Like I Have Time For This?

I’m about halfway through John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. The reason, in fact, that I haven’t blogged in a few days is that I’m halfway through John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. And while I do apologize for my absence, I don’t apologize for being halfway through this book.

If ever I get enough time in my days to actually attempt novel writing, I would hope that I’ve read enough Irving for it to have rubbed off enough on me so that I might actually have even the tiniest smidgen of his talent.

What I’d like to share with you here is a little passage that comes early on in the book, that says a lot about both modern public education, and modern private education. In this scene, Eddie and his father have gotten lost on their way to the ferry, and they have finally pulled into a gas station to ask directions. Eddie is sixteen and a student at Exeter Academy. His father, Joe (Minty) O’Hare, is a teacher there and an alumnus as well.

They stopped at a gas station, where Joe O’Hare made his best attempt to engage in small talk with a member of the working class. “So, how’s this for a predicament?” the senior O’Hare said to the gas-station attendant, who appeared to Eddie to be a trifle retarded. “Here’s a couple of lost Exonians in search of the New London ferry to Orient Point.”

Eddie died a little every time he heard his father speak to strangers. (Who but an Exonian knew what an Exonian was?) As if stricken by a passing coma, the gas-station attendant stared at an oily stain on the pavement a little to the right of Minty’s right shoe. “You’re in Rhode Island” was all that the unfortunate man was able to say.

“Can you tell us the way to New London?” Eddie asked him.

When they were back on the road again, Minty regaled Eddie on the subject of the intrinsic sullenness that was so often the result of a subpar secondary-school eduction. “The dulling of the mind is a terrible thing, Edward,” his father instructed him. (pp. 38-39)

The dulling of the mind. What an incredibly apt description of what today’s public education does to our children’s brains. We call our children “bright”; then we send ‘em off to school where all that brightness is rubbed off. Sometimes permanently.

Or we send ‘em off to private schools where their minds aren’t dulled quite as much as in the public schools, but then the kids run the risk of sounding a bit too much like Minty. So, our choices seem to be: dull and sullen, or bright but arrogant. Where is the middle ground?

Oh, that’s right. In homeschooling.

Two years ago today, I quit smoking.

Had I known two years ago that within months of giving up the smokes, I’d be uprooting the kids and moving all the way back East, I probably would not have quit. Had I known what the ensuing year was going to be like: moving with a toddler, living in a tiny little farmhouse with water that stank and no dishwasher, I probably would have upped my daily intake to at least two packs a day. Had I known that that whole year would be filled with massive amounts of uncertainty and stress as we struggled to sell our house in a dying market, and as RegularDad heard rumor after rumor of layoffs and relocations back to Colorado or to California or even to Vietnam, I’d have switched to something unfiltered.

This is why it’s good that we can’t see the future.

Because it’s really only been in the past two months or so that I’ve finally reached that point where I’m really glad that I quit, and that I didn’t start up again.

Things are settling down for us. Finally. The kids have made great friends, we’ve gotten into a new house, and although this house needs quite a bit of work, it really has become my very favorite of all the houses we’ve ever lived in.

I guess I’m just glad we got through this move without picking up the nicotine again. (RegularDad celebrated his two year milestone of being nicotine-free on June 11. Everyone tell him how cool he is!) I owe a lot of thanks to RegularDad and the RegularKids for putting up with my crazy mood swings over the course of this move.

And I think I owe all of you a big giant THANK YOU as well. Because for the past two years, more often than not, I’ve blogged instead of smoked. Many, many thanks to all of you. For listening to my bullshit, and keeping me going.

For the record, here are my stats:

As of this writing I haven’t smoked for 2 years, 9 hours, and 32 minutes.
I’ve not smoked 14,628 cigarettes.
I’ve saved $3, 015.32.
And I’ve added 50 days and 19 hours to my life.

I’m thinking I might have to spend 50 days in Europe at some point. And at least on of those days I’ll have to go to Naples and have some pizza.

If you want to quit smoking, but you can’t, go here and do EXACTLY what they say. It really, really works.

Top left: Mama cardinal keeping a close eye on her little ones who’ve made their way out of the nest.

Top right: Papa cardinal, looking on and looking good.

Bottom left: Baby cardinal, hanging on.

Bottom right: Mama cardinal, showing him how it’s done.

That’s pretty much been the scene in my backyard today. The cat has been yowling all damn day. And there’s this suspicious-looking pile of very small, delicate gray feathers over near the swingset. And she hasn’t really been all that interested in the dry kibble I always leave out for her. But she did chow down on the Fancy Feast I finally set down for her her. So, maybe all the birds made it.

Maybe.

From www.wild-bird-watching.com:

The female [cardinal] builds the nest while the male keeps a close eye on her and the surrounding territory for predators and other males. The female will be the only one incubating the eggs.

 The male’s duty during this time is to feed her on the nest and protect their territory from intruders.

Once the young hatch, both will feed them. Two broods each season are attempted. The nest is made up of twigs, bark strips, vines leaves, rootlets, paper, and lined with vines, grass and hair.

You can find the nest placed in dense shrubbery or among branches of small trees. Generally 1-15 feet above ground.

Laying 2-5 eggs that are buff-white with dark marks. The female incubates the eggs for 12- 13 days and the young leave the nest in 9-11 days after hatching.

Every once in a while, I like to go down to my local Borders bookstore where I:

a) blow the college funds on trash fiction and vanilla lattes
b) take a little break from the kids and the house
c) regain my sanity
d) all of the above

hmmm…oh, yes…OPTION D….

Anyway, I’d been seeing this book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert displayed prominently on the nonfiction shelves for quite a long time, and I kept avoiding it. Why? Well, first of all, it’s nonfiction, and I have only a certain amount of time to read during the week, and I prefer to spend it on fiction or poetry. And second of all, it looked suspiciously like a self-help book, and I’ve grown a bit tired of all the self help literature out there. At some point, you have to stop READING about how to fix yourself, and just… FIX yourself already.

Anyway, so I avoided this book, until my mother-in-law (the one who wishes I was dead) recommended it to me.

At first, I was all suspicious. After all, she had just told me that she’d never used iceberg lettuce in her life and had no idea how to break it up and mix it in with the Romaine lettuce. Why would I listen to her literary recommendations? She can’t even rip open a head of lettuce. (Or perhaps the truth is, she can, but she wants me to think differently. She wants me to think she never fed her kids iceberg lettuce because iceberg lettuce is the BASTARD CHILD of all lettuces, and no self-respecting mother would ever put that in front of her children. Maybe she was just trying to unbalance me, make me feel like a bad mother.)

But then after the whole lettuce incident, she showed me this book and said: you can keep the book; it’s not something I need to keep on my shelves. And so I did, because 1) free books are just too good to pass up, and 2) she liked it, but not enough to keep, which meant that the book definitely had possibilities.

So, I took it home with me, and let me tell you: IT’S A KEEPER.

 This book chronicles a year in the life of Elizabeth Gilbert, award-winning writer, who has just come through a bitter divorce in which she lost everything. She takes a year off of life to travel to three countries, Italy, India, and Bali. In each of the three places, she learns everything she possibly can about three things: pleasure in Italy, prayer in India, and balance in Bali.

Gilbert has an excellent sense of humor, and truly takes you with her on each part of her journey. Here’s an excerpt from one little moment in Italy when she and a friend travel to Naples because another friend of hers there told her to go to a certain small pizzeria that makes, quite simply, the BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD. 

Giovanni passed along the name of the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest confidence, “Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did.

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered — one for each of us — are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”

All’s I’m sayin’ is: that’s gotta be some damn good pizza. Kinda makes me want to go to Naples. Like, tomorrow, perhaps.

After four months of pure sinful EATING in Italy, Gilbert goes off to an ashram in India where she changes gears and gets down to the business of fully experiencing all that a life of prayer has to offer. It takes her some time to get used to it, to clear her mind, and this is why I love her. Her early experiences with meditation remind me of my own, here in my house with a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, where every 5 minutes or so, someone is calling: MOM? Hey, Mom? Mom! Mom? There you are, Mom!

These aren’t the right years for me to attempt any sort of serious meditation, I guess.

After four months in India, Gilbert moves on to Bali where she spends the rest of the year keeping company with a wise old medicine man, a young woman who’s also a healer, and an intriguing older Brazilian man named Felipe. All of them teach her valuable lessons about family, love, and balance.

If you haven’t read this one yet, go out and get it. It’s worth every cent and every minute. And it definitely deserves a place on your shelves afterwards, no matter what my mother-in-law thinks. And about that iceberg lettuce, I asked RegularDad about it, and he assures me that all they ate when he was a kid was iceberg lettuce. Drizzled with bacon bits and some sort of dressing laced with high fructose corn syrup.

Guess she didn’t unbalance me after all.

Here’s an interesting little news story for ya:

Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High

Apparently, there’s a record number of high school girls at this school expecting babies because they all made a pact with each other to strive to get pregnant and then raise their babies together. The town is heavily Catholic, and birth control is not advocated by the community, and two of the school officials ended up resigning in protest or resignation or perhaps just sheer mental exhaustion after trying to promote birth control to these teens and being told to stop it by the mayor and the town in general.

And here’s my favorite part: the reason all these girls are doing this, apparently, is because they’re all looking for unconditional love. Check out this quote:

The girls who made the pregnancy pact—some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers—declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Ireland says. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.” 

(emphasis is mine)

Hello? They don’t feel loved unconditionally. So… they’re… having… babies…. It really says something about modern family dynamics, doesn’t it?

I know, I know, this isn’t really a homeschooling issue. But it’s not exactly doing much to SELL ME on the idea of actually EVER sending my daughters to high school, either.

Yeah. We homeschool. Unconditionally.

Considering all the bad shit goin’ down in the news this week, what with all the flooding, and all those kids (homeschooled or not) that died because they lived in abusive situations, I figured it was time for a few minutes of good old giggling.

Here’s Tim Hawkins on parenting.

As for all the hype about the “homeschooled” kid who died this week, go here and here for details and opinions. I’m all: Yeah, what THEY said.

Homeschooling had nothing to do with it. And I’m not exactly sure anyone sane would call what that woman was doing “homeschooling”.

A friend of mine recommended this month’s cover story over at the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid“, by Nicholas Carr, and now that I’ve read it, I’d like to recommend it to you. It’s a somewhat long article, so if you’re stopping by my blog during a tiny little hiatus in your work day, I’d say wait until lunch or until tonight when you’ve got some time to really sit down and read it.

Because that’s what it’s about really…how we simply can’t sit down and read a long article or book anymore. How the Internet is changing our brain, how constant data streams of smaller bits of information, snatched in brief moments of fleeting free time might actually have a lasting and permanent impact on our brain’s mapping and chemistry and all that shit. How today’s modern reader may no longer be able to sit down and lose themselves in War and Peace.

And you know, I’m not surprised. At all.

I haven’t been online much the past few days. Sunday was RegularNephew’s first birthday, so we drove on up to RegularSis’s house and had ourselves a little party at a nearby Chili’s.

And then yesterday, RegularDad had the day off so we spent the day cleaning out the laundry room and making yet more progress on the giant home project we like to call UNPACKING, which is really just us opening up box after box after box of utter CRAP, looking blankly at the contents, scratching our heads quizzically, and then transferring the contents of the box directly into the trash bin and hiding when the trash truck comes because these guys must think we’re nuts by now, or if not nuts, at least a family of people recovering from that weird pack rat syndrome.

And then today, it was back to a regular schedule, but the truth is, my regular schedule doesn’t exactly allow for a lot of free surfin’ time, especially when my day includes writing time. And days that include writing time are days in which I feel better about my life choices and my parenting skills, and I yell less, so we try to make those days happen a lot.

It wasn’t until almost 9:00 tonight that I was finally able to sit down and open my blog and see what I wanted to say. And the thing is: that’s okay. A few days away from the Internet was downright refreshing.

Because I’m one of those weird people who exists on the outer fringe of all this. Who still likes to read long, complicated books, who still wants to get the paper ON PAPER and flip lazily through the pages while sipping coffee and eating bagels and listening to the kids fight over the comics.

I want to use the Internet for all the good it has to offer, but not be consumed by it. I want to close my browser and go get myself a copy of something by Dickens or Tolstoy and go sit outside with a glass of iced tea with it, and curse when the condensation drips onto the pages and wipe away the water with my finger and just keep reading.

And I’m sitting here wondering if that’s just a naive little pipe dream. 

Here’s a memorable quote from the article:

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

Reprogramming. That’s a word to keep you up later than usual tonight. You will be have been assimilated.

And even in spite of my wants and wishes, in spite of my best efforts, I also am changed because of the Internet. I had just settled down to read this long-ish article (off my laptop — no printed copy here) and as I hit paragraph 3 in which Carr addresses how difficult it’s become to immerse oneself in a long article or a book, I found my attention had wandered from the text to things like possible blog titles for the entry I planned to write on this topic, to wondering if anyone else had already blogged on this yet, and then a quick glance at the scroll bar at the right, to check it’s length and position on the screen so as to gauge just how long this article would be and how far I’d come in it, and on and on and on. I kept having to force my brain back to the words in front of me, force myself to concentrate on the meaning behind the words, which was of course, how hard it is to make today’s brains concentrate on anything longer than news blips on Yahoo’s homepage or the latest YouTube video.

And then I think about how schools are using the Internet now, and how computers have become essential tools in the classroom, and how no one is reading books anymore, and I just want to run screaming down the street because there’s just no way to make any of it stop, but instead of doing that, I find myself once again renegotiating my stopping point, and mentally redrawing my line in the sand, lips pressed flat and determind, knowing that pretty soon something else will come up and I’ll be doing this again. And again. And again.

And then, I pick up our copy of Gilgamesh, or perhaps The Iliad, and read it to my children again. I barricade them and myself behind a great wall of printed words, because that’s all I can think of, and when they ask to go online to visit their Webkinz, I smile and say, “Maybe later.”

A couple of weeks ago, RegularDad and I were sitting on the back porch together. He was putting together some toy or other, and I had my camera out and was waiting patiently to get that shot of the cardinal I posted not too long ago. I was so focused on the trees on one side of the yard that I wasn’t able to change gears fast enough to take a picture of the moment when this enormous hawk came floating over our yard and dove into the top branches of a tall tree a little further off in a neighbor’s yard.

The hawk emerged seconds later with another bird (black and obviously young) struggling in its beak. The hawk turned in the air dramatically and shot away, back over our heads and off towards the creek area, followed closely by a large crop of Very Pissed Off Blackbirds who dive-bombed this hawk and attacked it ferociously, trying to get it to drop the young bird. The screeching was incredibly loud. RegularDad and I watched this whole thing go down in amazement. In truth, the whole thing took maybe ten seconds tops.

“Holy shit! Did you see that?” RegularDad said to me. “Did you see that?”

I nodded, and then lamented the fact that it all happened too fast to get a picture of it.

“I can’t believe that,” RegularDad said. “Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

For the rest of the afternoon, RegularDad existed in a state of utter amazement. At least twice an hour, he’d turn to me again and say: “Unbelievable! Seriously unbelievable. I never knew birds did that kind of thing.”

Finally, I said to him, “Why don’t you look it up on the Internet and see what you find?”

“Yeah,” he said, still in awe. “Yeah. I’m gonna.”

The next day I asked him, “So, did you ever look up that bird-thing online?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Really? What did it say?”

“It said: birds do that.”

Ouch.

Today we went to an “Old Fashioned Field Day” hosted by one of our homeschool clubs. The girls ran foot races, sack races, sponge races, egg tosses, not to mention the infamous water balloon toss which turned into a gigantic water balloon fight and fiasco. But in a nice way, ya know?

It was HOT, of course. We’re in the throes of our first heat wave of the season here, and it’s Barely Tolerable. The girls opted out of the final Tug of War match just because they were Too. Damn. Hot. Luckily, there was a reasonably priced community pool right across the street from the park where we had our Field Day. So, after lunch, a bunch of us went over there and spent a nice afternoon swimming together. The girls all picked mermaid names from various Barbie movies and spent a good hour playing a very elaborate game based somehow on at least two different Barbie movies. It was cute. Then we just sort of swam around. For a long time.

And even in spite of the sunscreen, we’re all a little lobster-colored now. But it was still a great day.

And I’m sitting here now thinking about how “mainstream” homeschooling is becoming. All those arguments about socialization are rapidly becoming meaningless as hundreds of thousands of people opt to homeschool and then go online and find other people who have opted for the same, and then (GASP!!!) actually form groups so that they can all be… like… social… together. Nicely.

There’s even a homeschool prom in these here parts, believe it or not.

Yep. It’s true. A bunch of homeschoolers a little north of here got together and decided to do a smallish prom this year. And, so they did. And the unsocialized homeschooled teenagers that attended this prom were so nice to each other, and so well-behaved, and so SOCIALIZED TO BEHAVE LIKE GOOD, DECENT, UP AND COMING CITIZENS OF THEIR COMMUNITIES, that the hotel staff working that night were FLOORED. They couldn’t stop gushing about how wonderful those children were. And then the local paper got wind of this, and they sent over a reporter, and now the Homeschool Prom is receiving accolades from the local journalists.

No one, from the wait-staff at the hotel to the reporters, had ever seen anything like it. Or so they said.

And why am I the only one around here that thinks that’s sad? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m cheering like mad for those homeschoolin’ teens who know how to behave at a prom, and yes it makes us LOOK FABULOUS, and I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how thrilled I am that I now have this little hidden gem of a bullet stored away in my arsenal for when my mother-in-law asks: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PRRRROMMMMMM?????

But I’m also a little sad for all those other kids who went to their proms with agendas nonspecific to dancing and enjoying themselves. Because, so often, there is a completely different agenda on prom night, isn’t there?

Oh, well. No sense losing sleep over it, I guess. The world will be what the world will be.

But at least homeschooling is grabbing on a little more. And a little more. And each day, just a little more. Because if enough people start homeschooling, then eventually, things could start to self-correct, a little more here and there, slowly over time. We’d begin to see a bit of shift away from the endless crops of unhealthy, unhappy, unprepared young adults, to generations of people who were actually ready to take on this world and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. And eventually, maybe, that could make a difference globally.

I know, I know… it’s a stretch. But how else do we grow stronger without stretching a little first?

Think about it.