My Ideal Job

Happy Labor Day. 

Since I am out of work and still looking, I have been “visualizing” my ideal job! Ta da! It exists!  But somebody else already has it. The Bloggess!

Yes, she apparently gets paid to write about all the categories of her existence, including momhood, anxiety, sex, and silliness. And she has a book coming out in 2012. I am totally buying it. Or using my free Amazon coupon thingey to buy it. I know she will forgive me, because she is generous as well as funny. But she might mock me for writing for free. For that, I guess I forgive her.

We all have anxieties, OK?

Anyhoo, it’s possible I should also visualize more practical or likely job opportunities, since The Bloggess has already created and taken my ideal job, and good for her! 

OK, so my other ideal job is Poet in Residence. I reside here and write poetry, and get paid.

Or Generalist in Residence. (As I can also teach short fiction, literary editing, and acting, etc.)

In this ideal position at a local college or university, I teach but am not required to attend department or committee meetings.  I am paid to teach workshop classes with no paper grading, and to set up readings and performance events for the students, inviting the town, and having lots of fun. The students would be traditional and nontraditional college students and members of the community who write, act, or whatever. 

We would have a big event every year and invite The Bloggess as our guest speaker. She can say whatever she wants, and would be free to stage another zombie apocalypse.

Another version of the ideal job is one in which I have my own office, fresh flowers in a clear glass vase, and a friendly candy dish (wrapped candies for all, to avoid germ spreading).

It’s a job in which I get to wear more of the clothes in my closet, all saved for a rainy day on which I go to work and get paid. Right now, I wear jammies on into the day, forget to eat breakfast, and then, if I have to go beyond my back yard or my front stoop, put on an outfit I might wear off-and-on for the next week, until there’s some real reason to wash it.

I did have a reason to wash my clothes after creating the homemade compost bin from a garbage can, and after climbing up a ladder into the lilac tree to pull down the seedpods of sweet autumn clematis, which resemble the lady parts of the Wicked Witch of the West and all her female progeny. I can’t even find images of these on the Internet, and I know why!

Fear not, I am actually making a go of it with freelance work and visualizing labial seedpods opening to spread money into my eagerly cupped hands. 

I am furiously happy to blog and write poems for free.

See also Labors of Love at Escape Into Life.

4 Humors

Happy Labor Day weekend. I am in a holiday humor, as Shakespeare would say. Specifically, as Rosalind would say in As You Like It.

By coincidence, 1) I am (still) reading The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown, in which a character, Rose, has been named for Rosalind, and 2) I have been looking into the four humours, or humors, as in the four main bodily fluids connected to personality types (now) and physical health (in ancient Greek and Roman times), dating back to the famous Dr. Hippocrates.

Based on the looks of these guys, and the bodily fluids connected to them, I so do not want to be melancholic, but I probably am. And phlegmatic, too. Sigh....

I am looking into the 4 humors again, a concept I encountered several times during my formal education, thanks to a wonderful essay assignment in my daughter's honors English course. Yes, they have to determine their main personality type using characteristics related to the four humors. I went to the school open house on September 1, so I know my daughter is supposed to read her draft aloud to me this weekend! Yay! And her retired English teacher grandmother will be here to listen, too!

Reading aloud is such a great composition and revision strategy!

We did some "prewriting" together, by way of a conversation about how she perceives herself--easygoing, responsive--and how I perceive her: those two, yes, and sociable. She is clearly of a sanguine humor--the happy guy under the phlegmatically happy guy.

So her main bodily fluid is the blood, a good fluid to have. Mine is black bile (ew!), for melancholy, or phlegm. Really, who wants to be ruled primarily by black bile and phlegm.

I am OK with being associated with water and earth, though, among the 4 elements. Annoyingly, in the course of this wikipedish 4-humors research, I ran into the Enneagram again, and took the test, the long version and the quickie comparison version, and I am an annoying mix, as usual, of all the things I do and don't want to be. (Sorry, Enneagram Institute. You are cool, I am not.) First encountered this as entertainment with group of friends--fun discussion, etc. At least I am a consistent mix of personality types in the 1-4 range: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist. But no one clear thing. That riles my black bile. That brings my phlegm nowhere near boiling point.

Garbage Can Compost Bin

Here is the video and transcript for making your own compost bin from an old garbage can! (It's at About.com, after a little commercial.)  The woman telling us how is Danielle Lessovitz, and she makes it look so easy!  

It is so easy. 

I now have a home made compost bin sitting in the sandbox under the old tree house, "cooking" up some compost from old leaves (stuffed by squirrels into an old Dogloo), fresh grass clippings, fruit & veggie peels, coffee grounds, and some newsprint torn into strips.

My variation on the video instructions is to use (or have your handyman husband use) an electric drill to poke the holes because 1) individual nail hammering would take two days and 2) my particular kind of plastic had too much give to take the nail.

Also, my can is not round, and I can't roll it, so I have to stir it now and then.  Have stick, will stir.

In future years, gradually, I hope to build a little wall of flowers and blooming vines around the old treehouse to mask this compost bin. Wish me luck with that. In the meantime, it's still fairly unobtrusive behind a mature sweetgum tree, and masked from the neighbors by their big pine. I realize I could turn the treehouse frame into a grape arbor if I were really ambitious.

But I am not really ambitious. 

Also, I can't really plant morning glory there, or let the sweet autumn clematis take over, tempting and aromatic as the latter would be, because electrical lines hang too near, and the power company would not be happy with me. 

But wait! I've just imagined the tree trimmers for the power company coming, finding the vine, an incident involving electrocution on a metal ladder, and **Zap!** a new superhero: Sweet Clematis Man!

That's it for Slattern Day!

Choose a Lane

"Choose a lane," is something my excellent-driver of a husband sometimes utters when driving behind someone who has not. We are plagued by what I call "provincial driving" where I live, people who are following their own local routines, living in the center of their own little world, driving down the center of the road, even a road divided into lanes.

My husband is known for his laid-back nature and the thing we call "Cuban time," which does not require getting anywhere fast or strictly on time (although he has been cured of this by me when it comes to theatre and sports events, work, poetry readings, doctor and dentist appointments, movies, and stuff involving other people and their feelings), but  even he grows impatient and testy driving behind someone who will not choose a lane.

I stay in my lane and signal all lane changes, as it's the law, it's polite, and it's much safer to let other drivers know your intentions, right? Unless you are a self-absorbed, provincial driver who doesn't want anyone to know you are just about to turn (left or right) in case you speed up to pass him before he does, which this same driver might do as soon as I signal my intentions.

This is a life lesson for me that I never quite learn. Do not signal your intentions. Someone will take advantage of the situation to speed up and endanger you and everyone around you.  Am I overreacting here?

Anyhoo, the other side of this...road...is that provincial drivers who are better drivers than I am are alert to the selfish and even the spaced-out habits of other local drivers. And might I just mention that it is not good to be driving while writing a novel in your head, or vice versa, as I learned the other morning while driving 30 mph through a firmly red light after dropping my daughter off at school.

OMG, I'm a provincial driver. And, worse, a creative type trapped in a car and a routine that lulls me into thinking I'm safe and can be thinking of other things while driving.  Life lesson, life lesson, life lesson. Learn it! 

Anyhoo, no drivers or pedestrians were harmed while revving up the engine for this blog entry. Thank you, provincial drivers everywhere.

Eventually, though, please choose a lane.

Goodbye, August! Goodnight, Moon!

Goodbye, August, on this first day of September! And goodbye, August Poetry Postcards, a wonderful project supported by and Concrete Wolf and Lana Hechtman Ayers and guided by Paul Nelson.

You can learn more about the poetry postcards project, annually in August, at their blog, where you can also keep up with the weather in Auburn, Washington, and the current phase of the moon.

The new moon for the new month was a little earlier this week, and September begins with a waxing crescent!

I did write and send out 31 short poems on postcards, one a day for August, though I started a little early, as recommended, in late July, working around a week in Michigan. Postcards were surprisingly hard to find, compared to their abundance in my youth, on traveling vacations, but I got a bunch of art & photography postcards all at once at The Garlic Press, a kitchen and gift shop in my town.

As suggested, I did write about place and in response to the card's image, but this always mixed with whatever was going on right in front of me.  So "place" often turned into my back yard, its gardens, along with the postcard image, and sometimes also my reading.  For instance, here is "Omnivore," clearly influenced by The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, and also in response to William Eggleston's color photograph of a man in Memphis, TN eating a fast-food hamburger circa 1965-68. (You can find the image here in Monographs, the Los Alamos book samples.)

Omnivore

Snip his fingernail
and you'll find
he's eating corn, born of corn,

singing corn in the cottony south.
The chickens ate corn, the cow;
the fish are taught to love corn.
And you'll wail
along to his corny country song,
red, white, and blue.

This wouldn't be strictly true circa 1965-68, but it would pertain since 1980, and to a fast-food hamburger meal eaten by an omnivorous country singer now. Also under the influence of reading, I created a female superhero named Nitrogenia!

It was fun, as fellow postcard poet and workshop participant Candace says, to send the poems off with no pressure at all to be perfect. And wonderful to connect to other poets by pen and stamp!

I received, and am still receiving, postcard poems from people in the Northwest, Canada, California, and New Jersey. And Candace, here in the corny Midwest.

Thanks to ESO and Andy Strappazzon for the crescent moon. Thanks to Tomruen  for the animated moon. (If it's not moving, click it!)  Goodnight, moon!