4 posts from September 2006

Let's make a list.  What are 20 things in your life that you're grateful for? 
Inspired by wyndslash.vox.com.

1.  The obvious:  My husband and my son.  More than grateful because they give me hope and balance and thus make life possible in some way.

2.  Another obvious, ok:  My friends and family. 

3.  Music.  Without it, life would indeed be a mistake.  Especially the albums that have changed my life.

4.  The national forests.  Seriously.  I don't know if I would have said that before I went to Japan, but in Japan the forests are so screwed up.  The government there has been replanting them with monoculture cedar in nice, neat rows because (I think) that makes them easier to harvest for timber.  Or they just love order.  Whatever.  But, seriously, America's forests are unbelievable.  Relative to other countries, they are really underused and pristine (I said, relatively).  And, boy, are they vast!  You should get out into them and appreciate them. 

5.  Fisher's Hornpipe.  Not a day goes by when I cannot apply a quote from this book to a situation in my own life.  Usually it's the business about feeling it necessary to shoot heroin.  Occasionally it's that my craziness has nothing to do with the bandage.  And then, of course, there is the tagline of this blog.

6.  People who have the courage of their convictions.  It doesn't matter if their convictions are the same as mine, but I hate a moral coward. 

7.  A perfect peach in summertime.

8. Clean rivers for swimming in.

9. Mason jars.  I love to can food.  I make jam, jelly, whatever.  I rock it pioneer-style, yo.

10.  The Value Tales for kids.  I learned a lot from those.  I not only learned who Nellie Bly was, I learned that I could make my own life if I just had the huevos.  I also learned that lesson about making your own life from the Devo song, "Society's Fool," but that song taught me nothing about the life and times of Nellie Bly.  More's the pity.

11.  Bumper stickers.  Unless your car is a '69 Mustang or something, cars or boring without stickers. 

12.  Johnny Depp.  George Clooney.  A girl needs something pretty to look at, but I need some sign of life and intelligence and personality in the eyes.  So, thanks you two.

13.  Go Fug Yourself.  I'm not a super fashionista or anything.  But those girls are funny.  Fuggin' funny. 

14.  Japan.  Every single day, I am happy that Japan exists.  It ain't a perfect country, but, then, who is? 

15.  Art that is also useful in some way.  I love ceramics and pottery that can be used.  I love fashion as art, even if it means that "useful" is being very loosely applied to 5-inch Balenciaga heels that no one should ever actually use.  And useful does include food.

16.  The seasons. 

17.  New Mexican chile.

18.  Mail.

19.  Seriously, my son.  He is healthy.  He is happy.  He is fun.  He is sunshine and sweetness and light.  Nothing else compares.  Not even George Clooney in a freakin tux.

20.  The crabs at the Portuguese restaurant on the beach in the Portuguese section of Malacca, Malaysia.  Those crabs are a reason to live, if you had no other.  Hmm.  I actually pretty much feel that way about everything Portuguese.  Portugal rocks.

What's the last thing you usually do or think about before you fall asleep?

Well, the true answer to this will be perilously sweet and sappy, I'm afraid.  The last thing I usually do is...go into my son's bedroom and watch him sleep for a few minutes.  He's 18 months old and impossibly gorgeous.  Every day for the past few months I have been watching him gradually morph from baby to little boy (or to raving, rowdy marauder, really).  Every day, he needs his mama an almost imperceptibly small amount less.  Every day our cuddle time gets oh-so-slightly shorter.  Every day, he wants to try something new on his own.  But when he's sleeping, he's still 100% my baby, only longer than before.

Bittersweet.  If we're going with a chocolate comparison, though, I'd have to say it's more semisweet, maybe 45% cacao.  And that is plenty sweet.  I love that he's learning to talk and to run and eventually to fly on his own.  It is true that I greedily sop up every bit of cuddle time that he'll give me, and when he hurts himself, some part of me is glad to be looked to for comfort.  But I never hold him longer than he wants to be held, or at least I try not to.  My job as a mother is to help him grow into himself, grow up and out away from needing us.  I hope, of course, that he will always love me, but I know that the love of a child for a mother is not the same as the love of a mother for a child.  The love of a mother is love enough to put the child's needs first, before the mother's desire, or at least that's what it should be.   And so I let him go all day long, and just at night, while he sleeps, I get to heave my sighs over how perfect he is, how much still a baby, how overwhelming this love is.

A brief intro:  I grew up listening to country music.  Not exclusively country, but a lot of country.  Some of my earliest childhood memories involve Johnny Cash songs.  I could sing every word of Jerry Jeff Walker's Sangria Wine long before I could drink any.  I thought Willie Nelson might be the second coming, and Patsy Cline was certainly an angel.  Country music runs deep into me.  It is the genre I find the most comfort in, the most applicable to my own life.  And if you don't like country music, well, you're walking on the fighting side of me.

 I'm not especially a purist when it comes to country, though.  I'm not sure why you would be, because country, blues, rock, bluegrass, R&B, gospel, folk and to some extent even jazz all come from the same place.  If you listen to the music recorded in the Sun Studios during their heyday, it is not clear why Elvis is considered rock but Cash is considered country.  The differentiation into genres fit for neat radio packages were artificial, so I feel that purists are to some extent asking country to do something artificial.  I feel that they are often also asking country music to stagnate.  No artistic genre can keep doing the same thing over and over again and remain relevant. 

That said, I am in general dismayed by the crap that is on most country radio stations, and I have to hoot at the GAC (TV) show, The Edge of Country.  Excuse me, but Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Patty Loveless, Dolly Parton (!!!!) ARE bloody well country.  The fact that they are now "The Edge" tells you what sort of laughable state country music is currently in.  Apparently at some point there was an influx of country-music listeners who have never lived in the country and who actually want to listen to something like soft rock or pop, but perhaps they were turned off by the state of contemporary pop music.  I was turned off of pop, too, so I can sympathize, but what these people seem to want is something like clean or wholesome pop.  Sadly, country hasn't traditionally been all that clean and wholesome (although it has gone through some clean-and-wholesome phases, which have unfortunately involved a lot of string arrangements).  These people apparently wish to listen to Tim McGraw and Faith Hill and Shania Twain.  There are worse things than this, I suppose, but I don't turn on the country radio to hear breathy, syrupy love ballads.  It's not my style, but it doesn't quite piss me off as much as it seems to upset some people.

(In the interests of being completely honest, Shania Twain actually does piss me off very much.  But I can't bring myself to get quite so enraged about Faith Hill usually because she just seems like a cool person, and I would love to hang out with her and talk about our kids while our husbands grilled up some steaks.  Besides that, Shania really is more pop in the sense that, like Britney Spears, she's selling music with her body.  That's fine, I guess, but if fucking Loretta Lynn didn't need to bare her midriff to make it, then why do you?  Faith is beautiful, but I think she actually sells her music with her voice and her whitebread lyrics.  I feel this way at least in part because her dancing in her videos is decidedly unsexy.  It is whiteness dancing.)

When music critics who ought to know better (I'm talking to you, Christgau) talk about country music listeners getting nostalgia via country lyrics for a past that never was or some such crap, they are talking about those listeners, the pop refugees. [ I especially love when one of them (and I'm talking to you again, Christgau) referred to rodeo as a "country folkway" which I suppose it is, but he said that in a condescending way, like, "Oh, how quaint and yet tiresome that Garth Brooks should sing so many songs about this disappeared novelty."  My first boyfriend was a bullrider.  My best friends in high school roped in rodeos.  Garth Brooks sings about rodeos because some of us out here are still living rodeo.]  But I have to think that the majority of what I will call country's core constituency did live that past evoked so well by the country lyric--and, indeed, many (most?) of us still are. 

We will speak more of country music later.  But we will never speak of either Kenny Chesney or Rascal Flatts.

Can you be homesick for a place that was not your home?  What does it mean, exactly, for some place to be your home? 

To a person who has always lived in the same place, maybe the first question seems nonsensical and the second one seems obvious.  But I am not one of those people.  I have lived a lot of very different places, and I don't always know what it means to be "home."  I didn't, for example, feel like Missoula, Montana, was home until after I had left it; going back there after a three-year absence made it suddenly feel as though it had once been home.  At least, I still did know many of the local bands (rock on, Volumen!).

The two places I really get homesick for, though, are (perhaps appropriately) two of the places I lived the least long.  One is Arkansas.  I lived there every summer when I was growing up, because that is where my father lived after he left us.  The other is Japan.  I lived in Japan (two different cities) for three years.  I married a Japanese fellow.  He is not homesick for Japan, but I find myself spending much of my downtime at work searching for blogs of Japanese people and expats, looking to get a sweet nostalgic taste of cherry blossom.

What do I miss, exactly?  Obviously, the ramen, but besides that... I think Japan was one of the first places I felt at home because it was one of the first places I felt that it was obvious why I didn't fit in, so I didn't feel so bothered by not fitting in.  Everything about Japanese culture says, "Hey, white girl, you don't belong here," so I never felt like I had to.  It just was, and I just was.  I made my own life there exactly how I wanted it without worrying so much.  I didn't care about the fucked up political situation like I always do here in my "home" country.  I didn't care that people watched so much TV and did so much shopping and hair-and-nail maintenance that they were left with little brain space for anything interesting.  I just didn't care.  That was so freeing.  I try to carry that over into life back in the states, but I can't quite pull it off here.  Something about speaking the same language and nominally coming from the same culture makes me feel as though I ought to have something in common with other Americans, and yet...I have trouble there.  I don't know anything about the TV shows people are talking about, except now I do watch a few geeky shows like MythBusters and Good Eats.  But I have maybe seen three episodes of Seinfeld in my life, so I don't know what the ruffled shirt business is all about, and don't look at me that way because I don't.  I don't care much about it, either, so also don't try to convince me that I need to see it, you TV-pushing bastard.

Anyway, probably what I'm missing is the sheer freedom that I felt in both Japan and Arkansas.  Being in Arkansas in my youth meant a very severe lack of parental control; it meant summer and Johnny Cash and hitting the open road and spending all day swimming in the river (watch out for snakes!).  It meant drinking nothing but Dr. Pepper for months on end (and so, sadly, Arkansas also meant severe bladder infection).  Japan meant being fully and completely myself because I could.  In Arkansas, there were no rules.  In Japan, most of the rules did not apply to me since I was foreign.  Is this what I am calling homesickness?  Probably.   That and missing the food in both places.  But is this what homesickness actually is--a longing for a return to youth and/or freedom?

That could explain why my Japanese husband has a distinct lack of homesickness for Japan.  He was markedly less free there than he is here, particularly because he does not fit in in Japanese society.  At all.  I do know that a lot of my Japanese friends feel homesick for Japan, though, even when they do fit in, so I think homesickness may also have a component of missing knowing things.  Shit.  That was awkwardly phrased.  What I mean is that I think to miss home is to miss the place where you knew how everything worked, where you knew what was expected and what your role was.  Even if you only use the rules to subvert them, there is a home-like comfort in knowing them, isn't there?  Well, if that is what homesickness is, then I suppose that is not what I feel for Arkansas and Japan.  Having spent the least amounts of life-time in those two places, they are the two places where I am in most respects not in that comfort zone of knowing all the rules and roles and cultural workings.  Yet they are the two places I feel most comfortable.  A trip to Oil Trough (Arkansas--yes, we're damned hillbillies) or Osaka...it always cures what ails me.