My front yard has become weirdly important, ever since someone suggested it as a way to deal with fear. When fear is such a big part of you and your life, honor it; do the things you reasonably can to be more safe. Then after you've tried that, after you've given yourself that chance, choose the compromises you want, if you decide on the trade-off for more time and freedom.

As far as the outside of the house goes, the idea is "show no weakness"; don't look like a victim. Don't look like a target. It's become a very tiny, personal crusade. I find myself watching all the time--which houses seem like easy marks, like places where you could get away with it? Which ones don't? More tangibly, what are the details that make that difference? My goal is: just from looking, it will be clear that someone cares enough about the people in this house not to let things slide. Just from looking, it will be obvious that we who live here are well taken care of.

It's an enlightening study. Learning to do is hard, but so is learning to see, and suddenly there's the obvious connection that I've never made; to make things so clean and tidy and neat like that, to make a space that emanates strength, you have to be aware of your surroundings. You have to notice little details. It's a natural connection, so much more than just learning to bother--which is important enough on its own.

Somehow this is more important to me than everything else I should be working on. It's a slow building; half a step, stand back, consider--what can I do, with the tools I have? With the strength I have? How many more days will it take to finish weeding around the driveway? What other tools would be good for the job? Is there any way I might take that stump out by myself? Will it make a difference to sweep away that dirt, does that edge need to be straightened? Is there a solution to the weeds next to the house without buying pavers? My imagination is on walkabout; this will be a showplace, beautiful, clean, bountiful, precise, liveable. Just keep working every day, thousands of baby steps.

Stages and details of maintaining an everyday life are so new to me. What I'm probably best at, in fact, is keeping it nominally together after everything has gone to shit--and assuming that it's always going to be that way. I am scraping a different life from weeds and black clay, handful by handful.

Today was different; feels of possibility. I woke up to an alarm after five hours sleep to finish writing about Irigaray, finished that in plenty of time and got ahead on my reading. After class, I spent four hours grocery shopping for my sister.

It was interesting. I was doing things for myself from an early age, but I've never shopped for a family of eight. The amount of planning involved--especially with a diet high in produce--is spectacular. Also, the repeated push-starting of the car (not my car, which would have completely stressed me out) and a mild blizzard contributed to the sense of adventure. :)

And now I'm home, in pain (a high 4) but thrilled. There are vegetables in my fridge, a backup jar of nutella in my pantry, and--perhaps most importantly--a dozen packets of seeds across my desk. I have been counting them, reading and re-reading, arranging them. I've narrowed it to four I definitely want to grow and six others in the running. They are my sister's seeds, shared because that's what we do, and because out of the packets that I choose, I'll only need a few. It's important not to get involved with too many different varieties. This is, after all, the girl who killed lavender and rosemary in Utah making her first beginner garden.

Before now I never appreciated how much fantasy goes into planning a garden, but I'm making up for lost time, savoring every choice in vivid detail. The nutty, crisp warm of biting into a parsnip? Or the high contrast of casper and sweet pumpkins sprawling across my yard, disconcertingly orange and white against the lush green of their vines? What do okra plants even look like? And what kind of tomatoes do I want for making my first eggplant parmesan completely from scratch?

I also have, from this afternoon, 20$ of un-designated cash in my coat pocket. I would hate to associate poverty with virtue, but I think that it (poverty) can, for some people in some circumstances, be good. I'm one of those people in one of those times; some alchemy of my current circumstances allows me to unpack the magic in a twenty-dollar bill like never before. I was recently out of gas, funds, and fresh food all at the same time, but still had my basic needs completely covered. Knowing what I can do without makes it easier to understand what the things I have are worth--and turns a small amount of cash into much more freedom than I thought it could be.

self-indulgent

"Today," I announced to my roomate, "I have been TOTALLY self-indulgent."

"Well, what did you do?" she asked.

So I told her about waking up hurting, trying to do homework but taking motrin and going back to sleep; about visiting a friend in the sculpture studio, watching him glaze bowls and helping him make sculptures of fish, then taking an hour of his shift at work (not a sacrifice, trust me) so that he could get things done on time. I told her about visiting my oldest sister's family, taking two of the kids with me on a grocery run, letting them both sit in the cart even though they're way too big; getting stared at in the aisles while I animatedly told them my favorite Asian fairy tale. I told her about having dinner with my sister's family and playing their piano before everyone went to bed, then eating the ALL of the tinned oysters I'd bought myself as a shopping treat.

It was fun.

"I love that this is what totally self-indulgent means to you," she said.

And I've been thinking about that. The things I spent my day on aren't useless; they just aren't the things I more officially need to get done. I didn't do any homework, or housework, or writing, or repairs, or reading, or exercise, or therapy(Bleah). This is apparently how things go when I prioritize social interaction. I don't feel wasted, though; I just feel. . . like. . . happy.

Weird.

Today continued the trend. I rolled out of bed after six hours of sleep and hastily checked the web to see what homework I'd ditched (none, but not on purpose), sat by my window soaking in morning sunlight, and eventually took the bus to class. If I were a good academic, I'd be putting in the hours to get a solid foundation in early modern, but I only sat through feminism. . . and it was fun--fantastic, actually. I was with people I like, having a long deep informed discussion about things I care about a lot--as I said, fantastic. Then I went home and promptly fell back asleep.

And this is my self-indulgent life. I don't know if I'm ok with it. It can't be ethical, right? People are starving. All this time I'm spending on myself--it's not helping anyone else. Is this what it feels like to be safe and stable and fed? If anyone stopped talking to me, it would not be devastating. I'm not sure if I'm ok with it, but now that I know I can have it, it's nearly impossible to motivate myself to do otherwise.

I think I'm going to go with it, for just awhile; my plan is to take the next year off of school and just. . . do what I want. Just do this--just read and garden and sleep and cry and talk to interesting people pretty much whenever I want. Most people have a life at some point, don't they? Even the ones who then give it up to fight for Truth and God and The American Way?

It's astonishing how often I start considering some problem that I find really interesting, or that otherwise relates to my life, and it immediately turns to, "I've really got to get around to reading ___________ book." From today:

Infantilization of women by otherwise decent guys: The Macho Paradox (Jackson Katz)

The question of whether systemic violence is necessarily the case in a global economy: Empire (Negri and Heart)

What to do about elitism in education: Literacy with an Attitude (Patrick J. Finn)

Whether female sexuality inherently entails victimization: The Second Sex (de Beauvoir, of course. . . though to be clear, whatever she says, I don't expect to believe her)

How to prune my new plum tree: The Backyard Orchardist (Stella Otto)

Whether I should go all out and get micronutrient soil testing (mostly for fun): Introducing soil science (Brady)

Whether capitalism has any merit on a macroeconomic scale: MIT Opencourseware, and the economist. Ok, so that's not a book. Still. . . you get the idea.

Clearly, I am an addict.

compost as housekeeping

It is possible that somebody out there has been wondering how my gardening adventures have resolved themselves.

Everything has died.


My definition of housekeeping is: mastery of the things that are how, not what.

My interest in gardening is about how I want to eat--healthy, and with deep understanding and awareness. For the most part, we all have to eat--and wash dishes, do laundry, sleep, clean up. It's whether we wash the dishes every meal or every week that determines housekeeping styles.

It seems to me that having at least a little gardening in one's life is rather like clearing up after every meal--and like using a journal to sort out your thoughts before going and screaming at someone, and like bothering to take a half an hour calming down with your favorite Bach recordings before going completely insane, and like managing your time so that you actually do the things you actually wanted to have done. You know, housekeeping.


Everything having died, I've moved on to the logical next step; compost.

After weeks of exhaustive study and consideration, I've devised a magical and well informed bucket-based system that will (hopefully)lead to successful and convenient composting. Pouring from one bucket to the next will serve to turn it; black plastic sheeting will increase temperature to speed the decomposition process, and if I have to go buy bailed hay, I will get the carbon/nitrogen ratio right so the damn thing doesn't stink.

After all, we all have to throw our kitchen scraps somewhere.

updates

I've been doing a lot of rethinking my goals, lately. I think a lot of the things I'd been planning to do sort of have more relevance to what I think I should do, than to what I want to do. .

and what I want to do matters too.

So I've had a shift in focus; instead of "get all that serious traveling out of the way before I settle down," my main goal is now to do whatever it takes, whatever I need to do, to get my brain in the right place to go back to school and get a bachelors. There's lots of bits and pieces to this; the fact of taking a break, as I am pretty burned out on school, and working. . doing some minor bits of travel, reading. . . focusing on independence and stability. It's nice to own, or at least shortly own, where I live and what I drive. . .

In terms of independence, it's hard not not to be a little freaked out about our national energy system/crisis these days. That's part of the why for my gardening kick, which hasn't been working out very well. . . I guess I need to start small. I'm trying really hard to get in the habit of growing my own sprouts, and I have one rosemary plant. . if it's still in excellent health a month from now, I'll try to expand my repretoire by another potted herb. :D (not that kind of potted herb. :P)

I guess it's reasonable that I should suck at gardening till I've read half of what there is to know about it. . . that's how it's worked with everything else.

So, here I go, being minorly (and awesomely) employed, gardening, reading, learning about technology. . a pre-garden, a bicycle, increasingly specific plans for shorter trips to Europe, and a case of ramen are to prepare me for the future and apocalypse. . . but it's all good, cause at the moment, this is really what I want to do. :)

Lady digshovel strikes

-
















Check it; I found my image of "kindergarten in a vegetable garden" at http://blog.americanfeast.com/whole_foods/.


Written 5/14
As those of you who I don't talk to often enough (which is to say, damn near all of you) may not know, a couple of days ago I knived my way into a bit of a garden patch.

Of course, within 24 hours of said kniving, I was sanely aware that with no idea what I was doing--I killed the herbs I tried to grow when I hit my gardening kick last fall, and only sometimes succeed in seeing sprouts through to edibility--that patch was probably much better off safely in the hands of others. Still, I couldn't let the opportunity go at nothing. As a compromise, I've arranged to weasel in on the gardening exploits of my sister, and also of my new friend Bonnie.

Tonight confirmed my expectations; so perceptive am I, as to be correct about the fact that I, indeed, have no idea what I'm doing. Turns out that it's good to have an experienced supervisor.

Today, the transplanting of potatoes, and putting seedlings of lots of kinds of tomatoes and peppers into the ground. . . so far it's really nice to be out digging in the dirt.
















Van Gogh, Vegetable garden at Monmartre