those who were seen dancing

I have to write this story down. It's not only adorable, but emblematic of my family.

Last Friday, when you may or may not have been celebrating Christmas, my mother got up and read the paper. As people often do. She came upon an article about a family with several dogs who'd ended up in a lousy financial situation through a combination of injury and the generally lousy-ness of the economy. The article mentions that the dogs eat a lot - seems all of them do! - and the family is worried about providing for them.

Mom decides we need to take them our "spare" dog food - that is, several large bags and some cans. And, because she is herself, we have to a) do it immediately, that morning, before we go to the annual xmas movie... in an hour, and b) she's not coming with us. People tend not to believe this, but my mother is shy. Introverted, too. She's great at organizing people and making them feel comfortable, but if you look really closely, you can see that it takes effort.

I should mention here that we only know what neighborhood they live in and vaguely what their vehicle looks like. Also, I'm not sure I've yet put on pants when she issues this decision.

So. Dad and I get dressed, by which point mom has a fully developed plan and is already executing it. We all load up the van, and we locate the neighborhood. I read the newspaper article in the car, so we'll at least know the name of the family when we show up at their doorstep. We then drive around until I spot the family's vehicle, and dad goes and tells them we have dog stuff for them (also a small offering for the people), which the dude, dad & I all drop off at their place in about 5 minutes.

Total elapsed time on this entire project? About 40 minutes. Half of which is driving. No big production, no hand-wringing, no pushiness in the direction of the dogs and people we - I hope - helped. And then we went to the movies.

My parents have figured out how to use eBay to sell stuff donated to their rescue. On the off chance any of my LJ friends are the sort of raving dog fans who feel the need to have dog pillows, dog mugs, etc. - well, then. Check out their eBay store for cute dog memorabilia that supports a good cause.

And, also, just, from me, a wish to treat yourselves and your bodies with tender, attentive, active appreciation. It doesn't matter if your choices are different from mine, I'm wishing that for you. (from susanstinson, here)

I got mommed when I went home for the holiday. I don't mean that my mother pushes her perspective or agenda on me in any way, but simply by being my mother her stuff with her body reflects back at me & almost always gets me questioning myself. And rarely in a good way.

My oldest friend, snidegrrl, is a day older today.

Happy birthday!

I just made the second best pancit I've eaten in my life. And I grew up on Norfolk naval base, so I have eaten a lot of pancit. The best pancit evah? Made by a place in the food court at Waterside. No, really.

Anyhow. Pancit always makes me think about this. About half of my friends until they booted me out of public school in 3rd grade were half-Asian. Half-Filipino, half-Korean, half-Samoan, half-pretty-much-anywhere-there-was-a-US-naval-presence. It wasn't until like college that I realized that was one seriously complicated racial situation, naval housing. Military housing is where the blue-collar folk live. All these boys who join the Navy in their teens, travel around the world, meet exoticised Asian women, bring them home and have cutting-edge (given that you couldn't take a non-white warbride home until the sixties or seventies or something) multi-racial families while retaining pretty conservative working class views on the world.

The military is interesting like that. I wonder how much of my own perspective is colored by growing up with normal being... you know, that.

Of course, at the time, I was FIVE. So what I knew was that all my friends' moms, unlike mine, could cook. They made pancit and lumpia for kids' school things - white people dig pancit. Even my non-cooking midwestern mom picked up a few Filipino recipes.

( recipe for second best pancit, in case you're interested )

My throat hurts. I was totally fine, and then went from hey, my throat feels funny to aieeee, the pain in like four hours yesterday.

I must be getting old or soft or something, too, because I am totally happy that my sick didn't catch me until after the Mom'sbirfday trip to simple life porn to buy quilts and eat German food this weekend. And possibly more put out about missing work than missing my hipster Sunday night plans. I hope everyone else had a blast, though.

The yupster playground by my parents, where we took the dogs yesterday, has a miniature rock climing wall and this awesome gymthing that looks like a tensegrity structure. Mom thinks other grownups don't play enough, but it seems like most everyone I know plays all the time.

Maybe I'm just cool like that. But probably not.

There is a lot of "folk art" in Amish country that I think of as akin to simple life porn. Like, look at the cute leetle girl in her bonnet with her fuzzy animal! How quaint that she won't go to school beyond 8th grade! It just feels exploitative.

So, I think of all cultural fixation on things Mennonite and Shaker and whatnot as sort of a pornography of simplicity. But there may be more to it - that there's something in this other culture that appeals to our idea of ourselves as living more shallow, technical lives than we want. And maybe we'd like a little more slowness, a little more craft. To be able to spend months with our family sewing a quilt or something.

Cause as a culture we don't really allow for much craft. There's very little interpretation of our own work (not just our jobs, but all work we do) or others' as the work of craftsfolk. Can you even imagine a culture where table bussers and cashiers and computer programmers were all expected to think of their jobs as a meaningful craft - something they could perfect and control? I think that'd be swell.

While we were in Michiana, we stopped at this sorta touristy sorta Amish place that had this odd fleamarkety thing in an old barn.

( And this is what we saw there )

Feministe on teen parents and "success".