The Miracle of Sufficiency

On September 4 of this soon-to-die year of 2009, I lost my mother to leukemia. It has been a good while since I last posted anything. As I muddle through the passage as best as one can and through this tunnel of winter, it feels as though one is somehow giving birth to herself. The process is not always easy, more often painful.
On Christmas Eve, perhaps for the first time in my life, I was completely content to be at home, alone, not needing, not seeking anything, working at the bead table, and to know that my own sons, for whom cakes were rising in the oven, filling the apartment with the most wonderful smells to be shared on Christmas day together, are their own, great persons, and that this is a good life. I was serenely delighted to not have gone out shopping in a desperate frenzy of spending. I was humbled and grateful to have reached this place. "This must be the way Joseph and Mary felt that night in Bethlehem," I mused. "There they were on the road, in the vortex of a collectively superimposed taxonomy of values, really, preparing to go up and be counted for the census, for tax purposes, with this great, external, societal onus upon them, and a spiritual new life within, about to enter the world, and all they needed was a place to be...ok." A simple thought, of course, but splendid: the miracle of sufficiency.
Similarly, drawing from Hebrew lore derived from another archetypal, very human experience of this same, deadshort-day, dark time of year, Hannukkah is considered by many Jewish people to be the celebration of the Maccabees' guerilla-warfare led defeat of the Syrians and the celebration of the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem after its defilement by Antiochus. Yet it seems to me that the true celebration lies not in the outcome of war, for war is really not at all a salutiferous event, but in the strange and awesome occurrence beheld afterward as a shining example of the miracle of sufficiency: the scant amount of oil that the Jewish people managed to forage to rekindle the holy flame at the altar (symbolizing the connection between the human and the divine--the gift of life) somehow proved to be enough to burn for eight days and nights or until more oil was brought to ensure the tenability of the flame, ostensibly, forever. It seems no accident that at this same time the metaphoric struggle to preserve light and life occurs it is at the time of the winter solstice. The message is so clear: Peace lies not in the realm of thought, nor in hopes for greater things. I fold my arms about me, as angels fold their wings. Merry Christmas. Happy Hannukkah. Happy Holidays, wherever you are, and joy to all.

...and Lay Flat (to Dry)

If you haven't already, check out the washing instructions on most athletic gear. Like I, you've likely memorized the robotic tag directions (before smugly ripping the nasty, itchy little inhibitory bit of chicanery out of its seam and hurling it with satisfaction into the trash, where it belongs- certainly not at the base of a human neck, or pecking at one's waist): MACHINE WASH COLD, HANG OR LAY FLAT TO DRY. What are the manufacturers thinking when they make this clothing? Perhaps they are...preoccupied with maintaining the precious, synthetic veneer of the fabric? God knows. They certainly aren't thinking about how quickly bacteria spreads.
Take, for example,a quality pair of cycling shorts. They have a crotch pad for cushioning, yes? They're built to help the wearer remain on the bike, whose proportionally much-larger-than-the-narrow-Isthmus-of-Panama-seat bedonkidonk will be there for a good, long while. And during that long while, it is highly probable that the rider will sweat, and ooze, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, "precious, bodily fluids." These "precious bodily fluids" will seep into the crotchpad of those shorts. Why would one invite, yea, prolong the inevitable growth of bacteria in the shorts (and in the very area of the shorts that is indeed most sensitive for human beings) by washing them delicately in cold water after a ride? Does cold water kill bacteria? I mean, unless you are Lance Armstrong or Connie Carpenter and you can afford to buy a pair of cycling shorts at about a hundred dollars a pop and throw them away at the end of a ride, I have news for you: a delicate cold water wash minus the heat of the dryer is merely going to spread that bacteria all around. Mmm, mm, good.
The same thing is true for swimsuits, running shorts, and the like.
Lest you do not understand, in graphic terms, the consequences of the habitual, ritual, and perpetual cold-water wash of sporting apparel, let me further 'splain, Lucy, 'splain.
Staph bacteria is highly contagious; there are whole mutant forms of staph growing in many of the gymnasiums and locker rooms of this country, undetected, which are totally resistant to all of the classes and types of antibiotics made by and known to man. A person himself or herself may be very clean and have superb hygiene; however, let that person sit on a locker room bench which incidentally has even a spore of staph on its surface in those sweaty cycling shorts or tights after a spinning class and then go home and naively follow the manufacturer's instructions for washing. Hmm. Let's see, cool water, no dryer, and I see a huge boil, at the very least, on this person's rear end in a couple of weeks. Worse: I see a serious cyclist with normal abrasion (from riding so much) literally having said staph bacteria ground into his/her genital area on consecutive rides and a trip to the emergency room which may or may not resolve the now life-threatening infection. How do I know this? I've seen it happen to someone I love, and it is frightening, and it is unnecessary.
The manufacturers of sporting apparel must be mandated by congress to change their tags to include updated information and washing instructions for wearers of their pieces. Corporations that produce clothing for athletes should be required to issue a health warning (much like the tobacco companies must publish on the side of each box or carton of cigarettes)regarding the vulnerability of the fabric to bacteria growth when subjected to human warmth and moisture, along with specific instructions to wash the garment in hot water and dry it thoroughly in a hot dryer EACH TIME the piece is used. Further, manufacturers need to purposely cut the articles of clothing that they make and sell at least one size larger on purpose and indicate in the tag that this is done to ensure room for shrinkage. If the buyer then chooses to still purchase an article of athletic garb that fits at the time of purchase, he/she does so at his/her own risk.

Since When is the Rightful Maintenence and Distribution of Social Security a "Bailout?"

In perusing the news headlines the other day, one in particular caught my increasingly myopic eyes. "Wall Street Bailout First, Car Industry Second, and Now, Social Security." Since when has the minimal insurance policy that we Americans have technically been paying into since we were old enough to work, essentially our OWN bank account, then, been lumped together with the bailout for freeloaders on Wall Street and for their trickle-down nieces and nephews, those head-cracking car-business carnies? I was, am still stunned.
To my knowledge, Social Security was set up by the Roosevelt Administration in the wake of the Great Depression precisely to preempt the need for some sort of massive financial onus upon the government for the unemployed aging population in this country. It was a way, in a sense, of making the American worker responsible for himself, even if and when the banks and/or the government could not be. Clearly, then, if I have been contributing (a.k.a. having money taken even if I don't want it to be) to Social Security since I began working as a sixteen-year-old, and I am forty-eight now, what "bailout" would I, could I possibly need? How could my account be empty? No, my account, which the government forced me and millions of other working Americans to establish, should have the money in it that I contributed, plus whatever interest it has accrued. (Not to mention the taxes I, we, have all been paying over our lifetimes, which too should guarantee that the money is there. You can see the steam coming from my ears now.) Is the government telling me that somehow, that money is NOT in my account? Who has been dinking with my money, then (I really want to use stronger language)? And beyond that, even if the government could somehow come up with some sort of daffy explanation as to "where have all the dollars gone, long time passing?" that isn't enough. The fact that the money is gone is criminal, and the government must replace it. Childish and naive view? Of course. But this is my bank account we're talking about here, folks, mine and yours. And what's right is right. Yet on top of that, if there could even be something more disturbing than this revelation and consequently the need to demand what is rightfully ours and see it restored is the mentality of the purported leaders of this nation that is disclosed when they call the essential responsibility of replacing our missing Social Security funds a "bailout." What are these people thinking? Or rather, how are they thinking? Are they thinking?

Potassium in Coffee: Something to Drink Over

I don't know about you, but being a fairly avid cyclist, I'm always looking for ways to get more potassium. Salt isn't a problem. Neither is sugar/glucose, or really calcium, but the potassium magnesium thing: that's another dealio.

I automatically and categorically denied Jim's assertion the other day that a cup of coffee has the greatist potassium hit in it of anything known to man. "Nuh-uh!" I spurted, vigorously shaking my head. "Look it up," he said gently (which provoked me even more); I did so, and yup, yup, yup, there it was, like Marcy Playground: over 20,000 whatevers per cup. Dayum.

Many cyclists drink copious cups of coffee. I know I do, but then, I was drinking coffee way before the biking bug bit. Lance Armstrong, for example, drinks at least two large cups every morning, likely, more. Could it be that imbibing coffee isn't about the caffeine per cup, necessarily, or rather, that the caffeine is just an added benefit, and in fact, the common addiction to coffee has to do with the potassium?

...for that matter, could Americans' collective addiction to coffee have less, even little to do with the caffeine, nothing to do with the ambiance of the coffeehouse, and possibly everything to do with living in a "Fast-Food Nation" and eating hugely minerally deprived diets? "Potassium....give me potassium or bust."

God Help People Who Mean Well

Today was bad. I mean, really bad. My Volksie's battery wouldn't start; my neighbor Bud said the cables leading in were completely corroded. He and another neighbor gave me a jump start, and I thankfully scurried off to Sear's ("where America shops,") ostensibly to buy a new battery. Um, no. They couldn't deal with foreign cars with this type of wiring: I had to go to a real Volkswagon Dealer. (I honestly think my hamster could file those wires better than some mechanics.) To make a short story long, the car is still there. "Have a shot or two of tequila," my boyfriend wisely advised when I arrived home via a ride from the dealership.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I stepped outside, shot glass in hand, admiring the pinkening sky, delighted that this day resembling more of a haul up Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima was almost over, I noticed that the dahlias...my dahlias...they had just sprouted leaves...were gone.
My neighbor (another neighbor, not Bud, certainly no Bud of mine), without my knowledge or my consent, dug up my dahlias. Oh, I saw her working in what I am now sure she considers "her yard," and I approached her to ask whether she happened to know about the missing plants surrounding the hydrangea bushes that had just begun to stretch out and greet the sun from their tubules. "I thought they were some type of potato," she stammered, visibly uncomfortable at being "caught."
We live in an apartment building, and this woman with an evidently orange prefrontal cerebral cortex seems to think that she owns all of the land around it. She plants flowers, rakes, trims, and cultivates. She loves gardening, and it shows. However, purportedly, dahlias look like potatoes to her wandering-over-the-hoe eyes. (Do dahlias look like potatoes to you? Seriously.) "I live here," I gently intoned to her. "Oh!" she let out a raspy, reeking, smoker-compromised exclamation, as if the idea never had occurred to her. "Um, what happened to them?" I asked, about as politely as Hillary Clinton. "Well, they're here," she said with growing irritation, pointing to an earthenware pot on the patio outside her door. "Thanks so much for saving them!," I said breezily. "I'm going to go get a bag. I'll just scoop 'em right up. I'll be right back..."
The genuine desire to help a fellow human being in need, such as my neighbors who helped me because my battery cables were fried, is an admirable trait and deserves much more praise than I give here, precisely because it's genuine. Let's call it the desire to liberate another; the human interest to see and set someone else free (that certainly works well with Independence Day nearly upon us). Maybe even, call it love (don't get emotional on me here); at the very least, call it decency. Conversely, the burning need to own something--a little land, something that grows, a life--is likely so great in some people (call it codependence?) that their sense of "meaning well" starts to look suspiciously like a disguised sense of personal entitlement, grows exponentially into the cancerous "I needas, the I wannas, and the I gotta haves," and ultimately bursts all boundaries of respect and protocol, remains unchecked to astoundingly mutate and metastasize in my apparently potato-filled space.

War Enactors My Ass

It never fails. It's that time of year. You're walking through historic Gettysburg, trying to reinvent a certain battle in your mind as the skeeters nip at your creamy white legs, or you're treading the cobblestones gamely enough in Colonial Jamestown, listening as best you can to the tour guide with the menopause blue cologne drone on, while your eyes wander and your mind wonders whether you really could swim the steamy James River yourself back to the hotel, or you're negotiating the ankle-twisting rodent holes of the overgrown field of the Mumma Farm in Antietam, and in any of these situations you are relatively fine, striking that delicate balance between being present to some degree in the anecdotal world of history, feeling genuine reverence for the dead, with Nature simultaneously evoking and stoking your senses to escape such horrors, until that balance is shattered by an Enactor. That's right. Even by a far reach of one's precariously balanced imagination in said settings, the man or woman walking by in "period clothing" (which in itself reeks of female taboo--let's not mince words here, folks) ruins everything; the maudlin, inbred and arcane image of his or her reducto absurdum countenance in a wool uniform that wordlessly pronounces the anal maxim "if we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it," is about as welcome as the sound of a loud and jarring fart, and I for one, prefer to not wait around for the things that may emanate from the orifices of these people who seem to feel they have some sort of empirical einkorn to share with me (a.k.a. ram down my throat) to justify their posing any more than I wait to "experience" what toxically emanates from the original maw of that fart. Both are obnoxious and have nothing, as far as I am concerned, to offer. Why am I so down on enactors and enacting?

If you were to ask one of the few relatives in my family who survived the Holocaust, "Would you like to participate a reinactment of this experience?" I assure you, they would firmly say, "No." Similarly, if you were to ask my former boyfriend's father whether he would participate in a reinactment of his Saigon evacuation from the roof of the American Embassy minutes before the city fell, or if you were to ask our neighbor who was one of the few infantrymen to survive the wee hours of the D-Day assault on Normandy during World War II whether he would like to reinact the 9/10 ratio of dying to living, they would think you were nuts. War is a horrible, violent, ugly thing. We all know that. And for people who have been through "the real thing," it is certainly enough: too close to the bone, never far enough in the news. Apparently, though, there are people who haven't actually fought in wars, or who haven't had enough of them if they have fought in them, who must sate their unfulfilled libidinal urges and surges by putting on gooniforms and reinacting the mayhem. (Do you know that in Tony Horwitz's book, Confederates in the Attic, for example, Horwitz documents that some people actually attempt to perfect the way they look dead, after they have been "shot" on the battlefield, contorting their bodies to actually bloat the way a dead body does? Yeah. What a healthy way to spend one's Saturday afternoon. "Hey, we had a great time at the Johnson's barbecue. Jim and I played a couple of rounds of golf and got the grill going. Joanne went and played tennis with Caitlin. Hey, Mike, what did you do?" "Oh, I went over to Spotsylvania and perfected my bloating...."

For that man who likes to play soldier, then, there's only one nepenthe. Dress him in a real uniform and send him to Afghanistan, post-haste. I assure you he will come home, if he does come home, never wanting to play dress-up again.