Slugs Do Not Live the Lowliest Life

My apartment complex insists upon watering our small patches of grass twice a day, and subsequently the smaller patch of concrete that is my front doorstep is frequently covered with earthworms, slugs, centipedes, and other invertebrates inspired by the moisture to flee their homes.

I particularly enjoy the slugs. They may not be capable of higher math but I like to believe that they think great thoughts in their own way. They’re steady, determined creatures. They probably think that they move very fast. Maybe they even see my front porch as a new uncharted territory, and that they’re off on a grand adventure. Going where no slug has gone before, and whatnot.

Except, slugs have been here before. A few hours ago I was sitting on this front step of mine, admiring the antennae of a smart green slug. He was left in the dust by the occasional centipede but he didn’t seem to mind, making slow but tireless and happy progress. He seemed quite content, and I enjoyed looking at him. A few hours later he was dead.

I smooshed him. Very much by accident, and I still haven’t recovered. I know he had started on the south-hand side, heading west. I figure after an hour or so he encountered the front door and had to turn north in order to avoid exploring the prickly welcome mat. An hour after that he would have had to turn again, east this time, when he had found his way barred by another door, the door to the storage area, where I keep my cigarettes and lighters.

Cigarettes are the reason I went outside. Cigarettes are the reason I put my feet in front of that door and, in a single, irreversible moment, snuffed out the grand adventure of one slug’s life. In that moment I became an instrument of murder, driven by a petty and irrational love.

Afterwards I sat sadly and watched his poor body, the little antennae no longer probing about curiously but sticking straight up and awkwardly in the air. I did ask myself why I was so upset about one slug’s death. I eat meat. I eat chickens, cows, and pigs. Do I not think that chickens, cows, and pigs also deserve grand adventures? Do I think that perhaps their grand adventures are trumped by my desire to eat them? I lamented that I didn’t have an answer, except that chickens, cows, and pigs do not live on my front doorstep, and that if they did, I would not eat them. Not those particular ones.

There has to be some way to deter the relatives of this slug from venturing out upon my doorstep. Short of putting his dead body on display in an effort to warn the others, I would do pretty much anything. I do not want to smoosh another slug. I do not want to wrap another slug’s body in tissue paper and dispose of him in the garbage. I do want my slugs to continue their grand adventures, and while I admire their willingness to take risks in life I do not feel that they have the perspective necessary for adventuring near sidewalks and doorsteps.

I wish that slugs could recognize that they are vulnerable. They are not protected by external armor or even the stiffness of bones. I wish, at the very least, that they could have their playground, while saving for myself a small, slug-free pathway that I could pass through unencumbered by potential murderous guilt.

Until this dream is realized, I can only watch my feet.

Hundred and Twenty-Five Posts, Wow

Funny how you can go from eating, breathing, sleeping one thing for two weeks before you wake up and wonder what you saw in it in the first place. It’s like flirting with a new boy when you’re married; at first you think this is just a great friendship but then you wonder if it’s something more, something until you realize that it’s just the same lines stuck on repeat. You’re back to your old ways.

I thought maybe, for a day, that I had something here, something bigger than me and possibly even better. But it didn’t make my heart race, the way this does. It brought just bad dreams and nightmares and made me write lots of frightened little lists. Lists of things I could do. Lists of things I could be.

Yeah, so I don’t totally make sense. I’m willing to sacrifice a little bit of sense to make even more, put my faith in something outside of myself to find out who I really am on a good day. I know enough about the other ones.

It's Called 'Frugality,' My Dear, or, Why I Should Neither Buy Books nor Blog After Drinking

Logic puzzles are getting harder and harder to find.

I remember the very moment I laid eyes on my first logic puzzles. Dad had driven Jamie and I to Houston for a school thing, where we'd go to the natural history museum and the renaissance faire and then afterwards, inexplicably, we would all go to the cinema to see The Beverly Hillbillies (which still sticks out sorely in my mind because it was a terrible movie and I could never quite figure out how it fit into the whole trip-thing). After that it was dark and I was probably wound up, having had so much excitement packed into my day followed by two hours sitting still in the dark. I'm sure I was whining.

"Dad. I'm BORED."

Dad's answer to boredom has always been one of two things: airshows or bookstores and, there being neither in the near vicinity, we ended up in the magazine aisle of the local grocery. (What people will do, in a pinch.) And there they were: logic puzzles. A whole magazine full of them. I remember having that tingling sensation as I flipped through the pages, knowing at that moment that my Solitaire-playing days were over. (Yes, I DO care to find out whether John's last name is Jones or Bobton or Trent, and whether he married Sally or Alicia or Jane, and whether they went to the Galapagos or the Bahamas or to boring old Yosemite on their honeymoon. This is IMPORTANT INFORMATION.)

Tough little buggers they were, too. The logic puzzlers are a dying breed, I'm pretty sure, and when you're little and you're puzzling and kind of stuck, there's really no one that can help you. ("Mom? Can you read this?" "...No.") Only once has someone ever approached me while I was puzzling away and said, "YOU LOVE LOGIC PUZZLES?!" and that person was really, really excited, and she told me how she thought she was the only one in the world who did them, but I was like, well, obviously someone is coming up with the things, and she was all, no, no, really, IT'S JUST ME. AND NOW YOU.

Suddenly I know how she feels.

One would think, of all places in Portland, Powell's would have logic puzzles. Would you like to see how many shelves make up their Sudoku section? Or perhaps their crossword section? Would you now? Because I can show you. I can also show you their Mensa section, and their stupid "Fill-It-In" section, and their anything-that-anyone-else-has-come-up-with section. I had to plead with the info guy to search for "logic puzzles" because he kept sending me to the math section and then back to the puzzle section and I had to keep telling him that I wasn't FINDING IT please just search for them and tell me where they are because every time you send me out I keep picking up a new book and I can't afford all of this PLEASE - thank you. Finally he did and the one book we came up with seemed to be an assortment of general brain-benders so I sighed and then bought my books and left.

Which! is actually the point of this post. I need to stop buying books, because A) I do not have time to read them so they just sit and look rather pretty, which sounds pretentious but actually feels really comforting and good and B) I should probably save my money, considering that I haven't gone to work in well over a month now. But last night I was cleaning up after Lyra left and I lined up all of her books on the shelf under the tv and they really didn't take up much space, so at Powell's today I very carefully selected a few new additions to her library.

It's time-consuming, picking out Lyra-books: I know, or think I know, what sort of stories she would like and the kinds of illustrations she's attracted to, but then I have to read the entire story all the way through because I've been tricked by pretty pictures before. Also, and barely relatedly, there's a book called "Henry Works," about a bear who is supposed to be Henry Thoreau, and while the illustrations are fantastic the story is quite boring, although the end is funny in a three-year-olds-will-never-get-this kind of way. I did not buy it. Instead, I ended up choosing a delightful rendition of "The Emperor's New Clothes" and this fabulous book of poems called "Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant." How could she not love these? I like to think that I'm shaping the future memories of her childhood, that she'll look back in twenty years and ask me just which book it was, the one with the flying frog toasters? And I'll say, "Ah, I remember the very day I picked that out of you..." and then I'll spend a whole weekend digging through box after box in search of it just so I can run my fingers over its wrinkled pages and cry. Then, when she wants it, maybe she's thinking about having her own kids or she just wants to revisit those pictures and the way she felt back then, I'll make her promise to take care of it and hopefully she'll roll her eyes and say something like, "MOM. You bought that book for ME, remember?" And I'll probably offer to buy her a new copy, one without wrinkles, and maybe we'll even fight about it a little bit, a good kind of fight, the kind you can only have when you both really love each other as well as something else.

See? Books are special.

Some of you are probably wondering how I can get so off-topic so quickly, and I really have nothing to say to that.

Corporal Punishment? Really?

Robert Rummel-Hudson, author of "Schuyler's Monster Blog", brought something to my attention that I thought was tucked safely into the past of our, erm, enlightened society: schools are still spanking, paddling, whacking, beating our kids.

Excuse me?

He says that the numbers have gone down, and, great, plenty of counties are outlawing corporal punishment. But where have I been? I thought it was ALREADY illegal, hands down, for years and years. To top things off, kids in special education are far more likely to receive bodily harm at the hands of their teachers. Robert, whose daughter has an extremely rare neurological condition called Bilateral Perisylvian Polymicrogyria, had this to say:

Even if you're one of the people who think that hitting a child is a good way to discipline and to educate, or perhaps especially if you believe that, I'd like you to stop for just a moment and think about that. I'd like for you to close your eyes and imagine how that scene might unfold.

Meanwhile, what's the topic of the most vocal outcry from disability advocates of late? The use of the word "retard" in a movie.

And I thought I would just quote that here, because he really hit that nail on the head.

Natural Punishment

I'm not drinking that wine again.

To be sure, I was already in a bit of an odd mood when the wine-drinking commenced, and, to be doubly sure, I nodded off over Aquinas's account of the sins that deserve of eternal punishment. But the dreams that followed were so vile, so repugnant, that I hate to think that they came directly from me, so I'm blaming the wine.

I've never dreamt such dreams. I couldn't label them as nightmares, because there was no element of fear, just a profound sense of sadness and pain as I watched the goings-on and, later, participated. Certainly, there was also a submission to weakness: knowing that I didn't have the strength to call attention to the situations or even verbalize what was going horribly, horribly wrong. It couldn't even be called "wrong," really, not in a definitive sense. Everyone was partaking in these strange crimes and I felt as though my own conviction was being called to me from another lifetime, barely remembered.

I just noticed there are Fruity Pebbles all over the floor. Lyra's alternating between dusting with a basting brush and drinking hot cocoa on my yoga mat (she calls it her "sleeping bag," leading me to think that I haven't subjected her to the camping experience enough). The fact of her woke me from my dreams more than once, when I would mention her name and then realize that I didn't know who I spoke of. Every time I would awaken, then, I would check to make sure she was still alive, because I'm always fearful that my dreams are prophecies but thankfully they never are.

Lyra tells me now, strangely, that she dreamt of the two of us last night; that she was stolen by a bus driver but I attacked him with swords, like a pirate, and I saved her. But she was still hurt, she said, so I took a band-aid from my pocket and put it on her knee, and then I told her that I was holding on tight and she'd never get away again, and we were very happy.

It occurs to me that Lyra's image of me and my image of myself are not one and the same.

Normally I would comment on how I hope that I can maintain this disparity, somehow, or more ideally transform myself into the person she believes that I am. I could say that, but I won't, because right now I'm just grateful that she thinks I'm someone worth knowing, someone capable of protecting her and that I've been granted this power to comfort her by simply being the person who's always been.

All this talk of punishment can pervert a person, at least temporarily, the way social workers tell me that they can't look at happy families in the park without visions of domestic violence and molestation. That isn't the life I want to live; I'd like to look past the maintenance of baseline human interaction and see what else is out there, what happens on the other side of the line. Artists try to reach this place, as do scientists and anyone else concerned with the classic trio of "truth, love, and beauty". Owen Flanagan puts it a bit more elegantly, calling these areas the "spheres of meaning", and that our navigation through these spheres is essential to reaching eudaimonia. (You can read his book for yourself, if you have some preternatural sort of patience: "The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World".) I agree with him about these arbitrary (I mean, fluid) spheres of meaning, at least in respect to individual navigation and individual fulfillment, but as a theory for groups and large communities I failed to see how it could really hold up (except for the obvious "happy people make happy communities" - largely unsatisfying and simplistic). Maybe he covered all that in the chapter I skipped.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever is past the bare minimum of acceptable human behavior towards one another seems, even now, to be the subject of just sheer speculation. We have these notions of an ideal society, or collective nirvana, or what have you, but what we don't have is any evidence that these states are objectively possible and what they would look like, just overly-poetic waxings on the one hand and cult experiments on the other. I think this is a bit of a curiosity.

I'd like to say more now, but it's time to go to the park.

I Hart Rawls

I'm having that sinking feeling that I get before an impending all-nighter, when I know that I will waste at least an hour staring at my computer screen, trying to convince myself to select all of the text I just wrote and start over. It isn't good enough, I'll tell myself, and I will stall, paralyzed. I will not move.

Well that sounds a bit dramatic. It probably looks a bit dramatic, too, me all wide-eyed and afraid of my own writing. But, that is the way it is, and I suppose that that's possibly why I find the act of blogging so attractive: it's unthinking, nonjudgmental. I censor myself, naturally, but stylistically I'm unconcerned.

(But then I say something like the above, and I wonder if I'm just slipping that in as a disclaimer.)

I had another point, too, but if this blog is a whipping-boy then I'm afraid I have to invent my point-making energy in another arena and end this here. Tut mir leid.

Where Blogs Go When They Die

I haven't had much time for superfluous writing as of late, but I didn't want you to think I've been slacking. Heavens, no. But the truth of the matter is that not every blog entry makes the cut, and when I don't have the time or self-esteem for cleanup most of them are left to wither and die like forgotten... things... that wither and die. Like plants! Right.

So anyway, I thought it'd be fun to give you a rundown of all the posts that didn't make it in the last few days... time for the List O' Week!

1) State of Nature - Hobbes meets reality television: think Lord of the Flies, but better. Take your all-rights-waived contestants and throw them on an island with some berries and wild pigs. None of these silly obstacle courses, but then again, no one's going to save you! Make a social contract or die.

2) Nasty, Brutish, and Short - Our existence, that is. Why my inner theologian is very happy.

3) Why Having a Hippopotamus for a Friend is Inconvenient - Alternately titled "Sorry, I don't Speak Duck," or "What is this Booh-Bah You Speak Of?" More commentary on children's television.

4) I Know I Already Said This? But the Food? IT'S SO GOOD. - Why buying a car must take so, so long, and the embarrassing programs one may watch to pass the time.

5) Top Ten Reasons Not to Sleep with Him - Why sex with your boyfriend is a major no-no, including but not limited to "He'll want to have sex with you again" and "He might be married... to someone else." Does not include worthwhile reasons such as "I find him annoying" and "I would, but I already slept with his father."

6) Four Horsemen of the Divorce Apocalypse - No one could have convinced me that anything about divorce is funny until I read this line. (Stolen from forgotten source.)

7) Playdoh's the Gorgeous - How much I adore my professor's accent.

8) I Was Flirting with Your Pizza, Not with You - When stomach rumblings and a longing glance conspire, and the awkwardness that ensues.

9) "In god shape. Does run." - Wherein I discuss why, exactly, I couldn't bring myself to buy a cheap car.

And finally:

10) Paris Hilton's IQ is 117. Can You Beat her Score? - And how! Leftover musings from a Dear Abby column ("Find a nice man with a high school diploma") and whether intelligence can even be measured in unsocialized children (I think not).

Sister.

From what I've been told, she came early and quick, tearing her way painfully into the world. It would be the first, but not the last, time she would enter a room this way, taking over with her eagerness, her steady competence. This day she would become the first of four children, all girls. Later she would become my idol.

My mother and father say that she was an easy child, ever quiet and cooperative. Her steady attention would become her biggest asset: at two she would sit with my father one day and learn every letter of the alphabet; at four she would alter the course of my life forever - me, the yet unborn - by teaching the other children to read. Her teacher would call my father one day: did you know what she's doing? and resulting months of testing and observation would shape our educations, our expectations.

I worshiped every breath she took, tagging along on walks with dogs and expeditions through literature. I would copy every move she made, read every book she read; I would emulate her gestures and retell her jokes in the hopes that I could capture the essence of her easy humor (I never could). I would love her the way a dog loves its master and she in turn would be abominably cruel in her efforts to shake me. These early years of torment would be replaced, later, as I grew into a semblance of a human being - she would teach me then about God, about love, what it meant to be a family when the family is gone, raising me when our mother left for school and our father knew little more about educating children than imparting them with endless facts. She would question first, but more thoughtfully, less loudly, generating a wake for me to ride upon, a preformed reputation at school that I could slide into without trouble. They would think the best of me because they thought the best of her.

Only once would I see her cry. Years later I would hear her cry, again, on the phone, and I would remember the overwhelming helplessness that I felt the first time: that I cannot help her, that she will always be above me, that I am the one who is supposed to fall. My love for her will always be traced with this outline of adoration, even as we grow now into adults with responsibilities and desires and depressions, sharing rather than forcing our stories onto one another, drunkenly dialing, lamenting and laughing and offering the best bits of advice we can muster.

So here's to you, dear friend, the most influential person in my life: I love you more today than yesterday, and more then than before. I still kind of (sort of) worship you.

Happy Birthday.

P.S. - I know this is late, but then I was never the punctual one. That would be you.

What Makes Things Right Again

Not sure if this is the title to a previous post; it popped up in my little title bar and seemed like such a sweet and fitting line.

I'm not really in the mood to write. I have an hour, still, before class begins, and while there's something or another that I would like to be saying to someone I don't seem to have the words for that either. If you live in Portland, you know what the weather is like today: the thunder, the rain, the still, oppressive mugginess. Lyra woke up from the thunder and wouldn't return to bed despite my protests that I would keep her safe. In the end it didn't matter, because it was late. We were late. I can never tell what time it is in my apartment when the blinds are drawn and the sky is blanketed by clouds and rain.

So I'm typing this, not really even thinking, just dancing my fingers around because words will come out of them even when you're thinking about something else. I've written many a poor story that way, little over-trimmed topiaries of stories that are missing all the good parts but somehow still seem to embody a bit of the original intention, whatever that may be, whether it's plant-ness or story-ness or emotionless-ness or, I don't know, pick something. I'm sure you'll be right.

I had never noticed how beautiful it is here in the Memorial on an overcast day; the contrast between the green of the park blocks and the gray of the sky and the sweet tryingly-modern lines of the interior. Such a simple pleasure, really. I was surprised at how comforted I was to walk through the doors after only two weeks of absence, but in many ways I feel like this is my home, the one constant location of my last two years. Over there is where I met Mem for the first time but not the first time, when we both came to hear Fodor speak. If I were to take a right down that hallway, I would come to the place where all the dirty smokers go to talk about everything or nothing, the place where I realized my advisor didn't recall that moment in which I briefly entered the philosophy department and left again, when I asked him how he came to be a philosopher and he said, "Delusions of grandeur." I went back to my science at that moment but returned when everything I read seemed to keep bringing me back here, to these thoughts and these people, and I thought I would at least take a look, investigate, see what there was to find.

Soon, it will be three years, and I will be gone. But I will always miss this place.

Explanation.

There are no words, Mem; that’s why. I’m not as eloquent as I would like to be, not yet, possibly not ever, and I would rather endure the dignity of silence than scrape at some superficial veneer of what I cannot name. Words have boundaries. Words aren’t emotion, and words aren’t things. When a thought refuses to be encapsulated by words, I can’t simply succumb to the limitation. I can’t agree to the lesser truth.

Not now, anyway. Not in this case, when every thought lost in translation was the very thought I wanted to obtain.

Retro Baby!

Lyra: not quite two. I never could get enough of these socks.

Divorce Kills, Except Not Really

"One divorce, please."

"With children?"

"With children." She circles an option on the menu and tells me to head to the cashier to pay for the forms. I look down at the sheet.

"Ooh, annulment - that sounds fancy. Do I qualify?"

"Did you marry your brother, sister, mother or father?"

"No."

"Were you forced into the marriage?"

"No."

"Was your spouse previously married but his partner died and then came back to life?"

"No. That definitely did not happen."

"Then you can't get an annulment."

"You know what? That's fine." I pay for my paperwork and she hands me the forms, a five-pound packet - the instructions, she tells me - accompanied by a single sheet. Husband's name. Wife's name. Sign here at the bottom. I'm a bit confused.

"Are you sure these are the instructions?" She nods.

Mem and I are in the sports bar. He's upset about the air conditioning. Too cold. It's over a hundred degrees outside, I say, enjoy the air conditioning. Here, eat the rest of this.

He tells me it's never hot enough, that he has to store the heat of today for the impending winter. Right, I say. Look at this. I hand him the giant packet of instructions. Isn't this funny?

Mem flips through the first few pages, raises his eyebrows. "You have your work cut out for you, Jen. Look at the third page."

I grab the packet from his hands. Third page, fifth page. There's at least a hundred pages here.

"Oh crap. I have to fill out all of this?"

Mem laughs, settling back into his seat, and I realize that he always looks this way, as if he's just waking from a long and pleasant dream.

"You're funny, Jen," he says. "You're very funny."

I get to the house late. Lyra wouldn't go to bed on time, probably because it's so hot, Chris says. I tell him he looks nice. Also, does he have any alcohol?

We go over the forms line by line. I read every one aloud. Property, no, thank god. You can have the bank account. No alimony, no child support, but you're paying for Lyra's health insurance. Can I check this box, the one here? I don't want to have to notify the court if I move. Ok, ok... do we have a parenting plan? Did they think we had one before the divorce? Maybe they should make everyone have a parenting plan... waive the 90 days; waive the order of resistance. You know I wouldn't move without telling you, right? Where are we? What's next?

We're done, I say, but we can't sign them now, have to sign them in court. I'm reading over the instructions again. It says we have to make an appointment for the class, then we're onto stage two. Stage two is court, I tell him, and all the paperwork that comes with it. Then we're really done.

He tells me about his friend, how he met her. He tells me she left something of hers at the house, something small, and how she came back the next day to retrieve it. I smile.

Of course, I say. Of course.

Children Would Be Great If It Weren't For All The Crumbs

My daughter, the blond one with the giant blue eyes? She’s a bit weird.

I’m in the kitchen, perusing the bills (yes, I said “peruse.” That’s what I do with bills.). Lyra marches in, practically goose-stepping, a Geico brochure clenched tight in one teeny fist.

“This is my truth!” She declares. Stomp, stomp, stomp. “My truth! I must tell the ditizens!”

"The what?! The citizens?"

"THE CITIZENS!"

Sorry, I can’t even type this without laughing. But seriously... what is this? No one warned me about this when I decided to become a parent.

(Confidential to Jamie: watch out. Except your children are going to grow up talking funny; you should have thought of that, hmm?)

That Was Unexpected

Has it really been more than a week? I apologize to both of my dear readers; I didn't mean to neglect you so. I was a bit lost in my own reality for a few days.

Here, have a random picture of Lyra gnawing on a scone:



Cute, eh? That should make it all better. (Oh, and you may notice the uneven haircut - I mean, "haircut." That was not my doing, thank you very much.)

This Thing

I probably shouldn't be writing this, not yet, not while my stomach is still uneasy and my thoughts haven't settled. Most likely I can't even add to this piece that someone else has already written. In every way, it speaks for itself.

The girl in the window.

Two of my favorite bloggers have already posted this link; neither knew how to react except, seemingly, with the same sense of despair that I now feel. Perhaps parents react differently; perhaps parents of daughters react differently, but everyone who has grown up with loving parents or unloving parents or anyone at all that can feel - you will react to this story.

To be fair, I only read the story with curiosity and only a vague sense of discontent until I reached the section about the mother. The adoptive parents, I admired them. I admire their selflessness and their solid picture of reality: possibly the rest of their lives will be dedicated to the care of this small but growing person. Here I did confront a gnawing fear of mine, that I would be unfit for such an enormous task should it ever somehow be placed upon my shoulders. I am not a selfless person.

Yet it wasn't until the story turned to the mother that I couldn't read anymore, had to pace around the small rooms of my apartment before I could force myself to return to the entry. They portray her with such oblivious desperation, trying, maybe, to do what she could but failing to meet anyone's standards of a mother. I'm at once both disgusted and alarmed. The journalists went so far as to list her IQ, by way of what - explanation? Reassurance to the reader ("this could never happen to you")? Simple comparison? And yet, at the same moment, we wonder for an instant how much hope there could be for Dani, with neither the force of nature nor nurture falling in her favor.

Deepest, though, is the fear that I could suffer from my own delusion, doing what I think is best for my child but somehow blind to a grave and certain danger. It's this fear, perhaps, that keeps us rooted in our perseverance or at least to our consciousness of the parenting act: how is she growing, is she happy, are her moods a phase or is there something I need to adjust? I said once that the only thing we ever want is for our children to live, but it simply isn't true: we want so much more. We worry that our own expectations will stunt our children, or that our lack thereof will keep them from blossoming into the persons they could have become. We worry, not just that they'll be harmed, but that we will do the harming. We, the ones entrusted with these small and tender shoots of personhood, as if they've brought nothing to the table but are truly the tabula rasa upon which we write our own scripts, our own fears, our own shortcomings and neuroses.

This is not the optimistic view, to be sure, and it denies our children not only their own weaknesses but also their strengths, confining them to a sort of eternal childhood free of agency and strapping ourselves into the role of hapless provider. And yet this thought does not soothe me because I'm still shaken; I cannot, at this moment, tiptoe into my own daughter's room and gaze at her peaceful sleeping face.