I was young and had no life experience, and then suddenly, these references to being second always and yet preferring it – or the final lines: “In the slow float of differing light and deep,/No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,/Nothing that’s quite your own/Yet this is you.”

It simply cuts – and cuts the right way, however painful the realizations that come with it. I don’t know another way to put it. I know many people find poetry completely unrelatable, but for me, it is alive and takes on new lives each time I read it. Much like these expressions we adopt into our vernacular … and forget how they got there and maybe what they originally meant.

All of life is a transitional time

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I wrote recently about a period in my life that ended up being the precursor to a big, life-altering change. I did not know it at the time – I was going in one direction that seemed to be what I wanted but turned out to be more like where the current was carrying me. A friend who was in my life during that period and came back into my life in recent years made a comment on the blog post, stating that she remembers that time and how transitional it was for both of us. While she is quite right, I actually found that I got completely lost in thought earlier this evening, walking in the premature darkness (that’s Scandinavian winter life for you), analyzing this very same idea that all of life is transitional.

Some periods are more transitional than others. Some people fight the tide of change while others ride it. Some make excuses or proudly announce, “It was such a transitional period”, as if this reasoning can provide cover for any number of bad decisions or indiscretions. Now, the older I get, the more I see, the more I realize all of life is a transitional period. In the slow creep of day-to-day life, maybe it does not seem like we are in the middle of some “transition” – but if you have anything dynamic happening at all, it’s going to be somewhat transitional. Especially if you welcome and invite constant change, as I do. (Perhaps it is the unwelcome and unintentional change that is harder to face.)

What prompted these thoughts about life as a transitional period was rumination about what to write in my annual year-end letter. (Technically, I view my Halloween letter, which accompanies my Halloween mix soundtrack CD, as my “year-end” letter. This year, given the collection of more music I have amassed and the technical difficulties of the CDs I did make and send out for Halloween, I am sending out a “revision” – I also could not resist the maddeningly, irresistibly cute series of Swedish Christmas postage stamps this year… needed an excuse to buy a whole bunch and use them – can I blame it on the fact that it is a “transitional period”?) I contemplated the fact that this year has been a series of disappointing events, mostly clouded by a hazy, grey aura, a good deal of (often self-imposed) loneliness (not because of a lack of people but more because of a lack of understanding and deep connections with others – and we thought that deep-seated sense of being misunderstood was a wholly adolescent affliction!) and a strange, ineffable sense of longing (for what I don’t really know). I considered writing something about how this has been a particularly difficult year full of change and transitions that were not what I expected or hoped for. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I write and repeat something in a very similar vein in my year-end letter every year. Is each year becoming qualitatively worse? Is each year a constant pit of disappointment? No. It changes. But there is consistency in the fact that it is all in a state of (often slow-motion) flux and transition.

Perhaps the period my friend referred to was more tumultuous than life feels now – certainly for her, if not for me, but life is always tumultuous. I try to remind myself of this when I ride the tram each morning and evening. I look around at the other listless-seeming riders, people whose lives are mysteries to me, trying to imagine their stories, wondering if they have always lived in this city. Have they had the adventures they dreamt of? Or is this what they wanted… or did they ever stop to think they could or should have done something else? I could never have been content just staying in one place and living without major upheavals and transitions (good and bad) – but for some people, a life with that kind of uncertainty is no life at all. I wonder also when the tram riders look at me, do they imagine a whole life story that obviously will not have one shred of fact in it?

Insomnia: “Sorry, I quit. I need to go play with baby tigers.”

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My mom’s friend, who operates a wild cat sanctuary in western Washington, is getting two baby tigers soon. I have never wanted to return to Washington state so urgently. I feel like hopping on a plane next week. Wouldn’t it be fun to call my workplace and say, “Sorry, I quit. I need to go play with baby tigers”? Exaggeration, yes. Unrealistic (at least the playing with baby tigers part), no. I never thought I would be able to say that… it is not unrealistic to think I could play with baby tigers!

Of course this sounds all the more tempting because a little bit of overtired mania is overtaking the more logical parts of my brain.

Husbands & wives – Communication patterns, anesthesiology and double standards

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It is a bit counterintuitive to start a post on marital communications by writing about preventing perioperative hypothermia but that is where my observations begin. My employer organized a webinar – the live event was held at KU Leuven but we had a broadcast in the HQ tonight. The webinar consisted of a series of lectures given by the superstars of the relatively niche area of patient warming (something that matters mostly to anesthesiologists and anesthesiology-related O.R. personnel) – Dr. Andrea Kurz of the Cleveland Clinic and Dr. Elke van Gerven of University of Leuven – and Dr. Marc Van De Velde, also of U of Leuven as part of the Q&A session.

Before the lectures began, a colleague sat down next to me and started talking. Soon a big bowl of candy was passed around, and the colleague took several pieces, announcing, “My wife does not let me eat candy.”

Suddenly it struck me that almost every married man I know will make these kinds of statements: “My wife won’t let me do/see/eat…”. No one really questions this; they may laugh at it, may make an offhand remark about the controlling nature of the wife. Yet if the reverse were true, and a wife were stating that her husband will not let her do whatever it is she wants to  (certainly if she were to phrase it just that way – as if she were being forbidden), it would be met with exclamations of spousal abuse, subjugation, etc. etc. Kind of a double standard. Not always – there is no such thing as always.

The webinar, by the way, was quite interesting. As a non-clinician without a life sciences background who often has to write about all of these medical issues, I really enjoy informative sessions like this. I get excited in almost an outsized way about learning things like this and filling my head with ideas about maintaining normothermia and strategies for preventing inadvertent hypothermia even if it will never have practical applications in my life.

Be careful where you stick it – Words change meaning

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Watching television news and pseudo-news à la The Daily Show, I hear a lot of misplaced modifiers. I also see them in print:

  • the former lesbian tennis star
  • the former French president
  • seeking a junior Chinese copywriter

These bother me because they change the intended meaning. I am fairly sure the former tennis star is still a lesbian; the former president is still French and the junior copywriter sought is still capable of using Chinese (what would a “junior Chinese” be, exactly?).

I’m fussy, but clarity is meaningful.

Letting go is not failure

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“Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon coeur?”

–Verlaine

Years ago, in my youth, I spent a few years with a man who was considerably older than me. Now I find myself older than he was when I first met him. The time that has passed between our entanglement and now has been so full of ups, downs, aches, pains, losses, triumphs – all the stuff that fills a life – and mostly things that have nothing to do with him. I write him birthday and holiday cards that have not been met with any kind of response in well over a decade now. I don’t think there are any hard feelings (?) – we remained friends after we split, and while he might (have) harbor(ed) some kind of resentment about the things I planned to do – that he was actively helping to underwrite (things I never actually finished), I would not imagine that he went silent for those reasons. I figure that, like most people, he moved on, as I moved on. We didn’t have anything left to say, and the more time passes and more experience occurs, the more like strangers these characters, once intimates, become.

(And my failing to follow through on goals I had then … well, I am not terribly proud of it, but I am happy that I made the hard choices that led me to where I am now. I cannot imagine how unhappy I would be if I had stuck to my original plan. It is not as though every moment or even half the difficult journey of the last 15 years has been happy or hopeful, but I have taken the path that has given me the most valuable challenges, the most happiness, given me the most opportunity for personal development and the road that enabled a more secure future given all the things that came to light about me in the years after we split up. He was fond of telling me what I did not know because I was, in his somewhat condescending words – which infuriated me at the time, “just a little girl”. It turns out, he was right. I was in my early 20s. I knew a lot of things but not nearly as much as I thought I knew. I was trying to make decisions for a life and life path I didn’t end up actually wanting. I would hope if he had any lingering resentment about anything, he would consider my youth and the fact that he could see, as I learned, that I was unformed and immature.)

Long ago and far away. Years of silence. Most of these years have passed without my thinking much of him at all, other than to be grateful for all the things he did for me and taught me or to wonder what and how he is doing today. Yet, lately he has appeared in my dreams all the time, and this has been going on for months. This makes me feel a strong urge to talk to him.

I think he springs to mind because I believe he was in a phase when we split in which he was hoping to meet someone with whom to have children. I don’t know if that ever happened, but it would be sad if it hasn’t. I never thought I wanted any myself, in part because I have always been under the impression that I could not have them. Now, after roller-coaster-esque years of tempting fate and enduring more losses in this realm than I can (or want to) count, two (runaway) trains of thought run parallel in my mind.

In one, I consider where he might be in this journey since he had seemingly wanted this outcome for himself (children). (I make it sound so scientific, writing “children” parenthetically as if I am adding detail to the information about the control group in a clinical study.) If he has not reached this stage, does he consider it a regret or, worse, a kind of failure?

In the other, I consider whether he imagines I am a failure (for failing to follow my original path to its end, i.e. law school in the US). I never felt like a failure for choosing to give up on something that made me miserable and would set the stage for a lifetime of future misery. At the same time, I find myself, especially at the tail end of this gloomy and grey year, beating myself up and feeling like a failure for my biological failures — and yet these are things over which I have no control.

I had to toil to finally conclude that I cannot put myself through it any more, and to forgive the fact that I finally have to let go (and accept that it is not a failure).

Worry overtakes

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I had one of those days recently that just made everything seem so hopeless. Such days happen. I want to give them a name. Like “Snickerdoodle Days” – harkening back to the days when all I had to think about was passing my driver’s licensing test, school and listening to new music with friends. And baking snickerdoodles every weekend, of course. Back in the end of the 1980s or the early 1990s. Listening to “Harold and Joe” in the tail-end of the goodness of The Cure’s musical career. I reminisce clearly about this song, playing on a mix tape from my friend Gary as I crossed the field from the main campus to the “vocational building” for my ill-fated drafting class. Or just, in general, “…it was acceptable in the 80s… it was acceptable at the time…” (Calvin Harris).

Sometimes, if I have a drink – since I don’t drink – I become quite emotional. Feelings wash over me in a way that convinces me that I would be one of those “sad drunks”.

I am thinking of the verb “to miss” – against the term “to be missing”. I read something that stated “I am just missing Bob in Skype”, which was unclear. We’re back to the challenge of how to phrase it when you want to state that you miss someone versus what you should state when you want to say that something is missing/not there/lacking. Does “I am just missing Bob in Skype” mean that he is not signed in (and you miss talking to him)? Or is this missing him in the sense that he is missing, e.g. he never subscribed to Skype and you are missing him from your contact list? Like a missing child, a missing puzzle piece – something that is not there versus something that you have a sentimental sense of loss for. The sense of loss and the idea of losing people and of murder – I recently published the recipe for some vanilla cupcakes filled with cherry “blood” filling and some candy knives as decoration – this rushes to mind. All the loss, untimely and senseless, as described below, or the ideas of murder – e.g, a former colleague who was accused of murdering a neighbor in their common parking garage. I don’t ultimately know what happened there, but it is still the loss of a life – both the victim and potentially that of the former colleague.

I have recently moved my blog to a new platform (the brilliant WordPress). I had been using MyOpera because it was handy – I worked at Opera for so long, it seemed like a smart idea to just use the community blog… but I always had the nagging feeling in my mind that it would one day meet its demise. Like most things – it was too altruistic an effort – and a real effort – to maintain such a community – for a company that is increasingly profit obsessed. I moved the whole thing over, but I don’t know that I love the layout/theme I chose. But it will do for now. Ideally I would get the whole thing set up and designed for my own domains, but I am just time-challenged. MyOpera was never ideal – quite ugly and no one had ever heard of it. My new choice is still a wee bit ugly, but at least WordPress is hardly going to collapse. Either way, my choice is a little bit ugly. Not unlike the whole Wolf Eel idea.

This year has been such an empty, gray space. It started with major change, but has just felt like a daily grind, churning through the abyss of dull daily life with the accompanying annoyances – but they have been frequent. Since the start of the year, there have been so many deaths, illnesses, big changes – so much unexpected and unpleasant change. I go through so much of my own completely ON my own – and then become so completely overwhelmed by the issues affecting other people – the suicide of a young former colleague (a new mother), the death of a friend’s young wife, the death of a former colleague’s young child – and then the catastrophic illness of another former colleague and an accident that nearly took the life of a family friend (he fell off a ladder when he was home alone). Or the murder accusation about the former colleague, mentioned in an earlier post about cupcakes. “Murder Tonight in the Trailer Park” by the Cowboy Junkies springs to mind, only it’s murder tonight in the parking lot, not trailer park, in this case. And then I think further on loss – not personal but to the artistic community – the recent death of Lou Reed. And I think then of how much of an impact Lou Reed and his creativity had, how much they contributed. Stream of consciousness.

Not to add the upcoming, somewhat sudden, voluntary deployment abroad of my brother – military. Worry.

The nature of worry springs to mind. Worry overtakes me so easily.

Pumpkin spice cupcakes with pumpkin spice filling

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pumpkin cake

Pumpkin spice cake with pumpkin spice pudding

Pumpkin spice cupcakes are only improved with pumpkin spice pudding as a filling. Topped with the very yucky but totally necessary pumpkin marshmallowy candy, these really represent both Halloween and autumn.

candy corn and candy pumpkins

Yucky Halloween candy

Check out the pumpkin spice cupcake recipe. The only difference will be the filling and frosting.

pumpkin spice cupcakes

Pumpkin spice cupcakes all ready for Halloween

Feeling stabby – Vanilla cupcakes, cherry blood filling and knives

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feeling stabby

Vanilla cupcakes with cherry “blood” filling decorated with small candy knives

A number of years ago, I worked with a guy who was accused of stabbing another person to death in a parking garage. He spent some time in jail but was eventually released – I suppose there was a lack of evidence. I don’t know all the details of the story or the case. But I can’t look at these small candy knives and not think of him, regardless of his guilt or innocence.

Vanilla cupcake recipe

2 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 cup softened butter

1 1/4 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

3/4 cups milk

Preheat oven to 375F/180-185C. Line a cupcake pan with liners.

Whisk dry ingredients together in one bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth and fluffy. Add eggs, vanilla and 1/4 cup of the milk. Beat for a few minutes until the mixture is light. Alternately beat in dry ingredient mix and the remaining half cup of milk. Half-fill each cupcake liner.

Bake for 15-20 minutes (check for doneness by inserting a toothpick into the center of cupcakes; a clean toothpick means the cupcake is ready). Cool.

When cooled, hollow out the center of the cupcakes, discard the middle parts but retain the very top to recover the filled cupcake. Fill each cupcake with cherry jam or cherry pie filling and top with the reserved cupcake lid.

At this point you could also frost the cupcake but the “bloody knife effect” is best achieved by simply sprinkling more jam/filling messily on top of the cupcake and plunging the candy knife into the cupcake or flat on top of the cupcake.

feeling stabby vanilla cupcakes

Vanilla cupcakes with cherry filling

Candy corn & cappuccino cupcakes

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candy corn

Disgusting candy corn and candy pumpkins

The Halloween bake included some cappuccino cupcakes, which were decorated for Halloween. I covered them with chocolate frosting and topped with decorations. Not really exciting decorations but I did use candy corn – a very disgusting concoction that is highly popular this time of year in the US. It was sort of funny – I brought the leftover candy corn and little pumpkin-shaped candies made of the same gross materials designed to be a kind of corn syrup marshmallowy thing to work, thinking no one would be interested in this disgustingness. But an American colleague was so excited that she wished I had an even bigger secret stash of the stuff somewhere else.

cappuccino choc candy corn

Cappuccino cupcakes with chocolate frosting and candy corn topping