Neigh, neigh

Took Beanie to the library this morning to borrow a book. She finished Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux, which she immediately followed with DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Beanie, who likes to remind me that she will have her half birthday on my full birthday, in two weeks, making her 6.5 years to my 40 years, tells me that she likes stories that have sad, but happy endings.

So, of course, the book that she selected this morning had to be a book about a girl and a horse. Also, not just any girl, but a misunderstood orphan, and not just any horse, but a mustang too wild for any man to handle, but that the kindness of a courageous girl could tame. Sigh. If you are 40 years old, like me, then you know this story already - and have loved and cried over its iterations.

The book that Beanie is reading is titled Katie and the Mustang, and it is the first of four parts in a series called Hoofbeats by Kathleen Duey, who is quoted on the book flap as suggesting:

Girls throughout history, in almost every country, have grown up trusting horses with their friendship, their secrets, and even their very lives. The Hoofbeats books are about that trust.

In future posts, I want to consider, as a parenthropologist, Duey's claims about the relationship between girls and horses. My hunch is that it is part of an American middle-class experience, which clearly seems connected with fantasies about the American frontier and anxieties about urbanization and industrialization - not to mention gender - but I am willing to be proven a chronic overthinker who is plain wrong on this.

Here is an essay that considers the question, Why do girls love horses?

By the way, a bit of advice on pursuing this topic - typing "girls and horses" into google yields some results that you never wanted to know existed, along the lines of the historical rumors surrounding Catherine the Great's demise.

What had me laughing aloud

Oh, David Sedaris... If only they could bottle you...

See his essay, "Standing By: Fear, Loathing, Flying," in the August 9th issue of The New Yorker. I was reading it aloud to StraightMan as he washed the dishes. It was hard to get through because I kept choking with snortles:

Everywhere I go, someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can't help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!"

I am laughing aloud, again, as I type this.

I confess that this comment felt spot-on to me:

It was one of those situations I often find myself in while travelling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue I need to know whom you voted for in this last election.

If the grandmother's criticism was coming from the same place as mine, if she as just being petty and judgmental, we could go on all day, perhaps even form a friendship. If, on the other hand, it was tied to a conservative agenda, I was going to have to switch tracks, and side with the [teenage father wearing the T-shirt printed with] Freaky Mothafocka, who was, after all, just a kid."

Petty and judgmental, but no friend of Glenn Beck, thank you.

Ars moriendi

Atul Gawande has a thoughtful essay, titled "Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can't Save Your Life," in the August 2nd issue of The New Yorker.

In it, he considers end-of-life issues and reports on the benefits of hospice and palliative care. Here is a finding that seems important:

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.

Gawande notes that hospice, both in principle and in practice, departs from the rest of medicine today - for example, enabling people to live their everyday lives, keeping them comfortable, talking and listening to them about their wants and needs. I find it telling that an oncologist interviewed in the article admits that it is "easier" for her simply to prescribe another round of chemotherapy, even a second or third-line drug that in all probability will make no difference, than to have a conversation about the fact that a patient will die.

Yet, he notes also that doctors and nurses can learn what to do and how to do it and to become practiced in it. Susan Block, a palliative care specialist, tells Gawande: "A family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation." She notes that words matter, so that instead of saying, "I'm sorry," you say, "I wish things were different," and instead of asking, "What do you want when you are dying," you ask, "If time becomes short, what is most important to you?"

Gawande, a doctor's doctor, is thinking aloud in this piece about how our ability to do (e.g., develop new therapies that might not cure disease, but at least can prolong life) outstrips our ability to make sense and esp. meaning of it all: In other words, cultural and social challenges for the individuals deciding what their lives (and deaths) are all about, including for the doctors and nurses.

This is, in fact, a point that I feel is important to make in my class on Medical Anthropology. So, I might consider assigning this article. The issues and the reporting here already have been published widely - from the journalist's perspective, there is no really new news here - but the article is compelling to read, in part due to Gawande's assured and compassionate voice, and in part due to the heartbreaking story that frames it: Towards the end of her pregnancy, an otherwise healthy woman in her early 30's learns that she has an aggressive cancer. She delivers her child and immediately begins what reads like a painful and unending course of grasping at straws. Yet, who could blame her? I thought about Beanie and Bubbie, and I suddenly became conscious of my own breathing.

The point I present to my students is that perhaps medicine as we take it for granted in our society both succeeds and fails at what matters to us. Gawande points out that there is "a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is" - which I suggest has to do with the aggressively ahistorical stance that medicine itself takes. The only history that seems to exist is a path of "progress." There seems little perspective that as medicine "progresses," our experiences and expectations also change - and that progress and change are not the same. It seems like resorting to "heroics" in medicine might have meant one thing when death was what Gawande describes as "typically a brief process" of hours or even days or weeks, but it seems to mean another thing when it involves months or even years. Is that not enough time to consider living, and if so, then what is? Is it then not worth remembering that living itself is the process of dying?

Here is what Gawande says to the doctors:

We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, "You let me know when you want to stop." All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time - just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come - and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.

I would add that this is not the responsibility only of the doctors and nurses, though they clearly can have one to their patients, and they might be able, in fact, to serve as the agents of change.

I can't fix it

Today, I am going Garrison Keillor on you. No, not by cracking jokes about Lutherans - ha ha ha! Here is a poem that I think summarizes exactly what a house of one's own means for StraightMan and me, esp. in this summer of repair.

It is "Handymen" by Cornelius Eady, published in The New Yorker on October 8, 2007:

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.
You can’t fix it.
The toilet babbles like a speed freak.
You can’t fix it.
The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.
You can’t fix it.
The screens yawn the bees through.
Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.
Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.
The frost heaves against the doorjambs,
The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.
No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,
No one schooled you in spare parts.
That’s what the guy says but doesn’t say
As he tosses his lingo at your apartment-dweller ears,
A bit bemused, a touch impatient,
After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,
After the hard wind has lifted something away,
After the mystery has plugged the pipes,
That rattle coughs up something sinister.
An easy fix, but not for you.
It’s different when you own it,
When it’s yours, he says as the meter runs,
Then smiles like an adult.

BTW, we have this poem taped to the wall of our kitchen, right above the light switch for the basement, which as far as I am concerned is a place that contains things that certainly are vital, but also leak and rust and crust over...

Like my colon, I want to be able to take for granted the working condition of the nether parts of my house. It is bad news when they call attention to themselves.

The WC

The air around here has been thick with the dust of cedar shakes being scraped for restaining, and heady with the scent of trim being repainted. For the last two months... Yesterday, there was also the buzz of saws cutting rotted wood and rusted metal from the flat roof of our laundry room, which had been added onto the house some time in the last 50 or so years and apparently never maintained.

Not to worry: StraightMan and I hired someone else to work on it. They seem actually to know what they are doing. When they are here, but that is another story...

Even as I write this post, StraightMan is in the kitchen, replacing the kitchen faucet. Last winter, our furnace quit, our pipes froze, leaving thankfully minimal damage, but it included hairline fractures in the neck of the faucet.

(If you were, are, or know a breastfeeding mother: You know when a baby suddenly pops off mid-nursing, sending the stream shooting across the room in a fine white thread? Our faucet behaved like that. For those unfamiliar with breastfeeding, now you learned something new about human lactation.)

Meanwhile, this is the first summer in the six years that we have lived here that I have weeded and pruned and even grown a few plants in pots. Something resembling landscaping has been emerging around the house.

I also am researching a remodel of our upstairs bathroom because the time finally has come to do it. The paint and the wallpaper are peeling, the vinyl floor covering is prying loose, the area around the tub has dark spots of water damage, and the vanity around the sink is rotting. Sigh.

In an earlier post, I decried the tyranny of the kitchen island, which in fact was a way of expressing my irritation with the so-called "not-so-big" movement, which seems really to be about not-so-small spaces and kind-of-big budgets.

To get ideas, I am turning to Web sites like apartment therapy because I realize that we essentially live in a duplex apartment with a bit of outside space not unlike a Manhattan roof deck or even a large fire escape.

I also just read about vintagesimplehome in a Better Homes and Garden Kitchens and Bathrooms magazine that I bought at Home Depot. I * heart * the bathroom, which is just similar enough in size and layout to our bathroom - except it might be a bit roomier (or is it just the effect of the pedestal sink?) and our toilet and sink are on the same wall (which I guess makes the layout quite different...) - it gives me hope that we can have a pretty bathroom, too.

A sure sign that I am approaching middle age: I so covet subway tile.

On the other hand, there is always Plan B.

P.S. The photo above came from here.

What the frak

StraightMan and I lag behind the curve when it comes to TV - and no doubt other things, but the point that I am making here is that we just became hooked on the reimagined "Battlestar Galactica."

Striking is (what I perceive as) the constant use of the word "frak."

Jesse Sheidlower, in his book, The F Word (Oxford University Press 2009), includes frak as "(a partial euphemism for) FUCK, in various senses and parts of speech":

Coined on, and chiefly associated with, the television show Battlestar Galactica. In the Original Series (1978), used exclusively as an interjection; in the Reimagined Series (2003-2009), used more broadly as a euphemism for many forms of FUCK, both figurative and literal. Spelled frack in Original Series scripts, frak in the Reimagined Series, apparently because the producers wanted it to literally be a four-letter word (Sheidlower 2009:55).

A more complete explanation on the uses of frak in the Twelve Colonies is available at the Battlestar Wiki on the topic, which explains also that the reason for the invention of the term had been to get around FCC regulations concerning language.

Which demonstrates, again, the cultural and social process that is language. The focus on the FCC is on policing particular words, which is based on (and promotes) esp. narrow understanding of language. The funny thing is that we absolutely know what Starbuck and the rest of the crew mean when they utter such phrases as "frak me."

BTW, StraightMan and I just started watching Season 2, but I am not sure that I have heard "frak you" - or possibly that crosses a kind of line? "Frak me," like "fuck me," is what one says to acknowledge one's own predicament - somewhat self-deprecating, it can be played to comic effect (esp. when the word is "frak"...) In contrast, "frak you" is hostile and possibly not funny at all.

***

Frack has been on my mind, too, because we live in an area where hydraulic fracturing, aka hydro fracking or fracking, are esp. live wire issues. Drive around, and you will spot "No Drill, No Spill" signs cropping up on lawns aplenty.

It might seem "obvious" that fracking comes from fracturing, but it seems also to me that there might have been a bit of deliberate wordplay involved in coining the term. Ground penetration, drilling, the pumping of fracturing fluids: We hardly need Dr. Freud to interpret for us the kinds of metaphors and images that frequently become used to describe human interactions with their environments, esp. when those interactions are intended to extract resources from the environments.

Terrestrial life

From Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness:

I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than scientific. Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as motion.

This just about says all there is to say about the worth of our week at Wellfleet.

It was a time for moving slowly, resting, and taking note: Walking and sitting in the sand, feeling its grit and its fineness, and its weight. Feeling the effects of sun and water on your skin. Feeling the surprise of losing your footing in the waves. Experiencing all of this with Beanie and Bubbie's hands gripped in mine - and occasionally, feeling their hands slip free to take hold of stones and shells.

I have a wish right now to take this holiday and try to make it live on somehow...

Wishes I make tend to be granted through books.

This morning, Beanie and I stopped at our excellent local bookstore and I found this book - The Nature Connection: An Outdoor Workbook for Kids, Families, and Classrooms by Clare Walker Leslie.

"I came to my study of nature knowing nothing," Leslie writes. "I spent my days indoors, not roaming about outside."

As a parent, this is a book that makes me feel like I can tell my kids to play outside - then follow them out the door.

The book is a guide to keeping a nature journal - drawing pictures, noting dates and times and writing short entries on "What I Saw" or "Enjoying Nature Surprises," and composing stories and poems. In short, it is about the kinds of things my kids already enjoy doing.

The first part of the book is called "How to Be a Naturalist" and suggests activities on keeping a nature journal. The second part is called "Learning the Sky," and moves from weather and the sun and the moon to the tides to constellations. I esp. like the "Moon Journal," tracking the phases, and the "Naming the Moons," explaining Algonquin traditions surrounding the cycles.

The bulk of the book is devoted to a month-by-month guide to "Exploring Nature," with activities particular to each season - like a "Snowflake Study" featured in January and a "Search for Water" in August.

Free worksheets for a number of the chapters are available, here, at the publisher's Web site.

The book seems to be part of a larger movement to inspire us all to see nature wherever it is.

As a cultural anthropologist, I could add "whatever it is," but I will restrain myself. For now...