I have not laughed this hard in a while

I am addicted to the Daily Show with John Stewart, nothing better than intellectual, political fun. Watch this clip where Jason Jones talks to a pastor who believes Obama is the antichrist and another who believes he is a second Hitler. It is so absurd that I cannot stop laughing.

Can pants be a mistake of epic proportions?

I am out of commission and cannot move, my medication makes me dizzy, so reading is not really an option, so what do I do: Day time television - ugh, I'd better be sleeping, really. So I happened across this show called 'What not to wear' and I am disgusted. Some people called in the TV crew because they thought their coworker was looking to frumpy. They filmed her secretly and while looking at the footage laughed their head off. The only thing evaluated is what this person is wearing. I cannot stand the attitude of the co-hosts making fun of their victim. She gets brought to New York for a overhaul and she has to throw out ALL her clothing, while she is on the verge of tears, because she loves some of it. She gets some rules explained and has to head out finding clothing for herself. I think this show is unbelievably shallow and stupid, this persons personality, likes and dislikes are thrown overboard, made fun off and she is has to conform to some external norm. Of course the show justifies itself by every people being so happy with their transformation. And if they can stick to the new rules, the hosts are 'so proud', though they have to scaled her for wearing sensible shoes once.

If somebody feels unhappy with their wardrobe and actually wants and seeks advice and somebody who has a good eye and good people skills takes this person shopping, that can be great. I had an optician pick perfect glasses for me that I would never have picked up myself, but that did not include ridicule or ambushes by camera. There is absolutely nothing wrong with make-overs in general. How about collaboration on a clothing analysis instead of shaming people into change and using words but awful, ugly, hideous and laughing stock? Do unflattering pants really fall in the category of 'mistake of epic proportion' or would not the Iraq war fit better into that category?

A show with sensitive nice hosts that really find out who the person is and work out together what lines, silhouettes and colors work, what looks good, but also feels right. I take issue with making fun of people and making a show out of it, validating such shallow behavior. It is not that I cannot see some value in looking appropriate, after all that is the first impression we give to people and there is always some kind of judgment involved. For me it is actually very important what I wear, because it has to do with how I feel. Clothing is an expression of myself and I spend time and money on it, it is my very own unique style though and rather quirky - it is me. I can just picture what these superficial people on the show would want me to wear and I would absolutely hate it, because it would not be related to the person I am inside.

At the moment I am annoyed by beautiful people

As I am sitting here and watching the Academy Awards, I cannot help but think about something that was mentioned in the show "the human face" that I watched on PBS a few years back and saw a bit of it again this week. They were talking about beauty and the golden triangle and one very interesting fact was mentioned. It used to be that when we had relative small and constant social circles around us and no mass media, there would be few 'perfect' people - in the sense of beauty - that we ever would encounter. But with movies, television, magazines and other mass media, beautiful faces surround us everywhere. The problem is that this becomes a norm, a norm that normal people can actually not reach and therefore is rather absurd. This leads to most people feeling inadequate and people go to great length to try to be more beautiful, well at least on the outside. I am very happy that my children so far do not seem to waste even on tiny thought on this, even though there are a lot of children around them who think fashion and fame are very important topics.

I have made a very conscious effort to never show my children any kind of unhappiness that I feel in respect to whatever shortcoming is feel I have regarding my looks. I was raised with a mother that was always dieting, always wanted me to do the same and was who was successfully instilling in me the conviction of being ugly. It was very important to not do this to my children. Of course there is nothing wrong with beauty, beauty is beautiful, what can I say, but when did it become a virtue, something that we need to reward and aspire to? Why is it a value placed about things like integrity, intelligence or creativity? I am actually getting to the point where the multitude of beautiful people is getting annoying. I simply cannot stand the fuss about models, the pretty faces trying to sell you beauty products, the huge interest in what these beautiful people are up to. Why is this so important? I think this is one of the reasons I am so drawn to british television shows, which seem so wonderfully normal and real. Interestingly, while I watch the Academy Awards, it seems that all the people behind the camera just look like very normal people as well, I like that. Well, gotta go back to the show and see how many Oscars 'Slumdog Millionaire' can sweep. What a wonderful movie!

Nutty Vanilla Muffins

This is life, one day it is about death and the other about muffins - the bizarre absurdities of reality. Once I was the queen of muffins and before one could decide what kind they wanted, I already had them done. Never the same and often adventurous, my best sweet muffins were triple chocolate muffins with fresh raspberries, I made them for a picnic in the park while enjoying the Glendale Orchestra and champagne. On the savory spectrum the yummiest is probably the bacon/blue cheese muffin. My children have a new favorite though and I had to make them a few times now: Nutty Vanilla Muffins. Here is the recipe for 24, because I bought this wonderful professional heavy duty muffin pan at the Williams Sonoma outlet.

Mix 2.5 cups of milk, 3 eggs and 1 stick of melted butter and add to a mix of 2 cups whole white wheat flour, 2 cups all purpose flour, 1 cup ground almond, 1/2 cup ground flax seeds, 1 1/2 cups whole hazelnuts, 2 Tbsp baking powder, a good dash of salt, the vanilla of one vanilla bean and 1/2 cup of homemade vanilla sugar*. Don't overmix, fill into (unbleached) muffin papers, about 3/4 full and bake at 375 degrees for about 15 minutes. They are perfect with a vanilla infused black tea, really!

* I have a jar filled with fine sugar and whenever I scrape vanilla out of a vanilla bean, I put the sticks into the sugar and every now and then I fill up the sugar again. I keep this going for years and it makes amazing vanilla sugar. Vanilla extract works well too, but it needs to be mixed with the liquids. Any form of vanilla works, as long as it is real vanilla and not some artificial flavor.

My uncle

Last week an uncle of mine died. I had not spoken to him in 5 years, since we had a fall out regarding inheritance questions, like many families experience. In the fall, when his bad health was taking a turn to even worse, my mother decided to let bygones be bygones and visited with him. Even though the things of the past were not resolved, it is important she got to see him, as they were very close as children. My mother was just 1.5 years older and felt as his protector. She is holding his hand in the picture below.

My memories of him hark back to my own childhood. He lived with his family upstairs in the house of my grandmother, where I spent a lot of time and consequently upstairs with my cousins. He worked at the local bank, where I sometimes went to visit him and he would take me downstairs and hand me a coke. remember the small greenish glass bottles with the real taste of coke before recipe changes and corn syrup? I liked visiting at the bank, he always had freebies like fantastic ball point pens and all this materials for house and interior design. His workday was like clock work, coming and going precisely and I remember the sound of his steps on the stairs, because his prosthetic leg made a certain noise.

He was not a man of many words, when I would come and visit after having been away at school for a while or maybe a year out of the country, he would mutter something like "ah, back in the area" and that would be it and it would be enough.

My uncle has been quite sick and in and out of the hospital for a while. Strangely, he died on my aunts 60th birthday, as if he decided it was time to go, time for her to care for herself and not him, which she has done for so long. Sometimes it just is time for people to go, knowing it does not make it less sad, but easier to accept. I do not know if I ever would have seen him again anyway, but even so, his death is bringing back little memories of my childhood and reminds me of the deaths of my other uncles and so I do feel some kind of melancholy and sadness. And in a weird way I am sad about having a family in which members are not really emotionally close, where love, loyalty and selflessness are not daily occurences.

"incorrigible negligence" - Bohuslav Martinu

The Worcester Chamber Music Society gave a wonderful concert at Assumption College in Worcester. It was a very interesting concert with the following program:

Martinu: Trio for Flute, Cello & Piano



Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 13 in C Major
Ravel: Chansons madécasses
Mendelssohn: Octet

I had never heard of Bohuslav Martinu, a Bohemian czech composer, but was enthralled when I heard the trio, a very lovely piece, written in 1944. It is a very melodic neoclassical piece with a hint of modern. Even though I cannot tell why, it did sound very czech to me. My friend and I were reminded - in a roundabout way - of writers like Kafka and Kundera and their wonderful way with words. I never gave that much thought, but of course music and literature have quite a lot in common in the sense that there is melody, rhythm, timing, voices and the likes.

Martinu was born in 1890 in Bohemia in a bell tower - how fascinating. He played with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra until he left for Paris in 1923. In 1941 he came to the USA. What struck me as most interesting though, that shortly after enrolling at the Prague Conservatory in 1906, he was thrown out for "incorrigible negligence", what ever that actually means for a violinist. Being 16 years old and coming to Prague, maybe he partied to hard and was always late for class? I have no idea and can only guess. He kept on going with independent studies though and persisted. That is a lesson right there.

Valentine's - I can't help myself

Growing up Valentine's day seemed to be something made up by some association of flower shop owners. When winter was slowly winding down, signs and ads for Valentine's would show up at the florist shops. I remember buying flowers for my mother once or twice. Even as a child I had a dislike for holidays like Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, they seemed contrived and marketing driven. My mother and I would often surprise each other with little tokens of thoughts for the other, a little chocolate, a flower, some licorice, a nice candle - whatever we came across and thought the other would like it. We never needed a special day. How much meaning does it have anyway, when it is mandated by a holiday that comes across as being invented by Hallmark to boost sales. Flowers on Valentine's are obligatory, any normal day of the week, they are much more special in my view. Yes, you guessed it, no red hearts celebration in this household.

That works pretty well until children go to school and have to bring a Valentine for each child. In theory that is actually a nice gesture, children have to learn this somehow, but it turned out to be an exchange of yet-more-candy and ugly little mass-merchandised cards with superheroes and Disney characters, outside of few exceptions. I have a rather difficult time seeing something meaningful in that. So every year, my children had to craft Valentine's cards and put thought and love into it.

Last year I had found marble hearts and had the kids write the names of the kids on them, they were a huge hit and truly nice. So with that precedent, I found myself last night in the store, trying to get something for S to take to class (J had already crafted something a while ago), I absolutely could not get one of those boxes with cards, I was physically unable to pick it up and purchase it. Well, I am a bit of an all-or-nothing person and I can rarely do something that is not up to my standard. So even though I was very tired and had hardly any time left, I had to do something nice. So when I saw the rack with flower seeds, I knew that was what I was looking for. Admitted, it was expensive compared to a box of generic cards and it still needed me to do design, print and assembly, but I loved the outcome. I just cannot make it easy for myself, I just can't. It is worth it though, because I am sure that there are always a handful of children that remember these out of the ordinary Valentine's.

Building a xylophone

At our elementary school, one of the cool units in third grade is the physics of sound. As part of that unit they have to build an instrument to show that they understand the terms they have learned and they have to demonstrate their instrument. Last year J built a stick fiddle, which never stayed tuned, but was cool otherwise. S decided to build a simple xylophone this year and I found these plans online. They have a lot of plans for home build instruments.

She did all the measuring and cutting of the conduit tubing and the pvc pipe. It is pretty neat to see an eight-year-old girl handle power tools, clamps and a measure like as if she has done it since years. I guess the apple landed pretty close to the tree here. Maybe if I play my cards right, she can become my apprentice and help with the 4 shelves that are on the carpentry to-do-list.



Of course measuring, marking and cutting for the first time, the pitch is not exactly on the mark, but for doing this with very little adult interference, I am amazed at the result. And this is her very first try on the final instrument:



During my search for plans - i.e. length of pipe for pitch - I found this guy who sells plans for building a 3 octave marimba and the children want to build one during April vacation. Since I had always kind of wanted to have one, I blame it on that Orff music education I had, I am easily convinced. This would be a fun project and I could teach some more wood working and the handling of some more power tools (oh yeah!).

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I just joined a book group and the book for our next meeting is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I though I share some of my thoughts.

it is a dark novel in a dismal and disturbing world with difficult images and gritty realism. The story is about a father and his son traveling to the coast set in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of any life but some people, ash and ashen snow. It is not a typical post-apocalyptic book though, the reader is not told any reasons for the state the world is in, we all can imagine many possibilities in today's world. This dark and inhabitable world works as a back drop by reducing everything to the bare minimum, allowing the focus on survival and relationship between father and son.

I did not care for McCarthy's style of writing. Though the sparse punctuation was actually befitting, his prose is a strange mix of minimalism and a constructed style that seems over thought and over worked. I found the incomplete and fragmented sentences very distracting. It made the reading process an arduous one, filled with frustrated rereading and prohibited fluidity and really diving into the story. 

The surroundings are well described and felt, and the sounds and visuals are vivid. The dark nights with the terrible frozen cold are interestingly juxtaposed with the movements of the twirling ashes. The people and places though stay undefined on purpose, the reader can gleam a tiny bit of insights into the father's history by his dreams and thoughts, but they are kept to a minimum because it does not matter anymore. 

The story line presents itself intentionally repetitive and tedious. It was a bit annoying to me how they always found food on the brink of starvation. Regarding the end it was clear that the father had to die and come to terms with the inability to end the life of his child and instead leave him alone. What I did not care for was this wholesome good family show up and take the son. It was contrived and convenient and it was also sappy and not appropriate in the context of the story. When we lived in California, we often were invited to screenings to see movies before the final editing, to see how people react to the story and if they understand the characters, but mostly to make changes to it to widen its appeal. Resulting is often a supposedly better, but ultimately bad ending (think Pretty Woman) that gets pasted on, never really fitting though. 

One of the themes in the book is good vs. bad. The son is good, pure and innocent (yet always scared), the father declares himself as good, but is he? The father slowly turns immoral, putting the survival of his son and himself above helping other people, survival of the fittest. One could argue that in a world like that it would the only way to be, but since everybody is eventually going to die anyway, would that survival above all not be futile?The son is clearly disturbed by the father's inability to see that. Even though father and son categorize the world into good guys and bad guys, the world is not that black and white, it is grey - figuratively and literally -  indeed. The question about what is good and what is bad, forces itself out of the book into the readers head. Concerning morality and ethics, do the values from gone civilizations still hold true?

Like any story set in a post apocalyptic world it reminds of what is truly important, leaves one with an uneasy feeling, also confronts us with the truth that what we have might be gone in an instant and the ultimately the only thing that matters and lasts, even outlasts death is love and coupled with love are hope and faith. If anything this book was about love and about hope. The hope carried me through to the end, at which there is nothing, the goal that carries father and son forward does not get rewarded. It is a let down for the protagonists as well as the reader, though I was not excepting anything different. But in the most dire situations it is hope against hope that gives strength to carry on. It is a world with only one certainty: death and that is a parallel to our lives, even though we have food and shelter and families, in the end that is the only certain thing there is and it seems that between the fragments of hope and the knowledge that there are two bullets in the revolver is where this story is relevant to everybody. Ultimately everybody struggles and if there would not be a sliver of hope and/or faith, we could just give up to live. In the book the deep love for his son makes the father keep going. The mother chose the other alternative and killed herself, leaving the father with no other choice as to stay alive and protect his son. Death itself can be a hope though when things are tough and the book shows how that is a dilemma parents are in, because children take that type of hope away. I am not sure I can adequately express my point here.

I liked this book on some levels and really disliked it on others. Obviously I feel ambiguous about this novel, I think it is interesting and is definitely a great book to think and talk about. I have a few doubts though about the importance it has been given. It left me depressed, I did not experience the uplift that a lot of fans had the joy to feel, if anything I was actually disappointed because it did not give me any profound insight or revelation, it offered no interesting new viewpoint and it lacked depth. On the other hand, I have to admit that

Laugh it in the face!

Since about 1.5 years I have been involved in a sport I now call medical football. In this case, I am the football being tossed between different doctors, specialists, tests and procedures, all while going on a roller coaster ride of medications and side effects and spending way too much time, money and nerves. Now I am no stranger to the medical runaround, but usually I had to take care of one or maybe at the most two problems and even though they were severe, painful and scary at times, it was clear what needed to be focused on. At the moment though, I have to think about nearly a dozen health issues plaguing me and I feel quite overwhelmed. The fact that there are so many things that need to be taken care of in regards to my daughters and their need for counseling, therapy and IEPs, all while house and cars are breaking left and right and the schedule is so tight that I am happy if I have enough time to pack and unpack our bags between everything going on.

The two most important points on my compass are Health and Happiness, since most other points are directly and indirectly related or dependent. It is easy during times of sickness and pain to give up, get angry and lose hope. If anything though, I am clinging to some sort of happiness, even though it is a kind of cynical humor making it possible. A lot of medical nightmares are actually sort of entertaining and funny, because they are so outrageous or absurd. I clearly remember the aftermath of multiple fractures in my left hand and wrist and the time spent in various old hospital hallways waiting for yet another opinion that would not bring me any further. I started writing on any pieces of paper I could find, describing the situations, feelings, people and buildings. It was a great outlet.

Humor is a wonderful thing, without it life would feel bleak. During grad school I took a couple of classes about comedy, satire and the likes and the need of people to look at the most awful through the lens of humor. Incidentally, John Cleese happens to be on PBS at this very moment, talking to a guy in India who meets with people to laugh for 15 minutes a day, just plain old laughing, without really any reason and even that reduces stress. So here's to laughing - ha ha ha!

out of sorts

I have completely lost my groove recently, I am not sure what it is or why, maybe the winter or maybe a loss of routine? It seems that lately nothing goes planned and something different happens every day. Between things breaking left and right, repeated snow days, constant medical appointments, starting new things and doing things out of the ordinary, it just feels a bit helter skelter at the moment. Being a person who loves to be in control, I sure hate feeling out of sorts. The problem is that as soon as things are a bit our of whack, I loose my handle on the daily stuff and all of a sudden there is way too much laundry or we run out of milk and bread constantly. It is not like there is no time to do the necessary things, but rather that the lack of routine paralyzes me somehow and I find myself playing computer games, actually killing time. Well, maybe it is just the winter blah, which descends upon me every January... Well wait, it is February already..., does that mean winter blahs needs to be over? As much as I love winter, I am so done with it now and I would like some sunshine please!

Good night!