Leesburg Essay 16: The I Must Be Middle-Aged Issue

I know now why “they” say that as people get older, they feel younger inside their own heads than their chronological age. This was brought home to me recently as I was reading a news article describing the background of a Greek government official. The article noted that this particular guy had been in college in the ’80s. My automatic thought was something like: ”…that long ago—wow.” And then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute! I went to college in the ‘80s!” How delusional can one be?

Leesburg has been making halting steps beyond the typical fast-food, chain, and Italian options of a small-town restaurant environment. One of latest entries is “Cajun Experience,” which specializes in New Orleans cuisine. George and I went to lunch there one day (now that both kids are in school all day, we can sometimes go out to lunch like normal people do). It was almost as good as the food we had in New Orleans, although George felt the bread on the shrimp “po boy” sandwiches should have been much fresher. Beignets come out hot and drowned in powdered sugar. They had authentic beer, coffee, and music to complete the ambience. We would definitely go again. To New Orleans, for sure, or maybe just down the street. Nora has mentioned New Orleans a number of times since we were there and says she wants to go back, but she hasn’t yet been able to tell me why it made such a big impression on her. It was the same way with Bar Harbor, Maine, but in that case I think it had something to do with the souvenir shop at which she got the flip flops that changed color in the sun. Baxter ate them soon after, and she really has never gotten over it.

Early this summer I managed to catch a number of the World Cup matches, and I have to say that my favorite thing about the whole competition was the psychic German octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of a number of the games. George doesn’t care about the World Cup, to be sure, but he is a true believer in the genius of octopuses. As I’ve noted in the past, he loves it when animals get the better of people. The editor’s note in a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated contained such a laugh-out-loud kind of story, in which Christopher Kimball wrote about man vs. deer in a scenario that should send chills through the heart of any hunter.

Buck Bites Back

by Christopher Kimball (from the July/August 2010 issue of Cook’s Illustrated—with apologies to the author for the excerpt!)

Over the years, a few of you have written in to say that my hunting stories are out of place in a cooking magazine. I won’t rehash my vigorous defense of this activity, but instead I offer the following narrative, told by one of our Vermont neighbors, Ryan Brown, in which the hunter becomes the hunted. I will let you judge its veracity.

“I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then shoot and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there—a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the feed while I am in the back of the truck—it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down), then hogtie it and transport it home.

“I filled the cattle feeder, then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back; they were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes, three deer showed up. I picked out a likely-looking young buck, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. He just stood and stared.

“I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer just stood transfixed, although it appeared to be mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step toward it; it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then received an education.

“The first thing I learned is that, although a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, it is spurred to action when you start pulling.

“That deer exploded.

“The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a lot stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope, and some dignity. A deer? Not a chance. It ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting closer. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined. The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.

“A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was blinded by the blood flowing out of the large gash in my head. (I had cleverly arrested the deer’s momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground.) At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get my rope back and go home.

“I figured if I just let the buck go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die a slow and painful death. I recognized there was a tiny chance that I shared some minuscule amount of responsibility for the situation, so it was up to me to find a solution. I managed to get it positioned between my truck and the feeder—a little trap I had set beforehand, much like a squeeze chute. I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

“Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have considered this possibility, so I was surprised when the deer grabbed hold of my wrist with its teeth. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse: it bites and then lets go. A deer holds on and shakes its head—like a pit bull.

“Thinking back on it, I guess that the proper thing to do at that point would have been to freeze and draw back slowly. Instead, I screeched and shook my arm like it was on fire. My method was ineffective. While I kept it busy (allowing the buck to tear mercilessly at my right arm), I reached up with my left hand and pulled the rope loose. That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

“Rearing up on their back feet, deer will strike at your head and shoulders with their front feet, which are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that, when an animal—like a horse—strikes at you with its hooves, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and move aggressively toward the animal. This will usually cause it to back down so that you can escape.

“However, this was not a horse, so I surmised that this strategy would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy.

“I screamed like a 5-year-old girl, turned, and ran.

“Now, the reason I had always been told not to try to turn and run from a horse is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. As I quickly learned, horses and deer do, indeed, have a lot in common. The second I turned to run, the buck struck me in the back of the head, knocking me down.

“But when a deer gets the upper hand, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. Instead, it jumps up and down on your back while you lie there, begging for mercy, covering your head.

“I managed to crawl under the truck, and the deer finally went away.

“So now I know why people go deer hunting with a rifle with a scope. Deer may appear cute and docile, but when provoked, they are merciless killers.”

Speaking of nature getting the best of man, some men build “man caves” filled with—who knows? Maybe free weights, a flat panel TV, beer, and Maxim magazine. Places where they can escape from presumably shrill and annoying women and only sometimes male offspring. Well, instead of a man cave, I realized recently that George has built himself a nature sanctuary on our deck where he can contemplate birds, spiders, rodents and the stars through his telescope. After finishing his work rebuilding the deck, he installed a bunch of bird feeders—one regular, one “squirrel-proof,” one just for finches, and one for hummingbirds. This last proved surprising: just as George threatened to remove the hummingbird feeder because of seeming disinterest by hummingbirds, the birds moved in. They’re very amusing to watch as they suspend themselves in midair and stare at you. All the birds—hummingbirds and others—tend to nest in the big evergreens that line our back fence and then pop over for a snack. Baxter also enjoys the nature sanctuary, as he believes it’s his job to catch the squirrels that hang upside on the feeders. Sometimes George removes his collar so that Baxter can make a quieter attempt at catching them. Further afield, there have been quite a number of vultures around, and George believes he saw an owl in our backyard on a recent afternoon (although he still is unable to explain what the owl would be doing out during the day).

This summer was unbearably hot. We had so many days that were in the upper 90s or 100-plus that, looking back, we never seemed to get much relief. We had a few days of cooler temperatures during August, but as I write this paragraph on the first day of fall, the temperature has again shot up to the upper 90s. All this after our backbreaking winter (mostly so because this area is just not equipped to handle that much snow). To add to the fun, one day in August we had a real earthquake. It came very early in the morning, just after 5:00 a.m., and George—who was shaving at the time and was grateful he didn’t accidentally cut his throat—was convinced that it couldn’t be an earthquake. I was convinced that it was, however, because what else would make the house shake when it wasn’t storming? Maybe a power plant explosion or the crash of a big airplane, but my bet was on earthquake. Supposedly animals sense when such things are coming but Baxter was busy dreaming about squirrels and made not a squeak. I bet the squirrels themselves ran and hid, though.

Our peach tree clearly has some sort of disease, probably not helped by the extreme temperatures this summer. Even so, I believe the peaches that were on the tree earlier in the summer and nearing some stage of ripening were stolen. Not by wild animals getting the best of me as a gardener, mind you, but animals of the two-legged variety. One day we stepped outside and found that the tree had been picked clean. George thought that it had to be squirrels; I made the case for people. Of course there was no resolution here. Then a few weeks later I caught an article in the local paper that said that the Master Gardener Demonstration Gardens at Ida Lee Recreation Center in Leesburg had had all of their fruit trees picked clean by a peach burglar (who knew such people existed??). This was especially unfortunate as the gardeners were planning to donate the fruit to Interfaith Relief. A major piece of evidence as reported in the local paper echoed what we found in our own backyard: “…there were no hoof marks under the trees, no marks on the limbs, and no fruit lying on the ground as there would have been had the animals been pulling at the fruit and branches.” Kind of creepy, don’t you think?

We did have a big respite from the summer heat on our trip to Lake Placid. I believe that the ambient temperature dropped about 20 degrees from northern Virginia to upstate New York. Having never been to Lake Placid, I was stuck with this image from the horror movie Lake Placid—which George so helpfully brought up before we went—of this grisly hand coming up out of the dark water. No such hand was in sight during our trip, luckily. We took a boat trip around Lake Placid itself (our fabulous hotel was on Mirror Lake, right next door) and took a couple of longish hikes. For the first time, Nora hiked without complaining. The lake water was pretty chilly (75 degrees or so) so I ended up being the only one who went in all the way. I felt I could handle it because I survived Girl Scout camp at Saranac Lake (one of Lake Placid’s neighbors) and a number of summer trips to Washington Lake in New Hampshire. Neither place was notable for its balmy water temperature, even in August. The hotel had a great indoor pool in addition to its lakeside beach.

Because of scheduling conflicts, Alexander is not playing soccer this fall, so we told him he would need to get his exercise in other ways. In addition to the riding his “ripstick” (a hinged, two-wheeled skateboard-like thing that takes quite a bit of balance to maneuver) and playing various sorts of sports with his friends in the cul-de-sac, he and George have been on a couple of grueling bike rides—from Leesburg to Purcellville and back, which is just over 27 miles. Alexander likes these rides in part because they stop for lunch at a smoothie place in Purcellville and get smoothies and roast beef & wasabi sandwiches for lunch. And I had a heartwarming moment at an afternoon party recently when Alexander said, bravely given that our fanatical neighbors were circling around, “I hate the Redskins!” That’s my boy! Actually, I gave him permission to be a Redskins fan because he is from here, after all—I thought this was very big of me.

Media Update

We have begun using our new cell phones (yes, the cell phone I have trouble answering) for GPS service, rather than our Garmin GPS. Using the phones rather than the Garmin means one fewer device to drag with us in the car, but what’s definitely missing is Aussie Karen. Aussie Karen is the Australian actress who provides the navigation prompts on Garmin’s devices. When you get your GPS, you have a choice of voices, and George quickly settled on Aussie Karen. I believe he had a crush on her. The kids just liked it when she would say “take ramp ahead” and it sounded to them just like “take Grandpa head.”

Audiobooks

Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo. Bridge of Sighs concerns the family life of kids growing up in a mill town in upstate New York in the middle of the last century, particularly two kids destined to remain in the town and another one who eventually leaves and moves overseas. The book is told loosely through the memories of the main character, Louis Lynch. The end was—as is so often the case—unsatisfying, but the rest was very engaging and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in stories about small town America.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackery. This is a rather long novel written a long time ago about people in extremely different circumstances from those of the America of today, but, even though fiction, it shows once again that you can plop people down in different circumstances, different eras, and different countries and their thoughts and reactions will be much the same. I liked the novel, although I found most of the characters tiresome, to say the least.

Push (Precious), by Sapphire. This short, extremely graphic novel rings so true in parts that I had to look it up on Google to see if the author was writing her memoires, or, if not, if she had based the book on someone she knew. As it turns out, the author knew people who had had these kinds of experiences, but the book itself is fiction. The simple description is that the book traces the inner life of a severely overweight black teenager in Harlem who has suffered terrible abuse and neglect at the hands of her parents. She finds her way into an alternative school and finally, at age 16, begins to learn to read and write. This novel was made into a movie that received a lot of praise and the actress Mo’Nique won an Oscar for portraying the girl’s horrific mother.

Books with Pages to Turn

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I borrowed from my mother before the furor over the movie started up. This book is hilarious and tragic in equal parts. For those of you who have managed to avoid it thus far, it contains the writer’s memoires of travels to Italy (eat), India (pray), and Indonesia (love) following a devastating divorce. The book is structured along the lines of numbers that are considered particularly auspicious in yoga philosophy, which in itself warmed me toward it. I didn’t expect that I would find such profound things in a book with such a premise, but if I had had a pencil available at the time, I certainly would have done some underlining. For example, the author describes a psychologist friend of hers who was to begin counseling Cambodian refugees. The author catalogues some of the true horrors that those people would have experienced, and then notes that her friend felt herself to be possibly inadequate to be counseling them about what she assumed would be terribly traumatic experiences. What the friend found instead was that these refugees wanted to talk about seemingly mundane and everyday matters like the relationship they’d started with someone who was on the boat with them. Again, people in different circumstances react as humans do.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (“Book the First” through “Book the Thirteenth”), by Lemony Snicket. Nora and I have been working our way through this children’s series for most of the summer and now into the fall (George and Alexander are just ahead of us and have almost finished the series). I am a big fan of the Harry Potter series, in which Nora and I are up to book four of seven, but this series is in some ways more remarkable. The writing is very sophisticated yet completely accessible for children. The farcical situations remind me of the best Monty Python material. Adults are mostly shown up to be fools in a variety of clever and novel ways. The books are definitely worth reading, whether you purport to be an adult or a child.

Television

Rubicon. George claims that this new AMC series, about a group of quirky analysts at secret government agency masquerading as a national-security think tank, more accurately portrays what real CIA analysts do than most movies or TV shows about the intelligence community. We stayed tuned in after the first couple of meandering episodes in the hopes that the plot would eventually go somewhere; in the beginning it wandered around in a Lost sort of way. Unfortunately, the characters, although quirky, are not as engaging as those in Lost, and it’s set in a office building somewhere around NYC rather than in Hawaii (well okay, Lost wasn’t really set in Hawaii), so there the similarities end. As the season finishes, however, they seem to have sharpened their plot focus and begun to move things along.

We continue to enjoy Mad Men, although as we’ve settled into it, the plot takes on much more importance as the quirky 1960’s details become less shocking. As we’ve learned a lot more about the characters we’ve graduated to discussing their problems and motivations rather than simply speculating about whether people really drank that much at work and could still function. An interesting editorial from the Washington Post argues that Mad Men is an extremely accurate portrayal of the times.

And in the category of catching up, George and I are up to Season 5 of The Office on DVD, a show which is appalling and heartwarming at the same time. First of all, I love Steve Carell, who plays the clueless boss of a Scranton, Pennsylvania paper company. The love story between characters Jim and Pam is painfully real and played perfectly off the absurd things going on in the rest of the story. Many of these situations would be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in a modern office environment, such as staff birthday parties, sexual harassment training, distribution of parking spaces, and on and on. My favorite character is Dwight Schrute, a salesman who is clearly a lunatic and completely rational at the same time. The worrying thing is how many of Dwight’s personality traits remind me of George. Hmmmm…

Movies

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I found the first part of this movie—in which an old man is born in a half-baby/half-old-man state, from which he proceeds to get younger—extremely disturbing. I hate babies that are made to look like old men or vice versa. The freakish baby “grows up” to be Brad Pitt and then Cate Blanchett eventually shows up, so that makes it better for a while. It reminded me somehow of Forrest Gump, as this character floats through life observing all sorts of historical nonsense. I guess I liked it despite all of my criticisms, but I’ll never get the picture of Brad-Pitt-as-old-man/baby out of my head.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The real star of this Woody Allen film that purports to star, among others, Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson (George sat near her on a flight once last year and I believe has been a bit enamored of her ever since) is Spain itself. The movie is a very engaging romantic comedy, and I’d happily watch it again, but what it really does is serve as one big travel advertisement. I immediately wanted to hop on a plane to fly over for an extended stay in some small Spanish towns.

Frost/Nixon. George and I both really enjoyed this one, which supposedly tells the backstory to the famous David Frost/Richard Nixon interviews that aired a few years after Nixon left office in disgrace. We both would like to see the original interviews, as the movie portrays the two in the end as basically battling one another for supremacy. The way the questions and answers play out (i.e., who’s on top) changes as they work their way through the hours of tape. The actors are very good, and I liked the ‘70s atmospherics.

In Addition

New York magazine. For those of you unfortunates who did not spend your formative years in a suburb of New York City, New York magazine was during my childhood the chronicler of the cool and the shocking in city life. It taught me about city politics, arts, trends, the importance of a good restaurant review, and to my endless amusement, personal ads, of which the back pages were filled. The most important thing I learned, though, was that the Kennedy family represented the apex of American life. This was the era when John Jr. was thought simply fabulous and Jackie O. had escaped the family by marrying Aristotle Onassis and wearing really big sunglasses. They were worshipped as gods. The more I read about them, the more inexplicable I found this. I guess maybe had I been born in 1956 rather than 1966 I may have thought differently, but this was the ‘70s and ‘80s and it seemed to me that the bloom was off the rose, despite the relentless fawning of the media. One of my grandmothers used to get Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, both of which were definitely worth perusing, but neither was nearly as fascinating as New York.

The next matter has only a glancing relationship to media, but it’s really an Internet-based research update, so I thought I’d include it here. It turns out that the history textbooks distributed to fourth graders in Virginia (i.e., Alexander and his ilk) contain certain misstatements about the Civil War—including the “fact” that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South—that were put in there by the author after she “verified” the facts on Google, which pointed her to a link to a website maintained by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and other revisionist groups. The Sons of Confederate Veterans maintains that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War—the struggle was one primarily over preserving states’ rights and individual freedom and liberty. In any case, because of her misstatement, all the textbooks had to be collected for correction. This scandal has exposed the soft underbelly of textbook production in Virginia, as the author in question is not even a historian, and the “review committee” is pretty weak. Couldn’t they have found some starving history grad student somewhere in Virginia to act as a fact checker?

Once again this summer, a flock of Donaldsons were gathered around the TV for a tennis match, this time in Knoxville watching the “end” of the Wimbledon match that wouldn’t end. These poor guys played on and on and on and we kept watching and watching and watching as they’d go from deuce to advantage and back to deuce. And then the guy who ultimately won the match lost in the next round. A discussion of it here takes the point of view that the match was boring, which I have to agree was probably true.

Last year I followed pro football with the help of the ESPN Podcast called “Football Today,” hosted by former pro scout Jeremy Green, the son of former NFL coach Dennis Green. By the time the 2010 Superbowl rolled around, however, I was sick of his antics, which had seemed to escalate over the course of the season and so I just deleted the Podcast from my list on iTunes. What I discovered over the summer, weirdly with no official comment from ESPN itself, was that Jeremy Green was arrested in July both for possession of illegal drugs and—something that is truly disturbing considering that he has (I believe) four children and had just recently remarried—for possession of child pornography. And to think that I’d listened to hours of this guy talking about football over the course of the year. YUCK. In the end, ESPN has found a replacement in Ross Tucker, a former player, who is beginning to grow on me, and thus I’ve tentatively taken up listening again. I can only imagine what the atmosphere is at ESPN that the network continues to breed these weird scandals with its personnel. It’s almost as though the analysts must mirror the scandals that so often engulf the sports stars they cover.

Domesticated Animal Update

Animals like schedules and routines, as those among you who are pet owners have no doubt observed. Just after school started I read an article somewhere that noted that many pets get depressed when school starts again, in part because when the kids are home from school many pets get more attention. Baxter was absolutely the opposite. He was depressed all summer, even stopped eating his meals. Some of it could have been the heat, but all I know was that when school started Baxter started eating again. There’s a Staples commercial I love, one where a Dad is dancing through the aisles at Staples, presumably buying school supplies, kids standing nearby looking disgruntled while the song “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” plays in the background (view it for yourself). All I know is that no one was happier than Baxter to see Alexander downstairs at 7:30 in the morning the day after Labor Day ready to feed him. He pranced off to the corner to see the bus arrive and sniff all the kids and his dog friends. He is not necessarily thrilled, however, that I have begun brushing his teeth upon the recommendation of the vet.

When we saw Cheryl, Hon and Annaliese in Knoxville this summer, Cheryl had with her a brochure concerning horse breeding. More specifically, this was a brochure that contained glossy pictures and information regarding horses that were being offered up for stud services. The thing that I found absolutely fascinating about this, given that I know nothing about equine industries, is that in order to breed your horse, the STUD NEED NOT EVEN BE PRESENT. I believe you pay a chunk of cash and you receive in the mail (hopefully packed in ice) a syringe containing the necessary material. But what if you can’t…er…administer it properly? There goes thousands of dollars. I imagine someone has thought of this and there are probably people who are experienced in equine in-vitro fertilization, but can you imagine how stupid you’d feel???

While we were all together in Knoxville this summer, Cheryl’s cat Max died. She had had him for such a long time; I have pictures of him from way back when Cheryl lived in an apartment in North Bergen, New Jersey. I know animals get old, and I guess he must have been about 15 or so and had a variety of health problems, but it seems weird to me that poor Max is gone. In tribute, I enclose my pictures of him here:

Politics Update

In the category of how silly can things get when a president bends over backwards to please everyone except his own countrymen, check out this column by Charles Krauthammer regarding moral equivalence.

George and I both read excerpts from the Washington Post’s big series on the intelligence system in the U.S. This was set up to be, I imagine, the kind of series that brings a newspaper a Pulitzer prize. I read the first installment and was bored to death. It was more like a list of offices and organizations than any kind of analysis, ironically, and contained no information on the overall usefulness to policymakers of the kind of intelligence that is produced by this unwieldy system. For example, does the President’s Daily Brief meet his needs? Has the production of it become so bogged down in new levels of bureaucracy that it has ceased to function as intended? Has some other mechanism by necessity taken its place? In any case, George and I both liked this piece by Richard Posner that reviews the Post’s work.

And finally, as I’ve been expecting, someone has finally advocated killing people to save the climate. The extremists have finally tipped over the edge and become caricatures of themselves!

Leesburg Essay 15

Travel Update

We were in New Orleans for several days over spring break; the first time I’ve ever set foot in Louisiana. The trip was well worth it. We stayed at The Windsor Court Hotel, although we didn’t eat at the hotel’s very well regarded restaurant because the kids were too young. Cheryl, Hon and Annaliese were also vacationing in New Orleans, so we took a number of excursions with them, including a trip on the streetcar to look at the beautiful houses on St. Charles Street followed by a long walk in a huge park full of live oaks, a swamp tour that featured a number of alligators lazing about in the sun and a small house lifted and carried downstream by Katrina, and a nighttime horse-and-buggy tour of the French quarter. We had a number of good meals. I had red beans and rice every day; poor Alexander was on a continual search for shrimp that was not battered and fried. Our swim in our hotel’s outdoor pool may qualify as George’s favorite pool experience of all time: completely shaded, cool air temperature with pool heated. We didn’t take the kids on the Katrina tour. I can imagine how bored they’d be after a few hours on a bus following the path of devastation. We did drive by what appeared to be the Ninth Ward, and vast portions of it were still clearly abandoned and completely trashed.

This summer we have our regular trip to Tennessee (we always go as soon as school is out), and during the first week of August we will be in Lake Placid, near to where I went to Girl Scout sleepaway camp at Saranac Lake (man that water was cold!).

Homefront

The garden is always beautiful in the spring, even when I haven’t gotten out much to weed or get the plants under control. Everything’s green and has new growth, we have cute little peaches, the strawberries are coming in, and the plants aren’t yet wilting in the heat every afternoon. The snow this past winter seems to have had a stimulative effect—the geraniums by the front walk have gone absolutely nuclear. Unfortunately, I had put in some grape and blackberry bushes in the fall and they didn’t do too well—I have only one left of the blackberry bushes and maybe two of the grape bushes and so I’m perhaps going to replant. The kids like growing lots of food, and they keep adding to the list of things they want me to put in. Not only pumpkins, but watermelon and corn (last year something ate our tiny corn crop). And Alexander has real concerns about the peaches surviving to adulthood. Last year the tree dropped its baby peaches before they matured—I suspect the issue may have been that the tree was still too young to sustain them.

Would that I had more time to get work done in the garden. We have been flat out busy since the end of March, especially as both kids were in sports this spring, Alexander had CCD up until the beginning of May, and Nora had to prepare for her dance recital. During a typical week there were two separate practices and at least three games, in addition to dance class and CCD—oh yes, and don’t forget the numerous random and time-consuming events such as team and dance class pictures, sports fundraisers, and the bringing of snacks for the teams for after games (don’t get me started). That, combined with all of Alexander’s homework, my teaching jobs, George’s frequent travel, two birthday parties, and Easter, and I was counting the days until school got out.

In fourth grade, Alexander will be enrolled in a special Loudoun County program called Futura, which is meant to be more challenging than the basic curriculum. I’m sure that this will be good for him, but he has concerns because he will be removed from his normal classroom once a week and bussed to another school for instruction, leaving the question of how much he will miss and how much homework he might need to make up. To address his concerns, we told him what we had heard about how the program works and then George printed out some materials from the Loudoun County website about the instructional approach. These materials were utter gibberish, the kind of thing that bureaucracies are champions at producing. They include a cute matrix of general statements about the progression of instruction from the basic to the more complex and abstract. We were making fun of it at dinner one night and Nora decided to simplify it for us—and for the bureaucrats. She replaced the three-dimensional matrix with one concise sentence that she wrote on the back of one of the pages: “Mack the kids lrn” (i.e., “make the kids learn”). So there, then.

As third grade wrapped up for Alexander, I looked back and realized that this was the year—the tipping point—when I began to have a hard time helping him with homework. He brought home math challenge sheets every week and sometimes I was utterly mystified by the way the questions were worded, although the math itself was simple. (A separate issue is the way the questions often fell over themselves to be “inclusive.” For example, one question from his prep book for the Standards of Learning tests was worded something like this: “Mikey is reading a book on Booker T. Washington. If he finishes five pages a day, how many days will it take him to reach page 125?” The fact that the book is on the subject of Booker T. Washington is utterly irrelevant to answering the question, and quite possibly a distraction to the student. )The real trouble for me, however, was when he brought home a project in which he was supposed to design a “simple machine” using a series of parts (like a wedge and a pulley) that they’d gone over in class. I am very relieved that he has a decent understanding of mechanical things because I would have had no idea how to help him and would have had to punt to George. Good thing I never had it in mind to teach third grade.

What I did do, of course, was work for EPA for ten years. When I explained this to the kids on a car ride one day (yes, Mommy went to a job every day just like Daddy), Alexander started speculating about what I was doing at my job. Knowing only tiny, disparate facts about environmental protection, and combining this knowledge with the memory of George’s encounter with the deer last fall, he came up with things like: “You worked to save the deer.” “No, you worked to save the recycling bins.” “You worked to save the deer inside the recycling bins.” “You worked to save the deer inside the recycling bins from the cars.” On and on, you get the idea, and by this point I was laughing so hard I could by no means begin to explain what I actually did at work. I can’t even explain it to adults, never mind nine-year-olds.

Media Update

New Technology: Four Stars

Until February, George and I were utterly last century with our cell phones. We finally decided to upgrade and went all the way from the stone age to the Motorola DROID. It’s a great device that would be phenomenal if I could just answer the phone part in a timely manner.

Movies: Four Stars

Up. The question I have about this marvelous little movie is whether it’s really meant for kids. It was certainly marketed to children, but it contains some pretty adult themes that run throughout (I had the same feeling about Ratatouille). My kids did not get some of the more poignant parts. It was terrific all the same, and I just loved the pack of dogs that stopped whatever it was doing and froze whenever a—SQUIRREL!!—scampered by.

Slumdog Millionaire. I had heard so much about this movie prior to seeing it that I really wasn’t sure what to expect. Even so, it was not what I expected. George and I both thought it was a terrific story, beautifully told, with a really interesting “framing” device that provides the structure. I can understand, though, why many Indians might resent how conditions in the slums are portrayed.

Doubt. This lovely movie stars Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two nuns and a priest who work at a Catholic school in the Bronx. Meryl Streep’s character suspects the priest of indiscretions and it is never quite clear who is telling the truth. The movie has a great look to it and the actors do a terrific job.

Movies: Two Stars

Revolutionary Road. This film, set in the 1950s and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, purports to be about suburban boredom driving people literally nuts. I had the feeling throughout, however, that it was not so much that Kate Winslet’s character is driven to lunacy by the suburbs and lack of artistic fulfillment…she’s just crazy. I liked the atmosphere, but the plot certainly didn’t stick with me.

Elegy. Penelope Cruz is probably the best thing about this movie, which also stars Ben Kingsley as an emotionally immature professor who falls for one of his much younger students. His character is so unappealing that it was hard for George or me to feel any sympathy for him.

Rashomon. Apparently a lot of people at George’s job refer to this movie as a good encapsulation of how things sometimes work in international relations. Be that as it may, this 1950s Japanese flick is not really scintillating entertainment, more like watching performance art that extends for an hour and a half. The premise of this story is that a number of people witness a murder and they all have a completely different story to tell about it; George came to the conclusion that each witness’s story was based on the individual’s need to save face. I liked some of the visuals, but the acting was way over the top and almost bizarre. Well, at least now he’s seen it so that he knows what people are talking about.

Finale update

How to end a TV show that has captured viewer’s hearts and minds for years? When The Sopranos finished up a couple of years ago, it took one possible path: the non-ending ending that infuriated many fans. When 24 ended this May, it had a quite touching ending, but by that point we were so beyond caring that it didn’t actually touch us. Battlestar Galactica had a great ending because it actually gave you an idea of where the characters had been and were going and it had some emotional resonance. The best ending, however, may have been achieved by Lost, a show which had both enthralled and utterly exasperated us along the way. The ending didn’t answer many questions, but weirdly managed to make most of the more trivial questions irrelevant. The best thing I read about the Lost ending is from the “On Faith” column in the Washington Post.

Books

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. What can I really add to the commentary on W & P? The book is built up to such a degree in people’s minds, particularly with regard to its length, that having finished it my primary emotion is just relief (wow, it’s a real book with a real story!!). After years of hearing (and saying) things like “He thinks he’s writing W & P” or maybe something like “It’s not like it’s W & P” or simply “that’s as long as W & P,” I found that I enjoyed most of it immensely; a few parts I will single out for comment. First, I was struck by the amount of emotion that male characters would show toward one another, even kissing each other extensively and referring to each other as “dear heart.” This leaves me wondering whether this was the style among men of the time or just Tolstoy being dramatic. Second is Tolstoy’s arresting description of French troops basically dispersing into a non-army when they reach Moscow; this part in particular stuck with me. Third, I found myself extremely bored near the end of the book when Tolstoy devotes a lot of ink to analyzing how historians treat history. Finally, I was disappointed by the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) Boris and Natasha do not get together at the end; I somehow assumed partway through this book that the characters in the Bullwinkle cartoon must be homage to Boris and Natasha in W & P. Oh well.

Overall, I think I have found that most books that are considered “great” books by a vast number of people over time have been quite enjoyable or at least interesting to read, with two big exceptions: Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness (and no, I didn’t really like Apocalypse Now much either, but I digress). I found reading these, which I believe I did in high school, insufferable. I admitted that to Alexander recently, and he found this so interesting that he and George quietly rounded up a copy of Moby Dick so that Alexander could follow me around the house reading aloud to me from that “great” work. All I can think of is my English teacher at the time droning away about the “seven levels of meaning”…Good lord, what a bunch of nonsense.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I read the author’s first novel The Bean Trees some twenty years ago. It seemed like a perfect book for the early ‘90s, probably read with a soundtrack of the Indigo Girls playing on CD in the background in my first or second Arlington apartment. I haven’t read one of her books since, but my mother passed The Poisonwood Bible on to me and I really enjoyed it. It follows the story of a missionary family in the Congo, told from a point of view that shifts among the mother and the four daughters. The only thing I found annoying about it was that it took the oh-so-typical view that all of Africa’s problems are brought on by white people; one character is constantly trying to atone in some way for her white skin. The only character who doesn’t feel this way is presented as a fool. Despite this, the author does a great job of switching from voice to voice, even making mistakes in language appropriate to some of the characters.

Nora and I made our way through the first two Nancy Drew mysteries, which she received for her birthday. Although some of the concepts and old-fashioned language are difficult for her to follow, she seemed to really enjoy them. I read all of them when I was a kid; I think my friends Ginanne and Robin and I used to act them out. What cracks me up about reading these books many, many years later is that the author always describes Nancy as being “attractive,” and/or “attractively dressed.” Also, I’m really, really uncertain as to what Nancy is supposed to be doing with her time. I guess she’s graduated from high school as she’s 18, but she’s clearly not in college and apparently doesn’t really have a job either. I mean, I guess she goes around solving mysteries but there doesn’t seem to be a real career path there. Maybe she’s biding her time until Ned marries her?

Nora herself is ready to run for president, as depicted in a recent drawing:

At the same time, I should note, Alexander finished the first five or six Hardy Boys books, in addition to the first few books in the Percy Jackson series (which is extremely popular among kids at the moment). George, to whom Alexander read aloud one of the Percy Jackson books, says that the author’s approach to presenting the main character’s autism and dyslexia is to make these conditions almost a secret advantage, giving the kid super, elite abilities. For most kids with these conditions, I imagine this is not the case so I wonder what message the author is trying to project?

Audiobooks

Lush Life by Richard Russo. I had read the author’s book Empire Falls, which was made into a movie with Paul Newman, but nothing else. His book Lush Life reminds me a lot of the HBO show The Wire, which George and I love. The story concerns the investigation into a murder on the Lower East side of New York City. The book explores, in colorful language, the motivations of the numerous characters, including the police detective, the victim’s father, and the perpetrator, as the murder is solved. The melting pot is thoroughly explored as the various witnesses are interviewed (and reinterviewed).

Open by Andre Agassi. I used to be a huge tennis fan, and I can still remember watching some really gripping matches, such as when 17-year old Boris Becker was playing in Wimbledon. Or those epic matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe (one in particular had the whole Donaldson family gathered on the floor at my aunt’s house in Carlisle, Massachusetts, glued to the TV for four or so hours). And the match that won Andre Agassi the French Open the first time. I remember when I was a big fan of Stefan Edberg; my friend Carrie worked at that time for a sports management firm and managed to get me a glossy Stefan Edberg brochure package to peruse. The big revelation in Open has been repeated in the press a lot—that Agassi actually “hates” tennis—but the story of his childhood, his ups and downs as a player and marriages to Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf is fascinating and well worth reading for anyone who is or has ever been a tennis fan.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This book is a very engaging story of Thomas Cromwell, the aide to Cardinal Wolsey and then advisor and fixer to King Henry the Eighth. The way she tells the story is very fluid, non-linear and the point of view shifts very gently throughout. I found myself admiring the book rather than loving it, but it brings English history alive. The most frustrating thing for me in any work of historical fiction is the lack of accurate pictures. The portraits of the time are so static looking, it’s difficult to see them as representing real people and in the case of pivotal figures such as Anne Boleyn, who charmed the king so much that he absolutely had to have her, it would be useful to know what she looked like in real life. The book won the Man Booker prize in England; I like this review in the Wall Street Journal.

Climate Change Update

The case for climate change is beginning to take on the flavor of the arguments for or against the existence of WMD in Iraq—the more people tell me I have to believe it the more resistant I become. I am extremely suspicious of the arguments made by many politicians and advocacy groups that we’re utterly destroying the future of the planet; there are too many unanswerable questions and ambiguous data. I am also suspicious of arguments made on the other side that the only fuel we can depend on is oil—I think that displays an amazing lack of confidence in scientists who are investing a lot of money and brainpower in energy research. Why would we want to remain so dependent on a dirty (in more ways than one; all we need do is peruse the state of the Gulf) and politically destabilizing fuel? Where is the progress in this? I for one am all for investing in solar panels and wind and working through the technical issues associated with them (or the political issues, as the Kennedy family, of all people, recently fought against the wind farm that they would be able to see from the Hyannis Port compound). George likes to read the magazine Scientific American and often brings to my attention the incredibly innovative approaches that scientists are developing for agriculture, energy production, and the like.

Al Gore wrote an editorial for the New York Times a few months ago that summed up for me the ugliness and utter lack of perspective of people on both sides. It was presumably meant to convince those on the fence to commit to action against climate change because really, why write an editorial that brings with it no new converts to your cause? The tone, however, drips with contempt for people who don’t buy the climate change arguments lock, stock, and barrel. He is either as dumb as I’d begun to think he is, or he has really bad PR people.

On the subject of fuel, I have a vivid memory of the gas lines in the 1970s—when you had to buy gas on certain days based on whether you had odd or even numbers on your license plate. I think I can remember my mother packing a lunch for us and then us going to sit in the car on line at the gas station that was somewhere between Irvington and Parker avenues in Maplewood. I’m sure that was a real thrill for her.

Obama is seriously beginning to annoy me. It’s one thing to, I don’t know how else to put it, “rebalance” our alliances so that we take account of the rising powers and turn some of our focus from traditional allies in Europe. It’s another thing entirely to stand with the president of Mexico while he trashes Arizona’s immigration law. All the while, of course, the Mexican government isn’t so fond of illegal immigrants itself, which Calderon admitted to Wolf Blitzer in an interview on CNN. This is amusing because what in part made Arizona act is at least the impression that the federal government is not enforcing its immigration laws. I guess maybe the federal government in Mexico does at least give lip service to enforcing its laws. The same week in politics saw the absurdity of our diplomats in China who brought up the Arizona law in discussion with the Chinese to make a point that we have our own human rights problems to work through. What is thoroughly ridiculous about this is what is the administration’s ultimate aim? Obama is projecting weakness through these and other head-shaking approaches to foreign policy. Purely from a politician’s own point of view, he is working to erode his own power base! What kind of testosterone-fueled politician does this? When you’ve got control of the U.S. government, which has enormous economic, military, and persuasive power is the world, why would you want to undermine any of the pillars of your power? If foreign leaders (assuming it’s reasonable to compare them to dogs) perceive you as weak and likely to back away, then they will come right up, put their paws on your shoulders and start breathing in your face. Whatever it is that you want to do with your power as U.S. president, whether it’s launching military strikes on Iran’s purported nuclear facilities or passing a global climate-change treaty, you cannot be perceived as weak. Weakness does not equal fairness or respect for points of view, it just equals diminished possibilities.

Here are a few interesting articles I came across recently:

First, one on the power of the left in Germany.

Next, one on Hinduism and yoga.

Also, the best investment advice I’ve heard yet, courtesy of the creator of “Dilbert.”

And the final note, courtesy of George, is the following excerpt from the Drudge Report around April 15th:

Coincidence? You be the judge…..

47% will pay no federal income taxes...

45% say amount of tax they pay 'about right'...

Leesburg Essay 14: The Snowmageddon Issue

a.k.a. Tell Vancouver We Still Have Snow Available for Immediate Shipment

Annaliese, Nora, &Alexander; Christmas Eve 2009; Leesburg

Yoga Update

Since October, I’ve been teaching quite a bit in gyms around the Leesburg area. I work my schedule around when the kids are in school or when George is home, but even with the time restrictions I have found numerous opportunities to teach. How true it was when our instructors warned us trainees that as a yoga teacher you are totally exposed up in front of the class (like any kind of teacher, I suppose). They also stressed how hard it is to teach mixed-level gym classes, tackling the dual problem of keeping the more advanced students from getting bored and the beginners from getting lost—the solution to which is to become skilled at giving people options. In a class with a lot of beginners, I have found that I must demonstrate the poses almost continually otherwise the students tend to freeze in place. I spend the whole class in front on my own mat or walking around and helping individuals. This makes it harder to focus on what the whole class is doing.

One of the places in which I’ve been teaching is incredibly loud—the aerobics room is right over the racquetball courts and behind the weight machines—and the class typically has 15-plus students. I imagine that it’s hard for them to relax—and hard for them to hear me. I just ignore the noise and talk over it. Luckily, I can be very loud when I need to be. Most of the group class instructors (e.g., body pump, cardio step, zumba—a popular dance class) have the lights in the room on very bright, the fans on, and microphones on for shouting instructions. In contrast, the yoga instructors come in and turn off the lights, turn off the fans, and in some cases bring in their own heaters.

Many yoga teachers at gyms teach something called “power yoga,” which generally means that they go through poses very quickly to create a big cardiovascular effect. Even though a couple of my classes are labeled “power yoga,” I don’t really teach power yoga. I don’t think that power yoga really helps the students to understand and feel what’s happening in the poses. I asked the gym manager to relabel the classes to be “flow yoga” so it’s not false advertising.

Many of my jobs in the fall involved subbing for others. Currently, I have three regular jobs and one gym for which I’m on the list for a Saturday morning class rotation. There’s another facility desperate for yoga teachers out near Dulles that is willing to pay above normal rates to get teachers, so a friend and I may be splitting those Saturday morning sessions. It would be ideal to have a couple more regular classes. There’s also the option of marketing private instruction, but that begs the question of where the instruction would take place.

One of my colleagues from the teacher training, and one who has drawn me into a number of teaching jobs, asked me to consider subbing for her “yogalates” class, which is a combination of yoga and pilates (which is an exercise program developed by some German guy and meant for strengthening your core). At first I said no because I’ve never even taken a pilates class and I expected I’d be utterly hopeless. In the end I said yes, and bought a book and video to study up. I then asked a yoga teacher who also teaches pilates what she would recommend I do, and she commented that she’s never understood the point of yogalates classes because the two approaches are actually quite different. Well, given this, I memorized the basic principles and a ten pose routine, and then managed to make it through the class. A group class instructor develops a number of things to say that become routine, phrases to fall back on during the class. I don’t have a feeling for how the teachers cue pilates poses, so I didn’t have anything to fall back on other than what I managed to memorize. I guess I would benefit from taking some pilates classes but they always seem to be at noon or some other time when it’s pretty much impossible for me to go.

It is hard to tell how you are doing as a teacher, unless you get direct feedback from your students. I guess if the students keep coming than I’m doing okay. The students who come up to me after class mainly like to talk with me about their injuries, or how lately they’ve let their yoga practice slip and they're trying to get back into it; sometimes how different my class is (usually they seem to be saying this as a good thing) than the other “power” yoga classes.

In my last job (at EPA—now almost eight years ago), I had a normal salary, so I rarely thought about the fact that my salary was listed on my paychecks as an hourly rate. Now I’m getting paid by the hour, so I really have the sense of what it’s like to work for an hour.

I have continued a lot of the reading that I was doing for my teacher training. What has occurred to me lately—probably not a remarkable insight, but I hadn’t thought about it before—is that yoga philosophy is definitely tied to place, which in this case means India, which means references to elephants and lotus flowers. (Yoga philosophy is also closely related to Hinduism). This is all well and good, but what if yoga had been born in the Arctic Circle? Would we then be speaking of elephant seals? How much does this matter? In the case of Ayurveda, the traditional health system closely related to yoga, it actually means a lot. Ayurveda demands ingredients and herbs that are most likely to familiar to Indians, but not to Westerners. Just once I’d like to hear a discussion of Ayurveda that suggested a Western equivalent for Indian holy basil (tulsi).

A recent article in The New York Times discussed the relationship between yoga and food, eventually covering some of the arguments about the necessity of veganism to yoga. Some yogis are quite militant on the subject, citing the philosophical basis of yoga, one piece of which (a “yama” or abstention) stresses the broad concept of non-violence (the Sanskrit term is ahimsa), which is taken by many to extend to vegetarianism (or even further to veganism). This is fine, but I’d like to know if they also subscribe to the “yama” of Bramacharya, which basically says that you’re supposed to abstain from sex. Those in the yoga world are perennially reinterpreting this stricture, much like the second amendment of the Constitution. I think the focus on veganism is political more than anything else, something hip about which to be holier-than-thou. I suspect this is the case, but I’d have a more complete picture if I could find out how the militant vegans felt about abortion, given the ahimsa stricture. And, if yoga brings people away from various bad habits on its own, as the article notes, why the need to browbeat anyone? Finally—on the idea of eating and doing yoga—it’s not really a good idea to eat and then get yourself into, let’s say, a headstand. And I don’t need an ancient source to tell me that.

In case you’re curious, I’m listed on Yoga Alliance’s website, although my name is misspelled as "Kathrine".

Media Update

Books with Pages to Turn

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. This is the first book in a series that was a favorite of George’s sister Alex. It is historical fiction combined with elements of Harlequin romances (I recently reconnected through Facebook with a friend from high school whose room at that time was covered in huge stacks of Harlequin romances). I liked the book, but I didn’t love it. I found the lead character too incurious and nonfrustrated by eighteenth century life. And she goes on ad nauseam about the beauty of her buxom young husband.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling. Nora and I have begun the Harry Potter series, making it through the first two books. I found them very funny and clever. The characters and situations are interesting, and the kids seem mostly to behave like real children, which is a plus. In addition, it’s nice to see Nora play that she’s the character “Hermione” from the Harry Potter series rather than, let’s say, Hannah Montana. It’s hard for Nora being the only one in the family who can’t read, although they are working on this at school. Don’t bother to ask her, though, as she never seems to be able to remember what she did in school.

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson. This book is the second in the Millennium series that I mentioned in my last essay. I thought it lived up to the promise of the first book, and now I must wait until the third book is translated from Swedish, which I believe is supposed to be by next summer.

I am currently making my way through War and Peace. I hope to provide a full account in my next essay, but I’m enjoying it so far. The biggest problem for me is less the tossing around of all those Russian names, but all the military terms that are a complete mystery to me, such as “Cossack,” “Hussar,” and “Junker.” And the whole battle scene early on that involves the taking or blowing up of this one silly bridge.

Audiobooks

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. This book is beautiful and hopeful in a weird sort of way, but the reader on the audio version has a style that is too slow and deliberate. The story revolves around a teenager who is raped and murdered by a neighbor and she observes the fallout for her family from her perch in Heaven. Apparently the movie eliminates much of the ugliness and presents a lighter and younger-teenager friendly movie, but I imagine that this approach cuts the heart out of the story.

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. These books concern the slow disintegration of the traditional outlook and lifestyles of an upper middle class family in Victorian-era Britain. It moves slowly, as does the voice of the reader, but I found it weirdly fascinating. The motivations of the (numerous) characters are in many ways utterly incomprehensible to a twenty-first-century American, but there are things I found to recognize in them all.

Television

The Biggest Loser. I am still a fan of this silly “reality” show. Every year they have to up the ante, so this season they have the heaviest person ever on the show: 526 pounds. After his first week on the ranch, however, he’d already lost about 40 pounds or so, which is quite astonishing. The end of last season featured the participants running a marathon. This brought back for me all my memories of walking the Marine Corps Marathon in 1997—and being out on Haynes Point in the 50 degree, rainy weather, with few people out that far to cheer on the participants, exposed to the elements, and thinking “wow—I really want to go home.”

24. We’d nearly given up on 24—the hook of the ticking clock had long since lost any meaning, the plots were formulaic, the characters sort of annoying—then along came this season, which so far is promising. The addition of Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica is definitely a plus, as is the return of Jack’s partner from last season, the newly-deranged Renee.

Caprica. I was completely suspicious of this show, which purports to cover the origins of the conflict that leads to Battlestar Galactica (50 years later). I should have had more confidence in the producers, because I liked the first couple of episodes a lot. A completely different show but compelling in its own way.

Lost. We are still following this series, now in its last season—but in this case, “following” can be considered a very loose term.

Movies: Four Stars

Milk. My favorite part of Milk, a movie starring Sean Penn that tells the story of Harvey Milk, the gay activist from San Francisco who was eventually assassinated, is all these guys sitting around in a purported “camera shop” in the Castro district mocking one another day in and day out. It is unclear to me how they made any money in the “camera shop” because they seemed to have a wall with rolls of film and little else, but that doesn’t seem to concern anyone else in the movie. The end is touching. I thought Sean Penn was great.

Three Stars

Burn After Reading. Directed by the Coen brothers, this film is punctuated with weird, unexpected violence, but it’s very funny—and Brad Pitt is so ridiculous it’s refreshing.

Rachel Getting Married. I first thought that this might be a chick flick and George rolled his eyes, but then we started watching and realized that this was much darker than your typical wedding story. Rachel’s sister Kim gets out of rehab to attend Rachel’s wedding, and all sorts of revelations concerning their train wreck of a family ensue. The only problem was the ending, which was typically vague (the “I kinda like the way this movie feels but I really don’t know how to end it” syndrome). This leads us right into…

I've Loved You So Long. Another uplifting story about sisters, one of whom has a challenging past. Kristin Scott Thomas is terrific. It only gets three stars because—despite the fact that it’s a quality film— it’s very French.

Two Stars

Body of Lies. I liked the Jordanians in this movie—and it has since come out that the Jordanians are in fact in close working contact with the CIA—though not much else. George hated pretty much everything about the movie, especially the way that the Agency is portrayed. Russell Crowe is not on screen enough to develop his character, and Leonardo DiCaprio sometimes sounds like he’s reading his lines. Not a best effort by writer, cast, or director.

Australia. This movie is very pretty, but it has such a weird tone to it (Is it a comedy? A drama? Are we supposed to like Nicole Kidman?) that neither one of us could say that we really enjoyed watching it. That said, the ending is definitely better than the beginning and some parts are truly touching.

Theater

Cirque du Soleil—Wintuk. We caught Cirque du Soleil at Madison Square Garden over the Christmas holiday. The production was striking and beautiful; the “story” is nonsensical and besides the point. Alexander was literally on the edge of his seat through most of it; Nora claims she liked it too. I’m absolutely certain she liked the part at the end where paper snow came pouring out of the ceiling onto the audience; she collected a big chunk of it and had me carry it home in my purse. (It’s still there, come to think of it.)

Random Stuff

Hunting season. Driving back from D.C. one night last fall, a hormone-crazed deer launched itself into the side of George’s car on the highway and did about $5500 worth of damage. The auto body place said that at that point they were seeing an average of ten deer-damaged cars a day; Enterprise Rent-A-Car reported that six out of ten of their rentals were resulting from deer strikes. George got half the two-deer-per-season limit that Uncle Bill is allowed to bring home in New Jersey, and he didn’t even need to go crawling around the woods in the cold.

Kids and illness. As I learned in history class at some point during my long school career, revolutions occur in the time of rising expectations. It’s like that with kids and illness. Both kids had the flu in the fall. (Alexander, at least, definitely had swine flu, although Nora was sicker.) When they’re really sick it’s almost easier to deal with them. The real trouble starts when they begin to feel better and are almost ready to go back to school or start playing with their friends again. Then there’s constant collapsing on the floor and whatnot as they chafe against their illness-related restrictions.

Our budding composer. In New Jersey over the Christmas holiday, Alexander composed the following little song about Nora; he says he came up with it while lying in bed and had to jump up, turn on the lights, and write it down before he forgot:

‘Tis the season to check our passports

Fa la la la la la la la la

I think my sister’s name is “Nopa”

Fa la la la la la la la la

(Here’s where Nora chimes in: No no no no no no no no no)

My parents also think that’s true

Fa la la la la la la la al
So I’m going to check her passport too

Fa la la la la la la la la

Food. I've had (lately) the feeling that I should learn to eat fish. At the very least it would be nice to have another option when we go to restaurants. So I chose a fish recipe from my most trustworthy source, Cook’s Illustrated. They considered a classic French recipe for fish (in this case cod) baked in parchment and updated it to be baked in aluminum foil pockets with a compound lemon butter on the top and leeks and carrots underneath. As it baked, I sat with uneasy expectation—probably how my kids feel every night at dinner. Was it a failure, do you ask? Well, it was okay. Nothing to write home about (although I guess I am writing home about it). I didn’t say yum, nor did I say yuck. I may try it again someday soon, with a different fish. I still prefer tofu for an alternate source of protein. Alexander sort of liked it but not in large quantities.

I have, however, developed a strong liking for vegetarian sushi. This probably gives George hope, as he loves sushi and I’m sure he wishes we’d be willing to go to a sushi restaurant with him. Let’s see: if Alexander can eat simple cooked shrimp (which he loves) and I can eat the veggie sushi, this just leaves Nora. Plain rice, maybe?

Wedding dances. George and I have been to two weddings in the past year. One was for a couple in their early 20s and one for a couple in their early 40s. Both featured Abba’s “Dancing Queen” during the dance portion of the reception and both times it got a big chunk of the guests on their feet. What is it about this song? At what point will this stop being a high point at weddings? Alexander loves this song, too, so maybe not too soon.

Speaking of dancing, Vanity Fair featured an article on the history of disco that consisted of quotes from people remembering bits and pieces of the times. One quote from the writer Fran Liebowitz describes going to the New York clubs in the wintertime and being perplexed at what to do what your winter coat. She says that at one club people kind of folded them and laid them on the side and kept an eye on them. She says thinking about this dilemma still has the power to make her feel anxious. I can relate to this—I remember going to the club Limelight in New York when it was horrifically cold out. I must have brought a coat. What did I do with it? Was there a coat check? Did I manage to get it back? There was probably a whole industry in New Jersey reselling the coats of people that managed to lose them at the clubs.

Canine intelligence. I thought that along with tying shoes, reading, and adding two plus two, the kids would learn how to tell time in school. Alexander displays, however, a disturbing (perhaps deliberate) lack of awareness of what time it is. Actually, the dog tells time much better than my kids. He knows when breakfast and dinner are, what time we go to the bus in the morning and afternoon, and what time George comes home at night (this is when he primes himself by running around the house and barking at everything).

No Clear Place to Start on Current Politics

Well, just where to start. Perhaps with the distribution of visas to those coming to visit the U.S. I thought the point of having a visa structure was so that the U.S. could control who was coming into the country. It amazes me that the Christmas Bomber could get a visa despite the warnings his father gave the government about him. I gather that the State Department requires a great weight of evidence before it denies a visa, but really. I guess a more strict regime could create complications for people trying to get into the country if one (perhaps false) comment from a friend or a family member or “source” to the U.S. government gets that person on a no-entry list, but it seems that the State Department just passes these things out willy nilly to some groups and then makes it very difficult for academics and scientists seeking visas to come to conferences to take up research at American universities.

I’m counting the months until President Obama talks about a single issue without making some reference—explicit or implicit—to some mess that he “inherited” from the previous (read “obviously incompetent”) administration. I would love to see him stand up and own something—anything. Between blaming the previous administration and pushing forward the pain of various pieces of legislation to beyond his current term, he’s going to take responsibility for nothing. No president is ever handed a blank slate. How lovely it would be if they were—oh were it that the outgoing president was simply able to sign off on the final piece of legislation, push through a couple of controversial pardons, erase the white board, and turn out the lights, leaving the new president a fresh blotter and an empty agenda for the first staff meeting.

One presumably wants to be president because not only do you get a cool house and a cool ride and your own plane (!) but you get to make what you believe are much better decisions than the guy before you. Oh, unless you don’t like to or are too inexperienced at it. The president reportedly didn’t like his options on Afghanistan. Let me guess—he was looking for the option that was costless and was followed up by a chorus of Hallelujahs. News flash: whatever option you choose, Mr. President, people are going to die. Then he finally made a momentous move, stunning his critics: he decided to decide! Of course he supposedly decided a good six to seven months earlier.

I am beginning to see Obama morphing into Tiger woods. Not in the obvious ways, and no, I don’t believe that he’s got mistresses all over the world. Tiger Woods seems to be one of those people who became a receptacle for others’ hopes and dreams. No one seemed really to know him and he remained aloof and sheltered by all sorts of handlers—but now all the flaws are being teased out. At least with the Clintons it seemed to be all out there—all their flaws and whatnot—even their lack of allegiance to any particular set of ideas was out there. Obama reminds me of Tiger: a blank slate onto which others have pitched their assumptions. Even his reported eloquence seems to have crumbled into nothing. I find his speeches pretty boring. Even when Clinton was saying nothing or something infuriating he was interesting to listen to (well, except for those seeming four-hour long Chavez-style State of the Unions).

Also, Scott Brown, the new senator from Massachusetts, may be the miracle boy, but he’s also a scandal in the making. Just look at him.

Nora and friend under dire threat from global warming, February 2010

Baxter and his friends bewildered by climate change, February 2010

Welcome to the sunny south, February 2010

Nora's picture of George shoveling, February 2010

Given the global climate chaos in December and into February that saw us here in Virginia experiencing extremely cold temperatures and huge amounts of snow, the threat of global warming is a difficult sell (I personally believe this winter is a result of the wrath of God descending on D.C.). Obviously global warming needs a serious rebranding. Upon the president’s return to the U.S. from the Copenhagen climate conference, he was greeted by terrible cold and even frostier politics. (While at Copenhagen, I believe the president apologized for years of U.S. economic development. George thinks that when developing countries start demanding that industrialized countries fork over more cash to make up for years of pollution, the West should demand payment for the development of things like electricity, cell phones, computers, the Internet, vaccines,...you get the idea.) The climate crowd is gradually making its way toward the conclusion that mass suicide on the part of Americans, western Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and perhaps the Chinese is the only solution. If this is to be the case, then I humbly suggest that unlike the leadership of Al Qaeda, the first person to bring it up in public should be the first one to go.

Of course the recent scandals concerning climate data don’t help matters. The cynicism of many climate scientists is jawdropping. It seems that they believe that ordinary people are too stupid to grasp the nuances of climate data and its interpretation, and thus it’s not important to be careful about data management, never mind interpretation. What they’ve managed to do is make it more likely that people will believe that their agenda is really to reign in the biggest economies and punish us for wasteful lifestyles. The Economist had a really good take on the climate data scandal. I also like this editorial from Bjorn Lomborg in The Australian. Finally, related to this subject, here is a link to a good article about environmentalism as the new religion.

In Alexander’s third grade class, obviously in an effort to be inclusive in discussions of famous or important Americans, they had the kids learn about a series of clearly carefully-selected historic figures. I have no quibble with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Harriet Tubman, but included on that list is Cesar Chavez, who agitated for farm worker’s rights in California. I really don’t know how I feel about that. As the only Hispanic included on the list, it’s an interesting choice. And what is interesting is that the minorities included on the list are ones who were fighting the powers that be. Is there any minority who could be included who was not remembered mainly for struggling against white people for power? I’m not suggesting that these figures were not important, or noteworthy, but in terms of role models for today’s students, couldn’t the list include a supreme court justice? Or a successful military leader? Or perhaps even a religious or civic leader who worked to provide charity to people in their communities? These are not fully formed thoughts on my part, I agree, but I’d like to see a broader and ultimately more inclusive inclusive list.

And FYI

This link discusses an interesting museum in Eisenhuttenstadt, in the former east Germany.

And to close, here's the best news I’ve heard (yes, heard) in a long time for Generation Xers, from the Washington Post:

Is that Right? Loud music ruined baby boomers' hearing?

After years of being told that the loud music we listened to in our youth would make us deaf, we baby boomers can take comfort in a new studythat provides evidence that Led Zeppelin didn't permanently damage our eardrums after all.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health found that rates of hearing loss have actually been decreasing over the past decades. The authors suggest the improvement may lbe due largely to reductions in smoking (the cardiovascular effects of which can contribute to hearing loss) and better management of workplace noise. It's exposure to that kind of long-term, environmental noise that's most apt to harm hearing, the authors note.

The study analyzed data for 5,275 people born between 1902 and 1962, comparing the incidence of hearing loss in later years among those born earlier (the parent group) and a group of their offspring (a cohort roughly coinciding with the baby-boom generation). They found that as the younger folks advanced in age, they maintained good hearing far longer than their elders had as they aged.

From the news release announcing the January 15 publication of the research in the American Journal of Epidemiology:

"Generally people think that our world is getting noisier and noisier, but we found that the prevalence of hearing loss is decreasing," says Dr. Weihai Zhan, who led the study. "These results suggest that hearing loss is not a normal part of aging and there are things we can do to delay hearing loss."

In the news release, the authors note that short-term noise exposure such as may occur at a concert (or when listening to recorded music with the volume set to 11) generally causes just temporary hearing loss. As they note in the study, though, it remains to be seen whether frequent use of earbuds among today's young people may causepermanent loss of hearing.

I'm so happy to hear this news, I'm going to go dance around the kitchen to some White Stripes songs on my iPod. Really loud.

By Jennifer LaRue Huget  |  January 29, 2010; 7:00 AM ET