Things that Revolt Me

I am going to be grumpy in this entry. This grumpiness is the result of the New York Times, though not for the normal reasons (crappy snotty biased articles, equally condescending op eds, most of them, etc) -- it is the result of Wirecutter. I do not enjoy Wirecutter, unless I am looking up one thing, though it's a rarity. The last time I looked some consumer product up on Wirecutter, it was... I think a pot. A saucepan? I don't even know the terminology well enough. I wanted a good pot to cook rice in. Anyway.

What was sending me berserk today is really the greater hatred I have for Black Friday. I have always hated Black Friday. I have never ever bought anything on Black Friday -- it's my personal Don't Shop day. My family never did either, let me say... not out of disdain or a critique of capitalism or whatever, just because we did not in general buy the kinds of things that were big ticket items.* We got new clothes twice a year at K-Mart, once at the beginning of summer, and once before school started. Each of our series of used avocado green Chevys were inherited from my father's uncle. Christmas seemed very wonderful and expansive and extravagant to my sister and me, but looking back it was more a question of enjoyable quantity than anything that cost a lot. I am still perpetually astonished at the prices of gifts people I know routinely give each other for birthdays and Christmas. The wrapping paper is often the most enjoyable part of it all for me -- I mean, I like GIVING presents, and wrapping them. Of fancy items of consumption we had... a dishwasher, which remained an amazement to me. A washer and dryer in the basement for both flats in our building. A tv (it is still bizarre to me, the idea of having more than one -- lots of my students' families have one in almost every room). An okay Pioneer stereo. Otherwise our apartment was a space full of refinished used furniture, india prints flung over anything you could sit on, endless shelves of books, house plants, political posters, photos my mom had taken, guitars and a mandolin and a dulcimer and recorders (and yet I cannot play any of those things... I could once play the recorder and do some duets with my mom). I guess my mom was kind of 70s hippie-ish as well as a socialist. I remember we both really enjoyed Apartment Living which basically was a magazine that showed how to do interior design knockoffs on the cheap, in 70s style -- lots of macramé and rich colors and use of large coffee cans covered in découpage or whatever, and thrifting.

Anyway, that's the way I like objects. What makes my guts churn is "door busters" and every electronic thing in the world being hyped at deafening levels -- I looked through Wirecutter this morning, god knows why, and saw not one single thing I could ever imagine wanting. Ring cameras. Various iterations of Alexas. Technical cookware I could not even understand. Electronic toys for toddlers that are basically screens but prerecorded or something? Or not? I don't know, I couldn't even understand it but it made me want to be a crotchetty old Luddite who insists on wooden toys and fabric books and art supplies.

It was strange -- the visceral dislike of everything on that list (even the Apple products, and I am an owner of a MacBook Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone) was slightly similar to BUT NOT AS ENJOYABLE AS that yearly snarky take-down of the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. Which is kind of what I feel like the NYT is ... it is just as condescendingly bougie but tries to disguise that with its staid paper-of-recordness.

Okay, I feel slightly purged now, whew. I think I am going to do a book-end entry on Things that I Love (or am grateful for, same diff).




*Let me interject here that I am NOT someone who thinks that socialists should be abstemious for some stupid moral high ground reason. Friends in grad school would always try that shit on me, and it's nonsense. Also, my dad raised me with a couple of jingles that guided him: 1) I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus, sitting on the dashboard of the car; 2) The working class can kiss my ass; I've got the boss's job at last (you can see he was a premature aficionado of today's ironic wokeness), and -- crucially -- 3) Nothing's too good for the working class.

Things I Love (and am grateful for)

Note: I give this as a journal topic every year, often around Thanksgiving, but not only. The idea (I tell my students) is to be as specific and exhaustive as possible.

1. I love Celtic interlace. I learned how to make a couple of patterns WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY. The image above is one.

2. I love lesson planning, especially for Social Studies projects involving art. Currently, my 7th grade students are immersed in writing an original letter in the persona of Eleanor of Aquitaine (or one of about 17 people she actually knew and in some cases actually wrote to, though in much briefer form) to Eleanor of Aquitaine or one of those 17 people *... which they will then turn into an illuminated manuscript on parchment paper. This is the Medieval 1% study focus. For peasants, the 99%, we turn to Karen Cushman's excellent YA novel The Midwife's Apprentice, which (I had an insight years ago) maps pretty directly on to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, so I teach that, too and sometimes have them write an essay proving that.

3. I love Devlin, my cat, who is glorious and snuggly and endlessly open for petting, including on the belly, and who sleeps next to my head until I pull the cover up and turn onto my side. Then she flounces off, but when I wake up, she is already back, asleep by my head.

4. I love learning languages -- to date, French, Spanish, Hindi (in progress on Duolingo), Irish (ditto)... eventually I hope, Arabic and maybe Farsi. Korean also seems cool. I am intimidated by Chinese.

5. I love stained glass. I have a small imitation Tiffany lamp I got my mom as a housewarming gift, um, 35 years ago? Which I inherited back from her once she moved out here. The background screens on my phone are both photos of stained glass from Winchester House, where that whacked out widow of the manufacturer of Colt revolvers lived.

6. By the same token, more or less, I love colored lights and have a string of them up all year round. And I go crazy on them when decorating my Xmas tree.

7. I love revolutionary politics and Marxist theory, and I am super glad to be in two different Zoom reading groups, one around Palestine (and also reaction to the election, sigh) and the other around the history of and resistance to fascism.

8. I love most things Indian except Hindutva -- food, language, pop culture, visual art.

9. I love Quebec and Montreal even though I haven't been there since I was a teenager. But it is an enduring love.

10. I love soups -- my mom's cabbage bean soup (but swapping cannellini beans for red kidney beans, and ground turkey for ground beef, and adding a cumin bagheer); split pea soup with ham; habitant soup with pork shank; lamb barley stew; a really good soup my older niece just made with cannellini beans and chard and lemon and parmesan; black beans and onions and cumin and cotija cheese and crema (not really a soup); masoor dal with cumin (ALMOST a soup); chicken soup with carrots and onions and rosemary and peas...

11. I love Irish (and generally Celtic) music and I love folk music, having been raised on it, and I miss singing with my mom so, so, so much.

12. I love reading -- genre fiction, from young adult fiction, to historical fiction to historical mystery series, to sci fi, to Regency Romances, to chick lit, to some fantasy, and also theory and history and biographies. I do not love self-help books, though my mom owned a bazillion of them and had a shelf devoted to them which she called the Richard E. Miller Memorial shelf -- her father who offed himself when she was twenty-two or so. Okay, that's not so germane to Things I Love, but.

13. I love the fact that at my alterna-school program I can go to work every day in a comfortable tee-shirt, a cardigan, and one of the innumerable pairs of pajama pants I own. And crocs. I literally checked with my administrator about this on the day I started back to work in person after two and a half years of remote teaching (I had an extra year of it).

14. I love that I am lucky enough to have actual painted art by various relatives up on my walls -- a not-very-good oil painting by my mom's brother Peter, of his mandolin; a watercolor of NYC, probably Greenwich Village, by my great-aunt's husband Don Silks, two oil paintings by another great-aunt's husband, Claude Owens -- very surreal dream pictures. Also a 1972 screen printed red and black poster in my mother's handwriting and some no-nonsense sans serif font advertising her speaking on "Women and Revolution", for the Young Socialist Alliance and the Women's Coalition for International Women's Day (which my sister and I grew up thinking was a regular holiday, celebrated by lots of people).

15. Speaking of things on my walls, I also love that I have the actual diploma (it is ENORMOUS -- about 2' by 3') that my great-great grandfather's cousin Jennie Quinn received in 1888 from Lake Geneva High School. She went on to Wisconsin's Normal School (teaching college, in Milwaukee) and then spent her entire working life as a teacher in Milwaukee, until the 1940s. I have traced her various 'homes' -- which were basically rooms in someone's apartment in the neighborhood near the school she taught at the whole time... sometimes she'd stay in one place for a few years, and often there was at least one other female teacher lodging there as well. But she came home to Lake Geneva every summer, no doubt partly to save money.

16. I love the smells of rosemary and lavender and citrus.

17. I love Irish breakfast tea with half-n-half, which would probably horrify all my friends in Britain. The half-n-half, I mean. It could be even MORE extreme, honestly. Once I was in Sevilla with my best friend, and we were wandering around town, coinciding with people's morning commute. We shouldered our way into a crowded cafe and I tried to order "té con leche". The barista looked at me like I was insane, and then steamed milk to past boiling and poured it over a tea bag. My god it was delicious.

18. I love my nieces so much that it would be endless to write about it. I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area not because the idea of California compelled me, but because my sister had, and I knew she'd reproduce out here. And that decision is justified every day by the mere existence of R & R.

19. I love doodling. I use Zentangle with students, but I've been doodling basically like that since long before I ever learned about that method. But it's very good for de-escalating the fear that a lot of kids have about their 'inability' to do art.

20. I love Prismacolor colored pencils.

21. I love journalling, and have been doing it since I was nine years old.

22. I am somewhat surprised that I love having carpet under my feet in this apartment.

23. I love Wisconsin -- Madison, Lake Geneva, Green Lake, Wild Rose, Milwaukee. I love much of the Midwest, in fact, and it super pisses me off when people dismiss a whole swathe of states. To be fair, though, I question the need for Nebraska and Oklahoma. But slagging off Ohio? Wtf.

24. I love my parents, all three of them -- my father, who is getting so old and creaky and needs teeth pulled and a heart valve replaced, my stepmother who is extremely wonderful, and my mother, whom I miss every single day.

25. I love scented candles -- cranberry, pine, bayberry, any citrus.



*Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, King Louis VII of France, King Henry II of England, Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, Petronilla (her younger sister, whom some sources say was dead and others say may have accompanied her into captivity), Archbishop Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, Sir William Marshall, Marie, Alix, Young Henry, Richard, Matilda, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joanna, John... the letter has to be written in the year of 1175, so Thomas à Becket is actually not SUPPOSED to be involved, but one kid broke my rules for the assignment years ago and wrote a letter as Becket pleading for compromise... and had the letter splattered with ink-blood!