fried mac
Thursday 8 May 2008 | I like a cookie
G5 at the doctor’s office in Scottsdale for a cool $90/hr. Typing this on Brujo’s, no, MY laptop, which is evilly slow. Will update from school tomorrow, whence I go to shut down office for the summer. I will say this: DUDE you can get a lot done with no computer. Paradoxically.
sumer is i-cumin in, / lhude sing, cuccu!
Wednesday 7 May 2008 | 7 cookies in the jar
I FINISHED.
Well okay almost—one student posted a .docx instead of a .doc file for her final and I have to open/read/grade it at school tomorrow. And I still have to write my own final for the Duende. And a letter of reference. But basically?
I FINISHED.
And now there is bliss. Ecstasy. Dancing in the streets. Feasting and whooping and sensual celebrating of all descriptions. Or, more accurately, I slept like a dead thing from 4 am to 11 am, not even aware that the Brujo was recording his (uninhibitedly loud) radio show in the living room. But NOW there will be feasting and whooping and celebrating—
True, I am broke. True, after the next paycheck there are no more paychecks until August and some sort of decision will need to be made about how to keep body and soul together this summer, especially given the fact that I apparently cannot go a week without spending money on fabric. True, the Korean car hasn’t started in 3 weeks and is dead in the driveway gathering tree spall and bird poop on its hood. True, the Brujo is also broke and has no insurance and we just put another $500 on the credit card for his dental emergency last week (oh, he was in PAIN and it was hard to see…stuff came up for me that hadn’t visited since I cared for Maman….). True, Aunt Freud and I have never managed to do bupkis; yet I owe her squillions of dollars in copays; and worst of all my meds have mysteriously and completely given out and thus so do I, every day around 3 pm, dissolve into sniffling and Existential Despair and usually, very shortly thereafter, bed. (Whence mercifully I can retire daily now.)
Yes, all these things are true. AND. A barrage of good stuff follows, in image and word. Bodhi wahoo!
• I don’t teach comp again until 2009! This fall I teach POETRY to 20 students and in the spring I teach LITERATURE to 25 students (and presumably another comp section) and also I take my own classes and I WRITE. (This is where we live by the way—our house has the red car in front, not where the little green G••gle arrow inaccurately points. See how we live in the suburbs?!)
• The library, it turns out, not only has books on literature and education and writing and so forth, but, can you believe it?? Books exist on QUILTING!!! and FABRIC!!! Who knew?! Behold my latest gloating stack—best of all, a book about SILK, an utterly anti-ecological substance with which I am currently completely obsessed. I’m going to use the grad computer room scanner to scan in quilts and show them to you….some have literally brought me to tears.
• The Brujo has decided to teach summer school and then full-time this fall, which will be hard on him, but hopefully enable him to get out of tax debt, AND he’ll have health insurance and some kind of dental coverage, both of which are good for a fiesty field-collecting 47-year-old Brujo to have.
• Not only the Dying Book, but also my own little book of poultry comes out any day now! ‘Twas supposed to be published in April, but Particle Series Books is a brand-new micropress and besides I was insanely late getting my final version to them, bless their hearts for even still speaking to me.
• Why I am the best thrift store shopper ever: a brilliant vintage Sears ironing board for $5.99, beating the Wal-Mart/Hanjin Shipping price by $6, AND it’s much more stylish, especially when I finish its new Robert Kaufman paisley ironing-board cover. I need to take a better picture revealing its fashionable space-age atomic-era curving legs, freshly sheathed in buttery almond high-gloss paint. But I no longer have to press fabric on a burnt-towel-covered piano bench whilst kneeling on the floor!
• Why I am the best thrift-store shopper ever part II: sewing table for $10, so I no longer have to stab my knees into the makeshift steamer-trunk arrangement, and/or remove entire sewing set-up everytime I want a notion or stash fabric out of said steamer trunks. Behold, new sewing corner, with Virgin of Guadalupe pillows in the making. Yay for spiritofjoy’s suggesting that I start by sewing something for myself. Fabric for said pillows: SIXTY-TWO CENTS at the fabric-by-the-pound joint across the street, possibly because She has a bolt seam running across Her middle; but we don’t mind it much.
• Why I am the best thrift-store shopper ever part III, pictures to come:
1. red-and-black floral Betsey Johnson silk skirt: $2.75.
2. Limited silk skirt, pink with wee brown polka dots: $2.50
3. unremarkable but cute pale green silk camisole: $2.25
4. stunning pale blue Vietnamese silk housecoat: $2.75
• I made vichyssoise and coconut cream flan for the Brujo because he can’t chew, and he loved them and so did I. Ooh, and my salsa has been fabuloso this spring! With lots of lime and cilantro, and deseeded tomatoes and scallions and jalapeño and nothing else. Simple and good on corn tortillas, which the B. was able to masticate gingerly on one side of his jaw.
• A yard of caramel-colored dupioni that I extravagantly bid on and won via the Bay which is evil (sometime in the depths of February—I think—about $3?), and then thought dismally I will never ever use this—has now revealed itself to be PERFECT for an arty silk coin quilt which will look something like this. And within it I will use the special bamboo batting; yes.
• Speaking of which quilting class starts again May 22 so I can finish all the half-sewn, half-cut-out mini quilts I began this winter and did not complete due to getting February/the semester all over me, see above. Or below.
• Behold my fledgling inspiration board….why, just this morning I gazed glazedly upon it, cereal bowl clutched in bleary hand, and conceived a brilliant idea for a silk quilt for Oleoptene—can you guess what it will be?
And maybe, just maybe, all of these things also mean I can stop the incessant in-my-head writing of blog posts and starting of poems and imagining of quilt shapes/fabric colors, and instead construct actual Things in that which it pleases us to call Reality, for a while. The State School seems to want no part of me between now and August 18; and while I have the standard 100+ end-of-semester panicky oh-God-please-don’t-give-me-an-A-minus emails, plus I have woefully neglected my staunchly faithless and frequently texting/telephoning beloved Fruitbat, and Oleoptene and Persephone, plus the house is unspeakably filthy, plus plus plus plus plus….yet:
Time. Opens up and beckons. And I. Rush grateful forward into her.
mommy feels the same way, darling
Tuesday 6 May 2008 | I like a cookie
almost….finished….
Tuesday 6 May 2008 | I like a cookie
Please stand by. Or sit. Actually, lying down is even better.
heart-cockle-warming review
Tuesday 6 May 2008 | someone left a cookie
Behold this nice blurb from Publishers Weekly, in re: the Dying Book. Not starred, but a decent review anyway; and maybe they don’t even give starred reviews to Buddhist self-help books? Notice how it says, “clarity”; and, “supremely readable.” Notice too how I’d much rather have a copy of Martha Sielman’s art quilts book, also reviewed this week. Hopeless, I’m hopeless.
In this moving meditation on palliative care, Herself tells a story about a dying Zen teacher who confesses to his students: “Maybe I will die in fear or pain. Remember there is no right way.” This sentiment forms the core of a book that provides practical and philosophical guidance to caregivers. Drawing on her 30 years of experience in the “contemplative care of the dying,” Herself honestly enumerates the challenges of being with the dying while exalting it as “a school for unlearning the patterns of resistance…[it] enjoins us to be still, let go, listen, and be open to the unknown.” According to Herself, “bearing witness to dying” can teach innumerable lessons to the living—assuming “we give up our tight control strategies, our ideas of what it means to die well.” Herself is a Zen priest, and while many of her teachings derive from Buddhism, her supremely readable book will attract readers of all faiths who will appreciate her clarity and compassion and the poignancy of these stories of ordinary people facing their final hours with quiet courage.
status report: today’s end of classes predictably followed by total physical systems failure
Tuesday 29 April 2008 | someone left a cookie
It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed nightgown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. “You all will have to look out for pa the best you can,” she said. “I’m tired.” (William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying)
as we approach our final descent
Tuesday 29 April 2008 | someone left a cookie
Dear rhetoricians—tomorrow is our LAST CLASS and we must arrive prepared. Therefore:
1) Get a good night’s sleep HAHAHAHAHA!
2) Bring your coffee mug for the delightful regional beverage we will be served [horchata and pan dulce]….and
3) Don’t forget an extra copy of your project so you can mail it off and get that extra credit we all love.
I am updating grades throughout the night in a completely random and non-alphabetical order. If you want a sneak peek at the final reflection, you can find it in its own little folder on the website.
Please bring your chair and tray tables into their full, upright, locked, and most uncomfortable positions, as we prepare for landing. Thank you.
material mondays · zazu’s petals
Monday 28 April 2008 | I like a cookie
Zazu by Tina Givens for FreeSpirit: chrysanthymums in teal, raspberry, and the fabulous rich buttery yellow they call “Africa.” In a coin quilt on cream?
friday refrains · brian diamond
Friday 25 April 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
The Un is especially pleased this week to present a poem by her colleague Mr. Brian Diamond (whom she calls, affectionately, “Briamond,” but faithless readers need not follow suit because it is kind of silly).
And who is this Briamond character? He himself kindly provided the following boilerplate bio: “A native of California, Brian studied at the University of Oregon and received his MA from Cal State Northridge. He enjoys gummy bears and light rail construction. His greatest accomplishment to date is winning the New Yorker cartoon contest.”
Well. What could a lowly editor possibly add to that? Only that Brian is gently ruthless in workshop, a wise reader and a thoughtful reviser, and unremittingly hilarious. (The two Brians—pictured below; Lee on right, Diamond on left—are probably largely responsible for getting me through teacher training in one mostly-sane piece, due to their capers, cutups and sly sarcastic untermütters.) He’s also one of the few State School colleagues writing poems I want to keep and read over and over again.
Here, then, is one of them; Briamond performed this a couple of weeks ago at a reading and I immediately demanded a copy to post. He politely obliged but when the NYer wants to pay him $300 for it, of course, he should pretend it never saw print anywhere and I’ll delete this post tout suite.
SENSE
It takes 4¢ to make a penny
A man in Calcutta got rich this way, melting down
currency and selling it for scrap
Your share of the national debt is over $77,000, most
of which you owe to yourself
The square root of a large number is also a large number
I don’t believe in math, I believe in miracles
says the politician who is mathematically eliminated
To be mathematically eliminated is, in fact,
a kind of miracle
Cancer kills more people than cars and cars
kill more people than war
So cars are the medium between cancer and war
The president declares war on integers, then chides
a blind man for his sunglasses
If you go blind, you may learn to see with your tongue
Smell precedes sight and dies first
Smell I could do without, says the war-torn village
A dead ovary is a black raisin to the touch
There are only three bones in the human ear,
the most delicate in all your body
Four out of five doctors makes a B-
99.9% of all species are extinct
(Brian Diamond)
and when there’s nothing else to do?
Friday 25 April 2008 | someone left a cookie
You can always be astounded by Russian cake art.
