Archive for September, 2004

50 dollars a barrel, folks

Sharon September 29th, 2004

Ok, does anyone out there really believe that we aren’t on the precipice of peak oil? My economist buddy, Steve, told me last spring that there was no way that oil was going to keep rising to $50 per barrel. Not a chance.

Guess what, we’re here. There is already evidence that the poorest people in the US

(G-d help the poorest people in the rest of the world) are going to have to start choosing between heat and food. How long before the rest of us feel the cold?

We’ve built an economy on oil. Not only do we need oil for nearly everything, but we need it to be cheap. We need oil to pump our water and remove our wastes, to warm our houses and cook our dinners, to get us to our jobs and to visit our parents in the Home. We need oil to grow our food and transport our starlink corn to the feedlots.

And when the oil prices start to rise, the turtle tower (think Yertle) starts to rock. What happens when we have to choose - food or gas, heat or sewage disposal? What happens when all those jobs supported by suburban sprawl can’t heat those buildings or get their employees to work? What happens when the economy teeters and crashes, and there is no more cheap oil to raise it up again?

I don’t think we really can fix this one anymore. Not by electing the right president, not by conservation (although it would certainly help), not by invading more countries. All we can do is be the youngest, weakest fairy godmother at the baptism, softening the curse a little. We can soften it for our children and hopefully our grandchildren by personal preparation. We can soften it for our communities with planning, for our nation by conservation, but we cannot fix it, and every minute we let slip by, every day we waste because we don’t want to change our lives, every act of education we (I) forgo, we make the curse a little darker, longer and deeper.

Damnit, get cracking folks!!! Don’t wait for Colin Campbell’s $286 per barrel.

Sharon

On learning to knit again

Sharon September 29th, 2004

Gram was a nasty old woman, and Great-aunt Helen was worse. They’d lived together for thirty years by the time I knew them, since Gram divorced my grandfather in the 1950s, and spent much of that time subtly manipulating my father and his brother into hostilities. Once grandchildren came along, did much the same for my sister and me. Oh, they loved us, indulged us, entertained us, adored us. It took a while before we noticed how much pleasure they took in playing my sister and I against each other. I was the favorite, so smart, so talented, of course not too much to look at, but that’s all right. Rachael was the pretty one, such a lovely blond, and if she was a bit dumb and overly-theatrical, well, that’s nothing. Our father was wonderful, but our mother… Uncle Rick was perfect, but his wife (who my sister and I worshipped), well, there were terrible things there. There were nasty suggestions and bitter comments about everyone, and each of us wondered what they were saying to other people about us.

With our visits came subtle (and at times not so subtle) diminishment, mild cruelty, the simple certainty that I was ugly and Rachael was stupid and that we were (and should be) in competition with one another. They told stories of Rachael’s errors and small sins to me, and vice versa, making us into conspirators against each other. We came for a week each summer and left angry and confused and hurt in ways we could not articulate, but took out against each other and our parents.

At the same time, however, those weeks were magic. Whatever we wanted, we had. Our mother, who disapproved of junk food, was appalled when we told her what we ate. There were cookies - peanut butter and chocolate chunk. Favorite foods were cooked, and they rose early to make popovers. There was candy in the glass dish, and we could watch as much television as we wanted. Little statues of animals and other decorative items inhabited the massive hutch in the dark front room, and we were permitted to take them out and play with them. The garden was filled with flowers, and we picked them and thrust them into the endless supply of glass jars under the cabinet. They were admired as much as if we’d grown them ourselves. More jars were taken outside to collect fireflies, toads and crickets, also deeply admired. In the huge backyard one year, Uncle Rick set off illegal fireworks to our amazed eyes.

We took the fat, elderly dogs for dozens of walks each day, visiting the drugstore and the hot dog stand where everyone knew we were Barbara and Helen’s grandchildren. We rode the horses and played Atari and Uncle Rick and Aunt Karen’s house, and we raced around Aunt Edith’s farm, chasing the barn cats, playing with the chickens and proving how much we could lift with the cousins. At night, we tried on the perfume and jewelry in Aunt Helen’s boxes, at whatever we desired for dinner, and watched tv drowsily as Gram and Auntie knit sweaters for us in our favorite colors.

Oh, could they knit. My father still wears the Aran fisherman’s sweater they knit for him 20 years ago, and it looks nearly new. Not only were there sweaters and mittens and scarves for us, but crib mobiles for my baby sister, halloween decorations, blankets, everything you could imagine, in vibrant colors and patterns that I now know must have consumed them. I liked to play with the yarn when I was young, pulling it out of the knitting closet, and tying things together with it. How much did I waste, and they never said a word, just pulled out a skein of another vibrant color for me to make spiderwebs of. It was always this way - they were wonderful and terrible, generous and petty, loving and cruel, and even now, I cannot divide the dualities that shape my memories.

We wanted to learn, of course, and they wanted us to learn. Even in the early 1980s, they felt that they were losing us to a different kind of girlhood. The lamented my short hair, predicted dire things for girls who played too much basketball, and tried to make us into ladies, without much success. They tried hard to teach us to knit. I was too clumsy. I learned to crochet, but showed little interest, and a few granny squares later, gave it up. I never did master the rhythym of two needles. My sister was a bit better than I, but the magic of their hands never appeared in ours. The knitting lost out to the horse, and to our resistance of anything that smacked of ladyhood.

As my sister and I became teenagers, some of the magic faded. The dogs of our childhood died. The multicolored sweaters we had been so proud of became less cool. And we began to associate some of the anger we came home from our visits with with Gram and Aunnie. The final year came when Aunnie read my diary aloud to Aunt Karen, with, I gather, snide commentary. After that, the visits were shorter, and never happy. When we became teenagers, we stopped making the four hour drive altogether. We visited only rarely. And they got older.

By the time I went to college I was truly angry at them for the things they had done to me. Aunt Helen would call sometimes in my dorm room, but I rarely returned her calls, although she begged me to. One day, in my sophomore year, I found a package waiting for me. It was a baby blanket. I was horrified that she would send this thing to me at college, so totally alien, so like them to inflict upon me expectations that I had not interest in meeting. When I called her late, Aunnie said that she didn’t think she’d live long enough to see my babies. So she made the blanket for me and sent it, and I stuffed it in a box and rolled my eyes at how little they understood me. Trying to hurt her, I told her I’d probably never have any. She didn’t believe me.

Aunt Helen lived to meet my future husband, lived to express horror that he was Jewish, to complain to my face that I never came to visit any more. She did not survive to see the babies. I had not visited in many years when guilt drew me there, and I saw how near to death she was, still bitter, still snide, but on the edge of total failure. Still, I went once (in many years) before she died. My sisters did not, and paid the price in my grandmother’s anger.

Gram managed to survive on her own just a few months before she went to the nursing home. There was no more knitting there. She faded, stopped walking with her walker, stopped reading, settled for complaining and watching television. I visited her more then, coming a few times a year, first with one son, then two. She died shortly after I let her know that her third great-grandson was on the way. She never knew that the fourth, my youngest sister’s child, followed shortly after.

When I was young, Gram and Aunnie made elaborate lists of who would inherit what after they died. In fact, my aunt and uncle took what they wanted (not much), and then my father and sisters and I came and took what we wanted - that was all. Mostly, there was garbage. I took some strange things. This was before I had children, but I felt compelled to salvage the period clothing - the hats with elaborate feathers, the fur stoles, the sparkly shoes and other things that we had been permitted to dress up in when we were children. I am not sure why they mattered to me. I took Gram’s cedar chest, and left Aunnie’s for my cousin Cody. I took books my father had read as a boy for my future children. I took some of the dishes that stood in the hutch. I took the knitting needles with the cloisson ends. I had no children, and I did not knit, but I took them. Somehow Aunnie’s anticipation of my future had begun to change me. It changed my sister too. She took the unfinished Aran blanket, with the hope of someday finishing it.

There was no funeral for my grandmother. My uncle Rick decided against it, I think perhaps in part to hurt my father, but also because there was almost no one left to come. Her sisters were dead. Her friends, the ladies who knit from the DAR and Eastern Star and the church committees were dead. The younger women in those groups, even the neighbors no longer visited, except to ask if she wanted to renew her memberships to things. We never convened to say goodbye to Gram, and I think only my father was much troubled by it. I was relieved, more than anything, not to have to travel while pregnant, with two young children, not to have to watch my father and his brother fight out the battles of their childhood again.

Right before my first son was born, I dug out the blanket. It was white, with pink and blue stripes delicately across the middle. Like everything they tried to give me, it was not a perfect fit. The yarn was cheap acrylic, I loathe pink and baby blue. But I felt then a twinge of sentiment, that Aunnie, whatever her flaws, had believed in and loved my children before I ever knew them. I threw away a lot of things they gave me, but not that. My son slept beneath it, some of the time.

And then, not long ago, I was seized with the desire to knit. My sister had her first child, the one that Gram never knew, a little girl. And the desire to knit her a blanket was nearly intolerable. Knitting blankets is what aunts do for their baby nieces. And so I did. I learned to knit from a series of books. I am not a coordinated woman, and it finally took a book about knitting for small children to bang the basic motions into me. But once I began, I could not stop. And I thought of them every moment. Of how much I wish I’d listened to some of what they knew. Of how badly I wish I’d been able to distinguish between their desire to make me in their image and their desire to simply teach me what I knew. Of how much easier this would have been if they could have showed me, hand over paper-thin hand.

I am still not sure how much nostalgia for them I have. I find them easier to live with as anxious memories, for it is easier to distinguish between sorrow and pleasure, to sort out the things I liked best, and try and leave the others behind. And all I can do to assuage the memory (the ghost) of my failures to understand, and theirs as well, is to knit for the great-grandchildren they did not live to see, but believed in so fervently.

Accomplishments…sigh

Sharon September 27th, 2004

Looking at my blog from this morning, I’m struck by how bitter and incoherent it is. Let me assure you all of several things. 1. When my infant allows me more than 8 hours sleep (over three nights ;-P) I can write a simple declarative sentence. 2. I am not (quite) as petty as I seem here - my irritation was not at political bloggers themselves, but at the Times article attempting (badly) to evaluate their impact. 3. Yes, I really am this cranky.

Today has been more or less a total loss. Eli was off to school (hallelujah, school!), but Simon (irritable and sick), Isaiah (a little sick, not too irritable) and Mommy (sick, exhausted and really, really irritable) were trapped in the house together for 8 hours, after five days of totally disrupted routines. It was not a recipe for joy, particularly if you are the kind of horrible, evil Mommy who does not want to perform Bob-the-Builder related acts of love all day long. If I were a good Mommy, I would:

1. Let Simon watch Bob the builder videos until his brains started to leak out his ears.

2. Play Bob the builder colorforms for hours on end.

3. Carry the garage, giant scoop, and 680 seperate pieces of Bob the Builder paraphenalia up and down stairs every half hour.

4. Hold Simon in my arms and lovingly tell him stories about how his best friends came over and they played Bob the Builder games, and helped Lofty rescue Pilchard from Scoop’s bucket, while Spud did obscene things to Muck and Bob behind Farmer Pickles’s barn (ok, I swear, I didn’t say that. I was just tempted to.)

Instead, what we did today was - whine. All three of us whined, except when we yelled. Isaiah whined because he did not take a sufficient nap. I whined because I just wanted to be left alone, and I really hate Bob. Simon whined because I hate Bob, which apparently means I don’t love him, and because I did not fill his world with non-stop Bob. Then I yelled at Simon for whining. Then I gave in and played with the fucking colorforms, while removing them from Isaiah’s mouth at various intervals. And I let the kids watch a truly grotesque amount of television, so that I could blog, among other things. This seems appropriate, doesn’t it?

Grand total accomplishments for the day - hideous neglect of my children, 1 load of laundry, two blog entries. Yep, I can see why I started doing this…

Cheers,

Sharon

Why I should not be allowed to read the Times Magazine

Sharon September 27th, 2004

Ugh. Long week - 12 for dinner every night, Grandma’s 80th birthday, descent of relatives from CA, baby sick and not sleeping, yom kippur, sukkah to put up, deliveries to do, cranky children, nowhere near enough sleep.

This morning I finally got to yesterday’s Times Magazine, and besides the hideous article in defense of cars and sprawl, which contained a level of coherency and reason only occasionally matched by some of my densest undergraduates in their first drafts (anti-sprawl activists are elitists, and those who advocate higher gas taxes and tolls (regressive taxes that injure the poor the most) are good Americans, intolerable misuse of both Plato and Aristotle, not to mention poor sentence construction); there was the cover article attempting to gauge the importance of blogs on the current political campaign.

Ok, let me be clear. I have no idea how many hits this site gets per day, since I haven’t the faintest idea how to download a hit counter, but I’m guessing maybe…2, one accidentally through the “next blog function” and one that plugged “Shakespeare and farming” in for reasons that escape me. I am giving no one any kind of run for their money as a political blogger - I am so deeply nauseated by the present political process on every side and so short of time to attend to the news that I am reading yesterdays Times. So I should be clear that I am the wrong person to gauge the impact of anything on anything. And yet, I still think we probably shouldn’t care.

The thing is, as many hits as political bloggers get, do we really imagine that Wonkette is being googled by the last undecided voter in Ohio (I know her, actually - she’s the moderator of a list I belong to, very sweet, very wise in her own way - I promise, I’m doing my best to swing her towards the left!!!)? Oh, maybe she is and they all are - maybe they are changing the landscape with younger, angrier voters (Dear G-d - are there really people angrier than me? I know they are younger, but if they are angrier, I pity them and hope the medications help!) - they are certainly raising new money, and I’m grateful for that. But I suspect we’re going to lose this election by a considerably larger margin than we did the last one (ie, we’re going to actually lose it, instead of having it stolen), and I don’t think any amount of money could make a difference.

John Kerry is a mediocrity - he has been forever. Bloggers are giving a direction to the disaffected left, but the disaffected left (which includes me, and has since I worked on my first campaign at 12, and was deeply disillusioned - oh, and for the record, I worked for two of Kerry’s campaigns, once in high school and once in college) has damned little power right now. But the Bush-loathers (of which I am one most passionately) aren’t going to swing this election. And the shame of it is, yet again, we’ll have thrown away an election we could have won, with a passionate, charismatic candidate. Democrats are cowards, and I’m frankly ashamed to be one, but I’m not sure what else to be if I want even the remotest access to change.

I do not aspire to blogger fame - well, ok, just a tiny bit, in the sense of wishing for influence. But the people who I want to influence don’t read blogs - or at least not mine. I don’t know how to reach them, and I wouldnt know how to move them, given the hand we have been dealt. And it appears no one else does either.

Knitting and Crocheting

Sharon September 20th, 2004

I like to tell myself that knitting and crocheting will be useful in a post-carbon era, and that we will need lots of warm garments - scarves, mittens, sweaters, hats, blankets. In fact, I think I’m just a little bit obsessed. I really love to knit, and I like crocheting even better, because it is so much easier, and thus I can even watch movies with subtitles while doing it. If I do that when I’m knitting hideous things happen.

I also like to tell myself that my little yarn addiction is good for us, that it means we’ll all be warm after the peak ;-), but its really just a bad habit. But I really, really like running my fingers through yarn, winding it, knitting and crocheting with it. My current favorite yarn is a beautiful bulky merino from www.handpaintedyarn.com. They are an uruguayan collective, and they spin the softest, most beautiful stuff I’ve ever come in contact with, in the most astounding colors. I’m currently knitting an afghan with their yarn in shades of dark green, chocolate, cream and peach.

My other project include a couple of ribbed scarves for my Dad and his partner Anna (made with another favorite yarn, Brown Sheep’s bulky wool - have you noticed I like bulky yarn?), a striped blanket for Isaiah (who sadly was born before my fiber resurgance, and got no homemade blankie from mommy), a sweater for Eli made from a beautiful blue and purple ribbon merino (did you notice I like soft yarns?), a handspun afghan of wine, blue, purple and brown for my dissertation advisor (I swear I’m going to finish, so I have to make him a thank you gift - then I can claim that I didn’t write the diss because the blanket wasn’t ready), an afghan for us in blues and creams, light blue cotton slippers for Grandma (Brown sheep cotton fleece yarn - another favorite), an afghan for new niece Abby (she also missed out), chenille scarf for Mom, scarves for my sister and her boyfriend (Soon to be fiance, I hope, they are at present on their way to Italy where she expects to be proposed to - although she’s been expecting for a while, without results), socks for Susie (my step-mom), a blanket for Grandma and Grandpa, and a baby blanket for pregnant friend Bess, who I think is having a girl (they don’t want to know the sex, but I’m good at guessing them - one of my few talents).

Do I have a few too many works in progress? Knitting is kind of like my life - I think my theory if that if I keep up the WIPs, I can’t ever die.

Talk about weird and obsessive - I’m so into knitting that I have purchased the yarn for the *next* baby’s blanket - a baby I don’t intend to conceive for a good 5 or 6 months. I’m sure this is bad luck. But I really, really liked the yarn, and this one will probably be the last, and it takes me so long to finish anything that I wanted to plan ahead….sigh.

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