Appropriated Culture

I can't remember why or when I got the gift of the afghan from my grandmother. We all received one eventually, all of us grandchildren, I mean. Jessica, my first wife, got one too. I am not sure now if all the spouses of grandchildren also received one or if Jessica had commented on how much she liked mine. That kind of narrows the time frame for when I got mine as I do not think I had it in college when it would have been nice to wrap up in to read with, as, being an English literature major, I averaged reading two novels a week. Some years after we had divorced and Jessica already had children with her new husband, she found her afghan hidden away in some closet and called me to see if I wanted it. I told her to keep it and give it to her little girl someday. Jessica passed away from cancer several years ago. I hope now that her daughter wraps up in it at night reading one of Jessica's favorite books.

I think now that I must have received my afghan as a birthday gift. My birthday is in August and I vaguely remember there was some slight incongruence on opening up a gift on a sweltering summer day to find a crocheted wool blanket. Looking back on the use I have gotten out of it and how important this blanket has become to me, my face should have been one of delirious happiness. Instead at the time it probably said that I thought my grandmother delirious with heat to be gifting such a thing. Thinking back, it might have been that I received it while I was in college yet, but that it got put up in a closet since it was of no immediate use and did not get pulled back down until sometime when I was at home at Christmas thinking about how between home in Chicago and my former home in Michigan finding as many warm layers to pile onto myself would be smart.

An afghan, if one hasn't heard the term before, is simply a throw, usually knitted or crocheted and usually in bright colors. The term entered the English lexicon after wealthy travelers and soldiers brought back colorful, hand-woven blankets from their travels to Afghanistan in the 10th century. American women began making their own versions as alternatives to quilted blankets. I had to go look it up to ensure that I was not just using some esoteric term that only my grandmother seemed to keep around from days of yore. (Like "snot rag". I swear that the Kleenex people got to Grandma when they became afraid they would lose their trademark to the common use of their name for their facial tissue and convinced her that she should keep using "snot rag" to refer to their product.)

Mine, having been created by a little woman in Saginaw, Michigan, who understood my own sensibilities and not by some Pashtun woman thousands of miles away, is not brightly colored. I think one would say it is of a natural wool color or something like cafe au lait, heavy on the lait. It is done in a pattern of alternating two inch by two inch squares, one where the pattern seems to go up and down and the other where it appears to go left to right, giving the entire thing a sort of basket weave appearance. Over the many years of use it has become pilled and some of the crochets have slipped out and developed holes like runs in a woman's nylons. But it has also become softer, and, though I am certainly biased, has an appearance more of being well-loved than ratty.

Grandma was constantly knitting or crocheting while we watched Barney Miller or Wheel of Fortune together. Like I said, each of us grandchildren got one, and I am sure that many other people have one as well. Of course, it took time to make one and probably more and more time as she got older and her eyes got worse and her hands became arthritic. I honestly couldn't say how long it took Grandma to make one, Some ballpark of several weeks to several months, but it was why you just got your afghan when you got it. She couldn't churn out a couple dozen like some sort of Nike factory worker to hand out all at once at Christmas. If yours was coming up on her list and your birthday was coming up in August, she was going to do it and not worry about the weather. She had other orders to be filled.

I said it is well-loved and it is. In today's world of the commercial fleece blanket and (ugh) the Snuggie, the hand-made afghan is worth its weight in gold. (Okay, perhaps not literally because gold is like $2000 per ounce, and every man has his price. Sorry, Grandma.) I wrap up in it every night as I leisurely read or watch "The Last of Us". It doesn't even need to be cold out. Now that we have central air here and Jen has the occasional hot flash, I am more than certain I've used it even on hot August nights. Jen says she knows when I am sick when I drag my well-loved security blanket off behind me like Linus as I head to bed. Then there are those days when one feels alone and is alone. Those days when even those of us who are non-huggers could really use one, but no one else is around. On that kind of day, I can still wrap myself in love. 

Thinking About Art

I am listening to Lincoln in the Bardo, a fantastic (fiction) book about the death of Willie Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War and its impact on Abraham Lincoln. I am almost finished with it and was talking about it with my therapist this morning. I have read literally thousands of pages about President Lincoln (Thank you, Doris Kearns Goodwin!) from non-fiction sources. Though Lincoln in the Bardo is a work of fiction and what the President must have been thinking is largely speculative, it shed more light on and opened my mind to the impact of that particular event in Lincoln's life more than any non-fiction book has.

It's as if one were comparing a single Albert Bierstadt painting of Yosemite compared to a 12-hour documentary series about Yosemite. You are sure to learn a lot about Yosemite from a 12-hour documentary, but from which will you get a better idea of the beauty and splendor of Yosemite? Lincoln in the Bardo has made me think a lot about art and literature as art.

Allow me to sidetrack for a moment here. I am also reading Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins. Robbins states that he didn't intend for Tibetan Peach Pie to be a memoir, but rather a collection of stories in his life that he has related multiple times to friends and family and wished to share them with a public audience. One of those stories is about an LSD trip he took in 1963 (Maybe 1964; I don't remember.) at a time when LSD was still legal and was being experimented with at universities. Robbins calls the experience life changing and a huge impact on his work since. The story doesn't focus so much on the trip itself, though, but rather on his experience afterwards. 

Robbins laments that he had this life-changing experience, but now there is no one he can really talk to about it without sounding completely crazy. Of course, at the time very few people in the United States had tried any sort of psychedelic substance. It made him feel incredibly lonely. Here is someone who is a magician with the English language, someone who has studied the craft of putting the human experience into words, someone who was working as an art critic at the time, who simply couldn't find the words to describe the experience.

And here's where I bring it back to art and literature. For those of us who have never done LSD (and I will state for the record here that I never have), we can't even imagine what such a mind-bending experience would be like. We can watch documentaries on LSD or read about its effects but we can't get from those the "feeling" of LSD. If you've read any of Tom Robbins's novels, though, you can get a glimpse of that "feeling". You won't come anywhere near understanding the entire experience, just like you can't get your own experience of visiting Yosemite from a Bierstadt painting, but somehow art conveys a glimpse into the artist's own feeling about the subject for us to appreciate. It shines a very focused spotlight on just a dot of the human experience.

Georgia O'Keeffe is another example I like to think of in how art illuminates the human experience. O'Keeffe didn't paint an orchid as we would see it if the plant were placed before us. She captured the essence of the orchid. She captured the feeling of what it is like if we were intensely focused on the flower. O'Keeffe did at least twenty paintings of the doorway to her New Mexico home and still felt she never quite got it right.

I know that Robbins in his writing is doing much more than trying to describe one acid trip he took in 1963, but it is almost as if he is repainting that doorway over and over at slightly different times of day and from slightly different angles with each novel he writes and each story he tells. I think about Mark Twain's giving us a glimpse through his writings on how it must have felt to be American in the late 1880s as the industry of the east met the frontier of the west along the Mississippi River. Dickens gives us a glimpse of Victorian London, the gothic horrors give us a sense of what it must have been like as a layperson witnessing how scientific breakthroughs were transforming the industrial world, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald help us feel that post-Great War disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

I'd be remiss if I wrote something on art and LSD and didn't mention the work of Ralph Steadman, another artist who asserts he only dropped acid once but it influenced all his work from that point (rather heavily, I would add). I also haven't mentioned the musicians and sculptors whose works shine light on the times and places in which their pieces were composed. I'm sure I could go on with this subject for a good long time and i know a number of books have already been written about it. I would like to hear your thoughts, dear reader, on how art trains a spotlight on tiny aspects of the human experience.

Post-script: The cast of the Lincoln in the Bardo audio book is phenomenal. Nick Offerman and David Sedaris have significant roles along with a number of other voices you will recognize. Offerman is a natural fit for an audio book. If you've ever heard David Sedaris speak you'll agree that he seems an unusual choice to cast in a major role for an audio book, but he is really outstanding.

You Make My Heart Go Pew, Pew, Pew!

Happy Valentines Day!

I used to live just a couple blocks from 2122 Clark St., the site of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. I'm not sure why my mind always goes to that event when Valentines Day rolls around. I'm sure living in the vicinity has something to do with it, since I don't remember having the sort of fascination with it previous to living there. Part of my interest is probably the same that caused such an outcry from the public back in 1929 when it occurred. This wasn't some singular drive-by in the middle of the night in Cicero. This was a brazen execution of seven men in the late morning hours on the North Side of Chicago. Two of the killers were dressed as police officers. I'm not sure how busy Clark Street was at the time, but it certainly is busy now. It's hard to believe that such a crime could be pulled off in such a busy area, showing the power and brazenness of the Mob in Chicago at that time.

I'm not sure how the massacre is related to my lack of sentimentality for Valentines Day. It isn't that I'm not a romantic person; I suppose I just don't like the romance to be foisted upon me. A hint of mystery, a bit of surprise. Not $40 for a dozen roses that would cost $10 any other time of the year. Still, it's nice to have at least the one day set aside for a bit of love and romance. Maybe all Al Capone needed was a
hug.

Go, 'Lopes!

I decided that I didn't have enough sports teams to root for, so I decided I would adopt the Antelopes of Grand Canyon University as my representative team to root for in the WAC. Just to show how much I support the 'Lopes, I decided I would enroll in GCU. Rather than go for a third bachelor's degree in some other field that has nothing to do with the actual work I do, I decided I would change things up and go for a master's in something that I can actually use, Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.  Having done voting machines, then credit cards and now securing government systems, I somehow fell ass-backwards into a career where information assurance and cybersecurity has played a large part of my job the last fifteen years.

When I went to Northwestern I never could have imagined that my career would have turned out like this. The Internet was something that existed only so much as it connected the Department of Defense and universities and Matthew Broderick when he wanted to play a nice game of chess. The World Wide Web as we know it now didn't exist at all. I was going to be a journalist, and in my freshman year the TA scoffed at my essay that asserted that relatively soon people would be getting their news on their computers. "No one's going to want to carry their computer on the El." Boy, did I show him!

I like computers, I like solving problems, and I like solving problems with computers. As much as I wish now that I had become an astronaut, I fell into a career that has suited me. I also feel now like my career path has opened back up. At Nordstrom, particularly in the last year, I felt like my career path had closed up tighter than an earthworm's butthole in January. I am an ambitious person and not used to sitting in the same role for four years. I love feeling now like I have the chance to build on myself while helping to build a new organization at RVCM. I love feeling like I have the chance to advance in that organization without someone having to die first.

As I write this, I am watching GCU men's basketball team on their way to their fifteenth victory of the season. With Northwestern's basketball also having fifteen wins, will this be the year that I actually get to see not just one, but two of my schools in the Big Dance? March madness indeed!

Making a Habit of It

I'm having a difficult time lately. It is difficult to admit, and I have been trying to hide it because I don't want people to worry. I am battling through with the skills I know I have and leaning on outside support more than I have in the past. I switched medications because I was recently diagnosed with having a mood disorder. That is that not only do I struggle with the chronic depression, I also have manic episodes mixed in. I've suspected this for a while, so it comes as no big surprise. I suspected that I have cyclothymia - think of it as a lesser form of bipolar disease. But you treat it differently than depression. In fact, the depression medication really just exacerbates the mood disorder. So I suspect that changing up the drugs plays a big part in how I've been feeling. I will say, though, that I am sleeping much better. I had horrible insomnia before, and was averaging three or four hours of sleep a night. Now I'm getting six or seven, so that makes a good deal of difference.

I just returned back from Florida, though. Back to Colorado and some frigid temperatures! I experienced going from eighty degrees to minus 10 in the matter of less than twelve hours! I was getting outside and getting sunshine in Florida. When I got breaks in my schedule, I'd take a short walk around the block. I am still recovering from bunion surgery, so had only worked up to about 5000 steps per day while in Cape Canaveral. Still, I was getting out. The sun is shining nice and bright here in Denver, but I have no inclination to get out in the cold and snow. That rat bastard Punxsutawney Phil did not improve my mood any on that front this morning! So, the weather along with the constant nose bleeds certainly has something to do with my mood.

It's more than that, though, being back in Colorado. In Florida the possessions that surround me are fairly sparse. We live in a small space, so there is not a lot of room for having extra "stuff" just lying around. There is less to distract my attention from what the ambitious side of me wants to be doing. My fat, lazy self is perfectly content with finding distractions here in Colorado, not to mention sitting and watching television or scrolling through social media. Those last two are in no short supply in Florida, so I have to think it is just not the "stuff" that distracts me. There is even more to it.

Some, I suspect, is Covid-related. Something about getting into bad habits at the outset of Covid that I haven't really broken. I didn't need to shower and get dressed if I didn't want to. I could go to the fridge and snack any time I wanted to. I could make my workspace as messy as I wanted without annoying any coworkers other than Buck who I annoy by not having a space on the futon in my office for him to lay down on.I suspect some of you had a similar experience.

Those bad habits have been tough to shake, but I made new habits in Florida. Healthier habits, like taking a little walk when I had a break in work. Or like sitting down with a book rather than flipping on the television. Our habits definitely have a contextual element to them. Our surroundings play a big part of the habits we create. I need to shake off some of those bad habits that I created here in Colorado. It's tough to do!

I have gotten very interested in habits in the past couple years. Habits are mental shortcuts we make. Without them, our brains would be overloaded with what action to take next. Can you imagine how your drive home from somewhere else would be without habit? Not only would you need to be thinking about which direction to go and which turns to make, but you would have to consciously think about turning the key to even start the car and think about buckling up. 

I was reminded of this being back down in Florida and driving the Ford Fusion again, a car we keep down there now, but one that I was driving to and from work every day pre-pandemic. To connect to my phone's bluetooth and start an audio book requires a series of button pushes on the audio system. I could literally do this in my sleep previously. Last week I had to remind myself of which menu items I needed to find in order to keep listening to American Dirt. We carve paths through the jungles of our minds with habit. It makes our drives home so simple that we often can't even remember details of the drive at all. It also makes it easier to scoop a bowl of ice cream or pour a glass of wine in order to make ourselves feel better as opposed to going to the gym or taking a run.

Anyway, I need to work on better habits here in Colorado. If you are interested in better habits, this is a great video on them. I also highly recommend the books that got me interested in them in the first place: The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits. Let me know if you have other recommendations!