Magic. We've all been there, one way or another. Maybe you don't watch the sixth inning of a playoff game for fear of jinxing it. Maybe you rub a little spit onto the corner of that job application for good luck. You wear yellow underwear on New Year's Day. Or maybe you're normal and just avoid broken mirrors and the number 13. I've been having a little fun with magic myself, as the economy seems to spin out of control around us. A little magic seems like harmless good fun. A little religion...not so much. I didn't go to church Easter Sunday. The rest of my family went. My daughter helped set out Easter eggs for the little kids. Me--I stayed home. I'm still feeling guilty, I guess, which may explain why I'm blogging about it today. This is a big deal to me. I can't ever remember having missed an Easter Sunday. In college, my fervent roommates and I became "born again" Christians. We used to go to church Sunday morning, Sunday night and sometimes Wednesday night, too. Later, in Kansas City with young kids, Mike and I still managed to go almost every Sunday. The past three years or so, though, we've skipped more and more. First it was just in summer. Then it was most of the year. Finally our attendance boiled down to just Christmas and Easter. This year...I don't know. Easter dawned and I just didn't feel like going. I bring this up for two reasons: The Newsweek cover story (please subscribe) this week was titled, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America," by Jon Meacham. He quotes the American Religious Identification Survey, showing that the percentage of people who call themselves Christian has dropped about 10 percentage points since 1990--from 86 to 76 percent, while the number of unaffiliated has doubled. At the same time, religious faith pops up there right along with "positive attitude," as a good thing for mental and physical health. (See related articles here and here.) So apparently I'm part of a trend. The Meacham article is mostly a reaction piece. It doesn't go deeply into why people's attitudes are changing. I can't speak for everyone else on that survey, but what I feel is religious fatigue. It's been building for a long, long time--since back in the early '80s. That was when we started hearing endlessly about right-wing religious fundamentalism and how it was reshaping politics and the economy. First it endorsed Reaganomics, then ever more extreme forms of laissez-faire capitalism. And social issues. Those who disagreed were renounced ever more loudly. I started to hear with amazing regularity that I couldn't possibly be considered a Christian if I voted a particular way, or disagreed with a particular thing. I couldn't possibly be both a liberal and a Christian. And, I don't know, at one point--maybe it was during the campaign season--I just quit arguing. Yeah. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not a Christian after all. It felt good just to say it and get it over with. Because when I think back on the past two decades, it's been American-style Christianity backing up the politicians who got us into the mess we're in. Ergo, American-style Christianity should be willing to shoulder some of the blame for the shambles that is the world economy. So does the decline of self-identified Christians mean optimism is also on the decline? Can I possibly have the hope I need without a religion? Especially now, when I should be praying like mad? We'll see. All I know is, I feel a little better for having unburdened myself. Ahh yes. Another gray, cold Monday morning.
I've got to stop all this worrying about money. College funds, retirement funds, all the things the stock market took away this past few months. It's not good to dwell on it. It's not optimistic. An optimist would be investing, now that it seems things are on the upswing. And so I'm going to start focusing on things that can give some hope--or at least a little entertainment--in weeks to come. Just as some turn to gambling (are all gamblers by default, optimists?) I'm seriously considering putting some of my teacher's mite on stocks. It's only money, right? And the first thing I'll back, as soon as I can scrape a couple of sawbucks together, will be anything that has anything to do with the Tetris. Because dang! That video game can fix anything! This comes up because I've recently become interested in brain waves and brain wave therapy (ask me later). In the course of reading about brain wave research, I came across Tetris again and again. Exhibit A: Researchers at Harvard Medical School used Tetris to study how the brain uses dreams to learn things. The study's subjects, who were asked to learn to play Tetris every day, reported dreaming about the game, or seeing images of the game's colored shapes floating before their eyes just as they went to sleep. The scientists believed that their brains used the sleeping state to reinforce and review the things they needed to learn. To this day, the person who dreams about vexing problem he or she must solve is said to be experiencing the "Tetris effect." (Here's a report in Scientific American, 2000) Exhibit B: Playing Tetris within a certain time after a traumatic experience may help alleviate "flashbacks" and other post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Oxford University scientists came up with these results after showing their subjects a disturbing film, then having some of them play the game. Those who played, later reported fewer or lighter memories of the stressful film. (BBC report here) The theory: If you busy yourself with Tetris soon after the traumatic event, you interfered with the brain's ability to form vivid memories of it. Therefore, these vivid memories will not come back so strongly in the form of flashbacks. Admittedly, this study still needs some follow-ups. (And, I hate to admit it, but this seems to back up my grandmother's folk wisdom about "putting it out of your mind. Just keep yourself busy with something and forget about it." She can't be right about that. Can't, can't, can't.) If it's true, though, I could see myself stocking up on hand-held Tetris--for emergencies. They'd be in my house, to play in the back of the ambulance after my husband's ladder and chain-saw accident. They'd be in my car, for after that truck driver almost kills me. (Well, wait. Maybe no Tetris in the car. That's what texting's for.) Who knows, maybe if I'd had Tetris, I would remember junior high as a land of rainbows and unicorns, where goodwill and kindness reigned over all and nerds and gearheads walked together in peace. It would have helped this pas few weeks, for sure.
Here's a guitar version of the theme, in case it isn't already stuck like glue inside your head.
When things look bad you suck it up. You get tough. You show what you're made of. That's the conventional wisdom. But given our reaction so far to bad economic news, I'm beginning to have niggling doubts about our own family's fortitude. We know we're going to have to make some drastic spending cuts. We tell each other it won't be forever. Our income will improve some day. Yet so far, we haven't found the strength to make much of a dent in our spending. When hard times hit my grandmother's family in the 1930s, they made do with less. When she was alive, she used to tell me about her favorite childhood "treat"--a piece of bread smeared with lard and sugar. Which makes me wonder: Are we tough enough to eat a lard sandwich? I decided to find out.
There's a fair amount on the web about cooking and the Great Depression. On YouTube, a 91-year-old survivor of those times named Clara has a whole series of films cooking the food of her childhood. Check out this one for "Poor Man's Meal."
Fried potatoes and onions. What's not to like about that? But I run into trouble where she adds the hot dogs and tomato sauce. I spent several years watching my picky boys eat Beanie-Weenies from the can. As a result, I can't look at a cut up hot dog now without a strong urge to retch. So hot dogs in our family casserole? Ain't happening. I started at the store with a couple of foods that probably weren't available when grandma was little: Ramen noodles and Spam. Ramen noodles are, of course, the favorite of broke college students everywhere. This week they were on sale for 20 cents a package. Even when I threw out the disgusting "flavor" packets, I still saved money against regular pasta. It turns out there are several recipe sites just for ramen noodle lovers. I checked out this one and whoa! Ramen noodle chocolate cakes? Ramen noodles and Jello!? (Appropriately enough, there's an ad beneath this recipe that teases, "How I lost 32 pounds using a crazy method." I'm willing to bet that method was the recipe above.) I was encouraged, though, that one of the pictured recipes used Spam, because that's exactly what I had in mind. Spam, the pressed ham in a square can, is enjoying a popularity upswing, says the New York Times. Apparently hard times make people think back fondly on institutional meals of years gone by. I couldn't quite let go of my family's health, so I picked up a can of Spam Lite. At $3.19, it didn't seem like that great of a deal. But oh well. I should add here, that this isn't the first time I've cooked with Spam. A few years back, Mike entered a Spam cooking contest. Afterwards, a reader sent him another can, which I made into...something. I can't remember what. And we brought home a can of spicy Spam from the Spam museum in Rochester, Minn. one year just out of curiosity. As I was leaving the store, I found the lard, tucked quietly between a freezer case and some rawhide dog chews. It had dust on it. Had some wise guy drawn a skull and crossbones?
My supper dish was fairly simple. I cut the Spam into cubes and fried it hard, then added a chopped onion and some frozen peas, a bay leaf and some thyme. I thought this might be a good place to use some cherry juice I had frozen from our tree last summer, so I put in about a half cup. But it was sweeter than I remembered (these are sour cherries) so I put in a little soy sauce and then thickened the whole thing with a cornstarch slurry. The Spam mixture was served atop a bed of three packages of cooked noodles, sans flavor packets. I made the lard sandwich just as my grandmother described: Lard spread on bread and sprinkled with sugar. While I was at it, my husband wandered through the kitchen. "Just so you know, I'm not eating that. No matter what." So I cut the sandwich into appetizer-sized cubes and added poked in some festive colored toothpicks. No one can resist party toothpicks. You'll eat lard and like it, mister. There were the expected jokes at the table. "Could this give you liver failure?" asked my son, the med-school hopeful. But everyone thought the Spam was passable, if a little sweet. As for the lard sandwich--what can I say? Colored toothpicks make everything better. Mike had two. It was an okay meal, if you're just desperate for meat. We probably would have been better off, though, with one of my endless vegetarian recipes.
Very funny, you may say. The hunger and poverty of the Great Depression wasn't a joke. No, it wasn't. But our experience has made me think the people who will survive will be the ones laughing anyway. Maybe fancy toothpicks really are the key. Even for a family of marshmallows like ours.
As each week passes we get ever closer to the drastically lower paycheck. We thought it would be this week, but now it turns out we have one pay period more to go. Enough time has passed that by now, we aren't feeling the dread as much. But it's hard to decide exactly which stage of grief we're in. The Kubler-Ross model is: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. I think the order may be somewhat different for workplace grief, though. At least for us. So far I can identify anger, bargaining, depression and maybe now, denial mixed with guilt (because after all, other people are losing their jobs completely.) No acceptance yet, though. But it's pointless to dwell too long on feelings. Not optimistic. We need action. With such a large pay cut on the horizon, the logical thing would be to start drastically cutting expenses right away, wouldn't it? But so far in our house, it has been just the opposite. Need some new jeans? Better get them this week while we still have enough. A movie? Sure. It may be the last we see for a while. Better get that physical while we still have enough for the deductable. Planning ahead, though, has proved to be next to impossible. Part of the problem is that figuring the new check is amazingly complicated. We'll stop having 401K money deducted. Same with life insurance and long-term disability. Then we'll probably go down a tax bracket, so that will affect how much comes off the top. Also, the Obama tax break will kick in, and that will help a little more. What it all boils down to is I have no idea how much the new amount will be. Consequently, I don't know how much to cut. That hasn't stopped us from trying, though. But from the preliminary talks we've had, it sounds like cutting the expenses is going to be at least as hard as getting all the pork out of Congress's spending plan. Every time anyone puts something up for discussion, it turns out to be someone else's favorite air base. HBO--But mama! Flight of the Conchords! All the movies. Bill Maher. New York Times--Hey, it's a business expense. And the crosswords! Cable TV--Well, maybe. How hard would it be to get everything on our outdated computer? The gym--C'mon. It's keeping us all alive.
And on and on. So for the time being, we're going to try not to cut the fun things, and concentrate on smaller things until we know more. With that in mind, I'll be looking back on a previous post, "Try these money saving tips," with an eye toward some creative cost cutting.
Monday posts are the hardest. Maybe it's because I'm still grieving the loss of the weekend. Or because it's only 30 degrees, windy and cloudy right now. I just don't have it in me to attempt humor. Yet it also seems wrong, on a Monday, to subject others to some of the darkly serious thoughts plaguing me this weekend. Topics. Let's see... The advice to "do the thing you love" vs. the hurt when that thing is no longer an option? No. Would I advise my daughter to break from her career some day to raise kids, given what's happened? Uh...let's don't go there today. Comical ways to cut our budget? Try me later, when it seems funny.
So instead, today's topic will be the activity that truly defines both optimists and saps--the vegetable garden. We've had some form of vegetable garden since our second year in Kansas City--twenty-four years in all. This surely puts us somewhere in the top tier of both optimists and saps. Because to grow vegetables in this area takes either a blind belief in positive outcomes or naivete on a scale that is touching and yet sad. Having moved here from the garden of Eden (Iowa) I was something of a garden snob.I remember thinking on the drive down: Look at the limestone ledges. Look at the pasture land. Surely that's not a good sign. And what's with all this hot wind? Yet we went ahead anyway, first with a small plot at our rental house, then a community garden, then a garden on a neighbor's land and finally (!) our own plot at our own house. All my Iowa instincts proved correct, too. Over the years we've experienced the following: Drought so bad the soil turned beige and tomatoes remained spindly through July. Flooding that soured the soil until the rain spigot turned off in July and the garden became hard as the tennis courts at Wimbledon. Mass infestation of spider mites and some yellow and black bug I never could identify. Theft of garden produce from mysterious invaders. Deer? Squirrels? Raccoons? Neighbors? Freak late freezes that wiped out every bit of early planting we did.
We start again every spring, just the same. And from all indications, more people are interested in vegetable gardens this year than in at least the past 20. Participation is up in gardening "schools" put on by the extension office. The Obamas started a garden at the White House. Why? Why go through all that, year after heartbreaking year, when food is readily available for the buying? There are obvious answers. The economy keeps grocery prices high while people are out of work. Customers are fed up with endless recalls for salmonella, e Coli, etc. They want to cut down on their carbon footprint. But I think it all boils down to one overriding reason: Control. You keep your thermostat at 65 during the day in winter and 60 at night and it does not get you ahead. The rates go up anyway. You work unpaid overtime and you do not get ahead. You get laid off. You make what you think are sound investments for retirement, like grandma told you, and they turn out to be a scam. You read all the labels on the package and they turn out to be a lie. Drought. Flood. Insects. At least you have a fighting chance against those.
I went out and looked at our garden today. Don Harman predicts a hard freeze tonight (well, at least it's not a catastrophic solar event). The potatoes are not up yet, but I could see signs of peas and onion tops, tentatively poking at the topsoil. The cherry buds are still tight fisted, but the apples are further along.The over-wintered garlic...well, that's a risk you take. I found myself wanting to yell at them, "Stay under. Don't be an optimist. Keep your heads down until this all blows over. Just hang in a little while longer." Because maybe this will be the last hard freeze. Then again, maybe it won't.
Every so often, you'll hear someone scornfully refer to the "dead tree" version of the newspaper. You don't necessarily have to waste that newsprint, though. Here's a way to take the newspaper and feel less guilty about the "dead trees."
It was a lot of fun rewriting an old fable about the rewards of hard work into a neo-communist tract. But as I was doing it yesterday, I realized just how inadequate Aesop's characters are to express the nuances of today's economy. Not many of us have the spirit of the ant who works himself to death for the benefit of the group. Well, maybe the Japanese company men touted by the Reaganites back in the '80s. Are they still the norm? And the grasshopper is also a confusing image. Is he a musician, living the bohemian lifestyle? Or a tobacco-spitting redneck out to game the system? Anyway, squeezing American capitalism into the fable seems a pretty tight fit. And it skirts a better question: What type of insect would an optimist be? The first temptation is to look for bugs that seem kind of human. What better optimist than a bug with a somewhat human face, for example? An insect that seems to look you straight in the eye and say, "How dare you think of squashing me! I'm one of you!" I found two or three good candidates on the web. The samurai beetle:
The shield bug:
And the skull crab spider:
But as it turns out, two of those bugs are stink bugs, and, I don't know, it seems wrong that an optimist would be stinky. (I think I may have found my new avatar, though.)
Likewise, I had trouble with what I'll call the "bloodsucker family," Fleas, ticks, mosquitos and the like. And wasps. Insects that lay their eggs inside of other insects...wow. All those bugs would make pretty good villains in the fable. But you couldn't call them optimists.
The water spider would make a decent optimist, though. This little bug lives and hunts underwater, despite the fact that it has absolutely no physical adaptations to make it easier. It can't breathe underwater. Instead, the water spider carries pockets of air down on its abdomen and makes a bubble nest, which it has to keep replenishing. It would be like one of us saying, "Hey, you know, I like swimming. Why not set up house about 20 miles offshore? I don't have any scuba gear but that's no problem. I'll just bob up every so often and collect some air in my shirt."
Maybe someone should introduce them to those bubble-blowing dolphins.
The dung beetle is another obvious choice for optimistic insect. Dung beetles are famous for living in, working with and eating feces. Some of them roll it into balls and pushing those giant balls of feces up and down the countryside all day long. Here's a video of one with his special prize that I would nominate for "feel good movie of the year."
On second thought, maybe the dung beetle isn't the best choice for optimist bug. He does what most of us do every day, after all. Nothing to watch here, folks.
Okay. There is one bug. One who stands alone in her tenacity, inner strength and ability to inspire. Ladies and gentlemen, the cockroach.
She's an opportunist who takes every adverse situation an turns it to her favor. I have personally seen cockroaches eat laundry detergent. Not the stuff you buy today, either, but a real he-man's detergent, filled with phosphates and all kind of other stuff deemed too dangerous for us mere humans. A cockroach doesn't bow to the authority of the hive. She doesn't grovel by prettifying herself or having pictures on her back. She doesn't stink. She survives, even thrives, despite that pile of garbage that surrounds her. She eats, she lives, and when we try to wipe her out, she gives it back by climbing up through the sewer pipes and giving us a good scare. If that isn't something to pattern yourself after, I don't know what is.
Forget the DOW. Forget the deficit. As we move into the second quarter of 2009, a really important decision looms before us. Should we be ants or grasshoppers? You remember the Aesop fable. The busy ant kept his nose to the grindstone, stayed in line, did things right. When winter came, he was warm and well prepared. The grasshopper, meantime, drank deep from life's nectar, had fun and ended up shivering and hungry. When winter came, he had to go begging at the ant's door. At that point, you can take your pick of endings. Either the ant told him "tough luck" and he died or else the ant showed his kind nature and shared. As we've watched large corporations getting handouts this winter, we've often wondered if it's worth it, to stay ants. In fact, I toyed with the idea of rewriting the fable to suit modern times. Then I looked online and--whoa!--rewriting the ant and grasshopper story is something of a cottage industry. Michelle Malkin claims a version that has made the rounds. In it, the tireless ant, which is supposed to be the workers, is beset by sneering grasshopper bankers who start a group that sounds like ACORN and demand access to easy credit and questionable mortgages and--wait. I guess in this version the ants are the martyred corporate bigwigs who later come with hands out to the government And the grasshoppers are...us? Another site, Positive Liberty, takes a similar turn, mentioning Jesse Jackson, Oprah and Kermit the Frog and taking a little swipe at Republicans as well. Then the readers chime in with their own alternative versions. I'm confused. We paid our bills and lived, with the exception of a family vacation and the dog's illness, within our means. When we refinanced, our mortgage payment went up, not down, so we would pay less in the long run. So I really don't think we're the grasshoppers. And I know for sure the top "talent" of GM and AIG, etc are not the ants. So okay, I'll take a little crack at it. There once was an intrepid little ant. Well, a colony of ants really, because these ants helped each other out. They didn't believe much in rugged individualism. When they all worked hard, they all reaped the benefits. Anyway, these ants stayed at it all summer long, carrying food back and forth in single file for the good of the commune--ity. Just across the meadow there was an arrogant grasshopper. This guy was a real user. Since he was so much bigger than the ants, it was easy to just stomp on them and bully them out of their food, and he did just that. The ants just shrugged and kept on working, though. As summer passed, the grasshopper took more and more food from fewer and fewer ants. By September, he noticed something: There wasn't any more food to take. The indignant grasshopper stormed to the ant colony to demand the ants get back to work. He was shocked by what he found. The ants were mostly dead from overwork, trying to feed both themselves and the grasshopper. "Get up, get up!" the grasshopper cried. "How will I eat if you don't get back to work?" A small voice rasped from nearby. "When you work, you should reap the benefits." There you have it. A communist ant and grasshopper story. That was fun.
Tomorrow: Insects continued.
(Note to literal-minded readers: I've always been pretty direct, haven't I? If I have problems with particular people, I just come out and say it. So read this at with that in mind. It is an allegory. About the bailouts. And insects.)
Welcome to my journey. I am a piano teacher and composer and former newspaper reporter who took time off to raise kids and never made it back. Inexplicably, I am not a natural optimist. Is it possible to change?
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