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| I'm building a house in Goshen
brick by brick
with blood, and sweat,
and fingerprints.
I'll furnish it,
and paint the walls
and plant a garden.
Reason says to pitch a tent
lest I leave a piece of me
in very brick, and fingerprint
But still I'm building a house in Goshen
brick by brick,
with blood, and sweat,
and fingerprints,
because I cannot always live in tents.
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| There's a little old man who comes into Ruby's now and again. He tips excessively. No one knows his name, he always pays in cash. We call him Colonel Sanders. He drives an old beat up Honda with shiny chrome spinners. He has wild, white, einstein-esque hair and a full beard. Sometimes you can catch him combing his hair as he shuffles towards the front door. He always orders the same thing: Wild Turkey whiskey, a glass of water, a cup of black coffee, and ribs with sauteed onions and mashed potatoes. I'm told he used to order a full rack of ribs; half for him, half for his dog. But his dog died, so now he only orders a half-rack. He smiles faintly as he talks, his voice fading in and out, his eyes only meeting yours in passing. He has cloudy, yet vividly bright blue eyes. We talked about Coffee for a while this week. He said ours was "too black" (he meant too strong), said all Ruby's coffee was that way. I commented on the brand. The brand didn't matter he insisted, JFG is just fine, he's been drinking it all his life. I told him I like my coffee strong, and so my mother won't let me make it when I'm home. He told me I should listen to my mother. | | |
| I have been driving around on spare tire for far longer than anyone should drive on a spare tire (over three weeks). When I bought my little Honda Civic Hatchback it was incongruently pimped out with 18" rims. Used tires of that size are hard to find and new tires are expensive, so when I had my third flat tire in 6 months, I decided to replace all four rims and tires with something more standard. Reasonable Ron of Reasonable Ron's Used Tires (that name cracks me up) recommended I look for rims at a do-it-yourself junkyard. Lured by the possibility of dirt cheap parts, I decided to give it a try. I rounded up a crack-team to help me: Megan, an opera singer, and Peter, a Canadian hydro-geologist (specializing in fecal matter. No, seriously. fecal matter). Early Saturday morning we set out in the cold, sleet, and snow. My timing, as always, was impeccable.
Pull-a-Part is the latest in eco-friendly, state-of-the-art junkyard technology. The lot was nicely landscaped and perfectly orderly, with computerized touch-screen inventory lists of the car's makes, models, and locations. We got a printout of all the Civics and set out. Through the neat rows of jacked-up, half-gutted, car-carcasses, we intrepid three -- the historian, the opera-singer, and the hydro-geologist -- searched for a car with suitable rims. Megan found an abandoned tickle-me-Elmo doll which we adopted as our mascot.
We found a couple scattered rims that would have worked, but were thwarted in the end by mis-matched lug-nuts that were too big for our lug wrench. In the course of our first failed attempt, we discovered that when the wheel spins and makes it impossible to loosen the lug-nuts, jamming a two-by-four in the wheel-well will hold the tire sufficiently steady. Jamming tickle-me-Elmo in the wheel-well, however, will not work. Poor Elmo.
Finally, just when hope was near gone and our collective toes near frozen, Peter found a civic with four steel rims complete with hubcaps. Using our two-by-four technique, the first three wheels came off easily enough, but the axle on the fourth was loose, making it impossible to keep the wheel steady enough. You must picture the following scene: Megan, all 110 pounds (if that) of her, strains against the two-by-four jammed in the wheel-well. I scramble up the side of the car and stand on the tire. Peter begins to fight with the lug-nuts. Just at this point, three men, clad in overalls and greasy jump-suits, wander by. "Do ya'll need help?", one of them deadpanned as the others looked at us, placid and unperturbed but clearly wondering what the hell we thought we were doing. I jumped down from the tire and as casually as I could tried to explain. He suggested we try the parking brake. Feeling very stupid, we found this solved our problem and obviated the need for two-by-fours or standing on tires.
As I laughed openly at the bizarreness of it all. Peter looked at me and said, "you feel like you're
in China." I did. Something about stepping so completely outside of my comfort-zone, taking a risk and trying to do something completely beyond my experience, reminded me of life in China. I don't know if it is this way for everyone, but when something is beyond my experience, beyond my comfort-zone, I tend to let go. I more easily see the humor and bizarreness in failure and difficulty. I become more resourceful and more flexible, and almost incapable of being embarrassed. I miss that.
And sometimes its when you take these kinds of risks that the best things happen. Those rims cost me 54 dollars. The cheapest rims I had tracked down elsewhere were going to cost me $130. When I got to Reasonable Ron, I was told that the tires on the rims, which I was not charged for, were perfectly good and should last me quite some time. So in the end, I got four rims, hubcaps, and tires, for about $75. I had expected to spend at least $220. So here's to Megan, Peter, and Elmo! I owe you.
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| I am
supposed to writing a paper on Marxism, Leninism, Max Weber and the
Modernization theorists. Instead I am reading presidential candidates’
websites.
Years ago, I heard Obama’s wife introduce him
as her “baby daddy.” I find it sad that our society needs a specific phrase to
describe a relationship between two people wherein nothing ties them together
other than their joint procreation. It almost offends me that an individual who
aspires to leadership would use this phrase with no thought to the fundamental
societal problem it reflects. Perhaps Mrs. Obama simply misspoke. Perhaps she
just did not think about the cultural, even moral, connotations of the phrase. But
I would hope for more class from a prospective first lady.
His wife’s ill-chosen words aside,
Obama has always seemed to me to be vapid, a mirage of a man. I’ll be the first
to confess that I’ve not based that assessment on anything more than my gut and
random news clips. But this evening as I perused his website I found nothing to
contradict my initial impression. There is nothing real, nothing hard, in his
opinions. Everything is carefully hedged and rhetorically pleasing, but somehow
empty.
Maccain on
the other hand seems to be nothing but hard. Clear cut lines and archaic
conservative cliché’s. He leaves me wishing for a candidate, a leader, with grace
as well as backbone.
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| I miss thinking. I miss a lifestyle with pockets of time for thinking folded in; bus rides, and walks home. I don't like being alone with myself anymore. I don't write anymore. As I write this all feels like.. pastiche? convoluted. contrived. Maybe its the forum. Feigning talking to myself. I know that the answer to my problems, to my general malaise, is to put my head down and just live the best I can. The questions that bother me aren't ones that can be answered, even if I really wanted them to be. But in fine female fashion I want to rant and rave and think out loud for an hour. My periphery has been so cluttered these past few months with work or school that I've not been able to breath the whole panorama; past, present, future, emotions, experience, divinity, which alow me to turn in on myself and think for any extended time period. I'm kind of drowning in it all right now.Worries and decisions about the future. Impossible decisions. But soon I'll shake it all off and keep on living. I shifted on some internal level when I got my grades back for the semester. All A's across the board, if its good manners to announce that. For some reason, its almost been like succeeding at this nearly insurmountable semester has sucked all the excitement out of the next year and a half. I've proved to myself I can do it, and I wonder now if thats the only reason I am here. I was sobered this week by the realization that Academia (capitalized because it is a nation, with a culture and language, unto itself) is not where I want to be in ten years. What do I do with that information then? Do I even finish this degree? What is it that I really want to do? This is where lightning strikes and non-doom-predicting-handwriting-on-a-wall would come in handy. I owe many people apologies. I have 8 month old e-mails sitting in my mail box that I need to reply to.. I keep telling myself I will one day. I know that my silence implies that those people weren't important to me or that I didn't care. I did care. P.S. thanks Janet for nudging me to write something. | | |
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