Barcelona, belly laughs

Hello from Barcelona, where it is cold! Looks like we brought the first cold snap of the season with us from Brussels. But it's a rosy, Mediterranean cold and just the look of the air is warmer than in Brussels. I, stupidly, did not pack anything warmer than a light sweater, and all I have in my drawers here are sixty tank tops. And since the heat still isn't installed in this apartment, we've been a tad chilly. Nothing we can't solve with piles of blankets on the bed and a space heater, though.

We just drew up a master plan for the day and for the party tomorrow, thinking of as many things as we can that will fill the need for the Halloween effect. It's a matter of thinking creatively, because it's not as if we're going to find any stores with Halloween-themed food and/or decorations. And we still have to complete our costumes, as well as accomplish various tasks related to finishing the apartment renovations (choosing a bathroom mirror, choosing wood for built-in shelves, etc.).

It feels reeeally good to be here in our little nest, to have escaped from Brussels for a little while, to see the family. I am especially thankful for the beautiful faces of our little nieces, whom we visited just before they went to sleep last night in their bunk beds, and for their adorable belly laughs when the Mister was tickling them under the chin.

On a jet plane

The sky is a frosty bright blue today, and has been for a couple of days, amazingly enough. It is accompanied by plummeting temperatures, temperatures that, of course, drop below zero on the days I have a nasty stuffy head cold (still, I'll take sun over rain any day). When I say zero, I mean celcius, that being the only temperature I know how to convert from farenheit to celcius. All the rest are vague relative sort of calculations when I see the temperature displayed somewhere. "Oh, it's 6 degrees! That's...warmer than yesterday?" I say to myself.

When I look up into the sky this morning, I imagine myself in it, in a few hours. That is, in it in a plane. (I think I need to say the word "in" a few more times.) In a few hours I will be in the sky in a plane.

I tend to think about people in planes on any given day, though, not just the ones where I am going to be on board myself. Am I the only one? When I see planes slide across my window pane, I imagine those little tiny people who are really as big as me eating their peanuts and looking out their oval windows at the tiny postage stamp rooftops of Brussels. I wonder if they are wondering if anyone is thinking about them, because that's what I wonder when I am on a plane. I wonder if anyone looking from the windows down below are wondering about me, up above.

No matter how often I do it, and despite the obviously negative things about air travel, I always look forward to being on a plane, to being suspended in time and space, somewhere between here and there, between then and now. I've written about this before, so the two of you who are vaguely interested in what I'm saying can click here, a blog post from just over a year ago in which I wax poetic about flying and airports. (Here's the "I'm-thankful-for" part: today, it's for airplanes and airports and the thrill of going somewhere.)

So, we will be winging our way to Barcelona shortly. If any of the security people open our suitcases, they will find some pretty random and maybe vaguely worrisome items. Instead of clothes, I will be bringing a wig, gold chains (explanation here), black spider Halloween decorations, large paper pumpkins, orange candy, two loafs of pumpkin bread, and some little wire bird decorations that I promised to buy for our niece. In his carry-on, the mister is toting a kitchen lighting fixture.

We have a full weekend plan: just for starters, the Mister's father will be bringing us directly from the airport to no less than three different stores so that we can buy a bathroom mirror, bathroom lights and towel holders, and a shelving unit for the office. And then there's the party, and a planned excursion to the annual aplec ("gathering"?) at the tiny church where the Mister's parents were married, Sant Iscle. What I'm saying is that blog posting might be light. But I will be posting, by hook or by crook, because of the November blog posting challenge.

Happy weekend!

Pet peeve: pet peeves

Bloggers tend to be sticklers about grammar. I should amend that and say, good bloggers tend to be sticklers about grammar, which amounts to saying that good writers tend to be sticklers about grammar. It makes sense, you know? Someone who can write well is usually familiar with the nuts and bolts of language, the little bits of grammar and punctuation that make for a good sentence.

So it makes sense that a lot of people end up writing about grammar, and specifically their grammar pet peeves. One example I read recently is MetroDad's Confessions of a Grammar Nerd. (I dare everybody to read all of the comments...)

I always have a mixed reaction to these kinds of posts. On one hand, the former proofreader in me wants wants to cheer, because I too want to correct every last twist and turn of the language fast lane. But other the other hand... Well, let's just say that the road metaphor is especially apt because language is one. I.e., it is always in motion and changing, and cannot be entirely defined by any ruler-nosed grammar panel or elementary-school textbook. (Despite what the Académie française might like to think.)

I'm especially formed in this line of thinking by a linguistics class I took in college, during which we read Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. My memories of the book specifically are fuzzy, but I do remember being inspired by it to view language as not something created by a list of external rules, but as an internal wiring of the brain. So, if language changes, it is often because the change fulfills a (social) need. Now, of course I know the difference between a completely laissez-faire attitude and an awareness of varying social language registers, which is why I tell my students that it is not OK to use instant-messagese in an academic paper and why I correct their grammar anyway.

But all of this is a long way of describing why one of my pet peeves is grammar pet peeves. One of the most maddening is the insistence on maintaining the split infinitive rule. The only reason grammarians decided we should not split the infinitive (i.e., it is important to always keep "to" and "keep" together) is because in Latin, these are contained in one word. By that standard, English wouldn't have any moveable parts at all. This is not Latin, it's English, and we should be allowed to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Another example of this is nixing any and all dangling participles. Yes, in some cases they are awkard, unsightly, or unecessary. Sometimes they are jarring rhythmically. But in others, it is more awkward and/or unecessarily formal to rework the sentence so that there is no dangling, resulting in a lot of "to which blahblahblah." I would be perfectly happy to lose this "rule" and just stick with what sounds nicest. What do we have against prepositions?

Of course, there's a difference between disliking the rules and fragrantly disobeying them. I know that these are important to most other people, so I would--especially in any important, work-related document--not split my infinitives or leave participles a-hanging. And if you give me an in-house style book and tell me to hunt out whatever deviates from it, I'm your eagle-eyed woman. (Especially the Genetics house style: that was my baby when I was a proofreader. And yeah, proofreading genetic code will make your head spin in proportion to how important it is that any given C, G, A, or T be correct.)

I do have to admit that there are plenty of niggling (or howling) grammar mistakes that get my goat. Most of them do serve an important function because they distinguish between variants of a word (it's/its, their/there/they're) or change the meaning of a sentence (punctuation is often to blame for this, especially commas and the hilariously improper use of scare quotes--check out this blog, it's fabulous!). I also get a bit annoyed by improper alphabetization (titles beginning with "The" found under T), untidy title capitalization (capitalized prepositions) and incorrect usage of foreign language words or terms (this last can, admittedly, get kind of fuzzy and I've run across some huge challenges in translation over this issue).

Most often, though, I find grammar "mistakes" amusing or revealing because they get me thinking NOT about how they are breaking some invisible rule, but because they make me consider the structures of language and shades of meaning that can arise from word placement, spelling, punctuation, and all that jazz.

Here's an example I saw the other day, in an e-mail from a long-lost family member we met at the family reunion in September. She writes, "I have a whole family I had never met that I now feel so blessed to be apart of..."

First reaction: beep beep! glaring error! Second reaction: language is so cool! Maybe you've noticed this before, or maybe you just think I'm out of my mind. But this only occurred to me for the first time upon seeing the above e-mail: a part and apart are only differentiated by one small space. But they mean the opposite of one another, and the one with a space in it means to belong to something, while the one that is all together means to not be together!

(Yes, I am a language nerd. Forgive me if grammar was the last thing you wanted to read about today. Hopefully you stopped reading long long ago if that's the case.)

Now, a slight tangent. I bought cough drops today that advertised in bold letters on the front that they are sugar free. Yet, the ingredient list contains "sirop de sucre caramelisé" or, as they translated it in English, "burnt sugar syrup." How is this not sugar? Chemistry? Or semantics?

Today I am thankful for: feeling better, or at least that the cough drops/cough syrup combo is working. Also, the smell of pumpkin-apple bread fresh from the oven. I'm baking it for our autumn/Halloween party in Barcelona this weekend. We promised something "American" to our guests, and this is the only thing I could come up with that was plane-portable and contained Halloweeny/American ingredients: i.e., pumpkin. It's the last of the cans that we brought back from the US, so if anyone wants to send me some more, feel free.

The golden cage

I was forwarded an e-mail from the Mister yesterday, to whom it was forwarded from someone else, and so on and so forth. Imagine what it would be like to piggyback on the shoulders of an average circulating e-mail, not spam, but the kind people send each other because they think it's interesting (this, by the way, is highly subjective and I know I irkedly delete e-mails all the time that others consider "highly interesting").

You'd get to see a whole lot of faces peering at you from around the world, and the expressions on those faces would range from annoyed to fascinated to worried to happy. You'd find a poor girl like me coughing away with runny eyes and nose on the couch in her sweats, a guy like M. in his suit in the office, and all sorts of people in between, faces lit up by their computer screens.

Anyway, the e-mail I received yesterday was an article from the Guardian from last summer, about living in Brussels, which the author, Gareth Harding, describes as "living in a golden cage." You want to escape, but know that you have it good (more in a moment on the "have it good" part). He speaks of the embarrassment of acknowledging that you came to live here for a few months or a year or two, and suddenly discover you've been here 14 years. Oh dearie me, I hope this doesn't happen to us. I know that conversation--we've had it with many people--and I hope it is not me someday doing the apologetic begrudging thing. Yeah, Brussels.

Harding writes: "American travel writer Bill Bryson once described the city as a 'seriously ugly place, full of wet litter, boulevards like freeways and muddy building sites,' and many people still associate the Belgian capital with rain, sprouts, bloated bureaucracy and barmy laws. This is, after all, a city whose two most iconic monuments are of a sackload of suspended balls and a small boy peeing."

Kind of makes you want to move here, right? Along with my eternal griping about the weather, the capital of Belgium just sounds utterly romantic, n'est-ce pas?

The question Harding asks, after going through the myriad reasons of why Brussels stinks, is: "why do over-educated, multilingual high-flyers invariably end up staying longer in Brussels than they planned to?"

This is the crux of the issue, and I keep reading, because I think we would rather avoid staying longer than planned. Even if it ends up being another five years, please let it not be fourteen. So he goes on to list the benefits of Brussels. For one, it's a whole lot cheaper than Paris or London but only a train ride away from either. He cites the hospitals, the schools, the food, and of course, the beer. Ultimately, he concludes, it's a city to live in, not really made for sightseeing:

"The magnificent Grand Place aside, there are few must-see sights. Instead the city’s real charms – surrealist cafes, Moroccan markets, giant beech forests, comic-strip murals, Congolese eateries and cinemas showing only silent films — are either tucked away down side streets or marooned in the sprawling suburbs."

Yes, this is true. The city's charms are much more hidden. But is this really much of a consolation prize? A silent film or two, a couple of colorful murals (of characters beloved by Europeans, evidently, but I don't get much of a kick out of them). Sorry, maybe I'm being cynical. Maybe I need to get out and do more exploring. And I really do enjoy my own "tucked away" Brussels discoveries.

But it's probably time for a break, which is why it is a good thing we're going to Barcelona this weekend (which is today's thankful thing coming after a whole lot of ungrateful). It's been far too long, and it will be good to escape, at least for a few days, this "golden cage."

(The full article can be found here.)

Not writing about snot

My cold has decided to return with a vengeance. But I will not go into details, because I promised not to, in one of my first entries ever.

Instead I am going to tell a little story about one of the things that happened to me while I was back at school last month, and how I discovered I didn't have a degree that I thought I had.

I had never received my MFA diploma in the mail, but I thought this must have been due to either an address error or a delay on the University's part. Granted, it had been a year and a half, but things sometimes move slowly in University Bureaucracy Land. Thus, while I was in campus, I went to check on the situation. One office sent me to another office, and so on, until I landed in the little cubicle-filled space where all the forms and grades and dissertations go to be stamped and then filed in a bottomless hole.

They were about to send me to yet another office, but I asked the guy in my nicest voice if he could just check to make sure everything was in order on his end. Lo and behold, it was not. I did not have an MFA, I was a Master of no Fine Art. Evidently I had been a fraud on my resume for the last year and a half without knowing it. (At least I didn't send that resume anywhere. I was only a fraud on my hard drive.)

I found why the next day, after the guy had done some digging. Why? Basically, the degree had fallen through the cracks. Lest you think things like degrees don't fall through cracks, let me reassure you, they do. Through the combined clerical error efforts of two distinguished offices, the Department of English and the Graduate Recorder, one of their upstanding students was an unintentional dropout.

The department never changed one of the thesis credits from an "R" placeholder grade to whatever they change it to, and when the graduate recorder wrote to them, they changed it but never got back to him. Then a new graduate recorder came on the job, and there was no follow-up from either end.

Now I was in a pickle. They gave me the option of having an October 2007 graduation date or my original June 2006 date, but the latter would require extra work, including petitioning the dean. I told them to petition the dean, petition George Bush, whatever it takes. I would much rather the record reflect the actual date that I completed the MFA thesis and coursework (while taking my PhD exams, thankyouverymuch).

Fortunately, the dean was magnanimous (I just wrote that word about fourteen times to get it right--gotta be the cold), and I was allowed a retroactively dated degree. Finally, it seems, I can suffix MFA to the alphabet soup after my name.

OK, so that's what I am thankful for today, that the little mishap was discovered and a solution found. Also, I am thankful for some renewed inspiration on a series of poems I haven't looked at since I finished my MFA (that's what got me thinking about all of this in the first place). They are Vermonty poems, wintery poems, and written in a matter-of-fact farmer's voice. I wonder if I'm drawn back to them now that the days are darkening down, the leaves on the tree behind the house are gone, and the air is decidedly chill.

Say it in words

Although it's Monday (blah) and the Mister is gone again (boo) and my sniffles remain (achoo), I am thankful that the internet is back in working order and that I have some energy. Yesterday was one of those drag-yourself-around days. All along my mind was trying to convince myself that I was fine, I was making it all up, really it doesn't feel like someone punched me all over, but of course the fact that I thought I needed convincing was evidence enough that my body wasn't its usual self.

Now that both my brain and the big brain (hooked up to the web we are) are allowing me to do so, I'd like to write about just that: writing.

I've been thinking recently about my tendency to write my life in my head. You know how sometimes people imagine their lives as movies, with a soundtrack? I imagine my life as a book, written in perfectly descriptive and beautiful phrases. Sometimes they're not even descriptive, sometimes just words that sound nice. But it would be a funny kind of book, not much of a page turner, because those phrases are all snippets of what I see, think, hear, feel, imagine... Readers would get SO bored. They would ask where the story went.

When my little nephew was starting to talk, and would sometimes revert to whines or cries in frustration or need, my sister would say to him: "Say it in words. Tell me in words." And that's the ultimate challenge, isn't it, big and little? To translate the precise look of an object, or the deep whine of a feeling, into words that can capture at least enough of them to communicate to others.

I sometimes wonder if it can be distancing, or a kind of defense mechanism. Am I experiencing this any less, living life less fully, because I'm trying to put it into words? Hard to say. I do know that I can deliberately use it as a distraction, but I also know that I probably couldn't stop if I wanted to. I guess it means I'm a writer. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm a good one, but it means that is who I am, living in words.

Say on the train I'm noticing the people around me. Or I'm walking outside and I try to describe to myself the exact way those leaves are arrayed. In my head I start trying to say with words what they look like, or imagine what they might be feeling (the people! not, generally speaking, the leaves). Sometimes it sounds like a crime scene report or newspaper article, sometimes like a poem, sometimes academic, sometimes like, well, a blog entry.

Here are some of the snippets that I can remember "writing" in my head this weekend. They weren't going to go anywhere, or probably even be written down unless some story happened around one of them to appear as a detail in a larger picture. I make no claims for brilliance. But they are a little portrait of me, this weekend, trying to "say it in words."

evening arrived fast, bringing the cold of winter with it

the spices smelled as bright as the color of the carrots, all simmer and steam in the pot

she thought nobody else on the train could tell she was crying, but the woman reading a magazine across from her was only pretending to read

that girl is a stocky Lindsay Lohan with a British accent

wet fall leaves the size of platters sunk into the mud, like starfish in the sand

they walked silently, and too carefully, as if they might break the air

A poppy

We continue to be without internet. And I have a cold, a sore throat all-over achiness kind of cold. The blogging is bound to get the brunt end of both sticks.

So in lieu of any acumen from me, I hereby offer you a bit of poetry, excerpted from a war poem, in honor of Remembrance Sunday and courtesy of Miguel Hernández. It’s a Spanish Civil War poem, of course, and here as in most of Hernández’s war poetry, blood is a character in its own right, morphing and coloring everything the poet sees (“My blood is a road” or “a liquid cloak twisted around my bones / like uncommon serpents”).

Consider the poem a poppy buttoned on today’s gray coat, in remembrance of the end of World War I, 89 years ago today, a war that was supposed to have put an end to all wars.

Bloody Fate

I come, blood on blood,
like the sea, wave on wave.
I have a soul the color of poppies.
The luckless poppy is my destiny,
from poppy to poppy I come
to fall on the horns of my fate.
…
I fight with blood, I argue
with the pounding of bodies, with all those veins,
and each body I bump and contend with
is one more cauldron of blood, one more chain.
…
Blood has given me birth, and jail.
Blood dissolves me and swells me up.
I am a building constructed of blood and plaster
which demolishes and rebuilds itself on a bone scaffolding.

A bricklayer in blood, dying blood,
washes and hangs out his shirt each day
not far from my eye,
and each night, with my soul,
and even with my eyelids, I gather it all back in…

(tr. Don Share)

Tenuous

Internet this morning was crashed; we called the company and they said it’s not just us, everyone’s internetless!

Meanwhile, we went to Ghent, to the Fine Arts museum there, and lingered hours over the paintings and lunch at the café to avoid the cold wet day outside.

Now back in Brussels, and the internet is still not working. If I get an itty bitty tenuous wireless signal from one of the neighbors, I’ll post this in a flash.

Thankful today for museums, museum cafés, museum bookstores. And for time to linger.

Stellar moments

The Mister bought a book last month by Stephan Zweig called, in Catalan, Moments estel.lars de la humanitat (Stellar Moments of Humanity; I'm not sure what the title is in the original German). I also can't figure out when it was first published. The nineteen-thirties? Forties? We've been reading it in pieces, sometimes aloud to one another, and then each on our own.

The chapters detail, as the title suggests, great moments of history. It pretty much fits into the "great men" tradition of history (and it is strictly all about men), except Zweig takes pains to point out that sometimes the turning points of history revolve on the actions of scoundrels, cowards, or unknowns.

I turned first to the race to the South Pole by Captain Scott, because I always love arctic exploration stories. Other chapters I rather enjoyed include the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable by Cyrus Field and the "discovery" of the Pacific by Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

Right now I'm reading the chapter about Handel's composition of the Messiah. I don't know why I ended up saving this one for last, but the timing seems right. I've been engrossed in the story of a man who, just recovered from a paralyzing stroke, besieged by creditors, without any desire to compose, suddenly is sent a libretto (by a librettist he had been known to belittle--hee hee I always wanted to use those two words in one phrase!) and finds himself gripped by a manic episode of composing that lasts, day and night, for twenty-four days.

When he emerges from his almost visionary state and finally sleeps and eats heartily, he insists that the music has come not from him, but from divine inspiration. He donates the concert revenue to hospitals and prisons, stating that the work is for the sick and the imprisoned, because he himself once was sick, and was cured, once was a prisoner and has been freed.

Then, last night, I went to choir. We're performing the Messiah this semester, and as much as I love this music, as much as singing it is always thrilling to the bone, last night the story of its composition, the text, and the music all fell together and just about overwhelmed me. I started to sing with my eyes closed, so familiar it is, and became utterly absorbed in the exquisite sound.

I've sung the Messiah in Oxford's Sheldonian theater, one of the places Handel himself conducted it, with a professional orchestra. I've sung it with feeble high-school strings trying heroically to keep up with the tempo. I've sung it at parties, in church, in countless rehearsals, school gymnasiums. I've sung solos from it for auditions and in performance. I still remember the first time I heard the whole thing live, and listen to it on the radio every Easter and Christmas. But last night it was new to me all over again.

The story of redemption in song, the incredible word-painting, those breathtaking musical surprises. In that moment it was clear how art can be so much greater than itself, that it is much more than the production of a meager human being. I think this is emphasized even more in choral and symphonic works, because their magic is that the music becomes so much more than a sum of the parts, a true synergy of human and divine.

So Zweig didn't have it quite right; the stellar moment isn't so much the composition of the work as the singing of it, time and time again, with thousands and thousands of voices. The newness of a familiar work in every performance, how the inbreathing of notes on the page and plain old air becomes the outbreathing of, well, music.

And that is what I am thankful for today.

Fairy tale spam

I just got a very nice e-mail from a guy in an undisclosed African country. His father was "a licensed solid mineral (gold, diamond ) Cocoa etc exporter." So far, I'm right with him: the raw material for making chocolate absolutely deserves to be classified with gold and diamonds. And if you've got all three in the family, well, you're set for life, right?

Sadly, no. His father passed away, and the story becomes tragic:

"Few years before my father died he apparently married a woman who became my stepmother because my mother died when i was very young. My stepmother already had two daughters of about my age, and they came with her to live in my Father's house. I discovered that there was some ill-feeling from my stepmother towards me, since then i have been badly treated; being forced to undertake work befitting only a servant, in my father's own house."

Wait, a stepmother (whom your father "apparently married") and two evil stepdaughters? You're being made to work like a servant? Do they have you cleaning out the fireplace? Holy mackerel! Despite the alias, I am positive this is Cinderello writing.

Poor guy, the situation becomes worse.

"When my father died instead of being in the state of mourns as custom demand with our tradition, she went as much as desired and claimed my father's property and in future to come she stand as a possible danger to my live with atitude to me."

First of all, outrageous that she didn't travel to the "state of mourns." Secondly, she went elsewhere, "as much as desired." Heartwrenching. And the clincher is, she is dangerous to his "live with attitude to me."

It was just at this point that I started wondering what I could do to help this poor boy. If only there was a way to lift his spirits and get him out of the evil stepmother situation...

But wait! There is a way! I can help him with some money, some 8 million euros, which he has in a bank! But can't withdraw. All I have to do is get in touch with him, send him my contact information, and then withdraw the money. No problem, right? And in thanks for all my help, he'll give me ten percent of the money.

What a saint, that Cinderello. I'm going to write back right away.

Thirteen roses

Squeaking in under the wire, today. It's nearly midnight! As is usual on Thursdays, I didn't get home from choir until close to 11 and my first priority is to feed my whiny, demanding stomach. Now, filled with a quinoa sweet potato dish that I just made up and turned out to be surprisingly delicious, it has stopped controlling my actions and I am free to blog.

All day I've been thinking about a movie we saw yesterday, Las 13 Rosas. It was the opening film for the Spanish and Latin American film festival this year in Brussels, followed by a reception, and we were invited courtesy of M's boss not having any interest in going to the forty millionth reception this year. I was looking forward to it all week, as I vaguely knew the movie was about the Spanish Civil War, and that the reception was probably bound to have Spanish wines and cheeses.

But when it came time to go to the reception, after the movie, I didn't exactly feel like mingling and being cheery, because this was the saddest movie I've seen all year. My neck was sore from trying to hold in my sobs, my face was a teary mess, and my heart was heavy. Because it is a movie based on true events (and the documents and letters quoted in the movie are the real thing), it was even more powerful. As M pointed out, his grandfather was held in prisons just like those depicted in the movie; in other words, it touches close to (my husband's/my adopted) home.

The movie tells the story of thirteen young women who are picked up by the police just after the end of the civil war, on suspicion of being "Reds." It depicts their experience before this event, the brutal and violent treatment they receive, and the aftermath of their imprisonment and trial (I won't give away more than this). While the film seemed tinged with that miniseries quality at first, the quality of the acting and the manner in which the story is told drew me in.

One of the best things about it was how it focused on the relationships of these women (some who were best of friends, some who hardly knew each other). Instead of trying to present the full back story of all thirteen, the movie moves from connection to connection in vignettes that interlace and give a great sense of relationship. In fact, many of them get brought to prison because the police follow one of the girls as "bait," watching to see who rushes up to her and embraces her as a friend.

This was one of those movies that makes you wonder what you would do in such a situation. How you would react? Would you succomb to the deliberate currying of fear and suspicion among neighbors? Would you avoid sticking your neck out for others? Or would you risk your life in even small acts of defiance?

These were the thoughts running through my head as we headed to the reception afterwards. In the sea of people, I lost the Mister and was buffetted about by all those giant handbags slung over women's shoulders (why is it suddenly the fashion to carry purses the size of suitcases?). Witty conversation, a glass of wine, and a wedge of Manchego didn't seem terribly appealing.

Today, I'm thankful that we don't live under a dictatorship. That we don't have to make tiny decisions that could mean the imprisonment of neighbors and loved ones.

Computer speaks

Good morning to you, said my computer, as I settled in front of it, having breakfasted well with my marit.

Good morning, I said in return.

May we travel calmly today? it said.

What do you mean by that? said I. I hoped there were no implications about overly strenuous computer usage.

And within a few clicks my eyes were opened. The internet was crawling at a snail's pace. The snail in question is arthritic, has a bum hip, and is battling a smoker's cough.

Mr. Computer, I said, let's try to restart you and the internet box, and see if that clears out your lungs a bit.

You are welcome to try any remedy, it said. I was surprised to discover how eloquently formal my computer is. Under the youthful white exterior hides the soul of a professor.

Restarting activities were futile. I think Mr. Computer knew this all along, but was just being polite.

Do not take it too much to heart, it said. You have done your best, and in life inevitably there come the times of testing.

So I am left with a slow day, despite an early start and good intentions. A crawling day.

I am going to go swimming now. I am going to do the crawl.

(Today, I am thankful for the swimming pool across the street. For the swimming pool, with its 19th century iron spans, warm chlorinated air, and the little cubbies lining the water's edge. And for the fact that it is located across the street.)

Slightly out of tune, but mellifluous: a piano story

After posting about the final arrival of the piano this weekend, I thought I would gather up the posts about the piano and put them in one place, this post being that place. Why? Because I have a firstborn's listmaker brain and I like to organize things and as a child I always ate M&Ms in a specific order according to color (if you must know, brown, tan, orange, yellow, green, and yes, they threw a wrench into my nine-year-old brain when they added red).

Consider this the piano fascicle, for you Emily Dickinson and/or anatomy buffs.



Part I: the impulse purchase
Part II: reluctant delivery
Part III: we fire the moving company
Part IV: misplaced signage is costly, piano at the doorstep
Part V: signage incompetence continues
Part VI: cancellations and complaints
Part VII: home at last

It took exactly two months from the moment of purchase to the day a concord of celestial harmony caused everything to fall in place and the piano to land in our dining room.

Here is a fuzzy picture of the beautious beast:


I've been playing every day and I'm sure our neighbors are thrilled. I'm sure they would like me to keep playing, all the time.

As the day wanes

Today I am thankful for a warm house, warm soup, and warm tea. Can you tell that it's cold outside? I got quite rained on as I slogged home from French class this afternoon. No umbrella, because it seemed like it might be a nice day when I left the house--but I should know by now not to trust the morning sky in Brussels.

Speaking of French class, we got an assignment to bring a ghost story to class on Thursday, something from our "home culture." She said it could be anything Halloween-related, witches, goblins, etc. Something along the lines of a story we read in class today (for a fourth-grade reading level, isn't that encouraging) about a little boy who discovers tiny witches giving sorcery lessons in the forest. But I'm drawing a blank. Somehow I missed all those charming childhood Halloween stories, I suppose! If anyone has any ideas...

I learned in class today that Belgian children get presents on December 6, which goes a long way towards explaining why all of the shops have been packed recently. It's like Black Friday frenzy in the US: only one month to Christmas! On the night of the 5th, Saint Nicholas comes to leave presents in everyone's shoes. Then, many families also celebrate Santa Claus as a separate thing on December 25th and thus have two gifty celebrations. It's like in Spain, with Christmas and then the arrival of the Three Kings, who also bring presents.

Since the Mister and I have a Catalan-American-Belgian household (Catamelgian, if you will), we should celebrate all of them: presents in our shoes on December 6, presents under the tree and pooped from a log on December 25, and presents left by the Wise Men on January 6. A whole month of presents! Now there's a holiday season worth caroling about.

iMe

Is anyone else getting a little tired of everything out there being called iSomething or eSomething? I get it, we live in an electronic world, the iPod is everywhere, and the internet is our new playground/town hall/encyclopedia. But surely we can stop with the i-ing and e-ing?

It's especially bizarre when the thing being i-ed or e-ed is totaly unrelated to electronics or the iTunes revolution, and it is clear that the name bestowers simply were attempting to give a little hipness to their project or connect to the iPod somehow.

Yesterday, in Place Royale, we saw an exhibit that is called eDoubts. I think the e in this case refers to Europe, as the artwork is dots marking European cities, each with a big question mark on it, spread all over the plaza, cars and busses rattling over them nonstop. As the Mister pointed out, if they think throwing a bunch of question marks onto the ground is supposed to make us interrogate the concept of European cohesiveness well, they've got another think coming.

So, if we can have eDoubts, I wondered what other nouns have been transformed into iVersions and eVersions. Quick google searches of objects within eyesight and some other nouns that came to mind proved that the i and the e can be attached to just about anything: iLamp eLamp ePlant iChair eCandy iMirror iBlanket iWorld iDog iHero iWish eDreams. Welcome to the internetization of the world.

It was not until I tried "iFloorboards" and "eFloorboards" that I hit a wall. Even then, there were a couple of companies who had already registered the domain name "iFloorboards" in case someone ever wanted to eMarket their...virtual floorboards?

Anyone want to make bets as to what will be the next manifestation of Vowel Prefix Syndrome? a, o, or u? Introducing the exciting new whirligig called aThing! uGadget. oExpensiveFancyStuff.

Today, I am thankful for things that are not i- or e- or virtual or pixellated. I'm thankful for my fuzzy sweatshirt, and my husband's morning kiss, for the roasty taste of coffee, and the straight spines of books lined up on the shelf.

Piano: a happy ending

Guess what I'm thankful for today?

The piano is, at long last, esconced in one corner of our dining room. It is happy, I am happy, the Mister is happy.

This time, the placards reserving our space went up in the right sector of streetfront, but cars were still parked there last night at the appointed hour. I called the police but they were predictably slow to respond. Fortunately, our enterprising lift operater managed to squeeze the truck next to the minivan parked in the spot in front of our window and made it work, lifting the piano up and over the parking interloper.

It was quite difficult on the nerves to watch the piano be hoisted into the middle of nighttime traffic (it being dark already at 6 pm--we've done the daylight savings thing already here in Europe), then up through the air just perched on a little platform, not tied down by any means. And then to watch three men wobblingly balance it it half in the window and half out while they tried to maneuver it in. At that point I was as nervous about their backs and bones as I was about the piano.

But all backs, bones, and piano were all intact after the short interlude of its travels and I am simply happy to have the saga over with. Commence happy music now.

I am also thankful for the Mister's safe arrival from South America yesterday, an hour or two after the piano's arrival. Although it doesn't make as good a story, being in his arms again kind of trumps everything else.

Faith

Last night I had one of those life-changing conversations, one of those interactions with other people that is exciting and encouraging and, ultimately, true.

Interestingly enough, the whole thing developed after a discussion about the internet, and even more precisely, about blogging. Does it truly bring people together? Or is it a symptom of our separation and distance and the atomization of modern life? Are we talking to a void? Despite over a year of blogging on this webpage, I don't know how to answer those questions, and I only can speak to what motivates me to write: to keep family and friends up to date on my life, to practice a different kind of writing than my poetry or my academic work, to speak about the things that otherwise might just be bottled up, to allow myself to laugh, to muse, to ramble.

But that's not quite what I meant to write about, either. At that point, the conversation turned toward matters of faith, and my friend and I were up until four in the morning discussing what it means to believe in God, what it means to know that he exists, and what, then, that means for our lives. How to live a life that is beautiful, how to live beautifully.

While she has come recently to this conviction, and is still searching for answers, for me it sometimes is so familiar that it is an invigorating thing to state afresh what it is that I believe, especially to someone so genuinely curious and open to what I have to say. My beliefs are Christian, and in many senses traditional, and I find that the challenge is to explain them humbly, in a way that doesn't ring of piousness, rightwing political catchphrases, Christianese, closed-minded fundamentalism, or hellfire-and-brimstone preachiness. To find new language to state the things in my heart that matter most.

I hope that I spoke clearly, I pray that I spoke truly, and I know that her enthusiasm and joy were a gift to me. And that is what I am thankful for today.

I promise

So I find that I have joined this thing called National Blog Posting Month, which means posting every day for the month of November. It scares me a little for several reasons.

1. I have never posted every day for a whole month.
2. It means that maybe somebody besides my grandpa and my parents and my three friends might read this blog. (Since I had to join this networky thing to make it official and keep myself honest.)
3. The abbreviation of the challenge is called NaBloPoMo, which, well, scares me a little. Therefore it is the last time I will use said abbreviation.

But one of the good ideas that I got from the networky part was to post every day about something I am thankful for. So, since I'm starting on November 2, I will write two things:

1. I'm thankful that the Mister is coming home tomorrow.
2. I'm thankful for the nice feeling of putting on a clean pair of socks.

See the world, don't move an inch

Yesterday I discovered one of those fascinating yet time-wasting internet thingamabobs. Maybe you've heard of it already and are all, that's totally old news, and I've known about it forever, and get with the program, yawn.

But to me, this is pretty cool. It's flickrvision, and it shows a big map of the world with all the images people are uploading to flickr, the online picture gallery, in real time. It feels like you're watching snapshots taken of the whole world at once.

You get to see Lara in Brisbane's photo, and then a picture by Luciano in Milan, and shots of Stephanie in Seattle's party, and Renata in Rio's travels and Yulianus in Indonesia and Fundera in Germany...and on and on.

While the pictures of groups of smiling people and/or pets are legion, there are some wonderful landscape and travel shots. One fun part is noticing that a given picture, while uploaded in Germany or China, is actually of Barcelona or Monument Valley or whatever. It makes you imagine people moving across the map, seemingly at the speed of a few flickers (flickrs?!) of the computer's pixels. Or, click on "3D view" and the world spins as though you're the one flying.

When familiar things pop out of the map it's especially exciting: someone had taken a picture of a croissant from the best bakery in Barcelona! And that statue in Boston! It happens more than you might think, too, that the photos are truly stunning, worth waiting for while the boring blurry ones drift by.

Yesterday as I watched, some distinct trends started to emerge. The Americans, they were uploading pictures of zombies and witches and bumble bees and dragon (to clarify, people costumed as these things). The Europeans were uploading scenes of either parties (blurry pictures of bands and groups of people around beer-littered tables) or travel (cobblestone streets, mountaintops, monuments). The southeast Asians were uploading pictures of street scenes and school events.

After watching for a while I finally saw a picture from Belgium. And what, you are dying to know, was it of? A plate of food, unrecognizable beneath the pile of cheese melted all over the top. You gotta love the Belgians.

But that was just yesterday, during one little slice of the afternoon. What does the world look like today?

Sleeping like a marmot

Yesterday's evening was a success on both social and culinary levels. I was introduced to the joys of the little round almond cookies called panellets and I introduced my guests to the joys of pumpkin pie. None of them had ever tried it before--imagine the tragedy of a pumpkin pieless life!

I wore my Cleopatra wig and eye makeup and managed to astonish everyone who came through the door. I even managed to frighten myself a few times, especially after I had ditched the wig at around dessert-time but caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror still wearing half-smeared crooked black eyeliner all over my face. But, sadly, I was the only one in costume. I understand that on what to them was just a regular worknight, it was hard to get hyped up enough to se deguiser. So I played the role of the loony American hostess in her wacked-out wig and kooky color schemes (I served an all-orange menu: carrots and orange peppers, bright orange butternut squash soup, pumpkin pie).

Everyone stayed until 2 am, and although I lost some of the thread of the conversation by the end of the night, due to sugar overload, wine, and the fact that it was 2 am, I did pick up on a rather handy Catalan phrase. "Dormir com una marmota," to sleep like a marmot, is the equivalent of sleeping like a rock or log. I like it because I'd much rather sleep like a marmot than a log, the former being a whole lot softer and snugglier.

And sleeping like a marmot what I proceeded to do as soon as I had popped the leftovers in the fridge and crawled into my jammies. (And yes, OK, I'll admit it. I ate pumpkin pie for breakfast today.)