A night at the Historic Hawaii Theater

If it seems like I spend a lot of time at the opera, it is because my aunt and mother buy sets of season tickets to support the theater, and every few months they send up the signal to pull on panty hose and get my head out of the oven of woe to join them for the evening. 

This was another minor opera based on a modern play, so it was bumped over to the older, smaller theater in downtown Honolulu. Whoever designed this place understood what a night at the theater was supposed to be like - festooned, gold-encrusted, and decorated with naked people. I love it a lot.

Nobody loves a minor, modern opera, though, and the seats were mostly empty. We waited until the lights dimmed and then sneaked up to the front of the balcony. By "sneaked," I mean, "walked right down past the usher, who reported us to the manager". The manager did not do anything, though, because our seat poaching set off a minor stampede of old ladies doing likewise, and they decided to pretend they had not seen it because they didn't want a beaded purse in the face. 

It was a really beautiful evening of discordant wailing, which I enjoyed because that wailing was not directed at me or coming from me, and also because I had had a gin & tonic for dinner.

Next season, I can maybe repay the favor, because the doorperson mistook me for a musician in the orchestra and tried to shoo me into the changing room, so all I need to do is hide my aunt and mother in a couple of cello cases and we're in. Maybe we could test it out on a dry run at the local movie theater or something. That's just smart planning.

Oh no

Guess who is having a meltdown? It is me!

"Okay, what is going on over there?" asked my officemate, watching the books arrive in shipment.

I hauled out the stack of preschool registration forms, vital record order forms, fee forms, tuition forms, aftercare forms, insurance forms, immunization forms, pickup authorization forms, debit enrollment fee forms,  and uniform order forms.

There is a bit of narration in The Gods Must Be Crazy that has stuck in my head like a fork since the first time I heard it.

Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. 

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again. And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.

Then we watched Babies over the weekend, which is a beautiful documentary with the same take-away, and I threw the remote and ran outside with my knitting. "I'm doing a Henry Thoreau! Civilization is a sham! Money is imaginary! Population is isolation!" Zenny was the only person home to hear me ranting, and she came outside to water her seedlings and check on the chickens while I cast on the sleeve for a sweater that Leif will never need. "You know, mom," she said, "If we are not using devices, you should turn off your phone." 4 year-olds, you guys. "This is the Beatles. They don't count." But I turned the Pandora station to Celtic folk music, as a sort of compromise. Fiddles are natural, being made of wood. Although the Beatles are also natural, being made of people. 

Mini-farming, then, while my resources are tied up with complicated self-created environments to make life easier. I would probably be better at growing plants if I didn't get defensive and take any soil-quality suggestions as personal criticisms. You're going to want to mix the cinder and check the acidity of your soil by - LALALA MIRACLE GROW. It is not a helpful trait to have in oneself. 

So far my mini farm consists of a lychee tree, a lilikoi vine, an impossibly huge oregano bush that has gotten out of control, a banana tree with six tiny bananas on it, three broody hens who won't get out of bed or lay eggs, and a scabby blind plague chicken. I'll hammer together some raised garden beds out of leftover lumber*, and maybe build a quarantine coop for this diseased chicken that persists in surviving. I'm rooting for the little thing, but I can't even post pictures of it because it is very ugly and people don't like seeing disfigured baby animals, as a rule. It should recover in a few weeks, if all continues to go well. Here is a very flattering drawing of the little thing - minus the weeping eye pus and crusty red scabs. 

Will report.

* And we don't even need to buy dirt, because I stopped raking and declared the back yard a compost pile. That is called urban sustainability.

A poxy chicken for your birthday, kid

A plague on our house


"Mom, I found a chick in the parking lot. I think it has an eye infection. Can we keep it?"
"Uh. Where's its mom? Try to reunite it with its mom first."
10 minutes later, "Mom, I found another chick with half a leg."
"Oh! Half a leg is okay. Did you reunite the sick one with its mom and rescue the crippled one? Birds can live with one leg." I imagined tiny crutches, a robotic prosthesis, a harness and wheel, a pirate peg.
"No, it stumped away too fast to catch, I still have the one with the eye infection."
"Of course you do. Alright, let's see it."


I immediately wished I had not seen it. It was either on the receiving end of a very brutal pecking, or it is infected with warty chicken-face plague. Or both. But it just doesn't seem interested in dying, so it is living in a cat carrier and I have replaced its mother with a hot potato wrapped in a sock while it eats medicated chick crumble and submits to antibiotic eye ointment. Everyone is under vigorous quarantine rules and has to scrub like a surgeon any time they touch the thing, so that our nice fat broody hens don't catch the pox.

I've named the chick Ruth. Baby Ruth. Because it looks like Sloth, from the Goonies. Sorry, chicken.


Tea time

And while I was juggling a diseased chicken, there was also a birthday party to pull off. It went off without a hitch, because all the disaster mojo was preoccupied with my mother, who was trying to make a tiered cake with cream cheese frosting.  The weather was too warm for soft icing, and all the layers tried to slither off onto the floor. She finally tied the whole thing together with candy, and the kids were SO EXCITED.

It was a good weekend to turn 4.

Those cheesecake squares are Japanese cotton cheesecake - which needs no crust, takes less cream cheese, and is completely amazing. Go make some.

real world impact: swastika edition

A couple of giggling teenagers approached the desk. "Hey, do you have any orange, yellow, green, and blue chalk?"

"Uh, no. Why?"

"We want to turn the swastika on the library sidewalk into a Windows symbol."

"WHAT."

I stomped outside. There were four target-shaped circles scratched deeply into the concrete, along with one big crappy swastika. 

And a smaller crappy target that they messed up and turned into a Toyota emblem

In my 10 years of public library work, we've had to clean up ketchup, smashed liquor bottles, ripped up plants, pried up chunks of asphalt that had been thrown at the windows, "SUCK A DICK" spray-painted across the library doors, and pee in the drop box. This is a first.

My boss came out to have a look. One of our regulars who sits outside the library saw us chuffing at it with our sneakers and hid her dossier of conspiracy theories under her arm, edging out of view.

"Hi, there. Do you know how this got here?"

"NO. WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME. I DON'T KNOW."

"We're going to have to call the police and prosecute whoever did this. Hate symbols are unacceptable."

She followed us inside. "Okay, I know who did it."

"Oh? How do you know?"

"Uh, DUH, because I KNOW. It was this guy. He's a Hells Angel from Australia. He's living at the resort."

"And he came here all the way from the resort to sit by the library and carve symbols into the sidewalk."

"Yeah. He's killed a man. With his hands. I don't want to tell you too much or he'll kill me, too."

"Can you describe him to the police when they arrive?"

"Yeah, I've got his picture right here," she held up her folder, which had a mug shot printed from the internet taped to the front. 

The police officer arrived a few minutes later, talked to our witness/suspect, and walked into the office to help us fill out the report, doing some mindful breathing and trying not to roll his eyes. 

"These things have been cropping up all over town," he told us.  

"It's those pesky Australian biker-assassins, up to no good," I said.

"Every time."

So now we have to figure out how to buff/chemically obliterate swastikas out of concrete. Life skills I never thought I'd have to learn.

The third foot falls. Twice.

Stomach flu.
Exploding toilet.
Long flight off a short staircase.

The law of threeness had been fulfilled. But then -

Burned my arm in the oven pretty badly.
Childcare provider resigned.
New childcare expenses wiped out the already-tight grocery budget. For one year, until Kindergarten, things are going to be very character-building around here.

The superstitious wind-chapped fishwife that lives in my ancestral brain is squinting at these things and warning, These are the first two sets of three. Plant potatoes and salt the haddock, there is more coming. The older and more superstitious peat-chopping asshole adds, You're paying penance for being a wicked wanton woman and coming home pregnant to resign yourself to a life of marriage you should have been grateful for in the first place. The even more ancient blue-tattooed Celtic seafarer spits, None of this matters at all, and in any case it's nothing a minor blood sacrifice wouldn't solve, you weenie.

So I bandaged the burn, spent our last grocery money on meat, dried goods, and preserves as if battening down for a long winter, and sketched out plans for this year's vegetable garden. A fleet of seedlings is sprouting along the windowsills. I've got every library book on sustainability at the ready. The house is safe, the children are cared for, we have health insurance and secure jobs, the chickens are... not actually producing eggs right now, but alive and happy at least. The lychee tree is absolutely covered in budding fruit, the bananas are coming in, and there will never be a hard frost or a bitter night.

It's fine. It's fiiiiiine. It's good, even. It is healthy to tighten your belt and scrape things together and bake your own bread. Even tighter than you already were. Hoik that belt until you scream. You are so wholesome! People buy tiny houses and gypsy caravans just to dig deeper, when all they really need is to be flat broke. WE WIN, HIPSTERS.

work in progress

I'm still on schedule with this book. Keep it simple, I tell myself. You do you, myself replies, getting really involved in drawing individual leaves and wicker.

 

 

Question du jour

One of our older regulars approached the reference desk, and I set my face to Extra Helpful, bracing for her usual question, "How do I copy and paste?" This time, though, she leaned over my desk, looking for something.

"Can I borrow your tape?"

"Sure, here you go."

"Thanks." She reeled out three long pieces. "I windburned my eyeball. The drops my doctor gave me are irritating, and I can't keep winking at everyone." She pressed the tape down over her eyelid and onto her cheek in an asterix, pinning her eye shut. "I fell asleep in front of the fan. You know how that goes."

I laughed. I hadn't told anyone that my hobble was from slipping in toilet water and falling down the patio stairs, but this woman knew a kindred spirit when she squinted at one.

Put it on my headstone

Last year, that epitaph nearly read, "Crushed to death while trying to carry a piano up a flight of stairs." This weekend I almost earned, "Electrocuted while charging through toilet water." And minutes later, "Snapped in two after sailing off the patio steps in the dark." It has been that kind of weekend.

We knew it was going to be that kind of weekend, because we were expecting house guests, and nothing sets the wheels of normalcy tumbling off their axles like a visit from friends you actually want to sit and talk to. The last time we visited this friend, Zenny left on a $6000 helicopter ride to the hospital before we'd even gotten dinner on the table. So on the first night, when 9pm rolled around and the little kids were in bed while the teens were safely shut up in the bedroom with a fog machine and a Ouija board*, I was recklessly optimistic.

"Okay, Zenny said her tummy hurt a bit and then bonked her head on the tub while brushing her teeth - but other than that, nothing terrible has happened!"
"Oh, no, you said it. Was that thunder in the distance?"
"No, that was artillery."
"Ahh. Very hygge."
"Cheers."

And then were was a retching noise, and Zenny vomited pizza all over the bed, down the inside of her pajamas, and into her own ears. I spent the rest of the night hanging barf laundry, running her back and forth to the toilet, rinsing her in the tub, and peeling her eyelids back to check her pupils for concussion. She said her tummy hurt before she bonked her head, I told myself, but myself was too tired and worried to listen. When she finally ran out of barf and fell asleep in the early hours, I jerked awake every 20 minutes to see if she was still alive. She was. And she woke up at 6am cheering for French toast.

The next night, after our guests were safely returned to the airport, we collapsed on the couch and exchanged a high-five.

"Okay, we had an all-night barf-a-thon and a bonk on the head, but other than that, nothing terrible happened!"
Artillery rumbled in the distance. "I'm sorry for whatever it was I just summoned."

At 1:00am, right on the nose, I woke up to a roar. I ran out of the bedroom and into water rushing down the hallway. Splashed into the bathroom and slapped on the light. The toilet was erupting from a burst pipe, blasting the floor with water. I tried uselessly to reconnect the pieces and hold the hole shut with my hands while Mike skidded outside to turn the water off. I grabbed all the towels I could find and slopped them down into the water, then remembered there were more on the laundry line outside. I ran through the kitchen with wet feet, charged out the back door, missed a step in the dark, slipped, and went sailing off the stairs like a swimmer in the middle of a flip turn. My leg tried to catch me, but it failed, and I came down on the concrete knee-first. Something in my leg tore. Yeah, but you've been working that pipe loose for days and didn't get it to go off while our guests were here, so HA, I said to the Fates. I said it silently, though, because I was laying on my own leg in a puddle of toilet water.

When I finally limped back inside with towels, Mike was bent over, catching his breath with his hands on his knees, trembling.

"Cheer up, it's just a flood. Good thing it didn't happen while we were at work, right? You okay?"
"Nope," he said, "I think I have Zenny's stomach flu."
"And the water is shut off."
"Yep."
"And the toilet pipes exploded."
"Yep."
"That's no good."
"Nope. Also, look." His hand came up and pointed at the electrical outlet by my feet. The water had risen to just below the plug holes.
"Hey! The Fates tried to kill me! Those assholes! If I had slept ten seconds longer I would have come running out into electrified toilet water! Of all the stupid ways to die, that was not among the options I had considered."
Mike bent over the tub and tried not to vomit.

 Adventures are never fun while you're having them, but at a certain point you tip over the edge into hysterics and laugh all the way to Home Depot with a swollen leg and a man with a stomach flu who left the corroded piece of plumbing he needed to replace on the trunk of the car.

The toilet is toileting again. The man is, too. Order is restored, and I will be making no more rash proclamations about how great things are going for some time.

Hope for sun, but dig trenches, etc.


* In high school, I bought a Ouija board after it fell on my head twice at Walmart while I was trying to flirt with a boy on a rival swim team. Over the next year or so, my friends and I had long, complicated, gruesome conversations with the thing, until one day my hand began jerking to "Y" over and over again. It never worked for me again, and even now it just continues to chant, Y, Y, Y. So I passed it on to the teens. They might have had better luck with it than I did if they hadn't convinced themselves they were talking to a dead Roomba trying to communicate in error codes and serial numbers.

Heathens!

It has come to my attention that the two lazy web sites I looked at for the Lent fasting rules were WRONG. They were being hip and unfaithful to the true and terrible suffering that is old-timey Lent. Catholics these days, I tell you.

So I'm going to add the really old rules as bonus points (source and source). I've been starving for 3 days so this sounds like a great idea or a terrible idea, I can't tell the difference anymore.

1. No spine-based animals AT ALL. Shrimpy-type creatures are ok on any day. No eggs or olive oil or cheese or cream. 

2. No eating AT ALL on the first Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday - which doesn't seem fair because Lent doesn't even start until Wednesday, and what about all the little pancakes studded with coins to choke on for Fat Tuesday? It does say people "fast completely on Monday and then eat only uncooked food (bread, fruit, nuts) on Tuesday evening." If uncooked foods can be bread, bread can be pancakes, so there's your loophole, folks.

3. No alcohol except for weekends. If you are thinking, "What the shit? That is bogus, these monks INVENTED beer," don't worry, they had the same thought, and they added provisions for toasting saints on designated saint-honoring days. Which is every day. So if you're going to tide yourself over with a beer in the evening, look up the dead person du jour and you're fine.

4. TWO meals a day on weekends, not three, but you can use oil and booze as part of those.

5. CHEESE FARE WEEK. Wait, this one is actually good! The last week before Easter, you get all the animal fats. Eggs! Milk! Butter! Cream! Still one meal a day, but that meal can be a stack of pancakes, so keep that shining beacon steady in your sights.


I was going to get on the scale this morning and see how three days of fasting was paying off, but my scale broke. Just for me. It tells my kids how much they weight and then goes blank when I stand on it. I guess it's Catholic.

Also I have learned that "oil your hair and fast in secret" is a thing. So now that the ground rules are laid out, I will be shutten-uppening. I will not be oiling my hair, though.

Super fun extra-orthodox Lent for the lazy and godless

It's that time again!

This year for my latent-Catholic-schoolgirl self-discipline challenge, I have decided to go full zealot and try the old-fashioned, time-tested, traditional methods of personal betterment/torture.

Orthodox Lent is mostly about fasting and giving up decadent foods. So you barely have to do anything, you just have to not do things. And the thing you have to not do is eat. How easy is that? You can do that while not doing all the other things you were supposed to, and you don't even have to exercise, because you'll be too weak! Simplicity itself.

Today is Day 1, so there is still time to join in. 

Here are the rules:

Monday-Saturday: ONE MEAL A DAY. You can drink tea/coffee and a piece of fruit in the morning and maybe a light beer/cup of broth in the evening so you don't give up or die. Your one meal should not have fatty meat or cheese/eggs or fried things. Think turkey sandwiches, salads, soups, and lean chicken/fish. Avoid whole milk or cream in your hot drinks. Easy on the mayo (why are you even putting mayo in your hot drinks?).

Friday: ONE MEAL AND NO MEAT. Have some beans and bread or a hearty noodle soup or something. 

Sunday: THREE MEALS HOORAY. Relax and eat with your family, but still lay off fatty meats and desserts.

That's it, really. Then you get to buy smaller pants for Easter and pretend you aren't happy about it because you did it all for spiritual improvement. That is specifically part of the orthodox instructions - pretending not to be happy about the weight loss. There's probably an ancient secret fist-bump for people who are happy about it anyway, but I can't find that bit in the doctrine. They probably got their heads chopped off by starving peasants, and didn't get a chance to write it down. 

Today I am having:

Your snacks should not add up to a regular meal, so I'm probably cutting it close with the snack bar. I'll add that to my main meal and say we're good for today. 

6 weeks to go. JUMP ON IN.