SuspendedAnimation

my schooling

Today I started the second of my two summer courses. If I get bad results from this week's bloodletting, I get to pull a junior high trick and get a note from my doctor, so that I can drop the course for a full refund. There are moments that I think it'd be worth the further uncertainty and intrusive gynecological procedures just to have an excuse not to be in a class for the rest of the summer. Does it sound like I don't care for schooling?

But if you think that's where the post name comes from--haHA! wrong! This is actually the first dharma post in quite a while.

Regard all dharmas as dreams

No Such Thing As A True Story
By weaving our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable, or seamless as they seem ... [W]e habitually string out thoughts together into a story that tricks us into believing that our identity, our happiness, our pain, and our problems are all solid and separate entities. In fact, like thoughts, all these constructs are constantly changing. Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory.

Wisdom is a fluid process, not something concrete that can be added up or measured. The warrior-boddhisattva trains with the attitude that everything is a dream. Life is a dream; death is a dream; waking is a dream; sleeping is a dream. This dream is the direct immediacy of our experience. Trying to hold on to any of it by buying our story line only blocks our wisdom. --Pema Chödrön

My experiences over the past few weeks have included a lot of fear, a lot of sheer incredulity over the intensity and variety of what can befall me over such a short time. But over the past couple of days I've found momentary relief in moments where I get in touch with the sensation that I am just moving through life, that I am walking, breathing, lying down or standing up--just this continuity of existence that I can rest in if only I can take the first single baby step from my churning mind that is constantly manufacturing memos in triplicate Re: the past; Re: the future. How much freer could I be if more of these memos hit the circular file?

Be grateful to everyone

Writing this post, I was struck by how difficult it was articulate adequately my profound joy at the overwhelming gift of love that has washed over me from so many sources: of course, Howie and my Jellybean and others in my family, but also certain beloved individuals so talented in the art of friendship and superabundantly endowed with generosity and affection that I have been just knocked senseless by it. I know that this slogan, this instruction, is about stretching myself to be grateful to everyone--even, say, to embryos that have mistaken my pelvis for caves near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border--however I am so struck by my profound gratitude for my friends that I am going to willfully ignore the instruction and concentrate my gratitude on those who so glaringly have earned it.

Three objects, three poisons, three roots of virtue
The 'three' talked about here are craving, aversion and apathy. I have been blessed with the opportunity to experience heaps and heaps of each of these recently. This is the 'poison as medicine' slogan, the basic idea being: I can just allow myself to be slapped hither and yon by these forces for the rest of my life, and feel all the suffering and confusion that comes from following them around like a sheep after its bellwether; or just as unskillfully, I can look at them as 'the enemy' and aspire to be 'above all that.' They become 'three roots of virtue' when instead of reacting to my responses by running like hell, hiding, acting out, I just let my feelings open my heart. Somehow this slogan has touched me very recently, and I feel a lot of compassion and humility rising out of my own confusion and chaos and grief.

If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained
I have been hugely distracted. Normally, when this happens, dharma gets a sabbatical. I don't know why this time around, I am having these tremendous, tearful experiences of contact with myself, really making friends with myself in a new way. I humbly admit I have no idea who I will be a week from today. I am resigned to having lost all delusion of having a ground to stand on.

Correct all wrongs with one intention
Life is precious. I really hope for nothing more than to leave it better than I found it.

Woe there, little dogey!

My family is all trickling away from me.

First, today: we met my in-laws for Father's Day brunch, and according to plan, the Jellybean went with them for a two-night visit. By the way, I'm considering revising my theory about the supplemental dining-out tongues that I suspected the in-laws to possess, because the excruciatingly mediocre restaurant where we ate met with their vocal and enthusiastic approval. I'll just disclose now that I have decided on a matter of policy: not only do I hate every food containing portabella mushrooms, but on principle I hate every restaurant that has anything with portabella mushrooms on the menu. And I double-hate (doubleplusungood! bad restaurant!) a restaurant that advertises a food as containing 'wild mushrooms', and said food instead contains that insipid* cultivar, the egregious portabella. You know, not only are they not wild--they're not even a distinct variety. Portabellas are just big crimini mushrooms--and criminis are just darker and slightly denser than white mushrooms, and more or less identical in flavor. The Wonder® Wheat Bread of the mycological world. I know I increasingly sound like a food snob--but really, I'll bet you a Chick-Fil-A® sandwich I'm not.

That was a digression.

So, Howie and I left the Jellybean with her grandparents and waved as they drove off, with my daughter urgently and repeatedly reminding me that I should call her 'at 7:55.' Which was rib-tickling to me, and also was making me cry. It may sound like a good thing for me to have time away from my girl (or, more to the point, for her to have time away from me), but candidly I like having her around. For instance, I like doing stuff like this with her: After the goodbyes were said, Howie and I took an hour or so for a walk in the cutesie open-air-mall town and then drove back home so that he could start preparing for his trip tomorrow morning.

Yeah--he's leaving me for the whole week. Coming back in the wee hours of Saturday morning, so that he can party up with a bunch of his ultra-specialized colleagues (Homo technocranius) at their Special Conference in northern California, and so he can make me pant jealousy over the endless supply of cheap, delicious Mexican food that he will no doubt be eating whenever he can duck out of the conference long enough.

The Jellybean will be back home with me for two nights before making another trip to visit her other 'Grammy,' so I'll be on my own for a total of three nights over the next five.

So that will unofficially make me a Single Girl, just briefly, won't it? Somehow it doesn't feel the same (at least in anticipation) as it did in my twenties. I don't know if it's the house in the suburbs, or ... or what! But I suspect that 'being single' is not going to have any other effect than not having a regular dinner, or going out for an hour or two without having to account for my whereabouts. Pretty dull stuff.

In other news: I am now baaa-ing politely in the wake of the Netflix bellwethers. Ohhhh sweeeeeet Netflix. My queue beckons with its DVD releases that were never, ever available in the local Blockbusters. I contemplate my future leisure opportunities, my ass growing ever-larger and lumpier now that I have the incentive to spend an increasing number of hours gaping at the television, watching The Triplets of Belleville or Standing in the Shadows of Motown or, heck, Guys and Dolls. Something sedentary to do on days the Yankees aren't playing, or when they are indulging in the occasional (accursed) day game!

I will leave you with the recipe of the cake I made for breakfast in honor of Howie's paternity. It's an adaptation of an almond cake in Deborah Madison's The Savory Way.

Blueberry Peach Almond Coffeecake

Cake:
3 oz. almond paste
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. unsalted butter
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 c. sour cream
1.5 c. flour
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/8 tsp. salt
yet more almond paste [optional]
1/2 c. blueberries
1 small peach: peeled, quartered, and sliced crosswise

Crumb topping:
1/3 c. sugar
1/2 c. flour
1 oz. almond paste
2 Tbl. unsalted butter
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 325°F ; grease and flour an 8" square pan.

First make crumb topping by combining ingredients in a small bowl and blending with fingertips until it forms large, cohesive crumbles.

For cake: In food processor, combine 3 oz. almond paste with the sugar and process until thoroughly combined. Add eggs, one at a time; then sour cream; then flavorings, processing after each addition. Transfer mixture to a large bowl. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the moist in three batches, stirring gently with each addition. If desired, break up some additional almond paste into little pieces and fold it into the batter.

Put about 2/3 of the batter in the prepared pan. Distribute the peaches and blueberries over the batter. Drop remaining batter on top, trying to cover all; use a spatula to increase the coverage, but don't get obsessive about it. Sprinkle the topping over that, and bake in center of oven about 55-60 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean near the center of the cake.

*two posts in a row with the word 'insipid.' Let's see if I'm on a tear! In fact I wish I could find a way to include the word 'vapid' in this one, too. And now that we're on the subject, Howie might object since he's the gardener in the family, but 'aphid' would look very nice somewhere around here ... if you can think of any other '-id' words, kindly leave them in comments because this is quite suddenly an intense interest of mine.

Why not someone else's neurosis for a change?

Drive all blames into one.
I was just thinking, Wouldn't it be a good idea to dispel the notion that some of my readers might have, that I'm basically a very nice person? Because in the end, that would just prevent bitterness and disillusionment; we all get sussed sooner or later. So how best to accomplish this goal of showing my dark side?

I gave the matter due consideration. I thought about advice that people give about how to accomplish the reverse goal: for instance, what are people told to do, or avoid doing, at a job interview? The best advice in this instance is, Never be led into saying anything negative about anyone, no matter what. It always redounds to the discredit of the narrator, right?

Magic! perfect! In order to let you in on my fell aspects, I'm going to use this entire post to the nastiest portrait of another person from my past that I can manage. I realize that some of you with excellent memories might think that I've done this before, that a certain person has come in for his fair share of unflattering representations here. But that doesn't count--he's an ex. If you don't bore people to tears with constant bitter invective about an ex, they're likely to cut you quite a bit of slack, within certain contexts, for the occasional snipe and character assassination.

Don't malign others.
The person I've selected actually comes from the quite recent past. She was one of my coworkers at the job I just left. The first crucial step in a wafer-thin disguise of the character assassination process is to choose a pseudonym. Because I have neither shame, nor the slightest compunction, nor a morsel of compassion, I am going to call this individual Hortense, in spite of the ridiculous improbability of anyone of approximately the age of thirty bearing that name. I do this because it's a despicable appellation. (Lee, that was for you.)

Here comes another hurdle in my task: I have yet to develop adequately the really exquisitely developed techniques of droll exaggeration (some writer thingie that I haven't mastered) that have been vigorously demonstrated by a few of my much more talented friends.* By my estimation, though, this particular person is barely going to require it to make a good post.

Are you enjoying the glacial pace of this one? I kind of am--or maybe I'm just procrastinating. Maybe, on top of everything else, I lack grit.

Don't wait in ambush.
Okay, so Hortense. Heh. I met her when she transferred into my department, and almost immediately thereafter we ended up commuting to graduate school together, as we were in the same night course. Both at work and at school, her dominant characteristic seemed to be an obsessive streak, and a habit of dramatically berating herself for trivial errors. This same trait manifested as a startling propensity to deride others based on, for example, typographic errors in emails.

But proximity breeds intimacy. Hortense and I worked close by another--extraordinary--person in the same department, and the three of us got to be friends--everybreak, everylunch friends. Constant-stream-of-dirty-jokes friends; socializing-outside-the-workplace friends; sharing-crises-of-daily-life friends.

Except.

Don't talk about injured limbs.
Over time it was growing increasingly apparent what taking Hortense on really meant. Now, since I'm supposed to proving exactly how mean I can be, the fact that we were friends means that, in theory, I really ought to reveal all kinds of deep, dark--and of course hilariously embarrassing--secrets of Hortense. And even though she knows about this blog, I truly believe that she does not read it (but if I'm wrong, Hi Hortense! I know you recognize yourself! Comment if you like, 'cause if you don't like it I'll change it or delete and maybe block your ISP in the bargain! Welcome to my world!). But I just can't stomach it. Call me a wimp. I'll only say that there's something involving Laura Ingalls Wilder** that would be very amusing to relate if spilling it didn't make me too repulsive even for myself to take.

Don't ponder others.
Suffice to say that there were concerns. For instance, there was Hortense's annoying habit of considering it an act of loyalty to report to me nasty things said about me by my colleagues. These anecdotes were always served up as a little outburst--including, of course, her heroic defense of my finer qualities, and her outrage that anyone could say such a thing about me, how could they misunderstand my character so!! And even though I patiently explained to her that I really neither needed, nor wanted to know about malicious comments made by others, eventually she always leaked them to me, such a friend she was.

Outbursts were, in fact, her specialty. Fairly early on in our friendship, she came back to her workstation upset. She had just returned from a raucous, high-volume altercation with her former co-worker. In the office. In front of their supervisor. And in the course of that argument, the colleague accused her of being 'high-maintenance.' High-maintenance? Why? Maybe because everything within your orbit must grind to a halt when you become paralyzed with anger or shame--or, worse than paralysis, a performance of furious contempt directed at either yourself or your personal selection of Idiot of the Moment, absorbing every morself of energy within a quarter-mile radius?

In retrospect, this phrase 'high-maintence' was, in fact, a pithy formulation of exactly what it meant to be in Hortense's sphere. She would also mention, periodically, that she worried about her drinking; and her narration of daily events would be punctuated by stories of this dinner party at which she got blotto and broke down into uncontrollable sobbing; or that wedding anniversary that she spoiled by drinking herself into a puddle. I didn't see the drinking first-hand for a while: the one dinner party I hosted showed Hortense pretty cautious with the bottle. But when she returned the invitation on Valentine's Day, I got a glimpse of Wild Party Hortense, which included sudden flare-ups of fishwife cursing at her husband; uninvited lap-dances dispensed gratis to bewildered male guests; and lots of kind of scary gaiety.

So it wasn't that much of a shocker when Hortense showed up at the office thoroughly pickled after a business lunch one day. To be fair, others at the lunch had become equally (or, for all I know, even more) intoxicated, but Hortense was the only one fuckwitted enough to actually come back to the office. By the time she got to my workstation, she had already been chatting very vivaciously with some of our student workers; and since I could smell her from about ten paces, I imagine she was an interesting specimen for them as well. She wasn't just a bit woozy; she was at the Whoopie! stage of shickered, generous with sloppy displays of affection and punctuating her babbling with exclamations of 'Fun!!

In short, she was subject to disciplinary action just for being at the office, such a state was she in. It was about 3PM--still an hour and half left to my regular work schedule--but I whipped her out of there, to the local cafe, and bought her coffee and sat there with her, distracting her with idle chatter, until she sobered up enough that I could be confident she wouldn't try to drive home within the next two hours.

It wasn't too long after this incident that Hortense gave me and our other mutual friend The Big Chill. She was suddenly 'too busy' for all breaks and lunches, which I took at face value (because I'll rarely suspect a friend of lying to my face or lacking the courage to talk to me about a problem between us). All chat within the office was replaced by busy silence. Face-to-face encounters as fleeting as a morning greeting or just a walk-by were marked with a frozen rictus. After a while it sank in that I was being blown off. So there was the element of relief there for me; but ego and pride dictated a mixed response. She blew me off? You can't fire me, bitch--I quit!

But at that point I had only weeks left at the job. I made one straight-on, email attempt to come to the point about whatever had occasioned her withdrawal; this was met with chilly, cordial dissembling. So I let it ride, and in fact, on my last day of work, left without as much as a goodbye.

Don't seek others' pain as the limbs of your own happiness.
So, since I didn't tell her in person, I'd just like to say: Good luck with that, Hortense.

*And I'd like to clarify that by "friends" I mean "frighteningly talented people on whose blogs I obsessively comment, on each of whom I have tremendous 'friend crushes,' and who haven't specifically emailed me to request, politely, that I stop coming round and annoying them, and come on, they could figure out how to email me if they really tried." And not one of them has gone so far as to actually delete any of my comments. Yet.
**I apologize to all the LIW fans about the irrelevance of this post to your Google search.

life's just one damn thing after a mother

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.

Once, I was a member of a distinct and much-studied demographic: after my parents' divorce when I was fourteen, my sisters, mother and I became one of literally millions of newly-impoverished female-headed households. I don't intend to overdramatize our economic status: we never wondered whether there would be enough to eat; and my mother was able to buy a condo with the equity from our previous house, so we had bread in hand and roof overhead.

But we all knew, too, that we were not living in fat times. Utilities periodically got shut off; we became adept at evading the angry phone calls of creditors; I particularly, and not fondly, remember one of my mother's more memorable attempts at frugality: the purchase of a dozen unbelievably scrawny chickens, frozen in pairs in plastic bags, that on occasion we would vainly attempt to transform, alchemically, into edible food.

My mother at this time was almost literally worn to a gristle: tough but battered. The mental strain of the failing year of the marriage and of the extremely nasty and bitter divorce proceedings cost her about twenty pounds off her small and short-statured frame; her look in the early days after the separation I would describe as 'post-chemo,' though by the time the divorce was over she looked merely slightly gaunt; and in the year or two following, the unrelenting pressure on her to just keep the household going with too little cash and no time, while working at an awful job with an equally awful commute, did not often add up to what you would call "gracious living." But she got the job done--not always a pretty sight; her motto in those days could easily have been "By Whatever Means Necessary."

One weekend, her cousin and his wife invited her to join them in Atlantic City. Never before or after have I known my mother to be the casino type, but she gave herself a modest gambling budget and drove down from Connecticut. On Sunday night, she returned and told us she had good news. She had won three hundred dollars gambling! We rejoiced as she planned purchases of new clothes for us, and a celebratory night out.

The festive air was cut short when she tried to find the cash. There was a brief, feverish search for a little coin purse where she had deposited her winnings, but it never turned up. Mom finally figured that it must have been either lost or stolen during her sole visit to a rest stop while driving back north. She could almost picture laying the little object on the counter as she washed her hands; then--nothing. There was not a lot of tears or talk about this. It was like turning off Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve just before the countdown and the release of the ball. Just a switch from excitement, to nothing--except our tacit knowledge of our mother's heartbreak at being robbed of the opportunity to buy us gifts with her windfall.

I remembered this incident, quite suddenly, this past weekend when we were driving past a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. There doesn't seem to be anything to add to it; it's just been hiding there in my mind for years, lead-heavy, a little stale piece of sorrow.

pleased to report!

Abandon any hope of fruition.
Man, I love that one. I love how it sounds all grim and inexorable, but under its obstinate and flinty shell, there's just Life is not about winning something. It's just what you're getting, moment to moment. It's precious--icing is superfluous.

In other words: Better. Not giddy, not overflowing with joy. But, definitely an improvement. Earlier this evening, I actually chanted aloud my hatred for contour sheets as I wrestled to get our guest room prepared for my dad and stepmother, who stopped over tonight on their way elsewhere, and then tried to fold the rest of the load of laundry. Contour sheets were invented just to torment me, I know it deep within the marrow of my bones. And I even have a reasonable strategy for folding them--it's just that my perfectly sane, rational strategy doesn't work, because the sheet knows what's coming and does a little spasmodic performance just when I'm trying to get all the corners folded into each other.

But still--that's the sheet's problem, not mine. I do not have to choose to take on the neurosis of my bed linens. I have other, better ways to expend my energies.

For instance, today I made challah. This recipe almost got lost. It was my great-grandmother's recipe, and the same challah was made by her daughter, my great-aunt. Aunt Rita died about two years ago, and though she'd given me the recipe long ago, of course I'd lost it. Neither of my sisters had it, but Aunt Rita's daughter-in-law did, and she gave me the recipe--just a list of ingredients. The original recipe is for something like six loaves--calls for five pounds of flour. A "baking of bread"--I guess that's why the bags are five pounds ... I adapted it for the bread machine, to make a measly two loaves. It's unlike any other challah I've ever had. A very fine, stiff crumb.

Bubbi's Challah
1 2/3 lb. white flour
2 eggs (+ 1 yolk later, for glaze)
1/4 c. sugar
1/4 c. oil
1 1/2 tsp. yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp chernishke (also called black caraway seed, or kolonji--available through penzeys.com)
About 1 1/3 c. water, depending on conditions

Put ingredients in bread machine, liquid first (start with 1 c. water and check during the first kneading to adjust for a soft, springy dough). Put machine on 'dough' setting. At the end of the cycle, punch down, knead briefly, and form into two loaves. Let rise in bread pans until doubled in bulk. Beat an egg yolk with a pinch of salt and a Tbl water and brush tops of loaves. Bake at 350°F for about 35 minutes, or until nicely browned and, you know, done.

P.S. The part about this baking of challah that brings it right back to the sphere of my daily chaotic messiness is this: yeah, I set about making the dough, when I had a half dozen other things going on--including my sheet-wrestling match--and forgot all about it, twice. I didn't get the loaves into the oven until almost midnight. And here I am, in the wee hours, about to get the loaves out of the pan to cool off so that I can stagger off to bed. But: it's all good. Challah for breakfast tomorrow!

Why people call my husband a lucky man

This was actually the second four leaf clover that Howie found during our fabulous weekend-with-friends on Chesapeake Bay. The first one he let the Jellybean bring back to show everyone; she promptly lost it in--you guessed it--the grass; so that was a remarkably ephemeral pleasure. Apparently, according to one of our friends, it's not that hard to find a four-leaf clover, but it does take a kind of dharmic approach--an illustration of this slogan:
Abandon all hope of fruition.
Howie agreed. You can look and look and look for the four-leafer; as long as you're striving, it will elude you. But if you just let go and look at the grass, within a pretty short time you find that you are just looking. at. a. four. leaf. clover.

But I take it back; that's not a really good illustration of the slogan, because I have just implied that if you abandon all hope of fruition, you will be rewarded with fruition. Sorry! Not necessarily.

The method described above, though, is the more happy-making method of seeking a four-leaf clover.

It doesn't hurt to follow up with strawberry shortcakes, though.

The Charminge Towne near (if ten miles is near) the house we stayed had one somewhat miserable grocery, that didn't even have Bisquick--the shortcake ingredient recommended to me by Our Friend Who Knows such things (I didn't even eat a biscuit until sometime in my twenties--I always thought of them as a goyish thing, but now I know that--even if that is true--it won't do to let the Gentiles keep their claim on that kind of good stuff). So I got Jiffy Mix instead, and the shortcakes were pretty fine, because the berries were mighty fine.

That whet my appetite, though, and when we got back from the trip, I bought local berries from our second-favorite (because not organic) local farm, and made my favorite shortcake. This is an adaptation from a recipe by Deborah Madison, but that was for a cobbler recipe. I use this for cobblers and shortcake. If you make it with the vanilla bean, it's better than with the extract ...

Shortcake
1 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. salt
1 Tbl. superfine sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
1/2 vanilla bean or 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 Tbl. butter
1/4 c. half-and-half cream
1 egg

Preheat oven to 400°F.
Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and 1 Tbl. sugar in a medium bowl. If using vanilla bean, split it lengthwise and use the tip of a paring knife to scrape the seeds into the dry ingredients, and then use fingers to rub them into the mixture. Add butter, cut into small pieces, and cut into dry ingredients until mixture is the texture of cornmeal. Beat together the cream and egg, adding the vanilla extract if using it. Add to dry mixture, reserving about a Tbl. to glaze the shortcakes later. Stir together until almost all combined with a fork; then turn mixture onto a board and knead briefly just until it all comes together smoothly. Then shape into a circle, about 1/3" thick and 7" diameter. Cut into 6 wedges; brush with reserved egg and cream; sprinkle tops lightly with additional sugar. Remove to a foil-lined baking sheet and bake about 13 minutes, or until just starting to color on top. Cool on racks; split to fill with sliced, sugared berries and top with lightly sweetened whipped cream.
These shortcakes freeze well. Reheat 30 seconds in a microwave.

I am restless. And, I am enervated.

I'm addlepated. I can't keep up. I've got less than a week left at work, and it's bizarre to me to consider that within days my quotidian routine is going to be drastically altered. (Hey, I worked 'quotidian' into my post!) But that's not all that's on my mind. It's just that I'm not blogging about the 'all' that is on my mind. Confused yet? I am.

1. Although I have the usual 100% delusional picture of how I'll spend my precious two weeks of leisure, unhappily I have the maturity to be fully aware that the energetic days of house organizing, yoga, meditation, bread baking and healthy meal preparation--interspersed with relaxed, joyful hours spent with my child--are likely to continue to exist only in the realm of my febrile imagination. A more realistic picture of the next two weeks--well, where's that film stock with the flipping calendar pages? yeah--like that.

2. I am refusing to mourn the job I'm leaving. That's gonna cost me. I'm leaving a familiar environment, where I've laid down a massy chunk of hours for the past almost three years. So I really am obliged to cope with the truth: leaving this job is going to entail a substantial adjustment for me. I don't take my work terribly seriously (it's useful work, and I enjoy it and try to do it well--but really: we don't get scenes from ER with the preservation people and the catalogers rushing the gilt-tooled moroccan-bound volumes with their gauffred edges and marbled endpapers through the hallway on a gurney: Quick! It's acid paper! Prepare the alkaline bath and freeze-drier!). Still, I've been cavalier in my assumption that I can walk away with a cinematic nonchalance.

3. I got nuthin.' I feel all dried up. Oh sure--maybe it's because I wrote 48 haikus yesterday for the Haiku Smackdown. I can see how that could dessicate a girl. But beyond 5-7-5, I'm not very juiced.

4. I suck at making lists. I never get far past the first 3. So maybe that eensie little 4 signals impending progress! heh.

Take a moment to defuse some hate

When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.

Thanks to Jo, who passed this info on from Dawn.

A hate group is Google-bombing the word "Jew" to bring itself to the top of the hit list when people type 'jew' into the Google search box. I checked the site out (please, if you decide to look at the site, don't click on the Google link, because I believe that this will fortify their standing--type the url directly into your address bar), and some of its 'categories' include: Jewish-Zionist-Soviet Anti-American Spies; Jewish Communist Rulers and Killers; Jewish Mind-Control Mechanisms ... There's more, and it's all mighty ugly. This the real, wackaloon, toxic deal.

Here is how we defuse the bomb--click here: Jew This will bring you to the Wikipedia entry for 'Jew.' It's painless, and every time someone clicks, it further displaces the hate group lower in the Google recall.

I don't know if it helps twice as much by doing it twice--but hey--go ahead and try! I did ...
And if you have a blog, please consider including a hyperlink from 'jew' to the Wikipedia entry. 'blog it forward,' as they say ...

It you post it, it will come

I ran across the Excedrin chip o'dung while looking for the per dose caffeine content for a friend--not because I was, at that moment, having a headache myself. But lo and behold, the moment I publish my sneering attack on their acetamino-peddling, I am felled by a mighty semi-metaphoric blow to the head; I am now in what might be called blinding pain, in that the piercing agony wrapping my skull induces me to close my eyes and then, dude, like, I can't see! So wouldn't that, then, be blinding? Forgive me--pain does not sharpen my wits.

Well, I think the headache might be one of the symptoms of a lame-ass kind of cold I caught yesterday, which doesn't have much else in the way of symptoms except a kind of floury, insincere (but persistent) cough, and the sensation that an industrious salamander crept into my nasal passage and throat while I was asleep, and walked around with 000 grit sandpaper shoes for a while. Apart from that, I feel great.

That's why I had enough energy to have the following email exchange with Jo about a mutually detested co-worker:

From: jilbur@ivy.edu
Sent: Friday, April 9, 2004 3:33 pm
To: jo@ivy.edu
Subject: An idle mind

Since I am fortunate enough not to be subjected to this today, I don't know why it occurs to me to express my irritation at the way Detestella pronounces 'room.'
not with 'oo' to rhyme with 'boot';
not with 'oo' to rhyme with 'book' (not my favorite, but I'll let it slide);
but somewhere between 'oo' in 'book' and 'u' in 'I have an enormous BUTT.'
Also reminiscent of 'redRUM redRUM redRUM.'

From: jo@ivy.edu
Sent: Friday, April 9, 2004 4:27 pm
To: jilbur@ivy.edu
Subject: Re: An idle mind

That has always, ALWAYS bothered me about her.  For real.  It could also be
a thick Scottish accent pronouncing that demon beverage...

From: jo@ivy.edu
Sent: Friday, April 9, 2004 4:43 pm
To: jilbur@ivy.edu
Subject: Re: An idle mind

And furthermore: the word is always pronounced in bold, italicized capitals,
thus calling attention to its nonstandard pronunciation.
I think "nonstandard" should totally be an insult.  As in:
"Dude, that weed you sold me was totally nonstandard!  It was like oregano
shake or some shit."
"Shuh!  Those pants are way nonstandard.  What is she dressed for, the Cinco
de Mayo gordita sale at Taco Bell?"

To fully appreciate Ms Van de Leery Polyp's masterly skewering of Detestella, it helps to know that the object of our depreciation was actually wearing those nonstandard pants on Thursday. Although of course I can't conjure up an exact image of them, let us just say that this and this give a good general idea of theme and intensity in the offending article of apparel.

All of which leads to my choice of slogan:
Don't malign others.

Which as you can see is a big point of struggle for me. The idea, I know, is that while dissecting the foibles of the supremely annoying under a high-power microscope might seem like good fun, ultimately it's not toward my greater happiness. Or, it's distracting me from some more skillful use of my focus and energies.

So I ask you--why does it please me so? When does the karmic fallout begin?
*shuffles this slogan to the bottom of the pile

even irony bores me

Abandon any hope of fruition.

See what I mean?

To make matters worse, I was soooooo longing for a really good Google image of Underwood products, and I think anyone would agree with me that the above is very shabbily edited. And the only superior one I could find was animated, which I find really just weird. See if you agree with me.

However, one a more optimistic note, it led me to this more pleasantly nostalgic icon, and for someone who is bored with irony, this might seem an odd choice for a blog ...

Sometimes you just have to pack it in and hope that tomorrow will bring inspiration.