But how do bookstores stay unique? I’m just actively starting to care about this question, so I really am asking. Take the bookstore in Madison, CT, RJ Julia, one of the most successful and respected independent booksellers in the world. In the time it takes for a slow barrista to pull a long shot, the Espresso Book Machine is the only thing of its kind on the retail level. It produces great color quality with the cover on the spot when the customer wants it. (The “Espresso” name is just goofy enough I keep thinking someone’s gong to tell me they saw this on The Onion. But as I haven’t had a comment since 2009, I might welcome the correction.) I call it a modern robot. Probably a few old-world bookbinders who’d like to curb stomp it.
I loved a little dive in Austin, TX called 12th Street Books, born in 1992. To a big college town, they offered a good sized used selection of books for such a small space with a tiny but well-run espresso bar and pastry case. Somehow they squeezed in easy chairs too. A real claustrophobe would’ve hated it! But I loved it if I didn’t think about the book dust I was breathing in. It’s not only still there, it’s recently remodeled and reinvented as an antiquarian bookstore specializing in literary first editions, small-press, and finer bindings. It’s the only one of its kind in Austin.
My area now has the only one of it’s kind. It’s brand new, and though this is a very precarious time to start a new business when people are even saying no to Girl Scouts, it has great potential. The books are new and 1/2 price. Named Giant Book Sale, the new owner bought all the remaining equipment from Borders which had last occupied that space. The twist is in the cafe. Run by a Latino couple who have been teaching after-school programs for several years, John Paul and Lucy Lepeley offer daily guitar and piano lessons in the afternoons. They also teach art and tutoring sessions. You can even sign up for salsa lessons. Their cafe space is generous for movie nights, toddler readings, study groups and book clubs. They’re in a good location by well known stores, namely, Sports Chalet and Kohl’s on Rosewood Avenue in in the center of Pleasanton. Better yet, it’s locally owned.
I am watching how this business play out. I hope it succeeds, and becomes a place we can return to as we’re raising our children and bringing our friends.
When fewer people are flooding an industry with job applications pursuing work in what was a much bigger industry 10 years ago, looks to me like that industry would draw the real talented people who love it. People who are in it for more than money, and sticking around for the long haul. I like that. I like being with people like that. Instead of competing with other people looking to make a fortune in money, let’s compete with other people who want to make a fortune in good quality.
]]>My migraines are gone. By the time I added a third and fourth martial arts class a week, I stopped having that headache every two days out of the month. Never laid up in bed anymore! I haven’t had a migraine since August of 2010 :)
There are other things I’ve learned that I never could’ve guessed. They seem like small lessons, but they’re not, once I saw how well they’re applied to other walks of life.
First, I didn’t think I needed compliments. I thought I was above that. Needing compliments seemed… kinda needy. In the beginning, there were times I left class feeling like the whole night was a failure. (Always worse at night I should say, maybe because of fatigue?) This was especially true in classes when I tried a technique for the first time. Then I had a night or two that when trying something new, I had a word of encouragement or a small compliment, and I left the studio feeling so much better about looking like a dork!
Secondly, I feel the same way if I can train beside people who are light-hearted or at least willing to make eye contact. I have the most fun when my classmates and I can make fun of ourselves and laugh a little. The fuddy duddies who won’t look me in the eye bring the mood down fast. Not sure how to reach those people.
Thirdly, I see a leap in progress after I get away from the training for a while. When the studio is closed for Christmas break, I don’t work out nearly as much. I might practice tkd at home or do yoga. When we travel and visit with family, we think and do entirely different things then we usually would. When I get back to class, something always seems a bit different. My balance is better or a certain kick is more controlled. Just like studying for a test plants seeds, you still need to sleep in order for the understanding to grow roots. People who study all night don’t test as well as those who sleep on what they’ve read. (I already knew several years ago that travelling gets me out of a stressful situation, out of the habits of my obsessions, and I come home understanding better that time passes and solutions present themselves. Or maybe the problem just goes away.) Getting away from the training floor lets the muscle memory take root. Then I’m better at giving attention to other things that need work.
Also, just like I can’t do math in front of others, memorizing the tae kwon do forms has been difficult to do in front of people, especially when it’s a very small class. The fewer students in class, the more attention I get, then the more self-conscious I am. One day a year ago, it was just me, the teacher, and one other student in class. I had a lot of trouble remembering anything of the form I was told. I went into the bathroom, did the form one time, and I had it :) Likewise, working on techniques at home and especially yelling with the k’ihap as aggressively as I should, I go back to class noticeably better. The k’ihap creates its power through confidence, confidence that often needs to be found in private. When that happened, y’all should’a seen how much my hook kick improved.
The last lesson, for now, is in my emotional reactions to these challenges. I had a bad day a week ago. I have been very run down. Starting a swimming class has given me one more source of anxiety. I am respectfully afraid of the water. I can swim, but I’m certainly not used to it, and it’s very tiring to start a new sport like swimming. Learning new things makes people wake up more in the worry hours of the night, so people lose sleep. Also, I’ve been feeling anemic off and on for three months. My diet had gotten really predictable eating the same 10 foods for the last year. With the bad nutrition, I was dragging myself out of classes, sometimes 7 hours of workouts a week. So last Thursday when I got kicked in the shin, I felt it down inside the bone. I had already forced myself not to cry earlier in the hour as I had other things on my mind and was feeling really emotional. I have tried to give myself permission to cry in these situations, but then I’d have to kill everyone in the room, and it wouldn’t be easy. So I control it. I’ve felt this emotion in class when I first started 2 years ago, and from what I learned the first time through it, it means I’m about to make progress.
Having said all that, I’m on a short break from tkd to focus on Krav Maga, taking supplements, and eating much better. (There is a ridiculous amount of iron in blackstrap molasses.) I plan on going through the basic Krav testing in April. After that, I’ll return to tkd.
]]>I only see my sister once a year. Two years ago, Christmas, she said I hadn’t aged in the last year. She claims she can tell, when she hasn’t seen someone in a while, if they’ve aged. It was a nice compliment. Though before she said that I hadn’t thought about it much.
If I smile more, it will slowly make the laugh lines deeper, but hides them at the same time! I won’t get “home” this year for Christmas, so it’ll have been two years by the time my sister sees me again. I wonder if she’ll say anything. Maybe I can smile the entire visit.
]]>But corner lots have a reputation for being broken into more, easy access. I can still say no to salesmen like nobody else and be super nice. I simply feel safer not opening the door. Neighbors who are smart enough will let me see them from the kitchen window.
I started self defense classes with my children a year and a half ago. We are not mean fighting machines, but being immersed in the lingo of safety, being told again and again the importance of a quick reaction, what mean people might do, and what you on the defense need to do before you run, it stays at the front of your mind. If I took a job selling insurance, the lingo of worth and replacement value of property would stay on my mind. I’d see the need for insurance everywhere. But how boring that would be!
Krav Maga “was derived from street-fighting skills developed by Imi Lichtenfeld, who made use of his training as a boxer and wrestler, as a means of defending the Jewish quarter against fascist groups in Bratislava[3] in the mid- to late-1930s. In the late-1940s, following his immigration to Israel, he began to provide hand-to-hand combat training to what was to become the IDF, who went on to develop the system that became known as Krav Maga. It has since been refined for civilian, police and military applications.[4]” Wikipedia
I’ve never been victimized. Bullied yes, usually by men in their 50s and 60s (1) in grocery store parking lots. They don’t get enough respect in real life, so they bark at me to slow down or put my cart up, never when my husband is with me of course. Used to, it didn’t feel like a physical threat, maybe I should’ve thought of it that way all along though. The turning point for me in seeking out self defense was having three children, getting a few years closer to their leaving home, and realizing that these are multi-layered skills I can give them. It’s confidence that spreads to every corner of your life.
Having said all that, we live in paradise. I read the police log which is mostly a peppering of burglaries that sound to me like inside jobs. Who pays $18,000 for a ring? I come from a mean town though, overrun with meth when I left in ‘97. Not sure what the drug-of-choice is these days. From the movies, it looks like prescription pills. As for paradise, who knows where in the world our children will go?
For more about Krav Maga.
1) I’m convinced these same men are who my curvy girlfriend says act like idiots to get her attention. Always at the gas pump. They say ridiculous things and make snorty laughter to get her to notice them. We compare stories. I get mad, and she has a laugh.
]]>How ironic that I would enjoy the simple changes that take place inside a home every day. I never thought I’d be domestic. My course 15 years ago set me on the travelling, sad artist’s path. The engine on that stalled, praise Jehovah. Then I asked myself if I wanted children. Once I knew the answer was yes, I asked how many. One, two, three, four, or any number until menopause? Really, I thought about each of those. My (and Brad’s) answer(s) was 2, 3, or 4 to be worked out as we went along.
In 9th grade, Whitney and I were going to live in New York, go into advertising, and have a dog. No marriage! She ate her words too. I wonder if she reads this.
This week has been domestically astounding. Astounding may not seem like the right word, but in domestic terms, it is! Monday and Tuesday, Arwen’s doctor appt. and the furnace maintenance appt. were both completed BEFORE the appointment times were even supposed to start. This never happens people! But it did.
I added 100 words to mapping the woods which is 100 words more than I had before I sat down. Using yoga and martial arts, I worked through two “injuries” that were probably caused by the yoga or the martial arts. And I’ve been to 3 tae kwon do classes this week because next week is belt promotion. These things happened on top of the usual accomplishments of not yelling whenever I want to, making good food, and giving everyone clean clothes.
Ok, this is not so astounding, but yesterday I scarfed down a delicious, large curry burrito in 15 minutes (which I’ll never do again) and still took Arwen to jazz and later took all the kids to church. A lesser woman would’ve just gone to bed. I certainly wanted to.
Today has been so-so. I think the week was already a success. Today is icing. Next week may be the most boring ever. I’m sure I won’t write about it.
]]>For a writer to say that about a movie of his own book, what a compliment to the movie! I hear he waited a while to even see the movie. He got to the end of his life and was able to look back with a level of pride most don’t get to know. “My life”, “my creative work”, “are justified.” That is quote-worthy and a goal to work toward.
The quote is why I read the book recently and re-watched the movie in the afterglow of the book.
Creatives often suggest that it’s necessary to get physical distance from creative barriers, aka, taking a break, but psychological distance will give creatives an extra spark.
“Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant, solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al., 2009).
◊ For insight: Try imagining your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. This should encourage higher level thinking.” spring.org.uk
Science fiction writing is an obvious creative genre to apply psychological distance. As a child, there was a creepiness about The Twilight Zone that I only felt again reading C.S. Lewis’s sci-fi trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I felt it again reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). Dick is noted for enough insight to affect contemporary philosophy, tapping into a spring of creativity that’s hard for most. Imagine writing stories of interplanetary travel before human vision into space was brighter and farther. I would imagine writers of early sci-fi novels seemed to have more psychological distance and therefore more possibilities to imagine, more unknowns that we know now don’t exist. While I’m hoping for water on Mars and the Moon, C.S. Lewis hoped for Martians. What possibilities!
My own storytelling is not what I call science fiction, but I approach every scenario with the feeling that it’s a universe I’m creating where the laws are not the same as the laws of the East Bay in 2010. It’s how I use psychological distance. My stories do not feel like discoveries of literal possibilities in this world. Psychological distance works just as well for other genres.
I only live on the internet intermittently. It’s not my universe, but I pop in from room to room for my blog, research, social networking, and my obsessing just a bit over my virtual persona. And from what I know of old science fiction writing, I see the same possibilities for internet creatives. It is still brand-new - as are the possibilities. So what of construction, education, civil engineering, homemaking?
]]>Their policy for protecting children travelling alone states that a lone male cannot sit beside one of these children. Mr. Fischer was travelling with his wife on the other side of him.
He said: “I felt humiliated and outraged. They accuse you of being some kind of child molester just because you are sitting next to someone.”
Concern for the children is legitimate, but so many people in policy making positions swing on the pendulum too far. For the same reason, instead of teaching moderation, the culture I grew up in taught that any amount of liquor was evil because of alcoholism in my family and so many of my friends’ families. (It was a dry county but crawling with crystal meth.)
It’s also why you see almost no male teachers on the elementary school level. Arwen had a male substitute in kindergarten several months ago. He was about 35 or 40, and he left a strange picture in my memory sitting in that rocking chair, eerily comical. I can only imagine how many strange looks and questions he got from the mothers. Sadly, the lack of men means almost no male role models in the system for our boys. If Seth didn’t have his daddy to look up to, he would have his P.E. teacher, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario.
]]>Without music, I can’t stop thinking about what I’ll eat for lunch, at what time into the run that sweat starts to make my elbow pits itch, and how that girl is running on her toes. That’s not good for her knees. Maybe I’ll have a generous piece of lemon bread with lemon curd. That’ll be half my lunch there….
Relying on music means a runner isn’t building any mental discipline. Ever since this idea occurred to me a few years ago, it has felt like a challenge calling out, small…. but big to me. Today was my first effort to run without music. Since following a twitter account that chronicles building more running time, running and walking certain intervals seemed like the right distraction from how looong it takes for lunch to get here, even though I just had almonds in the van.
I didn’t miss the music today. I did well, until my 3rd little jog, I took off my sweaty glasses and suddenly felt no focus, literally. Without being able to visually focus on SOMEthing easily, my body began wavering in it’s gait and rhythm. I began subtly “flailing.” My eyes found a cupholder on a machine in front of me, and I was able to run more steadily. Next run, contact lenses.
25 minutes total: 3 min warm up. Jog 3 at 5mph/Walk 3 at 4mph. Repeat cycle and jog at 5.2 mph, then 5.4 mph. Last walk I put the incline on 4. On the cool down, I slowed to 3mph. After, I like stretching my calves by placing one foot on the end of the treadmill, dipping my heal below the edge then standing up on my toes, several times. Feels good.
I came home to stretch, ‘cause I’m too self-concious to do that at the gym. At home, I do some yoga stretching, then I take my time getting into the splits (front and side.) My left leg is still notably favored in the front split. I should post a photo of Seth in the side split. I don’t know where he gets it.
]]>I didn’t get a lot of comments anyway, probably because the content didn’t encourage discussion, surely not edgy enough, for good or bad. I’ve engaged in very little, if any, online conflict. And whenever I was tempted, it was only because the other person was taking me way too seriously. (Since turning off comments, I have wondered what it would be like to get into a virtual knock-down-drag-out. It’s just an amusing thought though. Virtual people are still very real people to me.)
Now it’s more of a diary that anyone is welcome to come and read. Once I began to feel like an adult, at about 22, (and always when I’m feeling really lucid with just the right amount of caffeine) I realized I don’t have anything to hide. Why should a blog be any different?
It’s not only turning off the comments that has changed my own voice. Some credit goes to the 3 hours alone that I get 5 days a week now. I read 3 or 4 times more than I did a year ago. I can get lost in the voices of other writers when the house is cool and quiet.
If a blog could have a physical location, I feels that mine has literally moved. The blog packed up and picked up, and here I am in a new place. The changes in content and writing are subtle, especially to someone stumbling in from a search on “parenting” or “Paul Auster”. Only some of you will notice.
]]>“The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment from its mother, she prodded open the tiny bud of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.
To the mother she said: ‘You should be happy, they bring luck to the household.’ But from the first Anna K did not like the mouth that would not close and the living pink flash it bared to her. She shivered to think of what had been growing in her all these months. The child could not suck from the breast and cried with hunger….”
I thought, “This is not gonna end well.” But it has been a breeze of a read, which is always a good sign. And as the author has several books to his name, I have lots to look forward to :)
]]>When Brad’s father was very ill and his family needed him, Brad went to Mississippi in early 2008, not knowing how long he’d be there. (This is important, as I stayed behind with our children, not knowing how long I’d be alone.) His father passed away three weeks later; a week after that, they had the funeral. Brad was gone for a month. There were a couple of people in the church who offered to help me with the children. And I don’t mind saying yes, but it always seemed “like more trouble than it was worth,” as my mother would say. Am I really gonna get a babysitter just so I can go for a run? My people don’t really do that.
Instead, I have a friend who was going through the same experience at the same time. Only her father-in-law lived a few miles away from them and was dying of a different cancer. We visited each other during those weeks, and she needed my help for a couple of weekends. Her boys came to spend the night so she and her husband could have time alone and time for the funeral. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Is it odd that we were given this experience simultaneously? Or perfectly planned by a God who knows the comforts we need?
People were not meant to raise children alone. Ask a mother who’s husband is travelling for long periods of time, or divorced or just plain abandoned. There is a period of time they’ll tell you, even decades later they remember it, when everything felt black. It’s hard to find joy, even in children you love, when there’s no one sharing it beside you. It never got that bad in 2008. I knew Brad would come home.
Two parents who agree that children deserve respect will keep each other in check. We don’t hit our children. I understand the desire though to knock two heads together. I choose not to. Brad’s daily presence in our lives keeps me on this childrearing path, and vice versa. If a second parent isn’t around, who is there physically to be witness and confessor? Imagine when a single parent doesn’t believe that God is watching either.
My days definitely got murky. I clench my teeth in times of stress. My language internally isn’t clean, and I’m not proud. I’d often put the kids to bed early. There is something endlessly sad and tiring about doing and serving and teaching children when there’s no adult conversation to balance your days. Driving round for my errands, I’d sit in a fog at traffic lights. When the light turned green, I’d have to slowly make my brain tell the rest of me, “Green means go.” And then I’d go.
Later, looking over our spending during that month, I’d been to Trader Joe’s 16 times. That’s 4 trips a week. I’d broken a record! The grocery store never goes anywhere. There will always be women there, and a few men who don’t mind the company of women. We can share it with you, but it still feels like ours. I meet my Trader Joe’s friends on Tuesdays. It’s where I met Lucy who trades me Spanish lessons for help on her spoken English, which is already excellent, and the writing she does in her classes. Arwen is crazy about S., who always gives her attention. S., flirts with the burly men who come by, and the women pretend not to notice. I haven’t seen K. there in a while. I think things are looking up for her, so her routine must’ve changed. And there’s A. who works at the sample bar. She’s the one who feeds us! I’ve met others that I’d know by name but rarely see.
I can’t stand going into Costco anymore, the vast headroom, heavy carts, unparalleled quantities, impulse buys, and clothes I can’t try on - but especially, no one to talk to. Safeway is the same way. Nobody knows my name. They look at the receipt and mispronounce it, which does not offend me. It’s just a stark contrast to the intimacy of the small scale at Trader Joe’s, where they’ll wave across the store if they see me.
]]>“The fact is, we have struggled to make our food so inexpensive that we’ve basically decided to grow cardboard, which, if you’ve ever tasted it, requires plenty of salt, especially if you intend to serve it to guests. Why do you think food is so cheap? Because there’s nothing of value in it! Including flavor. Thus, the salt.”
…and one more thought of note…
“My belief is this: if you eat natural foods, you don’t need to worry about salt. Period.”
]]>Seth: When are we going to stop going to church?
Savannah: When you die.
Arwen: I don’t want to die!
Seth: Yes— everybody dies.
Arwen: (quietly) I don’t want to die.
Seth: Well, you’re gonna!
Savannah, as we passed a graveyard: They don’t go to church now.
Daddy: Don’t be morbid.
Seth, concerning the dead: They’re close to church.
]]>