opening up space

The little volume control on the taskbar at the bottom of my screen disappeared. I asked Peter on google-chat how to get it back, he suggested restarting, so I did. Nope, still gone. I don’t want to be going to Start → All Programs → Accessories → Entertainment → Volume Control every time I want to mute my sound.

Because Don was busy at school Friday night as Master of Ceremonies for “Family Fun Night” I was home with lots of free time. As I was browsing the various unknown programs array when you click “Start” next to the Microsoft logo, I found the “Disk Defragmenter” tool (although I doubt I could find it again). I thought, hey, good idea to defragment. That was about two hours ago, and it’s now at 42%.

What’s cool about this Disk Defragmenter is that it is moving files around that can happily be contiguous and save space. You can see the top row there before defragmentation. The bottom row is in process. All that white unused space is to the right now, and the contiguous blue is clustered together, using space more efficiently. It just needs some time to regroup and open up that empty space.

Defragmenting is what Inge and I talked about at lunch earlier Friday. Not about computers, but rather daily life. And we didn’t use that word, but it seems right now.

She was telling me how she had gotten sort of crusty (my word) with built up stuff (I won’t tell you what kind of stuff, since that’s her business if she wants to blog about it) and that she had spent some time putting her consciousness on it and “stalking” it. Then she found insights and connections in her readings that reaffirmed her life calling, and she felt renewed.

You gotta understand. Inge and I are pretty introspective. We’re perfect friends for each other.

This is the most stressful time of year in my job. Papers, records, mail, journals and books pile up, waiting for less busy days to read, sort and file them. Students get annoying, colleagues get annoying, the University gets annoying. I can let resentments build up.

Friday morning my friend Alek in Greece posted this great black and white photo of an old Athens restaurant with a huge window and high ceiling. Something about that high-ceilinged room ~ head space ~ reminds me of defragmenting. You’re out on the busy streets of Athens, you stop shopping and bumping into people and step into this cool space and drink a café. All that chaos from the street hovers invisibly above your head. Your solitary self settles and regroups.

It’s fairly easy to see the need to declutter my house - throw laundry in the hamper, clear off the counters and put the dishes in the dishwasher, pick the newspapers up off the floor. It’s not as easy to see when my computer files need to be reorganized. It’s even less easy to see when I need to defragment and open up some space in my own head, free of crapola and annoyances that like to add up. And I guess my point is that it’s probably more important to do it when I am stressed and busy than when I’m not.

Hey! The Defragmenting is done. The report says:

0 files fragmented (I guess it didn’t need defragmenting after all.)
I have 8,236 folders (all those photos).
I have 36% free space.

mom's jewels

(Click on the images to see the pins better.)


Mom was 40 years old when I was born. She was born in 1916. You can do the math.

She was of the generation of women who wore matching shoes and purses, and hats too, until the late ‘60s. Because she was a preacher’s wife, she dressed up every Sunday.

Fine jewels weren’t affordable or appropriate.

Costume jewelry was just right. Some of these pins belonged to my mom. Some I bought. Some were given to me.

This one was given to me by my sister Ginnie when she came back from Peru. I might have been 11 or 12 at the time.

Mom used to say:

“You get hungry for what you feed yourself.”

“Don’t let intellectualism take the place of God.”

“I always knew I had to marry a preacher and a redhead.”

“I try to be funny, but no one ever thinks I am.”

That last quote is a jewel I share with my mom, along with these pins.

a flick of a switch

While Don was recuperating from shoulder surgery, we got hooked watching "24," the TV show that started in 2001 about the CIA operative Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) and the counter-terrorist unit in LA. Now that we can queue TV shows on Netflix, four episodes on a DVD, we could watch interruption-free, one episode after another. The writing is quite good, and the acting is excellent.


We finished the third of the six completed seasons last week (the seventh season premieres January 2009). In a strangely oxymoronic way, the show displays politically progressive viewpoints, while in the context of the very structures Progressives would like to see changed or eliminated. The politics in it are complex, not black and white.

Each season became more intense, the violence more graphic and more personal. Sure, Jack Bauer is a great guy who only tortures someone because he needs to save a million Americans. But this past season (3) when he had to shoot a colleague in the head and deliver his body to the terrorist enemy (a former British MI-6 agent gone sour) to keep him from releasing a biological weapon that would kill millions of Americans, we decided to stop watching.



Two out of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture this year were violent films, including the winner, “No Country for Old Men.” The other is “There Will Be Blood.” Today we decided to take “No Country” off our queue because it’s rated R for strong graphic violence. Everyone says it’s a great movie.



It’s sort of strange that we cover our children’s eyes to protect their developing minds from violent acts, but it becomes okay as adults to entertain ourselves with it. I know it's out there in the real world, but as my mom used to say, "you get hungry for what you feed yourself."

I dunno, I’m getting sick from feeding myself violence through the TV.

addressing race

After Barack Obama's race speech, below on YouTube, people are talking about the race issue again. He acknowledges anger among Whites and among Blacks. Whether you want him to be President or not, to listen to a man who is a viable candidate for President of the United States who has relatives of practically every race, address the issue of race head on, is remarkable. He is the son of a White woman, apparently descended from slave owners, and a Kenyan father. His wife Michelle is descended from slaves and slave owners.

I am descended from slave owners. But my parents raised us to treat people of all races with utmost respect. Before I was born, my father was a poor Baptist preacher in the South who told the story of the Good Samaritan with the Good Samaritan as a Black person. You know the story. A man is robbed and left for dead, all the "good" people like priests walk by him, avoiding him lying there on the road. I suppose it was about the blood they weren't supposed to touch. Along came the Samaritan (Jesus' audience in this story, the Jews, hated Samaritans) who tended the man and paid for him to be nursed until he recovered. Ok, so my dad told the story from the pulpit with the Good Samaritan as a Black man, in a little rural church in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. After the church service, the Elders came to him, saying, "Rev. Hart, we'd appreciate it if you'd please only preach the Bible."

In the 1990s I got a seven-year education in American race relations when I worked in a University office in which I was one of two White women. The rest of the staff (10 or so people) were either African American or Latino. I learned that my friend Sheree, a beautiful AA woman of 35, felt discriminated against every time she went to the mall and the staff stayed close by her and left White women alone. I learned that there was deep anger between African Americans and Latinos. I learned that some African Americans felt superior to Whites because they believed they would never degrade other humans through slavery. I learned that even after 140 years, Whites can't necessarily expect that African Americans are ready to "move on." I learned that I basically have nothing to say as a White person, about what an African American or Latino person might feel or should do.

This is the first 9-minute segment of Obama's speech two days ago. You can download segments 2-4 from the sidebar at YouTube.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I'm sorry I won't be going to Ireland for the University this summer. I was lucky to go the last three years.

Enjoy the green.

road

associations:

road - - - - - - - - - residue

spring - - - - - - - knee-deep

human - - - - - - - exchange

today - - - - - - - - taste

speaking - - - - - concepts

escape - - - - - - - road

Listen to Jack Kerouac read from On the Road:

Hitchcock

Rear Window: Unlike Jimmy Stewart, I wasn’t really spying on anything or anyone fun, just a brick exterior wall.




Check out Vanity Fair’s online photography portfolio recreating classic Hitchcock scenes with current movie stars, by photographer Art Streiber.









When you click on the photo in the portfolio, the original Hitchcock scene opens in a new window.

• Charlize Theron as Margot (Grace Kelly’s role) in “Dial M for Murder.”

• Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem spying on their neighbors in “Rear Window.”
  
  


• Naomi Watts as the psychologically challenged “Marnie.” I just re-watched this. Sean Connery is great. Apparently Hitchcock was smitten with Tippi Hedren and wooed her, without success. After failing with her, he wouldn’t mention her name.
  
  


• Keira Knightley and Jennifer Jason Leigh as “Rebecca” and Mrs. Danvers. My favorite Hitchcock.




• Emile Hirsch and James McAvoy as “Strangers on a Train.” Eeww, this is a creepy, but good, movie. Robert Walker is forever a creep for me in movies after it, I can’t watch him in any other role and like him.
  
  


• Renée Zellweger in Kim Novak’s role in “Vertigo.” This one doesn’t quite do it for me, the movie or the Zellweger shot. She looks old! Not that old is bad. She just looks old for the role. But I like how she really got into this, which you can see on the video making this portfolio.
  
  
• Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. in “To Catch a Thief.” I can kind of see Gwyneth as Grace, but the cliched choice for Cary would have been George Clooney I suppose.
  
  
• Jodie Foster in Tippi Hedren’s role in “The Birds.” Hmm, I don’t know about this one either. Did you know Daphne Du Maurier, author of Rebecca the book, also wrote the story for “The Birds”? Talk about two geniusly creepy minds, Du Maurier and Hitchcock.
  
  
• Seth Rogan in Cary Grant’s role in “North by Northwest.” Who is Seth Rogan? Although I love this movie, I always wondered why Cary Grant wore reddish brown shoes with a grey suit. Must be a ‘50s color scheme.
  
  
• Marion Cotillard (recent Oscar winner for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose”) in the shower scene in “Psycho.” I love this one, I think she looks pretty good screaming. But how do you replace Janet Leigh’s panicked face?
  
  Here’s a video of the making of this cool project and here’s the background on making it, but I hope no one will ever remake these movies.
  
  Um, I guess they already have:


• “Dial M for Murder” became “A Perfect Murder” with Paltrow and Michael Douglas in 1998. It was pretty good actually.
  
  
• “Rear Window” remade with Christopher Reeve and Daryl Hannah in 1998. Um, not so much.
  
  
• “Rebecca” remade for TV. Didn’t see it, don’t know.
  
  
• “Strangers on a Train” – Hey, a remake is in production this year!



• “Psycho” – I didn’t see Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche as the screamer.

Do you have a favorite Hitchcock movie? As you probably already know, he never won an Oscar for Best Director, although “Rebecca” won best picture in 1940.

“You thought I LOVED her!?”

By the way, I'm not quite getting why the illustrator shoved the movie poster over Joan Fontaine's head:

I had been longing for spring

This morning, from the treadmill, I watched a high-legged rabbit leap across the snow.

The sky behind was lit with pink ice.

I decided it was silly to light a fire for Spring, as if Beauty will be born Tomorrow.

full skirt femininity

I am ambivalent about fashion. I'm skeptical of trends that last 5 minutes, yet I love seeing a woman wear a beautiful outfit well.

I wear some of my clothes for 10 years or even longer. I try to buy things that won't go out of style any time soon and update with pieces here and there that will keep me feeling young. I don't have a big closet, and I try to keep my clothes pared down to just a few things.

You have to laugh at haute couture sometimes, but a few years ago I began looking at it as Art, and that changed my perspective. If I don't think of the shows in Paris and Milan fashion weeks as serious wardrobe contributions for the average woman, but as art galleries of a sort, I am more likely to enjoy them. And honestly, these shows are just big expensive marketing events for perfume.

Fall 2008 Ready to Wear hit Paris last week, and the Louis Vuitton collection really caught my eye for its fitted tops and full skirts. I'm sharing two photos without permission, taken by Karen Kooper at the Paris show (above and below). I hope she'll forgive me if she comes here, hehe. The others below, of Audrey Hepburn, I'm afraid I don't know who the photographers were.

Isn't this fez hat fun?

This pic of Audrey and Gregory on the Spanish Steps for "Roman Holiday" - one of my favorite movies - shows how well tiny Audrey wore the 1950s style with the fitted waist and full skirt.

Our old Iranian friend Shirin Majuri designs and makes clothes in her own version of haute couture right here in Lansing. I took a friend to her once to discuss a wedding dress, and Shirin said, "Why would you want a wedding dress like anyone else's?" My friend didn't go with her. But Shirin has a point, I suppose. But, even if I had $1000s to spend on clothes, I wouldn't. And maybe it's just sour grapes, but I think it's more fun to find great looking things at the VOA Thrift Store for $2.50. Think I can find a full skirt like Audrey's?

I hope this full skirt trend lasts more than 5 minutes.

phone

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Alexander Graham Bell’s birthday is today, Monday, March 3, b. 1847, the same year as my grandpa! (Yes, my father’s father was born in 1847. In fact, he fought in the American Civil War - on the losing side. I am two generations removed from the Civil War, and I’m only 51. My dad’s dad was 70 when my dad was born. He died when my dad was 9. And my dad was 40 when I was born.)

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words into a telephone:

"Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."

Wiki says he (Bell - not my dad, or my grandpa) refused to have a telephone in his study, because it intruded on his true work in science. The inventor of the telephone said it was an intrusion and didn’t have one in his office. Hellooooo!
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We have gotten rid of a land line in our house (it was an intrusion), but we each have a cell phone. This model put out for Verizon customers is pretty low tech now compared to state of the art models, like the next one, below it, with a slide-out keyboard. But we always get the cheapest model. Yeah, my charger connector is broken, so we have to charge Don’s and switch batteries every few days. Jeepers.

I mostly talk with my kids and Don on my cell. (Why don’t we call it a mobile like the rest of the world? Same reason we don’t buy into the metric system? We’re stupid?) What did we do before cell phones, picking someone up at the airport? It’s fun to send text messages and pictures too. It’s great having all my Contacts on speed dial. Owee, Boots has two numbers, one’s her cell, and one’s her land line.

This picture on mine was one Don took of one of his sunflowers. I love it when Lesley pix messages a pic of herself at Central Park or in front of the Empire State Building. Or just smiling at work. Ah, two flowers.

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Speaking of NYC, I’ll never forget September 11, 2001. Well of course. But I mean that at noon that day, I was supposed to meet my friend for lunch. After what happened that morning, we decided to cancel our plans. But then I wanted to be with other people. So I walked across campus anyway, to the International Center, and there was my lunch friend watching CNN on the ceiling mounted TV in the lobby, along with a hundred other people.

In that 10 minute walk, everywhere I turned, crouching under trees, walking slowly on sidewalks, sitting on building steps, every single student was on a cell phone. It was eerie, knowing what everyone was talking about, even though I couldn’t hear the words. They were saying the same thing I was saying to my kids and to Don on my cell: "Are you there? Come here -- I want to see you."

Don's new blog!

Don started a new blog, A View from the Green Barn, about life on our little farm.

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He has ordered chicks to be delivered the first week of April, and I think this prompted blogging. He visited many chicken blogs these last few months while researching how to raise chickens (which he's actually done already back in Milford on our previous farm). His favorite line became: "I google chicks on the Internet." He'll also raise quail, and who knows what this will lead to!

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Oh no, two bloggers in the same house!

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