Comma Dot Comma

Anonymous survey results:

These results are being made available to everyone except my sister, who stated that she didn’t want to know.
As of this writing, there were 14 respondents and all but one of you excrete at least one fluid in the shower. More than half of you cry; half of you urinate; many of you bleed. I wonder if the crying and the bleeding are at all related? Fluids that do not appear in the table were not selected by anyone. We seem to draw the line at the same place– high-fives all around! Though really, jumping in the shower is not the first thing one thinks of mid-vomit. So that omission may be simple practicality.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the letter P and the number 14.

So I was washing my wads of snot down the drain, and I thought to myself: “Self, are you an anomaly? Or do others also excrete things in the shower?” So, being the Junior Knower that I am, I thought I’d ask The Public. Anonymously, of course, thanks to surveymonkey. Also, it’s been quite awhile since we had a quiz around these parts. I’ll report back on results once we have a sufficient sample size, and I will, of course, participate. Hope it doesn’t throw off the results.

Click here to take survey

Update: as of  12:14 am Thursday, 10 people have taken the quiz.  I think I’ll give it another day or so to accumulate a few more results.  Realized too late that I forgot to include “none” as an option for question 1.  If you haven’t yet taken the survey, and “none” would be your answer for #1, just skip that one.

Dr. G’s mom has a new kitten, dubbed Gizmo.  I swiped this picture off of his sister Marie’s blog because it is cute enough to be on cuteoverload.

Knowing stuff — facts, how to do stuff, how to find out about stuff, how to show what stuff you know– was pretty important in our house growing up. If any of us kids asked our parents a question, they were likely to ask right back, “What do you think?” or “How could you find out the answer to that?” I knew how to scour encyclopedias and set up controlled experiments long before I was allowed to go on bike rides by myself.

In a house like that you’d better believe that The Dad had to know the most of anyone. As Chief Knower my dad cut a pretty impressive figure. He could out-calculate, out-cook, out-repair, out-wilderness, out-remember, out-science-trivia, and out-design everyone we knew. One of my favorite family activities as I got older was to go head-to-head with him in knowledge and reasoning battles. In my mind they were like chivalric jousting sessions– will the apprentice surpass her teacher? He did not enjoy these debates as much as I did, especially on the occasions when I led my younger siblings in well-planned group attacks against the reigning order. I knew that to succeed, I would have to develop an artillery of hard-hitting, far-reaching skills, especially for times when my actual knowledge and experience came up, er, a bit short. The strategery:

• Act confident.
• Insofar as possible, know a lot about the subject.
• Use details and examples.
• When you don’t have many details, pad them with facts from a similar field (if you are talking about waffles, bring in info about pancakes).
• Employ real statistics when you have them.
• Employ fake statistics when you don’t (with caveats).
• Call on your greater experience.
• Call on common sense.
• Elaborate the consequences of a mistaken point of view (lots of room for fun in this one!).

I had occasional success, but winning was never as awesome an experience as I had imagined. These days we have left behind the high-stakes battles over rules and religion in favor of more mundane, though perhaps equally unsolvable, topics, such as my reading habits. Do I read more books than almost everyone? The other day Dad and I went back and forth on this issue for about five minutes. At last, the fake statistic “There might be 25 people in the country who read more” was employed. It was perfect: specific, untestable, arresting, and mitigated by the caveat “might.” Case closed!

The fake statistic, the dodgy fact, the perfect comeback: loveable and lovely one and all. And that is why, to this day in the Land of Dottie Comma, you will hear me make statements –in even ordinary, non-debate conversations– such as “I was 87% sure I would have to make a trip to the DMV.” (Dr. G: “Oh really? Not 88%? not 86%?”) And if you disagree with me about the value of fake statistics and dodgy facts, I invite you to consider the wasteland all our conversation and poetry and fiction would become without them. Envision a vast waterless moonscape, with a crater for every place an apt comparison was left out and a pile of radioactive decay for every place that vagueries such as “pretty much” and “almost all” had to be left in. There are three-legged frogs hopping around the dried-up pond where metaphor and exagerration used to grow. You see where your logic takes you?

Should I be talking about tacos? Last week my friends lost their son. I noted it on the blog, and then within a few days was onto squirmy wormies and tacos. It’s a version of a question that keeps recurring in my writing life, a choice that is never made once and for all. The first reason I ask the question is because, as fellow blogger Julie has so eloquently explained, after a death one feels the world should stop and acknowledge the enormous loss; the world should somehow show it is affected. The world will not stop, but friends and family can. We can create a space to honor and remember.
The second reason I ask is because devoting similar space to both large events and trivialities may appear to grant them equivalence. Newspapers give the most space and the best spots to the most important stories– does this quantitative representation of value in journalism carry over to essays and blog journals and fiction and poetry?

I tell my students that the chief requirement for a piece of writing to be worthy of a reader is that it be interesting. (An exaggeration). On the other end of the spectrum, I got fired from the university newspaper for refusing to write columns about anything other than religious virtues. I haven’t read those pieces in many years and so can’t testify to their literary merit one way or the other. At the time it seemed frivilous and vain to wastespace on random thoughts and irrelevant opinions, as I had done (rather successfully) the year before. My 20-year-old self would probably find this blog a crashing betrayal of her ideals.

And yet. To notice or desire one thing is not to forget or devalue another. My skin smells a little stale, my hair feels stiff due to tangles. The rock tumbler in the closet grinds like gnashing teeth in the closet. Beyond physical sensations there are the fragments of thought and influence. There is Ezekiel, who left that place with “anger and bitterness, and the strong hand of the Lord upon [him]”. There is my brother’s new song Groovybaby, LSU’s This is the Healing, Milton’s “mazy error” of nectar running through a soon-to-be-lost paradise. A few layers beneath that I find an area I might call constant prayer, where those I love remain. This is the part of me that is sort of metaphorically lifting each one up before God, into a big swoop of love, truth, and consolation. Sometimes a face or situation will push through the other layers and occupy my thoughts and prayers, canceling out all other concerns. Other times I drop down to visit and float through the love-swoop.

All these things coexist. I want tacos, and I grieve with a friend. I imagine how Project Runway will turn out tonight, and I rejoice about news of an upcoming marriage. Should I write only about what is most important? Do I need to give the big things more room?

I guess today I will let the big things themselves make room. Here, in one of the loveliest things I have read in months, is Mike’s tribute to his son.

O! Don Pedro’s! How have I missed thee since the summer of 99? Let me count the ways.

I wrote letters from Africa to my Mexican-American aunt, begging for the secrets of handmade tortilla making. I had it all: the beans, the tomatoes, the peppers, the onions, the garlic, the corn flour… I lacked only expertise, which alas, constantly eluded me.

I ate pupusas in the storefront restaurants of my El Salvadoran/neo-hippie neighborhood in DC and was delighted but not satisfied.

I visited the most highly touted Mexican restaurant in Baltimore only to find ground beef, iceberg lettuce, yellow cheese, and indie rock T-shirts.

O! Don Pedro’s! No one in the whole restaurant spoke English and I navigated your menu by pictures and pointing. Girls with ponytails and tattoos brought heavy oval plates, steaming with shredded chicken. I loaded the flat, greasy tacos with pickled peppers and radishes and green salsa and lime juice. A dollar or two each. Perfecto.

Even Mexico didn’t have Mexican food that good. Back in my youthful idealist phase I worked for a few months in an orphanage where the food was positively Dickensian. At breakfast, all the kids would fill up on fresh tortillas from the lady down the road and I quickly learned to follow suit. My fellow staff members and I regularly cleaned out the pastries sold in the corner store, and we lived for weekends at the office where we could get tacos from a little stand on the street; the meat was chopped into tiny squares and grilled to the crispiness of crackers. Back at the orphanage, the teenaged residents took turns “cooking” meals which usually featured (I kid you not) boiled-practically-unto-a-paste cabbage as the main ingredient.

O! Don Pedro’s! I thought it inevitable that there would be hundreds like you in Phoenix, and it used to make me dance– nay, shimmy– around the kitchen in anticipation. Your brethren surely must be here somewhere. But the Pink Taco is not your brother. Nor is Filiberto’s, the 24-hour-place where the rice is orange and the refried beans soak the whole styrofoam plate in brown liquid. Nor is Chino Bandido, the strangely yummy mexican/chinese takeout place where you can get your General Tso’s cooked up in a quesadilla.

O! Perfect Taco! You are out there in the Phoenix Metro Area. One day soon I will find you. Keep the radishes fresh.

Last night, as we pulled into our parking space after a successful CD-trading venture (One of our finds was the lovely Extra Golden), something writhed in the headlights. A very yellow something, or rather, group of somethings. We got out to inspect. It was a handful of caterpillars, anywhere from two to four inches long, with big red spikes on their business ends. Their legs rotated like joysticks and took them zooming around the parking space at an alarming rate. We inspected them like the vaguely interested urbanites we are, and then retreated into the house, happy with our impromptu evening zoology and equally happy to abandon it.

Caterpillars are interesting when they are few in number. When they reveal their intent to take over, that’s another situation altogether. This morning I found that the few scouts of the previous night had given way to a huge migratory wave coming off the mountain behind our house. It was as if someone had centrifuged yellow paint across every road and sidewalk, except that most of the paint splatters moved, quite swiftly. My internet research tells me that every few years they come in such numbers that their flattened bodies cause road closures due to the slick. This brood seems a little more localized– At the pottery studio, which is in a similarly undeveloped area but several miles north, there wasn’t a single yellow squirmer to be seen. This afternoon on my return, I found them mostly ground into the roads but still determinedly clinging to the walls of the condo and the screen door. They squirmed and fell with loud plops as I hurriedly turned the key and swung it open. It was a close call– there were a few on the ground that had poked their noses over the threshold. I begged them not to come in the house.

Here’s a good picture of one from http://www.calflora.net/wildplaces/index.html

They are the larva of the White-lined Sphinx moth, which sometimes tricks people into thinking it’s a hummingbird. F-f-f fascinating, I’m sure. Imagine being about its size, when it rears up with its red horn and simultaneously oozes green stuff from its mouth. That would be scary.

Kyrie, rex genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleyson.
Kyrie, luminis fons rerumque conditor, eleyson.
Kyrie, qui nos tuæ imaginis signasti specie, eleyson.
Christe, Dei forma humana particeps, eleyson.
Christe, lux oriens per quem sunt omnia, eleyson.
Christe, qui perfecta es sapientia, eleyson.
Kyrie, spiritus vivifice, vitæ vis, eleyson.
Kyrie, utriqusque vapor in quo cuncta, eleyson.
Kyrie, expurgator scelerum et largitor gratitæ; quæsumus propter nostrasoffensas noli nos relinquere, O consolator dolentis animæ, eleyson.

Lord, King and Father unbegotten, True Essence of the Godhead, have mercy on us.
Lord, Fount of light and Creator of all things, have mercy on us.
Lord, Thou who hast signed us with the seal of Thine image, have mercy on us.
Christ, True God and True Man, have mercy on us.
Christ, Rising Sun, through whom are all things, have mercy on us.
Christ, Perfection of Wisdom, have mercy on us.
Lord, vivifying Spirit and power of life, have mercy on us.
Lord, Breath of the Father and the Son, in Whom are all things, have mercy on us.
Lord, Purger of sin and Almoner of grace, we beseech Thee abandon us not because of our Sins,

O Consoler of the sorrowing soul, have mercy on us.

(A middle-ages kyrie and its translation, from the Catholic Encyclopedia.)

Dr. G walked in the door, took in the scene, and did a weird involuntary motion, similar to condensing four sizes and then slowly re-inflating. I stopped experimenting with stitch sizes to check on him. As the sound of the sewing machine died away, he regained his full stature. “It is very strange to see you using my mother’s sewing machine.”

Yes, ma-in-law has bequeathed me her reliable 1973 Kenmore electric sewing machine, purchased before Dr. G’s birth and kept in near-constant motion throughout his childhood. We have many quilts and even a little apron that she made for him on that sewing machine. It’s no wonder that such an iconic piece of childhood, with the rythmic chunk-chunk sound of its moving needle, threw him off-kilter. But it’s still going strong! Sturdy, compact, straightforward. Even a career girl like myself can successfully use it.

(Image from www.wildflowersewing.com)

I started off with a couple pillows to make sure I could sew a straight seam, and now I’m on to a dress– sleeveless V-neck brown with small turquoise polka-dots, magnifique! Dated? Perhaps. Somewhat garish? We shall see. I’ve already altered the pattern so I can have bits of material with the reverse pattern (brown dots on turquoise) garnish (that’s not the right word! What do sewing people call it? Trim?) the hem and waist. A dangerous move. If I were 007, Q would be telling me over my Rolex watch/walkie talkie to abort mission and go back to plan A, otherwise the lives of thousands, including my own, could be lost. But like 007 I will press on, because though there is more risk, there is so much more to gain. On y va!

For some reason I keep getting surprised by the mix of loveliness and trouble that I encounter as I move through life. There are very few pure moments– everything is jumbled together. I’m thinking about Sudan but Arizona insists on oozing its gorgeousness all over my metaphorical windscreen. A drive of an hour or two in almost any direction will yield gasp-worthy vistas; a close study of any square yard of mountainside compels me to look closer, and yet closer, at the intricately balanced system of flora and fauna.

To wit:

Oak Creek Canyon, near Sedona

View of Sedona’s Red Rocks from a mesa top near Prescott

Desert Flowers with a Blurry Butterfly

Rainbow outside Tuscon

View at dusk, northbound from Tuscon