Yes, I’m jumping the gun. I know it’s November when I do my annual photo, but this October day this week was too gorgeous.
If I didn’t live a block from the Seine, I sometimes wonder if I’d still be in Paris. I’ve spent most of my life next to or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you see, and I can’t live long without a body of water nearby. Even the dirty brown streak of the Seine, a sad, sad substitute for the Pacific, an icky little skid mark in comparison, satisfies that criterion.
The fact that I’m a Pisces has nothing to do with anything at all, but it’s a pretty coincidence.
I’m not complaining about the murky strip of river that is standing in for my ocean, really I’m not. I walk my dog along it every day and it’s water and even though I can only look at it, not that I’d want to get in it, yuck, it gets me as close as I can get for the moment to Madison when she dumps the bottle of Morton’s in the tub and unfurls her tail.
This post is brought to you today by the letter W because it’s Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers all over the world publish posts on the same socially or environmentally conscious theme and this year’s theme is “water.” (Last year it was “poverty,” and I wrote about it here on frogblog.)
I put on my drama queen costume and say I would die without water but, every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 really do die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
We don’t have problems like that in the West.
(Mini-mermaid maintenance in Indiana, while Dad was at Purdue.)
For a time, I lived “on the shores of Gitche Gumee,” a formidable body of water, not an ocean, but big enough that I couldn’t see to the opposite shore and badass enough to swallow the Edmund Fitzgerald. It served as a Pacific surrogate for a short time. Much later, the almost three years I lived an hour from Death Valley nearly killed me, though the thunderstorms were magnificent and flash floods made temporary baby-beaches of the dunes. By the time I escaped and moved back to the ocean I was like one of those fish in Africa that live in ephemeral ponds and dehydrate into crispy fishcakes in the dry season and then come back to life with the spring rains.
I don’t feel like getting on a soapbox today. Sorry. I feel like selfishly daydreaming. I don’t rant as much as I used to on this blog anyway. Maybe all the people in my building tossing cat litter into the recycling bin and plastic bottles into the trash bin and American morons voting for Tea Party morons and fucking Sarko rounding up and deporting a vulnerable and disadvantaged ethnic group to pander to the far right are slowly draining the fight out of me. At least today I don’t have much fight in me.
Sometimes I just want to say to the world what my mother said after a dozen years of watching my little brother and me knock each other around, from her spot on the couch where she was drinking white wine as was her wont in the years immediately following her divorce: “Go ahead and kill each other. Just don’t knock over the Christmas tree.”
Anyway. Do me a favor and go here and scroll down to “Suggested Post Ideas” to get some compelling factoids about the state and use of water on our poor abused and declining planet. And then please sign this petition. And then maybe donate some money to Blue Planet Network or a charity of your choice (preferably one that doesn’t shove religion down throats along with spoonfuls of mush) so I can keep on dreaming of warm salt water on this fall day in Paris without feeling guilty about not having done my duty. I’ll be grateful to you. Besides, I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do; I donated to Worldreader.org last month. (I guess I am still fighting after all.)
My darling husband knows the Seine is not a permanent solution, so he dangles this carrot in front of me on gloomy days. We’re toying with the idea of going there “next,” when and if next happens. Rents there are less than half what they are in Paris and you get an ocean too.
I have not lived on the Atlantic, but something tells me it will do just fine. I should be able to stick my toes in it at least a few times a year. And I’m sure it looks and smells right, and I’m sure it sounds right. Like an ocean.
Long ago, during the very brief period (about a year) during which I was a desperate housewife, I took a Photoshop class. Since then, it’s been my favorite toy; when I’m bored, I fire it up and try to make art. My best work is rather… personal… so I won’t share. It would be indecorous. (I did have it on an anonymous erotica blog for a while, but I took the blog down because it was associated with one of my gmail addresses and I was afraid one day they’d announce to all my professional contacts through some new “service” that it was mine.)
I have a 12-year-old niece who just discovered Photoshop a couple of months ago, when she was still 11. This niece also happens to have a huge crush on her geeky, artistic, Apple fan (not quite fanboy) uncle Vincent. Nothing odd about that; I had uncle crushes too. One turned out to be schizophrenic and the other would feel right at home at a Tea Party… Oh well. But the schizo one looked like Marlon Brando and Paul Newman combined, and the other one had a fabulous nose (always had a thing for noses) and was much less uptight back in the 70s, when he drank a lot of beer.
Anyway. So as soon as my little niece got the hang of Photoshop, which appears to have taken something like two days, she started sending her uncle gifts. These are some of my favorites:
Now, let me add that my niece’s parents are both stage actors, and her dad’s a playwright too. Her mom is a total technophobe. Her dad is not, but he’s no geek. He just got an iPhone the other day, and my niece e-mailed her uncle Vincent to commiserate with him because she’d spent the entire day showing her dad how to use it (she is a wiz with her iPod touch).
Until now, this is the kind of art project my niece has traditionally done (probably since birth) with her outdoorsy, Earth Mother mother:
They do a lot of this kind of stuff. (She’s one of those mothers who always make you feel inadequate because you don’t spend all your free time with your kids making dolls out of flowers and gingerbread houses and shit.) But there’s something to be said for that kind of dedication. It undoubtedly contributed to my niece’s creativity and aesthetic sensibility.
Not only is she a budding geekette, but she’s also a budding Apple fangirl:
Now, this work is truly impressive, but what inspired it is even more interesting.
Her uncle’s Apple love and her desire to please him certainly come into play. But more than that, it’s the products themselves.
They’re purty. Delicate. Sleek. Shiny. (These images say a lot about how this little girl perceives the products.) There’s a refinement to Apple products that jumps the gender gap (and creates a healthy aftermarket for butch iPhone cases for those who aren’t real comfy with their feminine side, or “How to make your Apple product look more like a Hummer”).
Getting the girls on board is no small feat for tech companies (laptop bag manufacturers haven’t figured it out yet). What GameBoy would have given to have girls go for GameGirls the way they have for Apple stuff!
In couples, women make most of the purchasing decisions. And for a long time now, single girls have been buying their own diamonds, if you get my drift. Apple, with its aesthetically delectible toys, has managed to achieve the Woman Acceptance Factor, starting very young, without alienating the boys.
Maybe the reason they haven’t come out with the red (or maybe pink, depending on my mood) iPhone I want yet is because they don’t want to scare the boys away… Or maybe it’s just a classiness thing. I guess wanting a pink iPhone makes me less classy, but I’m OK with that.
In past generations, we’d look at kids and think “they’re the future,” and buy them hula hoops to keep them occupied till they grew up and became a factor. But this generation is decidedly the present as well as the future. So watch closely. It’s fascinating.
In any case, Steve, I think you should look at my niece’s work. It might give you some ideas for your next ad campaign. Just e-mail me and I’ll tell you where to send the check.
I told my brother we were going to the middle of rural Normandy for 10 days and that we planned to do nothing but read. He laughed! I guess that’s not his idea of a good vacation. Then we had a conversation about how his vacations are all about entertaining the kids. I sympathized and told him it wouldn’t always be that way.
Sitting around in chaises longues outside a cottage in the sticks (even French sticks) may not be everybody’s idea of a perfect vacation. But it worked for us. We didn’t only read, but we didn’t do anything mentally or physically stressful (that’s the point, right?), which is not to say we did nothing strenuous. A novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald is not something you just read, after all. It’ll take your breath away and leave you dizzy. Like exercise, but entertaining, edifying, elevating…
So what did I do on my summer vacation besides read?
Saw a 13th-century church in the village of Rugles on a gray (but not cold) day. You get those in Normandy, in the summer.
Contemplated seedpods that fascinated me (their wings) and delighted me (their color scheme, which I promptly decided I would do my dream living room in).
And in this little field, I imagined a tiny house next to this solitary tree, which looks as if it’s had some hard knocks in its short life, to hold that living room. The barbed wire will keep all the people away. Oh! Right! There are no people…
Pitted cherries. A tree planted by Vincent’s dad about 20 years ago bore fruit for the first time this year. The best cherries I’ve ever had in my life, easily 20 years’ worth of stockpiled cherry flavor in ‘em. Can’t you see it? We made a cobbler. There are no words.
Geek tip: If you have an image whose colors make you salivate, and if you have Photoshop, you can break the image down into a color palette you can use for web design, or home décor, or putting an outfit together, or whatever! Choose the Filter menu, then Pixelate, then Mosaic. Make the squares big till you get a workable palette.
Welcome to my living room in the little house in the little field by the little tree. This is all I have so far, but it’ll do. I don’t really need much.
I plugged a chunk of my novel-in-progress into this web app that analyzes your sentence structure and word choices, and I got this:
Loved Handmaid’s Tale, but Cat’s Eye left me cold. Tried to read Good Bones and Simple Murders, but I don’t generally like short stories (it was a gift from someone who does like them). Can’t remember what others I’ve read, but I know I’ve at least started one or two more. I’ve always wondered why she’s so popular. My general impression of her is that she’s kind of a “John Irving lite.” But maybe I’ll have to revisit her stuff now that I’m older and wiser and see what the fuss is about. Any recommendations?
Then I plugged in an everyday splendor post and got this:
Now that felt good. If only! Even though he could be a bit pompous and verbose. (Wait a minute… This app is good!)
Then I plugged in a frogblog post and got this:
Oh well. But who doesn’t love some good pulp from time to time?
Let me know who you write like!