Giving

With every trip I take around the sun, my empathy for my parents and grandparents grows. This is especially true during this most wonderful time of the year. As the husband and I pulled down our boxes (upon boxes) of fabulous Xmas decorations last week, I thought of my childhood holiday decorating routine. What I thought was, "Oooh, so THIS is why Mom made us wait to decorate until she was good and ready."

It's a freakin' unholy, exhausting mess, that's why!

Truthfully, I really do love the Xmas rituals...well, at least, my Xmas rituals. I love putting the crazy, handmade, felt Santa cozy on the toilet seat lid; I love the achy-armed fifteen minutes it takes to hand-whip the eggs for one batch of Grandma's 1938 Betty Crocker recipe for Dream Bars; I love sitting on the floor with a pillow room-divider between us as we watch White Christmas and carefully sift through last year's box of wrapping paper to reuse on this year's gifts.

These days, though, my rituals involve the very minimum when it comes to shopping for gifts. The thrill is gone. The societal pressure to stack the gifts high and buy that perfect something for every person who may have crossed my path for five seconds throughout the last year pretty much exhausts the crap out of me.

Man, the cynicism which has emerged in my old age sure is a bitch. I can't even enjoy the simple rush of a last-minute holiday retail bender anymore!

SOLUTION 2007

At work, this year I asked my boss if we could replace the obligatory gift-baskets with monetary donations to a couple of local non-profits; and, he said yes. We sent out a letter, which explained that we chose to make the donation in their names, to our usual list of holiday card and gift-basket recipients. Within twenty-four hours, we had received two phone calls and one hand-delivered letter of gratitude for our unusual gesture. It worked! And it felt great.

So, the husband and I decided to try the same at home. For one side of the family, we donated money to a niece's college fund; and, for the other side, we purchased tree seedlings for farmer's in Asia. For our friends, we purchased bee colonies for villages in South America. Not only did we enjoy putting together packages of homemade cards and treats to go along with the donation, but we also were able to avoid participating in the shopping hysteria of the season.

You'd be amazed by how much energy you are left with to face the rest of the holiday obligations when you don't have to dive into a round of Xmas Eve mall shopping. Next year, I'm going to remember this alternate giving ritual when it comes time to deck the halls once again.

Mind Games Forever

For every birthday candle blow out, for every penny thrown into a fountain, for every shooting star, it's always the same wish: world peace, now, pretty please.

Hope springs eternal, right?

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked the question, "What do you feel is the biggest problem in the world today?" My immediate answer was that people aren't treating each other with enough care, that there's just not enough love being passed around.

Love. There's a true abundance of it in my own life. Indeed, love overflow-eth for most of the people I know. That's not exactly the problem. It feels more like we -- as a collective species -- are lacking a wider sense of love for one another, for the masses of people who aren't in our day to day lives.

It can be a lot to ask to foster love for total strangers because, you know, they're strange. Plus, there are some seriously idiotic, evil and smelly people out there. None of these things make you want to devote any love to them.

This notion of loving the unlovable is all well and good when conceptualizing, when discussing it with other like-minded people. But, it sure is a challenge to put it into an active practice. I certainly struggle spare any love for the likes of certain war mongering politicians, hideously awful "role-model" celebrities, or parents who can hardly figure out how to protect themselves let alone their own children.

See what I mean? It leaves me feeling sour just typing those words about people I don't know and don't really want to know.

And there it is: the people I don't really want to know.

I desperately want to find love for everyone -- friend, foe and otherwise -- in spite of whatever shortcomings they may have. But, most of the time, it's almost too hard to a little spare find love for myself in spite of my own unlovable shortcomings. Perhaps, herein lies our cultural problem: not enough love for ourselves. If we worked on loving ourselves and all we have to offer each other, would that make it easier to share our universal love? Would that make it easier to have sympathy for each other's struggles? Would that make a drop in the bucket?

Yes, people. The answer is YES.

I always suspected John Lennon knew exactly what he was talking about when he said, "Love is the Answer." It's no mistake that song is entitled Mind Games.

This holiday season I've altered my world peace wish mantra. From now on I'm going to wish for world peace through love for every single person I'll ever know and never will meet.

Wax On, Wax Off

Way back when -- in high school -- I used to butt heads with English teachers when it came to interpreting a given text. In my little mind, I found it outrageous to try to read too deeply into the written word. It made me uncomfortable and annoyed to assign any meaning that may or may not have been originally intended. Most of the time, my argument was something to the tune of "Couldn't the author actually mean what he says?" and "Why must we assume everything is symbolic?"

The whole reading comprehension thing plain old escaped me and I have the SAT scores to prove it. Plus, a stubborn attitude and unwillingness to resort to Cliff's Notes (like most of the kids on the honor roll) probably didn't help me out much.

So, now that I'm older (and working on the wiser), what would I tell my sixteen year-old self about interpreting a text?

Well, for starters, I'd tell her that she was absolutely right to question her authority.

Next, I'd let her in on a little secret that those silly teachers were inexplicably keeping to themselves. It's not that we have to assign meaning to other people's words, it's that we get to. It's our privilege as readers to chose to stay on the surface or dive down as deep as we can go. Once the author has put it out there, the words become ours to understand through the filter of our own experiences. If we want to think about the era during which the text was written, well that's entirely up to us. If we don't feel like to considering possible symbolism of a fig tree, then screw the damned tree already.

Last night, I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time (yea, yea, the first time, I know). This edition has a foreword by Tolkien in which he addresses this issue of the reader's interpretation of his words. He actually gets quite defensive that these books are not allegory to the World War II era (when he wrote them), as many people have extrapolated. Then he makes a point that I wish I'd known how to articulate in high school.

Tolkein states that "an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience" and "the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex." Then he refers to his own experiences during World War I, which affected the entirety of his adult life. Basically, he's rejecting the assumption that a book is allegory for the day in which is written as limiting. It doesn't mean that it cannot be, at times, but it is certainly not a rule of reading (take that Dr. Fussell!).

The part of the foreword that sat me straight up in bed is his comment that readers often confuse "applicability" with "allegory." Aha! There it is!

This is why Shakespeare can be so wonderfully and shockingly relevant, even in the twenty-first century. Human nature hasn't really changed all that much for the last several centuries, has it? The way we treat each other and the things we do to one another are just as beautiful and just as shitty as they ever were. The stories written about them, however are almost always applicable to one reader of one era or another. The only things that really change are the circumstances, the scenery, the outfits.

Tolkein has forever endeared himself to me with his stubborn stand that the trilogy isn't allegory, goddammit. A little bit on the defensive, stubborn side, but also willing to allow the reader to have their own experience with a text...so long as they know the author might or might not have wanted it that way. He and I would have been great friends.

Twenty Minute Tuesday

For weeks now, my teacher has been exceedingly patient with my non-production of short stories, or even pieces of stories (I'm too sheepish to share the 10 million, unrelated sentences that I've started). He's been giving me all sort of fantastic suggestions and plenty of encouragement, but still I have not gotten off the pot.

One of the more confusing recommendations, for me, is to try reading books from a writer's perspective. Meaning, try thinking about how I might write the scene differently, what different choices would the characters make if this were a tale of mine, etc. Also meaning, pay close attention to the various characters and see if I can pick up on their distinct personalities...it's not as easy as one might think to write a story wherein not every character is coming from the same point of view.

Anyway, I was pretty sure this would fuck up the joy of reading for the rest of time, and I don't think I put much effort into reading like a writer. Until this weekend, that is, when I became engrossed in Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (a fabulous read, by the way, highly recommend it, but a book report this is not).

Somewhere along the way, I began to actually see how the author cleverly lets the reader know -- and gets us to care about -- each character through simple, unexpected actions and dialogue. Their vulnerabilities, their strengths, their dialects, everything is of that character, that person. And, in theory, it's so damned simple. How does this person answer a phone call differently than that person? How do they react to the choices of another and why? Personalities, turns out, are not fiction, they're reality; and I have experience with personalities.

Hopefully this is the mini-breakthrough I was waiting for. Of course, my relationship with the theory of writing a story is a whole different matter than my discipline to sit down, hash out an actual set of characters and let them lead me where they need to go.

I have two responses to these reading/writing revelations:

1. Hallelujah for this new awareness to bring to my reading. The best part of it all is that reading like a writer has not ruined stories for me, it's enhanced it exceedingly. This is beyond exciting (don't forget, it's the little things!).

2. Per my teachers sage advice: I am not on a timeline, I am not in a writing race, it is OK to feel scared, overwhelmed, crazy, intoxicated, unsure. But it wouldn't hurt to jump off that cliff and find out what...or who...waits for me below.

Laughter

It took an hour to get from home to high school -- a tedious drive through commuter freeway traffic even though we hit the road at by six o'clock in the morning. For the entire six years we did the drive to that school, we always listened to the Mark & Brian on the radio. Nothing like a couple of wacky morning DJs to start the day off right.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I finally had my driver’s license. Sometimes I was even allowed to make the drive with Annika, who just started going to that school as a seventh grader. One morning, as the two of us crept off the freeway and up the hill into La Jolla, Brian was in the middle of the most terrible impression of Ricky Ricardo. The fact that he sounded nothing like Lucy's husband only made it funnier the longer the bit went on. Before long, we were struggling to catch a breath we were laughing so hard.

It was so much fun to get absorbed into a laughing fit with Annika. Our eyes would go all squinty and our faces would go red. Being sisters, we pretty much shared the same sort of silent, hysterical laughter: lots of rolling backwards and forwards with our mouths wide open, a few strange noises accompanying the combination of gasps for air and uncontrollable stomach muscle contractions, tears shooting out of our eyes and across our faces. If you didn't know we were laughing, you might think we were choking.

Laughter.

What a gift, and Annika knew how to use it as a child. Unrestrained, long and genuine. And contagious enough to last all day or break us out of a sisterly fuss. The gift left her, somewhat, when the cancer treatments showed up. She even said so herself, from time to time, that the chemo might have taken away her sense of humor. Her brain just didn’t function the same way anymore. I'm not convinced she lost her sense of humor altogether -- we certainly shared a few belly laughs as time went on -- but I do know that level of laughter didn't come as effortlessly, nor as often, the longer she lived with pain.

Today, something I heard on the radio that reminded me of the morning where I could barely drive because of our laughter. It’s a memory that only she and I share. It’s a memory that gives me the gift of my little sister: happy and free and pure.

Twenty Minute Tuesday

Crap. Today I found out it's week 9 of my 10 week school quarter. This sucks extra because I've been planning my entire life for the last month around this week being week 8. I may be somewhat screwed, actually.

Such is the life of a raging procrastinator. There's no one to blame by my own, sweet self. This, of course, makes it all worse because now I must punish myself for the lack of foresight and planning and days of living as though I'm not, in fact, a student. It's tempting, actually, to lock myself in my closet and beat myself silly, like one of those crazy Puritan preachermen who falls in love with the resident hotty widow. But, seeing as I can't stand up in my armoire and the coat closet is full of vacuum cleaners, that level of punishment isn't an option.

I suppose it will be punishment enough to have to miss the Toys for Tots motorcycle parade with the husband this weekend and the canceled (on my account) Big Sur weekend with a few high school buddies.

Poor me.

There's a sort of meloncholy that accompanies this stage of my educational journey at Antioch. Two years ago, when I started, we had just lost my sister and it must have taken well over a year before I really felt like I was in school. I look back at the work I did during those first several quarters and can barely believe I did it all. It couldn't have been me actually doing all that stuff, could it?

I had a great couple of quarters earlier this year, where I felt pretty damned on top of the world as a student. Now we're back to the fog. Back to the "what's happening to time"and "why can't I seem to keep up with anything" experience. I feel so sheepish, sometimes, for not taking full advantage of the time I have with certain professors. A few years from now I'll be pulling my hair out over some story that won't come together and I'll find some clever way to link it all back to that Fall '07 quarter where I lost track of time and forgot that I what I was doing for a couple of months.

It's a little unsettling to consider that this schoolwork procrastinator identity of mine is foreshadowing my identity as a writer. I know it doesn't have to be this way, but it is. This is simply how I be.

Herein lies life's challenge at this moment: embracing shitty habits and allowing them to just be habits so I can move on and get things done already!

Cause, really, who am I hurting by being a procrastinator? Nobody, really. It only hurts me on days that I realize that I can't read a calendar and have lost another week to have fun while delaying the ineveitable.

For now, I will keep the faith that things don't change. If that, indeed, is really the case, then I'm golden. The procrastinator within always manages to step aside just in the knick of time so that Rita can get her work done -- and get it done well.

Fingers officially crossed.

Hybrid Hippies

"Sometimes these revolutionary discussions really do exhaust me."

So said a good friend towards the middle of an evening of planning and plotting clever ways to save the world. Sure thing: figuring out how to swing others to your way o' proper, alternative thinking can really wipe a person out...I feel like I'm recovering on a daily basis.

One of the many perspectives I'm learning to respect, as my education and life continues, is that -- like it or not -- we're all victims of our social era, our cultural norms, our human tendencies. Even the most alternative-living folks around are living with some serious technology in the form of laptops, ipods, cell phones, and sometimes even televisions with DVRs. It turns out twenty-first century hippies like take-out dinners, expensive shoes, and luxury vacations, too. Despite these habits, there's something different -- more deliberate, perhaps -- in the way most new-age granola types approach their consumer identity than the general, Black Friday shopping masses.

When it comes to revolutionary pondering of the mental shift required to protect the earth and rescue the human race from certain implosion, it's clear that we must address the consumer attitude of the peoples. For the most part, the general tendency of the eco-warrior is to approach this task with a certain level of preachy anger towards the ignorance of others...and we know how well that doesn't work. It's pretty basic really: nobody but nobody in this culture wants to be ordered around. Nobody wants to have their spending habits scrutinized as contributing to the fall of the current empire.

Revolutionary talk can be pretty dramatic, you know.

But we need to figure this thing out. We need to acknowledge that things have gotten out of control and consider ways to empower the little guys (that's us, by the way) to resist the system and stand up for positive change.

Recently, a loved one took the time to ask the hippy relatives questions about her grocery shopping routine. She wanted tips on eco-friendly ways to shop for food, paper products, cleaning supplies, etc. What I learned is that she, like so many others, honestly didn't have the knowledge about the impact of one-crop, mass farming. She didn't realize there's a legitimate ecological difference if she buys pesticide-free, locally grown produce or goes to Ralph's for whatever just came off the boat. She wasn't aware that items such as laundry detergent or toilet cleaner could be toxic to both the earth and her own body. And she didn't know why she is forbidden from setting foot in that blasted new Old Navy.

Her inquiries enlightened me to the notion that there must be plenty of consumers just like her. People who want to join the creeping-into-mainstream, green-living consciousness, but they really don't know where to start.

My heart grew three sizes that day...

Instead of the old style of lectures and holier-than-thou guilt treatment, it's time that we dig deep and seek out a little sympathy for the typical consumer mind. Not everyone wants to be a full on hippy-type, but most people are willing to adjust their lifestyles in small ways that help. Those of us already making efforts to live the green life, have something real to offer those who simply do not understand the ecological consequences as they head out for another day at the mall, a weekend at Disneyland, or even a necessary trip to the grocery store.

Here's the thing: most of us are never going to be faced with the opportunity to save the world with one perfect idea executed in dramatic, super hero fashion. Talk about exhausting! Rather, the revolution starts with the small changes that can be integrated into the consumer culture, of which we're all victims, of which we're all participants.

So, how about it? It's simple and it really doesn't have to hurt as badly as all that.

The revolution starts in our homes, in our bathrooms and kitchens. The revolution starts by sharing passion for a simple, realistic lifestyle with our families, friends, communities. The revolution just might actually start one person at a time, and why shouldn't that one person be each of us?

We have the knowledge, we have the love, we have the canvas grocery bags and we're not afraid to use them!