A miscellany for your reading pleasure: balloon animals, soccer tips, anecdotes, and beyond
balloon-dog, by AppleApple*
*Yes, she made her own balloon-dog. She looked up instructions on the internet. When she explained the twisting technique to me, my brain malfunctioned. That is because, when it comes to engineering of any practical sort, I am the opposite of gifted. She’s thinking she could sell balloon animals this summer at street parties; we weren’t convinced the yard sale approach would work for such a specific product.
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Here’s what I’ve learned at soccer, so far. This is purely skills-related. Skip over this section if you’re not remotely interested in playing the game of soccer.
First game: I learned to touch the ball.
Second game: I learned that I was fast. And that this is handy, if you like touching the ball.
Third game: I learned that a pass into the net is as good as a hard shot; likely better. Perhaps not coincidentally, I also learned how to kick the ball without injuring myself.
Fourth game: I learned to run with the ball by kicking it in front of me rather than trying to dribble it at my foot. I also learned how to do a throw-in. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way–during game play, by doing it wrong the first time.
Fifth game: I learned that when heading for the net, I need to turn in toward the middle a lot sooner. Unfortunately, in this lesson I’ve only gotten as far as realizing that I must be doing something wrong. I get the ball, start running up the wing, and then (mostly) lose it because I come up against a defender. Kevin tells me I shouldn’t really be coming up against a defender, but should be making my decision earlier either to turn or to pass.
Maybe in the sixth game I will learn to keep my head up?
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While speaking of learning things, here’s an anecdote to make you feel better about yourself.
Yesterday I was at the bank to make a simple deposit, and found myself waiting for ten minutes in a line-up of one (me), while one teller served one client, and several other teller-types walked briskly around in the background avoiding catching my eye, as if to say, I’m much too busy to open up another window here. Is a ten minute wait long enough to start getting truly impatient? Because I was truly getting impatient. In fact, steam was coming out of my ears.
When finally I handed over my cheques for deposit, a transaction that look less than a minute to complete, the teller thanked me for my patience. It felt farcical, like I was part of a reverse psychology experiment. I almost replied, “It would be much more accurate to thank me for my impatience because it’s clear I’ve got none of that other stuff, and you know it as well as I do!”
Oh my goodness, I am not a patient person. It’s the main reason I swear so much while driving. All that time wasted, endless inefficiencies, and being at the mercy of systems not of my own creation.
My goal is to find something good in every situation, to waste nothing, by which I mean to find in any situation something redeeming: educational or funny or comforting or amusingly distracting or morally relevant; but I sure enough wasted those ten minutes at the bank, seething with irritation. What do you think I should have done to salvage the situation?
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One more miscellaneous item, relevant today-only, and only if you live in the greater Toronto area. If you pick up today’s Toronto Star, you’ll find a special section on Canada Day, with a bunch of stories and a few photos by me! I’m especially pleased about the photos, though this job has spurred me to make a few minor (and thankfully inexpensive) improvements to my current photo-processing and -storing capacity. I would like to add Photographer to my toolkit of marketable skills, and this is an excellent start.
I see myself as a workmanlike photographer rather than an artistically-skilled one. But I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and that there’s a place for it.
It fits in with my philosophy that there’s a place for all kinds of writing, too; I aspire to be able to work across the genres. I think anyone who writes serious literary fiction should damn well be able to write light-hearted party-planning pieces, and snappy headlines, and generally entertaining well-constructed articles on most any topic imaginable, assuming there’s time to do proper research. These take technical skill, as much as anything else. I also believe that writing across the genres will make me a better literary writer. (My only caution would be: don’t get stuck in a rut, and don’t write the same thing over and over; write widely, if possible.)
And that concludes my On Being a Writer 101 lecture for today.
How to bake really good bread
Gone writing …
Gone writing. Yes, again. I’ve spent the morning working on a writing-for-pay job, and now I’ve got the afternoon (an hour or two, anyway) to work on hopeful-writing, ie. the new book. I’d love to tell you more, but I’m way too superstitious. If this makes it to a full manuscript, in months or years or whenever, I will run around shouting the news from any available top: hilltop, rooftop, mountaintop. You get the picture.
Meantime, imagine me quietly plugging away.
(Total aside: I keep hearing about these crowd-funded novel-writing enterprises — it seems the latest thing to do. Forget about applying for a professional grant, and sign up instead to ask many online strangers to donate a few dollars each toward a specific project. I’m kind of shaking my head, but also curious; under what circumstances could that possibly work?)
The week in suppers: what’s easiest?
sticky fingers
Monday’s menu:: Supper at Grandpa’s: BBQd chicken; mashed potatoes; corn; green salad; strawberry rhubarb crisp.
Dessert contribution:: Since I didn’t have to cook a meal, I offered to bring salad and dessert. It was a treat to have time to bake something. And nothing beats a strawberry rhubarb crisp. (My dad provided the ice cream.)
Tuesday’s menu:: Beans and rice; tortillas; cucumber and tomato salad.
Because:: The beans were easy to cook on an afternoon when I was home with small children anyway. But Kevin and I hardly had a chance to fit a bite in before we were racing off in different directions with various children to different soccer games. We both had big bowls of beans and rice as a bedtime snack instead. Sigh.
Wednesday’s menu:: Sausages on the grill; buns; green salad with radish, avocado, and tomato.
Because:: The prolonged heatwave was starting to catch up with our un-air-conditioned house, and I couldn’t bear the thought of turning on the stove.
Convenience:: I’ve gotten in the habit of texting Kevin, late afternoon, to request pickup of some supper item or another. Tonight it was buns. His office is a short walk from the grocery store, or from Vincenzo’s (a local store that has a bakery, butcher, and fishmonger), both of which are basically on the way home.
Thursday’s menu:: BLTs. Vegetarian option: goat cheese instead of bacon.
Because:: We had bacon in the freezer. And home-baked bread. And it was easy enough to ask Kevin to pick up tomatoes on the way home. And because I was running out of menu-planning steam. A popular supper.
Friday’s menu:: Gallo pinto (beans and rice) fried in bacon fat. Salsas; tortilla chips; asparagus; cherry tomatoes; vegetable empanadas.
Because:: We were picking up empanadas and salsas from Bailey’s, and I knew they’d go perfectly with leftover beans and rice.
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Weekend kitchen accomplishments: Cleaning the kitchen (does that count?). Four loaves of bread. A second strawberry rhubarb crisp. (Confession time: I ate leftover strawberry rhubarb crisp at least twice for lunch during the week, and I’m still not sick of it.)
Saturday’s menu:: Taco salad. We compromised and left it deconstructed. We also ate at a ridiculously late hour, so this was essentially a supper-themed bed-time snack. After which, I went to poetry book club and ate several pieces of a rhubarb custard pie.
Sunday’s menu:: BBQd chicken; steamed rice; sweet and sour sauce; roasted asparagus; plus the aforementioned crisp for dessert.
Because:: Grandma offered to pick chicken up for us at the market. The sweet and sour sauce was a hit, though I found the recipe a bit bland. Next time, more ginger and vinegar, and less water (who needs water in their sweet and sour sauce??).
Prelude:: To a soccer game (mine), and therefore I couldn’t eat much. I was nervous. We were playing the team that had whupped us last Sunday. Turns out, I had cause to be nervous. We were missing two of our best players and had almost no subs; I played 90 minutes straight (so did a bunch of others). Despite our best efforts, they killed us. On the bright side, I was able to run hard the whole game, and suffered no injuries! Came home and soothed myself with leftovers, plus a gigantic helping of crisp.
Lazy Sunday reflections on having it all
Lazy Sunday morning.
My two littlest are playing an elaborate imaginary game together. (During yesterday’s game we overheard CJ saying, in a very harrassed-sounding tone: “I have to do the laundry and make the supper and clean the house and I just can’t do it all by myself! You are going to have to help!” “Is he being the mother?” I wondered, but we couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to disturb the game to ask.)
My bigger daughter has given up trying to join in on the game and is practicing the piano instead.
The eldest kid is at his second swimming birthday party of the weekend.
And Kevin is at a soccer game. I’ve got one tonight too. We admitted to each other that we didn’t really feel like playing. I said, “I just don’t want to get injured,” and he laughed, because that was exactly what he’d been thinking. Honestly, after every game I limp home with some injury or another, which heals itself in time for the next game; so does he. I’m pretty sure this a factor of age. AppleApple pooh-poohed my complaints of injury, and said it was just to be expected — something always hurts after a soccer game! But, then, she’s 9, and heals quickly. I’m a good deal older, and appear not to have the same bounce-back abilities.
This was a lazy week, exercise-wise, in part due to a soccer injury. I did something to my hamstring, and couldn’t lift my leg for two days. Awkward for stairs, unhelpful for long distance training. Skipped my Monday morning swim in part because of the injury, but also because I had a deadline and I was worried about being too tired (I’m quite sure I could not exercise as voraciously were I working full-time; positive, in fact). Skipped my Tuesday evening run due to injury, plus insane heat. Ran Wednesday morning as usual, felt twitchy for first kilometre, then fine. Dragged self to spin/kettlebell class, but barely, Thursday morning. Skipped Thursday evening run due to thunder storm. Skipped getting up early on Friday due to meeting friend for breakfast. Finally, yesterday, forced self out for a long run after spending the day cleaning house.
And here is what I can report. I didn’t really feel like a) cleaning the house or b) going for a long run, but I sure felt a hell of a lot better after accomplishing b) than a).
I spent six hours cleaning the house. I do not exaggerate. It was filthy, disorganized, and disastrous. At the end of those six hours, I felt discouraged, grumpy, and accusatory. Cleaning is so pointless. Within minutes of it being scrubbed, someone walked on my kitchen floor! Can you imagine! With feet that had ever so recently been outside! And with predictable results! Also, every cleaned thing had the effect of showing up every thing that still needed cleaning and therefore looked infinitely dirtier as a result of being in proximity to the cleaned thing.
So I went for a run. I made it 15km. It wasn’t easy; in fact, it was a lot harder than the cleaning had been, in many ways. It took at least as much mental fortitude to continue. I wasn’t sure I could keep up the pace I was demanding of myself. But at the end, after I’d finished what I’d set out to accomplish, by golly didn’t I feel amazing. Elated. Content. Cheerily conversational.
Which is why our house is likely to be, for the most part, not that clean. And why I am likely to be, injuries notwithstanding, reasonably fit.
Whenever I get around to cleaning, I think about my Grandma King, whom my mother remembers rising at 5am in order to scrub her kitchen floor (she also worked a full-time job and looked after five children.) Different times, I guess. When a woman was judged on the cleanliness of her kitchen floor. But we’re still judged, aren’t we? Or maybe it’s that we judge ourselves, and harshly, comparing ourselves to models of perfection, to super-women, and inevitably falling short, as Anne-Marie Slaughter points out in her excellent and nerve-striking article in The Atlantic.
I heard myself on the radio yesterday, briefly, talking about The Juliet Stories. I called AppleApple down to listen (she was the only one nearby). I was mashing garlic to make a ranch dressing and listening to myself talk on the radio. The voice on the radio didn’t sound a thing like the voice in my head; in fact, the radio voice sounded much calmer, approachable, resonant, friendly. “Did that really sound like me?” I asked AppleApple afterwards, who looked perplexed. “Of course,” she said. Here’s the thing: I liked the sounds of that woman on the radio. But she didn’t remind me of myself, except only fractionally. Myself was the woman mashing garlic, wearing running gear, feeling irritable, noticing the dirty windows, trying to work up the gumption to get out for a run.
I was experiencing myself as a projection. And in a sense, that’s what this blog is too. A projection. Incomplete. The person I show myself to be rather than the messy much more complex and in all likelihood somewhat disappointingly contradictory person that I really am. I think we women like to compare ourselves to projections. It’s one of the reasons women always want to know, “How do you do it?” We’re imagining that it can be done. We’re looking for the secret formula. We’d apply it, if only it existed. I’m certain it’s not only women who do this, but maybe men do it differently. Maybe men don’t admit as readily to being imperfect or wrong; or maybe they don’t care; maybe they’re better at managing guilt.
These are horrible generalizations. Please, disagree. Tell me what you think.
My lazy Sunday children have now moved into my office; therefore, it’s time for me to move out. It’s lunchtime.