Today’s Narrative #2
Efrosini
I picked up my mom from the board and care home today and took her with us to have lunch at my cousin Aglaia’s home in Oakland. She really was not in a particularly good mood today. I don’t think she was feeling all that well, and she was showing her surly, stubborn side a bit, so i wasn’t sure how well this luncheon was going to go.
It’s about a 20 minute drive, and on the way, she asked if were going home about four or five times, about every two minutes. Each time, I explained to her that I had just picked her up from her home and that we were going to Aglaia’s house. She’d say, “Oh, okay” and be silent for a minute. Then ask again. After a few iterations of that, the conversation moved on to whether they would have food for us, and we did that repetition only about 4 times. Then she returned to the theme of us going to our home.
Effie: After we are done, take me back to our house.
Neo: I’m going to take you back to where you are staying mom, the place where you have a room.
E: Back to the hospital?
N: Its not a hospital mom, its a γηροκομείο (old folks home).
E: What do I need that for? I’m not old. They aren’t doing anything for me; they aren’t giving me therapy or medicine or anything. They aren’t doing surgery.
N: Mom, we have you there because you forget everything, that’s the illness you have. And what do you mean you aren’t old, you are 92 years old.
E: 92? What does that have to do with it?
I couldn’t help but laugh. Sarah and Theo in unison asked what she said that was so funny. When I related the conversation, they laughed, too.
The Dowry
Covered skillet
My mother-in-law said, “We have something for you, if you want it. I told Ray it was my dowry. We haven’t used them in a long time.” She was talking about the cast iron pan set that had belonged to Ray’s parents, or possibly even grandparents, and was passed down to them sometime after they were married. I guess she meant it was Ray’s dowry for her. And now, it is Sarah’s dowry for me, some 20-odd years after tying the knot.
“My god, yes! Thank you so much, Marge,” I said excitedly. I looked over the rusty and crusty pans. There were no cracks or chips, or anything a good scrubbing and seasoning wouldn’t fix. This was an interesting covered pan set I had not seen before. The bottom is an extra-deep skillet, and the top a shallower pan with a ridge along the edge that fits snugly inside the rim of the bottom. It wasn’t until I cleaned it up and prepared to photograph it that I noticed that the edges opposite the handles looked like a slot and bump that fit in it to form a hinge. Brilliant!
I gave them a good scrubbing with hot soapy water and scrub sponge. To season them, I wiped them down completely with vegetable oil and baked them in a 450-degree oven for 30 minutes. Then, I removed them from the oven and allowed them to cool completely. I repeated this three more times to put a total four coats on over the next couple of days.
My cast iron collection now includes this set and a smaller 10″ skillet I inherited from my father that’s probably about 80 years old, a small dutch oven purchased at a yard sale for $5, and big Lodge 14″ skillet I received new as a gift. I have to say, it’s heavy, but I love cooking in this stuff. I’m gonna see if I can’t ween myself off the teflon for good.
Morning Commute, March 16
This morning’s commute was inspiring. Starting with the dumped over the shopping cart and bag of baby shoes and ending with downtown buildings in soft overcast light.
“Confusion will be my epitaph
as I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying
yes, I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying”
State of California
I’m not sure what further connection there is between these two yet, but I feel strongly that there is one.
Computer Problem Undermines Recreational Productivity
Regardless of what happened in Vegas, what happened at home while we were in Vegas was: a power failure. The report was that once it came back on, the iMac wouldn’t finish booting. So, when we arrived home, there it sat, a blank gray screen glaring back at me.
“Probably just needs to be shut down and restarted,” I thought. And I was right, sort of. This time, it completed its boot up, but it wasn’t long before:
The spinning beach ball of death. Ever since then, it will randomly and annoyingly freeze and spin until I force quit out of the application. It seems to only affect one or another application in memory at a time with others unaffected. Also, whenever I try to shut down or just log out, it gets as far as that blank gray screen and no further. So, then its a hard shutdown and start-up.
So, naturally I’ve been wasting time trying to get to the bottom of it: resetting various mysterious acronyms (PRAM, NVRAM, SMC, PMU, and WTF!), booting from the install disk to repair the disk, and so on and so forth. When shit like this happens, it drives me crazy and I have a hard time ignoring it and moving on to other things until I resolve it. Although sometimes, when the problem is bad but not quite critical, I can manage to bang my head against it for a few hours until my short attention span gets distracted by some shiny object in another part of life. Then I forget about it until comes back to bit me when I least expect it. These past couple weeks have offered plenty of distractions. So, to be honest, I’m behind on solving this, too. I have not been able to face wiping the disk and reinstalling everything. sigh… next week.
Introduction to falling behind
Yes, I recognize that I’m now woefully behind in this post-a-day project. But it is not really my fault; forces beyond my control are conspiring against me. They weigh on me and burden me until I crumple down into a heap of my own laziness. (The laziness is beyond my control, too, of course.) These are not garden-variety forces of distraction and procrastination, like say, a hangnail on my typing finger, or simply beautiful beach weather. Not at all. Each of these complex and weighty forces deserves its own explanation that could stand alone in a separate post. And now that I type it, I see I have what looks like a great strategy for squeaking out some more posts! With that strategy in hand, I’ll do little more than enumerate the reasons why I haven’t written. And in the by-and-by, I’ll write about why I’m not writing.
- Las Vegas
- Computer problems
- Parenting
- American politics
- Family emergencies
- Neurotic belief that I must somehow learn about some 10 different computer programming technologies all at once.
- World events
There’s no particular order to this list, just like in my actual life. Although co-incidentally, the first item on the list marked the beginning of the end for my fidelity to the Commitment. There’s nothing like going on vacation to break the routine, get you out of the habit, and make getting back to work impossibly distasteful. Even if it’s only for a couple of days.
And so it was with the Las Vegas trip. Before the trip, the thought of completely failing to post for a day was just inconceivable. It may have been late, it may have been typo-ridden and incomprehensible, it may have been stupid and a sham topic just to get the post up, but by Dog, it was going to get done. Then, once I actually completely failed to deliver just once, just that first time, then it became conceivable. I thought to myself, “I missed a day and,…and… nothing happened.” And then after that, with each day that goes by it is SO MUCH easier to ignore the nagging little voice telling me that I made this Commitment I need to fulfill no matter what’s happened or who’s died.
I even brought my laptop with me to Vegas with the idea of continuing to write. I almost sort of did. I think I got one post up. But then,… well, I’d say more about what might have gone wrong with that plan, but you know what they say about what happens in Vegas. So, let’s leave it at that for the moment. And we’ll see if I can get around to explaining any of these other crippling roadblocks to self-realization through blogging.
Dining in Vegas
Spinach and Grilled Salmon Salad
There is no shortage of people who are willing to pay a lot for their meals in Las Vegas. That must be the case, because there was no shortage of places charging very high prices for mediocre food. Being a complete Vegas newbie, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I had always heard that everything was cheap in Vegas because they make all their money fleecing the players. I guess that was before the city became a more broadly marketed vacation destination with high-end entertainment, food, art, etc.
Not knowing the ins and outs of eating on the strip, we had our share of over-priced, dull food. But we did have a few outstanding meals. The very first meal we ate after landing and getting settled was at Mon Ami Gabi at Paris, Las Vegas. It included a spinach and salmon salad, artisanal cheeses, frite, and a couple other appetizers that the four of us shared around. Not to mention a really nice bottle of wine. And it was all reasonably priced.
Perfect over-medium eggs and crispy hashbrowns!
Chicken Crepe at Mon Ami Gabi
Having been so lucky on our first, perfectly random selection of a place to eat, we got the idea most places in the nicer resorts would be really good. It was with breakfast in the Wynn the next morning that we started to learn otherwise. And so it went for the next couple days with nothing comparing to that first meal.
We even at dinner “affordably” at the Cuban place on Fremont St. Yes, it was fun and funky and loud, and while the food was priced more appropriately, everthing beyond the opening chips and salsa was somewhat uninspiring.
Our sushi dinner at Japonais before the show (“Love”, which as fantastic, BTW) was pretty good at the price we paid, which was about half off for happy hour. At full price, I would have been disappointed. That goes for the drinks, too.
Finally, on our last morning there, we went back to the frenchie joint, where we had a great breakfast on a beautiful sunny patio while watching the water show across the street at Belagio.
Yes, maybe someday we’ll go back for another show or two. And we’ll be sure to do better job getting the intel on where to eat.
Today’s Narrative
Efrosini
Ok, so this isn’t “today’s” narrative anymore, since I got sidetracked after starting it. But it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’ll stick with it for now.
I try to see my mom every weekend. Usually, I go pick her up from the board and care facility and bring her to my house for an hour or so. Mostly we just talk. Sometimes, I’ll make her a little lunch with some feta cheese, olives and bread, or some Greek coffee.
Of course, these are not normal conversations on account of her dementia. In fact, it is charitable to call them conversations, but they are still important to me, and to her, I think. For example, we usually cover the same ground over and over again. Sometimes we only utter about eight to 10 different sentences; we just repeat them, sometimes with different inflections, or emphasis.
Interestingly, though she can’t really remember much anymore, she manages to maintain a theme for an entire visit, sometime over the course of a couple visits. Today’s narrative was something like this.
Effie: Come here pulakimou (my little bird). I don’t remember much anymore. But I think I loved you when you were little. Didn’t I?
Neo: Yes, momma, you loved me. You loved me too much. You let me get away with too much.
E: You have to indulge the children. We had a good life.
N: Yes, we did.
E: I took care of you didn’t? I don’t remember much.
N: Yes, mom. Do you remember Fresno?
E: Oh yes. You were there too weren’t you?
N: Yes, of course, momma.
E: I don’t remember much anymore. But I think I loved you when you were little. Didn’t I?
And so it goes, through a few repetitions on the same topic. Naturally, on different visits she is interested in different things depending on what dreams she’s been having, or something. And so, we get different narratives on different days.
It is quite striking to me how different her memory will be from one day to the next. One visit she’ll be out of it and not remember much of anything about the recent past, say 20 years. Then the next time she’ll even remember really recent things I’d told her over and over again on previous visits, that I was sure would never stick. It’s easy to get optimistic when the good days happen and think that maybe she’s getting better. But it doesn’t take long until the tide of memory recedes back to a low ebb.
Mere Observer
Lying here looking at the ceiling , I am reminded of various observational mishaps. The first one that comes to mind is something that happened to me in college once. After graduating, I returned the following year to take some more philosophy classes that had not been offered during my time at CSU, Fresno. The very first day I was sitting in Professor Winant’s Philosophy of Language class listening to her introduction to the subject and the class, and explanation of the syllabus. It was quite interesting. Then, to pair up everyone in the class, she counted off, “one”, “two”, “one”, “two”,… so that each person was assigned to either the “one” group or the “two” group. She ended on a “two”. Great, we are even. To make sure she got everyone and that the groups were even she asked the “ones” to raise their hand, and counted hands. Then the “twos”. But we didn’t come out even. Weird. So, thinking she must have miscounted the hands, she did it all over again. Again we were not even. Then, as she was starting to count for the third time, I realized why the groups were not coming out even. I was not raising my hand for either group. It’s not that i wasn’t paying attention to what was going on, I was earnestly.
In my head, I had become an observer, so much so that I had somehow forgotten that I was also a participant — that I was actually there in the room, and not just watching it on TV. And this, dear friends, feels like the story of my life. Observing, not participating. Watching in fascination as the parade goes by, but too scared, shy, lazy, preoccupied, busy, confused, or just stupid to jump in. But it’s no way to live, not at all.
Is it cheesing out?
Fog on Hwy 132 © neo serafimidis 2010
In addition to committing to a projet to post every day on this blog (I know, I know, that Vegas trip got me two days behind. But I’ll catch up!), I have been participating in a post-a-day project over on flickr as well. Needless to say, it is pretty hard to get all this in, especially after a painful 2 hours working with the kid on his homework. And I really didn’t have an opportunity to shoot anything today.
So, I was reading a discussion thread over on the flickr project 365 group where a poster shared his strategy for deflating the pressure of getting something up every day. That was to shoot the same object every morning as a backup shot in case no better shot gets taken that day. That way there is no pressure in completing the daily assignment. I was about to start employing this myself, with a little queasiness that I wouldn’t feel too good about just putting up a dispassionate shot of something sitting on my desk every once in a while.
Then I saw another strategy that I like even better and I can combine with another task I have to do anyway. This strategist points out that her goal in participating is to get post-production practice in as well as clicking the shutter. So, she’ll sometimes post a photo that was taken previously, but that was processed on that day.
I realized this would work well for me. I too, have thousands of photos that I have not processed yet. I also have a huge amount of file backup work to do. So, if I don’t have a newly shot photo to put for a given day, I will process an untouched photo from the current batch that is getting backed up. That way, I get some processing practice in, and some processing done, and get back to burning backups of all my files. Whew!
Here is the original unprocessed version of the shot found I rediscovered today while digging back through for the backup task.
Firebird, will you forgive me?
1969 Firebird
My first car was a ’69 Pontiac Firebird. It was black on black, in beautiful condition, exactly like the one pictured above. Being 16 years old, I basically thrashed it and sold it after a couple years for a mere $800. I think I paid about $1500, so I suppose that is not so bad. Just seeing the photo above made me queasy with nostalgia and regret. God I loved that car. I wish I still had it. For years, and I mean many years, I would periodically have dreams wherein I would suddenly find it somewhere, or remember that I had it somewhere, or otherwise be reunited with it in some totally illogical way, and be SO happy. Then, I would wake up and be SO disappointed.
Well, it looks like I could replace it for about $20,000. I suppose that’s not so bad either. If I had a garage for it, I might consider such a thing.
I’ll admit I’m also sentimental about Pontiac in general and can barely believe it really doesn’t exist anymore. There were a lot of Pontiacs in my youth. My childhood friends Richie and Debbie were a Pontiac family. Their mom drove a silver Bonneville and their dad drove a red ’67 Firebird. Eventually, my cousin Tommy bought the Firebird. By then it was a metallic root beer brown, kinda like the color of my Schwinn Varsity 10-speed bike. In high school my friend Mike had a silver ’76 Trans Am. Another friend had a GTO. The list goes and on. How Pontiac came to the point of building the Aztec (ugliest car ever) and then disappearing from the face of the earth is still beyond me. But so it goes…
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