scrappybadger August 14th, 2007
Has anyone out there read White Teeth by Zadie Smith or seen the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation? It was briefly mentioned on a professional email list I belong to, and my curiosity was piqued.
scrappybadger August 14th, 2007
I tend to dote on anything I plant, especially if it is a fruit or vegetable producer. That’s why I was scouring the internet this morning looking for reasons why our tomatillo plant keeps dropping blooms. I asked someone at the garden center where we buy all of our plants, and he recommended a tomato bloom setting spray. It wasn’t, of course, organic, so I passed, and we’ve been hoping for the best since then. Some people say you need more than one tomatillo for pollination purposes. It will really suck if that is true. We only bought one since we’re short on garden space, and we wanted to see how successful it would be before trying more than one plant.
My research this morning has me thinking I might still get some salsa verde, though! Many gardeners report not getting fruit until late August or even September. I hope that’s the case with ours. The plant itself is so nice and healthy, and it brings all sorts of cute bumble bees into the garden. It has nice yellow flowers too, but geez, I want some fruit. Wish us luck.
I happened upon this really cool gardening blog. I love her cucumber arch idea. I’m thinking it would be a great use of space near our heat pump. I wonder if the cucumbers would mind the breeze from the fan.
Oh, and apparently tomatillos will come back on their own each year. That would be awesome, and I can’t wait to see if we get some next year.
scrappybadger August 11th, 2007
Last night Ada, our youngest and definitely most mischievous cat, broke Luna’s water bowl. The food bowl that matched it was broken a few months ago by one of the cats, but since I didn’t witness it firsthand I can’t finger the culprit. I have my suspicions nevertheless.
It wasn’t an expensive water bowl. No one brought it back to Luna and I as a present from a transcontinental trip. I didn’t find it in an antique store, save up for weeks to buy it, or see it and instantly love it. It wasn’t even her very first water bowl. In fact, I can’t remember where I got it or exactly when I got it. I think it was shortly after leaving college and settling into our first badger’s-finally-got-a-real-job apartment. It was a simple ceramic bowl with a blue matte finish. Its mate was yellow. And other than being the perfect size and shape for a large dog, there was nothing extra special about either of them. There was certainly nothing about them to inspire crying over broken bowls - or spilled dog’s water as it were. Yet, there I was, sort of frozen, holding a tea bag, looking at the mess over our friend Jackie’s shoulder thinking I didn’t want to look ridiculous for getting upset over Luna’s broken water dish.
It wasn’t the bowl really. I mean, I had planned to keep it forever. I like tangible reminders of the past, and I knew that would be a nice one to have. Even so, it wasn’t the bowl that bothered me so much as another unwelcome reminder that nothing lasts forever, that I can’t hold on to things as long as I want no matter how well I look after them. It seems like I’m reminded of this more and more. Things break or get lost or are ripped to shreds by an energetic, young cat. Everything, time especially, whizzes by my head, and I’m standing there trying not to get dizzy, trying to keep up, but mostly trying to see and remember the past. I don’t want to forget it, and I don’t want everything to change.
And yet, I have the hardest time remembering my past. Piig can tell me specific things about her childhood, she can recall so many people and places and things. Mine is more of a hazy old photograph. The kind where you can make out people, but their faces are fuzzy and no amount of squinting your eyes clears anything up. I remember places because where I grew up they don’t change a lot. I can see buildings and houses and fields, and I can remember, generally, that my sisters and I rode our bikes around, roller skated on a small slab of cement under our carport, and played elaborate games of “store” where we’d put price tags on everything we owned and pretend to sell it all to invisible customers. I remember; I’m not an amnesiac. But my memory is so cotton candy-ish. It squishes and melts together. It has no clear boundaries, and I can’t really trust the shape it takes as being anything close to the original.
I want to remember, clearly remember, my life with Luna. I don’t want little pieces here and there, lots of them spurred on by photographs. I want to see it, a movie reel in my mind, that first night after I found her in the street. I want to remember ordinary days when we’d walk down the alley outside of our first apartment together. I want to be able to recall what I was thinking on my first day of college and then on graduation day. I’d like to remember my old friends and the things we thought were hilariously funny. And I want to know what Piig and I talked about the first time we met. Most of those things are lost. I can think and think and think, but I won’t ever remember them. Instead I get the pieces, and the pieces make me sad more than anything else. They remind me that everything is different now. I’m not a college student anymore, and I’ll never be as carefree and hopeful as I was then. Luna is old, and though spry for her age, she isn’t the same puppyish dog that she was 7 or 8 years ago. I want to stop it; I want to keep it all the same, but that doesn’t even make sense does it? Because if it stopped we’d all be stuck, frozen. And then I wouldn’t hear anything, and I could only see what was frozen in front of me.
And, so, I’m faced with yet another reality — you can’t stop it. The changing is going to happen no matter what. Sometimes it will be good and sometimes it will be bad, but you have to deal with it either way because there is nothing else to do. The reality doesn’t feel very good.
scrappybadger August 7th, 2007
I had a fun weekend. On Saturday we made our (almost) weekly trip to the local farmer’s market. (For dinner I’ll be cooking the purple pole beans we got. I’ve never had this particular kind, but I’m a big green bean — or snaps as everyone called them where I grew up – gal, so I’m sure they will be delicious.)
While Piig paid for our stash, I coaxed Luna to pose for more cell phone pics. The darn sun was in the wrong spot though.
I wanted to try it from a different angle, but Luna was bored with me.
Afterwards we went to a doggie event sponsored by a local art center to raise money for area SPCAs. We missed the parade and the best tricks contest, but we got cake, and Luna got to mill around inside of an unfamiliar building which she loves but rarely gets to do. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the day ended with Luna getting thrown in the slammer. At first she was a bit shaken.
But eventually she got used to it.
I ♥ ♥ ♥ my dog!
scrappybadger July 31st, 2007
My first reaction when I saw the news stories this morning about Star Jones was, “No shit, Star.” I mean, really, who just drops half her body weight in such a relatively short period of time through diet and exercise? Drastic, sustained weight loss without surgery is extremely rare - more so than most people want to admit. So I wasn’t surprised, as I’m sure most people aren’t. After reading the AP story I found her full Glamour article online.
I’m not a fan. I tried to like her. I remember the first few times I saw her as a legal correspondent on TV. It was nice to see a fat woman looking back at me. She knew the law and she wasn’t demure like most of the other women on the news. On The View she usually talked about fat women in positive ways, but she also acquiesced to patriarchal norms. Her views about women were often dated and over the years she became increasingly conservative and spoke disparagingly of women, the poor, and racial minorities. She also seemed to settle into some kind of caricature of blackness, one that was largely created and supported by her white co-hosts. I didn’t enjoy watching her perform her blackness for a predominantly white cast, crew, and audience. I also didn’t enjoy her ever prevalent self-hatred. She didn’t have to verbalize “I hate my fat body” because nearly everything she did said it for her.
Remembering all of that, my initial reaction this morning was one of disgust. I didn’t want to hear her fat bashing anymore, and I certainly didn’t want to hear one more person heralding gastric bypass surgery. Nevertheless, like a rubbernecker at the scene of an accident, I followed a link to the article she wrote for the August issue of Glamour, and I’m glad I did because it humanized her for me. It reminded me, as she talked about her “out-of-control behavior,” that her struggle and the path she has taken to deal with it are constructed by a patriarchal system that demands ownership over women’s bodies. I remembered the Saturday Night Live skits, comments by the (male) late night talk show hosts, and the incessant buzz about Star Jones’s body. Anyone and everyone felt the right to talk about her body, and that hasn’t changed any since she’s lost the weight. We are still talking about her body; we are still claiming ownership over that which should be hers alone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the comments to the AP story. Some people were overjoyed that she was, in their estimation, healthy now, others urged her to gain back the weight, and still others are still blaming her for her former fat body - a body that doesn’t even exist anymore.
It sickens me really. None of this is about Star Jones and her health. Commenters don’t really care whether she is happy or not. What people want, what society demands, is that she be pretty, that she be consumable by and, more importantly, acceptable to the male gaze. Her femaleness made her into a commodity, but her fatness negatively impacted that commodity’s value. She was doubly, triply ours in the collective sense. Our patriarchal society owned her femininity and her blackness and got to determine how much physical space she should, and ultimately will, take up in the world.
I wish she hadn’t had the surgery. I wish she had felt good in her own body and that it, and not society, had been able to dictate its rightful size. I wish those things for her, for others, and for myself. I wish, too, that my first reaction wasn’t anger with Star Jones but with the real roots of the problem - the isms. Sure, I took a step back and reminded myself that blaming her didn’t really make sense, but that first reaction, the one that immediately rose to the surface was the patriarchally programmed one, and that pisses me off.
Ultimately, Jones missed the opportunity to talk about some really important issues. She mentioned that she “wish[ed] someone had shouted: ‘Put that fork down and get active!’” when she was younger, but she never connected her body and the way she felt about it to the relative poverty in which she grew up. She never analyzed why her mother worked so hard to make large, good tasting meals even when they had very little money. She didn’t connect her loneliness to the way the world disappears fat people and how, the larger you are, the less likely you are to be seen. She didn’t wonder how her fatness and people’s reactions to it were connected to misogyny.
Maybe it isn’t fair for me to take her inventory, but it would have been nice, in an article that purports to be about her mental growth, to see a few of these things. Instead, it was a series of missed opportunities with her body laid out once again for public consumption and ridicule.
scrappybadger July 27th, 2007
Several news sites carried the story of Jake, a Utah based search and rescue dog, this week after he died of cancer on Wednesday. He worked as a therapy dog visiting sick children and the elderly, trained other dogs, and performed search and rescue, most notably after Hurricane Katrina and September 11th.
I have mixed feelings about rescue dogs. On the one hand, they are often removed from abusive situations. Such was the case with Jake. According to one story, he was found with several injuries, beaten and abandoned before he was a year old. His caretaker for the next 11 years trained him for search and rescue. It seems positive. After all, dogs are like humans in that they usually want to do something meaningful; they like having a purpose. For some dogs that means strength exercises, agility, or caring for the humans who believe we’re taking care of the dog. For dogs like Jake that purpose is a more dangerous one. Search and rescue dogs risk injury and sometimes death fulfilling their life’s purpose. It is a purpose, however, that is foisted upon them.
It is the good-natured temperament that most dogs have that puts them in danger. Like so many other animals, they pay the price for human foibles. Our desire to live near fault lines, to build homes on potentially unstable mountaintops, to vacation on coastlines susceptible to hurricanes, our propensity for conflict that results in bombings, and, occasionally, our dumb luck creates situations where these dogs have to help us. We look to a creature that is held captive by our whims and schedules to do what we can’t. I’m not sure it is fair to ask so much when, comparatively speaking, we usually give so little back.
I hope that Jake’s cancer wasn’t related to any of the favors he performed for us. I’d rather think of it as a fluke, something no one could have foreseen and that we didn’t contribute to. I don’t really believe that, but I want to. Truth is, if it wasn’t his work that did it, it was likely something as ordinary as sniffing the neighbor’s lawn and, in the process, inhaling toxins from fertilizers and weed killers. I guess that in the end it doesn’t matter what caused Jake’s cancer, but I don’t want to think that we helped it at all.
To read more about Jake, and to see pictures visit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12301482
scrappybadger July 20th, 2007
I’m not very good at keeping up with posts on this new blog. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself that I was going to blog about something, but life keeps getting in the way. One of the more enjoyable things I’ve been doing is enjoying fresh cucumbers from our garden. Last year we just dug a few holes and planted our tomatoes and one lemon balm plant in the middle of the grass. It was our first attempt to plant any vegetables at this house, so we did it slowly. I didn’t want to waste a lot of time without knowing whether we could get something to grow since I have something of a brown thumb. We were pretty successful with our tomatoes despite the fact that it was really dry last summer. Oh, and two of our plants never really got planted - we sat them in the dirt but never got around to taking them out of the pots. They were resilient and grew out of the bottom of the pots, producing some very nice tomatoes for us even though we treated them so badly. With one successful crop under our belts, we were a bit more ambitious this year. I got a Garden Claw for my birthday last year, and we used it to create a real garden. Back in May I plowed (clawed?) the little patch in our side yard. This is what it looked like when I’d finished half of it:
That bushy thing in the lower right-hand corner is the lemon balm from last year. We planted it primarily to attract bugs that like to eat tomato plants, and it is huge this year. It smells really nice too.
Once I got the rest of the grass cleared away for a little L-shaped patch, I dug out a trench around the edges and created a border with some bricks left in the backyard by the people we rent from.
Those poor, shriveled plants in the corner are lemon balm cuttings. We had to trim that monster back, so we decided to see if they’d transplant. A couple of them came back from the dead; others weren’t so lucky. Here’s what it looked like once we got everything in the ground.
In the leftmost cage is Roma tomatoes; to the right is basil, the next cage is a wilty cucumber plant that quickly sprung back. Next to that is a poblano pepper, Early Girl tomatoes in the corner, next to grape tomatoes, huge ass lemonbalm, and out of the frame to the right are tomatillos and beefsteaks. We like tomatoes.
It was a lot of work doing everything by hand, but we got to smell the neighbor’s jasmine
and when I rested I had a cute dog to look at.
It took a couple of days to get it all done. On the first day we worked until it was too dark to do anything else, and we got to see this nice night sky. Piig noticed it, and pointed it out to me because I have a tattoo like this.
Two months later our garden looks a little jungle-like.
It’s even bigger than Luna.
And the Roma tomatoes are mocking us, looking so yummy yet still so green.
We visit the garden just about every day to see what’s new. I just wish I’d start getting some tomatillos. I really wanted some green salsa this summer.
scrappybadger June 28th, 2007
I’ve been in my badger hole playing with blog plugins and Wordpress widgets for the last few days. I wanted to add some content to my sidebar, and I had to have a plugin to display a list of books I’m reading. I’ve been eyeing those currently reading plugins with much jealousy on other blogs for months. It took me a while to get things the way I wanted them because I tweak and tweak and tweak, and I’m still not sure that the sidebar will stay the way it looks right now.
I went through several plugins for creating a currently reading list before I found one that I like. Lots of them were either overly complicated implementations of a fairly simple concept or just not customizable enough. I finally settled on Rob Miller’s Now Reading which I recommend to other Wordpressers out there. It allows you to build an entire library database that keeps track of what you’ve read, how much you’ve read, and reviews associated with each book. Any bookivore is sure to find it quite delicious.
I’m a very slow reader, so my library is likely to take a long time to build, but I can’t wait to start adding to my future reading list! So, so many books and so little time.
All of this blog play has made me very neglectful of recent (and my first few!) commenters. I beg for forgiveness and blame it on my badgerness. Most badgers are, in fact, loners who eschew all companionship until mating season. I’m not quite that bad, but I am sometimes ostrich-like in the way that I deal with the world. Thanks, then, radfemlezzie for sharing your story of dickheadedness with me. It just goes to show that women all over the place are with men that don’t appreciate their intelligent and useful contributions to the world. I mean, it isn’t like we didn’t know that already, but it confirms it for about the 8 trillionth time. And big thanks to spotted elephant for reminding me that lots of other women feel the same way that I do. It is so easy to feel like the only one, ya know? And no thanks at all for getting me sucked into a long trail of bunny-web via your Bunny Blogging. Now I have to keep visiting The Brooklyn Bunny Cam. I’m so easily sucked into the internet.
All of this is to say thanks, y’all, for reading.
scrappybadger June 21st, 2007
Piig upon seeing a “Baby on Board” sign in an SUV during our morning commute:
“There’s nothing special about you because you had a baby. It just means you don’t know how to use birth control.”
I know how to pick ‘em.
scrappybadger June 11th, 2007
I’m feeling a little down lately. I guess, to be both honest and more accurate, I’m feeling more down than usual. I haven’t had an overabundance of joyful days for a while, but lately I’m feeling particularly beaten down by the world. Something happened. The wires got crossed, the connection was fuzzy, or I didn’t have good reception. I don’t know which one it was, but somehow my Pull Yourself Up By the Bootstraps memo ended up giving me one hellish wedgie. I guess, like usual, I misinterpreted. I’ve been pulling at the wrong strings, and all they get me is a butt rash and aching forearms.
Part of my trouble is that I’m tired. Teaching two accelerated composition classes doesn’t leave much free time, and what little there is always seems to be filled with dirty dishes and bills and laundry. Even the days when I shirk all of my responsibilities, when I take the day off from housework or grading or even answering the phone, are filled with worrying about what I’m not doing and guilt for not doing it.
The worry and the anxiety never go away. I’ve been trying not to think about a trip I’m supposed to be taking in October. My first grown up conference proposal was accepted and by the big Victorian conference — the really big one. I’ve been to the conference once, but only as a spectator when it was held at a school a few hours away. I really didn’t even expect my proposal to be accepted, but it was, and what’s more, I was faced with the possibility, be it ever so dim, of going somewhere. I haven’t been more than 5 hours away from where I grew up since I was an undergrad and even then it was to attend college. The last vacation (and the only one I think) that Piig and I went on was one funded largely by my parents who rented a beach cottage in North Carolina and invited my sisters and I.
We never go anywhere, so the idea of traveling to the West Coast, to Canada even, is really exciting. I’m beginning to think it won’t happen though. Everything is prohibitively expensive, and we’d need money for food, a hotel room, and airfare. That last one isn’t helping me feel optimistic either. Piig has been looking at flights, and I don’t know, but I’m really thinking I’m going to be forced to buy two seats. Just the thought of the dirty looks from passengers and the exasperation of flight attendants that I’ve read about in other fat people’s accounts of flying is enough to make me want to give up right now. Then there is the fact that I have to keep the trip a secret from my family until right before I leave or my parents, who live within two minutes of where my dad grew up and ten minutes from my mom’s childhood home, will start in with the horror stories of people killed in fiery plane crashes or kidnapped when they crossed the Canadian border.
Sometimes it feels like things that are really easy for other people are crushingly difficult for me. It’s as if IÂ lack some kind of enzyme that would allow me to cope with the world like a normal human being. Meanwhile, I usually just end up feeling inadequate and incapable of really doing anything. I go back to the dirty dishes and the bad student essays, and I wonder if this is what it will always be like.
Scrappy Badger
51 Posts
117 Comments
since April '07
Quicksand and Passing (American Women Writers Series) by Nella Larsen 
The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen