Mature Landscaping

Checking In The Frog Pile

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:16:00 +0000

Southern Leopard Frogs. "You said WHAAAT!?"

It is now no longer theoretical, but actual and, for the moment, absurdly farcical: Mr. Mature and I don't hear so well anymore. I doubt our good humor about this phase will last--we're likely to get churlish over it eventually, as most couples do--but for now we just get tickled by it. I wish I had some of our sillier half-deaf dialogues recorded to play for you. Instead, naturally, I've got frog and toad mating calls.

What could be more fitting, in our mutually muffled aural conditions, than that we sign on this summer to become audio-batrachologists, citizen scientist volunteers for Frog Watch USA, contributing to the carefully collected data that helps determine the cause and impact of changes in wetland ecosystems. We are obviously uniquely qualified in that we're old and don't have real jobs, live slap dab in the middle of a wetland, and can't hear ourselves think around here in summer for all the frog and toad racket.

My mnemonic for the Pinewoods Tree Frog call: an amphibious paintball session in the piney woods.

All we have to do is learn to identify the mating calls of the fifteen most typical local amphibians from memory; pass a two part test; step onto our back porch for regular timed sessions; follow the precise protocol for recording weather conditions for each froggy concert; and try to come to an agreement about the species we've heard each night and their approximate number.

Well, okay, agreeing on what we've heard could pose a stumbling block, but we're otherwise well-equipped. Just a few steps from our back door, you stumble into a classic Southern pond, yucky gook and all. Mr. Mature is an expert statistician and this is a target-rich environment. I'm a know-it-all with a modest knack for species identification of all sorts. The herpetofauna outback is seasonally hot to trot. It'll be as easy as falling off a slimy log, right?

Mere masculine attention-seeking. An-n-nd, he SCORES!

I must, however, rely on herptiles to articulate more clearly than Mr. M, who would probably mumble less, too, if he thought it would improve his chances of hooking up. Although we agree that we're now both hearing-challenged, we can't seem to break the habits of speaking to each other from room to room or passing along critical information as we're turning to walk away. If my husband is saying what I'm hearing, we've got bigger problems than presbycusis.

To illustrate, examples of attention-grabbing Mature communications from this week.

Mr. M. from office to kitchen and out of the blue: "Hey, did you start a frog pile?"
[Translation: "Did you start a fraud file?," in reference to the recent, and separate thefts of our two credit card numbers. Using mine, the perp ordered an escort from an online service--speaking of hooking up--and, later, sent "Cynthia" a huge bouquet of flowers from another online company. Cynthia must have pretended to find his mating call irresistible.]

Mr. M., another day, same physical configuration (we need to get out more): "Wow. I found a great source for penis plastic."
[Translation: "Wow. I found a great source for Peanuts Classic." You know, the comic strip...at the Washington Post website, which posts one a day. For all that this malapropism stretched my eyes, there's still something sweetly innocent, if unpredictable, in my Charlie Brown.]

Mr. M., yesterday, loudly, from somewhere near the back door, to me, still in the kitchen: "Okay, I'm headed out for some grinning and breaking."
[Translation: "...trimming and raking." It's Spring in South Carolina and the biomass has us in a stranglehold as usual, but naturally I pictured him break dancing in the driveway to amuse the neighbors.]

This tiny boombox likes to cling to our porch screens and bark like a duck.

We may not get out enough, but there's no room for boredom, for we've mumbled and stumbled into a startling, magical new universe rightchere down home.

Intermission

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:47:00 +0000

Most of the time, I cannot tell you what I'm doing until after the fact. None of that, "I'm going to swim the Hellespont!," for me, nossir; I'd be halfway across, breathing hard and having second thoughts before I'd even registered that I was all wet. So, you probably noticed that I was headed for a break from blogging long before I did.

I have no idea why I'm taking one...well, just this garden-variety idea, then. You know all those times when you have a blog notion, but you're not in a position to write on it and when you finally are, the notion's time has passed? Well, I seem to have strung more and more of those together lately and they've wrapped around my imagination until they've formed a virtual bright yellow police barricade to creativity. It doesn't matter that the barricade is nothing more than plastic tape and of my own invention; my ever-obedient left brain agrees that there is nothing to see here and moves on.

I will be visiting you, though, for I'm used to it and we like what we're used to. And I will be back to write again as soon as I see how some of these little dramas play out. Or until I get tired of staring at the yellow tape and vaporize it with my thoughts. Or until later this afternoon. I'll know when I find myself halfway through a blog post and perfectly useless for any other purposes until the thing is done...and, once again, perfectly happy with that discovery.

Greige. Dammit.

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:21:00 +0000

Our sky....for days on end...but not as bad as some skies.

I'm sending out a whimper from my rut. I haven't been by to visit you. I haven't been writing to you. It hasn't been intentional. I blame HGTV.

Before we left for San Diego in February, we began a project that we've resumed since our return...a project meant to get us unstuck from our rut of living in a house we no longer want, too far from our loved ones...a project meant to further our goal of selling this house and moving forward into Our Real Life...a project that I now, in middlespect, have dubbed The BFI (Bad _______ Idea).

We've hardly left the house for two weeks except for groceries and my trips to physical therapy, which have been largely necessitated by The BFI. At the end of the day, we are too tired and dull and sore to do much more than watch Chris Matthews' "Hardball" in horror, followed by two streamed episodes of Glenn Close's "Damages," also in horror, and then drag ourselves to bed with our books and our fudgesicles. During the day, we stare at the walls.

It all started when the first realtor to list our house walked into it the first time and said, "All the wallpaper has got to go. Nobody likes wallpaper anymore." Gee whiz, Batman, in the early nineties, when I last gave a rat's tushy about home decor for this place, wallpaper was the cat's pajamas! Was he calling our castle outdated just because we had wallpaper in every room? How quickly with it becomes out of it. All we did was work and raise kids through high school and college and beyond and weddings and next thing you know, we're so shamefully outré we should be happy to give someone a big chunk of our home sale price just to clue us in.

Mr. Real Estate Million Dollar Producer: "It's a buyer's market now. Watch a little HGTV. You'll see."

So we priced getting the job done and discovered that we could barely afford to get only the most individualistic papers removed and repainted (approximately half the walls; I was a big fan of toile), which left us with what seemed like acres and acres of this...

White on white French damask wallpaper.

I could not bring myself to let the treacherous HGTV enter my tastefully decorated home through our personal television, so I asked the folks at the gym to let me watch it from the recumbent bike and...quelle horreur...the real estate Nazi was right; they hate wallpaper now! And carpet, of which we still have a little (shudder). And absolutely anything that isn't hardwoodsgranitebrushedchromesubwaytile. I began to get the impression that we wouldn't be able to give our house away unless we spent approximately half of its (purely imaginary and arbitrary) value updating it.

Now, two realtors and two six-month stints on the market later, we're steaming and scraping white-on-white wallpaper one square inch at a time. Then patching, sanding, prepping and painting those halls and stairwells, up cathedral ceilings and down to the baseboards. One and a half achy old farts balanced equidistant on either side of sixty-five. I only count as half because I'm in PT a quarter of the time and the other quarter is spent strapped to a TENS unit under the influence of muscle relaxants.

We're DIY-ing and it's killing us.

I realized today that, in trying to do this job ourselves, we have taken a job. If you'd asked us if we wanted to start a paper-stripping and painting business, we'd have pushed you off the porch, but that's what we've got. And we're about to add a new service as soon as this wall job is done: cabinet re-finishing.

And all for what, this BFI? You will never convince me that the difference we're making with this project is the make-or-break point for selling a house.

Pottery Barn may call it "Powell Bluff"; Farrow and Ball may fancy it as "Archive"; and Martha Stewart may imagine it as "Ash Bark", but the color of our world these days is...

Greige. Dammit.

Celebrity Encounters: A Star-Studded Issue

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:06:00 +0000

The High and Exalted Grandson at Five, Rocking His Paper Jam

Herein, a star-studded report of our travels to Southern California and back again, admitting right off that we did not take our camera because we haven't got the sense gawd gave a goat. Not even combined. The trip will not go uncommemorated, however, because I believe the San Diego Highway Patrol got several good shots of our rental vehicle and will be sending ~~a ticket~~ proofs shortly by mail.

San Diego is broke, as evidenced by the ubiquitous potholes. It's sad, but they still have KPBS and they have their Red Light Photo Safety program, which saves them money overall and is responsible for my dread of mail delivery today.

You see, Your Honor, we were driving below the speed limit on a stretch of Aero Drive near the SDPD station, dodging potholes and approaching a yellow light while listening to the radio, when KPBS reported a short segment on the discovery of differences in regional goat accents, claiming that goats, like people, learn their particular bleats rather than acquiring them by instinct. We were fairly riveted by this news. They played three different goats' bleats for our comparison. We were listening so intently that Mr. Mature failed to notice that the light had turned red before he entered the intersection and we still couldn't tell one regional goat accent from another. We plead innocent, Your Honor, because who ever heard of a PhD in Goat Linguistics?

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Aztec Woman of Tehuantec by sculptor Donal Hord
in front of The Prado Restaurant, Balboa Park

We had a blogger meet-up with Tom of Sightings At Sixty, from New York, at the coffee kiosk by the Prado restaurant in Balboa Park. Tom's post on his San Diego visit reports that he met no celebrities, but I can testify that Tom is a most attractive gentleman who could pass for a celebrity and he tells me he was approached by U.S. News & World Reports to write a piece, so that surely counts as fame even if they didn't pay him. And Tom can testify that I am, quite possibly, demented, and that Mr. Mature is probably a saint.

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The reason for our trip was our grandson's, Liam's, fifth birthday. His parents are party-giving superheroes and the most funnest parents I could ever imagine. The theme was Knights and Princesses, with a giant jumperoo castle, a crown and shield decorating table, a search for dragon eggs, the covered patio turned into a grand stone hall with banners and fiery sconces, and a glorious feast for all with a coat-of-arms cake for Sir Liam's Knighthood Ceremony.

The next day, Sunday, we headed up I-8 toward L.A. in killer traffic for an afternoon at Medieval Times. Liam was thrilled by the knights and had to be reassured that no one was actually being hurt, but were acting their battles and injuries. I was thrilled by the horses and their dressage, particularly a long series with one particularly splendid superstar Andalusian, which included the capriole, the pièce de résistance of airs above the ground.

I simply couldn't think why all of I-8's lanes should be packed nose-to-tail at 75 mph both going and coming on a Sunday afternoon and evening until we arrived back at our motel and turned on the news to learn of Whitney Houston's death and to be reminded of the Grammy Awards that same evening in Los Angeles.

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We've never made one of our frequent trips to SoCal without scouring Craigslist or wearing out a realtor in our search for a house or condo we could afford. In fact, it was the frustration of our desire to make the move from the East Coast to the West that prompted the creation of Mature Landscaping originally. After two further attempts to sell our house here in an ever-downward-spiraling market, we are resigned to radical DIY redo's to try to bring it up to HGTV standards for another attempt when the housing market might be declared officially bottomed out and on its way back up.

So I suppressed my Del Mar house-hunting itch for this trip and confined it to my dreams, literally. I dreamt that we'd bought a spacious and decidedly odd house (with potential) that was in foreclosure in Solana Beach at a steal of a price. There was a cavernous garage--more like a warehouse, really--with dozens and dozens of randomly spaced dressmaker's forms fixed into the concrete floor. These dummies were splotched all about with fist-sized globs of dried, shredded green vegetable matter and the workers we'd hired to help us clear them out were speculating with me on what the shizzle their function might have been. The helpers' collective consensus was that we'd bought ourselves a grass skirt factory but I was entirely convinced that we'd purchased a cudball shooting gallery.

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Mad Men, Episode 8, The Hobo Code

I found myself suffering from a certain, um--evacuative profligacy--toward the end of the trip, which made for an exciting flight home. Fortunately, we flew the rare, wide-body 767 from San Diego to Atlanta; they have extra water closets and Hartsfield Airport is no slouch in that department either. I believe I visited all of them between Terminals A and D. The tough part was the little 68 seat puddle jumper from Atlanta to Wilmington, a short but bumpy ride that really never lent itself to time out of the seat belt.

Upon landing, I made a blind rush to the ladies loo at the Wilmington airport. They had those neurotic self-flushers that erupt steadily every five seconds; very off-putting to the nervous of sphincter, but not a problem for me on this occasion and I was ever so grateful for the sound camouflage, as I'd detected an occupant in the adjoining cubby.

When I came out to wash my hands, I commented to said occupant at the sink beside mine that they had rather silly toilets here and received a cheerful agreement. I glanced up to meet this face next to mine in the mirror.

Rosemarie DeWitt. Click for filmography.

I'd forgotten they make movies in Wilmington. My cousin told me later that Colin Firth is currently making one there, too. I shudder to think how easily, in my mad hurry and unfamiliarity with Wilmington's airport, it might have been Colin in the adjoining cubby.

A Riot of Zeitgebers

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:39:00 +0000

Flickr image: Jun

As if toenail anomalies weren't enough, with age comes the inevitable disentrainment of our internal and external zeitgebers, and you know what that means. My own have jumped slam off the rails since November 6th and I despair of ever getting those suckers re-entrained.

The weather, which conservatives would have us know bears approximately the same relationship to climate as the economy does to Wall Street, has not helped one bit. I guessed something might be wonky when, around Halloween, I saw a mallard hen with five new ducklings queued up behind her on our little pond. Azaleas have bloomed all winter. The Carolina Jessamine was covered in yellow blossoms in January and jonquils are up right now. I discovered that my car needed a freon fix when the temperature here topped 78 in the last week of January. T'aint right. You can't just dick around with external zeitgebers and expect the flora and fauna, among which I count myself, to go blithely along with business as usual. There are bound to be consequences.

Which might help explain why I began "sundowning" during this sorry excuse for a winter. As the sun sagged toward the horizon before five o'clock, I noticed an increasing uneasiness, a restlessness, an agitation of the humors, as it were. There was a little vertigo, a heightened anxiety and a speedier pulse as dark came on and all for no apparent reason whatsoever. The symptoms seemed independent of activity or environment. It was alarming enough to trigger my infallible reaction to change: worry that I was losing it, fed to a fever pitch by massive internet research, which, as usual, scared me nearly into next week.

If you search on sundowning, 95% of the results will associate it exclusively with dementia and residential care for old folks, which simply can't be right. Any mother will tell you that, as suppertime approaches, her kids get wild. The little ones whine and importune and pick fights and pull the cat's tail; the teenagers growl at everyone and sulk in their rooms; it's as predictable as peas and universally known. Or take cocktail hour, which begins at dusk the world around in most cultures (where not prohibited by scripture). Or the universal tendency of humans to gather in and gaggle up at sunset, generally, and bask together before a roaring fire or a blaring television. It is definitely not just me. Besides, I have not given permission for an aged discombobulation of my cholinergic Nucleus basalist Meynert neurons, so pfffft to the very idea.

Evolutionary psychology points out that darkness, especially winter darkness, is hazardous for the vulnerable and that sleep may have evolved as an adaptation to conserve energy during periods where activity was likely to be less productive and more perilous. If I get the creepy crawlies as the sun sets, it's merely a sign of my advanced and highly evolved adaptability and it has nothing whatever to do with the fact that I'm edging closer to Medicare eligibility.

No, no, sundowning can't just be a symptom of dementia. I put the blame on entropic chaos of the stochastic process and so, I suggest, should you. As long as there's Wikipedia, Thesaurus.com, and Lancome concealer, I'm younger than Springtime.

Oh, and speaking of disentraining one's zeitgebers, we're headed for southern California for ten days--just long enough to recover from jet lag at this age--for our grandson's fifth birthday and I'm leaving the laptop at home. I should be a circadian train wreck by the time I get back. I'll be able to read your posts on my new Kindle Fire, but any responses will be short because I tend to stab at the wrong letters on that tiny digital keyboard and can't seem to get the hang of typing with my thumbs.

We're Cool Like That

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:13:00 +0000

Here's glory and irony, HSP and Introverted Landscapers: we've made the cover of Time Magazine. (See Mature Landscaping blog posts, An HSP Reports In and Some (Quiet, Soft) Highly Sensitive Polling Results.)

The cover article references Elaine Aron of The Highly Sensitive Person and Susan Cain, who's new book Quiet is now available in hardback, Kindle, and Audio versions.

Unfortunately, the Time article, entitled The Upside of Being An Introvert (And Why Extroverts Are Overrated) by Bryan Walsh, now hides slyly behind a paid wall--two thumbs down--and the website is overwhelmed with registrants this morning, so I can't log on to pass it along in full. I'd recommend picking up a copy, especially if you scored 14 or more on Aron's HSP quiz or you know your Myers-Briggs puts you firmly in the Introvert Camp.

Time has its own quiz to help you determine if you're an introvert, extrovert, or ambivert, available without subscription, here.

You might recall that I speculated on the personality traits of President Obama and the GOP candidates,

I have a feeling (and we're good at intuitive hunches) that Jon Huntsman and Barack Obama might be borderline HSP's but Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich...nah, nope, uh-uh. And Ron Paul is an alien, which is why he talks funny.

Compare to Time's take.

I stand by my assessment of Paul. And I would label Santorum an ambivert, but I won't quibble over sweater vests. I think Time got this part on Obama's temperament and suitability to govern in these turbulent times almost right.

...if extroversion is great on the campaign trail, it doesn't always help in the business of governing. Both Clinton and Bush endangered their presidencies by engaging in what turned out to be graver risks than they might have imagined: one with an intern, the other in Iraq. An introvert like Obama is more inclined to think before he acts, and if anything, the President has been criticized as being too risk averse.

Of course, Mr. Obama was (evidently) remarkable on the campaign trail in '08 and shows all signs of coming up to his old standard this year, too. And his introversion has shown some other notable exceptions recently, namely his way cool serenade to the base at the Apollo and his school for neocons on how to deal with terrorists effectively.

So, I'm speculating now. How many introverted Republicans do I know personally? On the other hand--HSP Introvert that I am-- other than you, how many people do I actually care to know at all?

SC: The Trash Heap Has Spoken. Nyeh.

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:19:00 +0000

Click to hear Marjorie sing The Trash Heap Blues. Alternate lyrics available on request.

South Carolina is a Cut-Off-Your-Nose-To-Spite-Your-Face state. Newt Gingrich is the Paula Deen of GOP politicians. Brilliant match.

Here in Horry County, So'Calinah, the vote went overwhelmingly for Gingrich, the GOP Brunch Burger...right here where police cars still display the emblem proclaiming it The Independent Republic of Horry (Aw-REE, French pronunciation to designate classy sophistication) because seceding from the Union wasn't enough; we would secede from the world, ya'll, and screw ya. If the ballot had been a menu, Horry citizens would have ordered the Donut Brunch Burger with a side of cheese fries, a dipping cup of Ranch and the Big Gulp Mt. Dew. We wallow in our cholesterol down here. We will fight you for the right to be led by a lying, cheating, mean-spirited, lint licking, narcissistic cockfighter who'll put our poor 13 year-olds to work cleaning their classmates' crap off the toilets in their own middle schools because it's good for their characters, by God. We love it that the Old Guard of the GOP hates us. And we love it that you do, too. Nyeh.

The Paula Deen Do-nut Brunch Burger.

Oh, dear. I thought venting would help me feel better and all I've succeeded in doing is scaring myself silly and giving us both indigestion. I'm so sorry. I apologize to you for South Carolina; we were told not to feed them after midnight. I hereby order myself to a 28-Day PBS/ETV Detox Program with large doses of Downton Abbey starting tonight.

Remember that bumper sticker I was so proud to put on my car in December? On Monday morning, I've got to pull out of my neighborhood directly into a stream of speeding, mud-bogged Dodge Rams with rifle racks and creeping '97 Cadillac El Dorados with Bush/Cheney on their bumpers. Driving this.

If I turn up missing from your email and blog feeds, please be worried. If I post as usual, I promise to resume my little Textile Drive stories.

Wrasslin' Slime Creatures Down In The Swamps

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:06:00 +0000

I've spent the past four days down in the bowels of Blogger trying to wrassle the new threaded comments upgrade from the slimey clutches of an unseen gollum. When I wasn't cussin' my computer, I was wrasslin' the acrimonious alligators of arthritis as a low front surged through the area. And, in between, I've struggled to keep my head above a heaving sludge of nasty GOP primary ads and the slithering shame of sharing the state with the corroded souls in the audience at the FOX GOP debate in Myrtle Beach. It's been a filthy week in the Low Country.

Tonight, it gets even more squalid as Marianne Gingrich fingers Newt for the basest proposal a spouse can make: "Honey, it's okay with you if I keep both my mistress and my money, right? 'Cause that's what she would do in your place, which is why I like her better."

Jenny Sanford, wife of our last governor, was interviewed tonight by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, saying she smells what poor Marianne stepped in.

A new Politico poll has it that, here in SC, evangelical women are leaning toward Santorum and evangelical men are leaning newtward. As a Myrtle Beach marriage counselor, I coulda told 'em that.

The first question a guilty SC man always asks of the counselor his wife has drug his cheatin' butt off to--the question designed to put the counselor on notice that he has already been cleared by a higher power? What was the killer question the bad boys would always ask me in that quiet room? I swear to it; if I got asked this once in a first marital session, I got asked it fifty times, always with some fairly aggressive posture, shoulders forward, diaphragm down and vocal chords set to you're-in-deep-doo-doo-now tones: "Are you a Christian? I just wanna know."

Which guaranteed that the jerk had cheated, usually with both a woman and the IRS.

My Preciousssssssss.

Which explains why I suddenly and for no obvious reason got the itch last night to watch "The Fellowship of The Rings." Ring Wraiths, Orcs, and slime galore. Tonight, I'll watch the sequel: The SC CNN Debate.

Some (Quiet, Soft) Highly Sensitive Polling Results

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:29:00 +0000

Boreas - John William Waterhouse

Here in the West, when we come across shy people, we're pretty sure we should either fix them or do something sexual with them or both. I have soft proof. And that is not what we do with them here at Mature Landscaping.

When you do an image search for "shy," you get a lot of soft porn. If you do an Amazon book search on "shy," you get 1,516 results; the related searches terms are shyness, introvert, and social anxiety. On the first two screen-pages of Amazon results, there are 24 books listed: 7 (including the top two results) are on fixing shyness in adults; 7 are designed to help children fix their own shyness; 3 are books to help parents fix their introverted children; 3 are soft porn novels, one each for the most prevalent sexual preferences; 1 is a vampire book, which is probably soft porn too; and one is on paruresis or shy bladder syndrome--which, due to propinquity, laziness, and a Western cultural bias, I'm lumping in with the soft porn numbers. You don't even want to know what you get when you do an image search on "sensitive."

The news that encourages me about America is that an Amazon search on that word uncovers a trove of stuff based on Elaine Aron's seminal work, The Highly Sensitive Person and other work linking sensitivity to creativity. And some soft porn, in case you were inclined to overestimate your human beings.

(I detect a researchable trend. Theory: A statistical majority of x number of randomly selected adjectives researched in Google Images and on Amazon will produce soft porn results within the first two screen pages. Or: I need a job.)

Speaking of propinquity, I was taking a lunch break from tallying the results of my informal HSP test results accumulated from your comments on last week's post, switching focus to my latest copy of The Atlantic, beloved of all liberal introverts, and I was brought up short by an exemplary article on that HSP-est of writers,"The Autumn of Joan Didion" by Caitlin Flanagan. Confession: I've never read Didion, although I have The Year of Magical Thinking on my shelf. I'm a snob about books that are rumored to be wildly popular with women; snob was the identity I chose to go with in high school when I was too shy to pull off friendly or popular; most girls could do one or the other and, therefore, and for other reasons having to do with puberty, I claimed to prefer the company of boys.

This paragraph from Flanagan's commentary on Didion's first novel, Run River, jumped off the left hand page, sending me scrambling to the Kindle store:

"Taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf mute." Lily's sister-in-law remarks acidly (Didion's fiction always includes the wisecraking, jaded older woman): "Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands."

Shot to the heart. And, on the right hand side of the magazine just opposite that quote, a full-page ad for Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. That can't be coincidence. The ad offers what Cain calls a Manifesto For Introverts.

1. There’s a word for “people who are in their heads too much”: thinkers.

2. Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our “heed-takers” more than ever.
3. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.
4. Texting is popular because in an overly extroverted society, everyone craves asynchronyous, non-F2F communication.
5. We teach kids in group classrooms not because this is the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with the children while all the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the model.
6. The next generation of quiet kids can and should be raised to know their own strength.
7. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend-extrovert. There’s always time to be quiet later.
8. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is the key to finding work you love and work that matters.
9. Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.
10. Rule of thumb for networking events: one genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.
11. It’s OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.
12. “Quiet leadership” is not an oxymoron.
13. The universal longing for heaven is not about immortality so much as the wish for a world in which everyone is always kind.
14. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.
15. Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
16. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” – Gandhi

Can I get a witness? And that, naturally, sent me running back to the Kindle store, to my disappointment: Quiet won't be released for about two weeks and you have to pre-order. Meanwhile, here's Susan Cain's blog. Here's Pico Iyer's NYTimes article on the subject, "The Joy of Quiet,", and Susan Cain's NYTimes Sunday Review article on her book, "Shyness: An Evolutionary Tactic." Oh, and her Psychology Today article, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts." Psychology Today is the soft porn of psych journals.

I know it's worthwhile to post all these links because I have the results of my soft poll from your comments and, temperamentally speaking, I know where you live...yes, even the guys who may have inadvertently outed themselves by shying like wild horses from the very idea of taking a Highly Sensitive Person test (I say "may have..." and you know I love you).

HSP Results

Total Pageviews: 120 ( Approximately fifteen of these were the usual folks from Tbilisi and Destrito Federal looking for porn--soft or otherwise--by searching on mature.)

Total n: 32 (30, or 25%, of readers responded by taking the test and leaving a comment. Two additional comments came from two lovely HSP Facebook Friends.) 10 males and 22 females.

HSP High Score Did Not Meet Criteria Borderline Scores Shied Away

M: 2 1 2 2 3

F: 19 6 3 1 0

65.6 % of readers who responded with a comment endorsed HSP traits with a score of 14 or higher, supporting my soft hypothesis that this blog attracts other HSP bloggers at a higher rate than the 15-20% found in random public samples.

They also leave wonderful comments.

I leave you with two more passages from Caitlin Flanagan's Atlantic article on Didion. In describing Dideon's HSP traits, Flanagan reveals her own. And mine.

Didion's sensibility is like that of the young Joan Baez, whom she encountered in 1965: "Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young."

Ultimately, Joan Didion's crime--artistic and personal--is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old.

We'll see about that. I've just downloaded Dideon's first novel, Run River (1963), and ordered her collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968). For as long as my finger turns the pages (digital or paper), Joan Didion and I will be girls again.

[Proof that I'm wired this way. Two poems are temporarily added to the top of the Poetry page, written by me in high school and discovered this week in those boxes of my mother's that were in our garage. Please, judge the HSP traits revealed and not the quality of the poem. But you knew that.]

An HSP Reports In

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:11:00 +0000

In response to my low, post-holiday mood, I received a flood of empathetic and encouraging words and an invisible duck. You just can't beat a duck. I'm checking in to report that this sensitive sensory processor revived nearly overnight thanks to your kindness and...wait for it...a prodigious atmospheric pressure change. This is the perfect moment to introduce you to the HSP concept and ask you to take a charmingly short self-diagnostic test.

Let's play bio-social scientists, wanna? Lots more fun and elitist-liberal than astrology and more useful for typing presidential campaign contenders and anybody else on your radar.

Two of the coolest tools in my self-regulation toolbox are a digital barometer and my -itises (arthritis and bursitis, the inflammatory twins, gifts of genetics and too many years of aerobic dancing and fitness walking on hard surfaces). The barometer produces both raw digital data, including temperature, humidity, and moon phase, and historical charting. In the days around the end of December that I experienced high joint pain levels and a bottom-dweller's mood and prospect, the barometric pressure had made an unusual cliff dive from the realm of my highest subjective sense of well-being ( 30.40 Hg) to my misery zone (29.65 Hg and below) over a shockingly short 12 hour period.

Local weekly barometric pressure chart, December 25th - 31st, 2011

I live in one of the worst spots in the US for an -itis sufferer. Somebody buy my house, please. But the key point is not that I hurt all over, which adversely affects mood (it does for some fascinating reasons, but that's another blog post), but that my very Weltenshauung fell out of the frame. The world was hopeless and helpless, so eff it all. That's because I'm what Elaine Aron, PhD, calls an HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person--a human with acutely sensitive sensory-processing traits. They made me a natural born psychotherapist and I credit these characteristics for whatever creativity I possess, but they come with a steep price: I find me high maintenance. And it's becoming more pronounced with age.

HSP's make up between 15 - 20% of the population, too high a rate to make the trait a disorder, but encountered at a low enough rate to make HSP's feel strange and different in many settings. For you Myers-Briggs fans, most HSP's are Introverts, but some 30% of them are Extroverts (I'm an INTJ; Mr. Mature is an ISTJ, but he's never taken the HSP test, so--oh, goody). And before you start mentally profiling everyone you know, factor in that males and females are equally represented in the HSP population. We're conscientious, careful, often risk avoidant, hyper-aware of subtle details, often but not always shy, and share a rich and riveting internal life of the mind. We also can react viscerally, inconveniently, to unfavorable social and physical conditions.

For example, I am appalled to walk into a room and find people trying to socialize or even just exist under a single overhead light source; for their well-being, the success of their undertaking, and my own sanity, I have to turn that bad boy off and give the scene some friendly, lower level lamp light. And the light needs to be balanced in the room or, at least, enhancing to the task. The temperature needs to be right for the activity level and bare walls should be banned. Throw in some hard seating, echoing acoustics, MESS, and the wrong music for the nature of the moment and I am either out the door or pacing like a caged animal. If I'm hungry, I bite. If I'm overtired, you need to leave. If I don't know anyone in the room, most of the time I'm silent and ready to go home, but, if I have a role to play, feel safe, and the conditions are conducive, I can be warm, talkative, and very engaged. You'd like me, really. There's never been a cocktail party I couldn't hate unless I'm giving it. Which I don't. Almost hardly. But when I do, it's wildly successful. And don't get me started on colors.

Expect to find us among artists, writers of fiction, memoir, and poetry, designers, counselors, accountants, librarians, and totally fascinating people. Do not look for us among sales reps for, if we make that career mistake, we shortly self-destruct, but you might well find us in the ad copy department. I have a feeling (and we're good at intuitive hunches) that Jon Huntsman and Barack Obama might be borderline HSP's but Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich...nah, nope, uh-uh. And Ron Paul is an alien, which is why he talks funny.

So, here's the fun part. In blogging, we usually wind up attracting those who share at least one of our interests, but, I submit, quite often they also share our sensory-processing traits. I theorize that there will be more of you taking the HSP self-test (which is not a magazine gimmick, but a tested, reliable, and verifiable scientific tool, but also short, easy, and fun) who find you're also an HSP than who do not.

Please take the test HERE and leave your results and any thoughts you have in a comment. You might ask a mate, partner, or best friend to take it, too. I'll devote my next post to our results.

Now, wasn't that fun? Thank you for playing and thank you, too, for your kind thoughts on my last post. I've felt so upbeat and energetic the last three days (dry, clear, seasonally cold, 30.40 Hg, but dropping again today), I tackled a chore two days ago that I've avoided for six years: I lit a fire, turned on NPR, dressed in my softest, snuggiest stay-at-home clothes, got the lighting perfect, perched on my grandfather's overstuffed chaise and sorted through the big stack of boxes of the china my mother hand painted in her last ten years. I kept only four pieces, and disposed of the rest in a manner I feel great about. Huge accomplishment for me.

Here are some additional links that might interest you.
Top Ten Survival Tips For The Highly Sensitive Person
HighlySensitivePeople.com
The book: The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron, PhD. (Good price cut. Audio, but not Kindle yet)
"Scientists Still Mulling Causes of Weather-Related Pain", USAToday
The study: Sensory-Processing Sensitivity and It's Relation To Introversion And Emotionality
The wiki: Highly Sensitive Person
Ultra Sensitive? It's In Your Brain
In depth, Introduction To Sensory Processing Concepts

Some Short Thoughts On A Long Night

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:57:00 +0000

I woke up this morning to find my HIBERNATE indicator glowing steady red, indicative of the end of the frantic holiday season (merely demi-frantic at our house) and the functional beginning of winter. In the lull, we've been thinking long, long thoughts.

We've been wishing everybody Happy Everything for weeks, as prescribed, but the truth is we're both a bit blue, which is hard to discuss without bringing each other down. It's not that we haven't got things to do. There's an election to be won by all means, right down to tightening our stomach muscles as the vote counts come in. And we're almost totally completely mostly committed to a ridiculously ambitious do-it-yourself home interior update that we're half scared to launch for fear we'll get part way through it, give out, and be stuck with the kind of tacky dissonance you find in the homes of old folks who've run out of time and money. Ouch. We can be as busy as we please, but the savor ain't in it at the moment, and we find ourselves wondering if one can be busy and despondent at the same time. We also wonder if I'm using plural pronouns so I won't have to feel solely responsible for bumming you out, Dear Reader. Forgive us.

I'm probably supposed to know this...I'm sure there are people who believe a retired psychotherapist should know these things...but there's no answer coming to hand: Exactly what is it that old folks are supposed to be thinking and feeling? What's appropriate? What's healthy? What's...my personal bottom line...realistic? The right answer--"Boomer" right, not historical right--will meet all three criteria.

Elderly is a category almost all of us are likely to join and a huge glob of us is on the verge. We want to do it right; that's just the way we're built. I would venture that no generation prior to this one has cared so exceedingly to be "healthy" and "normal," but we're also the generation that embraced the task of defining these terms. How shall we define them for ourselves in our last decades? We enter what Mary Pipher has called Another Country (a book I read when dealing with my parents' dotage) at a tough time. Will we be hounded into submission by the cult of positivity or will we be allowed to notice our own experiences and report them honestly for the good it might do? I'm asking. Seriously, take it on.

If there's no right answer (Warning: there are at least two blog posts in my archives with "sticking it to the joy mongers" in the title), then is it valuable to report a less-than-sparkling status for the nonce? It can get pretty sparkly in the blogosphere and I'll admit I find that daunting when daylight is short and good news tough to come by. Um...we...find it daunting. Is misery, or rather, dysthymia, still allowed to peek its head out and ask for company when it discovers itself? Misery for no good reason other than it's a deep and dark January? And the Republican rhetoric in Iowa seems to pre-date the scientific method. And we've been told not to expect 2012 to be very different economically from 2011. And there is a drumbeat of blame sounding faintly from our children's generation, not yet widespread and certainly not politically correct, but noticeable; I see those articles, posts, tweets, and I quail.

[Addendum for New Year's Day with all thanks to John at Running After My Hat.]

Coming Your Way

BY J. ALLYN ROSSER

A woman walks, absorbed in the air

of her ill fortune, absorbing

the clean breeze in the sunlight

of a small town, seeing what she sees

through the lens of what she’s seen before,

as through glasses custom-made

for someone else. For someone else,

surely, because the events

that brought her here didn’t suit her

in temperament, conditioning, appetite.

Was it her fault she’d been so unhappy?

Were the events, the people, so bad?

Think of the results of good perfume

at the wrong time; the bitter mouthwash

of wine after a glass of milk.

Too bad if our schedules keep us

up late, coffee in our cups,

when we like to turn in early.

Or force us to commute in bad traffic,

in bad air, the first and last hours

of daylight, small birds flying

out of focus on the flat white sky

as we idle and surge and idle, staring

at the changeless billboards and exit signs

we can never get to in time,

causing us to hate our jobs

and speak tensely to our loved ones,

who perhaps love us

too irritatingly well, too calmly...

We adjust as we can to what nears us.

We turn, and turn, like leafy plants

to the sun of our circumstance,

hardly noticing the gradual alterations

to our tastes in music, recreation,

food, even forms of intimacy.

Woman who live together align cycles.

Men who drink together every week

begin to laugh in roughly the same way:

the new half-scornful laugh

that alienates an office superior

or close friend, or a wife.

And now this woman whose good intentions

have soured through bad alloys

of companionship, diet, occupation—

she is new in town and is looking around

mistrustfully, but with a shred of hope

as fine as the unraveled strand of hair

that lifts and falls, troubling her cheek

as she walks slowly but steadily

across the green, heading for this very spot.

She will turn to one of us

and one of us will turn to her

or away. Look at your blank faces!

Why are we all gathered here

if not to couple souls on earth?

Who among us can convert

without a single touch

the sour in her thwarted self

to sweet? You? You?

If I hibernate by the fire with P.D. James' Austen-based Death Comes To Pemberley (Elizabeth and Darcy at home!) while I wait for Mr. Mature to finish Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity (Scientific method outlives the ultracons!), you'll forgive me. Us.

Here's to whatever it takes to persevere in 2012. Hang in there. I wish you a Tolerable Twenty-Twelve.

Tales of Christmas Past

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:49:00 +0000

[This post is as much a record for my children as it is a Christmas card to you, my blog family.]

Tidewater Christmas 1985. Marc may be one of the bikers.

I've noticed that Christmas is simply never what it used to be. My two favorite Christmases are the Vintage Granny Christmas of childhood, which set the slapstick standard, and the Holy Shit Christmas of 1984, my hands-down happiest.

A Vintage Granny Christmas

For the last two years, I've posted this picture by Emmet Gowin as my Christmas cybercard...to mixed reviews. Gowin, who retired in '09 from teaching visual arts at Princeton, hails from Danville, VA, a short hop over the state line from my maternal grandmother's people in north central North Carolina. He built his reputation on pictures of his wife Edith and her family in Danville...real Americana that occasionally veers toward the pornographic. I suppose I love this photo because it reminds me of all the childhood Christmas Day gatherings at my Granny's in Greensboro.

Edith Gowin, Christmas, Danville - by Emmet Gowin.

Granny and Pawpaw had most of their six children and various siblings and cousins living, in the best Southern style, within hollerin' distance of each other. On Christmas evening, all their offspring, their sweethearts and best friends or their spouses and kids, the local kin out to a few third cousins, and anyone who knew a good time when they saw it converged on the big farmhouse on Ridgewood Avenue with food and gifts. It was bedlam at the end of an overfed, over-heated, overwrought day that had started at the crack of dawn with Santa and was punched up with heavy doses of FD&C Red Dye #40--candy canes licked to pencil points and left stuck to the arms of the sofa, a chunk of fruitcake forgotten on the back of the toilet. I never really gave much thought to there being just one tired toilet for that great gaggle, but I'm thinking of it now.

As eldest grandchild by a whole nine months, it was my job to goat rope my wild-eyed, sticky-faced cousins into a swiftly conceived and rashly scripted Christmas pageant to entertain the grown-ups before the gift exchange. I tried to vary the program annually--a Sleigh Ride here, a Night Before Christmas re-enactment there. I'd spent the long day visiting house-to-house with my father's folks, being petted and indulged, so I was a quart low on patience and chose to keep it simple at Granny's: a classical and dignified rendering of The Nativity.

The music portion was not that hard; most of us attended the same small elementary school and had learned and performed the same Glee Club routine together just a few days earlier; I just went with the flashiest number in our repertoire. "Dona Nobis Pacem" was an inspired choice, being in Latin to impress the Baptists, and, once I'd bribed the littlest cousins to, in effect, babble in tongues, it was clearcut, lyrics-wise.

The tough part was the nativity tableau. Straining what was left of the children's composure, I begged and bullied them through rehearsals in a cold, back bedroom. Most of us had been up since 5:00 a.m. and had dodged actual nutrition all day, were all careening gaily toward blood sugar crises, so our prep for the play necessarily involved blows over the choice roles, more than a few tears, and plots among the cast to take their revenge on the producer/director. We cousins ran roward skinny, dark-banged, pale girls with freckled noses and smart mouths. We had only the one sturdy blonde boy cousin, who had to do some swift costume changes to play both Joseph and the donkey. His sister, our youngest, was the only one small enough to stay on his back and admiring enough to still take my direction seriously; she was the perfect Round Yon Virgin, a bath towel safety-pinned under her chin, and a stain-faced, nasty, one-eyed doll from the toy box swaddled in a blue sweater and cradled in her arms at the exact angle to facilitate reverent adulation.

That was the year tiny Great Aunt Grace, eighty-something, joined us for the party. She was "good with children", but had none of her own and usually spent her Christmases quietly at church and at home with her husband Lawrence and his mother. She'd lost Lawrence some months before and we wanted to make sure she didn't get a quiet second to miss him much. Also, she was my Sunday School teacher and I wanted her to know I'd been paying attention, so you could say I had something riding on this gig.

The donkey sabotaged my shot at Best Director by straying out of character badly from the moment of his entrance. Recalling the Brementown Musicians, he tried kicking out both hind legs, then dug in his knees and had to be jerked hard by the bathrobe sash around his neck to get the show on the road. He grinned triumphantly, mugged,and wagged his head side-to-side (picture Stevie Wonder) through all the solemn parts of the Bible reading while his sister gazed down in perfect adoration of the sweater she was cradling. Aunt Grace got the silly giggles and choked on her fruitcake. The admiring relatives who'd been hurting themselves to keep their faces straight lost control and spewed eggnog in fits of hilarity. It was a hit for the ages.

Afterwards, we children resumed galloping insanely in a circle around the central stairwell, with regular circuits past the entrance to the only bathroom, all grudges given up to our perennial game of Keep Away From Grown-ups.

A Tidewater Christmas

I must have burned myself out on family togetherness in those years, for I married into the Air Force and fled Greensboro like a criminal. Most Christmases found Mr. Mature and me in yet another new town with just our two little ones on Christmas morning. In 1984, however, we'd landed at Langley AFB, Hampton, VA, within driving distance of my parents, who had just retired. I was recovering from a rough surgery, the kids were the perfect ages, at four and seven, to make a Christmas memory, and my mother decided this was the year to pour it on. She even aimed for the grand gesture and shocked me with a mink jacket...something I'd never thought to long for and have since worn about five times.

She and my father drove north with the car loaded to the gills. Call me crass--and I realize I should know better than to idealize the materialistic excesses of the past in this age of austerity--but, damn it, I miss the Eighties. I miss the promise and exuberance of it. I even miss the hair. Mr. Mature's AF career was progressing nicely (he misses his hair, too) and we could afford to make Santa look impressed with our two progeny, who were at their funniest and most beautiful. I loved our house in Hampton with its loft view down into the living room and its perfect neighborhood, where the local fire station drove Santa around to throw candy from the firetruck. My health and strength were returning. We had Virginia's full four seasons in all their glory. The mid-eighties in the Tidewater were our happiest time as a family, and, of all the decade's homes (Arizona, Virginia, Alabama, Alaska), that was the one we four recall most fondly.

Marc's bedroom was at the top of the stairs and he was the first to see down over the railing to what Saint Nicholas and his Nana had created.

We'd all heard him stirring and were listening from our beds. He proved himself, at four, an observant fighter pilot's son and a true Mature with his stage-whispered, "Holy Shit!"

The scene devolved into one that Emmet Gowin would appreciate.

My Edith-Gowin-in-nightgown-and-mink pose.

The next tour was a short turn-around in Alabama for Air War College. They were big on Dining Outs, formal and semi-formal soirees designed to prep an officer and a gentleman to socialize graciously in command...a training that never took for me; I proudly claimed to be an unrepentent feminist and the only Air Force wife in history to avoid hosting a single party in her husband's entire career as a matter of principle. (He has forgiven me somehow and swears it's not my fault he didn't become a general.)

We've never gone in for portrait Christmas cards, but here's my favorite photo from the Christmas Ball in Montgomery. I wore my mink. All the rest of our Christmas photos involve ratty bathrobes and circles under our eyes, just as they should.

Glamor Shot, Christmas Ball, Montgomery 1987

Dona Nobis Pacem. Hold your paradoxes gently, go forth and make memories.

The Mouse And The Moonbeam

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:58:00 +0000

The best Christmas I ever knew was wiped clean from my memory for forty-four years. I still can't recall the event, itself, but nothing much except giving birth has equaled the thrill I got when the Christmas of '57 was finally revealed to me in 2001. But we must first go back to 1952 to make sense of the tale.

Four must be the perfect Christmas age, the year the wonder really takes over. Although I wouldn't be a student there for another two years, my mother took me down Ball Street from my grandmother's house to Edgeville School's auditorium that December to see the students' Christmas play. The school would soon be named for William Sydney Porter--Greensboro, North Carolina's beloved O'Henry, author of "The Gift of The Magi." But on that Christmas it was still merely named for the center of the universe, my own sweet neighborhood and the blocks around my grandfather's corner store. Rows of curved, hinged wooden seats on wrought iron frames, a small stage with dark red curtains, my first time in a hushed and darkened playhouse...this part, I remember in minute detail. I can smell the green dusting compound that was used to sweep the school's wide-planked floors. I can smell the nearness of my mother. We were there for a homegrown production of Eugene Field's 1912 holiday fantasy, "The Mouse and The Moonbeam."

When the curtain opened, the stage was bare except for a tall grandfather clock with a curving smile on its face, a child costumed as a mouse, and a shaft of light, the only light on the stage, illuminating a pale ballerina in repose. And a voice offstage spoke only to me, calling me by a name that was new to me but undeniably mine.

From that gentle beginning, a lurid fable unfolded, both shocking and soothing, in the most rococo language, of what can befall a mouse for failing to believe in Santa Claus. There was a wicked brindle cat compared to Satan, a sister mouse maimed for foolishness. The old clock had hinged eyelids and eyeballs that rattled as they moved; he ticked and clacked, speaking of Time and Death, enabling all the shivery parts. "The cat that deprived my sister of so large a percentage of her vertebral colophon was the same brindled ogress that nowadays steals ever and anon into this room...!" Too graphic for a four year old, but those were the days of Grimm's Fairy Tales and I was little Dear-my-soul, gripping my fearless mother's hand. Stories always ended well in those days in my neighborhood and this one did, too, although not without the death of a young shepherd and a dramatic virgin birth in a stall.

Never mind. The imperative thing--the unforgettable thing--was that the moonbeam danced en pointe within the moving spotlight, adored by the old clock and the little mauve mouse and every eye in the hall. Howdy Doody had not prepared me for The Moonbeam. I had never seen anything so enchanting and I'm not sure I took in another word of the play...something on and on about exotic cheeses in mousey dreams and mankind in need of redemption and who cared? I was enraptured, transported into a world that promised something better than Saint Nicholas: a spot-lit white radiance, a curving grace and spell-binding beauty in a tutu.

Walking out into the cold Carolina night after the play, my mother said, "That was Susan Eubanks, a big girl in sixth grade. She's so-and-so's daughter and somebody-or-another's cousin, and she takes dance at Felicia's Studio." And, on the spot, I had a goal in life. I'd never heard a more beautiful name than Susan Eubanks. I would be Susan Eubanks. I would find Felicia's Studio.

The next day I told my second cousin Grace Ann about the play, breathing, "I saw Susan Eubanks dancing...!," in the same tone you would use for Nadezhda Pavlova, a whisper of royalty. The name was a spell I sighed to myself...Susan Eubanks...a spell that would make my neck long and white, my arms lithe, my toes strong enough someday to hold my whole weight. The toes, I could already tell, would be the hard part. I worried about my toes.

Felicia's Studio, my mecca, turned out to be a loft space above a shop on Greene Street in downtown Greensboro, where I spent every Saturday afternoon until puberty. In recital, I became a Sugar Bear and a top-hatted boogie-woogie tapper, among other things. I recall no elegant solos, no dreams-come-true. When I was eleven, we moved from the center of the universe out to Groometown Road near Sedgefield for the lake, and the stables, and the woods.

Forward to 1959. In the development of a dancer, eleven and twelve are crucial years, the years to begin en pointe work if the dancer is serious and strong enough. With the long drive back into town from our new house and a commitment of several dance classes a week for en pointe, my working parents would have spent every leisure hour in a car. And toe dancing "mangles the feet," my mother said. My father chimed in with something he learned in the infantry, "You have to take care of your feet and they'll take care of you."--lame words flung in the face of glory. I could have insisted; I might have prevailed. But I was an only-child and my job was the peace of the household. In the move, I'd lost my daily life with my cousins and my friends at Porter School, the proximity of my grandmother's house and my grandfather's corner store, and the entire center of the universe. I was not to know who I was again for many years. I had a training bra. I figured Fate was not to be argued with.

In the winter of 2001, I was well into my fifties. My own daughter had danced in white, graduated from college, and married earlier that year. My mother was dying, but we didn't know it that day as I sat at her kitchen counter going through a box of old photos with her. We talked about my daughter's grace and her love of dance. I asked my mother if she remembered Susan Eubanks as The Moonbeam, and she said, "You were smitten. And, when it was your turn, you were too young for toe shoes, but your ballet was just as good as Susan's."

My turn. My turn. I can't breathe right now, remembering what she said.

"You were The Moonbeam. When you were nine, they put on the play again at the school and you danced The Moonbeam. You were perfect."

And I still didn't believe her. But I had the ghost of a memory of tulle, of a complete stillness and hush, of a lifting in the diaphragm, of motes moving all around me in a bright, white light, of the sense of something big and unseen out beyond the light.

My mother went back to the cabinet for another box and brought me this relic, the program, entitled "The Mouse And The Moonbeam. Porter School. Thursday Evening, 7:30 p.m., December 12, 1957.

There were my friends I had lost. There was my cousin Marsha, who would die in the late Spring of 2001, just a month before my mother; she was cast in the play as an Angel. And my youngest cousin, Dianne, in the choir. There was Joan Knighten, my grandmother's little ringleted neighbor, a Flower; and jolly Michael Hornaday from the corner of Textile Drive and Tucker Street, as a Wise Man. There was my oldest friend, Steve Newton, as the Olive Tree, and my best friends, Cynthia Kivett and Pat Phoenix singing for Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class, my class. There were the small boys, Victor Schoolfield and Art Bulla, both favorites of mine for wit and kindness, and Page Dunlap, a gentle giant and my protector, who would one day send me a silk dress from Vietnam.

All the names had faces again; all my dear old universe came back to me. And I had danced in the light. I see from this distance that I have had a small life, but with moments so bright, they strike me blind.

Wouldn't Have You Think

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

"I wouldn't have them think..."

"Please, don't think...!"

"If I do that, everyone will think..."

"What will people think?!"

Of all the sheepheaded notions our minds produce, this one is the silliest. Good luck with controlling what people think of you. Nevertheless, we'll turn our fragile identities--for they are fragile and others have noticed already--into tangled knots, confounding ourselves and our principles senseless, to try to steer the stories others tell themselves about us. And it is utterly hopeless. The double back flips we perform to mold our images in the minds of others, in the end, merely strain our integrities and invite such labels as phony and hollow, synthetic and fake.

Completely futile, this effort to shape the opinion of others. Other people think of us according to the stories that characteristically run in their heads. If they've known terror and abuse, their stories about us are likely to be fearful and paranoid. If they are duplicitous, themselves, they're likely to think us dishonest. If life has played them fair, they can imagine you might, too.

Take my own example. I've had some trouble wanting to write lately. What slotted me under the laptop today was the thought, "I wouldn't want you to think I'd lost interest in blogging or that I didn't care to hold up my end of our special relationship." By opening a blog and posting regularly, I've embraced a responsibility to keep it up or have a good reason why not. And I don't have a good reason why not. I've considered that my lull is due the seasonal loss of daylight. Plus news fatigue; it just doesn't work for me to avoid the news. Think, instead, that I meet my citizen's duty to be informed.

What dominates the news this Christmas...what stalks my heart in this season dedicated to the hopes of mankind and the dreams of youngsters...what renders me speechless is the utter and perverted contempt for children shown by so-called champions for youth like Jerry Sandusky with his Second Mile charity (which complains that it's lost funding recently). Or Newt Gingrich with his attack on Child Labor Laws and his proposal to hire child janitors for public schools--superimposed on Gingrich Productions' sales of propaganda for children, Sweet Land of Liberty, and its history website for kids, Ellis The Elephant. But I certainly wouldn't have you think I've equated these very different types of child exploitation.

And yet, I believe that never before in American history has so much money been spent in the effort to grab your thoughts by the fistful and contort them to force a particular outcome in the voting booth in the year ahead.

While you and I examine our budgets and our credit card limits to decide what we can afford in the way of Christmas gifts this year, a Romney SuperPac, Restore Our Future, has launched a $3.1 Million ad campaign to run in Iowa this month. A Perry SuperPac, Make Us Great Again, will spend over $2 Million in ads above what the official Perry campaign will throw at the state's primary. And Charlie Smith, Gingrich strategist, says that the Solutions 2012 SuperPac is considering pumping its Iowa funds into negative ads against the other two. All in order to nominate the candidate who can best decry government waste.

Meanwhile, Romney wants you to think he's a people person (as opposed to a corporation) and as constant as the Northern Star, and Gingrich, possibly fearing that he's overreached with his self-comparisons to Atatürk, Abraham Lincoln, and the Duke of Wellington, settles for having you think of him as Sam Walton and Roy Kroch. He wouldn't want you to think he's a raving narcissist. In fact, if you have any opinions of him, he'll let you know.

Please, don't think all my posts are political; think of this as my last political post of 2011. And I wouldn't have you think I'm not thinking of you; I'll be visiting you even when I've succumbed to writer's block. You don't think I've become embittered, do you? Because I'm not. Because I said I'm not.

The Christmas Can't-Help-Its

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:52:00 +0000

From my dear friend Lee Ann, a tip of the hat, a deep bow, and a blown kiss for this Christmas card. I simply can't help myself; I had to send it along to everyone I love.

Pilgrimage To Parnassus

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:56:00 +0000

“This is not a showroom, this is not where you come in to scan your barcode.
If you like this thing, it’s your responsibility to keep this thing alive.” - Ann Patchett

I've taken the oath to shop local and shop small this season...even if I have to travel 600 miles to honor it.

Favorite gifts? Books. Favorite shop? Bookstores, preferably small and privately owned. Favorite author? Don't make me choose just one, but, if you insist, today it's Ann Patchett of Nashville, Tennessee,...venerated muse to localistas and literary postulants in The Athens of The South.

When we visited our son and daughter-in-law in Nashville for Thanksgiving, they kindly indulged the second item on my agenda (the first item, "hug family") by struggling through the traffic around Green Hills Mall to reach Ann Patchett's brand new Parnassus Books on Hillsboro Pike. Named for Mt. Parnassus, the mythological home of literature and learning, naturally. Nobody can say Ann Patchett isn't plucky to open a small, intimate bookshop in an age where even the big box sellers that drove the independents out of business are closing doors. More than plucky; quixotic in a cause I adore.

I hoped that, since the bookstore had opened only days before, Ann Patchett would be there herself and that I might beat back the crowds for a glimpse of the author of Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and State of Wonder, winner of the Mature Landscaping Award for Magnificence. What luck to spot the author from the front door, to be graciously welcomed to take pictures, to have a little chat that probably could have gone on for as long as I could think of something worthy to ask or add.

If I was a bolder soul, I'd have a picture of Ann (May I call you Ann?) and I. Instead, I have a picture of her dedicating both of the copies of State of Wonder that I purchased...one to my daughter-in-law, who will love it, and one to me, who has already loved it in both print and audio format. A not-very-good picture because I was reluctant to trouble her with framing a better one; I figure she's been through a lot just lately, bucking the bookstore tide and thumbing her nose at the recession, all on top of the audacity of producing fiction again and again, confident now in her established success that it will be read by total strangers. I have decided that authors of fiction are the bravest people in the world.

Hope Davis

Ann Patchett is a small woman to be so bold, not at all my image of a world-beater. And she is sweet-faced and lovely. A perfect fit on top of the pedestal I carried in the door with me. She has a soft, warm, alto voice that I thought would sound ideal reading her own work. I was tongue-tied in admiration and babbled about finding Hope Davis's reading of SofW to be appropriately breathless and vulnerable and wonderfully....uh...um...er. Me, at a vacuous loss for the word implacable when I finally got my chance to speak in person to a great wordsmith. It's true, though; Hope Davis, an actress with another lovely face, sounds both fragile and dogged, implacable, as she describes the relentlessness of the South American setting, the voraciousness of the insects, the impenetrable opacity of the Amazon. She sounds, come to think of it, like Ann Patchett sounds, but with a barely noticeable aspirational lisp that belies the courage of both Dr. Marina Singh and her creator.

Ann Patchett

Patchett told me that she doesn't like to read or listen to her own work, can't bring herself to go back to it when it's done. She was very pleased to hear that I'd found her chosen reader so apt. I was thrilled to have uttered something pleasing, so it worked out nicely. I'm certain, if I had been awarded the PEN/Faulkner, I would be impelled to return to my little words to see what all the shouting was about.

Parnassus Books is small, too, or just the right size for a bookstore where they might just remember you after a couple of visits. It reminded me of Meg Ryan's Shop Around The Corner in "You've Got Mail." There were about thirty patrons on Wednesday, big and little, all looking at home and absorbed in books. Or in the train in the children's nook, a space accessed by a pint-sized Doric columned and pedimented doorway so beguiling, it guaranteed a mother a good fifteen minutes to shop for herself.

Once home, I found that Ann Patchett has not always managed to avoid revisiting her own work. A few years ago, I read Lucy Grealy's Autobiography Of A Face, the story of this (equally lovely) young poet's life with disfiguring childhood-onset cancer of the jaw. The book's afterword is by her roommate at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Ann Patchett. I followed my reading of Face with Patchett's non-fiction memoir of her friendship with Lucy, Truth And Beauty, which was written after Grealy's death in '02. Because I now feel even more attached to Patchett, whose writerly accessibility is perversely imposing, I was gratified to find she'd narrated the audio version herself. Listening, I can hear a hint of something gently wry in her tone as she reads her own words...the same wryness that I heard when she mentioned to me how she dislikes reading her work aloud.

I have never gone out of my way to meet a writer in person before. The people who author the stories that unfold in my head always speak with my voice, always have my face, and I've seen no point in messing with something that suits me thoroughly. But I would go some distance to meet a woman who opens an intimate bookstore in this economically ridiculous November, 2011.

Usual And Customary

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:27:00 +0000

photo from "Between Naps On The Porch"

I am addicted to habit. Please plan an intervention. I warn you that my condition is grave and may require that I be kidnapped and hidden away on a Viking Longship and set adrift on the Rhine for fifteen days. Please hurry; Early Booking Discount offer expires Dec. 16th.

You've heard that old people get "set in their ways." I recall in my youth wondering how they determined which ways to get set in. I imagined that long lives would allow them to sample a wide range of ways from which to choose the ones they liked best, which didn't sound like a bad deal at all. From this end of the tale, I find that's not remotely the case. I should have suspected as much when I noticed how many of those old folk had chosen, out of all the possibilities available, K&W Cafeteria.

The way it really works is, if we can find anything that's pleasant or comfortable or safe (safety first, really), we fasten on it with raptors' talons and hang on for dear life. Sometimes, it seems that there's a window for new experiences that signals its intention to close, at around age fifty, by trembling slightly in its sash. At fifty-eight, it makes a sudden lurching, glass-rattling drop to half-closed, and, at sixty-three, it hesitates briefly and then slams down the last twelve inches with guillotine finality, lopping off all options unconditionally.

Whatever slips through the window in the critical last inches, one is stuck with for the duration. There's no other way to explain my parents' rigid preference for instant coffee at the very apogee of the yuppy craze for sleek, brushed chrome, counter-top whole bean grinders. This pseudo-sophisticated commercial was possibly the last thing to make it over their windowsill. (Picture Indiana Jones scrambling miraculously, with not an inch to spare, under the sliding iron door of the tomb as it pounded down for all eternity.)

My habit addiction applies to anything you can think of--exercise routine, decorating style, clothing choices, routes to get to the same old places I always go to, my spot on the couch, the loft of the pillows on the bed, etc.--but it's at its hook-iest over stuff that goes in my mouth. I think we humans are most likely to be picky about what passes over our taste buds; their exquisite sensitivity has evolved to prevent us from being poisoned, after all. I've simply made reasonable food precaution an art form.

Ten years ago, I discovered Klondike Slim-A-Bear Giant Fudge Bars. They were allowed on a diet plan I was following and they were creamy but just as chocolate-y as those old fudgesicles my grandfather sold from his deep freezer at Nance's Grocery on the corner of Ridgewood Ave. and Ball St. in Greensboro, NC. Instant and total attachment. That the diet plan was wildly successful just cemented the bond. They were my invariable bedtime treat for years until Klondike stopped making them. (You can play cool games on this Klondike 5 Seconds To Glory website, but you can't buy their fudgesicles. That's wrong. Those chocolate bars were so good, my hero Diane Ackerman wrote about them in One Hundred Names For Love.) I was crazed, a lunatic, when my grocer informed me he couldn't get them. I wanted him to circulate a petition among his customers to send to Klondike, Inc.

And then, about five really mediocre years later, they began to carry Weight Watchers Giant Fudge Bars and life was once again worth living. Until two weeks ago, when the Giant bars disappeared and were replaced by puny, half-sized bars. The Weight Watchers folks figured out that they could make more selling smaller bars. The good times were definitely over. I borrowed a step ladder at Food Lion and cleaned out the last two boxes of the big ones from the back of their freezer over a week ago. I am in withdrawal. We've found a half-assed substitute for the real thing, but I'm not attached yet. I don't want to talk about that any more.

Long-married couples crochet intricate interwoven habit shawls to wrap around their food rituals like his-and-hers shrouds. Mr. Mature and I have an invariable bedtime routine that centers around frozen fudge ice cream on a stick. He turns down the bed and puts the heating pads under the covers where our respective feet go, while I clean out the last of the Peet's Decaf Major Dickeson's Blend from the coffee maker and wipe off the kitchen counters. Then, no matter how cold it is, I bring the first two frozen chocolate bars (oh, lord, what will we do, now?!) back to the bedroom, hand him his and the tissue he's going to ask me for in about five minutes, and climb in with my book. Then I go to the kitchen for my glasses, which I forgot. We read and tandem-slurp frozen, artificially sweetened chocolate skim milk (I think I'm having palpitations!). He throws out the sticks and wrappers and goes back for the second bar and so it goes. We only get two. I follow it up with a stick of Trident Sugarless Gum ("American Dental Association accepted."). There will be no sleep unless this protocol is perfectly adhered to.

That's the tip of my food fetishes. I have two breakfasts I have alternated for eons. Lunch should be peanut butter, I don't care where you are. I love salmon, but only farm-raised, for which I have guilt pangs that I'm perfectly accustomed to, thank you. Every 5:00 p.m. I pour about 3 oz. of dry white wine to sip unbelievably slowly over the next two hours before I switch to decaf. I'm a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc girl. Imagine my shock when I suddenly discovered last week that I'd developed an allergy to the sulfites in wine. I've found a domestic organic, "No-Sulfites-Detected", alternative, but it was touch and go there for a couple of days--a race to see which would do me in first, the anaphylaxis or the anxiety over having to make a change.

Which leads me to the purpose of this post. Happy Thanksgiving. May you do something traditional and be grateful for it. We're going to Nashville to spend it with our son and daughter-in-law, staying at the same motel we always patronize and hoping to get our usual room across from the little workout center. We'll make a Publix run for Brand-X chocolate fudge ice cream bars and a nice, organic white. Our DIL said they are invited to have turkey today at a friend's, so would we mind having something non-traditional for the holiday...sushi, perhaps. I explained I'd rather lick the inside of the aquarium, but most anything else would do fine. I said, "You know us. We're flexible."

A Small And Fragile Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:25:00 +0000

A more mature landscape--antidote for my frequently too-circumscribed view.

The video captures in equal measure the wonders of the physical planet — including the dancing auroras of both hemispheres — and the impressive luminosity of humanity in the midst of its fossil-fueled growth spurt. It is indeed a “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” as Carl Sagan wrote in 1994. But the stage is getting pretty populated.

The raw video is available from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center, (Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes.Video edit and soundtrack by Michael Konig.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything."
- Thomas Berry

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Here's a terrific exercise that has to do with both geography and point of view: draw a map of where you live, your turf. You know where your house is, where the gas station is, where the mall is, and - if you're virtuous - where the church is. If you're the adventurous type, you know where the vacant lot is where you once set that fire. But soon - past the freeway, or by the railroad tracks - your knowledge stops. Drawing where you are in the world is marvelously helpful in showing you where you are in the world."
- Carolyn See
Making a Literary Life
Advice for Writers
And Other Dreamers

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've been aware of a certain physical and emotional hibernation lately. Not exactly depression, but more just the sense that the metabolic thermostat reset itself a bit low. I don't like to think that it's nothing more than the end of Daylight Squandering Time and the creeping onset of winter; my ego prefers the notion that there's some cosmic retraction of Self, a coiling that will inevitably result in a burst of recreation: I'll surge forth into a renewed purposefulness and....do what?

I've discovered the limits of my tolerance. Three years is long enough to be holding on and hoping that the recession will ebb and the pulse of life will resume. That thing we've thought of as American Life ( the 90's and from 2001 to 2007) is a chimera, a fluke, the shadows dancing on the cave walls.

For months, I have woken up in the morning and tabbed chosen articles from the major national newspapers across the top of my screen. I've read my way across while I drank my coffee...certain that it's vital to make sense of it all. I've spent my evenings hanging on every word from the mouths of the liberal pundits (with occasional peeps into the broadcast black hole of the opposition, punctuated by regular meditative retreats into some BBC Victorian-era series or Masterpiece Mysteries, my own anglophiliac thumb to suck.) Televised news creates the impression that something momentous just happened and something else momentous will naturally follow. The staccato speech and booming soundtracks can almost feel like a pulse.

I hereby promise myself that I won't spend the entire next year devoured by politics. It's a great temptation that's only likely to grow more compelling in coming months. And there's the looming threat of the Deficit Reduction Committee's deadline, that boogeyman under my bed. None of it constitutes a life. And I do get to have a life right in the teeth of it all.

[Hat tip to JES. I have borrowed your Whiskey River format a bit and I may need to do it again.]

Landscaping 2012: The Best Marionette

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:57:00 +0000

Thanks to the CNBC Republican primary debate in Michigan, I've got a strategy recommendation for the Republican Party.

Let's review. So far, it appears the Right's old guard has let the tea party throw some candidates up there--come one, come all--to watch them fall on their butts, to let them make fools of themselves, getting that out of the way and putting an end once and for all to their bedeviling highjack of the Grand Old Party. And, if that's been the strategy, it seems to be working out pretty well so far. One by one, the ultra-rights are biting the dust in spectacular fashion. Bread and circuses all around.

In fact, since they obviously have no love for Romney, some speculate that the Republican machine has decided to quit trying for a win this time; it's been much more rewarding for them to let Obama be identified with this gawd-awful slice of history, especially as it threatens to run on for at least five more years. Maybe they've decided to field none of their potentially electable people for 2012, but to continue to rule the country through obstructionism in Congress, to put the rest of their hope in a socially conservative SCOTUS, and to wait for the economic pendulum to swing itself.

But what happens if one of the tea party candidates screws up and wins in 2012? I don't for a moment believe that the GOP wants that, but they've recently demonstrated through the Bush administration that they know how to run a puppet government for eight years at a whack. If a Republican is elected, the GOP must insure that they have a fully-functioning, reasonably convincing, entirely disposable marionette in office.

That's Not Mitt Romney (there's a website!), who cannot be trusted to do as he's told and who lacks sincerity and believability. Gingrich won't survive the hypocrisy test due to his '90's history; he can't deliver the female vote. Herman Cain has failed to convince us of the seriousness of his campaign (until now, that is; the irony of the sexual harassment/abuse scandals for him is that he may now actually become serious about winning office as a consequence of mounting a desperate self-defense), but no one doubts that he owns and fully inhabits 9-9-9. The problem is that 9-9-9 is all he inhabits; his rigidity on that subject renders him non-malleable in office, even if his campaign could survive the sexual harassment/abuse charges. He's wrecked his chances of being the GOP puppet.

And Perry has proven a poor mouthpiece. The Rick Perry ventriloquism dummy has a tendency to suddenly slump over mid-sentence or, alarmingly, go ballistic and begin to gesticulate wildly all on its own. As the NYTimes' Matt Bai points out, he's got more problems as a puppet president than just his sieve of a memory.

Here he was calling for what would be a truly radical restructuring of the federal government — involving many thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars in federal expenditures — and he didn’t have a grasp on which sprawling departments he would shutter. It seemed the idea was not his own, but rather something he had tried and failed to memorize.

And in this way, Mr. Perry violated one of the core tenets of modern politics, which is that you have to at least sustain the artifice of ownership. (Emphasis, mine)

Trojan Suit, by Michael Speaker

The best marionette candidate will meet the following criteria:

Authenticity.
The ability to remember lines and speak them with total conviction and energy.
Laser-focus.
Convincing sincerity and "the artifice of ownership."
A quick study (can run off camera during commercial breaks in a debate to instantly commit to memory a whole set of facts and figures without considering their relevance).
Ability to bring in the tea party and evangelical vote.
Not likely to win, but presentable if handled properly and wholly malleable, just in case.
A tried and true Un-Mitt.

Since they have no candidate capable of leadership, the GOP now needs to throw their lot (and, as quickly as possible, all their hired handlers) wholly in behind the candidate that can best fulfill the George W. Bush model--what my friend, sculptor Michael Speaker, has dubbed The Trojan Suit scenario. Given that Republicans have seriously damaged their claim on women's votes (see Mississippi), there's now good reason for that empty suit to come with a skirt.

Come on, boys, it's Michele's turn.

So Help Me: Weekend Q & A Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:33:00 +0000

If you want the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. I have many more questions than answers this weekend after a fairly delirious week in the news. Anybody got answers?

Cain Enabled: In case you missed The Rachel Maddow Show Friday night, here's her epiphany on what Herman Cain's campaign is really about. You'll have seen the parts separately, but watch what happens when Rachel puts them all together. Suddenly, that strange slow grin of Cain's takes on new meaning. (Oh, and there's a short Goldman Sachs commercial for openers; the irony would be painful if it wasn't so...burlesque.)

On Facebook, a friend asked if Cain's campaign could still be called a political performance art joke if the subject doesn't know or intend the joke. Which prompted Mr. Mature to posit that there might be a rogue staffer on what passes for the Cain campaign team. Maybe it's Mark Smoke-'Em-If-You-Got-'Em Block, since he seems to be the entire team if you don't count David Koch. Whoever it is, somebody has pulled off the best prank in American history by putting this clueless-but-vainglorious fool in front of a microphone and feeding him junk material. Or not. Either way, we now have our Cain meme. Anyone have any better ideas?

Herman Cain will be quoting from Spaceballs next.

9-9-9..."That's the combination to my luggage."

"Now you will see that evil will triumph, because good is dumb."

"Or else Pizza is gonna send out for *you*!"

Really. "Never underestimate the power of the Schwartz."

AFP/Getty Images

POTUS proposes Financial Abuse Tax: Proving definitively that few people, either at home or abroad, understand that only the US Congress has the power to levy taxes, the G-20 nations asked Mr. Obama if he would join them in their plan for a tax on financial transactions, a plan that required all members to participate. If not, a partial response would mean that participatory countries would just move their investments to the markets of non-participatory countries. I think the President should get full credit for not pitching an international hissy fit in Cannes. I'd have worked up a high dudgeon, stuck out my lower lip, beatled my brows, stomped up to the podium, and yelled, "Why'n'tcha ask President Cantor that question?! Or President Boehner? Or President Ryan?! Huh? You think it's so easy to get a tax proposal passed in the US, YOU TRY IT!"

Instead, with grace and in full aplomb mode, Barack Obama did what he's been doing so well lately: He framed the problem in such a way that only the total tea party ass-clowns back home in America would fail to get it. He suggested that all the other G-20 nations enact their very sensible financial transaction tax, while we in America would settle for a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, levied on certain you-know-who-you-are financial firms until they pay off all the TARP money they owe you and me.

For those of you who accuse the President of being soft on Wall Street and Big Banks, this tax was proposed in February, 2010, by Mr. Obama, who explained it thusly: "Excessive risk undertaken by major financial firms was a significant cause of the recent financial crisis. . . . The fee would . . . provide a deterrent against excessive leverage for the largest financial firms."

One endorser, the president of the Tulane Law Review, studied the proposed tax and concluded that it would, "eviscerate . . . a preexisting tax law preference for debt financing," and "discourage the [concentration of power in] massive banks."

The tax proposal was immediately ignored, except by Barack Obama, who's still sponsoring it. He's now joined by the AFL-CIO, #Occupy Wall St., and National Nurses United in promoting an FTT (financial transaction tax). Is it either/or--an FTT or an FCRF (Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee)? How about both...one to get TARP paid back and one to generate some much needed revenue on an ongoing basis?

I really don't have any questions about Mr. Obama's response to the G-20 nations. Except for my standard rhetorical one: What the hell is the matter with the über-Cons? Are they insane or just evil?

The Elephant In The Portfolio: For a supporter of #Occupy Wall St and all its off-shoots, it's tricky to know what to do with whatever retirement money is left to me. My financial suggester (he used to be an adviser, but he's stumped these days) proposed that I might venture a step back into the market...this was last week, before Greece decided to give us all ulcers. What timing.

My friend Knatolee has a Duck Limerick contest going. Her contests are great fun and I recommend you try your hand. I worked for two days on one that involved pâté, but it wouldn't firm up for me...so to speak. I finally gave in and submitted the following, which has absolutely nothing to do with ducks except...well...that Knatolee didn't ask for financial limericks, so...

There once was a duck cum portfolio,

Who despaired at the Dow Jones imbroglio.
He cried, "If I buy stocks
From the Kochs and the Sachs,
Does it mean that I, too, have no soul-io?!"

Before you whip out the straight-jackets, riddle me this. If Wall Street and the investment banks are responsible for the pitiful state of my retirement account, what kind of idiot would I have to be to trust them to fix it? On the other hand, what else is there? How are you answering that question for your own retirement (realized or imagined)? And, yes, I am aware that this might just be one of the last questions we don't ask in polite society.

Landscaping 2012: The Power of The Testimonial

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:18:00 +0000

The Lesser of Two Weevils
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World — MOVIECLIPS.com

[Video may be slow to load. Click play button and do nothing further.]

In this short video clip, I give you the range of the Left's positions for the general election of 2012. Some of us will vote for Mr. Obama because we believe in the man as Captain Jack Aubrey believed in Nelson, and others will be casting a vote for the lesser of "two weevils." The dilemma we face is how we will think of the man and how we will portray him to our compatriots on both sides of the aisle between now and the day of the vote.

If we claim Obama makes our hearts glow, are we being mere enthusiasts? If we jump on the recently crowded bandwagon that proclaims disgust with the president's decision to preserve banks and Wall Street at the beginning of his administration, do we feed the Right Wing's Obama-bashing campaign and fuel the GOP's divide-and-conquer agenda? I hear trusted pundits cheer for the President's feisty new persona and I read praise for his recent program of executive orders, but the criticisms from his own base are more apparent, too. It's one thing to cringe at the manic silliness of Perry hugging a bottle of maple syrup or Koch-head Cain sneering at us through his campaign strategist's tobacco fug and decide that these candidates lack presidential gravitas; it's another to appreciate character when we see it for ourselves.

Americans love testimonials. When we want to know whether to hire someone to fix a faucet or hang a cabinet, we seek a firsthand report. When we try to factor out the White House press engine's spin and the House of Representative's demonizing, as we puzzle over what manner of man the incumbent president might be, we may wish we could consult an Angie's List for Character. I know two whole humans who can offer us their personal experiences with Barack Obama. They've agreed to share their impressions. Short of sitting down with POTUS myself, I've sought the opinions of trusted friends who have. Call it Nance's List.

Meet Bill Groome, father, grandfather, griller, and all around good guy. I looked up to Bill in high school when he was a patrician, red-haired football hero; he didn't really remember a quiet girl two years behind him, but a Facebook group for Ragsdale High brought us together and we got met recently to discuss his meeting with Barack Obama. As you hear Bill's story, keep in mind that he was a Republican until he suffered a set-back that led him to the White House.

In November, 2009, Bill sent the following letter to the President and his Congressmen:

On December 22, 2008, I was informed that, since my employer, Bill Davis Racing, was no longer in business, I was unemployed. Being unemployed at 63 is bad enough, but probably just as bad is the fact that, for the first time in my life, I had no health insurance. While my wife still has a job, her employers choose not to offer a health care plan to their employees.

Like a number of others in that situation, I enrolled in an individual family plan, and we were covered as quickly as possible, 45 days. The premium was $ 832 per month, but we were covered. Just this past Friday, October 30, I received notice that the premium, beginning in January, would increase to $ 937 per month.

A few weeks ago I decided that I should have a colonoscopy, since I am almost 14 years overdue. In fact I had set one up a year earlier, December 29^th, and canceled when my insurance disappeared on December 22^nd. I scheduled one just a week ago for December 3^rd. A day after I received the notice that my premiums were going up $ 105 a month, I received an estimate of my out of pocket costs for the colonoscopy: $ 3,000!

I fully realize that a lot of people are worse off than I. Mine is just one story that I feel needs to be heard by those who are under the tremendous responsibility of improving our health care system.

I guess that if I had health care coverage paid for, at least partially, by my employer or my former employer, I would not want to change the health care system either. I am afraid that now there is a new definition of “Haves” and “Have Nots.” The new definition may be “Have health insurance” and “Have Not health insurance.”

Bill Groome
Asheboro, NC

Barack Obama and William J. Groome, March, 2010

In response, Bill was tapped in March, 2010, to come to the White House to meet Mr. Obama and be on hand for the signing of the Patient Affordable Care Act. After the formal signing and a White House tour, each of the small group of letter-writers who'd been called to Washington got to speak to the President individually. Bill says, when it was his turn, they talked Carolina basketball and the President thanked Bill for his letter. Bill describes his impressions in his own words...

When he talks to you, he looks you in the eye like you are the only person around. He seems genuinely interested in you and what you are saying. In my opinion, he is, among other things, a fine and decent man. And he is real! And I keep thinking, why would such a busy man, who is the most powerful man in the world, on such a monumental day, meet with a small group of ordinary citizens. Why? Why would we get such VIP treatment?

After each had chatted with him and had pictures made, he addressed us all as we sort of semi-circled in front of him. His message was that people that send him letters are what he counts on to keep him informed on what he needs to do. He acknowledged that he couldn’t do everything that needed to be done, but he uses the voices of citizens like us to give him guidance. He said, and I remember this well, that this day was not his day, but our day.

A couple of months ago, when Bill told me the story of his meeting with the President, he was still excited, still an unabashed Obama enthusiast. His politics had taken an about-face. His vote in November 2012 will be a vote FOR Barack Obama. Don't talk to William J. Groome about "the lesser of two weevils."

Meet "Ashleigh Burroughs," the name you'll often see here in Comments and the name by which I knew this lovely Tucsonan before a brutal shooting in a Safeway parking lot pitched her into the headlines. A/B, as she signs herself, met Barack and Michelle Obama under the most difficult of circumstances: in her room in a Tucson hospital following surgery to repair the damage three bullets had wrought.

A/B's world had been ripped at the seams. Her senses were acute, despite the lingering effects of anesthesia. She's spoken of her impressions of the President to the likes of Brian Williams of NBC. When I asked her recently to share them with me, she provided me with stream-of-consciousness reactions to be passed along to you. In her own words...

He is a slim, tall, almost ethereal man (vs Michelle who is Earth Mother Incarnate). He is well-brought up and polite - waited at my door to be asked to enter, asked permission to take my hand - and it didn't seem put on or phony - it's part of how he was raised.

He really listened - I heard "make this world the kind of place Christina Taylor Green imagined"...[before] the world heard it on stage.

I felt safe in his presence...he felt REAL, if that makes sense...there wasn't any artifice or presumption of "how wonderful am I."

He was truly overwhelmed by what had happened to me - he's a dad and that came thru big time...It came from my crying that I couldn't understand how evil like that could exist in the world (ah, the wonders of drugs - no barrier [between] mouth and brain!)

He really heard that - he wasn't just talking to hear himself blather...he's a real guy.

Visit with A/B yourself at her blog, The Burrow; you'll find her doing remarkably well in both body and spirit. No "mere enthusiast," she'll be voting FOR Mr. Obama in November 2012.

I met Richard Nixon once. My mother took me and my cousins to meet him when he stopped by our little Greensboro WFMY-TV station for an interview as he made the rounds. He greeted my mother, patted a few kid's heads including mine. When he moved on to my cousin Donna's neat part, he back-tracked to my mother to point at Donna and say, "She's obviously YOURS!" I despised the man. It's hard to fool even a child, face-to-face.

Thank you to Bill Groome and Ashleigh Burroughs for taking the time to share their stories. May they serve you, Dear Reader, as you choose your own message on the election. Remember that old business school saw about the power of the negative review.

Scrupulating

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:50:00 +0000

McPherson Square, DC

[Subtlety Alert: You might have to read all the way to the end of this post to get the message I was aiming for. I fear I bloviated, despite my best intentions.]

We've been home from our trip to Virginia and DC for over twenty-four hours and I'm only now touching my keyboard. I've been busy unpacking, watering plants, and scrupulating. No point in looking that last word up; I coined it from scruple (to hesitate, dither, have second thoughts and thirds and fourths). I haven't been able to figure out how to write honestly about our visit to McPherson Square, location of the Occupy DC protest.

While I scrupulated, and from that same mindset but with less ambivalating (yep, coined), I cleaned all the advertisements from this page. That decision was comparatively easy. It did mean giving up on my 2009-era, brand new blogger's fantasy of making a little easy money by bloviating (real word). I've always dreamed of being paid for doing something I can't help. It hasn't worked out and it's high time I got real about it. I had ads placed through the BlogHer publishing network which paid me enough in the last two years to buy a pair of good athletic shoes, which have come in handy as I've attempted to walk off Blogger Butt. Bet you can't even remember any of those BlogHer ads now that they're gone. I also had ads from Google, which you may find easier to recall for the occasional jarring incongruity created by some particular ad's presence on a post I'd scrupulated over--the birther message on a piece praising the POTUS, for example. In over two years of ads, I'd accumulated exactly $29.40 worth of "clicks." Google doesn't start paying its bloggers until they reach $100.00 in clicks...at least four more years of bloviating. That particular American Dream is deader'n 9-9-9.

Since the start of the recession, I've got a backlog of much bigger, more dearly-held notions that I've been needing to give up on, so this was an opportunity to practice on something small. Going ad-free is no big loss. BlogHer insisted that I publish two blog posts a week. I don't have two decent ideas a week and the strain was starting to show. And Google's ad-bot is the essence of impersonal, Republican-ish amorality. We've been spared, reader.

And I can think of nary another distractor, so...to McPherson Square and Occupy DC. There is a dearth of old-fashioned, straight reporting in the media today. Americans used to respect that kind of journalism. Whether they actually ever experienced any of it is moot now; we like thinking we had it and we miss it. If I can't figure out how to gild this lily, I can at least scrupulate more and bloviate less about it.

It was Friday afternoon, October 21st, 2011, McPherson Square, Washington, District of Columbia. McPherson is a small park bounded by K Street, Vermont Ave, 15th, and Eye, about four blocks NE of the White House. There are some trees, sidewalks that outline the perimeter and criss-cross the square, some park benches. The square is named for the monument to a Union general. On this Friday afternoon, there were maybe fifty small dome tents, and there were no more than fifty demonstrators present, counting children. They weren't demonstrating; they were occupying the ground, living there. Most were young-ish. Many looked tired and more than a little scruffy. There were a few signs, mostly propped against a tent or lying flat on the grass, and none were clever enough to photograph. There were pigeons. Some of the older denizens looked like homeless people who had "belonged to" the park before the Occupation and found their new neighbors diverting, at least. See how easy it is to editorialize?

The sidewalks were kept clear and business persons were crossing the square briskly from time-to-time, carrying briefcases, possibly on their way to and from the Metro stop nearby. A food tent dispensed pizza to the new residents. There was a small drum circle with a couple of listless, dreadlocked drummers brushing exhaustedly at their bongos. There was a man in ethnic robes and a small, round cap holding forth to a group that sat on the grass at his feet, nodding in respectful attention. Mr. Mature ventured over to listen in and said that, to the best of his understanding, the man was telling his memoirs, but they didn't seem particularly relevant to Wall Street or the grand theft of the American Dream or anything to do with The 99%.

We were at a loss, underwhelmed. It didn't even feel right to take pictures.

Most of the benches were being used as cupboards for rough bundles of belongings. Suddenly the reluctant elitist, I found myself being overly dainty, gingerly shoving a batch of blankets over three inches so I could occupy something, dammit. I won't lie; I was thinking of lice and bedbugs and I'm sure my nose wrinkled. I fear my lip tried to curl. Any fantasies I had of standing shoulder to shoulder with The 99%, standing up en masse to The Man, were deflated entirely when I had the urge to dig for my sanitizer gel. I was badly flunking Occupy Everywhere.

There was one other alien present: A distinguished looking, well-groomed, lone man in matching REI wear was sitting on an empty park bench, eyes closed but, by his posture, clearly alert. (I will now give myself over entirely to assumption and the story in my head.) He, too, was occupying. I would swear that he, too, was at a loss. He'd decided to sit down and consciously focus on the reasons he'd come, on the sympathy he felt with those who'd lost their homes and their jobs. He was struggling with his own mental fastidiousnesses. I imagined engaging him in conversation. We could lament the absence in McPherson Square of "our own kind." I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. I had more than flunked; I expelled myself.

Okay, here's what I think and, if any one of you comments that you told me so, I'll delete it. When I first heard of the Occupy movement a few weeks ago, I commented to my friend Jack-of-all-thumbs (we're FOR this movement and we want it to matter) that I wondered if anyone would show up other than The Rainbow Family. They are born occupiers, dedicated to leaderless mass gatherings in public parks. Non-entities of non-movements with indefinable objectives; does it get more grass roots than that?

After taking the VRE back to our friends' historic colonial in lovely Fredericksburg, I borrowed a pc and googled "Occupy DC and Rainbow Family" and "leaderless tent gatherings" and found I was not the first to notice their trademarked ambivalating about defined purpose, their insistence on remaining minimally organized, their drum circles and thrift shop finery. Is that all this is, the Rainbow Family has left the national parks and come downtown? Where the hell is the MOVEment I was promised that would make this old protester feel young again? Never mind that I was scared of the underground Metro and squeamish about a pile of quilts. I was a sympathizer. I identified.

And I had to struggle with myself. I had to remind myself that someone has to be able to throw up a tent and stay put between visits from union organizers and celebrity pundits and whatever you'd call Michael Moore, bless him. Somebody has to be there to hold ground and provide the seed around which "our own kind" can gather on weekends to flex our equality and show off our clever signs. Somebody has to do the hard part on the hard ground, especially now that the nights are getting cold. Somebody has to know all about how permits work. Somebody has to know that freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. Somebody has to be a lot less intimidated by people like me than I am.

Thanks, Rainbow Family.

[And, as I finish this post, I find in The Washington Post, Tim Craig's "Occupy DC Protesters Welcomed by Local Homeless." I've got a lot to learn about being among The 99%.]

Hold That Thought

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:11:00 +0000

They shout, "This is what democracy looks like!"

There will be no regular posts this week while Mr. Mature and I head out to visit friends in Fredericksburg, VA, to visit the Smithsonian, and, if all goes well, to join the Occupy DC protesters in McPherson Square for an afternoon. Got my new walking shoes yesterday. Got my cortisone shot for bursitis this morning. Wish me luck. I will miss you.

When we return, I hope there'll be pictures to share and a story or two. It's possible I'll be able to drop in on you while we're away, but it's a quick turnaround trip, so I'll make promises to catch up when we return.

And, ahead within a post or two, a testimonials piece about two special friends who have met and talked with Mr. Obama in person and can share their impressions of the man. I, for one, will be casting a vote FOR my candidate in 2012, rather than just against something.

Mr. Mature Uses His Math

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Before, next to new parts of After.

For the record, I have a left brain but it's so throttled with words that there's no room left for numbers. That's why I married Mr. Mature, who is a man of few words and mucho math. Smartest thing I ever did.

Our most recent For Sale contract--our second attempt to sell the house since '07--just ran out. Again, with no offers, thanks to an economy brought to its knees by Wall Street and Big Bank malfeasance. That leaves us to channel our pent up real-estate frustrations toward DIY upgrades and maintenance. If we're going to be stuck here forever in a 21 year old house with a retiree's renovation budget, we'd better continue to make the care of this home our full-time job.

As much as I'd prefer to move into a new, single story, stand-alone residence in a fancy condo community with a heated indoor pool, living in a paid-for older home with a handy math whiz is not a bad second. Retirement means we spend our time doing the things we used to pay other people to do.

Mr. Mature's first career was flying fighter jets. His second career started out with a one hour commute to a crumbling high school in the middle of farm fields in rural SC, where he taught math on a Critical Needs Certificate--meaning they needed math teachers so badly, they would substitute experience, an engineering degree, and an MBA for the standard BS in math. That turned out really well for South Carolina's schools. When he retired three years ago, Mr. M. was head of the math department for SC's largest county's largest high school. He taught advanced placement algebra and calculus. Now, he tutors other teachers' students part-time. That's not nearly enough math for him.

I pick on Mr. Mature (aka Mr. Math Person)
from time to time, and I should be ashamed.

It is my pleasure to brag here on his most recent home DIY project, the building and replacement of two custom gable vents. Put this man in the garage with an angle, a yard stick, and some saws and stand back.

The Right Stuff

Checking from inside the attic, Mr. Mature had found that the louvered gable vents had some rotting wood in the inner frames that could only be seen from the inside, so off my hero went to Homey D's. He studied the design of the old vents, and produced a plan to build new ones. For a few days, I would only see him to remind him to eat and to check his progress, but I could hear something like a cat's purr coming from that end of the house.

Lots of measuring.

Some careful cutting.

A little white paint, some loud banging around from the attic, and we have two lovely vents with forty-five degree beveled louvers and screen backing to keep the anoles out.

Carolina Anole

The completed project proves perfectionism is a virtue.

Rightly proud of his project, Mr. Math Person then wielded his mighty measuring tape and calculator to prove that our house is actually over 300 square feet of heated space larger than the realtor had advertised. If we decide to go FSBO, we'll be able to add yet more value for the sale price.

At the end of the day, there was still enough math left in Mr. Mature's left brain to come to my rescue on Facebook. I'd newly friended someone from high school who took umbrage at my Herman Cain smack-downs and was mounting a wordy aegis to 9-9-9. I'd suggested we politely agree to disagree, but Friend had found an audience and had hijacked my rant. I had to force myself to step away from the laptop. A little later, I hopped off the couch where we'd been watching a movie to peek at my Wall and see if Friend had decided to post the whole Constitution in my comments. Instead, I found that Mr. Mature had been making stealthy use of his math skills again without saying a word to me about it. He'd made the following response to Right Wing Friend on my thread:

"So let's say you're a Godfather's Pizza hourly employee earning $7 to $9/hr. That's about $14-18K/yr gross. Right now that person is paying about 2-4% of their income to the IRS. Mr. Cain's plan would make that 9% if they saved every penny. More likely their fed. tax bill would be closer to 18% as most poverty wage earners spend everything they earn. Meanwhile at the other end of the income distribution, the folks who make money with money see their tax bill go from a marginal rate of 35% to zero. Yeh, that makes sense..."

Godfather's Pizza Salaries
www.glassdoor.com
‎8 Godfather's Pizza salary reports. A free inside look at Godfather's Pizza salaries posted anonymously by employees.

And that dried up the right-wing Facebook blather faster than you can say "class warfare."

Meet Mr. Mature, man of few words and some wicked math skills.

Beats Stockholm Syndrome

noreply@blogger.com (Nance) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:09:00 +0000

Analysis of Current Population Survey data by Gordon W. Green Jr. and John F. Coder, Sentier Research

At last, I've stumbled across a theory that suggests a plausible answer to my most stubborn political question: Why do poor and working class Americans back tea party fiscal policy?

This chart, featured in today's NYTimes, "Recession Officially Over, US Incomes Kept Falling," shows us what fuels populist movements like Occupy Wall Street. More than that, it illustrates for us what we've all been sensing as we work our household budgets: as individuals, we are not better off now that the Recession has ended. For the 99%, the Recession has accelerated. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrials Average can soar 330 pts. in one day, as it did today.

For those of us who sympathize with the OWS, one of the hardest things to understand is how other working class Americans, the tea party activists, can identify with the likes of Cantor (OWS protesters are "mobs" who "pit Americans against Americans") and Cain ( 'If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself'").

Take South Carolina, for example (please!). SC is the cozy that keeps the tea pot hot. It falls all over itself to woo the most medieval ultraconservatives. Socio-cultural and civil rights issues aside, South Carolinians stand staunchly with the cut-the-services fiscal policies of the tea party. And yet the South Carolina poverty rate for children under the age of five was 29% as measured in 2008 (Child Welfare League of America). How does something that illogical come about?

The answer most often cited as to why non-affluent Americans might support the corporatists is Dream Theory: they still believe that the American Dream, that oversimplified and disingenuous notion that absolutely anyone in this country who is willing to work can become a self-made millionaire, could suddenly favor them tomorrow. That it hasn't so far is not to say it couldn't any day now. Neither general observation nor the most blindered anecdotal evidence supports the notion that the Dream works formulaically, so those who are willing to stand in line at the polls to make sure the robber barons don't have to pay their fair share would have to be dumb. Dumb Theory is popular on Facebook. The tea party demographic is fairly representative of the population at large, which helps explain the behavior of ultra-conservatives in the $75,000 - 150,000 income range, but not those nearer to the bottom rung of the ladder. Nor does it support the Dumb Theory, really.

I've even entertained a Stockholm Syndrome explanation. I thought perhaps the tea party sympathizers are so controlled by the corporatist myths and the Madison Avenue influence of television that they now identify with their victimizers in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. But identification with the aggressor on such a large scale has no precedent (unless you look to the history of Germany, which doesn't quite fit, either, but works better than the Dream Theory and the Dumb Theory). No, we are as dissatisfied with these answers as the tea party is with their slate of candidates for the presidential primary.

I was surprised to see Freud cited today in yet another attempt to explain the inexplicable (NYTimes' Gordon Marno, "Freud As Philosopher"),

Our awareness of the idea of the unconscious can help us keep a third eye on the underlying leitmotifs of our lives, lest they dominate our understanding of the world. For example, for whatever reason there are throngs of Americans who detest nothing more than the idea of someone getting something for free, especially if it might involve their tax dollars. Thus, during the recent political debates over health care and, further back, welfare reform, the attention of many was riveted on collecting and serving up instances of the tiny percentage of people who perhaps worked the system to keep from working, or to get free medical treatment — as though the shiftless few were the rule rather than the exception. Could not some of these hidebound individuals profit from considering the possibility that there might be a hefty element of selfishness and/or resentment embedded in their psychic hard-drives, and that these fractious feelings filter their understanding of the facts?

We may call this answer the They Know Not What They Do Theory. I find this less than helpful.

But in an article in The Economist entitled "Don't Look Down," I find something useful, observable and cogent, Last-Place Aversion Theory.

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves. Those not at risk of becoming the poorest did not seem to mind falling a notch in the distribution of income nearly as much. This idea is backed up by survey data from America collected by Pew, a polling company: those who earned just a bit more than the minimum wage were the most resistant to increasing it.

Poverty may be miserable. But being able to feel a bit better-off than someone else makes it a bit more bearable.

That sounds like a sub-paragraph of Pecking Order Theory, perhaps. Now, what explains the fact that we are not all equally subject to Last-Place Aversion?

[I've been too busy reading up on theories to cook supper tonight, so we're ordering in pizza. Which reminds me that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are currently in need of food. Scroll down through this authorized website of the General Assembly of OWS to donate meals.]