Fill up Regular.
Gasoline at Three Nineteen.
Fourteen Gallons, Full.
The Over-Caffeinated Files: Suburban Mom Haiku #4
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Bloomsday! Calls for a little bit of reading “in” Ulysses Tonight
Bloomsday – June 16 – the day into which James Joyce compressed an entire modern novel with it’s magnificent, chaotic, structurally unstructured language – 22 CDs worth, in a modern measure of its breadth.
Carl Jung said it best about Ulysses in a letter he wrote Joyce, “I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.”
To me, the Molly Bloom soliloquy to which Jung refers is the best part. Truth be told, I’ve attempted Ulysses, it has lived on my bedside for months at a time, but I have never gotten all the way through it. I can always get through bits of Molly Bloom with her tough, crusty sensual lusty prose. Wow, the lady sure doesn’t seem like she’s from Joyce’s lifetime. I have also spent June Sixteenths for multiple years listening to chunks of the 13 hour reading of Ulysses by magnificent NY actors at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side. Quite a fun event. You buy a ticket for the day and then wander in and out at your pleasure – with breaks to gather your sanity, flex your butt muscles and eat some meals. I’ve seen both Fionnula Flanagan AND Elin O’Dea knock the proverbial ball out of the park with each of their portrayals of Molly, who is based on the Penelope character (wife of the main character, the king of Ithaca, Odysseus) in the original Odyssey. The painting below shows Penelope and Odysseus together, reunited – Penelope, symbol of faithfulness was also the holder of the matrilineal line- the line that determined kingship at this point in Greece. So, more than just a faithful wife, she was the stabilizing force for the Kingdom of Ithaca for all of Odysseus’ missing war and travel years. Interesting to consider Molly Bloom in this light.
Bawdy, rough, intelligent, X-rated – in contrast to Penelope, Molly is quite something. The monologue she delivers sure confirms for us that Leopold Bloom, her husband and the book’s protagonist, sure has his hands full! I’m not even going to encourage you to go look the passage up – it is right here for your listening pleasure – enjoy! Happy Bloomsday, everyone!
Last few pages here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq5hnnDI0qk
If you are inspired, here is the Full speech (hoping you can access Soundcloud, look left on the page for instructions: http://www.symphonyspace.org/live/program/bloomsday32_molly)
Joe Biden Nails it on the Downside of a Highly Privileged College Education
Food for thought for those of us hell-bent on making sure our kids have access to a “top” college education. Some words of wisdom from Biden’s recent speech to graduating Seniors at Yale, Spring 2015:
“Today, some of you may have found that you have slipped into the self-referential bubble that validates certain choices. And the bubble expands once you leave this campus, as do the pressures and anxiousness — “take this job,” …. “make that much money,” …. “live in this place,” …. “hang out with people like you,” … “take no real risks” and ultimately, “have no real impact,”…
And here’s the kicker of a conclusion he drops on these seniors at Yale: WHILE GETTING PAID FOR THE FALSE SENSE OF BOTH.” !!!!!
How do we help our kids pursue excellence without getting them stuck into a self-referential bubble where they come to believe that what they are achieving is earth-shattering and that they are thereby somehow more valuable or more entitled to a “good” life than others? Worth thinking about for our kids and, ultimately, for ourselves too.
Interested in pursuing this a bit more? This young blogger has some interesting things to say about living what I’d term an “authentic” life: http://theancientwisdomproject.com/
Dilemma
Plus to sitting quietly in my cave? Time to think. Downside? Coming to realizations that have no good answer.
Today’s Realization? I want to be universally liked AND I want to be free to express myself when I feel like it. That poses some challenges, now doesn’t it…
Cinema Sunday: Lessons Learned from the Movies: “Be the Ball, Danny!”
What does it say about me that the most powerful mantra I’ve ever heard is a Chevy Chase line in a movie as banal as Caddyshack, “Be the Ball, Danny!” I’ve attempted meditation in many guises throughout my life. The Buddhist Prayer for Peace (great sentiments, but for my purposes, too long for memorizing):
May those frightened cease to be afraid,
and may those bound be free.
May the powerless find power,
and may people think of befriending
one another.
St. Francis’s prayer: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred … let me sow love… (I’m a sucker for animals as was St. Francis, so this one doesn’t work – I get carried away with a bestiary of mental visitors and can’t make the doves and wolves stop appearing in my brain).
You may have seen a while back in one of my FaceBook posts that my son even came up with the NASCAR mantra. He came up with NASCAR in trying to recover from a concussion. When told to do as little thinking as possible, NASCAR was the one thing he could imagine “non-thinking” Americans most liked to think about. (And, he’s on to something – I’ve tried repeating NASCAR NASCAR NASCAR as an alternative to OM. Since I know nothing about it, all trappings of interest and referential imagery cease in my brain and NASCAR seems to thereby have a deadening effect on my otherwise very active imagination.)
But for me, the ultimate for meditative “punch” is the “Be the Ball” imagery. It has at its essence elements of “Be One with the Universe,” but that line is just too grand and filled with opportunity for flights of fancy to hold my attention for long. However a little, white, puckered golf ball is simple enough to corral my thoughts. Caveat here: I have never really even attempted to learn golf. For those of you who have any relationship with the game (which is to me the most frustrating of sports), “Be the Ball,” may not work for you. At which point, there’s always NASCAR.
However for me, being a ball is manageable. There it is, perched up on its tee: a small object, but one that commands deep focus, gleaming brilliantly against the green background of the spiky turf. What’s in that ball? I’d say the first and most captivating aspect is anticipation – all the anticipation of the crack of the club and the hopeful desire that that tiny sphere departs in a soaring arc floating ever outwards: 50 — 100 — 200 yards down the fairway before it lands at its next destination- progress – much like what we want for ourselves. All of that meaning, pent up in a small white ball that awaits your skill, determination, focus and to paraphrase Chevy Chase – all your essential oneness with it, before it makes its next leap. That’s an image I can get behind. The ball…the embodiment of forward motion…sitting still upon its little tee, awaiting the action of the universe upon it. This is unlike our relationship with a tennis or squash or soccer ball where you are often in contact with it reactively. Each and every time we interact with a golf ball, we are choosing the exact moment when we next put it into action. So, “Be the Ball, Danny!”
God’s Little Call Center
Dear God,
Just a little tip – you seem to be waaaaay behind the times, and I want to recommend that you put in a state of the art call center so that we, your people on earth, can get in touch with you STAT, (or at the very least, contact “your people”). You see, we need much quicker action on a bunch of issues that seem to be befalling the earth these days. I mean, I read Genesis, and it says right there in bold print that you made this ENORMOUS world in only 7 days. 7 days? Really? A whole world in the same time it takes a second-rate factory in Guatemala to make a container full of sub-par Beanie Babies? No wonder things are falling apart down here. I’m constantly telling my kids that they should neither rush nor procrastinate when they have a big project. And yet right there, in the most widely read book in the entire world, you admit for all to see that you made this huge world in only 7 days. What were you doing before those 7 days — lounging about eating cheese doodles, brownies and cokes and playing celestial video games against Satan 24/7/∞? And then, once you started you were all like Rush Rush Rush, “Woe is me, I have GOT to finish this World Project I started, and I only have 7 days!” …Once you got started, did you proof your work? Did you look for essential flaws? I’m thinking you may have taken a few short cuts in that area. Like volcanoes for instance…a little bit of careful editing, and you probably could have eliminated the entire Pacific Ring of Fire from the globe. And of course, I hate to bring it up but now that I think of it, how about the rogue asteroids that you left roaming around our heavens. I mean, 135 million years of dinosaurs down the drain because of a few sloppy asteroid mishaps at the end of the Triassic era. Zoos would be one hell of a lot cooler if we still had a few dinosaurs to put on display.
Right now we’re facing a whole bunch of new issues – not the least of which is water. You seem to be really into water what with Bible’s whole Red Sea parting, baptism imagery thing. Well, if I had an 800# to call, I’d let you know that the water we’ve got trapped up in the Arctic is about to melt all the Hell over the place and it is going to get REALLY messy for places like Brittany and Back Bay and Bangladesh. But as of yet, I cannot find your website, or a phone number or a FaceBook page where I can let you know, in advance, so you and your people can do something about your shoddy manufacturing. I can’t even complain publicly via a twitter feed and force you get back to me with an apology and a plan to fix your flawed product. Anyway, I hope you will forward this on to your customer service department in a timely manner and get me the answers that I, your loyal customer of 50 years, deserve.
Yours Truly, Julia in Wellesley
The Dreaded Parents’ Math Handbook Return Deadline
Bwahhhhhhahaha — I did it – I told them I WOULD NOT take the math handbook this year and retreated right on back into my cave with a resounding NOOOOOOOO. I shoved that thing back into the teacher’s hands with a quick, “thanks….but no thanks…he’s my 3rd kid – don’t need it,” explanation.
So, I just got the “Next Friday is the deadline to return the parent math… blah blah blah blah….” email from the teacher – bless her heart as she has 20 of these things to keep track of and I only have 1 each year. And then, the nagging little voice of doubt…do you have one of those? I bet you do. Like a little lone bat in the back of my cave – repeatedly squeaking, “are you SURE you didn’t keep the book?” “Nah…I couldn’t possibly, I can even recall the smug little sense of satisfaction ….” “But are you sure?” says the bat in the back of my mind. “NOOO I’M NOT SURE! You #!%# Bat!!!” And of course at the point my thoughts turn to Alzheimer’s….and then comes my enormous mental effort to block the nagging sense that that dang book is somewhere in my house – with the bat’s words haunting me. Finishing up with, “you SUCK at meditation and at organizing your life,” – such cheerful supporting words to begin my day….not!
Proof that you can never outwit the dreaded PARENT MATH HANDBOOK – it is like a specter that plays into your worst fears of aging and parental (not to mention mathematical) incompetence. Next time, I guess I will have to hand the thing back in immediately AND write it down somewhere…and remember where I wrote it down – because If You Give a Mother a Parent Math Handbook… but that’s a spoof book for another day…
Cave Home…
Enjoy … link below for pics of the whole house – wonder if they have a car that will hold a side of Brontosaurus ribs?
http://housepict.com/cave-structure-house-inspired-by-flinstones-cartoons/
Paleo
Nick swears that if you have to lose weight, “paleo” is one of the least bad way to go. However, he’s developed a kind of snarky take on paleo that helps combat those people who point out that your 3 ozs of quinoa or your baked potato is nothing a caveman would have ever had available which makes me want to go right for a giant topping of sour cream just to spite them. God, I HATE judge-y eaters. I mean, they chastise you for your potato but it’s not like they are wearing a loin cloth and most of them would recoil if you invited them to join you for a day of bow hunting in the NH woods. So, Nick’s take on paleo is that you want to eat like a later-era hunter gatherer – you know, the ones who happened to be lucky enough to live in proximity to a neighboring community that was just figuring out the whole farming angle. Your standard fare would be of course be the meat, roots, shoots and fruits/berries diet, but it would jazzed up whenever possible with the occasional violent and exhilarating raid of your neighbors, these nascent carb producers. You can see it right there in the picture above – hunter gatherer spear guy is morphing into farming rake guy – Nick and I call this stage of eating, “opportunistic late-stage paleo” or OLPALEO. I’m thinking it might really enhance my enjoyment of these carb binges if I dressed in skins and feathers, pulled into the Seven-Eleven at about 80 mph, came to a screeching halt, jumped out of the car, ran in and gave a war cry on my way to the cash register with my 32 oz Big Gulp.
Speaking of Big Gulps, I continue to ponder the whole Mayor Bloomberg logic of banning these mega-sized drinks. Truth told, I’m a libertarian at heart – paint your cave with whatever color animal drawings meet your fancy. Build the biggest bonfire you want in back of your cave. Just don’t tell me I can’t wander around naked if I want to. So, going back to Bloomberg and his very anti-libertarian stance, I mean, if that rule had passed, wouldn’t people who wanted a 32 oz drink with 91 grams of sugar (yes, you read that right, 91 grams) just purchase two 16 oz versions of the same drink? But, I digress…
So yes, paleo. In my mind, it is kind of a fetishy, nonsensical, trendy idea that heroicizes manipulating your eating patterns in a public fashion that serves to make you feel great in part by tacitly making others feel worthless and weak. I still don’t think that most paleo eaters have any true idea how actual living, breathing cows or steers become pre-packaged styrofoam trays of hamburger (they probably don’t know how a bull becomes a steer either, but that’s for another day). If they did know, they might very well have chosen veganism instead. But, I do think most of us collectively worry about What The Heck is in most things we call “food,” and we are desperate to pursue another path. So, no, I’m never going to be a paleo “purist.” That being said, paleo with a healthy dose of opportunistic carb binging seems like a great way to go into one’s 50s – particularly since I think I rank as a paleo eater because I AM someone who has actually witnessed the entire process of a bull becoming a steer and finally becoming the burger on my plate.
Troglothoughts
At 50, I really thought I would have left the security of the cave and be venturing further and further out into life. But, surprisingly, the cave is calling me back. Cave imagery is everywhere in my life and so I plan to embrace it with this new “Dispatch from the Cave” Blog. Recent thoughts from the cave that have hit me:
- Whenever I put on my ugly but functional Tevas – face it, neanderthals would have KILLED for Tevas – these things are like snow shoes, but for summer.
- Tossing wall balls at the wall of the CrossFit gym and mostly missing the mark- I feel much as a neanderthal must have felt chucking boulders over the cliff at a herd of passing gazelle.
- Hunched over a keyboard-shades pulled to conserve heat or cool depending on the season – I’m like some ascetic mystic -musing on the mundanity of life in this blog or on the pages of FaceBook.
- With each paleo bite taken, in my new-found quest for healthy eating that satisfies. NOT that I think paleo is the end all and be all – for sure it isn’t – wait for more postings on that topic! But dammit, there are only so many wall balls you can throw in a day – and by my calculations, a pack of M&Ms equals about 375 chucks of the 14 pounder. In neanderthal time, I’m pretty sure 375 boulders would have secured me at least 3 dead gazelles; I try and remember the thrill of a gazelle BBQ as I’m heading down the candy aisles at CVS.
And so, friends, I invite you to join me – visit here, invite friends and sit by this virtual e-cave of shared thought. You can sit down by the fireside of fifty-plus, share your tales and listen to mine. Welcome!
dispatchfromthecave 