Savannah Lee

I interviewed someone today for a freelance article, and we got to talking about jobs. This person loved hers. I could hear the lift in her voice as she talked about it--always going someplace new, always learning something, meeting interesting people.

It's rare to find someone who truly loves what they do. It made me happy to think of this person waking up and anticipating the next place to go, the next thing to learn, the next people to meet.

For me, freelancing is actually a lot like that. On any given day, I'll talk to someone who studies infant language acquisition, visit a historical home and learn about High Tea, check out a fair-trade coffee co-op, interview a movement therapist, or learn about treatment foster care. There are all these separate universes inside the world, literally around every corner. A cliche, but, like the best cliches, absolutely true.

Well. The tiny separate universe of our furnace is on the fritz...again...so I gotta go. See you later.

Yes. Bermuda. I want to go there.

Why?

Because that's the question I always asked whenever our friends went there.

We had friends who took a yearly vacation in Bermuda, at which phenomenon I could only stare in puzzlement, because they had a pool. It was beyond my childhood mind to understand why you'd go all the way to Bermuda when you could swim in your own back yard.

Then one day one of the girls let slip the secret: "They have pink sand."

I remember turning to their mother (my godmother) for verification. She smiled and said "Yes! The beaches are pink."

Now I understood.

Someday. Someday.

Purse Blog has featured these two very handsome pink bags. Sadly, they are not pale pink, which readers will know is my personal holy grail--but they are beautiful:

This Botkier Sasha duffle...

...and this unusual "fold-over clutch" from Miu Miu.

That's really all that's on my mind today.

I have barely finished this interview about the mommy wars--you'll have to sit through an ad--and I'm shaking. I'm shaking.

The interview features novelist Meg Wolitzer who has written a book titled "The Ten-Year Nap," about women who leave work to raise their kids. Once their kids turn ten, they feel "derailed," "vulnerable," and react by starting inane businesses called "Wuv Cards" ("There I am really lampooning the idea of suburban boredom").

Wolitzer says that of course it's different when your kids are young (even though "you don't have to use your brain" for things like nursing them), but then once they're ten, staying at home turns into a retroactive tragedy because "there is something inherently appalling about really intelligent people, in any context, not using their minds."

Which, as she has just explained, you don't do as a mom.

Hence the "ten-year nap." Stay-at-home mothers are asleep.

"I was judgmental of women I had known and liked," Wolitzer confesses, "who had given up careers...and [now] they weren't sure what they were doing." Later she claims she realized "Who am I to say" whether their choices were wrong or right...but the first sentence of her book remains, "All around the country, women were waking up."

Of course Wolitzer does claim to understand why moms might 'go to sleep' if they're lucky enough to have the choice. Here is her reasoning: "[M]ost people don't necessarily have a passion, or even something they're so good at, that they can't wait to get back to."

So they just mark time with their rugrats.

In an effort to be charitable, let me just say that That Really Really Hit Me Wrong.

Speaking only for myself, I've found that motherhood has taken every ounce of intellect and focus I've got. Kids are all subtext. You have to watch them like a 5th-season "Buffy." It's all between the lines, it's what's not being said, it's the silences and the timing and the context. I've had to work much harder to understand my daughter than I ever did to figure out what to say about a blowhard like Derrida. And how well I understand her matters, as opposed to proving whether I know poststructuralism.

I mean, you pass your defense, who cares? But the moment you realize your 13-month-old is melting down about bedtime because she fears she'll never be able to draw again if she stops now, and you say "You can draw again tomorrow morning!" and her whole face changes...THAT means something. You just stepped outside your parameters, you just made an intuitive leap to an essentially alien mind, and you eased a fear which might seem outlandish or trivial to you but which was desperately important to the little being who felt it.

And you know what? It's no less fraught when they're ten. My daughter is nine, and whereas she's certainly more independent in many ways, she also needs me more than she did when her world was simpler. She needs to tell me about her friends, her thoughts, her feelings, and now I have to imagine myself into her world to try to see it through my own eyes--to try to grasp the bigger picture from the necessarily more limited one that she gives me. It's still a leap, though a very different kind. And it matters just as much. Even more.

Well. I feel mean. So I'm going to say that people who call stay-at-home motherhood a "ten-year nap" are probably people who never could make those kinds of leaps, so they're covering their feelings of incompetence and inadequacy by reducing motherhood to breastfeeding and calling it a kind of sleep and "lampooning" its "suburban boredom" with condescending assurances that "most people" don't have anything better to do anyhow.

Thanks. Thanks so much.

Meg Wolitzer is probably very copacetic and this whole interview is just one of those unfortunate things where everything comes out wrong. It happens. As a blogger, I know that it is possible to COMPLETELY screw the pooch, to think you're saying one thing and discover that you have said something totally else, and ohmigod. Wolitzer throws out enough ill-conceived caveats ("Who am I to say?") to make me believe that her intentions were probably good.

But man.

I still maintain that Hostess cupcakes are good for you.

However, it has been one damn thing after another this winter--I have gotten sick again and again and I am way more wiped out than I should be. I have lost weight, I can barely drag myself out of bed, I've left behind a big chunk of my former interests so completely that I don't even think that was the same person, I am not just fantasizing about visiting Bermuda but in fact about moving there and starting an entirely new life, and the scary thing is, I'm not depressed. I'm demoralized, for damn sure, but I'm not depressed.

At times like this, I look to my father. My father, and I mean this as a compliment, is crazy. He's largely useless for anything normal, like shopping or watching TV, but he's very good when it's metaphorically (or indeed literally) 3am.

He taught me one thing, never with words but by example: when it gets that bad, start eating health food. Many were the times we went down to the local hippie restaurant for tempeh fried rice and enormous salads with a heavenly green dressing--piquant as a memory--that they shared with us like a secret.

It's gonna take a lot of that to fix me now.

I have to go there...I have to start eating health food. Not just one meal. But for the foreseeable future.

The fact that this does not even alarm me is what alarms me.

There are many philosophies of healthy eating. Tons of potential culprits to eliminate: dairy? Meat? Sugar? After reading this account by Laura Moser of her adventures in sugar-busting, I decided that that would be my organizing principle. My body appears to have rejected sugar anyhow, so I'll follow its lead. Out with the simple carbs.

"Just don't make us do it too," said my husband.

"I won't," I promised.

So I've dragged myself out of bed the past two days to make large quantities of red beans and wholegrain rice, wholegrain pancakes (use lots of milk if you try this at home--you don't want these suckers too thick), and other Just For Mommy fare. My goal with this is to get to the point where I feel good again. That's all I want right now.

Possibly my old personality will come back. That would be nice. Otherwise, I will sign up for the therapeutic massage program (long story) at our local community college and take it from there.

Sigh...

Was it 1989? I think it must have been. My dad had come to help me pack up and bring me home from another year at college.

We were in the student union, which was a dark place despite the banks of windows on either side. He'd just been talking to my friend "Anna," who was over in a booth drinking coffee--"I need it to feel normal now," she told him with chagrin. He winced in recognition. She asked him what he'd done to get it under control, and he'd described his process of ordering 3/4 regular and 1/4 decaf, then half-and-half, then 1/4 regular and 3/4 decaf, and now all decaf. She nodded.

Then he'd come to me and said "You should take next year off."

"Why?"

"Because I know it's not going well for you. These years don't come back, and you need to take time and figure out what's up. I should have done it myself."

Ah yes, I knew the story. The Lost Year, or, How My Dad Got The Chapel Rule Changed.

He'd gone to a religious college, where you had to attend chapel or they docked you an academic point. They thought they had the system worked out to where you couldn't graduate if you didn't attend.

The thing was, my dad had really thrown down academically, nearly becoming a Rhodes scholar. (He lost out on a technicality on a single math test, an event which gave him something far more valuable than a Rhodes scholarship--namely, a hefty sense of the absurd.)

So when he came quietly unmoored that one year, and, among other things, quit going to chapel...he had so many extra credits that the school could not flunk him.

In a remarkable display of practicality, they proceeded to abandon the rule.

I'd always thought that was decently cool, but when I told him so, my dad disagreed. "I should not have stayed in school in the condition I was in. I should have taken time off and gotten my head together."

He looked at me.

"You should too."

#

"And do what?" demanded my mother.

That was the problem.

They'd never let me go off somewhere, find some job and some apartment, and just be (which was what my dad was envisioning--for himself, his younger self).

Actually, they had to "let" me, because I was twenty years old. But if I had said I wanted to do that--which I didn't--they would have discouraged me in the strongest, the-skeezy-landlord-will-come-in-and-rape-you terms. And I would have had no particular desire to push them back. (That was the whole problem. I had no particular desire, except to be left alone in my private world.)

If there would have been some kind of nursery school for legal adults, that would have been fine, they would have sent me there gladly to get myself together.

Of course, there is a nursery school for legal adults...college.

The place with the inexplicably dark student union where I was unhappy and wasting my time.

They'd put all their faith in that institution, believing it would save me from myself, and it (or I) had failed them. Now what? There was no Plan B.

They thought it was obvious madness to send me out in the world alone.

The alternative--for me to live at home for a year--would fix nothing. I wouldn't be advancing. I'd be literally regressing.

As for me, I acted like I had no dog in this hunt. In fact, I honestly believed that I didn't. My real life was inside. I never showed up to push the situation one way or another.

So there we were: stuck.

That's what a stillborn turning point looks like.

For just that split second, I wasn't sure if they were tiny birds or tumbling leaves--those two animated fragments wavering away from me as I turned into the driveway.

They were leaves, but they had almost been birds--the kind you see gathering at the puddles after a rain.

I think this is why we have poetry. Because sometimes leaves are little birds.

You watch "Top Chef," right?

Tell me something: why are all these glorified diner cooks, and I mean that as a compliment, going on this show?

Take Eric, the one with the tattoo on his neck who got kicked off after the block party challenge. Why did he go on this show? If the idea of creating a "fine dining taco" (that week's "quickfire" challenge) offends him--he told Rick Bayless to go screw himself, although not to Bayless's face--then why did he go on this show?

A show where the head judge is Tom "Technique" Colicchio.

A show where they bring freakin' Daniel Boulud in to be a guest judge.

Is this the kind of show that someone should be on who would rather fall on his knife than tart up a taco? No, would be the answer.

The entire "Red Team" from the block party episode, who started bitching that their food was judged unfairly by Bayless and Colicchio with their "developed palates"--DUHHHH!!! Why are these people even on the show? What the hell did they think? That they were going to convert a bunch of highly-trained gourmets into roughneck bohemians who prize spirit over finesse? Did they not notice who won the last two seasons? This show has utterly belonged to technicians like Marcel, Ivan and Hung. Colicchio and Company are never, never going to look at a haphazardly-presented, crude, but passionate dish and say "It has heart, man! It's real! I like it!"

Occasional guest judge Anthony Bourdain might. But Anthony Bourdain is a recovering drug addict who by his own admission has spent chunks of his career "spooning cocktail sauce into ramekins." The man knows shame. It has broadened his perspective.

But Colicchio and Company! They are not going to care about heart if the finesse is missing.

They go for finesse every time--even when they "like" something else better.

When Rick Bayless tasted Spike's taco in the quickfire, for example, his face opened like a cactus flower in the rain. He said something like "That feels good in my soul." I think he might have even put his hand to his chest.

Then, to Spike's pained disbelief...Bayless chose Technique God Richard as the winner.

Because the challenge was not to make anybody feel good in their soul. The challenge was to make a plutocratic taco.

And that's what Richard did.

So Bayless chose Richard's taco--even though, on an emotional, sensual, and spiritual level, he seemingly did get the biggest kick out of Spike's.

That's what "Top Chef" is about. Those are its values.

So for the future: can all the heart-cooks of America please stay the hell off the show? Just let the Marcels, Hungs and Richards duke it out for the favor of Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller. Thank you.

Vanity Fair's website has a slideshow of all her cover articles in the magazine, with all the eye-popping layouts inside. (Steven Meisel, in my opinion, photographs her best.)

I bought about half of those issues at the time, so I clicked through the slideshow with great interest to see how they would look to me now.

Madonna defined the 80s in a way that I don't think anyone outside that decade--un-imprintable by it--could understand. (I certainly remember that my mother was politely baffled. Madonna lost her completely by trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" number within the "Material Girl" video. You just don't try to take on Monroe in the eyes of someone who was there for the original, ya know?)

I was imprintable and indeed imprinted by the 80s--and hey, ya know, it wasn't just empty arena rock; it was Cyndi Lauper, Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Husker Du, Bjork, and, though his actual flowering as an artist and sexual freedom fighter would not occur until the next decade, George Michael--so I have to deal with its legacy.

Hence clicking through the Vanity Fair thing at 2am.

And realizing:

I do not understand Madonna. What the hell is that? What are those exposed, turned-out, high-low, cool-seedy images of a woman who in retrospect seems more waxlike than real?

(It occurs to me that that "waxlike" remark could be taken as something cruel. I don't mean it that way. I mean it in a distressed-wail kind of way. In the rearview mirror, Madonna's image looks pasty and dead, and it frightens me. She was my secret mommy.)

You know, I actually just shocked myself by writing that. I didn't know it until my fingers banged it out. It is, in fact, true; I did look to Madonna for all the things a girl needs mentoring or mothering in but for very good reasons can't get from her own actual mother, aka sex. What people outside the 80s will never understand is that Madonna was that, and actually had and has the power to tear weird confessions like that from her (children) audience.

I think it's because her own heart was torn from her as a child. Wrenched. Grief is a confession.*

#

There's no coherence to the pull quotes in the layouts. Here she's going on about her lust for power. There she's confessing it's all to cover up her fears of inadequacy. Now she orders us to "be creative" in sex; later she props Sean Penn for bossing her around. She says she always wanted to be "alluring," then laments her failure to be "sweet" and "submissive." She informs us that, while she fantasizes about women, she's "mostly fulfilled" by men. She warns us not to depend on what "society" thinks of us, then leaves us--the very last quote--with the thought that "This film [she's making] was seriously influenced by Godard."

The parade of images is notable for its vast stillness, its fundamentally sculptural treatment of Madonna's body. Interesting, in that Madonna is a dancer first and foremost and the center of dance is stillness. (You have to learn to hold. Only willed movement has meaning.)

Most of the images are meant to be provocative, yet are curiously antiseptic as well. They recede, even when dazzling red sequined dresses are involved. They recede from the eye and the grasp. That's what I don't understand. Madonna Ciccone has never been accused of fading back.

Maybe her karma's coming for her. Stealing her breath from her images. Stealing her heart from the page.

Why it would do that, though, when she's already paid the price, I do not know.

---

*For those unfamiliar with Madonna's biography, her mother tragically died when she was young. I remember an article about her--it might even have been one of these Vanity Fairs--where she said "Well, I've outlived my mother" (meaning she had now attained an age her mother never saw). She was in her thirties. I put the magazine down in tears.

ED.: So, dead mothers and waxy images. Yes, you could say something about that horrific event in Madonna's past and the fact that her photographic images look embalmed. AND the fact that when I saw her deadness and her deadness frightened me I called her 'mommy.' Bringing it all right back around.

You could say something about all that. I didn't. I've decided that's for the best. You take it and run with it if you want. I'm going to let it lie.

ED. ED.: Here's what I will say: this is why pop culture matters. Because this is what pop culture does.

Peace Through Strength Through Eating Stuff That I Would Otherwise Not is going excellently, thank you!

Today's breakfast:

A piece of French Meadow Organic Spelt Bread (it's sixth product down from the top), toasted.

With Kettle Creamy Peanut Butter.

And a dab, probably around a teaspoon, of Light Madhava Agave Nectar on top.

Plus a banana.

I depend on my body in these matters, and the fact that my body was all happy and excited over this breakfast today, while looking with stony indifference upon the Einstein Brothers Bacon and Cheddar Bagel Omelet that my daughter engaged me to purchase for her with her allowance, tells me that I am on the right track. For now.

Sigh.

I've blogged about organizing, in the "household" sense of the term as opposed to the "union" sense of the term, before.

I look back on that post with infinite pity. How little I knew! How little I understood!

Not about priorities, which was my point in that post. But about how a household works. Ladies and gentlemen, I was ignorant, the product of a benignly chaotic household with no domestic order. I did not grasp that there was such a thing as domestic order. If you had used those words with me, I would have misunderstood you and not even known it.

No longer.

In keeping with the collapse of major areas of my personality in the past few months--I'd be open to a new religion right about now if I hadn't already done the following--I bought and am reading Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts.

"Home Comforts," as you may know, is the one where the author tells you how to fold your wash rag after you do the dishes.

Most reviewers treated Mendelson as being somewhat crazy for going into that kind of detail. They could not have missed the point any further if they'd gone to Pluto. "Home Comforts" is about how a home functions. Everything flows from that. The washrag instructions are like a ballet master correcting a dancer's finger placement.

That sense of coherence, of everything being the logical extension of a core principle, is what's missing in much physical home life today. In short, "housekeeping" is what's missing.

Mendelson strikes a mighty and long-overdue blow against the desperate proliferation of decor, luxury conveniences and crafts in place of "housekeeping," which is what people think they're doing with all that stuff but they're not.

The mission of "Home Comforts" is to show the folks who buy oversized pillows and aggressive closet storage systems what it is they're actually looking for.

Well, no, they know that. They're looking for order.

What Mendelson does is show them where order truly lies.

For the next several days, that is what we are going to discuss. A lot of it is going to be a comparison of housekeeping to today's trend of "organizing," which was all I knew before I read Mendelson. It seems to me that housekeeping and organizing are natural opposites and even enemies, and I wanted to explore their differences.

More tomorrow.

Here's part 1.

Order is not in the where. It's in the when and the how.

To see this, let's contrast the concepts of "housekeeping" and "organizing."

My definition and historical overview of housekeeping comes from Cheryl Mendelson's book "Home Comforts," and my understanding of organizing comes from having read (several years ago) Julie Morgenstern's "Organizing from the Inside Out."

#

Housekeeping is what middle-class people did for centuries. I still don't quite grasp it, although I'm beginning to. I know it has to do with proceeding through a certain set of appointed tasks at appointed times (the morning bed-airing, the Monday washday) which develop a synergy that causes a home to function in much the same way a hospital, a restaurant, or a five-star hotel functions. With the added bonus that the home is intimate and therefore takes on the personality of the people who perform the tasks.

From reading Mendelson, it's clear that housekeeping, to be properly executed, requires control of time. Every day. Because time is its axis. Housekeeping lives in the third dimension.

An aspect of time is process. It's not enough that things just be done. (That, by the way, is an example of the English subjunctive, a dying aspect of our language. People are starting to say stuff like "it's not enough that things are done." This is incredibly grating. The "that" in that sentence should kick off the subjunctive. "It's not enough THAT things BE done." See? That's a whole construction. There's a subtlety of thought there, a category of the possible and conceptual, that's being evoked. It's important. Don't let that door close.)

(The reason that door is closing, the reason the English subjunctive is dying, is because nobody's studying Latin. The subjunctive is only a minor aspect of English grammar, but a HUGE aspect of Latin grammar. You cannot study Latin without coming to know the subjunctive like that faceless man who comes up on you in your dreams. The one that's bigger, harder and going deeper. And once you have known him, the Latin subjunctive, you never forget him, and whenever, in your own language, you see him in a sentence like "It is not enough that things be done," you will shiver pleasantly.

(But when you see your lover's kingdom violated, when you see him held down and hate-crimed with a dissonant "It is not enough that things ARE done," your teeth will grate and your gut will twist and you will think dank Orwellian thoughts about the foreclosing of thought itself by the flattening of language and you will HATE.)

Where was I.

Oh yes. In the control of time through process that is housekeeping, it is not enough that things merely BE done. They must BE done IN A PARTICULAR WAY.

Chefs will understand this.

How do I know? Well, after blogging about "Top Chef" (because before would just make too much sense), I visited the Bravo website and checked out Tom Colicchio's blog. If you read the page where he reams Episode 5's "Water Team" a coupla new ones, you will see the process mindset in action.

The Water Team made a couple of little boo-boos during that episode, such as not fully de-scaling their salmon. The judges found a bunch of scales in their food, and they were not amused. Colicchio describes how this happened:

"At one point in my walk-through, I noticed the [Water] team's salmon filets dumped unceremoniously in a plastic tub. This may sound like nitpicking, but even at the earliest stages of prep, it's essential that chefs work 'clean.'"

By the way: note, please, Mr. Colicchio's use of the subjunctive construction: "it's essential THAT chefs WORK clean." You might not notice it, because he's talking about "chefs" plural, who "work," so it's the same form as if he'd said it wrong. But change it to the singular and you can see. "It's essential THAT he WORK clean." Not "that he works clean," but "that he work clean."

Onward: "If the salmon had been lined up neatly in the bus tub, the scales that had failed to be rinsed away would have been visible."

See? Process. If the Water chefs had followed the anal bullshit rules, which in this case are actually not anal or bullshit, they would not have been as embarrassed in the judging.

Housekeeping is the domain of anal bullshit rules that are actually not anal or bullshit.

So what happened to housekeeping? How come it went the way of the subjunctive? To the point where, re-reading everything I've just written, I'm afraid I'm actually crazy and totally wrong? (But I know I'm not. I know "it's important that he work clean" and "it's important that things be done" are the right construction. Just like I know, from reading Mendelson's book, that housekeeping is time.)

So what happened to it, that a middle-class girl like me has to struggle to understand it by reading about it in a book?

The 60s and 70s happened. And 80s.

Housekeeping met the 60s and 70s (and 80s) and drowned in the successive waves of social revolution (feminists, hippies, yippies, yuppies) and upward redistribution of wealth (less time, less money) that hit America. For both good and bad reasons, Americans lost control of their time and stopped living orderly lives within their households. They started dumping the salmon in the tub, instead of lining it up just so.

The dire consequences, tomorrow. Mwahaha.

Here's part 1.

Here's part 2.

Once schedules and habits became chaotic, home life became chaotic. "Ad hoc" and "haphazard," in Mendelson's terms. She complains, for example, that in housekeeping-challenged America, "Washday is any time anyone throws a load into the machine."

This sentence utterly confused me at first. I was like, Of course it's any time anyone throws a load in the machine! When else would it be? And why?

Thus perfectly making her point for her.

Notice how Mendelson goes by time: it's washday. I go by what could crudely be called space. I determine the need to do laundry by physical cues: that's a lotta underwear on the bathroom floor. Better pick it all up and run it.

That's the difference between housekeeping and the kind of thinking that led to the would-be successor of housekeeping: organizing.

Organizing works with space. Notice again how I was going by physical cues: the underwear on the floor is piling up. Organizers, in general, attempt to go with those physical cues, those after-the-facts, and get control of them.

"So Savannah," says the hypothetical organizer in my head, "most of your underwear gets dropped on the bathroom floor, right? More towards the sink than the towel bars, I see. Well, then, what we need to do is establish a place for it right there where you tend to drop it. We're going to install a pull-out bin in this under-sink cabinet. Just drop the underwear in there, and you'll never have clutter in the bathroom again! And when it's full, you can take it down and wash it!"

This appears to be a form of order. And if it works for you, fantastic. But underneath, at its root, it's a capitulation to chaos. It (literally) follows it. Thus, chaos remains in charge.

And as Elric of Melnibone (best cover EVER, by the way) can tell you, that's a precarious state. Chaos will never keep the bargains that you try to make with it. Stormbringer will be fed, bitch.

Okay, end geek analogy.

So that's the difference between housekeeping and organizing. Mendelson does not talk about organizing except to say that those closet systems and under-bed storage bins sure can be useful for all your stuff. To me, however, it's of critical importance. I don't think Mendelson grasps that these organizational systems are actually the enemies of housekeeping, the handmaidens of a competing and compensatory philosophy. But that is definitely how I personally see it.

The implicit idea is that storage systems can take the place of orderly habits. Store everything at the point of use (a Morgenstern idea) and make it easy to put away and retrieve, and it doesn't matter how or when those things are used. Placement can substitute for process.

Except it can't.

First of all, organizing is a bitch. As experts like the very fair and intelligent Julie Morgenstern will tell you, it takes a huge amount of time and effort. You have to rethink and rearrange everything. Literally. Physically. Housekeeping is much simpler, although no less demanding in its way. Instead of attempting to adapt your house to you, you do the sensible thing and adapt yourself to your house. Its needs. Its processes. Its times.

They are, after all, your own.

"The rhythm of the house," writes Mendelson with the immense profundity of simplicity, "is the rhythm of the body."

Part 4 tomorrow.

We interrupt our investigation into housekeeping with this unintentionally appalling introduction to a Rebecca Solnit article on Tomdispatch.

Tom Englehardt is busy explaining why he likes Solnit's work.

He first encountered it, he says,

"[when] the invasion of Iraq was already two months old. The vast, worldwide demonstrations by tens of millions of sane and sensible people who could see clearly enough that a disaster was on its way--and who have never, on any 'anniversary' of that disaster, gotten the slightest mainstream credit for having been right--had already ended in despair."

Then along came Ms. Solnit, who convinced him Not To Worry!

Why? Because:

"activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark" -- and ...history "is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does."It was, she wrote, too soon to tote up the "score" or declare matters over on the invasion of Iraq or much else. In fact, it's always too soon, since you can never really know what effect your actions have had -- or where, or on whom.

Yeah um. Ms. Solnit and Mr. Tom.

That.

Is.

What.

Bush.

And his enablers.

Were saying.

A little while ago.

To justify.

Iraq.

You remember, don't you?

Stuff along the lines of: "But eventually, it could turn out to be a good decision!"

Or more bullishly, as befits their mindset, "I think that people will look back at the Iraq War and say, 'Thank God he [Bush] had the courage to do what he did."

Because you just NEVER KNOW how things are going to turn out.

Except sometimes you actually do. That's what all those tens of millions of unsung anti-Iraq-war demonstrators were standing outside for. Because, as Englehardt says, they saw that this was going to be a catastrophe. And they were right.

Well--the catastrophe has happened. It can never be undone. It is by no means "too soon to tote up the score." Iraq is completely shattered. Its people will be struggling to absorb and repair the damage to their lives for generations to come. All of us who actively or passively opposed the war were defeated by plutocrats who had so much capital and such access to the means of state violence and control that they did not have to listen to us. WE. LOST. The harrowing of Iraq HAPPENED. WE. LOST. Measurably and forever.

Now, does that mean we stop trying to avert the next act of rapacious stupidity by a bunch of megalomaniacs who make Hollywood narcissists look like Buddhist monks?

No.

But not because "you never know" and "it's always too soon." No. Because aggressive wars, including 'bloodless' and largely invisible class ones, are wrong. Period. So you fight them.

Even though 90% of the time you lose.

Samuel Beckett. The French Irishman (i.e. he knew a thing or two about futility and defeat). Listen to him: "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Those of us who only want peace and quiet, who are not interested in empires except of the heart, who come a little when we hear the word 'mercy,' will always lose when the crypto-fascist banners unfurl and the drums begin to beat.

Our victories, as befits our nature, are the quiet ones, the ones in the margins. Something as small and yet huge as getting anorexia nervosa recognized as a mental illness. Getting homosexuality recognized as NOT one. And the idea that women should be educated.

That's where we make them feel as impotent and hopeless as they do to us here.

And in time, you know, they might reverse all our victories and we might reverse all of theirs. Thus "proving" whatever. That down is up, a favorite television meme as the gifted girl spurns school and the lezy jumps on a guy and the meek receptionist is the one who snaps and bludgeons someone to death. Of course! we all say. See? See? It had to be that way!

I suppose history televisions us all in the end. As the hairy barbarians of Europe proceeded to start the Enlightenment and the insanely civilized and advanced cultures of the Middle East became stagnant.

But living men and women don't measure time that way. We can't.

We measure it by the war orphan's heartbeat.

It's too soon to tote up the score?

That's what Mr. Bush wants us to think.

Here's part 1.

Here's part 2.

Here's part 3.

Besides the difficulty involved in “organizing” your house, there's its essential futility in my opinion.

Why do I think it's futile?

It attempts to impose order on use-patterns that are actually illusory because they arise out of the lack of pattern. Take my underwear on the bathroom floor. Most of my underwear gets dropped on the bathroom floor. Not all of it. See the problem? How many bins am I going to have to install to keep up with where I might happen to undress next?

My daughter's art supplies are another good example. They're all over the damn place, because it never occurred to me--it would have seemed so limiting and preposterous, and in a way, of course, it is--to tell her that she can only draw in one area of the house. What!? Like...if you want to draw, you have to go to your desk? What the hell!

If you think that way (as I do), then possibly you like kittening for the Lord of the Seven Darks in a domestic context. In which case, rock the hell on, my brother or sister. You reject both organizing and housekeeping, and great. You'll be throwing lots of blankets over lumps of clutter on the couch whenever a maintenance guy has to come over, but--great. As long as you wash the forks you fish out of the sink before you eat with them, great.

But we're talking about the pitfalls of organizing here. So: your daughter draws in her bed, sometimes at her desk, sometimes on the couch, sometimes in the kitchen, etcetera. How do you "organize," i.e. space-control, the resulting piles of crayons and markers and paper everywhere?

Well, you have to scope out those three or four places that she likes to draw the most often, and create storage there to accommodate her.

And then watch as she discovers a fifth. Because she will. Because organizing follows and enshrines chaos, and chaos, as we have discussed, is chaos. It is master.

Hence organizers tell you right up front that you're going to have to keep adjusting and developing your systems as you go. Constant re-thinking, constant redeployment. Why? In my opinion, it's because you're on the "wrong" axis.

The alternative to chaos in the domestic setting is process. Aka, yes, draw at your desk. GO to your PLACE when it's TIME.

Cheryl Mendelson's housekeeping book (which, as you may recall, started this whole thing for me) is therefore entirely about process.

That's why she tells us how to fold the washrag after we do the dishes. That is what makes this book seem exotic, bizarre, and even anal and crazy to some people. We freak out at the idea of someone controlling where, when and how we do things in our home, because we don't understand the concept of process and what it can do.

This lack of understanding has been surprisingly far-reaching, even influencing, I would argue, our architecture.

That's for tomorrow.

Here's part 1.

Here's part 2.

Here's part 3.

Here's Part 4.

I'm freelance-writing about kitchen trends right now, and one of the things my excellent, prompt, articulate and efficient builders have been telling me about is design.

Here's what's happening, and this isn't new but it's accelerating: people are merging the living, family and "hearth" rooms and running them right into the kitchen in an "open" floor plan. The kitchen then picks up the momentum and flows into an eating "area." Not a separate dining room, you understand, which is confining and passe. An area.

Not only that, but kitchens themselves are starting to look less kitchen-like and more like the rest of the space that flows into and through them. Cabinets and even major appliances like refrigerators are starting to be designed to look like "furniture." The merging of the kitchen with the "open" spaces around it thus becomes total in a visual sense.

Before I read Mendelson, I would have listened to these trends without understanding them. Having been newly awakened to the concept of process, however, I heard them with great interest.

One of the signs of chaotic domestic life is the mixing of activities. Leisure and dinner collapse together, for example, as people eat in front of the TV. There's nothing "wrong" with this, but it makes it more difficult to have order because you're in two states at once.

With these "open floor plans" and merged spaces and functions (yes, you can get a built-in flat-screen TV in your kitchen now--"organizing" thinking at work), we can see the collapse of process and order in our home lives. Our spaces can now be everything at once as we do everything at once.

Again, this is not "bad." But it reflects the extinction of an entire category of thinking about what a home is and how to live in it.

Notice also how houses are getting bigger and bigger. We need more and more space to contain ourselves. Why? Partly because we have more and bigger stuff...but partly, I would say, because we've lost control of time (and process). As with organizing, space is all that's left to work with. The house gets bigorexic because it's trying to compensate for being starved of process. If, by contrast, you are sure of what you are doing in each (forgive the anachronism) "room," then the room does not have to be large. Think of all the professional kitchens that are "submarine-size" (as Anthony Bourdain describes the Park Avenue South Les Halles kitchen), yet produce appetizers, mains and desserts for hundreds of people a night. How? Process. The verb-ification of time.

Really how? Housekeeping.

That is what it boils down to. Restaurants, resorts, hospitals, spas, hotels--the "hospitality industry" is the housekeeping industry, the professionalization of the job of the middle class woman.

Housekeeping has fled the home and started a business.

It serves us right, really. Mendelson tells us that housekeeping is a deeply and fundamentally intellectual process. She probably should have said metaphysical, as Anthony Bourdain fearlessly did in regards to cooking (but he has a penis and can get away with it). In any event, she and Bourdain are right. Housekeeping is indeed metaphysical, an art expressed as a science. I'm sure it grew angry at being used as a tool to oppress and disrespect its vestals. To close them away and forget them and trivialize them.

It went on strike. "See how you like it when I'm not there," it said.

We don't. But with it, it took the knowledge of itself, so we can't miss it. We never knew that it was there.

We will fumble onwards, "organizing" and footprinting the space which is all that is left to us, into a future we can only wish was the ceaseless Gatsbian past.

Here is my catechism of Iowa winds.

Yeah, I know your stereotypes about that state. Forget them. Think only of the land, the flat, absolute land that was here before us and will forget us the minute we're gone. Know the state namelessly as I knew it in those velvet black years when it seemed like nothing could lie to me. I could not function worth a damn, but I could see. I could feel.

I knew the winds.

Once that wind was the only voice which spoke on that plain. The wind was the only hand to stroke that skin.

Does that sound sensual? It shouldn't. Give the wind an inch and it takes all. Where the land lies flat for it, it builds up a weight and speed that make it cruel. It shears across you, unable to scrape you hard enough, to get you naked enough, to rub you raw enough. You can run away and hide inside those strange immobile trees which have no branches, but it screams for you and your bones turn cold.

Here is my catechism of the Iowa winds.

I'm not going to talk about how they sound or what sorts of eddies swirl through them or what they do to the trees, although it is fun when they whip the green caps into dervishes. (And why does it always seem to happen at dark, when the spillover from indifferent floodlights chops the chaos into slices of doom.)

I'm going to talk about what they do in those bones. In the hearts that hear them and feel, for a moment, like the surrounding body is a fantasy.

And all that exists is steel.

Or concrete.

Or an ocean racing towards a hidden moon.

A wall that you're trapped inside of...as part of the atoms. So there will be no rest.

Russian snow.

Black ice.

Electric strings, a whole army of them keening right now, and you don't even need your radio to hear them.

Your own heart. At midnight. (But it's always midnight, isn't it.) Which is why your body falls away when the gale blows. Because your heart leaps for home.

Those are some of the winds I've known.

As a result of reading Cheryl Mendelson's book "Home Comforts," I have learned that just eating something does not constitute having a meal. No. There is custom and ritual surrounding a meal. One must be seated at table and eat at least three courses: salad, perhaps pasta or bread, then a main and vegetables. Afterwards comes tea or coffee and dessert.

Honestly, I had no idea that that was an actual custom. I thought restaurants served the salad first because there wasn't room at the table to bring everything out at once. I've always been a potluck kind of eater: load everything on and get to it. I've always been perfectly happy that way.

But like I've said, I am not in my normal state right now. If I were still doing religions, I'd probably become a Baha'i. (Gotta love an explicitly feminist religion, although they do need to get up to speed on the whole gay rights thing, in my opinion.)

I am done, however, with formal spiritual inquiry. So instead of converting, I decided to try serving a traditional meal. I had my family sit down at our table and I served salad...then crackers and boursin...then chili...then tea and fruit and a couple of squares of chocolate. Voila. A traditional meal.

It was entirely pleasant. I never would have believed it, but we really did grow increasingly relaxed and mellow as the meal went on. Maybe there's something to all these archaic customs after all.

Okay, so I'm writing a synopsis of a project I'm working on, and it's hard. Because it's about my own work. My tendency, when writing about my own work, is to climb all the way up in the Tower of Intellect. I start writing for a teacher rather than a reader. (Stupid PhD!!)

(No. Not stupid PhD. Much as I wish I could hate my PhD, recent events have convinced me that I'm better off with it than without it--that I really do have an arrow in the quiver of perception and understanding which I wouldn't have otherwise. Believe me, I hate that. Few people had a stupider, ill-fitting-er, more disappointing time in grad school than me. I don't want to have to admit that the process gave me anything at all. But it did. I just told my nine year old that she should go through it too. For the only reason worth a damn, of course: its own sake.)

Anyhow! I was sitting here struggling with this thing that's hard for me, this thing that makes me feel alone...

...and in my heart she started running again. On that trail through the park where she learned to knock down twenty miles like she was goddamn Spenser or something. She started running again, alone.

Zan (Don't Call Her Suzanne) Hagen.

Hero (and yes, that's the right word) of such R.R. Knudson YAs as "Zanbanger," "Zanballer," and my beloved "Zanboomer," in which this consummate team player learns to run alone.

My degree of caring about sports usually does not achieve the level of indifference. But I read my mass market paperback copy of "Zanboomer" until it fell the fuck apart. This thing was up there with "The Tombs of Atuan," "The Great Gilly Hopkins" and "Jacob Have I Loved" for me. Thirty years on, I can almost touch the words of a character's near love letter to Zan; I can almost say them. I still know them in every way that matters. And that's because I still see what he saw when he watched Zan leave her house and cut into the early dark. At a run. Alone.

For the only reason worth a damn, of course: its own.

#

Zan does not, through some Echthroid rent in the universe, have a Wikipedia entry of her own. Mistakes have seriously been made. I blame the patriarchy.

'Cause you know that if the patriarchy hates anybody's ass, it hates Zan Hagen's. Because she ignores it. Because she runs/throws/drives right through it, her loyal sidekick Arthur Rinehart (whose heroically platonic adoration of her is so delicately subversive) in tow...not as if it didn't exist, but as if it was just a puffed-up high school jock already losing his grip to the forces of time. (Just such a figure being one of Zan's nemeses.)

She redshifts him. While he's still waving his ridiculous arms to try to grab her, she runs on.

He knows, as I know, that whatever happens now, Zan will run for me. And you. And you. And you. And all of us.

I see that, in his anger, he has hidden Zan's tracks with silence.

But that's okay. Zan learned how to "stand up here alone."

Thank you, Zan. Thank you, R. R. Knudson.

P.S. Read Knudson's "Fox Running" too. It's all that, and oh yes. More.

What song was that from again?

"No sugar tonight in my coffee, no sugar tonight in my tea. No sugar to stand beside me, no sugar to run with me."

I've been trying to pull myself up out of a deep hole of flu after flu by eating health food. It's something I've done before. This time around, my guiding principle has been to severely reduce sugar and all but eliminate simple carbs, which break down fast in the body and act like sugar (white bread, white rice, white pasta, white potatoes). Right now, the only simple starch I am aware of eating is the potato starch in my beloved McDougall's Split Pea Soup, which also has two grams of sugars per serving, but as far as I can tell from the ingredients, they're natural rather than added.

Natural sugars, e.g. what you get from eating raspberries, grapefruit, or carrots, are okay. In fact, the body needs them.

What I'm trying to avoid is the stuff that goes in my formerly-adored fun-size Milky Way Bars. That, and its handmaidens in the worlds of potato products and the kind of bread that feels like cotton candy.

I've made somewhat of an exception for wine, which does act like sugar in the body, but which, like tea, has certain specific health benefits that I'm after. I only drink a half-serving a day anyhow.

As I expected, my tastes are changing. I can detect sweetness in natural peanut butter now (the kind where the only ingredient is peanuts). A couple of weeks ago...let's just say the subtlety was lost on me.

I can eat an 88% dark chocolate bar. Well, not the whole thing at once. Which is probably for the best.

I am becoming reconciled to the gritty texture of wholegrain pasta.

I can eat salad with a vinaigrette made of white wine vinegar without feeling like killing myself.

The benefits? I haven't been sick again yet. After this past winter, that is more than enough for me.

Assuming I haven't missed anything, it looks like I've gotten my added sugar down to that dark chocolate and the agave nectar which I now use only on my wholegrain pancakes. If so, then I'm averaging between 9 and 24 grams of added sugar per day. Considering the amount of sugar I was probably eating before, that's pretty good.

I really hate to do this, though, because it turns me into one of Those People. You know, the kind that can't go to restaurants because they can't find anything to meet their exacting requirements. (Hello dinner salad purgatory. With no dressing.) But my back was to the wall.

And I haven't completely jumped the shark. A true, hardcore health-foodist would totally bitch about the amount of grains I'm eating (hey, all I care about is that they're whole) and the fact that I also eat egg yolks, red meat, salt, and, in fact, egg yolks and red meat with salt cooked in oil. Oh yes, I still 'sin;' don't let the unleavened spelt toast fool ya.

I just don't sin with sugar. Quite as much.

Maybe I'll get to the point where some days are entirely added-sugar free. That'd be weird. It really would. (As you might have noticed, I'm not mainstreaming myself with sugar substitutes like aspartame or sucralose. Nothing against them, but I lost my taste for them in the Great Bloodletting of '08. And when the bod says no, we obey.)

So where am I going with this? I have no idea. I'll do it for as long as it works for me. As long as I feel like I need it. That could be weeks. It could be years. We'll see.

I am grateful to be able to do this, by the way. To live in a place and enjoy a level of income and education where I can exercise that kind of control over what I eat if I want to.

I'm lucky.

Doing this may amount to little more than giving myself a hugely inconvenient placebo, but it does give me a sense of ownership of my health, and I am American enough to feel happy as a result.

ED. In case it's not obvious already, I feel like I should say that I'm not promoting this or recommending it to anyone else. It's something I'm doing for myself given my own circumstances. What works for me might not work for you. Always, think for yourself and do what works for you.

I was in the lineup the other day waiting for my daughter to get out of school. The wind split up and rocked my car from either side like a pair of hoodlums, then got bored and ran away.

The rain came in on its thousand cat feet.

Ever had a cat jump up on your car while you're in it? Trot across the hood, up the window and onto the roof? Felt its little feet up there?

How many times have I felt the cat feet of the rain. I could have kept right on reading and thinking and graciously allowing George Michael to beg to be my daddy on CD. I got a real kick out of that, because I'm one of those girls who has got a daddy, psychologically speaking. I couldn't let someone even if I wanted to. But it's fun to pretend.

And that's another thing, I thought, or started to: Mr. Michael doesn't seem to grasp, or perhaps he very much does and that's the whole point, that real daddies never ask.

(I don't even think they can; I think they're as helpless before who they are as everyone else is. See Sting's "Fortress Around Your Heart" for a description of how it really goes with that kind of guy--whether you meet him or are born to him.)

...I could have kept on with that, all that chatter, all that traffic without which the city behind my eyes would become the sound of one hand clapping.

But some aspire to that victory of silence.

So I surrendered to the rain.

That was a beginning...but of which there is no more to tell.

I've noticed something odd.

The proportion of my daily intake devoted to dessert (about 200-300 calories) has remained the same.

But the amount of sugar--as I've blogged before--has changed substantially.

My two to three hundred calories of CHOCOLATE!! (mmmm....chocolate) runs me about 9 to 17 grams of sugar depending on the proportions of really dark, x-treme we-ain't-kiddin' dark, or sophisticated-milk that I employ. And that's basically it for the day; I might have a teaspoon of agave nectar (5 grams) too, but that's it for added.

Didn't used to be that way.

I used to roll out of bed and eat 15 grams of sugar in my bowl of cereal, which I considered perfectly healthy because of its high fiber content. Moving right along, my lunch entree averaged another 10 grams (I found the nutritional info for my favorite frozen lunches; generally they had 10-12 grams of sugar in them), and then we hit dessert. Yeah, that'd be 20 grams. For those keeping score at home, I'm at lunch and I've eaten 35 grams of sugar already. I remember being blithely unconcerned by that, though, because I was getting plenty of fruits and vegetables and fiber. As long as I was getting plenty of good stuff, I did not see the harm in downing a ton of sugar too.

And there may not have been any. But, as I've said, when I got sick this winter, the first thing my body did was completely lose its taste for all the food I ate. All of it. That stuff I just listed for you, the cereal and frozen entrees and my formerly beloved Milky Way fun size bars? I didn't want it anymore. When I ate it anyhow, I felt worse.

Dinner was usually a bit better, but dessert would be another 10-20 grams of the good stuff, and then there was probably about 6 grams of hidden sugars in my commercial salad dressing, and if, as I frequently did, I ate a serving of baked beans, that's another 10-12 grams or so. In a worst-case scenario, dinner could run me 36 grams of sugar, topping me out at about 70 for the day.

#

If and when I go back to eating that way, I'll be doing it with my eyes open. I'm glad about that.

For now, it's just weird and funny to see that my eating is the same on the outside--I'm eating the same proportion of dessert as I used to--but all different on the inside.

HUGE GIANT EDIT: Whoops. It would appear that I have once again made my math teachers proud by committing enormous errors in basic computation. So, that'd be forty-five grams by lunch: fifteen in the breakfast cereal, ten in the average lunch entree, and twenty for dessert. Which means my average day could get as high as eighty, not seventy, grams of added sugar.

Sorry for the error.

And other rules I routinely break.

Commenter Ulla has asked me if I'm willing to talk politics. Which of the remaining candidates for United States President do I support and why? If I could name anyone, who would it be?

Well, if I could name anyone, it'd be Christopher Dodd, the senator from my home state of Connecticut. I think the fact that his campaign stayed under the radar says pretty much everything about what's wrong with our system right now.

If I had to limit myself to the high-profile candidates, I'd pick John Edwards. I was really disappointed when he was forced to leave the race.

Of the remaining Democrats, I threw in my lot with Barack Obama because he did not vote for the Iraq War. I felt he had a clarity and simplicity on that subject which I preferred.

I do not, however, share the passion of many of his supporters, as I've indicated here, here and here. I'm not on the "hope" train. I don't want to "transcend" anything. And I think Obama is playing with karmic fire by using words like "unity," "unify," and "unite." In my opinion, that whole concept is cursed after having been used and abused by George W. Bush.

I do not really support any one candidate in the upcoming election. I support the Democratic Party. My mother always taught me to vote a straight ticket, saying "The party is bigger than any single politician. Whenever you vote, you're really voting for two candidates: the individual, and the party they've chosen to be part of."

So.

I give the edge to Barack Obama, but would be perfectly happy with Hillary Clinton too, because, like Clinton, "I believe in the Democratic Party." The party is bigger than any single politician. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

So there's your answer, Ulla, and thanks for your question.

She's moving. She's doing Zan's run turned inwards and headed nowhere.

Zan, linear, forward, inherently masculine regardless of the sexuality that her author never addressed, would have little to say to a girl who could spend so much energy to accomplish nothing but dizziness. A.k.a. dance.

(And who is still a girl. At thirty-one.) (Thirty-one's what she'll admit to, anyhow.)

Yellowhair would just pull her lips off her teeth and spit out more moves.

The moves don't have names for her. She didn't learn that way. I don't think she learned at all, I think she bowed to Kali the Destroyer. Through the curves of her defiance to the wastedness of her despair (she tends to lose her flesh when it gets slammed against the wall too many times), she just keeps going, pulsing outward from the bones that are the only things she feels she really owns.

I think she keeps her heartbeat in her bones. Her heart is soft; she doesn't trust it. Her bones are hard. She feels as though they're made of steel. She might be right.

So she keeps herself there. In her bones and her dance is their heartbeat.

#

The girl with yellow hair is not me. But she crosses through my head sometimes on the way to somewhere else.

This morning she's listening to "Walk in the Shadows" and "Harvester of Sorrow." She can smell wet black concrete and the secrets of strangers. It's not a good idea to take off her shoes here but she does it anyway. Her heart is beating hard, so the kind of dancing she needs to do right now is not the kind you do in heels. She can live with cut feet.

I've given you this.

She would have made you pay.

Martha Stewart is softly trivialized as a lifestyle maven because nobody else seems to know enough to know that Martha Stewart knows her shit.

Sure, people vaguely understand that she was a professional caterer and could still put a cake together for a bride if she had to.

But I see no evidence that anyone understands that Stewart truly knows how homes function, to the point where she could probably kick Cheryl Mendelson's ass all the way back to Appalachia. And that a lot of her tips reflect that knowledge.

In fact, one of Mendelson's reviewers even put Martha Stewart down. "Cheryl is not to be confused with Martha," snips Margaret Carlson. "...Cheryl does not substitute crafts for life."

That's exactly what I would have thought too, except I was, to put it delicately, ignorant.

First, until I (rather ironically, given that Mendelson has been set up as the good guy in a little proxy bitch tiff between her and Stewart) read Mendelson, I couldn't tell the difference between Stewart's pleasurable trivia and her serious tips.

And then Carlson apparently can't tell the difference between a lawyer/philosophy professor who writes about housekeeping, versus a housekeeper-caterer whose livelihood is her brand. Mendelson can afford not to pander. Stewart can't.

Stewart, like fellow omnimedia titan Oprah Winfrey, has always had to please and subtly flatter people and offer them quick fixes and diversions. She's had to entertain. It dilutes her purpose and makes her appear not to be as practical or as deep as Mendelson.

But make no mistake: she is. The core is there.

When I went to her website, it was immediately obvious to me that there was a real housekeeper underneath all the silly "spray some pinecones gold for a handsome centerpiece" stuff which idiots like my former self mistake for her entire contribution to mankind.

Take the link I gave you above. Did you click on it? Did you think it was frivolous or anal? "Putting strips of linen on your bookshelves as a 'dust shield.' How ridiculous! What utter make-work!" Yeah, I know. That's what I would have thought as recently as three months ago.

But I was wrong, and so are you. As I'm sure Cheryl Mendelson would be the first to agree (and in fact I'd almost be surprised if she didn't do this herself--I'll have to look up "dust shields" in the index of her vast tome), that's a really smart idea that improves the functioning of your home. It helps to keep dust, which (I have learned) is way more than just visually bothersome to the repressed, off your books. And with very little effort or expense.

It's the kind of tip only someone who's a real housekeeper would know to pass on.

The fact that people like me have no eyes to see it is not her fault. It's mine and ours.

Martha Stewart: For what it's worth, I'm sorry I misunderstood you.

And thanks for the tip.

Folks, I've been overtaken by events. I'm either going to be late or never. So: see you a LOT later, or tomorrow.

A while back, I explained how I think white is the ultimate neutral for the home--literally, a canvas onto which you write your mood. Endlessly flexible and accommodating, timeless, the best showcase for any art you might want to put on the wall. Etcetera.

At the grocery store yesterday, I found this magazine, and THEY GET IT.

The blue-and-white motif on the cover is gorgeous--but even more gorgeous is the feature "The Whisper of White" (unfortunately not online).

Writer Stacey Norwood describes the potential of a white interior with real delicacy: "Gentle, romantic white never overwhelms but illumines what it touches...allows other elements--silhouette, texture and shape--to blossom...[it is] an empathetic hue."

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

They quote artist Judy Parsons: "Most people who are creative...come back to a clean palette."

Yes. White, black and gray. In the end, that's all there is; or I should say, all that is is there.

To prove the point, they found a fantastic quote from poor D. H. Lawrence: "Into the shadow-white chamber silts the white flux of another dawn."

(I'm sorry, but anyone who can come up with a sentence like that pretty much cannot be overrated as a writer.) (As D. H. Lawrence has been accused of being.)

If you get this magazine where you live, it's worth checking out.

Okay, remember that magazine I blogged about yesterday, which, at the time I blogged it, had its "Blue and White" issue on its 'magazine' page?

I just noticed something about my house.

It's actually trying to be that kind of blue and white.

Dark blue keeps cropping up--a sink, a countertop, the wallpaper in one room. That may not sound like much, but with a strong dark color like that, it doesn't take much. That's the basis. That's the root.

I couldn't see it until now, because (a) I don't actually like, in itself, the darker kind of blue which is essential to that design and (b) there's so much visual static in the way--dark brown cabinets, beige carpets, kitchen linoleum which does not state the theme clearly enough, and some what-were-they-thinking wallpaper. These things clutter and obscure the truth of this house, its face, its heart, its self, which strives, like that of a human being, for expression.

It took me a while to see it, because I've been running after my kid. And the things the People In My Head were showing me with the intent that I write it all down for them. (I don't really know...why...they want that...but they do.) But now that I've been shaken loose a bit, there's some space in my head, and the house got in.

And said. Like a human. Like a story. "Would you help me become what I am."

A combination of poor advance planning and massive overscheduling saw me scarfing down some mainstream commercial food recently.

As with the last time I eliminated/severely reduced sugar from my diet, I can once again smell it as a separate entity. I don't smell "blueberry muffin," for example, I smell sugar with some blueberries and dough in the background.

My body greeted the comparatively high doses of its old lover with coy pleasure: "Well hello there. Yes, things ended badly. But we could forget about that just for right now."

"Right now" is exactly what she meant, though. Afterwards, she moved on without a backward glance.

But--while it lasted, she did have fun with her old flame.

That was great. The various vessels of delivery, however, were not so. They were largely tasteless to me and had the texture of cleverly-disguised plastic. Including the smoothies. It was kind of alarming.

I returned with gratitude to my whole fruits and spelt toast...although, now that I'm doing better, I have eaten and will continue to eat a favorite locally-made baguette. Yeah, it's got white flour, but once a week ain't gonna kill me. And it don't taste/feel like no plastic. It's all real.

Yum.

It's been cold and gray here. A couple of days so windy there were warnings.

A major employer just laid off nearly a thousand people in a city nearby.

One of the moms at my daughter's dance school, huddled in a sweater, said how her father-in-law lives in that city and used to work at that place.

Yeah. It's a cold spring.