chattervox's blog

Garage sale of happy memories

Beezus and Ramona

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (Avon Camelot Books (Paperback))

My next-door neighbors were having a yard sale on Sunday, and the daughter, who's probably twelve now and has outgrown such nonsense, was selling two Ramona books for 25 cents each.  I couldn't resist, I was filled with too much nostalgia for when I loved these books as a kid.

The funny thing I never realized when I read these long ago, is the ridiculously long time span over which Beverly Cleary has written these books.  Ramona Quimby, age 8 was written in 1982, at least ten years later than I would have guessed.  When I was first reading this, it must have been some seriously right-off-the-presses hottness--I had no idea.  Beezus and Ramona, on the other hand, set 4 years earlier, was written in 1955.  Mind-blowingly, I found out from wikipedia while double-checking my dates that there is another Ramona book I have never heard of from 1999.  It is like a creepy reverse version of that really godawful Robin Williams movie, the one where he's a six-year-old dying from premature oldness disease in a sadly-poignant-yet-wackily-comedic manner, to think that spunky ostensibly-nine-years-old Ramona is actually 48 years old in that book.  Gah!  Weird factor eleven.

So if you pay attention, which I couldn't help doing this time, you can see the sands shifting under the small-town wholesomeness of the Quimby household: in 1955, mother is presumed to be home all day with the kids while father is off at some unspecific job, while by 1982 mom's the breadwinner while dad is working part-time and going back to college to become a children's art teacher.  That's cool.  Still, you have to be looking hard to see it move--there's a static archetypical atmosphere in their neighborhood that's almost as mythic as middle earth.  Even the approaching-millenial Quimbys live in a world where it's totally normal for a family with two kids to store a barrel of apples in their basement and to only go out for burgers once every couple months.  That's actually kind of cool.

Now I need to find one or more young children to give these away to again, since I have more than gotten my fifty cents worth.  (Anyone in Seattle need young person books?)

Blue

Blue (Three Colors Trilogy)

Last night we finally got around to watching Blue, the first film in Kieslowski's trilogy of films on the themes liberty, equality, and fraternity.  We've had this for the past two or three weeks; although in theory I was looking forward to finally watching it, I've kept putting it off.  My worst netflix habit is that I queue up lots of dark, elliptical, subtitled movies that I theoretically want to see, and then when they arrive we put off watching them for ever.  Eventually there's a whole stack of subtitled movies that we don't feel like watching right that moment, and we have to go rent Dodgeball from the video store.

Dodgeball - A True Underdog Story (Widescreen Edition)

I shouldn't have delayed watching Blue so long, though--like the decalogue, which I watched years ago and loved more than anything, it's subtle and profound, but without being too difficult or screwing with my head.  Which is not to say that I'm against difficult movies--I have a feeling even that they're theoretically more worthwhile somehow than accessible ones--but there's only the occasional evening where I come home from a day of work wanting to be put through the emotional wringer.  Blue I could watch any night of the week; in fact, I will probably queue it up again to rewatch in a few weeks, after I've seen White and Red, both of which I now can't wait to finally watch.   I feel like there's a lot that I didn't catch the first time that I want to watch more carefully, especially after seeing the DVD feature where Kieslowski explains what went into one 5-second scene with a sugar cube (if you watch the DVD, that extra feature is essential viewing).  And plus, Juliette Binoche is so pretty that it would be easy to spend two hours watching her clip her fingernails, let alone swim through water that has somehow cinematographically arrived at the apparent consistency of clear blue paste.

Dodgeball, incidentally, was very funny.

zen thought of the day: zerotasking

Today was the second time I've gone to this one zen meditation group not far from where I live.  The meditation is followed by a dharma discussion--where we take turns reading paragraphs from a book of zen talks, and discuss--and then tea and cookies.  It's very pleasant, I like the people I've met there very much, and I seem to need the peer pressure of being in a room with other people meditating just in order to sit the fuck down, so it's good for me.

You Have to Say Something

During today's dharma discussion, we read one of the talks from the book "You have to say something", and the topic of 'multitasking' came up.  The group leader, Kyoan Sandra, was saying that Zen discourages it.  Ideally, one would do only one thing at a given time, and do it as well as possible.   As a counter-point, another long-time meditator, John, told the following anecdote.  The well-known teacher Suzuki Roshi was eating breakfast and reading the newspaper.  One of his students came up to him and said, why are you eating breakfast and also reading the paper, when you have told us one should do only one thing, as well as possible, at any given time?  He replied (I'm paraphrasing here), what I am doing is eating-breakfast-and-reading-the-paper, and I am doing that one thing as well as I can.

I have been trying to keep my mouth shut as much as I can during these dharma discussions, because although I do love to hear myself talk, I don't think that my chattering on and trying to sound smart is going to help my quest for inner stillness etcetera.  While, on the other hand, listening to these short zen talks has been very good for me so far.  At this point, though, I could not help myself and interjected a short discursion.  How much multitasking one can do mindfully, I suggested, probably depends on how practiced a meditator one is.  Suzuki Roshi, I would imagine, could achieve a meditative state even while fixing dinner or doing the crossword or both.  There's no reason why meditation needs to happen while sitting on a cushion doing absolutely nothing with one's eyes shut.  For beginners like me, though, I added, even single tasks are distracting, so that I need to do that sort of zerotasking just in order to try to meditate at all.

John, who is a delightful gentleman and philosopher, commended me for inventing the word zerotasking, which gave me considerable ego gratification on account of how much I like to think that the stuff I say is diabolically clever.  So probably going to the sitting today was a net neutral as far as enlightenment is concerned.  To make up for this, I'm determined to sit and zerotask for a little bit of time, at least a couple mornings this week, since I've resolved to become relentless in my pursuit of happiness.

Hello world

Just dropping you a note to say hi.