Music and Homework, Learning how to do these things again

I've been listening to music. And working on a homework assignment. How is it that I used to do this all the time?

Back then I had a room all to myself, and I didn't have to worry about waking someone up from his nap. I could listen to it loudly, I could listen to it quietly, and sing as much as I wanted. It didn't bother anyone. At the time my homework assignments involved line drawings made with T-square and angle, cutting mat board with a utility knife, pasting drawing to page, creating templates for fabric design, laborful but mindless tasks that left mind open to experience sound. My friend Sharon once pointed out to me that each of us only lacked a couple of credits to have an minor in art. Back then I didn't have to make dinner for anyone but me.

I remember when I got my first copy of Five Wise Virgins by 100 Portraits. I lay on the floor of a housemate's room with my eyes closed and listened and cried and prayed through the entire thing. It is a recording that is too rich to listen to over and over again, but just the thing when you're feeling a little lonely, or need a different kind of gateway to worship.

These days I listen to music only when my children will let me, while I'm washing dishes, folding clothes or taking the dog for a walk. It used to happen sometimes while I was waiting without patience for something on the computer to load. Once or twice I closed my eyes and listened while the boys were down for their naps, but not in a while. It takes me thirty exposures before understand all the words. Occasionally it takes that long for me to decide whether I like what I'm hearing or not.

I love music. I love lyrics. I'd like to learn how to listen to both again.

My husband is only interested in a certain level of technical proficiency combined with adaptability when it comes to music. Trained as a jazz musician and admiring the likes of Charlie Parker and Michael Brecker, if a performance isn't compositionally nuanced and layered it is unlikely to win his approval. I hope he doesn't object to my characterization as such. I'd hate to learn that I had misrepresented him.

I am much more interested in lyrics. I want to hear songs that express the highs and lows of human experience, though narrative songs in the form of ballads drive me batty.

The homework I worked on today came from the exercises at the end of the Adler/Van Doren book. In one such exercise for the testing of elementary reading I was asked to comment on a rather lovely quotation from Sir Isaac Newton, something he said as an old man:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I was supposed to comment on this in 250 words. I could only manage 169.

Newton makes this statement because all of his scientific and mathematical pursuits were a matter to him of great pleasure. It was never his intention to make a great name for himself. He did not particularly enjoy the acclaim of his peers or public, or appreciate being made the center of controversy. All he really wanted was to be left alone to pursue his investigations, which for him were a matter of play. The smooth pebbles and pretty shells he refers to are the objects of his desire, which is discovery, and discovery undertaken only for its own sake. He understood only too well that the answering of a singe question could only lead to other questions being asked. Each new discovery was like a water molecule in the vastness of the ocean. He believed that truth existed and that the work he did contributed to mankind's knowledge of that truth, but he also recognized its infinitude and in fact I would think that he was pleased by it.

If I got nothing else out of the exercise at least I got this one lovely quote, which presents me with another way of looking at the world.

A Consideration of Words

This afternoon as I was driving home from the library I was thinking about words. I described something as splendid this past week. On second thought, splendid probably wasn't the right word to use when describing your admiration for a regional vernacular. Something that is splendid is covered in splendor, is it not? Like the grass covered with the final glow of the sun as evening falls.

Sometimes I want to say that a thing is terrific. But then I pause because it isn't terrific. There is no terror associated with the crayon drawings that my son produces during his daily quiet rest time.

Doesn't fantastic mean that something is too much to be believed? It is a fantasy, which is the equivalent of what Napoleon Dynamite promised his classmates, that he would make their wildest dreams come true. I check with IMDB. Was it Napoleon who promised that, or was it Pedro? My hopes are dashed. I remembered it wrong. Pedro made the promise; Napoleon only suggested it to him.

Here's one that Napoleon actually did use. Copied from the famous quotes page on IMDB.com: “That suit, it's... it's incredible.” Doesn't incredible mean that something really is not to be believed? As in, my credulity can only be stretched so far?

Smashing? I know I'm getting really British here, but could smashing mean that all the matter in the universe is so overwhelmed that it explodes under the weight of existence? Something that is wonderful if full of wonder. Something that is overwhelming in actual fact cannot be borne.

Impossible? Well, I think impossible is pretty straight-forward, even though it is usually used to describe things that really aren't impossible.

Can you think of any others?

I was about to quote something familiar which was said by C.S. Lewis, and that I'm fairly certain I have quoted in these pages before about the death of words. A quick internet search finds references to an essay with that title which I have never read. Lewis also writes about “verbicide, the murder of a word...” in Studies In Words, which I have read. But in thumbing through the introduction to Studies in Words this evening (for it is Monday evening as I write), I find something else to quote instead.

After hearing one chapter of this book when it was still a lecture, a man remarked to me 'You have made me afraid to say anything at all'. I know what he meant. Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are. (6, Lewis's formatting maintained)

Isn't it wonderful how human Lewis is? That in the middle of a book that would seem technical to most people, he inserts something as regular as an anecdote, but an anecdote that ties in with the matter at hand? He goes on to describe something similar to what I have been describing in my own undereducated way above, by which I mean to say that Lewis speaks with the authority of study, while I speak only from the considerations of my own mind, not having taken the time or trouble to find authoritative meanings for any of the words I have been pondering.

Inflation is one of the commonest [forms of verbicide]; those who taught us to say awfully for 'very', tremendous for 'great', sadism for 'cruelty', and unthinkable for 'undesireable' were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of is an example.... (7)

This is exactly the sort of thing I have been thinking about this week, and it is exactly the sort of exaggerative usage that I am continually guilty of, almost to the extent that I am “afraid to say anything at all.” Is there a whole lot of chance that I am going to weed these superlatives out of my speech? No. Is there much chance that I will weed them out of my writing? Probably not. But I am still going to be caught up short whenever terrific or terrible are the words I feel compelled to choose.

The Story of Our Week (Oh, boy, It's a Long One)

Last week did in fact turn out to be a trying week.

On Saturday I saw that the maintenance required light that had been blinking in my van for three months had suddenly changed from blinking to solid. This was not a good sign. I had been supposed to take it in for an oil change the week that I was sick, and then we had VBS every morning, and then the weekend, so I had to trust my children to ride in a vehicle that I feared, for about five seconds, might not be safe. Michael had commented that the engine sounded different and that it seemed to lose power as he was driving only days before.

Took the van in to the shop. I would have stayed and waited for the oil change if I didn't think there was a good chance something else would have to be repaired. Got a ride home from the shop with one of their drivers and practiced my question-asking skills all three miles. It wasn't difficult as he was the kind of man who takes a question and runs with it. Nice guy.

They were able to fix it for us that day, but it cost about two-hundred dollars more than I had hoped to pay for a repair.

That evening around dinner time we failed to notice that our yellow labrador was needing to go out. Parker, my four year old, was the first to notice her peeing on the rug in the back room, which is also our laundry room. She had never had an accident in the house before. Luckily our sometimes daytime house guest was there, and he was able to tell us what to do to clean it up. After we mopped up as much as we could with towels, he poured baking soda all over the wet area to wick up the moisture. This was scraped and swept, and in the morning the residue was dry enough to clean up with the vacuum cleaner.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday occurred without either positive development business-wise, or negative incident. A good friend brought us dinner. Michael and I got a couple of hours out of the house to attend a short seminar. The children and I met my sister at CHOM and at the public library.

Then Friday. Ah, Friday.

Because I had felt pretty crummy all week, and our laundry room was being used for test-taking by our guest, the laundry had been piling up. In fact I hadn't even folded towels from the weekend before. As Michael left the house for play testing with Jim and errands, I finally put on a load of clothes and got the children ready to go outside.

We go outside. I see an unaccountable puddle of water streaming from the basement. It looks like it has soap in it. I walk into the basement to investigate, noticing that a lot of the moisture seems to be originating around the water heater, but there's nothing wrong with the water heater. Next thing I know, a rush of water falls from the raw ceiling above the heater. I run upstairs to see what's going on, only to find a stream of water growing out from underneath the washing machine, the wooden floor boards becoming warped around the edges. Since the load of laundry in the machine is in its final cycle, I have no choice but to let it run, even as I have a pretty good idea of what is going on below.

Michael's gone. The children are outside alone. A friend of mine is coming in a couple of hours to cut my hair.

I could drag this out and give you all the details, but the main thing that happened in the hours before my friend got there and Michael made it home from errands was that a $600 car repair that didn't bother me at the beginning of the week suddenly became a frighteningly large expense, as I contemplated the possibility of an even more expensive plumbing charge. For a moment I envisioned the floor collapsing and the siding falling off the back of the house. For a moment I couldn't help but think about the disparity between our income and expenses for the month. We're fine, but it really was a rough couple of hours alone in the house with two tired, and I do mean tired, children.

On Saturday I washed all of our dishes by hand (with help) because I was afraid that running the dishwasher would overload the plumbing. On Saturday Isaac's diaper leaked into my bed, wetting our one and only mattress pad, making the laundry situation all the more urgent. On Saturday Michael worked on the plumbing, and worked on the plumbing, and worked on the plumbing, with the benefit of some good advice from our sometimes house guest, but the problem wasn't immediately fixed. It wasn't a surprise that a plumbing issue would require a lot of trial and error, but it was still disheartening.

More help, this time from my Dad, after which the problem was solved without our having to call in the professionals, and without my having to leave the house to do laundry or grocery shopping or anything.

This was the week that I was dreading, and it turned out to contain things I never would have imagined in advance. I was glad on Saturday that it seemed to be over.

On Friday for a time I wondered why God wasn't providing for us in a more satisfying way. I wondered why the business possibilities that had come up at the beginning of the month hadn't developed into much of anything. I wondered why I had to finally get upset about the cost of the car when I had handled it so well earlier in the week.

On Saturday I remembered that we're supposed to thank God for trials. And I figured something out about the way I was supposed to pray while we wait for our financial situation to change. Maybe this is what I ought to be saying to Him (God): I know that You could provide us with an adequate stream of income any time You want. For all I know You could be planning to solve all of our employment problems tomorrow. Until You do, please just stretch what money we have and in the meantime teach me the lesson that You can be trusted with all our desires and needs.

It's a lesson I've been working on, and I have plenty of ideas about what faith and trust mean in terms of our relationship with God, that lovely old loaded term I'm also trying to cope with.

And then I started to recognize some of the blessings of the week.

My mom came to my house unexpectedly on Sunday night and cut my children's hair after which they got to run around in the sprinklers for half an hour.

A friend who will remain anonymous because I don't know whether he would want me to name him or not brought us dinner one night because I had been sick and because he wanted to do something nice for us. That dinner lasted us for two meals.

The children got a chance to use the computer games at the library because my sister was there with us, which meant that each child had their own adult giving them full attention.

Our sometimes daytime house guest was here when the dog peed on the carpet and was available with good and practical advice when the plumbing went all haywire.

The friend who cut my hair was here when I needed someone to distract me from what could have become a full on panic followed by depression as I described above.

My husband was able to solve the plumbing and problem and my parents were available to help.

We ended Saturday evening in the presence of someone Michael and I both love, who fed us yet again, and who brought the entertainment, leaving fresh vegetables and lemonade, among other things, behind.

In fact it turned out to be a rather good week.

A Story, and How to Fall Asleep With a Book

Many, many years ago when Michael and I hadn't been married very long I stopped sleeping. The attorneys who I worked for at the time had announced that they were going to take me shopping for a new desk, and I think it was on the same day we went shopping and picked out the item that all sleeping ceased.

That night I lay awake with visions of office furniture spiraling my brain, as though I were Alice falling through a cherry paneled rabbit hole. By morning my skull hurt. The next morning it was even worse.

About three days in my mom got me an appointment with a doctor. My doctor gave me a sample of a sleeping pill which I took that night. I slept for two hours until my husband came to bed, at which time he accidentally woke me up, and that was that for the night.

After six days I was in really bad shape. I lost all depth perception, couldn't drive, couldn't even dress myself, and that's when I got on a sleeping aid that actually worked. As it turned out, I was suffering from depression, and once I got on an effective anti-depressant, an effective sleeping pill, and started counseling, things became manageable again. At this point I averaged about four hours of sleep a night, but it was tolerable.

The funny thing was that the sleeping pill I was on only worked if I fell asleep while reading. If I closed my eyes without a book, sleep would never come. If I drifted off in the middle of a page the desired effect would be achieved. It was still a trying time, but things were better.

I have continued to have difficulty sleeping, and having tried every natural remedy I can think of, I find the only thing that works is getting up at 5:00 every morning.  If I get up at 5:00 I'm tired by the end of the day, and so long as I drink a cup of something hot (milk or tea will do) and read a bit, I manage to sleep for a reasonable amount of time.

But the morning and evening routine are only a late development. I cannot tell you how many times I've been told that reading a boring book might do the trick. I've wondered, both innocently and naively, how on earth could I ever find a book boring enough that it would make me fall asleep?

In fact Adler and Van Doren have a prescription for me to read myself to sleep:

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause a slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring--in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not--and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time (How to Read a Book, 45).

A book I don't care whether I read or not? Where could I find such a creature? In fact I know plenty of people who could provide me with books that I would find quite boring, though I'll tell you that I used to read a textbook on textiles just for fun, so that tells you something. Besides boring books, there are plenty of downright bad books on library shelves. Fortunately I have managed over the years not to encounter very many of those. On the other hand, the seventh chapter of the third part of Atlas Shrugged, '"This is John Galt Speaking,"' could probably do the trick. It's approximately sixty pages in small print of Ayn Rand sharing her philosophy, and even I, who read Les Miserables in full without neglecting the digressions, couldn't make myself read that one, so obviously the book that will put you to sleep can be found.

I offer an alternative strategy for reading yourself to sleep, one that I employed with some success this time last year before the early waking cure was found. Read a book you want to read but know you can't understand yet. Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard is the one I chose, for example. It was a book I knew I would have to read more than once before I could begin to get anywhere with it, and a page was all it took to prepare me to sleep. Yes, I could already follow it in snatches, but that was only enough to make it an interesting read to fall asleep to.

It's Anecdote Time. Hey, I Thought They Were Funny.

Every time I go to Little Caesar's to buy a pizza, I get overcharged. Now, it's true that it is really cheap pizza to begin with, cheaper than I can purchase any other place, and it's also true that I've only ever been overcharged there by a nickle, but still it rankles me.

Michael and I are doing the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace program this summer, and even though we don't plan to give up use of our credit cards as per Dave's instructions, we felt that for the duration of the class we really ought to use the envelope system as much as possible. Which is why I keep losing nickles. Because I've been paying cash. About which I have very mixed feelings.

But here's the sitch: Last week I was going to be smart about it. I couldn't quite remember whether the pizza was going to cost me $5.45 or $5. 55, and I didn't feel like looking it up or doing the math, which would have taken me two seconds, so I took what I had, which was a five dollar bill, two quarters and five pennies. The plan was to give her the change based on what she told me, and this time to be sure to ask for a receipt.

As I near the pick-up window I plan out exactly what is supposed to happen, but then I get to the window and all my plans fly out the window. The pizza costs $5.45. I give her all my money. She doesn't even look at it really, gives me no change. I ask for the receipt. "I should get some change," I tell her. "Didn't you give me $5.45," she asks. I tell her what I gave her and then I say...

Wait for it.

"I should get a nickle back." She complies and I say something to try to make sure she doesn't feel bad about it.

Crap, Crap, Crap.

"Mommy, what's wrong? What's wrong, mommy? What's wrong?" Isaac is in the back seat in the van with me. I'm so amused and frustrated with myself and Little Caesar's pizza that I have to call Michael about it. Which sparks even more questions of what's wrong from my two year old.

So this girl at the window isn't good at making change, but look, it's my money! And I used to work in retail. I know how to make change. It's my own damn fault! What outrages me and makes me laugh all at the same time is that I thought I was going to be all smart and not make a mistake. Epic Fail! Not only that, but the receipt doesn't even show what actually happened in the transaction.  I doubt it would matter to you, but it matters to me.

I meant for this story to be funny, so if I've failed to make it so, please gently let me know in the comments.

Two more anecdotes:

1. Parker is four years old. A couple of weeks ago we're at CHOM and I hear him say to the lady at the craft table, "I'm four years old, but some people think I look older."

2. We've had a daytime guest at our house over the last several weeks, a friend of ours who is using our computer to take an online class. He walks into the living room one afternoon and tells us that he's going to have to find a school-age child to interview, someone six or older, for a class. Parker sweetly offers his services as an interviewee, even though he's younger than the lower age limit: "I'm tall!"

Rule Making & Assumption Setting

When I was in the library one day, taking notes on How to Read a Book by Adler, I made a mistake in my handwriting and made the move to scribble it out with that circular motion I regularly employ. This gets me thinking, and writing:

When I messed up that word and scribbled it out back there, I flashed back to being told in school to mark out errors with a single line, which I automatically codified as a universal rule. Was it for readability? or so they could check over our mistakes? maybe even so they could review our thought processes? or to train us not to obliterate our mistakes, instead to remain calm?

I imagine the truth was probably that student handwriting was generally so difficult to read that the ban on scribbling existed for the sake of teacher's sanity. I think it's interesting, though, how our young minds would tend to hear a recommendation like that, or even a rule, and think that it applied to all of life. Watch out for wrong assumptions. It isn't only young minds that make them.

Regardless of what the teacher's intention was, I am still trying to find an underlying principle in what I have considered above, and I think it relates to some of the other things I've been reading lately. Michael and I are participating in Financial Peace University this year at our church. It is the second time we have gone through the program in going on eleven years of marriage. Anyway, in one of his books Dave Ramsey talks about the fact that successful people are people who haven't let a fear of failure stop them. When they fail they see what they can learn from the failure, and then they try again. Personally, I hate failure. Though I am a recovering perfectionist, I still veer toward not wanting to try things if I don't expect to do them well. I also prefer to avoid cleaning up the resulting mess. Truthfully it is one of the reasons my bathroom doesn't get cleaned more often.

Peter Elbow says that in writing sometimes you have to go ahead and use the wrong word before the right word will occur to you. Sometimes you have to go ahead and write the wrong paragraph before you can make your way clear to the write the better one. It's a good tip. Sometime it's hard for me to follow. At 34 years old I'm learning still not to try and obliterate my mistakes, to stay calm.