Clean Living

I cleaned the house this morning, a dusting, scrubbing, vacuuming, wet-mopping clean. Thorough. One of my favorite words. Thorough.

The baby next door screamed in protest when I ran the vacuum, but I persisted for a good hour. My vacuum has this quirk where it spits errant crumbs in its wake, forcing me to re-vacuum a floor at least 10 times before I’m content. And then, after I have coiled the cord onto its back, I’ll roll the vacuum to the storage room and see more flecks of dirt on the floor, and I’ll suppress the urge to rip my hair out. Because then I’d have to vacuum it up.

A few weeks ago, I was at the laundromat. There was an elderly woman with whom I developed a wordless rapport as we unloaded our dryers and folded clothes next to each other. As she loaded her stacks of clothes into a plastic bin affixed to a rolling cart, she looked at me and announced “I’m never changing my clothes again.”

It was so deadpan and unexpected that I laughed gaily. “If only that worked,” I said.

“Why wouldn’t it work?” she boomed. “If there’s no dirty clothes laying around, there’s no laundry to do.”

I laughed again. She was cute, if a bit gnarly. “I think I’d last about two days,” I bantered.

“Never changing my clothes again,” she repeated. She looked away from me, at an empty dryer. “When I die, these clothes will be someone else’s laundry.”

I laughed, but briefly and out of discomfort. I walked over to my last remaining dryer, where Mr. P’s pants tumbled and flopped around. I watched them intently. Life is short, and how much time do I devote to cleaning myself, my clothes, my dishes, my house? I resent these chores that intrude on life’s higher purposes. I know this urge to keep everything pristine.

Posted in Existence.

Tagged with Laundry.

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By Meredith – August 30, 2008

There Will Be Crud

Business is bad. My website statistics show that visitor count and page view hits are down, way down, since the beginning of the year. If this were a for-profit enterprise, I would be forced to lay myself off. Then I’d have to look for a new hobby… and in this economy, too!

I can make excuses for the drop in traffic that sound similar to a media company’s earnings call at the end of a pathetic quarter. It’s a seasonal blip: consumers are reveling in these last moments of summer, they are vacationing, they are glued to the athletic and political circuses on their televisions. The competition has grown keen: millions of blogs proliferate the web, many aimed at a niche audience, many search-engine optimized, many produced by professional bloggers who have all day to hone their image, cultivate connections, and spin much cooler commentary than I am able to do in my 1 hour of daily allotted writing time.

All rationale that studiously avoid the truth: This website is stale. From a technical standpoint, it’s archaic Web 1.0. The lack of commenting, tagging, and linkable individual posts all deter potential readers, yet there’s nothing I can do without starting over by employing a blogging tool. The idea just exhausts me. What would happen to my five years of HTML hand-coded archives? Would they just sit on a server collecting cyberdust, destined for infinite obscurity?

Also there’s the content, which fluctuates from banal to hurried to tedious. The lifecycle of a blog mirrors that of most creative endeavors: Conception; experimentation; maturation; perfection; declination. I suspect this website is declining, and I’m half denying its senility, half wringing my hands over its fate. In the meantime, my life has changed. I’m married and happily reaping contentment from domesticity. My worldview of unfocused anger and hostility has evolved into exasperated sadness. I cannot simply imitate what worked for me in 2006. Great artists have the ability to reinvent themselves, to resist the comfort of formulas, to output concurrently with the normal stages of life.

So I can continue on this downward spiral from mediocre to pitiful. Or I can quit and focus on another creative project. Or I can stop whining to the few poor loyal souls who still come to this website, and focus on my new goals: To make this website pleasurable again. To remember that the topic is secondary to the diction. To shut up, and write.

Normally I would pad this denouement with an Oscar Wilde or T.S. Eliot quote about writing in order to solidify my commitment to this website. The words would be inspiring, but the gesture would be jejune, so instead I’ll say: Reimagining this website won’t be quick. It won’t be easy. It won’t be pretty. It will be the literary equivalent of slapping a rubber mini-dress and stiletto pumps on this matronly blog and making her do jumping jacks and squat thrusts until she’s as fresh as a fish.

Posted in Miscellany.

Tagged with Writing.

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By Meredith – August 28, 2008

Lost: Bike Seat

Sometime over this past weekend, a crime occurred at my home. Probably at night, probably when our driveway was empty because Mr. P and I were in New Hampshire and our neighbor had gone out, someone sneaked onto our back porch and examined my bicycle. Perhaps the perpetrator spotted the bicycle from the row of houses on the parallel street with the adjoining backyards. Perhaps the perpetrator came with the intention of stealing my bike but, frustrated to find it chained to the wooden railing, decided to settle for my bike seat.

As any victim of a petty crime knows, it’s the loss of security that hurts more than the actual loss of my $10 bike seat. I wouldn’t be so disillusioned had this happened back when I was living in the dysfunctional mean-spirited wilds of Natick or in the claustrophobic fend-for-yourself streets of Cambridge (where, incidentally, it has also happened to me). But this is A-town, an upper-middle class enclave where the grand houses are tightly spaced to confer a sense of close-knit community, and where superfluous possessions abound in the open: toys and tools litter front lawns, flower pots and rocking chairs decorate porches, and ceramic gnomes dance through garden patches.

I’m safely out of my twenties, so I can mutter scathingly about those “damned teenagers” who stole my bike seat.

“How do you know it was teenagers?” Mr. P asks.

“Because only a teenager could be so heartless, callous, cocky, and idiotic as to sneak onto someone’s back porch and swipe a bike seat,” I rant. Okay, so it was either a teenager or a neoconservative.

I’m outraged enough to consider blanketing the neighborhood with the “Lost” sign pictured below. The problem is, I’m not sure if it was younger teenager who could be “scared straight” by such a bold gesture, or an older teenager who knows that I’m powerless and might possibly return to wreak more damage upon my meek bicycle. Or maybe it was some toughs from Cambridge. Regardless, posting the “Lost” sign on this website confers hollow solace, if only because it serves as a reminder of my righteousness.

bikeseat

Posted in Existence.

Tagged with Crime.

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By Meredith – August 27, 2008

The Eroticism of Gourds

I was in Whole Foods not too long ago, scanning the produce shelves for cheap, comely comestibles. I honed in on a crush of green beans, but just as I near the beans, a middle-aged couple approached the adjacent zucchini display. I idled behind them as they made their selection.

“Do you think these are big enough?” the woman asked, holding a six-inch long zucchini up for inspection.

“Well, apparently it’s the standard size,” the man said, rifling through the pile of uniform-proportioned zucchini.

“They look awfully small. Maybe we should get two for each person. One might not be enough for me,” the woman says as she started indiscriminately grabbing at zucchini.

As you can imagine, well, I almost barfed. The indecorous waggishness with which the couple bandied on about the length and girth of zucchini was perverse, and I turned away in woozy disgust. I then stumbled into a stack of cucumbers. My flailing, helpless hands grasped nothing but filthy, filthy gourds! I pushed myself away and tried to flee to the cheese department, but my body reared uncontrollably into a tiered display of bananas. The elongated stiff fruits pressed themselves against me with fervid urgency. I managed to suppress the scream that welled in my throat and crawl to safety in the coffee and tea aisle.

Scenes like this happen to me a lot, given that women are allowed to freely handle and purchase sensually-shaped produce. Maybe I’d be happier in the Muslim world, where women protected by laws that ban them from buying “male” vegetables such as cucumbers. Men are allowed to buy “female” vegetables such as tomatoes, although she is later taken from him and smashed into a pulp on the ground. As she should be, the plump little harlot.

Posted in Existence.

Tagged with Food.

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By Meredith – August 26, 2008

Dearly Departed Leader

A Japanese professor wrote a book that speculates North Korean dictator Kim Jong II died of diabetes complications in 2003 and was replaced by a body double. How many headshots of roly-poly 5’3″ Asian men did the National Defence Commission of North Korea have to sift through before they found their man? “This guy’s bouffant is knocking me out, but his jowls just aren’t convincing.”

The professor, an expert on the Korean peninsula, cites as evidence Kim’s whirlwind diplomatic activity leading up to 2003 followed an abrupt, unexplained retreat from the public eye. This could be explained by death, but it could also be explained by a reversal in North Korean policy, assassination fears, despotic whimsy, or a preemptive sequestration upon the mortifying release of 2004’s Team America: World Police, in which Kim is portrayed by a marionette who, among other things, throws UN weapons inspector “Hans Bwix” into a tank of sharks. What dictator wouldn’t turn a little bashful?

Also noted in the book is how American spy satellites photographed Kim in 2006, and he apparently grew 2.5 centimeters. So maybe it was a body double pretending to be the deceased Kim. Or, the real Kim decided to enhance his height with a pair of heel lifts. Or… wait, America has technology to measure a person’s height to the millimeter from space, and I still can’t find a freaking functional Coinstar machine in all of Boston? Priorities, people!

The professor admits his Kim body-double theory may sound fantastic, but points out in North Korea, “fantasy and reality are not mutually exclusive.” Think of North Korea as Disney World, except all the food kiosks are barren, all of the attractions are in permanent renovation, and all of the magical characters have been rolled up into one tyrannical little villain named Dear Leader who drinks $800,000 of Hennessy a year. It’s the crappiest place on Earth.

Posted in In the News.

Tagged with Politics.

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By Meredith – August 25, 2008

The Twins

We went to the White Mountains in New Hampshire with four primary goals and one secondary goal. The four primary goals: To conquer Mounts North Twin, South Twin, Galehead, and West Bond. The secondary goal: To not incur any disfiguring mishaps such as a sprained ankle or broken bone. While safety is always an objective, it was more dire with only a month to go before the wedding and honeymoon. All goals have been attained, although my quadriceps are sore enough to have me walking with a slight grimace for the next couple of days.

On Friday at 11am, we set out on the North Twin Trail with our backpacks loaded for two days of hiking and an overnight stay at the AMC Galehead Hut. Ah, memories! This trail served as my White Mountains introduction six years ago when my ex-boyfriend and I twice hiked this trail to the North Twin summit, back when I was a hiking novice who wore sneakers, carried no emergency gear, and wheezed like a dying woman during the unrelenting elevation gain. When Mr. P and I reached North Twin’s summit in 3 hours 30 minutes, I realized that my ex-boyfriend and I never actually finished North Twin! Both times, we stopped at a outlook .1 mile from the wooded summit and assumed we had made it.

Here we are posing on the North Twin outlook, with Mount Washington and the other Presidentials looming in the distance.

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northtwin2

From North Twin, it was an easy mile to South Twin. The weather was calm but hazy. An AMC naturalist told me later that the White Mountains are at the convergence of 3 major storm systems and therefore often collect air pollution from the entire East Coast. We had both summits to ourselves, except for the flies that feasted on our sweaty flesh.

After bagging South Twin, we continued onto the Galehead Hut, the AMC’s most remote full-service hut. In the summer it accommodates 38 guests with co-ed bunkrooms, compost toilets and cold running water, and a “hearty” dinner and breakfast served by the hutkeepers, college-aged men and women who are often seen scrambling up trails with loaded packs of food. While the hutkeepers have a certain youthful glamour about them, the truth is they’re kinda like flight attendants in that they spend a bulk of their time preparing meals and cleaning bathrooms.

After checking into the hut and claiming our bunks, we set off to bag Mount Galehead, an easy 25-minutes from the hut. Galehead is a wooded summit, but we hung out on an outlook and pounded one of the massive cans of Heineken that we lugged up the mountain. Every day of hiking should ideally end with a beer.

galehead1

Dinner at the hut was edible and filling, with a nice soup and salad followed by bowtie pasta coated in a saltless film of cheese. The hutskeepers billed dessert as a “sweet surprise,” so my raised hopes (chocolate cake!) crashed like my blood sugar when I saw the lemon-icing shortbread cookies. After dinner and a game of Scrabble, I snuggled in my bunk, in the hut-issued wool blankets that smelled vaguely of vomit, and tossed and turned while listening to a nearby man’s buzzsaw snore. I knew I slept because I kept waking up. My left hand and wrist were experiencing an allergic reaction to several fly bites received earlier in the day. By morning, my fingers were plump like sausage and my knuckles were buried in an alarming expanse of swollen flash.

After a breakfast of oatmeal and pancakes, we set off at 7:30am on our ambitious 9-mile hike. It started off going .8 miles from the hut back to South Twin’s summit. With the 1000-foot elevation gain, it took a sweaty hour, but it would be the hardest part of the day. Then we headed to West Bond mountain, one of the Bond mountains that are famed for their unerring beauty and remoteness (see Bondcliff mountain below). We wanted to do all of the Bonds, but we were 5 hours from the car and due back in Boston that night. So we headed back to the Twins and down the North Twin Trail, half-exhausted but content with our journey.

westbond1