Scattershot

Boy howdy?

This morning I woke up and found myself thinking, "Boy howdy! Did I ever sleep well!" Now sleeeping well, for me, is an event rare enough to merit comment, but where the heck did that "Boy howdy!" come from?

Generally, I can trace quaint phrases that pop into my head to my mother, but while she often exclaimed "Cussword!" or said things like, "What's that got to do with the World War?", she was not given to "boy howdy-ing," nor was anyone in my family.

I wondered if I had picked the expression up from something I have been reading lately. I'm currently reading Cold Comfort Farm—a delight—but "There's something nasty in the woodshed" is what is more likely to come to mind from that. I just finished Breakfast with Buddha yesterday, but that book would most likely cause me to smile mysteriously and say "Ah....." a lot. I just started reading a long article about an Olympic marathon champion from Kenya, but articles about people who voluntarily subject themselves to long bouts of running only bring one sentence to my mind: What is wrong with them?

I turned to my own writing. I'm currently writing some grammar exercises for an educational company, and I'm up to my eyeballs in reviewing things like "future perfect" and "past perfect progressive" forms of verbs.

Wait. I just used "up to my eyeballs," which definitely seems to come from the same family as "boy howdy." Why am I saying such things? If I'm not careful, I'll soon be "gol-danging" and "shucks-ing" and "pert near-ing" and Lord only knows what else.

I think I'm going to start monitoring my friends closely. I must be picking this stuff up from somewhere.

Holy dirt

Last week, on our way out of the Santuario de Chimayo, a cathedral in New Mexico built in 1856, the guide stopped my husband and me and said, "Did you find the holy dirt?"

Huh?

He explained that the dirt found in a little room just off the sanctuary is considered to be holy, and that people come from all over the world seeking to be healed. My husband's leukemia is in remission, thankfully, but I wanted to leave no stone unturned. I grabbed his arm and led him back.

In the middle of the tiny room was a hole with a small spade and, well, dirt. I began reading the guidelines about how to proceed: 

1. Silence your cell phone.

2. Bring silence to your heart and mind.

I silenced my cell phone and began bringing silence to my heart and mind.

I went on to the next step: Try to listen beyond yourself, your own worries and concerns.

As I started to try to listen beyond myself and my own worries and concerns, a cleaning lady arrived. Armed with a bottle of what looked like Windex, she began squirting and scrubbing the wooden saints that lined the wall.

I'm sorry, but my spiritual concentration evaporated with those squirts, and I was struck with by a very un-spiritual, though silent, fit of giggles. It is hard to be reverent when someone beside you is wielding Windex in close quarters.

Really hard.

Pineapples don't have sleeves

U.S. schools have been going a bit (okay, a lot) crazy over the past few years, turning themselves inside out trying to improve test scores. What bothers me almost as much as all the attention on test-taking is the assumption that the companies creating the tests know what they are doing. Do these tests really measure anything valid? Are they sensible? Fair? How do we know?

I have long had my doubts. When I was a teacher, I had to use textbooks created by many of these same companies. I was often stunned at how boring, confusing, and lifeless some of the textbooks were. Would I trust the people who created these books to create meaningful, sensible, readable tests? Frankly, I would not.

In case you haven’t followed the recent flap about the New York State reading comprehension test for eighth graders, let me give a quick summary: A testing service took a Daniel Pinkwater parody of an Aesop’s fable (part of a novel Pinkwater wrote) and inexplicably changed key parts of it. For example, the race between an eggplant and a hare was changed to a race between a pineapple and a hare. Pinkwater’s story had this moral: Never bet on an eggplant. The rewritten version had this moral: Pineapples don’t have sleeves. The strange test story was followed by even stranger questions—questions that I certainly can’t answer, and I doubt that you can either. Give it a try. Here’s the actual test item and questions:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/20/nyregion/21pineapple-document.html?ref=nyregion

New York kids complained, and the item received a lot of media attention. Eventually, the the state education commissioner decided that the test item would "not be counted against students in their scores." However, it turns out the passage and questions have been used in various states since at least 2007. Only now is it receiving the attention it deserves.

How many other equally terrible test items are out there, being used to evaluate our children? I suspect that the tests are full of them. 

 

 

Fat French Lady

When I think about my recent trip to Costa Rica with my husband, I often remember the fat French lady who stood up to her neck in the hotel pool each day, holding a book high above the water, tipping her head back, and reading. The books changed, but she didn't.

It's always such silly things that nestle in my brain after a trip—not the landmarks or awe-inspiring scenery or things I should remember. I certainly loved seeing an active volcano in Costa Rica, but it is our tour guide Elliott who pops into my mind a lot more frequently. This charming man had eloped with a young woman from Idaho who was studying in Costa Rica, and he was going to the U.S. in two weeks to meet her father, who hated him. He wouldn't answer Elliott's letters, and Elliott was understandably quite nervous. It bothers me that I'll never know how things turned out for the poor guy.

From Paris, I remember the creepy, groaning hotel elevator that I refused to take. I spent a lot of time in the dark stairwell trudging up and down while my husband trusted the grinding phone booth of a lift. And I remember the riderless horse racing through the streets near the Louvre, as all kinds of officers tried to catch him. What had happened? Where was the rider? Again, I'll never know.

Sometimes I wish I could treat my memories like a Microsoft Word function, highlighting them all and clicking "sort, in order of importance." The spectacular view from a friend's apartment in a New York City apartment would come to the top of "New York Memories," along with laughing so hard at The Book of Mormon. Instead, what will often come to mind is being among a herd of teachers baffled by the elevator system at the Mariott Marquis on Broadway and being stuck in an elevator that would never stop at our floor. (I guess I do have a problem with elevators.)

Memories defy logic, but that's okay. I mean, everyone remembers the Eiffel Tower, but how many people get to see a riderless horse charging around downtown Paris?

Keeping in touch

My husband and I have a number of trips planned over the next few months, some of them out of the country. Yesterday he said, 'We need to figure out how we're going to deal with e-mail." Take a computer? Get a Sim card? Use my iPhone? Buy an iPad? 

I've been thinking about how strange our conversation would have seemed 15 or 20 years ago—or even 10 years ago. When people went on a vacation in the "olden" days, it was assumed that they would be out of contact. Now the idea of no e-mail for a week seems almost unthinkable.

I've also been thinking about e-mail in comparison to letters. In my quest to clean out old files, I've been going through stack of old letters I've saved over the years. Letters form my mother in my college days--long, newsy letters about every day life. Letters from former students. Love letters from old boyfriends. Letters from my little brother when he was in junior high, letters that clearly had the "Mom is making me do this" ring to them. The letters often make me recall chunks of my past that I had forgotten; they make me smile, and sometimes they make me cry. They are pieces of history, filled with personality and character.

For more recent years, what will be the record? 140 character tweets? LOL and CU later? Uncapitalized, unpunctuated trivia? We may worry about missing e-mails, but I wonder if we would really be missing so much.

 

Heebie jeebies and worse

If doubts and fears are going to crawl out of my brain, dance around, and make creepy noises, it’s going to be in the middle of the night, when things always seem darkest. Night before last, they were out in full force. I tossed and turned, trying to reason with them, but they were at their nasty best.

I had just scheduled a production of my show Lipstick! for a bigger stage this summer. In the daylight hours, this seems like a great idea, just the kind of thing I love to do. In the middle of the night, it seems like a truly terrible idea, an impossible idea, a terrifying idea. The monsters in my brain cackle and shout, “Are you nuts?”

After sleep had eluded me for a couple of hours, some words a friend mentioned some time ago popped into my brain. She had said, “Stop worrying. Instead, wonder.” Wonder how things will work out. Wonder what solutions will emerge. Look on with curiosity, rather than fear.

Somehow, that worked. I started wondering. I went to sleep. I felt better the next day and returned to bed last night, confident that my new mantra, “Wonder!” would save me.

It did. That is, it did until 1:30 a.m. when the battery in the bedroom smoke alarm started beeping. It only does this when my husband is gone, of course, and he was out of town for the evening. I pulled the alarm from the ceiling. I stood on a chair, peering at the wires and trying to figure out how to open the battery case. I googled “I can’t figure out how to open my smoke alarm battery case.” I watched a video by a fireman. Nothing worked.

After an hour of mounting tension and frustration, I grabbed a comforter, closed the door, went downstairs, and turned on fans to try to drown out the noise. I wondered what else I could possibly do. I wondered about hitting the case with a hammer and smashing it. I wondered about calling the fire department. Instead, I squashed a pillow over both ears and tried not to lie there listening for each subsequent beep.

It wasn’t until 8:00 a.m. this morning, that the battery finally ran out of juice completely.

 

 

 

Introverts

It was a large reception filled with strangers—just the sort of thing that makes me most uncomfortable and brings out my inner gawkiness. My husband and I eased up to the bar for glasses of wine, and the couple next to us introduced themselves. Within seconds, the guy—a gregarious man from back East—discovered that I had grown up on a farm and gone to a tiny country school. Wonder of wonders, he seemed genuinely fascinated by this information, asking many questions and appearing to really listen, as though he’d never ever met someone with such an interesting background.

I smiled inside, happy about his interest, and wondering if he was doing what I often do at parties—find the quietest, shyest, or most uncomfortable-looking person there and try to discover what is interesting about that person. I almost always find something.

I just watched a short video by Susan Cain, the author of a new book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. She points out that “There is zero correlation between the best talker and the best ideas” and that many of the greatest contributions to society come from introverts. How true. So much attention in our world goes to the loudest, the flashiest, the most demanding. But sometimes it is the quiet people who have a lot more to offer, if only we take time to listen.

Quiet is definitely on my “to read” list.

 

My revolutionary "Bladder Filing System"

I wish I were the kind of person who knows whether I should say “I wish I were the kind of person” or “I wish I was the kind of person.” A former employee, Sarah, had this area of grammar down pat and used to keep me in line.

But I digress. I mention this only because I want to say that I wish I were (or that I wish I was) the kind of person who doesn’t mind spending hours filing papers in color coordinated file folders with neatly printed labels. (Sarah used to put all my company contracts in matching purple folders with beautifully printed labels. I used to admire those purple folders every time I opened my bottom desk drawer.)

But I digress again. I no longer have employees, but I still have papers. In fact, I have a garage and an office full of papers that I’m trying to decide whether to file, toss, or shred. These are papers related to my previous business, to my writing, to my life, and, um, to I’m not sure what. My previous method of dealing with this, none of which involved Sarah, did not work at all well. It mostly involved looking at all the boxes, becoming depressed at the impossibility of the task, perhaps half-heartedly moving a few papers from a box to the top of my desk, and then giving up in despair. It just seemed too hard.

Stay with me now. I’m about to share my amazing discovery. But first I must share something a bit personal. Thanks to genes from my mother and grandmother, I have what must be one of the world’s smallest bladders—a bladder matched only in smallness by another former employee, not Sarah, who shall—in the interest of privacy—remain nameless. Adding to my problem, I love coffee.

But I digress again. Where do I spend much of every day, thanks to this minuscule bladder? The bathroom. Voila! A couple of months ago I had a brilliant idea. I put one big box in a place where I wouldn’t trip over it but would definitely see it on my way to the bathroom. Then I made a rule that, on the way back to my desk after each trip, I had to stop and take one thing from the box and deal with it firmly. If it needed to be filed, I would make a label and file it right then and there. One folder, one label—that I could handle.

It worked. Over the past few weeks I have emptied at least 10 big boxes of materials, taking papers to a facility for shredding and moving the rest to actual file folders with actual labels in actual file drawers. I admit to using folders of any color, in any condition, not matching purple ones, and my labels aren’t prettily printed. But THEY ARE THERE! THEY EXIST!

I have many boxes to go, but this method is really working, and it is relatively painless. Progress may be slow, but it is progress nonetheless.

I humbly share my revolutionary Bladder Filing System in the hope that it may work for another soul who hates organizing as much as I do.

 

 

The brain's nonsensical priorities

Saturday my husband and I went into a furniture store, and I noticed that the store had the same name as a fabric store I used to frequent 30 years ago when I sewed a lot more than I do now (which is to say not at all). A sturdy little brain cell marched to the front of my brain and announced, "Laura. The owner's name is Laura."

I was stunned. Could that be right? I'd talked to the woman only five or six times, ever, in what seemed a lifetime ago.

I asked. It was.

So where the heck was my brain earlier in the week when I was trying to remember the name of a neighbor I've known forever and see socially once or twice a year? My husband and I were walking past her house, and neither one of us could bring her name to mind. It was ridiculous. "Think of something else," I said. "It will come to us."

It didn't—not until we were leaving the furniture store several days later. After the "Laura" flash, my brain must have been embarrassed. "Kathy," it suddenly telegraphed. "Your neighbor's name is Kathy."

Sigh. Why can't scientists figure out a way to get our brains to prioritize information in a sensible way?

 

Smells and apostrophes

Once a week, my husband and I go to a little Mexican restaurant for dinner.

Once a week, I go to the restroom at the restaurant and wince at the sign on the door: Womens.

Once a week, I contemplate taking a felt pen and drawing an apostrophe before that “s.” I think I could do it nicely, without defacing the door. (I only briefly consider chipping off the “s” entirely, so that the sign just says “Women.” This, however, would leave a hole, and there are limits to what I will do in the name of good grammar.)

Once a week, after I enter the bathroom in a Cranky Language Lady frame of mind, I suddenly stop and smile, struck by something new: the wonderful flowery smell in this bathroom. I’ve never been in a bathroom anywhere that smells so good. I marvel at the smell—me, a person who spends a lot of time looking for “fragrance free” everything, who sneezes at air fresheners, who gags in candle stores, who has to change seats when someone with perfume sits down three seats away in a movie theater. How can I love this smell so much? How is it that it can surprise me every single week with its existence? What the heck is it? How does the restaurant create it?

Once a week, any nasty apostrophe thoughts evaporate in the pleasure of this smell, and I leave the restroom happy.

I think there are far-reaching implications here. If the smell can make a writer/editor/English teacher like me forget her standards week after week, what other powers might it hold?

Once a week, I wonder.