3.31.03 - the united states of iraq

or, the chilling thing i saw at the mall yesterday:

the Made In Idaho Or USA store (i'm not making that title up) was featuring "Support Our Troops" t-shirts with an american flag-themed design in the front window. well, not terribly surprising. but what caught my eye was the other t-shirt display: the one promoting "Free Iraq" t-shirts decorated up with a graphic design that combined the US and Iraqi flags into a single emblem. talk about propaganda. what are the chances that the US goverment is actually manufacturing these shirts and distributing them through private resellers?

3.30.03 - a quandary:

option 1: assistant stage manage. good money, fun company, job's in idaho where i want to spend my summer. work will not be terribly challenging or artistically interesting, however, the overall quality of the work will be first-rate. have to suck up the fact that the company is giving me a pretty significant demotion from last summer, as a result of office politics rather than me being incompetent. will have to be an assistant to someone i once had a summer fling with.

option 2: direct, stage manage and teach community classes for a young shakespeare company in new hampshire. earn $0 aside from room and board. do work that will push me outside of my comfort level, get me to try new things and discover what i'm capable of and what i want to do. runs the risk that the overall quality of the work will suck. have to be away from andy for at least six weeks. have to keep my day job for an extra month. risk being too poor to be able to move to chicago in the fall as planned.

which is why i haven't been able to pull together a coherent thought for slithy tove in the past week. what to do: sell out for a carefree and profitable summer, or throw myself into the fire?

3.23.03 - confessions of a dilettante

i’ll just come out and say it now: i have commitment issues. it’s not what you think; i am capable of carrying on stable, long-term relationships, i can choose colors paint colors and not regret having a twilight-grey living room two weeks later, i can make plans and show up at the appointed hour. no, no, it’s nothing like that. but i can’t, so help me god, commit to a hobby. my interests ebb and flow: first it was sewing my own clothes, nintendo and gymnastics. in junior high school it was ballet, cheerleading and then computers, in high school it was native american cultural studies, writing poetry, and communing with nature. during college i lived and breathed drama, dabbled in japanese, learned to waltz and attempted to knit. after graduating i started this blog and adopted a cat; last year i acquired a digital camera, then an mp3 player and a second-hand bicycle.

the sports i’ve participated in since grade school include (in no particular order) soccer, softball, basketball, horseback riding, skiing, cross-country, track, gymnastics, ballet, jazz, modern and social dance, tennis, yoga, aikido, weight training, kickboxing, and pilates. i buy cookbooks that gather dust on the shelves and leave veggies in the crisper to rot. scrap booking projects grow tedious halfway through and i toss the ticket stubs and photographs and glue sticks into a box on the top shelf. i’ve attempted to play the piano, the flute, the native american flute and the guitar (still can't manage happy birthday on any of them). other hobbies include hypochondria, scouring the web for low-priced airfare, and impromptu international travel.

i used to be embarrassed by my lack of commitment. i’d glower when my father would remind me of my many abandon pursuits gathering spiders in the garage. but why, exactly, do i need to commit to a single hobby? if hobbies exist to make me happy, relaxed, and stress-free, then why pressure myself into a corner? i’m interested in the whole world. there simply isn’t time for me to become an expert on any of it. the internet is my best friend; i go running for my computer at any hour of the day to learn how to buff scratches out of my car’s paint, what pine-needles will to do to soil pH, how to make a soy-milk smoothie, and what time the global peace rally takes place. on a fundamental level, learning new things is my hobby. i grow bored quickly with repetitive tasks or the things that i already know. it’s also probably why i’ve chosen a career field in which i’ve never had to hold the same job for more than 6 months. theatre is something that i have made a commitment to. maybe the gravity of committing to a career that sometimes demands enormous sacrifices encourages me to seek freedom from other sorts of commitments. at any rate, one of the best things about my career is that i start a new project every 2-4 months. a totally new challenge, new people, new subject matter, often even a new theatre or a new city. it keeps me awake and alive. (apologies to peter gabriel)

there’s the obvious cost in hop-scotching hobbies to consider; but as a child i had parents who wouldn't fork over a dime for acid-wash jeans, but were willing to spend entire paychecks encouraging their children's intellectual pursuits. these days i try to stay away from equipment-heavy activities. and while i might not be as committed to cheerleading as i was at 13 (thank god), i’ve taken parts of all of these hobbies on with me. i appreciate sports i'll never really be good at. i dance in my living room when no one is looking, i knit the occasional misshapen scarf for someone who, out of loyalty, has to wear it at least once. i still use the digital camera regularly, albeit with less fervor than at first. i have scrapbooks to remind me of college, a sufficient grasp on japanese to exchange pleasantries with foreign-exchange students, and a couple of knock-out recipes tucked away for the occasional dinner party.

so my newest project is organic gardening. i admit i'm starting from zero knowledge on the subject (i was spelling organic with a 't' in the middle), but that has rarely daunted me. why gardening? because i have a yard, and ideologically, i'm interested in exploring the connection between ourselves and the food we eat and how that connection changes when we change the relationship from grocery store-mouth to garden-to-mouth. why organic gardening? because i want to raise vegetables without chemicals, because have you read the research on what this shit does to the body?, because i want to find a way to live on the earth in a gentler fashion. if we buy biodegradable soap, cruelty-free beauty products and hormone-free eggs, how could i justify dousing the backyard in chemicals just so my yard will be greener than next door? one of my gardening books included a quiz: do you suffer from suburban peer-pressure? given that one of our next-door neighbors is a crazy cat lady, and the other place houses a bunch of college students who regularly toss subway wrappers and miller-lite cans into our yard, i feel no envy.

library books on organic gardening bury the new coffee table and i've posted questions on gardening websites about soil pH and companion planting. i'm compiling lists of what veggies i want to grow and plotting which section of the yard gets the most sun. the intent was to plant a vegetable garden, but when i looked outside last week, i realized that the entire yard needs some organic lovin'. two years of dead leaves and pine needles three-inches thick needed to be raked up off of the ground, revealing grass that had died for lack of water and sunlight, and petrified dog plop left from two-owners-ago. grass seed needs to be sown and coddled, the mulch pile turned and umm, encouraged? to turn into dirt. the hedges require taming, the prickly weeds picked out of the front bed, the daffodils rescued from the pick of bricks they're trying to bloom underneath. i'm not going to discriminate; if it's green and doesn't have thistles, and it wants to grow in my yard, it's welcome to do so.

like the ones before it, this isn't a hobby that will likely stay with me forever. this time next year, i expect to be living in a microscopic apartment in chicago, far from open plots of land or fertile soil. but for this year, i've been given the gift of a house with a yard, and the opportunity to reexamine my relationship with food, dirt, and earthworms.

3.21.03 - more war-related rant

i swear if i hear the term "shock and awe" on the news one more time today i'm going to vomit on the radio in protest. they make it sound like they're talking about fireworks, not a bombing campaign. it makes me sick.

the boise community is all a twitter today because on wednesday the Weekly published our regular column by New York-based syndicated columnist Ted Rall with the headline "Don't Support Our Troops." i admit i was shocked when i looked at the headline, but actually reading the column reveals that Mr. Rall's opinion is pretty much in line with the newspaper's anti-war stance. i'm not sure about the decision to run such an inflammatory headline (i'm just the receptionist, i tell callers repeatedly, but that doesn't stop them from making bodily threats and 20-minute rants on things completely unrelated to anything), but the real problem is that most of our furious callers (a sales agent for a local news station is calling for a boycott of our advertisers, distribution sites are telling us to pick up our boxes and stop delivery...) didn't actually read the article, just the headline. i hate ignorant anger. the paper's stance, and mine, is that the best way to bring our troops home safely to their families and loved ones is not to send them out there at all. its not really about not supporting troops, its about not supporting the administration. not supporting the people who come up with crap like "shock and awe" to describe how they're going to flatten baghdad.

to borrow a clip out of Rall's column:

"Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, opposes war with Iraq. Despite this stance, he suggests that Americans should set aside their political differences...'When the war begins, if the war begins,' says Kerry, 'I support the troops and I support the United States of America….'"

it's so easy to take a middle-of-the-road stance like that: to oppose war right up till it starts, and then throw in the cards and cheer along with CNN, praying that they'll nuke baghdad quickly and efficiently and then come home to their families. that's bullshit. if the war is wrong, it's wrong before and during and after. you can't jump sides just to be on the winning team. supporting our troops, to me, means not sending them into an unjust war. it means not sacrificing their lives over oil prices. other people need to support our troops by sending over shipments of coffee or valentines, by waving flags and holding prayer sessions, and i do understand that. but i'm supporting our troops by NOT supporting an administration that would force soldiers to make the grave moral decision to take the life of a fellow human being without the least assurance that it will bring about a greater good for the world.

my anger isn't focused on individual soldiers. i'll be glad that they're back home with their families. i respect that devoting one's life to the military (and that, really, is the potential price of anyone who joins up) is an incredible sacrifice, and i respect and appreciate the people who have sworn to protect the country i live in. i imagine that one of the hardest part of being a soldier is trusting, unconditionally, that our leaders are doing the right thing. but as a civilian, that's not my job.

3.20.03 - the difficulties of pacifism

do i think that attending candlelight vigils and posting angry rants here is going to change the course of world events? no. i have no delusions about my insignificance as an individual in the context of world politics. but the problem is, i don't know what else to do. it's too easy to go, well, lighting a candle won't do any good, and every one know the president doesn't really read any of his email anyway, so i guess i'll just be quietly apprehensive. i don't feel right about this, and if posting angry rants is all i have to give, then i'll do that. if i had a more effective plan, i'd go do that.

i made a commitment to pacifism at a time in my life when i was too young to really understand the ramifications of such a stance. someone posed the question, "who are you going to be? what role are you going to play in the lives of those around you?" and the words popped in my head: peace-maker. i was 10, maybe 12, and it was probably the first time that i saw myself and my life in the context of the larger world around me. at the time, the realization informed my life in the context of family and immediate relationships, not world politics. as i've gotten older, the application of my role as a peace-maker has changed, but my original commitment to pacifism has not.

there are thresholds: i'm not claiming that during WWII the US should have sat down and tried to reason with Hitler rather than liberating concentration camps. but violence needs to be the very last resort. Bush claims that war is now the only option, but i don't think all avenues had been exhausted. (as evidenced by this, among other things: "Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. "Feels good," he said." (link courtesy of lmo)) i opened a pro-war letter to the editor in the mail yesterday. it talked about what a crime it would be to sit by and do nothing while Hussein's regime continues to starve children and torture citizens. he's right. i'm not advocating inaction. i'm advocating non-violent action. if all those bright young minds that are currently focused on building our own weapons of mass destruction instead focused on finding diplomatic solutions that worked better than economic sanctions, maybe we'd be getting somewhere by now.

3.18.03 - time's up

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-Hermann Goering

if you have a god to pray to, pray for peace now. at this point, divine intervention is the only thing that's gonna stop our war-mongering dictator of the free world.

3.15.03 - plans for tomorrow night?

get yer vigil on.

3.14.03 - bad karma

each week the boise weekly features a painting or photograph on the cover, which local artists submit by the dozens. the pay ain't bad: $150 plus the exposure of being on the cover of a newspaper with a 35,000-copy weekly circulation. we get far more art that we could ever publish, and it stacks up in the editor-in-chief's office. yesterday he sorted it into Yes, No and Maybe piles. he handed me the No pile, so i could call the artists and tell them to come pick up their work. being the chicken that i am, i timed my calls to land at 11am on a friday, when most people were likely to be at work, and managed to leave 19 messages and only have to reject one artist over the phone directly. i felt kinda like a chump, encouraging people to continue to submit their work in the future, even the ones who turned in crayola masterpieces on cocktail napkins, but it was the nicest way to let people down. so that's what i did today. i ruined other people's days. it wasn't my fault, but it still seems like a recipe for bad karma. my resume will line production managers' wastebaskets all across the country when i'm looking for my next gig.

3.10.03 - best of

one of my tasks at the Weekly is that i enter all of the free classified ads - musician's exchange, prison pen pals, i saw you, kisses and kicks, lost and found, and so forth. this means that i get all the letters from jail, and all the letters from pro christian drummers looking for band members for serious work only. in lieu of a Freak of the Week column, i'm going to start posting my favorite classified ad of the week. this week's is from the I Saw You section:

MELTED INTO YOUR EGYPTIAN EYES on a walk behind
Camelsback Park. Pale sunset, chilly breeze,
breathless view of you. Repeat Friday? Maybe forever? ­-Roxy

god damn! if he doesn't call her, i will.

3.9.03 - sunday brunch

today was the great summit meeting of parents (andy's, mine) over brunch at our new house. since andy and i still eat dinner off of a half-sized card table, the event called for purchasing a new coffee table at st. vincent's yesterday, which means that our catholic couch now has a catholic coffee table to hang with. maybe they can get together and exclude the mormon tv stand - a sort of karmic role reversal from my own childhood.

the parents (also catholic, both sets) got along marvelously. they've both lived in the same small community for the past 30 years, so it wasn’t hard for them to find things in common. the decision to buy quiche instead of attempting my own turned out to be an excellent idea, and forgetting to serve the strawberries means that andy and i will be mashing our own strawberry ice cream later tonight. darn.

3.8.03 - the terrible twos

i missed an anniversary a few weeks back, when slithy tove passed the two-year mile marker. welcome to the terrible twos, where i will chew on anything and everything, pull the cat's tail, wail at the top of my lungs, dig in my heels and resist every helpful suggestion.

3.7.03 - keep a leash on that cactus

i was watering my new cactus when i noticed a stake in the dirt. it read:

asexual breeding prohibited

what, no cactus breeding in the privacy of my own home? apparently one can patent flowering cacti now. who knew?

3.6.03 - on this week's list of Fashion Trends I'm Too Un-hip to Understand

bullet-hole stickers to put on your car.

last week, i parked outside of work and noticed that the car behind me had a bullet hole on the side, up near the fender. weird, i thought. who shoots at cars in boise, idaho? the next day i parked and noticed that the mini van in front of me had two bullet holes. there was a perfectly round dent, just the size of a bullet, and the paint had flecked off unevenly for about a half inch around the center of the impact. closer examination proved, however, that these two bullet holes were perfectly identical to the one from the previous day, and that the silver paint was curling at the edges from the damp weather. these have probably been around for like a year, but, well, i'm slow with fashion trends for one's car. i'm still trying to wrap my brain around neon license plates holders and custom-lowered hyundais.

3.5.03 - lent, guilt and gendered deities

for reasons i don't entirely understand myself, giving things up for lent is the only part of catholicism that i still practice. most of the world limits itself to fat tuesday; i'm stuck with lent. tack on a hefty dose of catholic guilt and the unconscious habit of referring to god with a male pronoun, and you've got a pretty complete picture of the catholic i've grown up to be. when i was a kid my brothers and i used to think we were really clever, coming up with promises like "i'm giving up homework for lent!" or "i'm giving up giving up things for lent!" which would cause our CCD teachers to give us withering, do you think you're the first snarky kid to invent that? looks. these days, lenten sacrifices are usually centered around self-improvement. i don't have much willpower of my own, but given that breaking lenten promises ranks way up there on the
fear-of-being-struck-by-lightening scale, its can be a handy way of reforming bad habits.

this year the plan is eating-habits reform with a focus on eliminating toxins and 'unnatural' elements - less processed food, more organic vegetables, only grain-fed, hormone-free meats and eggs, etc. i have big plans for a vegetable garden in the backyard this spring. when i was a kid we had a couple of fruit trees, and in the summer my dad would come inside with an armload of apples. i recall avoiding eating those, because they seemed too...i don't know, dirty. they weren't shiny and clean and perfectly formed like the ones from the grocery store. more importantly, they hadn't come from the grocery store. and that's where all the food comes from, right? that made sense as a kid, and i still sometimes find myself unconsciously leaning in that direction. i think this betrays a greater problem - the total disassociation between source and finished meal. in a world of processed food, its hard not to lose track of where the food comes from - hamburger comes in a plastic-wrapped tube from the meat locker, not that from lumbering holstein in the mucky stall or the dewy fields. that's why i've largely given up meat in the past few years - i don't want to eat something if i can't reconcile the meat with the animal it came from. fish is easy - i've gone fishing, i've killed and cleaned and cooked and eaten a fish all on the same day. chicken proves more ideologically problematic, as i've never actually cut the head off of a chicken or plucked out the feathers. mammals are totally beyond my comfort level. i've been asked why it's so important for us to reconcile the death of an animal to the meat on our plate, and i'm not sure i have a good answer to that. it just feels wrong. it's one of those gut things.

reading Fast Food Nation recently only helped to solidify the notion that not knowing where your meat comes from can hurt you. (e.g., mad cow disease: a monster that humans created by fucking around with nature - feeding animal proteins to herbivores). not only did the tales of modern-day slaughterhouse horrors convince me that i never wanted to eat tainted, hormone- and antibiotic-laden meat from an animal whose feet had never touched the ground and had been force fed a cannibalistic diet nature had never intended, but it was the stories of the unspeakable The Jungle-like conditions that most slaughterhouse workers endure that turned my stomach. eating commercial meat isn't just bad for your body, bad for the animals and the environment - it's bad for largely migrant workforce, too. and the sweat of an exploited worker really can't make that burger taste better.

3.4.03 - overheard

things you didn't want to hear in the YMCA locker room:

i've got this athlete's foot between the toes that just won't go away. my eyes involuntarity slide down my locker and across the floor to confirm that, yup, the feet belonging to the speaker are indeed bare and in contact with the public-domain carpeting. my toes curl and i vow to wear socks in the locker room from now on.

3.3.03 - fuck you very much, turbo tax

it seems that filing in three states was more than poor little turbo tax's brain could handle, so i ended up having to do the damn returns by hand. which was better, in way, because i'm a control freak and i didn't trust turbo tax to get it right unless i could see all the math, but i'm horrified to realize how many hours i've spent in the past week trying to get it all straight - filing as a part year resident in new york state and a part year resident in idaho, as a non-resident in massachusetts, and then requesting tax credits for all the income that was double taxed by more than one state. dear god. this stuff should be easy - i don't even own anything - no stocks, no bonds, no property. with turbo tax's interpretation i would have been well on my way to an audit. which wouldn't really matter, given that my generalized fear of authority prevents me from cheating on my taxes, but it'd be a real pain in the ass. i mean, who the fuck writes this stuff?

3.2.03 - captain procrastination

ways to avoid finishing my taxes tonight:

1) invite my grandparents in for coffee when they stop by to drop something off. this necessitates cleaning the entire house. 2) spoil andy, who broke his collarbone snowboarding this weekend and can't move his right arm 3) watch boomtown, further desensitizing myself to violence and aggression. 4) cook dinner. wash all the dishes afterwards, even the ones that aren't mine. 5) blog. 6) online scrabble.