You're Doing It Wrong

I thought I’d start sharing our usage numbers on our cell bill since it’s so pathetic. Our plan gives us 300 minutes to share. I don’t think we’ve ever broken 100.

This month we used 58 plan minutes. All together we used 99 minutes.

This is a story about a friend who we will call KB. KB is married with 2 children and the family is what most would characterize as normal every day good people. (I say “most” because they had this crazy lady tenant at one point and her characterization might be less generous.) KB’s children watch cartoons and eat Fruit Loops and play games that involved knocking each other over the head with plastic toys. They speak only one language.

KB’s family is friends with another couple and their two small children. These children have attended a Spanish immersion school since they were toddlers. They eat only organic foods: plenty of fresh squeezed juices. They don’t watch TV but instead play with toys carved from wood harvested from sustainable forests or games that involve math and spelling skills.

KB’s family was recently invited to a birthday party with this family. Due to circumstances, the family split up. KB took the kids and did one set of errands while Dad was in charge of securing a gift and meeting at the house for the party.

KB arrived to find an eclectic group. The kind of people who listen to public radio and recycle and love the taste of whole-wheat anything. Their small children ran around speaking Spanish and playing games that emphasize cooperation. They feasted on a gluten-free cake made with organic figs and ground almonds and other foods harvested under fair trade standards.

When gift opening time came, the birthday boy got Spanish computer games and toys that embraced foreign cultures. When it came time to open KB’s family gift, it was a plastic Darth Vader sippy cup that sounded like Darth Vader breath when you drank from the straw.

The kids went apeshit.

Something I forgot to mention earlier this week.

On Tuesday I parked in the lower park-n-ride lot and as I got out of my car, an Osprey flew directly over me holding wriggling prey in its claws.

As I was getting in the car to go home, an Osprey flew directly over me holding wriggling prey in its claws.

What do you think that means?

Just so you know, I saw it this morning at the 9:30 show and it was AWESOME.

FOODday is the food section of the Oregonian and comes out on Tuesday. It used to be my favorite part of the paper but a couple of months ago they hired a new editor who comes from Connecticut.

I’m not sure why they felt the need to hire someone from back east. Don’t we have lots of talented and interesting locals with a unique regional insight?

Instead we get a lady from Connecticut who can’t stop telling us how she just moved here and is just figuring it all out: “I’ve been in Portland for only six weeks and haven’t yet traveled around the state, but it’s quite apparent that there’s something different about this region … .” Your journey of discovery is more interesting to you than it is to us, Martha.

This week she tells us that when her friends call they all want to know: Is she happy? Does it really rain all the time? How’s the shopping. Turns out: Martha says our food shopping is “as good or better than anywhere I’ve ever lived.” I hope she tells her friends we have paved roads and ATM machines, too!

Or maybe not. If people from back east realize there’s civilization out here they might all want to come.

The cover of this Sunday’s New York Times magazine talks about modernism — more specifically about preserving modernist architecture. I have no idea what any of this means, I’m just mentioning it because I was relieved that I wasn’t interested in reading most of the magazine: more found time!

My favorite part of the magazine is the Domains column which only runs once a month and features various people in their homes and asks them questions about their stuff. This month the person was Terence Riley, the chief architecture and design curator at MOMA. He talks about living space: “I like having a small apartment … I like really simple spaces you can inhabit.”

I’m not sure there’s a clear connecting line here but this inspired me to think what my ideal living space would be and I decided I would like one big rectangle with walls lined with shelves, cupboards and cabinets and everything put away. I would get a big zamboni ride-on vacuum cleaner and there wouldn’t be a bunch of crap piled around.

I read something recently that said that a slim man was more likely to cheat than an overweight man.

Isn’t that like saying a tall man is more likely to bump his head?

There’s another one going around that good looking kids are favored by their parents. Is it a major newsflash that good looking people are favored by the planet?

Or attractive anything. I picked up a dented carton of milk at Trader Joes earlier in the week (because I feel sorry for the broken stuff) instead of a more attractive non-dented carton and I got leaky milk all over everything as thanks for my open mind and compassion.

I read an article about getting stuff done that talked about “found time” meaning little bits of time you shave off here and there until you have a whole extra lump of it. I don’t think I’m explaining it very well, but I know what it means in my head.

For example, you’re waiting for your tea water to boil and while you wait, you put away the dishes from last night. Or like just now while I was downloading the 52 mb Chronicles of Narnia trailer, I picked up all the little papers I had sitting around on my desk and made a pile of things that need to go to the office on Monday. [And then I watched the trailer and it looks REALLY good. Yay, and I was so concerned that after my 2 hr and 20 minutes on Thursday morning that I would have no more movie events to look forward to.]

A major found time exercise for me is skipping reading things that don’t interest me or are stupid. And I don’t know why I feel obligated to read everything anyway. Somebody wrote it. Why am I personally responsible for making their time and energy worthwhile? I guess I worry I might miss something. Some fact that will become critical in a work or social situation.

But then look at how much worthless information is in the paper like an article about people lying about talking on their cellphones to avoid having to deal with what’s around them. That’s an article? And today the Oregonian had an article about men who use products (like skincare) which already has a name: metrosexuals and is about 2 years ago. Yay Oregonian, consistently behind the times again.

My sister accused me of being a suck-up after that last post. Hey girl: get a blog and you can suck up, too.

A number of years ago I read some sort of writers article. The kind where some old guy who’s been writing and/or editing for eons tells you all his writing pet peeves. Everybody has those. My current one is the misuse of “myself.” If I read one more memo that starts off, “Josephine, Heinrich and myself attended a meeting last week … ” I’m going to brain someone with a copy of Strunk and White. And that’s not a big book so it’ll take awhile.

One of this guy’s peeves was use of the word: coffer. “No one has coffers anymore,” he railed. “It’s antiquated and a silly cliche.”

Now this has become my pet peeve. I don’t want it to be my pet peeve. At no time did “coffer” even blip the radar and now every time I see it I think: stupid cliche. Last week I read all these stories about city coffers, county coffers, state coffers — newspapers reporters writing about government entities seem convinced there are coffers that are either being filled or, more often, woefully empty.

I checked to see if I could buy a coffer online. Here’s a whole Coffer Corp company that manufactures a range of flanges.

What’s a flange?

This is a Mothers Day post.

A week or two ago I did a workshop with Lynda Barry and the gist of the writing exercise is that you take a random prompt, say “cars,” and you write a list of 10 cars that you remember. Then you pick one on a new piece of paper write little notes of concrete details about that car, then you get a new piece of paper and start with “I am … ” and write a little story about the car. This is the simplified version but it’s a great exercise. You should try it.

For our main class exercise the prompt was: other people’s moms when you were a kid.

We did several versions of this exercise and at the end a few people read. Two of the people that read wrote stories about how they wished the mom they were writing about was their mom and how their moms were somehow, not ideal. (In their kid voice, not like now.)

I thought about that later. I never wished someone else’s mom was my Mom. I thought my Mom was better than the other kids Moms. (I’m going to give up on proper punctuation of the possessive. My head hurts {see yesterday’s post} and I don’t like apostrophes anyway. Live with it.)

I remember I didn’t like to eat at other kids houses when their mom cooked because other moms weren’t good cooks. And we always had good birthday parties. And we had pet rats. And we read lots of books.

You did good Mom. Happy Mothers Day.