Alternate Uses for a Troublesome Pie-hole

The other day, I listened in shock as the most ill-considered gossip tripped off my tongue. Seriously, if I took up chewing tobacco, my mouth would still be using its time better than that.

Why don’t I just zip my lip? It occurred to me that being a writer is part of the problem. I love stories, especially ones with a beginning, middle, and end. Especially ones with compelling characters, interesting plots, and a great twist at the end. A part of me threatens to pop, if I know a fantastic story, but I can’t tell it.

Please don’t stop talking to me once you’ve read this! I have a plan. Copenhagen may be the answer. Or maybe Bubblicious.

This blog brought to you by a cat that wanted out at 4:43 a.m.

Sendai?

Okay, be honest. Before March 11, did you know there was a Japanese city called Sendai?

Me neither, up until 23 years ago, when I received an invitation from my church to learn Japanese, then live and work as a missionary in that area for 18 months.

I spent two weeks after the disaster shouting at the computer: “Which city? Which town? Where, where, where?” On the theory that you might might not know any more than the news media do about the area, here’s a random Sendai intro.

You know about Tokyo, the Japanese equivalent of L.A., D.C., and N.Y.C., rolled into one. You’ve probably heard of Sapporo, which might fill the roles of Alaska (snow and cold), Wisconsin (dairy product capital of the country), and San Francisco (cosmopolitan and chic). Osaka is more or less the gritty and hip Chicago of Japan. Okinawa is a Hawaii-like place, tropical and laid-back. So what’s Sendai?

Sendai is the largest city in Tohoku, or northeastern Japan. Traditionally, it produced most of the country’s rice, and it’s recently become a center for manufacturing.

Tohoku is the flyover Midwest of Japan: maybe Detroit in industrialization, and Des Moines in attitude: countrified, conservative, and not so cool. The Tohoku dialect (“zu-zu-speak”) is also not cool. While I was there, an executive for the Asahi beer company made insulting remarks about the way people in Tohoku talk. The entire area boycotted his product until he apologized. Wikipedia asserts that young people are leaving Tohoku in droves, presumably for more happening spots.

They grow wonderful apples in Tohoku, with typical Japanese care: each growing apple is first encased in a protective wrapping. Then, I don’t know how, they affix the sign of the apple-grower somehow so that the skin doesn’t change color in that spot, like spelling a sunscreen message on yourself before tanning.

Everyone got the day off on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. We spent one autumnal equinox in the park, where police officers were giving away free pumpkins, with skins scarred to spell anti-drunk-driving slogans.

Sendai is on approximately the same line of latitude as Montreal, Canada. Farther north, on Hokkaido, they have adopted central heating. But bitterly cold Tohoku has not. Instead, they are experts at space heating. Space heaters for the bedrooms, covered, heated tables for the dining room, electric toilet seats for the bathroom, hot ramen for the stomach, hand warmers for pockets, sock warmers for feet.

Twenty-three years ago, many, many people on the street felt compelled to comment on my blonde hair—sometimes at the tops of their lungs, across the street. Maybe the reaction would have been the same on the streets of Tokyo. But I kind of think that was the Tohoku view of life—not too many jet-set cosmopolitans up there.

Toward the end of my time in Tohoku, I looked in the mirror. And stared: "Wow. That chick has blonde hair."

I've never been quite the same since Tohoku.

So. They're cold right now. You've seen the snow. They're sharing vegetables and blankets, and doing radiation checks, and wondering what happens next. And I stare, and yell, and cheer, and pray.

Limerick attack!

So, on the way to helping my 12-year-old prepare for the spelling bee, I learned the word "crepuscular" from the 9th-grade word list: of or pertaining to twilight.

My stream of consciousness skipped easily from twilight to "Twilight."
Then the limericks hit.

When caught in a tale that's crepuscular,
Just go with the werewolf who's muscular.
While Ed may requite you,
He just wants to bite you:
His interest is merely corpuscular.

My husband has to claim partial credit for this work.

Christmas Review

Just got done with the delightful little book, Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas, by Bill McKibben, which is so delightful and so little that it’s tempting just to quote the whole book.

Despite the name, the author is not advocating a strict hundred-dollar Christmas. He traces the origins—some of them surprisingly recent—of our society’s current Christmas practices. Then he submits the radical proposal that Christmas can be what we need and want it to be...and it always has been. For instance, back in frontier times, when life was grinding and cold, and there wasn’t anything on TV, Christmas was a day for mischievous boys to set off loud explosions. It was different than every other day. All that noise and mischief were what led reformers to make Christmas into a gentler, family-centered day. Now, we have 24-hour explosions on TV, and explosions of stuff, and explosions of appointments. What a lot of us—what I—need is more peace. And Christmas is a good day for that.

It’s not a hundred-dollar Christmas this year, and I can feel the Christmas crazies reaching their tentacles after me. But we have made a family goal this year to

a) share the work of Christmas
b) eliminate the stuff we don’t really like about Christmas
c) made sure we do the Christmas things we love

What do you love about Christmas? What do you not love so much? How do you beat off the crazies?

A complete (practice) disaster

Once or twice a year, our neighborhood has a mock disaster. No one specifies what has befallen us, though flood and earthquake are possibilities that come to mind. We all check in at a central location, where someone has a HAM radio, and we're encouraged to practice our family disaster procedures at home.

This year, our family decided to try out our 72-hour disaster kits. We each have a backpack full of personal supplies, plus a family duffel bag of food and misc. We grabbed those, threw some bottles of water in the back of the van, and randomly drove to a pond we've been wanting to visit a ways down the freeway. Then we piled our backpacks on a picnic table and attempted to cook and eat dinner.

Cooking, we managed. We had pieces from three different kinds of emergency stoves, plus a firepit at the campsite. Thanks to our time in Cub Scouts, we had a "buddy burner"* made out of paraffin, a tuna can, and cardboard. We'd realized we didn't have a pot in the kit before we left, so there was a big pan for warming up our can of beef stew.

There were not, however, any bowls for our stew, or cups for our water. And everyone was dismayed that we'd eaten up the granola bars in some past "emergency."

We ate from the communual pot, found a geocache, made friends with the feral cats in the dumpster, went out for burgers to supplement the emergency rations, and had a great time.

Still not ready to think about basements full of mud, traffic jams full of panicked people, and/or actually living on our provisions, though.

*Note discussion at this page about the possible dangers of plastic-lined tuna cans. I think ours was old enough to not have a lining.

Escher Dress

So, I'm putting a ruffle on the bottom of my daughter's dress. I sew together the narrow ends of four long rectangles, forming a loop. Then I run a line of stitching all the way along the top edge of the loop.

Except, the line of stitching does not end on the top edge. It ends on the bottom edge. Turns out, I've sewn the loop in a mobius strip.

I think I fixed it. If my daughter puts on the the dress and ends up in some alternate dimension, it will be time to pull out the cosmic seam ripper.

Now to think of a story involving a mobius dress...

Watch for Armadillos

Ever notice something obscure—say, for instance, armadillos—popping up in daily life and conversation, even though you hadn't previously thought about that thing for months or years?

I was sitting in a restaurant, waiting for friends and idly contemplating an abstract painting in orange and yellow. Hm, thought I, that shape on the right looks like a mitonchondrion. The friends arrived and began talking about how another friend's health problems were finally diagnosed as mitochondrial disease. Now, I do not spend all day thinking about the thingies inside cell bodies. I can't even remember what mitochondria do. But there they were, twice in ten minutes. That's an armadillo. Possibly even an atomic armadillo.

My sister invented the concept after an armadillo involving—you guessed it—armadillos. Particularly spectacular armadillos are called atomic armadillos. Armadillos which, upon further examination, have some logical explanation are called near-armadillos (e.g. an armadillo involving vampires probably has its roots in Twilight advertising).

And now you have a word for those experiences! Next we need a word for how, when you say a word (like "armadillo") a whole bunch of times, it starts to lose its meaning and look ridiculous. Armadillo, armadillo, armadillo...

Have you ever had an armadillo? Do you think "Vampire Armadillos" is a good name for a rock band? Share!

Photo from http://www.animals.nationalgeographic.com