Comma Dot Comma

mea culpa– I’ve been QUITE busy of late, and in fact have time to write this post only because I decided it was better to skip an event (half hour drive each way) than just show up for the last 20 minutes. Yeah, running an hour and a half behind schedule seems about the status quo. A friend posted this video on facebook and for unknown reasons I love it. It enters the pantheon of favorite dance videos. Where is Matt Dancing?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

In some ways living in Phoenix makes me feel like a kid again. Growing up in an agricultural valley in Northern California where rugged ranchers and stoic individualists abounded prepared me well for AZ. Gun racks hanging on truck cabs don’t even phase me. But even more than that, it is the sense of something happening– of being on the cutting edge of major changes. California always had to deal with problems and opportunities before the rest of the country, whether immigration, growth, or the new economy. Arizona in the 2000’s is right there where it’s all happening. Over on the East Coast, there’s a lot of talk, but most of the implementation happens elsewhere.

Immigration is up front and personal in Phoenix, which is a major hub for people arriving overland from central and south america. We have an infamous sherriff on a major round-up mission of “illegals.” We have a new law that makes business owners very antsy, because it can shut them down permanently if they knowingly hire workers with false or no documentation. There are grim predictions of the economy collapsing as the labor supply dries up. Which goes to show that immigration reform is a non-partisan issue– businesses who need employees will be holding hands with the human rights activists, singing kumbyah in no time.

And, as one of the sunniest habitable areas on the planet, Arizona is trying to become a major generator of cheap, efficient solar power– currently we have plans to build the largest thermal solar plant in the world. For over two decades, it’s also been one of the two fastest-growing states. Arizona has to deal with urban sprawl, pollution, and resource managment more or less by the seat of its pants and the hair on its chinny-chin chin. Where will all these people live, work, and dump their garbage? Where will they get water? How do we get them to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? We have one of the worst K-12 public education systems around, making Phoenix a magnet for experimental schools and programs. And the growing population is taxing the resources of the health care system.

With construction as one of the biggest industries in the state, we are taking a major hit in the economy, resulting in legislative deadlock on the budget for next year. Everything domestic issue that the presidential candidates bring up– energy, education, economy, health care, immigration– is the stuff I experience in rush hour and allergies and personal stories every day. It’s kinda fun in a way.

This movie clip from Season 1 of the Muppets goes out to all you folks trying to make a living off your imaginations. I honor the Gonzo in you all.

Tending a vegetable garden is a soap opera. Since I planted my 2×2 raised-bed kitchen garden in late February, I’ve been swept to the heights of triumph and the depths of despair multiple times. I’d gotten tired of the old broken concrete paving stones lying around the yard in little piles so I decided to buil them into a garden wall. I lined it with plastic and filled it with store-bought dirt, manure, and organic fertilizers (I have bone meal, liquified fish, and liquified worm poo, all of which work well if stinkily).

The strawberries were the first plant to bear fruit, within a week of planting! Since then it has been a race between me and some small animal that takes a bite out of every strawberry the moment it is ripe. I think the animal gets about half, and I get about half– my share comes out to two tiny strawberries, the size of my pinky tip, a week.

The two cilantro plants burned in the sunny garden bed so I moved them to the side of the house, where they immediately went to seed, dashing my tender dreams of 100% garden salsa. The Jalepenos are getting there, though I don’t see how that spindly little plant holds up those fat peppers. It’s a marvel of vegetal can-do attitude and I try to congratulate its fine efforts whenever I’m out there.

The other herbs are doing just fine– basil, oregano, thyme, and feverfew– though I made the mistake of putting a gob of feverfew leaves in my mouth raw. This is not an activity I recommend to others, unless you like lemony-paint-thinner flavored things. I planted it because it is good for migraines, but even tea made from the dry leaves is pretty bitter.

The stars of the garden are the tomato plants. I have two. Well, three, if you count the two intertwined ones I accidently planted together back when they were babies. I wash them with soap and water to keep down the flies and use a dry paintbrush to spread pollen from flower to flower (New title: Tomato Artist?) I’ve planted poles from the now defunct bamboo patch to create a makeshift burlap awning so the they don’t get too much sun (we broke 105 degrees yesterday) and spent a week anxiously tending a plant that turned half-yellow overnight. There were two possibilities: A root fungus had attacked, or I had broken some of the main roots off in my rough anti-fly maneuvers. If it was the former, the whole garden was probably doomed. If it was the latter, I was a bad gardener but at least my two weekly strawberries would survive. After days of mooning about and watching, I declared brute force the culprit. Yay! The tomato plant is recovering.

Yesterday I went out to do some therapeutic tomato-squeezing, as is my wont, and just as I was reaching toward a juicy red tomato, I spotted a scorpion resting on a leaf. Scorpions are not tomato eaters (they like crickets), so it was probably attracted by the shady dampness of the garden on a hot afternoon. But it creeped me out! I ran away. It was still there a few hours later. I hit it like a baseball with a stick for my bat and it flew out of the garden I know not where. In theory I don’t begrudge a scorpion seeking a little soothing garden time, as I do myself. Pragmatically, I don’t want to lay my hand on one as I putter in the garden. That would really hurt.

I’ll be teaching two online creative writing courses through the Piper Studio this summer, starting June 2. Discount summer rates of $100 for an eight week course. Same ones I mentioned earlier this spring, and still buckets of fun!

I’m suprised by what a fan of online writing courses I’ve become over the past four years– before I started doing it I wondered if you could create online the “warm fuzzy” atmosphere needed to encourage new or sensitive writers. As it turns out, you can. The trick is in the persona– the teacher has to have a very strong presence that sets the tone and erases the antiseptic feel of plain black letters on a white screen. Some people go the mothering route; others the philosophical route; I go the zany-yet-thoughtful, faux bossy route. It’s sort of like blogging in that you take some true version of yourself, and highlight/intensify certain aspects of it so they carry through a two-dimensional medium. Or like public speaking, where you still speak from the heart but change your pacing and volume from normal conversation. The teacher has to be the leader in humanizing the environment, and then the students usually follow suit. The medium itself becomes a way for everyone to develop his or her writing.

The other thing I’ve noticed about online teaching is that you need so many more instructions! We have no idea how much information we exchange via eye contact, tone, and body language. In a face-to-face classroom, I can give a one-line verbal assignment (”Write a poem in which an inanimate object complains”), judge from people’s expressions if they understand what I’m asking them to do, and follow up with just the right amount of explanation. Online, obviously, that does not work at all. I’ve been on the receiving end of opaque instructions and find the experience exasperating. “Answer the review questions.” What review questions? Where? Do I just answer them in my head or is there a screen where I must enter the answers? Online teachers, do not exasperate your students. Sometimes the poet in me cringes at the wordiness of online assignments, but if the person can just get straight to work without feeling confused about what needs to be done, every word is worth it. Even if there are very few requirements, I write that down: “Choose any subject, style, and length that you want.” I want my students to spend their energy on the creative process of writing and not on mindreading.

Most of my thoughts are related to dirt. The backyard and a few unsightly portions of the front yard are full of pits, trenches, and heaps of dirt, evidence of our belabored attempts to install a sprinkler system and plant a patch of grass in the backyard. Landscaping an older home (ours is vintage 1975, which I know is not old to east coasters but in Phoenix people hardly ever buy houses more than a few yrs old) involves a lot of destruction. So far we have removed:

1 rusty pool fence
3 tree stumps
1 tree
2 clumps of decorative grass
1 4×10 patch of bamboo
4 bushes
2 planters
1 yardful of knee-high weeds

We rototilled the back yard at the end of March and since then dirt has been blowing into the pool and the house at every opportunity. Mmm! Grit! Gotta love it. With all our tilling and digging and uprooting, though, we’ve uncovered a number of suprises.

1 plastic easter egg containing a mini candybar
1 carefully folded piece of magenta cloth
1 cats-eye marble (the big kind that we used to call boulders)
1 patch of asphalt
1 patch of concrete
1 coil of disconnected TV cable, which apparently connected our house and the neighbor’s at one time.
2 pre-existing non-functional drip systems
1 underground tree stump
Several bricks and paving stones
1 cockroach nest
1 bees nest
Countless nails and bolts
Countless big rocks.

Dirt, dirt, dirt. It is hard to imagine a time a time when it will be settled down and doing its job beneath a layer of grass and gravel.

It’s time for a visit from our favorite Netflix reviewer. Today, he weighs in on the movie “Circle of Friends.”

“I cry like the baby to watching this movie of girl with plumpness finding for the love. Mini Driver has for me the much of beauty to makes me wondering of her boyfriend playing with her sexy friend. I finding myself twirling in tornado of emotional for the hurtness of the Mini for suffer betrayal of lover, but for drunking by evil sexy friend. I cry the many of tears for sadnesses and triumphing. If you don’t sameness, you must be missing heart that is beatings in your chest cavity!”

An interesting post on Earth Day over on KarenJoy’s blog got me started on a long commment that I decided to convert into a post after it reached its second parenthetical aside.

Her post reminded me of some of my early experiences when we moved here from the liberal east coast. One thing about the culture of Arizona that struck me was how fiercely people resisted any label that smacked of, oh, how shall we call it– non-conservatism. On several occasions I heard people say, “I’m no _________ (fill in the blank with your favorite term, liberal, environmentalist, feminist), but…” and then share a deeply held belief or lifestyle choice that, to my mind, fit quite comfortably in that category.

Does this happen because people associate those labels with the most extreme ideas within those categories (For example, the tiny number of feminists who believe we’d be better off without any men at all)?. Abstract terms like these are catch-alls that hold a wide variety of ideas about a certain theme, and people who do identify with these labels often do not even agree with each other (Consider the label “Christian,” which I gladly accept, even though I share it with a few people who march around with signs that say “God Hates You”– an idea I do not agree with, to say the least). Is there guilt by association? Let’s take the term “environmentalist”. Some, if not many, environmentalists are motivated in their efforts at conservation by philosophies which are not Christian and in fact may be antithetical to Christianity. Should I eschew association with such a label due to the differing motivations among my fellow label-ees? I admit it’s not really a fair question since I had an answer before I even wrote it.

I’d describe an environmentalist as anyone who seriously considers, and tries to minimize, the environmental costs and consequences of their use of resources. If someone asked me if I were an environmentalist, I’d probably say yes. But in terms of actual choices about food, purchases, and use of water and energy, I suspect that my friend KarenJoy, who does not want to be called by this label, is actually more of an environmentalist than me.

I think it would be a fun experiment to take some of these assumption-and-association-prone terms and get a bunch of one-sentence definitions from people. Do you think it’s been done already?

Liberal
Conservative
Enviromentalist
Feminist
Politician
Emergent Christian
Fundamentalist Christian
Evangelical Christian
Humanist
Activist
Evolutionist
Creationist
Spiritual
Religious
Intellectual

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m suddenly so efficient. Dr. G has been gone most of the week, gallivanting around the country presenting his research and whatnot, and I’ve been fending for myself on the homefront. This consists, in part, of sleeping poorly and having dreams of the pool overflowing in the backyard while a row of evil Harley Davidsons charges the front. I also start to say things and then sheepishly stop, suddenly realizing that no one is there. I miss my Dr. G and will be glad to have him back. And yet, with him gone, I get so much more done. The annoying pile of tangled necklaces has even been sorted through, each one dusted and hung on a peg board; the leather sofa has been treated with a protective salve and the cushions rotated; I hung a picture and deep-cleaned the kitchen, dug up a bunch of bamboo in the backyard and treated my tomato plants for whiteflies. This in addition to the usual routines.

The question is, why? There is nothing in particular that he and I do together that would prevent me from doing things that otherwise languish undone for weeks. Granted, he did not grow up, as I did, in a home where Saturday Chores held a spot of honor just below loving Jesus and honoring your parents. So, these days, when I occasionally “get my chore on” Dr. G. opts for the Duck and Cover response. He does not believe in the Implacable Force of Chore Doing that was practically a member of my family. Perhaps my knowing that he is not a chore-mania believer subconsciously dampens my task-based enthusiasm when he’s around. Or maybe it takes plenty of homemaking effort to simply live life together, to pay the proper attention to the one I love. Most of the time, I will happily neglect any number of chores to sit out on the back patio or watch 1950’s TV shows together.

It was iron deficient. It was brittle. Its aged branches hung over the roof and creaked ominiously during storms. Its roots pressed up against the house and snaked under it. The trunk was about five feet from the front wall. It was only a matter of time until Something Bad Happened, so we signed its death warrant. The executioner came, muscles bulging just like they do on the billboard photo. He had his big truck and his posse and his ladders and his saws.

It was also one of the reasons we bought the house. It towered over the neighborhood, about three stories high with a trunk so wide we couldn’t reach our arms around it. It was a good thirty years older than the house itself, a tree that had seen the neighborhood creep up the hill in the 70’s and absorbed the sight with stoicism and aplomb. It kept one whole side of the house cool on hot days. And, being a eucalyptus, its leaves smelled great. This is Phoenix and a real tree is a treasure, except when it is a menace. A menacing treasure was our tree.

When I got home from work yesterday, all that was left was the edge of a root butting against the house and a pile of fragrant red sawdust. Alas! It was as if Dr. G smiled at me and his four front teeth were suddenly missing. It is sad to be the Destroyer of a tree.

See it here: http://commadotcomma.net/blog/2007/08/26/joining-the-landed-gentry