‘Oddest Thing’ Challenge

So, over at The Jade Road, there’s a challenge up to post some of your weirdness…the kind to be found in your house, that is.

I didn’t have to think long.

By far and away, the oddest thing going on in my house is in this corner of the guest room:

What is it, you ask?

I’m actually not sure. I bought it at an antique auction. R. almost had a coronary when he saw it. And then a second coronary when I explained that he needed to rope it to the roof of the Tacoma to get it home.

Do y’all know what Freemasonry is? Um, yeah. They’re not high on my list of politically acceptable organizations either, despite the fact that I had an arm of my family who were diehard members. (Speaking of dying, have you ever been to the funeral of a Mason? ‘Cause my grandfather was a Mason and his funeral had the whole masonic shebang, including a white leather mason’s apron around his midsection in the coffin and a super-secret-scary scroll that was placed under his clasped hands for reading only in the afterlife and a sprig of evergreen on his clavicle.)

So, because the Masons don’t admit women, they have a number of sister organizations, including The Daughters of the Nile and the Order of the Eastern Star. So, my oddest thing once lived in a Masonic Temple for use by the Order of the Eastern Star in their meetings. I should mention that it lights up (can you see that in the photo?)…and it has a rotary dial that can light up only certain sections of the five-pointed star or all of it. Each “symbol” in each of the sections represents a different female biblical character–a daughter, widow, wife, sister, and mother. I could say a lot about the gender politics represented herein, but I will refrain.

Instead, I will say this: It’s like a giant ritual popsicle.

Hey, what can I say. I like it. As an aesthetic piece. Or maybe a historical artifact. Ahem.

Mod Dollhouse

I promised a post on the dollhouse my mom just dug out of her basement and sent me this year for Christmas–the house wasn’t the gift, the act of mailing it here from the east coast was. It WAS my Christmas gift in 1969. At the ripe ole age of three.

Here I am holding the refrigerator in my hands in August of 1970:

My dad built it for me. I was enchanted by it. It was unlike anything I had ever seen–all one level with no roof, so very easy to maneuver the dolls around in. And my parents furnished it with Creative Playthings “mid-century modern” doll furniture that was a 1960s phenomena. It no longer exists in any store, just on Ebay. (*Yes,* I’ve been checking, in case I decide to upgrade the dining set or something. Heh.)

I have often wondered if this doll furniture is the reason why I have a serious LUV for modern design today. I mean, it’s got to come from somewhere, right? No one has a subscription to dwell and a Louis XVI ghost chair in their living room by chance, right? It certainly didn’t come from my parents…they had mostly colonial-revival stuff in our house growing-up. Except for the single Herman Miller Eames leather recliner and ottoman that my father liked to watch football from…that chair landed on the curb circa 1984.

The dollhouse arrived at the ranch a bit worse for wear–not from the cross-country jaunt it took, but from the way I left it in…er…say, 1979. The wallpaper my parents lined all six rooms with is peeling in several places, and the carpet squares that used to fit in the living room and bedroom apparently long since went the way of mold and mildew and were tossed:

I bought a new set of dolls to use in the house for Emme Lu because I had a sorry hodgepodge collection of weird fake Barbie-like dolls that my grandmother brought me from Florida in the late 60s and dimestore rubber animals (see old photos for weird conglomeration of dolls). I decided to get a little family of dolls for Emme, although I’m thinking of replacing the “blonde” little girl in the family with a black-haired girl…actually, I’m thinking of yanking out her yarnhair (which is really a rather unusual grayish mauve color) and gluing black yarn back in its place. You know…so that Emme can role play or whatever.

Here is the goofy bowlegged look I sported in my younger years:

I did enjoy that dollhouse. I hope Emerson will too. Now all I need is a nursery (ahem…toddler bedroom) to put it in.

Thank you, Auntie Wzgirl!

The Bee received some of the COOLEST gifts evah in the mail today from the wonderful woman over there at buttercup.

Take a looksee for yourselves and see if you don’t agree that wzgirl needs to be in the baby clothing design business:

Two onesies and a little T-shirt. The bird is cut from a loteria design from Alexander Henry and the heart is the tatoo print, also from Alexander Henry. I actually OWN yardage of both of these fabrics (for use in The Bee’s future quilt), so how psyched am I to find these very same fabrics used in clothing that I can actually put ON The Bee?!!? The third design has the coolest button with what looks to be the face of a flapper on it–definitely has the way cool vintage look. I am so excited!

These are definitely making the trek to China. White Swan here we come!

And check out the cute card that came with all this bounty:

So perfect. Thank you from the bottom of my (our) heart, wzgirl!

Weather Report…

we had our first snow this weekend…Friday and Saturday, it actually snowed a cumulative 1/2 inch. Woohoo. I have coined a new term as a result: snowmist. It is probably only new to me and won’t seem remarkable to anyone else, but I swear I saw the finest snow I have ever seen on Saturday morning. It just made the view out the window look fuzzy, like a frozen spritzer.

Here are some photos…

The ranch gate with snow:

Our nearest big mountain, frosted:

The mountains across the valley:

Now, watch what the light did:

And then:

If I need reminding about why I live here, that would do it.

Exchanging Looks.

Ever have a linguistic phrase or vocabulary word that confounds you? This one confounds me: they *exchanged looks.*

When I was a wee young thing, I read the Nancy Drew series voraciously. I think that may be where I first encountered the term, “exchanging looks” or “exchanging glances.” Whenever Nancy and her pals meant up with the bad guys or the mysterious woman, they exchanged looks. In my head, I constructed a mental image of what happened at that point. When Nancy and her chum George (a woman, by the way) exchanged looks, I imagined that meant they traded the looks that were on their faces at that moment–so, if Nancy was looking sad and George was looking mad, then they would trade those looks, and Nancy would then look mad, and George would adopt the sad look previously belonging to her friend. Get it?

I guess in my young mind I thought the word “exchange” meant a transaction of some sort had to take place…so that the people involved in exchanging looks were something like clowns who could take off their masks and hand it to the other person. It’s only been in my unimaginative adulthood that I came to realize that “exchanging looks” merely means their eyes met. They looked at each other. They glanced each other’s way. No trading of facial expressions at all. No smile or furrowed eyebrows undetectably passing by each other in the ether between people to land on the other’s now reinvented face.

And, yet, every time I read or hear that expression–even today–I have to make a mental note, like a mental hiccup or an intellectual pause, of what it really means. I have to remind myself that they only shot a glance the other’s way. The residue of my more imaginative mind still lingers, and it makes my intellect perform some extra work. I kind of like that idea, actually.

Anyone else have any mental hiccups or confounding expressions they’d like to share?

Confessions of a Blogophile.

Hello. My name is SBird, and I hate Bloglines.

There. I said it. I hate Bloglines. In the midst of a booming Blog Culture and many bloggers who have come not just to depend on Bloglines, but to revere the technological wonder that is Bloglines, I imagine I am a voice in the wilderness.

And, yet, here I am. Here I am to say that Bloglines does nothing for me. I have tried it. I continue to try it. And I understand that it improves efficiency…boy, do I understand that. When I post a new entry on my blog, I usually have a comment waiting for me on my email within minutes. Like two. Minutes. These are folks that I must assume have me on their Bloglines and so can see nearly instantaneously when I have a new post up. (Although I do wonder whether there isn’t some sort of bell that they’ve got programmed to go off, since not even if I liked Bloglines would I check it that frequently.) I, on the other hand, often don’t get around to commenting on other people’s blogs for hours or even days after they put up a new post since I still *prefer* to check the blogs that I regularly read the old-fashioned way.

Yes. You heard me. The old-fashioned way. I realize it’s a bit of an oxymoron to talk about such new technology (how long have blogs been around now? five years or so?) as even having an “old-fashioned way,” but that’s what it has begun to feel like. See if this makes sense: I am on my blog’s home page. At home. In the familiar environs of my singing bird motif, of my own words, of my comfy blog list. I can move my cursor rather luxuriously between my post, my comments, and my personally-categorized list of online friends. I can hover over a bloggy pal’s cybername, I can watch my own poised cursor make that friend’s cybername spring to life as it indicates an active link, I can click on it and be instantly transported into another world. Someone else’s world. Someone else’s home. And then–if they have a new post up–I can visit with them there. I love that feeling of almost-surprise, of confirmed satisfaction, when I discover that, yes, indeed, they DO have a new post up, and I get to unwrap it like a present. Really. Sometimes I check blogs like Johnny’s just to get my fix of confirmed satisfaction because, of course, I know he’ll have something waiting for me every single day.

Sometimes when I click over to visit one of my links, they are not at home. There is an old post still up that I have already read and learned from and perhaps commented on (usually commented on). Often, though, I will check the comments on an old post to see what other commenters have added since my last visit or to see whether the blogger themselves has added anything. Those sorts of updates to the original post (the ones done entirely within the comments section) don’t show up on Bloglines at all. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that there is something to the physical motion–the movement between home and off-home visits–the cyclical nature of checking blogs directly from my own–the emotional reaction to the appearance of either a new post or an old post–that is important to me. I even like the random nature of the “hit-or-miss” ethic. Perhaps it’s like the difference between a garment cut and assembled entirely by machine and one constructed by hand. You pay more attention to the warp and the weave of the fabric when you do things by hand.

Again, though, I realize that the analogy to using old-fashioned methods when we’re discussing the blogosphere is an odd one. We are talking about digital technology here, not about writing out our posts in longhand with a quill.

But, finally, it really does come down to aesthetics for me. Bloglines looks funny. It looks like a digital card-catalog with everyone’s posts stacked on top of each other and completely devoid of personality. They all look the same. Now I am very much aware that it’s possible to click on a new post’s title in Bloglines and be transferred over to the original post on the originary blog. But here’s the thing…after using Bloglines awhile, you just stop doing that. It just becomes easier–faster–even more efficient–just to read the posts where they are in front of you. And so eventually you give up and you don’t click over and you read the posts on Bloglines instead, in their completely standardized bleakness. Maybe you click over to comment–but, still, you’ve gone through the process of reading the post in its humorless, emotionless, Bloglines form, and I would wager that that changes how you read the post, what you read within the post. It’s almost as if the post becomes more earnest–and that is not a compliment to the post. Earnest in the sense of taking itself too seriously, too preservedly, which I think can happen even with serious posts that are meant to be taken seriously. If they aren’t surrounded by the homeplace of the blogger that is posting them, they absorb the earnest stolidness of the card-catalog that is Bloglines. The context in which we take in the words affects the words themselves.

I am not a purist. I am trying to do something that’s half-and-half. When I am very busy–too busy–having to moderate a yahoo group gone amuck (ahem), then I use Bloglines just so that my blog peeps don’t think I am ignoring them. They are so good about responding to me, and I believe in reciprocity more than I believe in just about anything. But my preference remains to check my bloglist links one by one from The Singing Bird homepage, as if I am knocking on doors, not entirely sure what I might find there.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming…

…for a brief MeMe brought to us by walternatives: The Nearest Book MeMe.

The rules are simple:

1) Find the nearest book
2) Open to page 123
3) Type lines 6-8 of said book
4) Tag three others

I had a bit of a hiccup in the process because I realized that my actual nearest book–nearest four books–only went to pages 75-100…they are poetry collections and because people in this rag-tag culture of ours don’t read poetry (AHEM!!!), they aren’t long. But then I realized I had a Bilingual edition (so, already twice as long), of the collected poems of Pablo Neruda nearby:

And those of you who know me won’t believe this, but here are the first eight lines from page 123, a poem entitled “Disaction”:

The dove is filled with split papers,
its breast is stained with erasers and weeks,
with blotting paper whiter than a corpse
and inks frightened by their sinister color.

Come with me to the shadow of administrations,
to the weak, delicate, pallid color of the chiefs,
to the tunnels deep as calendars,
to the doleful thousand-paged wheel.

So, besides the bird reference and the obvious writing references, does the line “the tunnels deep as calendars” remind anyone else out there of this interminable adoption wait?

Okay, I am tagging The Slow Boat to China, atomic mama, and omega mom.

Have Fun!

Radio Silence…

Sorry I haven’t been posting recently…I’ve been in a bit of a funk. This funk might be the result of any of the following reasons, in no certain order:

+ We in the SN world are busying our little waiting brains with trying to invent a new acronym for our signature posts. Let me tell you, anytime one is forced to come up with a new acronym–it can’t be good. This time the CCAA has implemented a new step in the SN process that happens after your dossier has been reviewed, but before the TA is issued.

They did this out of the blue. Without telling any agency types.

It is called a “Statement of Commitment,” which sounds an awful lot to me like those pledges Christian fundamentalist high schoolers are making to remain chaste until marriage. But actually this is exactly the same form that NSN aparents receive with their referral. It tells you who your child is and asks you to sign your names indicating that you want her, which of course I already did back on October 11th. They are now adding it as an extra step for SN aparents, and it will delay TA from 3 to 12 weeks. No one really knows for sure.

Does the word redundant come to anyone else’s mind?

The prevailing wisdom is that this new step is a reaction to the increase in disruptions we’ve been seeing over the past six months, but here’s the thing: it still isn’t legally binding, even if it is attempting to be psychologically so. Disruptions point to a sad state of affairs in terms of aparent preparation (or lack thereof), but disruptions aren’t preventable by adding a paper step to the process.

The acronyms being debated are LOA and SC…LOA for “Letter of Acceptance” and SC for “Statement of Commitment.” How about IJWMDN?

I Just Want My Daughter Now.

See? Funk.

+I got to see my father walk around my house at Christmas in his diapers (he gets disoriented finding his way to the bathroom). Although that cries out to be funny, it’s not. He has Parkinson’s. It sort of takes the wind out of funny, not to mention taking the wind out of everything else. I have a parent in diapers and an (almost) daughter in diapers, which makes me an official member of that sandwich generation. And it’s weird because I’m barely a parent, and yet I’m losing my parents. Those years of Norman Rockwellian, intergenerational bonding and holiday dinners and sharing of family stories belong to some nostaglic past, along with martini lunches and June Cleaver.

I’m realizing that this may be the true fallout of being an older parent…of “waiting” (even if it was not your choice) to be a parent. My parents waited until their 30s to have kids, and I am 40 having kids…which makes my parents first-time grandparents in their 70s. Which means they too are returning to being in a child-like state, if only because of their out-of-control bodily functions. I can’t imagine what that feels like. The idea of seeing your life as a bell curve is dismal.

+I have been thinking about the cockeyed way some countries might view our standing-in-line-by-the-tens-of-thousands-to-adopt-these-Chinese-babies while we bomb the hell out of babies in Iraq and Afghanistan or ignore the babies in Darfur. I think about this at 3 AM sometimes, and I am not a bleeding heart by any standard of measurement. It just seems a rather stark disjunction–from that other point of view.

Actually, I began thinking about this after the P@ula Z@hn debacle, when the Turkish-American panelist made his comments asking why no one is adopting Muslim kids…and that we wouldn’t want them to be near a chemistry class. Yeah, we all know that Muslim countries don’t ever send their children abroad for adoption, but what this guy was really trying to incite us to think about (I think…) is that it’s strange how we decide that some kids are indispensible and some kids are expendable. At least, our national behaviors would seem to indicate that we hold those dichotomous views. What does labeling someone a towel head have to do with adopting orphans from China? Well…maybe everything.

+It is so cold here things are cracking. Garden hoses, pipes, lips, ground, tempers. Cold, wind, and no precipitation. The only ice we have is in the birdbath. (Don’t worry, I bought a heater for it. I try to do right by my birdy friends.) We actually have a below-zero windchill. I hate windchill. If we never had to factor a temperature or anything else by using measurements that are merely metaphoric again, I would be happy.

+I actually do have some more posts planned…a post on the dollhouse my mom sent me for Emme Lu (which was mine as a child) that is some serious 1960s ranch house goodness…a post on the utter emptiness I feel towards the technological wonder that is Bloglines…a series of posts on this wacky ranch I live on…and a very special post that I’ve been planning for a long time on something I stumbled across a while back in the desert wilderness of southern Arizona. It’s sort of a bonafide secret.

Yours,
SBird
who is slowly working at pulling herself out of her purple patch of funk….

Homage to the Holiday Newsletter.

Before we get too much farther into the New Year, I’d just like to take a moment to confess that I am a BIG FAN of holiday newsletters–the ones that get such a bad rap from bloggers, my mother, and Miss Manners alike. Dudes! I really LIKE them. I actually LOOK FORWARD to getting them. Sometimes, I even RE-READ them.

What isn’t to like about a newsy, family-drama-filled page or two? Most of these folks I never hear from during the year, and then I get a feast of selfabsorpedloveliness come Christmastime. To me, that’s cool. I WANT to hear about the largest eggplant you’ve ever pulled out of your garden, your kid’s cello concert, and your trip to Key Largo. Why not? What’s wrong with people grabbing for their 15 minutes? Or their 2 1/2 minutes, as the case may be?

Hell, I’d even come to your house and read the newsletters of people I don’t know. I like them that much. I like to see how people tell a story.

That’s why I read blogs, too.

I was not always such a fan. I was not always so enlightened. My mom raised me to mouth the words, “if you can’t take the time to handwrite a note, then you shouldn’t write at all.” And I bought it. And for years I looked with the look of superior disdain at the all the piss-poor examples of computer-generated fluff and rote-recall of months and bragging extemporare.

Yeah. And then I got over it.

Because what’s worse–FAR, FAR WORSE–than the mass mailing of the holiday newsletter is the drive-by holiday card. You know. Where they let Hallmark do the talking for them and then just sign their name underneath. No note. Not even an attempt to write “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Chanukah.” Often not even a “Love,”–nope. Too many to finish. Not enough time for Love, .

So, basically, what was happening with the Disdainers of the Holiday Newsletters is that they were becoming Drive-Byers instead. And so I got nada. Nothing. I learned zilch about their year, zero about what the world’s dished out to them, nothing about them as people in their currenthood of peopleness apart from the card they chose that year to represent them. And– come on!–how much can a chickadee hanging off a snowy branch or a Coca-Cola-sized Santa or a penguin manger scene really say about a person? Okay, yeah. Maybe the penguin manger scene speaks volumes, but what I really want to know is…

where were you on the Fourth of July? What did you think of that election? Did you travel to someplace I’ve been or someplace I’ve always wanted to go? How much hay did you put up (we get a newsletter every year with this as its theme), which river did you raft down, which kid had the chickenpox, graduated from high school, visited you, didn’t visit you, went on a field trip to the science museum, said their first word?

Inquiring minds want to know. I want to know. Really. The alternative is so, so impoverished.

I think the holiday newsletter gets its bad reputation from some overly-refined sense we have that generating the same news in the same format for every single person we mail a card to is somehow inauthentic. That the mass-ness of it all and the techology of it all makes the stories we tell and the well wishes we convey somehow less genuine.

But I don’t think of Andy Warhol as less authentic or genuine an artist than Van Gogh. Their projects were different, of course. But I love both their work. What I don’t love is an empty wall.

When my parents were here visiting last week, I showed my mom the card I had just received from her best friend back at home. (Yes, I exchange Christmas cards with my mother’s best friend. I’ve known her since I was six.) My mom had already received the same card from G.–but without the newsletter inside. My mom’s best friend doesn’t send it to my mom because of the way my mom has denigrated the practice over the years. And guess what? My mom LOVED reading her best friend’s stories from the past year, even though she had heard most of them before. It was a catalogue, an encapsulation, of events and feelings and thoughts.

Was it accurate? No. Certainly not. Stories aren’t accurate. They’re more like housekeeping. An attempt to make order, an attempt to preserve–before the dust of the new year with its new events settles in again. And so what if some people brag like there’s no bragging left in tomorrow? So what if others bore you to tears with their rote declension of month after month after month? That’s their story. And I, for one, vastly prefer it to the empty wall.