‘Scuse my dust

As I’ve moved out of Red Fork, my old blog header seemed a little out of date, so I’m making some adjustments. Bear with me; things will probably look weird around here while I’m test-driving themes and dinking around with widgets. I’m sure I’ll get tired of rearranging the furniture and settle into something in a day or two.

Emily

Thanks, Mom

I got up this morning, made myself a cup of coffee from Sumatran beans purchased in Makanda, and stood sipping it on the deck as I looked out over the little organic garden in my backyard.

I spent the afternoon working at a job I adore and then drove home with an album of Bob Dylan covers pouring from the speakers in my tie-dyed artcar.

I am complicated and eccentric and outrageous and confident, a latter-day hippie with a social conscience, a DIY streak, and a taste for vinyl records, historic preservation, and irony, and it occurs to me that my mom had almost everything to do with that.

Here are some things Mom did for me, without which I would be a different person:

* Taught me to read at age 2. That pretty much set the tone for everything that followed.
* Let me read Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening over her shoulder when I was 3. I think I knew the recipe for thermophilic compost before I knew the recipe for oatmeal cookies.
* Matched my donation to Greenpeace to save the baby harp seals when I was 4.
* Exposed me to great music — Neil Diamond and the Beatles and most of the ’60s folk revival — and looked the other way while I was wailing into a hairbrush about having “two kinds of lovers, one on each coast” at age 9 or liberating Diamond’s Tap Root Manuscript and Joan Baez’s David’s Album from her vinyl collection at 15.
* Loaned me her copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull — and encouraged me to fly.
* Never, ever allowed me to own a Barbie.
* Tipped me off to the story that more or less cemented my reputation as a journalist and led to my first paying freelance gig when I was 14.
* Bought me my first espresso machine. (This may or may not have been a ploy to get me to quit cutting class to hang out at Longbranch, but the end result was a taste for good coffee that remains part of my life all these years later.)
* Set aside her personal tastes long enough to let me dye my hair when I turned 17.
* Scoffed — frequently and always within my earshot — at people who are afraid of aging.
* Never accepted “I can’t” as an excuse.
* Encouraged me to express myself, whether she agreed with the sentiments I was expressing or not.

Thanks, Mom. I love you.

Love,
Emily

Update from the garden

We had several cool days right after I planted, so the garden hasn’t grown quite as fast as I’d like, but I’m finally seeing some progress out there: A couple of the strawberry plants are setting fruit, the cucumbers are starting to sprout, the dill is up, a few cilantro seeds have sprouted, and the arugula and California poppy sprouts are starting to put out grown-up leaves. Today was warm, and we got a little sprinkling of rain this afternoon, so hopefully I’ll see some real progress soon.

In other news, I am still thoroughly enjoying my job, my proximity to my family, and my new house. We finally closed on the house Monday, so I’m hoping to spend part of my weekend hanging pictures and making it feel just a little more like home. I think I might stash most of the pictures in the garage and just rotate them in and out, though. Our old house looked sort of cluttered because we had way too much stuff on the walls. I’m fine with the office looking like somebody’s dorm room, but I think I’d rather the rest of the house look a little cleaner.

I kicked off my weekend in a thoroughly unproductive fashion: Nap, sudoku, and guitar. It was lovely.

Hope your weekend is off to a good start, wherever you are.

Emily

Debunking the Beauty Myth

I’m sure by now you’re aware of the latest and most egregious attack on teenage girls’ already fragile self-esteem, but just in case you’re not, click here to find out why you’ll be boycotting Abercrombie & Fitch and its affiliates from now until the Cubs win the Series.

As much as I’d love to believe that the inevitable demise of Mike Jeffries’ career will solve the problem, the sad fact is that it probably won’t; all this hypocritical P.R.-nightmare-in-flip-flops has done for us is put a comically clueless face on a much larger issue.

Jeffries’ tone-deaf misogyny harmonizes perfectly with the other sour notes I’ve heard lately: Disney’s gratuitous attempt to sexualize Merida from Brave; InTouch’s apparent ignorance of biology; the frequent attacks on Hillary Clinton’s appearance; and the ridicule a young friend of mine endures on a daily basis because she is albino and thus has a porcelain complexion, green eyes, and gorgeous golden-red dreadlocks to go with her African-American features.

Jeffries may have articulated it the most brazenly, but his message is no different than the others’: If you are female, your value depends entirely on the extent to which your physical appearance adheres to a narrow set of standards engineered by ad executives for the specific purpose of making the largest possible number of women feel insecure enough about their appearance to want to spend money to change it.

This kind of manipulative marketing is detrimental to women because it seeks to profit at the expense of our self-worth. It’s detrimental to all of us — men and women alike — because it seeks to remove variables such as individual taste and force us to evaluate beauty exclusively on Madison Avenue’s flawed, self-serving rubric.

I remember a comment someone once made about my favorite singer: “Judy Collins isn’t pretty, but she’s striking.”

I disagree with the first half of that assessment, but I think it illustrates the difficulty we have in wrapping our heads around the sort of beauty that doesn’t fit the rubric. If a woman is not conventionally pretty, we don’t know what to do with her. We can’t resist looking at her, but why?

You probably don’t fit the rubric, either. And you’re in awesome company, because you know who else doesn’t fit the rubric? Adele. Queen Latifah. Emmylou Harris. Bonnie Raitt. Jamie Lee Curtis. Helen Mirren. Tina Turner. My albino friend with the stunning African-American features and Irish coloring. Me. Not one of us fits the rubric. We’re all either too old, too heavy, too unconventional, or too all of the above to meet the standards A&F is promoting.

To hell with the rubric. I’d sooner die than swap my tangled curls, gray streak, hips, boobs, laugh lines, bifocals, or self-respect for some manipulative retailer’s approval.

To quote Bette Midler (who doesn’t fit the rubric, either): “Cherish forever what makes you unique, ’cause you’re really a yawn if it goes.”

Emily

Awww.

Somebody decided to take up residence in one of the hanging baskets on my front porch. Yay, spring!

I discovered the nest when I got too close and startled the mama bird while planting a pot of Shasta daisies in the front flowerbed this evening after work. So cute!

Emily

Madison

Today was glorious — chilly and drizzly, but just right for a trip to Makanda to wander through Dave Dardis’ secret garden. Dave has put in a new gallery next to Rainmaker Studio to display his work, and it’s really nice. A precocious fourth-grader named Madison, who apparently is a frequent flyer on the Boardwalk, decided I needed a guided tour.

You have not lived until you have experienced the Makanda Boardwalk through the eyes of a little girl with a big imagination. What an awesome place for a kid to hang out.

Madison and I had a very artsy, creative conversation that I am pretty sure inspired both of us. She has been studying Greek mythology at school, and she thought one of Dave’s sculptures — a woodcarving of a woman’s face with little brass people scurrying over it — represented Mother Earth and her children. Can you imagine? Fourth grade, and she’s already looking at esoteric sculptures and expounding on their underlying symbolism. As an old scholar bowl coach, the first thing I thought was, “Somebody needs to put this kid on a buzzer.” But when I suggested that she try out for her school’s team in a few years, she said she didn’t think she could do something like that, because she was in special ed.

Do I have to tell you what Mama Bear thought about whoever put that idea in this child’s head?

I assured her that I had known some awesome players who were in special ed, and if she thought something sounded like fun, she should go for it and let the chips fall where they may.

It really bugs me that people act as if a learning disability somehow disqualifies a kid from being gifted. Hell, I’m convinced that half the things we classify as “disabilities” are just gifts we don’t know how to use. We don’t know what to do with them, so we slap a negative label on them and try to train or drug them out of kids because it’s easier than trying to figure out how to harness lightning. And in the process, we end up introducing the false god of “I can’t” to a 10-year-old who spontaneously interprets modern art through the lens of ancient literature and articulates her findings to a receptive stranger.

Sometimes I really hate our educational system.

Emily

Folk Thursday: Speace and Fullbright

Wow. Just … wow. If I still taught, this would totally go into my figurative language unit.

Emily