Study leave in progress

March 30, 2017 in grief, history, uncategorized | 5 comments

I am in the midst of a week’s study leave. As usual, I didn’t really clear my desk before this “break from usual responsibilities,” much less write the reflection and eulogy I will need for Sunday, so it is far from a week of pure study. But I am managing to spend most of my time immersed in two topics.

One is death and grief. My first book of the week was Irvin Yalom’s Staring Into the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. By pure chance, the reading for my women’s group was an excerpt on different ways of incorporating past losses into our lives, from On Living, a memoir by hospice chaplain Kerry Egan. Tuesday, I was browsing the natural history section of a bookstore and stumbled upon H is for Hawk, which thanks to a review, I knew was not only natural history but very much about the author’s process of mourning her father’s death. It is now on the pile. The next day, I was browsing the DVD section on a rare trip to San Francisco’s Main Library, and remembered that I’ve been looking for the first season of Six Feet Under for a while. They have it! I’ve watched two episodes, and the people who told me it’s a really good look at death and grief are right.

The other area of immersion is African American history and fiction, a long-term remediation project to fill the gaps in my education and better equip myself to fight white supremacy. I’ve read Bud Not Buddy, a children’s chapter book by Christopher Paul Curtis. I’m also reading March by Geraldine Brooks, with the grain of salt I keep on hand for books about the black experience by white people, especially fiction, but so far, so good: it’s teaching me some things about the Civil War years that I didn’t know, and I’ve been nibbling at this book since December so I really want to finish it. Next up is Ida: A Sword Among Lions, an intimidatingly thick biography of Ida Wells by Paula Giddings–many thanks to Mariame Kaba for the recommendation.

Printer help sought

March 19, 2017 in uncategorized | 4 comments

Here’s a problem I have EVERY time I cancel a print job: it doesn’t cancel. Usually it then gets stuck and won’t let me print anything else; sometimes it just ignores me and after wasting ink on what might be dozens of pages, I’m good to go. Digging into the print spooler usually, though not always, resolves the problem.

I have two questions:

  1. Is this a Windows problem, a Word problem, an HP printer problem, or an Amy problem?
  2. How do I make it stop happening?

If I were a poet, like Derek Walcott

March 17, 2017 in uncategorized | Leave a comment

If I were a poet, then I could probably make a poem of this story:

Some poems of Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, appear on the website Poem Hunter.

Someone comments on one of them, “This is a good poem Derek, keep it up”

But I’m not much of a poet. I do appreciate good poetry, though, as well as ironic, deeply clueless comments, so hearing of his death sent me to Poem Hunter to look up some of his poems. I have read one now and then, but that’s the extent of my familiarity with his work. The very first one listed was so fitting for the service I’ve been planning for Sunday that I want to excerpt it for our centering words. It must be one of his best-known, because I’ve read it before.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

I was also very moved by “R.T.S.L. (1917-1977).”

On poking around on the internet, I discovered that Walcott lost a position at Oxford when charges of past sexual harassment (which he had not disputed) were pointed out. Good. I don’t think someone who has used his position at a previous university to try to coerce students into sex should be hired by another university. And we can still love his poetry and admire whatever in him enabled him to write it. Last Sunday, speaking about issues of history and morality raised by the debates about renaming buildings that honor people we no longer consider worthy of such an honor, I made the uncontroversial pronouncement that there are no saints. The prospect of using, in the service, the lovely words of someone who abused people so badly is where that rubber meets the road.

Are you practicing Lent?

March 9, 2017 in spiritual practices, uncategorized | 1 comment

I’m using the three-part approach to Lent that I’ve used before:

  1. give something up that drains my spirit: Facebook
  2. add something positive that feeds my spirit: draw every day, preferably before breakfast
  3. give to an organization that’s doing good in the world: the Coalition on Homelessness, since my daughter has recently asked people to donate to them in honor of her birthday (which also fell during Lent).

Do you have a Lenten practice this year? I’d love to hear about it!  (And if you’re seeing this when it posts automatically to Facebook: if you respond there, I won’t see what you wrote until after Easter . . . )

More grid drawings

February 19, 2017 in art journal, drawings | 1 comment

I’m loving exploring this idea from different angles. When does a grid stop being a grid? What is it then? The tension between the formal rules of the grid and the movement that arises through and in spite of that form evoke all sorts of other tensions in my mind. To what extent are our lives ordered or chaotic, regimented or free, communal or individual?

Both of these are about 4″x6″, drawn with ink in a pocket sketchbook. The light and camera available distort the colors, but you can get the idea.


Grid drawings from the sketchbook

February 10, 2017 in art journal, drawings | 4 comments

I keep drawing these grids in my little 4×6 sketchbook.

grid-1-from-sketchbook

I’m experimenting with how to change the shape and flow of the squares; in my view this next one went off the rails, but the two people who have seen it both like it a lot, so what does the artist know:

grid-2-from-sketchbook

grid-3-from-sketchbookgrid-4-from-sketchbook

These next two are my favorites–I love the way they ripple and move:grid-5-from-sketchbookgrid-6-from-sketchbook

I thought this one wasn’t finished (I don’t have my markers with me and there are still orange intersections to put in at the bottom), but since I was scanning the rest I scanned it too. Now I think maybe it is finished.

grid-7-from-sketchbook

In related news, I’ll be putting up 17 drawings, prints, and alebrijes from my sabbatical in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto lobby today, with comments on each one. They’ll be there through the end of March.

The biggest problem with Gorsuch . . . 

February 1, 2017 in politics | Tags: , | 1 comment

. . . is the problem with Trump. Is he our president or the flunky of a foreign, frequently hostile government? We don’t know.

Vladimir Putin should not be allowed to choose the next Supreme Court Justice.

So I’m with Robert Reich: this nomination must not go forward until the investigation into election tampering and Trump’s ties to Putin is complete. We deserve to know where Trump gets his money, why his private server talks to Alfa Bank so frequently (the F.B.I. says the reason could be innocuous–fine–find out for certain by subpoenaing the records), and to whom he’s in debt. We deserve to know whether he has been blackmailed by Russia and why he claimed that Carter Page never worked for his campaign (although he specifically named Page as a foreign policy adviser six months previously) and if there is anyone else, besides Page and Paul Manafort, who had a foot in both Putin’s and Trump’s camps.

Of course the government must keep rolling with him as provisional president, but allow him to name a new justice, who will serve 30, 40 years? No. Not until we have some answers. Much of this can be checked by following the money–is that why we still haven’t seen his tax returns?

I’m in the process of calling every member of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, listed here and here, respectively, to say this: “You are going to be greatly embarrassed by history if you confirm a Supreme Court Justice who was selected by someone who proves to be a puppet of Vladimir Putin. Please hold the nomination until the full investigation of the financial and other ties between the president and the Russian government is complete.”

Three things that make a room look tidier even though you’ve done almost nothing

January 29, 2017 in how about this | 6 comments

(1) Close the closet door. I guess it’s because the surface of a door is almost always visually simpler than the inside of a closet.

(2) Shut all drawers. A dresser drawer with just a sliver of t-shirt poking out look messy; a completely shut dresser drawer looks neat.

(3)–okay, this one takes more than a few seconds’ effort–Make the bed. Again, you get an expanse of smooth surface in the room. Even if your idea of making a bed is throwing a blanket over the lumps, it’s an improvement.

There you have it. Do you think this could be the beginning of a best-selling trendy book?

Is it just me? Song prompts

December 20, 2016 in uncategorized | 2 comments

Certain songs pop up completely against my will when certain prompts come along.

When I hear the name of the town Tlacolula (a bit east of Oaxaca), I sing, “Hey Tlacolula, she’s my baby.”

When I see a sign for a “Comida Corrida” (prix fixe meal), I sing, “Comida Corrida, girl you’re on my mind.”

And when my computer game prompts me, “Do you really want to exit?” I am sure it’s singing it to the tune of “Do you really want to hurt me?” and I join in.

Parade for La Virgen

December 19, 2016 in Oaxaca | 1 comment

The Virgin of Guadalupe, matron saint of Mexico, had her feast day last week. We were eating in a restaurant known for the view from its rooftop, and heard a parade coming. It was already dark, but I got this picture of swirling skirts in the street below.

img_7672

At the time, our main course had not yet been served. We received it and ate it; walked over to the ice cream shop up the street; strolled with our nieves (ices, literally “snows”) to El Llano, the main park in the center of town, where there was a traveling amusement park; walked around, went on a couple of rides and watched a couple more (the mechanical bulls with real steam coming out of their nostrils being a high point); and, as we were leaving, saw the same parade pass by the park. The participants had been going for at least two hours. They looked a bit less peppy now, but they were still marching, playing, and dancing.

We leave tomorrow. I’m going to miss this city so much.

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