Metamorphosism

Arf

Happy year of Sandy.
It will be good to us, to some of us at least, about this I have a certain feeling.
Punjab, what, he's already in the hot seat, ain't he, for spying, illegal spying? I'm assuming the seat is hot. It was hot when Nixon was in it, at least, right? That's a good way to start the year. What's up with Daddy Warbucks, any idea?
Good new year to all of you. Drink lots of water with your booze, take an aspirin before bed unless otherwise advised by your doctor, plus I take no responsibility for any health-related advice I may appear to be giving, this is all intended purely humorously, not really as life-help. I'm only saying.
And remind me to tell you about my ski trip.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you

I just noticed the article, just skimmed it; I was on the crapper and there's only so much newspaper you can handle in 15 minutes, after the juicy financial scandals and the drug scandals on the sports pages, how much else can you read? I got the headline - Premature Births something something, and the picture - someone inside an incubator - with a descriptive caption, and something about trends and whatever. My wife mentioned later she had read the article, she reads every one that crosses her path, because she is interested and not as haughty and let's be honest, vain as I am, not as convinced that she knows all about it because we do know something about it, having had two ourselves. Rather, she had them, of course, I was in the vicinity. She said the article was full of scary statements about what can go wrong when you are born early, and it is a long list indeed. The first guy I met in Vienna, showed me around town, he was blind, too much oxygen in the incubator. When our first one was born too early, on my first visit to her, the doctor told me, 90% chance she will have a normal brain.
So there is a great deal to worry about. A long, long list.
Journalists love that aspect. Scaring people is a big industry now. So with that disclaimer, that caveat, whatever, let me tell you this: it is theoretically possible for things to go well. There is a good chance they will, and that chance gets better with time, as technology and medical practices improve.
I would like to list for you the things that I know from experience can go right, but I have foresworn bragging about my children, and if I told you about them in any detail it would sound like bragging. So it's all a big secret. All I can say is, things can go very well. You can have a fright like this, seeing a child born at 1272 grams and shrink down to 1000 before starting to gain weight, that forms your expectations to a point where seeing your child sit up on her own, let alone walk, makes every day feel like Thanksgiving Day and then the child can develop into someone so very exceptional and excellent that you don't know where to start thanking whom. Things, I can't tell you exactly what, can be so amazing; you can have such unexpected adventures, which remain secret.
And despite all that, you can also forget it for an instant, get mad, get impatient, whatever. We are only human. But you can also remember. You can be sitting there at a table in a slow Asian restaurant with a sore back, tired and hungry, and be overwhelmed by your child's beauty and perfection, by the way her muscles move beneath her skin and the way her dark hair falls, the color of her eyes and shape of her nose, the way she makes conversation and the fact that she can sit up straight and walk under her own steam, not to mention all the excellence I can't tell you about. Things can go very well, pray they always do.

Messages from the lost continent

is complete. Thanks, Horst, it was a lot of fun.

You are here

There is that cartoon of someone standing in front of a map that is blank but for a dot and an arrow labled "you are here".
Like, who's not lost?
As a kid, it used to worry me because, you know, your parents are acting, say, a little weird, you go on an outing ("The things we used to do together when you were a kid," they'll say to you later) somewhere way the hell out somewhere and you have neither any idea where you are nor how you would get anywhere else should they abandon you nor a good reason why they wouldn't abandon you. You are entirely at their mercy. They think they are doing some nice family thing, and you're scared stiff because what if?
Because everything is a matter of life and death.
As a kid, I thought you outgrew it.
Adults can drive cars, they can read maps and they have money, ergo adults don't get lost. Perhaps the condition of unlostness is what defines an adult, defined one to me as a kid.
An adult knows the ropes. Knows where they are. Can change a lock.
I can assemble the trickiest furniture Ikea can think up, but I still am lost.
That doesn't change.
I think if you're not lost, you're just not looking hard enough.
I think if you're not lost, climb up on something and look over the walls of your cubicle.
But it doesn't matter. Because you're here.
It no longer bothers me. You live, what, a few days without food under most conditions, and I'll never be somewhere so isolated where I'd go longer without a bite or a drink.
I get lost, it's usually in cities, or in the woods near where I live.
I do it on purpose now. For enjoyment.
Nothing more fun than wandering aimlessly in the woods (of course, these woods, they're finite and bordered by a river and villages and roads. Walk in any direction and you're back out in half an hour, hour tops. I'm not advocating, you know, madcap behavior), unless it's wandering aimlessly in the city, which I'm going to do with my daughter in about an hour.
I'm just saying, getting lost is not the problem. The problem is usually starving, freezing, or being eaten by a large predator.
Lost is, who's not lost?
Lost is this. This is lost.

Caption Contest

Or: What's Bush Counting?

Shout out to all my fans in Portland

Neat.

How to play the cello

After five years of trial and error (meditate on those two words for a brief moment), I finally know how it is done. Or maybe, after 46 years of trial and error, I have figured out how to do anything.

I asked my cello teacher for some technical exercises. He is of the opinion that an adult student of the cello comes home after a long, frustrating day at the office and a long, frustrating commute and can't even drink a martini because he's still sort of dieting and sits down to play the cello for what, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, if he finds the time at all and in that brief time the last thing he wants to play is scales; he would rather play an actual tune. So he assigns me actual compositions, on the assumption that I will learn whatever technical stuff is necessary as a byproduct of learning the song. Which happens sometimes, but I have sort of missed what I would call any technical framework, any ability to place whatever it is I am doing at the moment into any larger picture, or even name the note I'm playing this very second or what position my hand is in. So I demanded some of those boring, stultifying exercises they make students play.

It sucked, of course, when I tried them at home and I did terribly at them. But at my next lesson with him we went over them and I saw the light. To be precise, we were doing an exercise that requires one to change from the first position or whatever it's called in English to the second, third or fourth positions. It requires you to pay close attention to your intonation. I kept messing it up. Over and over. Then it suddenly worked.

I had not been there, you see. I had been somewhere else. In the future, mostly. Hurrying. And this is how you play the cello. This guy here playing the cello, you are him, in that very instant. You are not worring about whether you will hit the note right, you are hearing it and playing it. You are not thinking anything else. You are not regretting past mistakes or how the hell this scratch got in the varnish. You are not anywhere else. You are not hurrying nor are you dragging your feet.

It's also how I get my kid to clean her room. At least, it worked once. Since yelling didn't work, I stood in the doorway with her and said, Look at your room. Everything perfect here? Is it perfectly clean? Anything you could do to improve it?

So of course now I try to do this with my life: stand in the door and ask myself if everything is optimal. Eventually the panic attacks that causes will abate, I expect, and then we will see.

Just being, and paying attention.

Christmas Tree

I bought a tree.

I bought a tree

After working out, I remembered we still needed a Christmas tree and stopped by a village on the way home where two farmers had competing Christmas tree businesses. I stopped at the first one, where we had bought trees previous years and looked around.
The farmer asked me what I needed. Regular room height, I said, about 2.30 meters. Any particular tree? he asked me. I said they all looked good to me, but no matter which one I picked, someone at home was likely to find something wrong with it.
I have a nice tree over here, he said, and took me around the corner, past the sold trees, where he had stashed a nice one. There was a tag on it reading, "Onkel Franz". My uncle never showed up to get it today, so you can have it, he said. I had picked it out for him. He can pick out another one whenever he shows up.
It was like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Christmas trees.
I paid. The farmer offered me a cup of punch, which had gone lukewarm as it was late evening and he was ready to close shop. He asked me where I was from and what had brought me to Austria. Work?
I thought about it and said, my love of Austria, actually. He seemed to like that. I unpacked my habitual conversational nugget about how my wife and I had debated where to move to from our last place in Japan, she for the United States and me for Austria. It's an easily told anecdote, much-practiced. It makes me sound adventurous, maybe, but I wonder if maybe my wife was just more ready to face her past than I was.
He told me about a trip he had taken through the US ten years ago. Then I guess he had enough. Enough of this, he said. If we keep talking, I'll get in the mood to travel again and you'll get homesick. He said he'd deliver the tree sometime after the 20th of December and asked if I had any kids. I said I did, and he said he'd be careful that no one saw him bring the tree, which the Christkind officially brings on the 24th, blazing with candles. He remembered where our house was, he said he liked our fence.

When wenches were wenchy

Eh, Corvus Corax. The Ren Faire crowd was there, and the roleplay crowd was there (and I don't mean I am your teacher and you are my student and you have been very very naughty now get out of that uniform and come her for a spanking) and everyone had a little chin beard, including the chicks. Lots of wench types around, quite a bit of the period costume, especially at first. Local period band opened the show, personally I wasn't enthralled by them, I had liked them better the first time I saw them a few years ago, when they had seemed rhythmically tighter.
ON THE OTHER HAND the first time they didn't have dancers. The dancers were alright. In fact, I was quite impressed by the slender, pale, dark-haired one with the back-sized tattoo on her back who breathed fire. Quite impressed.
I'm looking into firebreathing classes for Gamma now but I think you have to be at least nine for those.
Corvus Corax, OTOH, had no dancers. But they didn't need any. Those boys can put on a show. My ears are still ringing. The crowd seemed to normalize a bit when they came onstage - they have a broader appeal, I think. Not just the knaves and wenches, you know. They have their musicianship down, they have a great stage show, lots of energy, lots of personality. They wear boots the toes of which turn up and come to a point, they wear these long leather loincloth things, and that's about it. They worked very hard and gave us our money's worth. We left satisfied after two encores or so, satisfied and deaf. And I want new drums, and bagpipes! Or at least a chanter. And a belly dancer.

Father-daughter bonding

I try to expose my kids to as much culture as possible. Tomorrow I shall accompany my eldest daughter Beta to an evening of medieval music performed by the popular German ensemble Corvus Corax (shown above). We have been listening to their CDs on our commutes lately, and are both looking forward to a highbrow evening of authentic performances of carefully and academically researched pre-renaissance songs on historically accurate instruments.
Including an anvil, various bagpipes, horns and drums, and an IKEA clothes rack played with a screwdriver.

Contribution to the Pakistani Educational Curriculum

Just read this. It's a nice poem, but if they are really set on not using it, they could always replace it with this:

Another two years of his beady chimp eyes
Because of the chumps who swallowed his lies
Jets dropping napalm on innocent folk
Enemies everywhere as the country goes broke
CIA prisons in secret locations
Torture undergoing a massive inflation
Filling the pockets of corporate cronies
Another vacation out riding his ponies
Impeachment's too good for this ventriloquist dummy
Lipsynching lines fed him by Cheney and Rummy
Undermining our rights and sowing hate
Relying on fear to govern the state
Enough of this intellectual flyweight

Just an idea. Your suggestions in the comments please.

As it was, there were deer

It had been foggy at night and below freezing so the forest I drive through was missing only Tilda Swinton in a furry outfit and a big lion to totally resemble the magical sort of landscape Hollywood productions of children's stories aim at this morning. And if it had been in black and white, with a young prince on horseback and a slender nymph laughing theatrically, insanely, off-camera, because the prince is looking for an enchanted golden paper-clip and she has the motherfucker and he'll never find it, and a bunch of cheap extras wandering about, it could have been a Communist-era Czech fairy tale movie.

As it was, there were deer. Very dark against the snow and fragile ice-crystal-encrusted foliage as they grazed. Luckily I was alone in the car. Had my daughter been with me, I could not have said anything, because she recently criticized my conversation-making on our commutes as amounting to me saying, "Look, deer," and her going, "Where?" and being frustrated that she cannot see them. So that didn't happen this morning, because she slept in and caught a later train.

On the other hand, they really stood out, so maybe she would've seen them today.

On the other hand, being alone in the car, it would have been weird to say something. I could have called someone on my cell phone, which is working fine. In fact, I should have called my daughter and said, "I see deer."