9 LIFE LESSONS

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I saw a reel of this and am shamelessly reposting Tim Minchin’s 2013 address to UWA “Nine Life Lessons” from a site that has already done this:

Nine Life Lessons

However, I have had large groups of people listening to what I say for quite a few years now, and it’s given me an inflated sense of self-importance.

So, I will now, at the ripe old age of 37.9, bestow upon you nine life lessons to echo, of course, the nine lessons of carols of the traditional Christmas service, which is also pretty obscure. You might find some of this stuff inspiring.

You will definitely find some of it boring, and you will definitely forget all of it within a week. And be warned, there will be lots of similes and obscure aphorisms which start well but end up making no sense. So listen up, or you’ll get lost like a blind man clapping in a pharmacy trying to echo-locate the contact lens fluid.

Lesson 1: You Don’t Have to Have a Dream

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WHO TO THANK?

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I was still teaching when I reposted an old blog: WHY YOU DON’T WANT TO BE A TEACHER. That post arrived on my old Blogger site in 2011, then here in 2019.

I think black oystercatchers are my favorite bird. They make a noise like a squeaky toy, are protective of their babies, and have red beaks and legs and eyes of brilliant vermilion enamel.

Thousands of people read the original posting about why you don’t want my former job. At least two college programs assigned that post to students training to be teachers.

I’m grateful for the years I spent in education. I loved teaching but I enjoy other things, and I understand why teachers last, typically, just four years in the profession. There are people who think I’m a fool to have done it at all.

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BIRDS and MEN

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As I began writing this on Wednesday, I was reading Helen Whybrow’s memoir, The Salt Stones, which focuses on her family, her ninety-some Icelandic sheep, and how as a pastoralist she lives within the rhythm of her animals, the trees and grasses, blueberries and shrubs, the soil microbes and those in our gut, and all that lives in and on, over and above that soil and makes of her two hundred acres a thriving ecosystem. Her husband is kind, her step-daughter has gone off to live her life, and soon her daughter will follow. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t always know her daughter, but is the same kindly person for all that. I read the final chapter yesterday. I felt grateful for the beauty she shares.

On our beach walk, we found bits of litter on the sand and tangled in the rocks, enough to half fill our trash bag. Mostly this was bits of plastic and plastic foam smaller than my thumbnail, but also a comb, a sturdy mesh bait bag, several lengths of reusable plastic twine. We admired the local bald eagles scavenging onshore. This photo taken at a distance—the bird flew as a wave washed in.
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BLAME, again

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“This is what makes the myth such a great lie!” Gary says. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. It’s always someone’s fault, not ours.

We tried to watch the right/left overview of the our political week on The New Hour on PBS. We’d previously vowed not to watch it anymore, but today I backslid, found it on my computer a day late, and was sorely disappointed. Two journalists talked about the Epstein files and decided that was a big nothing. [Really?] The more astonishing thing, to me, is that both Brooks and the democratic-journalist-of-the-week totally blamed the Democratic party for ending the shut-down. The Democrats should have stuck with it until they got subsidized healthcare, since it’s what people want. Brooks said that and the other person said it too. They were so disappointed.

I was thinking about a man, smiling and thankful for the gift of a few spoonfuls of honey.

It’s not my day to post, but this happened a few hours ago—the homeless vet and the arrogant journalists so sure about what others should have done.

Maybe I used this image already. It’s only a week or two old, and the rainbow on Castle Rock is such a hopeful thing.
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‘DO THE MATH’

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THE MARTIAN (2015) is one of my favorite movies. Even though it’s romantic nonsense, even though, even though I barely care about a space program, even though Matt Damon. As I write, it’s playing on Netflix, and at this moment I am playing hooky from cutting and sewing my quilt border in order to focus on the ending. Every time his character Mark Watney follows the science, every time he goes to the numbers, I want to cheer and laugh. That determination to find a solution in listing what he has available to work with, to calculate how long till this or that runs out, and every time he recognizes an opportunity, my heart sings. Mark Watney, Space Pirate. “Everywhere I go, I’m the first.”

They are always bright and silvery, brighter than shows in this photo, even though “the little silver fish” are dead when we find them on the sand. Maybe this is a tiny bit of a missed pelican meal. There were still six pelicans fishing offshore that day.
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WHAT I KNOW

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The storms come, no stopping them. They also pass.

The wind had been blowing since midnight, and the rain coming hard not down but sideways, off and on. Mostly on. I could see the ocean waves blowing back over themselves and sea and sky are both soft grays with a hint of green in the surf. Two and a half hours till high tide, but all the sand wet from the rain, and we did not get our morning walk. We got out the door for our three miles and had to turn straight back. We don’t mind a light shower, but this was a serious weather front. Storminess predicted to last without a break until Friday, which is not at all unusual for November. I used to count on a solid week of rain in this month—all day and all night without a break. But recently all bets are off. (The days in January of warm east winds and a burst of termites and carpenter ants drowned in the surf has not been predictable for years.) We average about 90” of rain a year—sometimes a mist or drizzle, in a storm sideways like a firehose, not usually coming “down,” and a hundred and fifty inches of rainfall isn’t unheard of. People new to the area are unprepared, friends naively suggest rain gear to walk the sand. Weather reporters in NW cities are alarmed by 45 mph gusts; we are accustomed to 65 mph. There is no rain gear that will keep you dry and safe in a full gale. Stay indoors!

Despite the foam, the ocean looks more tame in this photo compared to earlier in the week. The surf grew and after the rain splattered the glass, an updated photo was impossible.
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ALL HALLOW

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It’s the end of the month I turned 73, and we were busy with cleaning and walking; I’m running a mile at a time on the flat and writing and reading. There’s more. The basalt shore is stirred up along the edges and we’re finding things.

I think about and intend to show a day’s collection during every walk, day after day. Here, finally, is one day’s “catch.” At left a very large “ugly clam” that looks like nothing special on the other side, but the inside is beautiful mother-of-pearl nacre. Then three striped limpets, the most common kind, and four white ones with the one at left showing damage from worms and the one at right nearly perfect. Just left of that and above another ugly clam is my favorite and rarest type of limpets with vertical grooves and a hole shaped like a droplet, pointed at one end and rounded at the other. The green seaglass is the second glass this week, what I’d call “medium size,” and that find is recorded in my daily record as “1glass” and will join other glass in a glass jar. Recent tides have been washing up into the rocks and exposing treasures and trash buried the basalt, including several bits of pumice from the blowing of Mt St Helens in 1980 in the past week but none this day. The feather is what I call a “two-spot feather” which may have a single spot across the central vein, one spot on one side, or a distinct spot on each side, hence the name. If anyone can help identify the species of bird that molts these feathers, I would love to hear about it!
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PERFECT GIRLS

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I watched a TED talk that insists women could be better. They should be more like men. We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave, says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code. Girls need to be more like boys, she suggests. They need to take more risks and demand jobs they are unqualified for. It works for the boys.

I appreciate Ms. Saujani for urging girls to be brave, for encouraging women to enter STEM fields. Too right. That should happen.

It’s a worthy goal to identify what holds girls and women back and to offer encouragement. Surely we underestimate the potential of girls and women in our culture. We actively stifle their potential. We should identify changes in their behavior and in our system that hold them back.

But. I am also tired of people urging women to behave more like men at their worst. Saujani describes how, in an experiment, 5th grade girls, especially the smarter ones, give up on “an assignment that was too hard for them.” I’d argue it’s a waste of time struggling against something they can’t do, an assignment specifically designed to be impossible for them. Recognizing that might even be termed smart because that’s not “giving up,” that’s sensible. Just as it’s possible to be persistent without being foolish, it’s possible to be sensible without being a coward.

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YOU’RE SWEET ENOUGH

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I enjoy reels of people on their weight-loss journeys. I read one yesterday morning: “Eat less sugar, you’re already sweet enough.”

The best part of this organic gluten-free, nut-free vegan chocolate cake was baking it for someone I love. It tasted great—don’t get me wrong—but making it was the greater fun for me. (It’s only 6 inches across with vegan “buttercream,” fresh blackberries, and sliced figs for decoration with blackberry jam between the layers.) I do love chocolate, but my mom always made me a lemon meringue pie for my birthday because I like pie better than cake. I often do that even now, though lately I make myself a lemon angel pie—whipped Chantilly cream over lemon curd, in a meringue shell. It’s worth the trouble.

Fat doesn’t need much in the way of calories to sustain itself—it’s a storehouse, not active tissue. Muscle, organs, and fluids in your body do need energy to survive. A person fifty pounds overweight can eat exactly what another person with the same body but fifty pounds lighter eats and neither will drop an ounce. They are both eating for the same core. It’s why an overweight person can eat a perfectly reasonable diet but not lose a pound.

Taking that weight off is really, really hard for most people. There’s a good reason for that.

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IMPOSTOR

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I was already intimate with self-doubt by the time I read about the “impostor syndrome” where people (most often women) believe that they are not all that, the success and admiration—whatever that might be—they enjoy is because they have fooled others into believing in them. Men often over-estimate their appeal, their skill, their accomplishments, and their abilities. Women tend to underestimate themselves.

Yeah, I get that.

My own self-regard tends to fluctuate. It’s low at the moment.

A recent writing workshop raised the common wish to be popular. I don’t recall ever aspiring so high. I wanted to have a “best friend.” Of course I was jealous of kids who were popular—they had so many people to call friends, multiple people who would rather spend time with them. I wanted one.

Briefly, over the summer before 3rd grade I had two friends: Stefanie and Denise. Our mothers made us matching dresses for the first day of school. On that day, I discovered I was in Miss Wara’s room and my friends had been placed together in the other 3rd grade classroom. [I would discover decades later that my sense that Miss Wara disliked me was not entirely my imagination, which I believed at the time. My mother mentioned casually that parents had multiple conferences with her because they recognized the teacher disliked me.] It was a hard year for other reasons. The boy I had a crush on ridiculed me in front of the class and my friend Don punched me in the stomach, though I’d probably done something to deserve that. In 4th grade we began SRA (a timed reading program), which I loved and it was the year my dad began reteaching history to me, which was a good thing. In 5th grade, we were introduced to a brand new (to the US) system of numbers with rods of different lengths. I loved that too, but as I remember it, I wet my pants nearly every day that year. Sixth grade was wonderful. Mr. Finley taught us math and science and the other fifth grade teacher taught us history and English. I learned to do math in base 5, began pre-algebra, and devised an experiment to determine whether white cloud mountain fish could distinguish colors. [Probably not.] In 7th grade at Cordell Hull Junior High School, I had art every day, which was wonderful. The reading teacher needed a note before I was allowed to read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because the copy I had was a paperback and she assumed all paperbacks were trashy books. I had the highest grades in class, which surprised everyone, including me when it was announced in Homeroom. We read Johnny Tremain, and I wrote the only piece of fiction before the age of 38 in that class. It was about Marie Antoinette struggling to face her coming execution. Denise and I were friends. But in 8th grade, Denise announced that she couldn’t afford to be seen talking to me anymore at school. Toni Burton moved into the district and became and remains a friend. I was part of a clique that year, the only period of my life where I had multiple good friends as a group. [In EdPsych I learned that cliquishness is typical of that age. “They should all be sent to an island until they become 9th graders,” was what the prof told us.]

In high school I mostly lost sight of Toni but was close to Rin. After high school, I drifted away from both of them, but made friends through the School of Art at the University of Washington. Sam Scott and Linda Beaumont in Fire Arts and Pamela Harlow and Kris Williams in the Metals wing. I reconnected with Madora Lawson whom I’d always admired from my Honors World History class in high school. She was doing Interior Design. Gary performed the legal wedding between Madora and Steve the night before the public one. I was a bridesmaid.

In the mean time, beginning the summer before my high school senior year, I met Gary in 1969 and found the one best friend who has lasted throughout all the years since.