S'aright? S'aright!

From way back in my childhood past comes a popular culture phrase: "S'aright? S'aright!" What was funny about this? I don't know, but everyone in elementary school seemed to be saying it. I was wondering, where did this come from? So I looked it up online and found that it was from a comedian named Senor Wences, and he died at the age of 103 in 1999. Wow. He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show more than any other guest. What more can I say?

Harry's Last Stand

A friend says that every time he hears "Harry Potter" he gets a mental image of a big hairy guy sitting bent over a potter's wheel, making pottery. What kind of a pot does a hairy potter throw .... ? But that's a random sidetrack.

July 20, 2007

We went out to greet Harry at midnight for the last time. Big bookstore bashes were booming at the two large book seller chains in our town.

First stop, Barnes and Noble. Lines of people were stretched around the block away from the doorway in both directions. Apparently no one was getting into the store until midnight. That didn't look fun. We were looking for a party.

Next stop, Borders. We found a parking place and went inside.

First observation: Harry Potter's fans have grown up. I estimate the median age of the crowd to be 18 or 19 -- about the same age as Harry (who I think should be 18 now, but according to my daughter, is actually 17 in the last book; it must be because one of the books was a year behind schedule). Many wore assorted versions of witch and wizard costumes: capes, cloaks, wands and tall, pointed hats. They gathered in groups on the floor between the aisles, playing cards, looking at books, and socializing. One girl sat on the floor alone, working a Harry Potter word search puzzle.

"If I may please have your attention ...." the courteous voice over the PA system was not easy to make out from our location near the front door, but it continued, "Very soon we will be bringing out the books." The voice politely requested customers to clear the wide aisle down the center of the store, warning that, "the books are heavy, and once the pallets start rolling, they are very difficult to stop," and the voice did not want to be responsible for hurting anyone.

The three of us moved out of the aisle, but apparently the announcements weren't effective for some; the polite tone gradually broke down to grim threats of imminent smashings of small children that were certain to occur once the pallets laden with 700+ page Harry Potter books began to roll down the center aisle, squashing flat everything in their path! Those poor children would soon resemble the dead possum we passed on the highway today, and not even Harry's magic wand would be able to bring them back to life!

Across the soon-to-be-deadly aisle I caught the eye of a tall blond wizard I recognized as one of my students. He grinned and waved, then settled back to a conversation with the girl next to him seated on the floor.

While I was very interested in being witness to the inevitable violence that was certain once those books began their trek down the center aisle, I grew tired of the wait. With the knowledge that there would not be a book there for us (we had not reserved one in advance), we decided to take our opportunity for escape.

Next stop: Albertson's. Albertson's?? I remembered that the grocery store had Harry Potter books for sale in the past, and Heather and I talked Daniel into stopping there on the way home, much to his chagrin. By now it was just a few minutes before midnight.

There were few cars in the parking lot. Daniel waited in the car, expecting to soothe our dashed hopes with an I-told-you-so. Upon entering the store, Heather and I saw approximately 20 customers queued up -- we knew why! We smiled at each other, knowing who would be saying I-told-you-so this time! However, an employee at the head of the line was making a disappointing announcement: We have only six books, she said.

Only six? Yes, she verified. They sent us one case. When we opened it, there were only six books inside. They are big books.

Now things were beginning to get interesting. People at the front counted off. A tall middle-aged man who was approximately 7^th in line insisted that he had been one of the first six to arrive and he deserved a book. He began to challenge the other customers and assert his right to buy the sixth copy.

The small, round, cherub-faced employee was now forced into the role of police officer/mediator. I wondered if her Albertson's employee training had prepared her for this role. Soon another employee, a taller and equally fresh-faced young man, came forth to the fray. He was obviously deeply troubled -- and provoked to resistance -- by the older man's angry demeanor. The two men dug in their heels and positioned metaphorical antlers in an age-old contest of strength and will.

Heather and I, having mastered the Buddhist principle of non-attachment, stood by in observance, with bemused smiles on our faces. I watched with some wonder as members of the crowd displayed varying reactions to the conflict, even those who were not involved in the dispute, and gave up their position willingly. One couple stomped out, the man saying, "Come on, this is Harry Potter! It's supposed to be fun!!"

After they had all determined their rightful places in line, at issue was the common economic problem of how to distribute limited resources. Should family members be allowed to buy a book for each person, or should they take only one to share until tomorrow, when the books would certainly be readily available around town? I casually threw in my 2 cent opinion for the latter solution, even though we weren’t in the running for a book. But the antagonist had now made himself so unpopular that it was impossible for anyone to rule in his favor – even if it would be the most fair and just outcome.

As we left the store, I saw the disgruntled customer scanning something at the checkout counter, and I thought I heard someone ask him if he was satisfied now. His response was not conciliatory: “I won’t be back anyway. Not to this store.” By his tone, it sounded like perhaps he had secured the book. We left not knowing whether or not he got the sixth copy.

Now Heather was in the mood to continue the hunt. It’s not that she cared so much about getting the book right then; if that were true, she would have reserved one during one of her frequent bookstore visits. She just didn’t want the fun to stop.

Daniel agreed to try one more Albertson’s store not far away. But this too was a dry well. They told us they had received 20 books and 15 had been on reserve. We decided to buy some cookies anyway. The young man in line in front of us had the book and was reading the prologue. He said, “I’m going to read the ending,” then seeing my horrified expression, he qualified it by explaining his plan to play a joke on his roommate. He would walk into the apartment with the book open to the last few pages, feign shock at the ending, and toss the book to the ground in disgust, saying, “So that’s how it ends!”

*******************************************

July 21, 2007

This morning, Heather got up and asked us to take her out to get the book. On a whim, I phoned the store where Heather was scheduled to work at 1:30, to ask if they had any copies. Irony of ironies, they told me yes, so I hopped in the car and drove down there, only to find them sold out.

Later this afternoon we bought one at Costco. They had hundreds stacked on pallets 12 feet square and 4 feet deep. I also brought home two of the cardboard cases the books had been shipped out in; they are a good size for storage, and they're cool because they have the book title and release date stamped on the outside. On the box it says "10 books." It seems as if the people at Albertson's had not been completely honest about the scarcity of this resource. Perhaps they were hoarding some for themselves. Hmmm...

And that’s how the story of our family's search for Harry Potter ends, for the last time.

Fun with Jury Duty

Well, this morning in the jury assembly room, they assigned us to groups named after animals. This is really true. Today was big cat day. (The lady told us that yesterday was shark day.) I thought, good, because I like cats! She drew our names at random. I was in the Tiger group. I would have preferred Cheetah or Bobcat, but Tiger was okay.

Then we watched a video about jury duty in the United States. Then I got a snack and settled down with my computer to wait to be called. A few minutes ago the announcement:

Tigers have been excused. She said not to take it personally. They kept the Cheetahs and the Bobcats. So now I'm going home.

This is really true. You see, school isn't the only place where people are placed in arbitrary groups... well, it's worth a smile in this ironic world we call LIFE.

I'm going home now.

Sadness

Flicks 'n ' Pics closed. Yesterday was the last day they were open. In the morning before they opened I stopped and photographed the familiar neon sign, the notices scotch-taped to the door. I was shooting into the sun. Maybe that's why my eyes watered. I kneeled to get a different angle. I thought about an altar, a prayer.

I wrote a message on a card from a museum in France. In the evening on the last day I went in and there was nothing apparently different. The neighbors were perusing the shelves. The shelves had space where the movies were checked out, expecting to be returned. The owner was there.

So many memories. I walked through the foreign film section. I looked at the French films. I walked through the kiddie room. I looked at the shelves from which, with my little daughter, I had rented so many VHS movies, so many Disney movies, so many unusual children's movies, like the Russian folk tale, "The Magic Pony." So many times, stopping by on the way home to rent a movie for a rainy winter Saturday night. So many movies rented for my French classes and the mulitcultural class I taught.

I was too sad to stay.

Hanging out at home in Springfield, OREGON, with the Simpsons!

Vote for OREGON!

http://usatoday.com/life/movies/simpsons-contest.htm

What do you think about the Cuban situation?

The summer this picture was taken, my sister and I were staying with our grandparents in San Luis Obispo, California. Kennedy was president. It was the year of the Cuban missile crisis. Among adults I often heard the phrase, "What do you think about the Cuban situation?" And then I would tune out. What did the Cuban situation have to do with me, and my life?

When my grandfather looked me directly in the eye that summer, and asked me that question, I stared blankly back at him. I was tongue-tied, and I felt ashamed that I didn't know more about it. It was an adult question, and my grandfather expected me to have an answer. I was far from being an adult, but Grandpa was aware that the "Cuban situation" could affect me and my generation for years to come, and it was my responsibility to participate in the discussion, to have an opinion, and to stand up for what was right.

Despite his lack of formal education, my grandfather was extremely intelligent, acutely interested in politics and the state of the country. He was also fiercely democratic, hard-working, and proud of it. I felt I let him down that day when I could not reply. It was many years before I understood the impact of this historical event.

My grandfather was a house painter. He also made furniture and enjoyed drawing and painting pictures in his spare time. During the great depression he had worked for a furniture company. He was fortunate to have a job, and gratefully accepted the payment he received at the end of each week. His employer would ask, "How much do you need for your family this week?" That's what he was paid. Usually it was just enough for some bread and groceries – much less than what his work was worth. But if the workers hadn't agreed to this, there would have been no job at all, because the company would have closed.

Grandpa told many stories about his childhood, growing up in the logging camps in Big Lake, Washington. He was tall, strong, and very good-looking. Ever playful, he loved to laugh, and he appeared to be 20 years younger than he actually was.

Grandpa was a firm believer in the "power of positive thinking." He believed that our thoughts become manifest in our lives. He was always optimistic about whatever came his way in life. While he had hardships, it was this outlook that carried him through. He inspired me to look at the world that way too.

Charismatic, he loved people. He would reach out and try to make social connections wherever he went and thrived when interacting with others. He often talked to strangers, realizing that no one is truly a stranger, and he made friends wherever he went.

Imagine what it would be like to go to a museum and find a photo of yourself there. That happened to my grandfather!

Sometime in the 1980's, he visited a historical museum in Washington State. On the wall he saw a photo of himself; it was a class photo, sepia-tinted rows of children sitting in front of a wooden building staring out at the camera (certainly a huge box apparatus on a stand, photographer hunched beneath the black cloth, admonishing them to hold perfectly still). Because Grandpa so loved people, he had a crystal clear memory of all the names and personalities of all of his childhood friends, and many of the adults in his life. He was able to help the museum people with documentation of the people in the photographs.

I wish I had been able to answer his question that day. Because he knew how to play and have fun I loved him. Because he was interesting and smart and knew how to make things, I respected him. I believed he could have been president. He understood hard work and the satisfaction in seeing work manifest in ways that make the world a better place. He understood what it means to sacrifce for the common good.

But my grandfather didn't need to be president to make a difference in the world. Like the vast majority of Americans, he made his contribution to society in other ways. He found his niche in satisfying work, and he had a positive impact on countless people in his 98-year lifespan. He was born in 1901. He died in the last days of 1998, just before his 98th birthday.

We'll never have a president like my grandfather. I only wish our leaders would understand people like him. And I hope that the work and effort of millions like him – the working class of our country – to bring democracy and a high quality of life to all Americans, will be respected and preserved, for generations to come.

JFK

You Are Most Like John F. Kennedy

You live a fairy tale life that most people envy. You are charismatic and you don't understand why. Although you were blessed with good luck from birth, you never cease to champion the rights of those who are less fortunate. When you are gone the world will experience a great loss.

What Modern US President Are You Most Like?

Concerning the Blog Bog: What technology has done to writing

blog (noun)

1. An online journal, typically comprising links to current news stories or other Web resources, and/or social and political commentary, and/or a personal diary, sometimes with replies from readers or RSS feeds.

to bog (verb)

Intransitive

1. (often with down) to become mired or stuck (especially in mud).

2. bog off (slang) to go away.

3. to bog up - to make a mess of (col).

Transitive

1. (often with down) to cause to become mired or stuck, especially in mud

bog (noun)

1. An expanse of marshland.

2. (slang) A toilet.

Here I am stuck in the blog bog again.

Words on screen. Lightning-fast I type them. Spelling errors magically correct themselves before my eyes. Zip zip! Writing is faster than thought and thoughts appear bluntly in bleak cruel incomplete incoherence. There it is for all the world to see: My spelling is perfect, but my mind is all wrong! EEEK!

Whatever happened to the privacy of writing?

Think back 200 years: Writing, what joy! What freedom! Feather plume in hand, dip in ink and take flight! A feather carries lightly on the wind, the thoughts, dreams, fantasies and wild wanderings of the mind. For birds, feathers are hollow for effortless riding of the wind; for writers, hollow to form a reservoir for ink. When the ink line dwindles on the paper, pause briefly to re-dip, then it’s back to the air currents. Splatters and splashes may punctuate the rough draft, but don’t interfere with words spewing forth on vellum like buttons from a jar: Colorful and contrasting, a clattering array of silver, bone, wood, and shell, later to be sorted and organized.

Stop! Enough fantasy! It’s a pretty image, but feathers are meant for bird-flight. In truth, writing with feathers is earth-bound and laborious. Human thought is quicker than a pen governed by gravity. However, the push of pen nib across the paper’s surface has a physical quality to be enjoyed for its own sake, and the writer’s effort has a specific, usually formal, purpose. It ends with the painstaking production of the final document; the artist-writer crafts it with beauty and solemnity, creating a product suitable for viewing. It is as beautiful to behold as it is thought-provoking to read.

The room is still. No TV, no chatter from the radio. The dimness of the room, the golden lamp glow, are comforting, reassuring. There’s no awareness of the missing-ness of TV, radio, record player, CD player, computer or cell phone. You just write.

The twentieth century converts the plume to fountain pen. Fuel stops are greatly reduced. The ink well is relegated to the artist’s shelf, while the writer pauses pen scratches only long enough to change the cartridge. Soon writers have an array of writing tools at their literal fingertips: ballpoint pens, pencils, or a heavy black typewriter.

Imagine you are there, mid-20th century, let’s say, 1952. What are you writing? A journal? A letter? A newspaper article? A poem or story? Why are you writing? To record events or organize domestic needs? To express affection to someone who will receive your message a week or month later? To express an opinion to the community via typeset printing press?

Whatever the case, you know who is going to read this thing you wrote down. You may do some revision later, but your thoughts are coherent as you write, because time is vast, the pace of life in step with the pace of human thought. When you work, it’s between you and the paper. It’s personal. You spend time with it. You live with it; you interact with it in a physical way. This combination of processes mental, corporeal, and spiritual is to writing, as water, earth and sunshine are to growing plants.

Now we have computers in all their incarnations: laptops, palm pilots, digital-this and digital-that. We have illustrations and graphs at our fingertips, at the ready for insertion into our documents. Finally, there are no more ink spatters or scribbles and scratches. Revision takes place during creation. Best of all, everything we write can be shared with the world via weblog, AKA “blog.” This is better, right?

I saw a TV show recently, Dr. Phil or Oprah, where a woman was asking for help. She had too much stuff. She couldn’t throw anything away. She was depressed. The camera panned her home, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, piles of papers, pathways so narrow they could barely navigate from the living room to the kitchen. The woman was bogged. She couldn’t pull herself out, couldn’t arise or lift even a finger to begin to sort or toss or make any sense of the mountainous gluttonous piles. The reporter picked up a single used sock, and suggested this was a good place to start – toss that in the trash can. “Oh, but I could find a use for that,” the woman said, “I could polish my dishes with it.” This is an actual psychological disorder, called Narcissistic Personality Disorder! A product of too-much-stuff-consumer-culture, an abnormal cell growth, a cancer. Humans survived for centuries on thrift. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a healthy adaptation gone awry.

The blog bog is like that. Write think write thinkwritethinkwritethinkquestion . . . question? I have a question! I don’t have to wait for the answer! I don’t even have to get out of my chair, or reach out to the encyclopedia on the shelf next to my computer. Google! Down the Google Path! La la la la-la! What a merry trail I trod, wherever curiosity leads . . . but wait! What was the question? Oh yeah, I’m writing a paper about the blog bog! But it was very interesting to read so many experiences about too much stuff. So . . . copy paste copy paste copy paste . . . now I have a place to put it – so interesting, all this interesting stuff, I really don’t want to forget it, so I copy paste copy paste and it’s safely tucked away in a saved MSWord document called “Saved stuff for paper #4.” Now I feel better. I’ll have it forever – in case I need it – unless . . .

. . . computer crash, disc malfunction, file overload, mind overload, I forgot where I put it, lost it in an overzealous trash-purge!

But everything is fine, safe, protected. Just make a backup file. Put it on your thumb drive! Dragging files back and forth, saving saving saving, doubling and saving, backing up and saving – then the dreaded question:

‘This folder already contains a folder named ‘OWP’ If the files in the existing folder have the same name as files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?’

The wrong answer could be FATAL! Precious files forever vaporized! Eeek! Stress! Fifteen files later, all labeled “OWP” or variations thereof, and I’m beginning to fear for my sanity! Perhaps someone has already named this version of mental illness. Bloggagooglebog Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am NOT going to search for that. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS PAPER.

I want to finish all my OWP assignments now, so I can read what everyone else has written. I want to have time to think about what they write, and send them comments. I want to do this before the end of the workshop. Also, I want to go further out into Blog World, travel abroad, read blogs from France, Canada, Africa. It’s like going inside the minds of people from every imaginable corner of the earth. No more wondering what other people are thinking. Now we know – at least the thoughts they want to blog at us.

And so, I’m done. This paper is over. I’m going to post it on the blog. Oh no. That means everyone can read it. EVERYONE. There it is. My crazy mixed up bogged up blogged up mind, exposed for all the world to see. Not to mention my sentence fragments, punctuation errors, and erroneous writing style in 2nd person P.O.V. Or is it 1st person?

Stuck. Wedged. Jammed. Lodged. Trapped. Having difficulties. Blocked. EEEK! If you’ve read this far, you know it all.

Here goes.

Author's note: I wrote this in the Oregon Writing Project, July 2005.

http://owp.uoregon.edu/