valentines tell-all & what i wore

what the?

julie reminded me how much i hated valentine's day in 2012.  i'll admit that the day is hard for me, but not for the reasons laid out in most romantic comedies.

it's just.

a) fake and cheap, b) a huge pain in the butt, c) expensive.  i feel like i have to fabricate emotion or something, and i'm really prone to angst around things that seem inauthentic.

well, today was good!

floral couch dress from boulder, utah.

first of all, i wore this kind of ugly but very valentines-esque dress.  i got it in boulder, utah on a field trip with students.  one of my teenaged boy students wrinkled his nose and said, "it looks like a couch."  it does!  which is why i fell for it.  that and the fact that it was handmade by a woman in boulder from re-purposed vintage fabric.  it usually just sits in my closet, but i decided to try to be festive like julie and wear something for the holiday.

secondly, i started on some anti-depressants.  some might find my confession to be TMI, or possibly deleterious in future job interviews, or embarrassing, but really, people, we need to talk about this stuff.  i used to be so embarrassed about my flaws.  i'm trying to own them, accept them, & love them now.

the black dog bit me, and i need medicine to heal it.  i've been through this before, and i've been lucky that medication has been so helpful for me.  i don't love taking it, but it really helps.  i'm trying a new kind, called vibryd. evoking the idea that i will soon be super vibrant again, perhaps preternaturally so.

i forgot about him for a second.

thirdly, i have this really amazing friend.  she's sort of a goddess/witch/pioneer/muse/and my lady valentine.  yesterday she called me while i was commuting home, exhausted and sad and barely able to keep my eyes open on account of fatigue and tears.  she said, "stop by on your way home."  so i did.  she handed me this e.e. cummings book with her own marginalia and a vintage full-length silver fox coat.  i said, "how did you know?"  she said, "because jesus is real."

i guess i have to accept the coat on account of the fact that jesus told my valentine to give it to me. & it will get passed along to another lady going through hard times some day, down the road.

happy valentine's day!  read e.e. cummings!

xxoo

9. by e.e. cummings

there are so many tictoc clocks everywhere telling people what toctic time it is for tictic instance five toc minutes toc past six tic Spring is not regulated and does not get out of order nor do its hands a little jerking move over numbers slowly we do not wind it up it has no weights springs wheels inside of its slender self no indeed dear nothing of the kind. (So,when kiss Spring comes we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss lips because tic clocks toc don't make a toctic difference to kisskiss you and to kiss me)

mothering in a tight place, t.v. writing, & vintage brunch time

1965 vintage barbie brunch time outfit= so many wonderful things:  barbies, vintage dresses, cooking & brunch.  and orange heels.

today i had brunch with some fabulous ladies (and one rad dude), cousins of my mother, my aunt bonnie, and my grandma beth.

my mom's cousin c. is legendary in my family, though i didn't meet her until my wedding day (almost 23 years ago).  my mother talked about how glamorous she always was,  how smart.  aunt bonnie told about the breathtaking figure she cut whilst lounging in a 50's rosemary reed black bathing suit by the family-run homestead resort pool.  she was a pioneer in television writing, around the time when television was just beginning, and she was one of the first female television writers.  she wrote for the walton's and falcon crest, most notably.  she also (simultaneously)  spawned and raised up five insanely successful children, including computer programmers, musicians, a deejay with a star on the hollywood walk of fame (and the longest running morning talk show in radio history), and a show runner.  i'm sure they also do other things that i don't even know about.  one of the characteristics of that family is that each of them can do more than one thing at a professional level.

so c. and i had a chance to talk (i fear i hogged her attention) at a brunch for her ??th birthday at the homestead in midway today.  (she lives in santa fe, but was in town for the holiday weekend).  so how do you do it all, she asked me.  i almost choked.  it was the secret i had hoped to pry from her today.  i guess i do a lot of things rather poorly, i said. i suppose i try to be consistent on a few things and let everything else go.  just be barely good enough.  she came back with, well, i suppose i was a bad mother because i was very ambitious.

i love to hear a woman unashamedly and unabashadly admit her ambition.  when she said that, i realized i've almost never heard a woman utter those words.

we talked about whether or not a happy, self-actualized, ambitious mother could be equal to the more attentive, devoted types of mothers.


well, my kids saw me writing on the dining room table, she said, so i think that was good.

sadly falcon crest was thought to be too sexy for teen viewing in my home growing up.  but now i can & will watch as many episodes as i want!!!!!!!

this is one of those questions with no single answer.  what makes a good mother?  i suppose, whatever kind of mother you are, you sure as hell shouldn't feel guilty about it.


i mean, it's a complicated endeavor and it has to take so many forms given the variety of mothers and children, the variety of abodes, cooking methods, birthing methods, safety, and medical care, levels of education and opportunity and freedom available to mothers and children around the world and throughout history. i tend to bristle at any pronouncement on best practices for motherhood, though i do feel as if i've arrived at a decent, certainly not perfect, mothering practice for myself and my children.

(they can tell you their side of the story.)

that's mine.  and i hope to get a lot more out of cousin c. some day.

(in fact, i plan to beg her for a GITP interview some day soon.)

i'm grateful for a chance to know these people, and for the kind attention they've paid me and my family.  

a barbie installation in anselm spring's boulder, ut. garden.  i heart barbie in all her incarnations.

out of context--final boulder post

 

back to my happy place

living in nyc was hard.  i was caught up in the minutia of daily life & surviving the mean streets of a much less gentrified nyc, & i didn't get out as much as i should have, & i didn't appreciate the intensity & grandeur of that place as much as i should have.

when i visit now, i can't even imagine that i didn't love every minute of my life there.

when i went to boulder, living in a rural town & milking goats seemed like the most magical thing in the world.

i'm sure it's not.

& i'm sure it also is.

a student wrote today in her boulder essay, "boulder seems like the most perfect place in the world.  probably because i don't have to live there."

that insight made the whole class laugh.

isn't it true: that we rarely really appreciate where we're at until later?

for tonight, i'm going to my happy place to combat the pre-travel jitters and stress of leaving my kids, planning itineraries, budgets, contacting friends and associates, etc. by going to my happy boulder place in my head.

happy place:  burr trail outpost in boulder, utah with honey rhubarb crisp & local characters

(and attending the walden art show, featuring work by students of our very own guest blogger josh graham.)

tomorrow, i'll be in my other happy place, new york city.  all the happier because i will just be pretending to live there for a week, ignoring all the quotidiana back home, getting to stay up as late as i want, & hanging with my girl julie.

legwear:  taking the red-eye leggings

looking forward:  to seeing julie

inspiration:  happy places

in gratitude

shrine at the hell's backbone grill no harm farm--photo by my student nate lebaron

everyone who knows me knows i'm obsessed with kitchens, grocery stores, restaurants, cookbooks, chopped, iron chef, restaurant impossible, etc., etc.

what a thrill to get to spend a little time with blake spalding and jen castle of hell's backbone grill (in boulder, utah) hearing a little more about their work, food, inspirations and more.  i read their book in 2005 when it first came out and there was quite a big stink about it.  i cooked the navajo peach crisp and the chamayo chile pots de creme and their famous biscuits and kept planning trips to boulder in my head that never happened.

i just re-read their book and got inspired all over again, and felt very grateful for the people who produce food and prepare food and recognize that it nourishes us and keeps us alive, but it can also be more than mere sustenance.  that it can lift our bodies and our souls and our minds and make us happier, better people.

i won't repeat too much of what's in their book, but it points out, through it's setting in the microcosm of the tiny community of boulder, what a communal effort the making of food is.  how, really, every community exists for the making of food, and when that process is hidden or bastardized, our communities become sick.

i'm extending the ideas in the book a little further than they actually go, but that's what being in boulder and re-reading this text made me realize.

i was lucky to see the process close-up for a few days and to notice what a huge difference love, care, and attention makes in the way food tastes on the tongue and sits in the belly, and changes the heart.  not only attention to the food as it's being prepared to eat, but attention to the soil it grows in, the animals & insects who give their lives so other animals can eat, the workers who plant, who chop, who wash, who serve and the eaters at table.

i'm grateful i was raised by parents who are deeply connected to food & recognize it's importatnce to  family and community life, and grateful for all the food evangalists in the world helping to instruct and inspire the rest of us to take more care in all things related to that most foundational thing, the thing that keeps us alive, makes us happy and keeps us in tune with body and earth.

also grateful for the food poems (they're much more than just food poems, but the food grounds them) of li-young lee.  he illustrates the kind of attention i'm talking about:

Eating Alone

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

Li-Young Lee

legwear:  all day yoga pants


inspiration: people who are attentive, thoughtful, and kind

looking forward: to colbert then sleep

barbies in a tight place

i spent last weekend in boulder, utah, the tight place of all tight places.  two hours from a supermarket or bank, population 120, and one of the two ways out of town along the hogsback, an eerie, terrifying road with steep thousand-foot drops and no guardrails on either side.

i've read that it's the most isolated town in the lower 48.

it's also one of the most beautiful, peaceful, spiritual places i've ever been, and we were welcomed with such kindness, openness and generosity by a group of people who mostly came there to get out of the tight place of mainstream american life, to live more deliberately, thoughtfully, lovingly, or beautifully.

there's way too much to say about this in a single blog post, but one thing i really loved there was the barbie art created by german photographer anselm spring.  we met in the  burr trail outpost, and anselm kindly agreed to show us his home and his studio.

we took our rented explorer (my toyota mini-van never would have made it) up a steep, steep mesa.  my palms were sweating and my heart was racing when a local in the car said, "you might wanna get some speed here."  i had to decide if i wanted to get enough speed to make it up the incline or risk going off the edge of the curvy road.

turns out the explorer had enough juice to get on up in that mesa.

anselm lives in a cinder block structure with a flat roof that was probably intended to be covered in stucco.  it was way cooler without the stucco frosting over top.  some other stuff about anselm:  he thinks dust and cobwebs are beautiful.  there were layers of dust on top of many things in the house, including the art.

his barbie art is a comment on the distortion of femininity ("the feminine is not about gender.  we're all both feminine & masculine.")

or is his barbie art a distortion of femininity?

whatever.  i liked it ("and yah."  that's how anselm ends practically every sentence.)

he's quite a good singer/songwriter & regaled us with four or five songs at the end of our visit, including a song for whitney houston on her death.

he made his reputation with photography, but has now given it up ("i used to photograph beautiful things.  now i photograph nothing.  and nothing is perfect.")  i think he had used that line before.

but i liked it anyway.

most people thought the barbie art was twisted & the photographs were beautiful.  i felt exactly the opposite.  what's wrong with me that i love things most people find disturbing?  granted, i adore barbie in all her distorted splendor.

there's so much, much more to say.  sadly, this is a blog post and not a chapter in a book, so i must end it here.

i know my life, heart, body, and mind changed forever in boulder this weekend, but i don't know exactly how yet.  i might begin to process it in the next few days or week, but i'm going to the most opposite place in the world, nyc, day after tomorrow, so it might be a while before the real processing begins.  

ken in a tight place

still life with boots, barbie styling head, and thick layers of dust

beautiful lavender flying barbie

barbie reclined on barbie styling head with no face throne in garden

barbie and shattered random concrete in garden

rock climbing barbie

legwear:  red tights (with red sandals & new strawberry shortcake dress, handmade in boulder, utah.)

inspiration: meeting people committed to people before things

looking forward to: new york city!

no harm farming

if you want to swim in the pond on the no-harm farm, here are the rules

i'll explain what this is tomorrow.

what an amazing weekend.

very tired.

good night.