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Wednesday, July 28, 2004

the road not taken

Everyone knows about the Frost poem "The Road Not Taken":

It's pretty much standard fare for pretentious high-school students (like I used to be) for whom it is an anthem to noncomformity, what with its ending line and all, and the reference to it in "Dead Poet's Society" (the memorable gift from our high-school class to the school as we departed was the professionally-scrawled text Carpe Diem on the outside wall near the gymnasium. Hey, it was the early nineties). I thought of it as such myself, until I was about twenty and I read Up the Down Staircase (READ THIS NOW. THIS MEANS YOU), wherein the fictional young teacher Miss Barrett leads a class discussion about how Frost's poem is not so much about nonconformity as it is about regret. No matter what road you take, you'll always look back and wonder -- what if I'd taken the other road? I have had a few "road not taken" moments in my adult life. One was when some of the people with whom I'd graduated started teaching at our alma mater. I had a day of thinking, here I am and there they are and I could have done that, until I realized how much more painful it would have been to have been single and teaching, and to see one of my classmates out for a walk with her two healthy, happy children and her adoring, nearly-perfect husband. And then today, I was thinking about those revolutionary thoughts from yesterday's last snippet, and looking up classes in the local community college's catalog. I had all the fun of making an imaginary schedule for myself, and by the time I'd fit fifteen units into Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was quickly becoming less imaginary, and I was thinking I really might want to find a way to do this. The itch to sit in a room with a sharp pencil and graph paper and a lecturer was becoming quite strong. Then I had the following conversation with my very cautious, somewhat anxious, clingy eight-year-old son:

I: (sitting on the porch swing) What would you think if I went to college?
He: (lying in the kiddie pool) Well, would we be with you?
I: No, you couldn't come to my classes.
He: (sits up) No then. No. I don't want you to.
I: (gently) I don't have to. But I'd like you to think about it a little. It would only be two days a week. You could be in a fun place with a lady Mommy knows and trusts, and with other kids, having fun, and playing. And your sister would be with you.
He: No. I like to just be here, with you.
I: What if Aunt Debi watched you at her house, with your cousins?
He: No.
I: What if someone came here to watch you?
He: No.
I: What if, after I went to college for a while, Daddy could stay home with you all the time instead of me for a while?
He: [long, long pause] It would be OK if Daddy could stay home, I guess. But I don't want you to go to college just for that, I like it fine the way it is. Why do you want to go to college anyway?
I: Well, if I got a degree in, say, nursing, so that I could work in a hospital, then I could get a job while your daddy looked for a job that didn't make him sad sometimes like the one he has does. And if we wanted to move somewhere like Florida or Texas, then I could get a job very easily and your dad could look around for a job when we got there. And I like learning. I miss learning.
He: I like to stay here, in California. There's too much rain in Florida, isn't there? And you can learn things on the computer. You do anyway. You learn about things like the C-shaped seaweed we saw in Morro Bay, and the jellyfish, and anything you want to learn about.
I: We certainly don't have to move. And if we ever do, it won't be very soon. But sometimes I just miss learning a lot about subjects, and sitting in a desk listening to a teacher, and having a sharpened pencil and graphs to draw or papers to write [lying through my teeth about the papers, the very thought of having to write a paper makes me want to chuck the whole idea, but the principle is there]. What if I went at night? If maybe Grandma and Grandpa or someone came here for just a few minutes before Daddy got home, and then I came home after you were in bed?
He: (another long pause). I don't really like that either. I am used to you being here. I like you being here. I like Daddy being here too. Do you have to?
I: (screaming inside) No, I don't really have to. But I think I kind of want to.
He: (yet another long pause) Well, if you have to go, I guess it would be OK if you went at night.
I: Just out of curiosity, how old do you think you'll be before it would be OK with you for me to go during the day?
He: Fifteen?

My husband and I have created a life for ourselves which 99.9% of the time fits me perfectly. It fits our marriage, it fits our priorities, our child-rearing principles, our spiritual beliefs. But today I found myself thinking, what if I'd taken that other road... and was presented with a reality check in the form of a flesh-and-blood-and-spirit result of the road I've been on for the past ten years. Already the wistfulness and frustration have dissipated to the point where I wonder what I was all wound up about -- but I am going to call the college about a night class tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

more snippets

just a bunch of little things, no one thing warranting its own entry...

snippet 1:
I remembered the second stupid thing from my camping trip. It involved a pan of spaghetti sauce, and one metal handle that wasn't hot, and one handle that was, and a really freakishly enormous blister on the pad of my thumb, and a relatively phenomenal amount of pain. I say "relatively" because I've had worse (um, c-sections), but for the amount of tissue involved, a burn packs quite a punch.

snippet 2:
We walked outside our house on Saturday morning to find a dead cat in our yard. It wasn't one of ours; it was one of the feral toms who wander around our neighborhood waiting for us to let our sweet young thangs outside (not gonna happen until they're spayed; a surprising amount of time and effort goes into making sure the cats don't escape the house). Anyway. So we had a dead cat to deal with; T used the shovel to take it into the bushes in the field near our house. And gee, I'm glad he did that, because we're supposed to learn something new every day, and now I know the direction of the prevailing wind (what little wind there is) around our house in the summer. The weather report helps with this:

GAG

Nothing like a little whiff of something dead coming in through the evaporative cooler to make your day special.

snippet 3:
I gained three pounds on vacation. Which is less than it feels like I've gained. Amazing how there's no good thing about how weight feels. You don't want to feel heavier than you are, but you don't want to be heavier than you feel either.

snippet 4:
My reading life has been a study in contrasts lately. Just before we left for vacation I read my advance readers' copy of Fire Along The Sky -- if you like historical fiction, romance, New York State, the early nineteenth century, Native American cultures, or just a ripping good story, you should pre-order this book TODAY, by the way. Then on vacation I read Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen*) and The Glass Lake (Maeve Binchy). THEN in the last week at home I've been reading the first Stephanie Plum mystery, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Ring of Bright Water, which is, so far, essentially an anthem to the natural scenery of the Western Scottish Highlands, although supposedly soon it will involve otter antics (unless the movie was an even worse adaptation than usual). Nobody can say I'm in a rut, anyway.

snippet 5:
All my nice ephemeral revolutionary thoughts about somehow finding a way for me to go back to college now instead of in eight or so years, as has been my plan since before my marriage, are becoming slightly less ephemeral. Suffice to say that T's boss is making me think that any life where T can be far from him would be way better than the alternative. He makes me say words that would never ordinarily come out of my mouth. I'm serious, he just MAKES me say them. Fortunately not to his face, but then I try to spend as little time around him as possible. See, there, I just had to stop one of those nasty words from spilling right out of my fingers onto the keyboard and into this journal. I am not sure yet what, if anything, will come of the revolutionary ideas. Realistically, since I've sworn a solemn vow that neither of my children will ever be enrolled in a public school and I intend to stand by that (not that T would let me change my mind on it even if, for some reason that would have to include either alien abduction or a frontal lobotomy or both, I should want to do so), there are a lot of obstacles to overcome if anything's going to change. But obstacles have been overcome before, so we'll see what happens.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

back from vacation

We just got back from our ten-day camping vacation at the beach. I know you are all (all, what, two of you who read this?) eagerly awaiting the details of all the stupid things I must have done in ten whole days. Well, I am not one to disappoint. I did two monumentally stupid things, and such is my Internet addiction that I was fully aware as I was doing said stupid things that they were going in my journal for you all to snort at. Unfortunately I forgot the second thing, I really did. But the first one makes up for it. Picture a BMX-style bicycle course, dirt made into bumps for riding over. Are you picturing? Now, picture me, freshly arrived in town with my family, stopping at the bicycle park before heading to the campground because we were too early for our site to be ready. Picture us parking in the dirt lot which is pretty much an extension of the bike area. (and now you totally just guessed what happened, didn't you). Picture the family deciding to ride their bikes straight to the park, while I drove the car. I don't think I even have to finish. I will just say, when you high-center a big old 1991 Buick Park Avenue on a packed dirt bump, so that you have to be pushed off backward, it makes a very interesting scraping noise. And lots and lots of laughter from onlookers (who, fortunately for me, were all related to me by blood or marriage). And lots of jokes at the driver's expense for the NEXT TEN DAYS.

I also did a lot of minor stupid things, like constantly (constantly!) hitting my head on the two lanterns in camp which were suspended in the air so that their bottoms were precisely five feet and eight inches off the ground, and don't tell me nobody did that on purpose, just for my five-foot-nine self, either. I also scrupulously used sunscreen every time we got out of bed for the first five days of our vacation, which was not the stupid thing; the stupid thing was behaving as if sunburn were a virus to which we had all become immune, and forgoing sunscreen for a few days, and getting myself burned just as badly as if I'd never used it in the first place. Fun.

While we're on the subject of camping, I'll explain something. What we do, according to my husband, is not actually camping. We "camp" at a level campground with fence partitions, clean bathrooms, hot showers, and a little store. This campground is between Highway 1 and the ocean, well within easy reach of such things as pizzerias and fish and chip shops and grocery stores and libraries. We even (ssshhh) sleep on an inflatable air mattress in our tent. I have, seriously, slept in EconoLodges that were less accommodating. No, if you're going to call it camping, it has to involve backpacks and extremely light sleeping bags, and tiny little one-person tents (or no tents at all), and water purification tablets and dehydrated food and, if possible, at least a few injuries requiring trailside first aid, bonus points for use of parachute cord in binding open wounds shut. You must hike to a place inaccessible by cars or even trail motorcycles, and brave bears and snakes and poison oak and emerge from the woods after a few days, filthy and triumphant, grunting like Marines in boot camp. This is camping. I never, ever, ever do this. Ever. I like my hot shower and at least a water spigot at my campsite with potable water. This is why for the first few years of our marriage, T and I did not camp together. He would do his manly hiking-in routine with his buddies once a year, and I would stay home and try not to think about rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Finally we reached a compromise. He'll camp my way; he just prefers to think of it as staying in a very inexpensive motel.

We had a great time, but it was so good to get home. We missed our cats (who didn't demolish the house as badly as we feared while we were gone); the kids missed their toys; I missed having my own toilet within fifteen feet of my bed. I never realize how many times I get up in the night for the bathroom until I spend a few days having to put on sandals and walk twenty yards through the cold foggy night to get to one.

I could keep going, but instead I'll just post a few billion pictures for the benefit of those few souls still in the Dial-Up Dark Ages.


the kids and their daddy in the ocean


C, just too cool for her training wheels, which she shed before the end of our trip (so did both of her cousins)


LT, also looking very cool


The infamous bicycle bumps. This isn't the one I drove onto.


We went to a GREAT rummage sale and got a ton of things (because it was just so easy to pack ten days' worth of our lives on the way there; we wanted a little more excitement. Or not). One thing we got was a shoebox full of Playmobil and Lego stuff for a dollar. C made this diorama of Ma, Pa, and Carrie in their covered wagon. And if you don't know who Ma, Pa, and Carrie are, I feel very sorry for you.


We hiked up this smallish hill where we got a great view of the surrounding area. This is Morro Rock with the power plant (which we actually like, it says vacation to us as loud as the rock does) with a fog coming in from the ocean. Worth the hike. My SIL and I decided that the top of the mountain, with its not-quite-accidental-looking dirt, rocks, and shrubs, looked like a set from a TV show; we kept expecting Hoss and Little Joe to show up and fight some bad guys or something.


Me in the Bonanza set.


Minas Tirith made of sand


I usually would take a book and sit at the laundromat while I waited for my laundry to finish. C was copying me, and then her cousin came along and they were looking at the book (another rummage sale find) together. Too too cute.

Friday, July 09, 2004

random music-related bits

It has been very nearly a full week since my last update. I have not been flung off the face of the earth by some inexplicable localized gravitational lapse. Nor have I been kidnapped or had my fingers cut off or (gasp) given up my LTL. I have just been, well, busy. Weird. And today's post won't be anything to write home about either, but here it is for what it's worth.


Yesterday I was driving alone in my car, so I was of course blasting the stereo really loud because I'm all mature like that. So what if I was blasting classical music, OK? (in the loose sense. Most if it was actually twentieth-century or romantic and not classical, if you want to get specific) Anyway, for a reason I won't go into, I was fast-forwarding the CD through Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." Surprisingly enough, the reason was not my vitreous hatred of Aaron Copland, which runs very deep thanks to his extremely annoying choral arrangements. "Fanfare" is a pretty cool-sounding composition, but it still doesn't get Copland off my bad side. AN-Y-WAY. I was cueing through the song and it sounded extremely cool. It sounded like 80's techno synthesizer music, as if "Axel F" had been written and performed by some European group with pointy hairstyles and lots of makeup. In other words, it rocked, in an I-shouldn't-be-admitting-I-like-this kind of way.


In other music news, I was just reading someone else's diary, and she said that her weekend was lame, and then she typed these words: "I blame it on the rain." So now guess what late 80's dreadlock-wearing lip-synchers are hip-hopping around in my head, and will be for a week? I'm sure Emily didn't do it on purpose. She could never be so cruel. Right?

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Saturday, July 03, 2004

Rachel's Lessons for Life

1. If you are working on an important document? Like, say, someone's resumé, for your work on which they are paying you a hundred dollars? And you have just made the most brilliant section EVER and everyone is high-fiving everyone else about how totally employable this person sounds because of you? You should definitely save the document. In fact you should have saved it several times already. And in the event that you attempt to close a window, even if you don't THINK it's the window with the magical $100 document in it, and it asks you to save? You should really triple-check before you click no.



1a. Rewriting is a bitch and it never comes out quite the same as it did the first time.



2. "Take and bake" pizzas should come on sturdier cardboard. That way they are less likely to wind up (uncooked, but not for long) all over the bottom of a 450-degree oven.



Funnily enough, I was having a fantastic day for quite a while today. Now I could cheerily boil myself in oil (and I don't think my son had heard me say that particular word before. But he has now. Because I am The Mother of the Year.)

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