Conversations with the small one pt 3 (+mother)

regarding pretzel-training--

Connie: It’s like babysitting a baby.

Kelly: Except you can’t spray babies with water

Mama: They had advertisements saying, asian carp, so delicious!

Kelly: Asian people, so delicious!

Kelly: and then instead of giving him the normal badge, he gave him the Elly badge, which was the grape soda one!

Kelly, in a wobbly voice: it was so touching. 

on the road back from minnesota----

Kelly, singing: Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain, Gander Mountain etc

Connie: You sound like a monk intoning something.

Kelly: haha! What’s Mama?

Mama (trying to sleep in the car, mumbles sleepily): I’m an alligator. Don’t bother me.

Kelly: haha! What’s Connie?

Connie: I’m a majestic lion. Roar.

Kelly: My favorite smurf was the narrator one. 

Kelly: I EAT MY WORDS!! They taste like beef jerky. 

Connie: So I can’t schedule an eye appointment until after February this year.

Mama: Okay. Do you need more insulation?

Connie: Insulation?

Mama: Yes.

Connie: You mean contacts?

(the building people were at my house)

Kelly: …and then Connie used it

(prancing in the hallway)

Kelly: And then the mice used it.

Connie in room, to self: what the fuck? 

Kelly: But maybe it will be all high tech by then.

Kelly: Because I plan to live a millennia.

Kelly: Are newspapers recyclable?

Connie: Yes

Kelly: GOOD JOB

Kelly: Are newspapers made from recyclable paper?

Connie: Yes

Kelly: GOOD JOB

Kellyisms: 

"his name is mr texas instrument"

"I just looked it up on google maps. I’m a miracle."

"I want to eat a large smelly boot"

"Tall people are awkward. It's because they have to go, where should i put my head?"

"he was so fat he had a beard!"

Experiences in the Transparent Eyeball

I succumbed to that most pleasant of poor decisions (see: drinking three cups of black tea post-dinner. in my defense...I don't have one! I gave in to the lure of new tea! guilty. guiltea...harhar) and so it's 1:15 in the morning but i'm wired. And yarned, I guess, since I've been knitting. It's oddly meditative and feels like a monkish activity that serves the same purpose as prayer beads. Once upon a time I read an article or heard something about how someone (or some sect of someones) found divinity by pouring grains of rice from their hand, scooping them up, and repeating, over and over. Something about repetition provokes the divine or at least the transcendent, perhaps. But checkers or factory workers probably beg to differ--one man's divinity is another's dull purgatory.

Sometime tonight, maybe around now, the snowstorm is supposed to hit and we'll wake up to a world completely changed. Maybe living in the north induces some quality in the people, some belief in the impermanence of things, with each transformation of our surroundings. But since it was such a beautiful day, I went on an amble through Owen Woods. Here is some of the wealth I took away, through sight or touch:

1. A stump, hollow underneath, open on the sides, and arched from the ground like a woody cathedral (It's no Cheeseburger in Paradise but) Something small could worship there.

2. Another stump, rooted solidly and traditionally in the ground but with the inside rotten away into crumbly bark, one step from humus, so there was a hole in the stump that extended down past where it grew into the ground on the outside. Imagine a pot buried up past its base in the dirt, hollow to its base. There was ice inside.

3. I gathered some of the tall golden prairie grass that had been cut down in the fall sometime and peeled away the outer thin layer. The golden grass stalks were thin like straws, but hard and very smooth. They have joints, like bamboo, and I like breaking them into their natural segments. I collected these when I was little, from when I made nests in the prairie grass where I'd play recorder like some out of tune loon. Loony tune. 

5. A piece of tree bark, rough wood on the outside but cut sheer on the inside as if done so by a very small chainsaw. 

6. A black feather. Have you ever stroked a feather and noticed how your fingers preen the individual fibers (?) together by spreading oil from the feather or your hand? You can make different groups but the feather remains smooth and sleek. This feather had fuzzies at the bottom which I think is the down underneath. How cool would it be to molt, instead of shedding hairs. 

7. An aspen sapling, with very smooth white bark. Surrounded by brown trees, straight and alone. 

*Apparently I like smoothness.

8. The whirling chirp of a red-headed woodpecker and his frantic tree hops.

Moving away from the list...there were so many people in the park today. Many of them were older folks. I said hi to an elderly couple--the man hobbling down the slope with a cane--and another old woman who emerged from the prairie with a camera in hand. I feel like older people tend to appreciate/go out into nature more than their younger counterparts. Except for the very young (fig. Overgeneralization Chart ---->) 
Children love nature innocently and selfishly, for what it provides them in the immediate sense: immediate tools (ex: bark to make fairy houses), or fodder for grander imaginations (meltwater rivers and leaf boats). As you get older, you connect with nature in a different way; you love it for what it means, the things it stands for, the emotions it brings. I can imagine being an old man in a park walking through not just grass but memories. 

In fact, there were so many people in the park that I felt like I couldn't escape them to be in the nature. You could hear strident voices carrying: women talking about their exercise habits, a child shrieking, men saying something I didn't catch. This brings me to another thing I was thinking about, and often think about: do you experience nature best in solitude? For me, its kind of a catch-22. In nature, I feel the most of everything when I'm alone (freedom! wide open skies! human silence! beauty!) but like Pandora's Box with one thing that doesn't belong, I also feel like I want to share this cacophony of feelings with people I love, the person I love. Or people I care deeply about and whom I know would find something of worth in the experience too. But if they were there, I couldn't feel the very emotions I'd want to share. Thus, nature is lonely and reaches its full splendor alone. I think I understand Thoreau and his Walden. Or Walden and its Thoreau, if you think we belong to places as much as they belong to us. Did John Muir and Emerson wander alone too? Not that I'm comparing myself to them, merely wondering if this is a universal experience. 

The closest thing to religion for me is being outside. In fact, something interesting happened recently. I was running and my heart was beating too strongly but I was looking up at the dark purple sky and the bright round moon and I quite literally thought "I could die right now and it would be okay, if this were my last sight." Disclaimer: NOT DEPRESSED. It's morbid, I know; but it's also freeing to know there's something not attached to humans or the vagaries of human actions that can be so powerful. 
Anyway, I walked up and down the paths in Owen Woods, breathing in the damp earthy smell you often get in the spring, with all that light pouring from all that sky. Then I thought about the storm forecast for the next day and thought, oh fuck, winter and got sad momentarily. But the thing is, it will be like that again. It will be spring and there will be days when new things are growing, when the air smells damp, when the sky is clear (for some reason, I'm picturing John Nolan Dr. in my mind, along the lakeshore path there and looking out over the lake water towards Monona Terrace). That's a constant, like nothing else in life is constant. There will be beautiful days. Given. Fact. Truth. There will be beautiful days until the end of days, and that may be the most certain guarantor of happiness I know. 

I sat on a bench overlooking the upper grounds of the park for awhile and semi took a nap. It was warm. After a bit, I opened my eyes and waited for something to happen. It really felt like something would--a deer would step out of somewhere, or a turkey, or a dinosaur. But I was still shocked when it did: there was a huge flash of wings in the distance, white wings, and something that looked like an enormous owl burst up into a tree. Not an owl, since it was daytime, but maybe a particularly large cooper's hawk. Then I got up and walked away with a stupid grin on my face. 

old post: i wanna plant some nicotiana

This is an something I wrote in June but never posted.
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I want to plant a garden. Or rather, I want to just get a few seeds and see if I can grow them into plants, especially flowers. I spent a fair amount of time looking through lists of common perennials and annuals, then googling images of those flowers to determine which ones were the gaudy little annoying ones sold at Shopko and Menards. I don’t like those. It turns out, however, that impatients, begonias, marigolds, petunias, and the like have their uses because few other flowers can carpet a space fully enough to give a bed-like feel. They’re rather like fat crayons used to color in blocky, large areas and capture the eye through sheer riotous number rather than delicacy or unique elegance. Elegant flowers are those like tweedia caerulea, whose name really doesn't live up to its beauty, lobelia, gentian, balloon flower. Southern star. Jasmine. Nicotiana is beautiful. There are so many and the only way I can explain how I feel when I think of them is almost like a dragon thinking about its hoard.


I also want to grow a flowering houseplant in my apartment, for when the dreary greyness of winter sets in. I’m thinking of a peace lily or another type of lily but one that preferentially has color. Edgar, my unknown plant at the apartment, is apparently a jade plant or a heartleaf rhodendendron, a plant prized for hardiness and ability to filter air. Not just for carbon dioxide but also things like benzene derivatives. So Edgar’s a pretty good plant. In sum there are three plants at my apartment: Edgar the rhodendendron, my sensitive plant, and the small basil-ing. There’s also the begonia? geranium? that I grudgingly water.


While I do greatly enjoy reaping the benefits of vegetables (i.e. picking the ripe vegetable), I think I like gardening flowers more. Because to grow a vegetable is to eventually sacrifice it to your consumption, whereas flowers can be eternally consumed with sight and yet preserved--or preserved as long as they are naturally intended to be preserved.


Which branches off into another thought-topic, naturalness, but that’s for another think.


Anyway, if you’re growing basil or lettuce or bok choy or kale or any leafy plant whose entire body (?) gets consumed, then you have to destroy something you’ve become attached to. I guess you could think of it as not destruction but rather returning energy to your body or some zen like that but in the immediate level of analysis you are tearing up what you put energy and care in to. I find that hard. Even when we grew basil last year in the garden, lots and lots of basil, I still didn’t really like breaking off the tenderest shoots and tops for cooking. And I really love basil in food. Like, really really love it.


But tomatos, cucumbers, beans, etc are a little different. At least then what you pick is separate from the entire plant. Granted, what you’re picking is the fruit of the plant and what it devoted all of its energy toward developing, as well as its hope for future reproduction. Wow, consumption of any living thing now sounds harsh to me. Too bad one can’t subsist off of non-living things. Kelly said something funny about that. Biology is the study of organic living things? That may have been it.


The thought of growing a garden is tied into growing a garden of my own though, starting from scratch and planning it out in my house. I’m very good at mentally starting projects because I love the blank slate (and blank notebooks, blank sheets of paper, etc. I guess I love possibility and newness most) but carrying through becomes difficult.


For now, I just want to get some seeds and grow something. I want to see the process unfold, of nothing but blank dirt at first, then the shoot, the cotyledons, the graceful tiny plantling, growing, youthful, mature, flowers brilliant. I want to see how easy it is to produce life and beauty.


_____


The only thing that's changed is that the basil-ing has passed on, as well as the begonia. Instead I now have a fuzzy African Violet and a battle-scarred aloe vera, poor thing. It battled gravity and lost. Also there's no winter flower yet. I have seeds!

akiojafkjawerism

this is what I am thinking about: as we build up our world views, do we fit into some philosophical box of which we aren't aware? by that i mean, if we were to step back and write down a list of examples of how we act or what we believe, could we then draw a conclusion like "oh i subscribe to the constructivist theory of learning." my instinctive response would be to say, to hell with categorizing but this begs some interesting questions.

first, on the level of the personal, it can potentially make you feel more connected to others if you realize that the ideals and principles which you have constructed from your experiences are similarly held by others. more than that, they are held by enough others that someone named an entire school of thought/theory after them. cool. you've participated in some shared aspect of the human experience. from the very personal (after all, no one experiences what you do) you have arrived at something macro-humanular.

second, it poses questions about the validity of having schools of thought or theories. is it valid to make an all-encompassing statement like "I am an Objectivist" without considering that perhaps in some aspects your approach to life could be more of a different school of thought? Here are the Top 10 Schools of Philosophy, as according to listverse, btw:

1. Solipsism - subjective reality; everyone's perception of the world is unique to them, nothing outside of your mind exists with certainty

2. Determinism - humans have free will, but you start a chain of actions and there's only one possible result from all the choices you make along the way 

3. Utilitarianism - morality of a choice is determined by how much good it can do "greatest good to the greatest number" 

4. Epicureanism - pursue pleasure = purpose of existence 

5. Positivism - you have to have evidence through the scientific method to believe things

6. Absurdism - there's no point trying to find meaning, although it may exist

7. Objectivism - abi. rage. 

8. Secular humanism - there is no god, everything is understood in human terms

9. Nihilism - life is meaningless

10. Existentialism - everyone finds their own meaning. the catch-all of philosophy. also, it's ironic because apparently existentialism is "the refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs...dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life" and yet it is a school of philosophy with its own body of beliefs. hypocrite, existentialism! you're the hipster kid buying $90 jeans with authentic rat holes in them! but i like you. 

anyway, now that i've probably lost the attention of all four people who maybe reading this, i can go on my rant more. does subscribing to one school of thought necessarily exclude you from being in another? it does sounds like philosophers would say that's true: certainly you can't be epicureanistic and nihilistic - because the definition of one is "the meaning of life is to pursue pleasure" and the definition of the other is "there is no meaning of life." but it's a little vague how existentialism differs from secular humanism differs from solipsism; there could be overlap among them. therefore, i feel like they aren't mutually exclusive. but that in itself could be a school of thought:


Articulated Confusion - the school of thought wherein you can belong to more than one school of thought; schools of thought are meaningless.


thus we run into the same problem as existentialism, which is a designation that rejects itself. it must be nice to be able to firmly say, I Am An Absurdist. it must be somewhat akin to saying I Am A Catholic. categorization feels so much cleaner. it is nice to say what things definitively are but at the same time my brain knows there's value in not labeling something. i'm running out of steam now, so i'll stop. it's also a beautiful cold day and if you read this, may you enjoy it.


http://listverse.com/2007/11/24/top-10-schools-of-philosophy/