Drowning in paper

Well, I guess we all are, but when you're someone who writes, and who does genealogical research, and who insists on printing copies of almost every email she sends or receives (I even find it frustrating that you can't also print Facebook chat conversa-tions, as I've had several good ones of those, now lost for all eternity) -- not to mention having all the usual bills, pleas for funds from various worthy causes, Statements of Benefits from ones health insurance company, grocery lists, grocery shopping receipts, scraps of paper on which are scribbled email addresses, telephone numbers, notes to myself to Do This or Do That, or names of musical pieces I've heard on the radio that I'd like to add to my collection (that may not be a typical source of clutter)...well, it can be truly overwhelming. And I haven't even mentioned all the Library Journals and New York Review of Books that I bring home from work, with the intention of reading the book reviews, to help me decide on what to order for the library.

I keep trying to get the situation under control, but the major stumbling block is that I do have to make a decision about every single piece of paper. The decision is: what do I do with this? I know there's a pearl of wisdom that says never handle a piece of paper twice -- in other words, take care of whatever it is now, and get the damn thing tossed or filed or passed along to someone else to take care of (not an option at home, rarely an option at work). But sometimes I just don't have the time to make the decision; too often I'm unable to make a decision quick like a bunny.

You might say, what kind of decision do you have to make about a grocery store receipt? Just toss the damn thing. But no, if I paid in cash the receipt must be set aside for at least a few days, in case something I purchased has to be returned (and I have, more than once, had to return bad meat, so this is not as utterly ridiculous as it may sound). If I've paid with my debit card, the receipt has to go on the stack that is supposed to be entered in a timely fashion into my check book...a task which, alas, I have been neglecting sorely over the past few months because it's both tedious and depressing, depressing both because it reveals how little money I have, and because I can never get the damn thing to balance...with the result that there is now quite a stack littering my dining table (and why does everyone put papers on the dining table? Most of us have desks, but they don't seem to be used for what is surely one of their major purposes...)

And then there are the begging letters. By rights I should just toss them in the trash, without even opening them, since I know I don't have the money to donate, however good the cause. But sometimes I'll think, well, maybe, in a paycheck or two I can send them something... And then I never do (or almost never, my two alma maters and Maine Public Broadcasting being the only likely exceptions), so the begging letters just lie around making me feel bad because I can't respond to them the way I'd like to.

I have this same problem at work, just stacks and stacks of paper that every now and then I make a stab at making the necessary decisions about. I'll get three or four sheets of paper taken care of, and then something will come up to distract me, and I won't get back to the stack for a week or two, by which time it has been buried by another stack.

I've even tried bringing some of those stacks home to get them organized where I'll have the time to concentrate on them without endless interruptions -- write little notes on stickies saying what to do with them when I take them back to work. But the same thing happens: I'll follow the instructions scribbled on the stickies for two or three pieces of paper -- get distracted -- and the rest of the papers in the folder will sit around for another week or two, until I stumble on them again, and try to clear them away again.

All I can say is: achhh!!!

The joys of librarianship

On Wednesday, even though I was officially on vacation, I went in for an hour and a half (which ended up being two hours), in order to put on the show that is our weekly Children's Hour. Any time over the past year I could have just left this to my assistant, who can certainly read a simple story and oversee a simple craft for two or three, or even four children. Which is how many kids we've been getting for the past year. Demographics were at play here: all the little kids who had been coming regularly suddenly graduated to pre-school or kindergarten, and there was not a new batch of children of the right age to replace them.

However, week before last we were inundated with children! Not two or three or four, but sixteen! It was like the old days. Which was nice, but we weren't prepared. We didn't have enough of the needed supplies for the craft we had planned. So Stacie and I had to do some quick thinking, to come up with an alternative. And, clever ladies that we are, we did.

We had to assume we would be getting about the same number of children this week, and I knew Stacie could not handle sixteen children by herself, however simple we made the craft. So I made the decision to go in, just for that time period. What the heck, it wasn't like I would be interrupting my Bermuda cruise. I would just be driving the 15 minutes from my house in Gardiner to the library in Hallowell, reading a story, getting however many kids showed up through a craft, and then splitting for my air-conditioned home once more.

However. We had been thinking: decorate rocks if it rains, paint on the long roll of white paper taped to the wall outside if it's dry. It was dry, and also very warm. The library was very warm. Painting really seemed the best option. But before the children could paint, Stacie and I had to attach a big piece of plastic to the wall outside, then tape the paper onto that. The wall is made of large, rough blocks of granite, not the best surface to be painting on, which was why the plastic needed to go on first.

But what a trial getting that plastic onto the wall proved to be! We did this one time before, a few years ago, and it surely was not so difficult then. The roll of clear "packing" tape I'd taken out would not stick to the wall. Stacie had brought out the almost defunct roll of masking tape, which worked better, but Stacie's hands shake even more than mine do (for a different reason), so she had trouble peeling the tape from the roll, then tearing it off (she'd forgotten to bring out scissors), then attaching it smoothly and securely to the plastic. My impatience couldn't tolerate her fumbling long -- keep in mind that we were not able to do this in a leisurely fashion, because Stacie only arrives at the library about 20 minutes before story time -- so I took over the taping, while Stacie held first the plastic, then the paper in place. There was also a fairly good breeze, which complicated matters. And I kept fuming, "I don't even have a book yet."

I'd actually spent some of the time before Stacie arrived looking for/trying to think of a good book to read. Normally I have this done by the day before, but of course I hadn't been in on Monday or Tuesday. I did go in for 3 1/2 hours on Sunday, partly to get some things done that needed to be done, partly to insure that my paycheck this pay period wouldn't be too pathetically paltry (since I went on reduced hours last year I am paid by the hour, rather than having a fixed salary as I did before). But on Sunday I was thinking 'decorated rocks', rather than painting, so what little time I spent looking for a book was spent looking for something having to do with rocks (and finding nothing). We try to connect the story to our craft, though that isn't always possible.

Selecting a book is always something of a challenge anyway. Our usual audience is made up of 2-4 year olds, and you can't challenge their limited attention span with too long, too complicated, or too abstract, a story. They want something to happen, and in a fairly short amount of time. And there have to be good illustrations to show them.

The situation is complicated still further when you have older children as well, which we now did. Part of our new influx of children included a private day care center (containing only six children, thank god) with ages ranging from 3 to 8. So what to read, what to read.

When I got back inside, hot and harried, it was 10:45, the time I usually sat down with a book and started to read. No time to find a book now. So what the heck, I'd tell them a story. Which I did. Not really hard at all for me...I am, after all, a writer! And as I've mentioned in these Notes before, I used to entertain my siblings with stories when the family would travel. I very cleverly included the children gathered around me in the story -- whenever I pointed at them they were to say their names. Thus I could begin my story, "Once upon a time there was a brother and sister named..." (point) "Sam!" "and..."(point) "Lily" (said very shyly, but said). I had Sam and Lily walking through a big forest that got darker and scarier as they walked, and they were starting to get a little nervous when all of a sudden they met... (point) "Corrina." And on we went, looking for the Ice Cream House, where they had such good ice cream, and meeting lots of children along the way.

So once again the human brain problem-solved in a pinch. And then we went out and painted.

Temptation, get thee behind me

We've all heard of taking a mental health day. This week I'm taking a physical health week. As I mentioned in a recent Note (May 14, 2011), for some time now I have been badly abusing my body with various "poisons" -- heavy doses of sugar (which, as a hypoglycemic, I'm not supposed to eat at all), caffeine (I've been consuming more and more diet soda, and coffee, which I didn't drink at all for 63 years, finally entered my diet about a year ago, when I discovered it worked better than anything else at keeping me alert when I began to drag...but it disagrees with my insides), lots of carbs, lots of greasy fast food. I was eating poorly because I was tired of the effort involved in eating well, and I needed all the poisons to keep me going.

I decided it was time for a change when I realized I had just had half a cup of coffee, and a slew of cookies, and I still felt like putting my head down and going to sleep, still lacked the energy to do what I needed to do. So o.k., if the poisons weren't going to work, maybe it was time to eliminate them altogether, try to get back on the straight and narrow of good eating habits. But I knew that would require a chunk of time when I could put my head down and go to sleep, whenever I felt the pull of an unhealthy pick-me-up. In other words, a chunk of time when I didn't have to go to work.

So here I am, at day five of my Great Experiment -- which actually seems to be taking the form of the Great With-drawal. No sweets, no coffee or diet Dr. Pepper, no McDonald's burgers, no bagels with cream cheese, no corn chips, not even any proper bread, but rather, a gluten-free, wheat-free loaf made out of various forms of rice and tapioca...which actually isn't too bad, if you toast it. Haven't really missed the coffee, miss the Dr. Pepper a lot. Day before yesterday I felt lousy, yesterday I felt terrible, today is actually a little better, though I still have no energy. The hope is that ultimately this jetisoning of all those things that taste good but are bad for you, in one way or another, is going to help me feel noticeably better, so that I can work up some enthusiasm for life again.

It's also great, not having to go to work (although as a matter of fact I did go in this morning for my regular Children's Hour, which is the subject of my next missive). I am so ready to be retired.

Weird, & irritating

I've mentioned that the young couple with the noisy trucks who used to live next door disappeared for essentially a year, with only the occasional drop-in to demonstrate they had not fled the country, and then moved out bag and baggage because (I learned from the male half of the couple) the in-laws had given them some land on which they were going to build a house (see Note of April 11, 2010). A For Sale sign went up out front, and then, after a few weeks, a group of men moved in, apparently in something approaching a fraternity house set-up (though these are not young men). They all have their own rooms -- with one of them being ensconced in the dining room -- and the kitchen is a common area.

Although this assortment of men also come equipped with trucks, these are not ferociously loud ones, and they are not left to idle for as long as 15 minutes, at twelve o'clock at night, as was the case with Patty and Matt (not their real names). So I'm not complaining about the trucks.

But here's the weird of my title. One of the fellows sits out there in his truck for hours at a time, both day and night. He turns the truck around in the driveway, so it is facing the street, and he sits. The window on the driver's side is right next to where I park my car, so sometimes in the late morning when I'm getting ready to leave for work, we'll exchange brief pleasantries. I kiddingly asked him one time if they'd thrown him out of the house, and he said no, he was just waiting for the postman to come "with his check," and then he could go cash it. That may have been the explanation for that particular time, but what about all the other times? He added at that time that he "liked to watch the traffic." Now, we do not live on a street that sees a lot of traffic, one of the things I like about it. He might see two or three cars go by in a half hour. So what's he looking at all the rest of the time? He's staring out his windshield at the wooded area that lies directly across the street from our two houses. He doesn't listen to the radio, he isn't sitting there reading the newspaper, I don't think he even smokes. Am I alone in finding this behavior odd?

Now for the irritating part. There has been some trouble with...oh, no...music from next door. Along with vehicles purposely made louder than they have to be, music played too loud, particularly the bass from rock music, is the bane of my existence. It isn't just that I don't like it; it's that it's a terrible irritant to my nerves. So here some rock musicians have moved in next door. Somebody plays the drums, and will practice for an hour or two at various times. Every now and then there seems to be a jam session, with people who don't live in the house coming over and joining in. So far none of these instances has been that loud, or late at night, or gone on for too long, so that I have not complained, and have tried not to mind too much. After all, I tell myself, musicians have to live somewhere ('though part of me is thinking, "Not in this quiet neighborhood!"), and obviously they have to practice.

However, the other night there was the unmistakable sound of an electric guitar coming at me for a good three hours. At 9:30 I went over and said to the man who answered my knock -- he of the truck-sitting -- that apparently someone was playing music? He looked blank, shrugged and said "I don't hear anything." "Well, if you were standing in my house you would hear it. Could you please tell whoever it is to turn it down? It's getting late, and he's already been practicing for several hours." "If I hear anything I'll tell him," the guys says, which tells me nothing is going to happen. And nothing does. So then I call the police and ask what time it has to be for one to be able to place a noise complaint (by this time it's about 9:45). The dispatcher tells me she can take a noise complaint, so I tell her the situation. "It's not like they're blasting their music all over the neighborhood," I say. "But I can hear it in my house, and it will make it impossible for me to get to sleep."

So in maybe ten minutes here come two police cars. Obviously a slow night for the Gardiner Police Dept. The two young officers stand in my front yard and can't hear anything, so I have them come into the house -- into my bedroom -- but of course just at that particular time the guitarist drops into one of his lengthy pauses (the music was very erratic, not constant).

Well, the police did, finally, hear the music, standing out in the narrow side yard that separates my house from the back end of my neighbors'. You could tell they didn't think it was that bad -- and it wasn't terrible, but why should I, or anyone, have to listen to somebody else's music inside their own home, for several hours, until late at night? Why should we have our peace disturbed in this way? So they knocked on the door, and asked the guy that answered (different guy, apparently the father of the young man who was doing the playing) to please stop with the music. What he ended up doing was promising it would be turned down...which, however, it wasn't, or not so you could tell. So eventually I had to go back, and knock on the door again, and blah, blah, blah.

This is actually something that really makes my heart sink, because the quietness of where I live has been one of its huge benefits, for me. I have had to deal with noise where I was living for most of my adult life, so not having to deal with it has been such a relief. And now it looks like I'm going to have to engage in that battle again.

Damn.

Life's little mysteries

O.K., here's a physics problem for you. I have a small coffee percolator that my mother bought once when she came to visit and discovered I did not have a coffee pot (this was during the time when Micheal and I were separated, since Micheal was as heavy a coffee drinker as my mother, and when we were together there was always a coffee pot in the house). Anyway, I've kept it over the years, even though I didn't drink coffee, for any visitors who might.

In the past year I have become a coffee drinker, despite the fact that I fear it doesn't really agree with my insides. I discovered it worked better than anything else, including my old standbys, a diet coke and a candy bar, at making me wake up when all I want to do is put my head down and go to sleep. So sometimes I buy coffee at the Dunkin Donuts on the way to work, or sometimes I'll stop at Slates Bakery, around the corner from the library in Hallowell, and get a cup there. And when I'm feeling frugal and can make myself do it, I make a pot at home.

Which takes me to the problem, although it isn't really a problem. More a minor annoyance, and a mystery. I put the five cups of water in the thing, the five tablespoons of coffee in the filter, set it on the stove, turn on the heat...and in a minute or two the whole thing is rattling like we're in the middle of an earthquake. I have to hold onto the handle for about five minutes, until just before it starts perking, or the shaking and rattling will drive me crazy. A short time before it starts perking, it stops shaking.

So why does it do this? I don't remember ever seeing another percolator heating up on top of a stove do this. I've thought, maybe it's that the cold bottom of the pot meets the heated burner, and until the former heats up to match the latter, it shakes. But that still doesn't tell me why. And besides, one puts cold sauce pans onto burners that are initially hotter than they are all the time, and the pans do not shake, rattle and roll. I would very much appreciate an explanation! Thanks.

From a member of the Camp tribe

I watched a few minutes of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS show, Faces of America, in which the family trees of various famous people -- e.g. Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Yo-Yo Ma -- are examined. As I already knew from being a librarian who has helped many people with their genealogical research, listening to other peoples' family history can be a bore. A detail or two that's interesting, maybe, but for the most part people marrying so and so, moving to so and so, having these children, one of whom died young, etc.

But even if one finds other people's family history boring, that of one's own family tends to fascinate, or at the very least, raise some curiosity (anybody famous? Anybody notorious? Any scandals?) And why is that? Indeed, this very question was asked...actually don't remember if it was on Faces of America or some other recently-seen PBS pro-gram...and the woman who responded said she thought it was because people wanted to connect. To find out who they are, where they belong. And they very much want to belong to something. And as she was speaking the thought that sprang to my mind was, "Our tribe. We want to know what tribe we belong to, and we want to know what it was like." (We know what it's like now, at least that part of it represented by our immediate extended family, with all the hopeless siblings, black-sheep cousins and weird uncles.)

Tribalism does indeed run deep in the human species. That is quite apparent in places like Yemen, where the various tribes are currently vying for power, as indeed they have been doing for some time. Our own Indian tribes cling to their heritage, and one of the problems the white man encountered, in trying to get Indians to assimilate into the white culture, was that most Indian tribes do not hold with the kind of individual competiveness encouraged by the white culture; they do not want to differentiate themselves from the other members of their tribe. (This is not true in sports, but there it is a matter of our-tribe-against-your tribe, more than an individual shining.)

I mused some time ago [Note of Nov. 6, 2010] about the mystery of fan hysteria over sports teams, the extreme identification with ones local team, even if it isn't made up of local folk. I even suggested then that it might be a form of tribalism, and I am more and more inclined to think it is. We need groups to identify with, to which we feel we belong. For most of us our immediate families are our basic tribe, even if we can't stand our relatives. As Ally McGraw's character said in Love Story, "Home is where when you go there, they have to let you in." Then come alma maters, school and local sports teams. For some people their state is a larger tribe to which they belong, Texans being the example par excellence of this mind-set. In England the multitude of private clubs served the tribal instinct well. And for most Americans, their country is their ultimate tribe, the one you sure as heck had better be loyal to. I confess that, as un-nationalistic as I tend to be, I feel very harshly toward Bradley Manning, and do feel he betrayed his country in leaking all the confidential information he (allegedly) leaked to Wikileaks. Public protests are one thing, putting people in danger is quite another.

But to get back to family trees. Most of the people who are very serious about genealogy are getting on in years (go on, Melody, say elderly). And why is this? When you are young you have lots of tribes to belong to, as suggested by the above list. But as you get older your children, if you have any, grow up, move away, are less a part of your life than they used to be. Friends die, as do parents, siblings. School and sports allegiances fade. If you have retired, you are no longer a part of whatever occupational tribe you once be-longed to, and identified with. So who are you? Well, you are the end product of all those marriages, all those off-spring, all those moves farther and farther west. And not only are those dead ancestors members of your tribe, but so, too, are all the third cousins once removed you discover who are researching another branch of your family.

You are a part of something bigger than your lowly, lonely self.

How do we make this more fair, and why should we?

Yes, I'm back, to talk about fairness. The concept of. I was lying in bed resting my eyes after squirting them with fake tears (my latest physical malady is excessively dry eyes which has me "abrading" the cornea just by opening my eyelids in the morning), and I got to thinking about the recent complaint of my friend who was diagnosed with a form of leukemia last fall about how unfair it was that here she had this fatal disease and there weren't some compensating joys in her life (at that particular moment) to offset this very negative fact. Of course, as we all know (as, indeed, Pat knows) life is not fair. In fact, it is so unfair that I can't help wondering how humans ever came up with the concept of fairness in the first place.

Fatalists don't expect fairness from life or the world in general. What will be will be. In countries where life has been extremely hard for most of the people for many generations, fatalism runs deep. This was even more so the case in the past. But even in such places, and times, there tends to be a strong tradition of revenge for wrongs committed against one by ones fellow man. You kill a member of my family, I kill a member of yours. This to them is justice, and what is justice, but fairness?

Citizens of the industrialized nations in general, and America in particular, expect to be able to change the world to suit them -- because they've seen it happen -- so fatalism has less of a hold. And in these places the idea that there should be fairness in human exchange is very strong. Even as people acknowledge that the happenings of the world -- natural catastrophes, the myriad illness that can befall humans, wars, economic crashes -- can fall upon people in an apparently random and indifferent fashion, they insist that to the extent that we have control over things there should be fairness.

I think about the two major political parties here in the U.S. Since presumably we all share this sense that things should be fair, it seems like the definition of what's fair is the issue. For Republicans what's fair is both individuals and corporate entities being able to keep most of the money they earn -- in other words, to be as free as possible from onerous taxation. Likewise from even more onerous regulation, since that fetters the freedom to run their lives or their businesses as they see fit, a concept that is even more sacrosanct to Republicans than that of fairness.

Whereas for the typical Democrat what's fair is that 1) everyone should contribute to the common weal, because we are all in this together, and that 2) everyone should contribute according to what they have. You make less money, you pay lower taxes; you make a huge amount of money, you pay higher taxes. And as for regulation: history has shown that people (and even more than individual people, businesses) will often not do what they should do unless forced to by law, because usually doing what they should do involves a reduction in profit, e.g., shorter work days for employees, a minimum wage, having to make the workplace safe. The Democrat tends to think that being able to do whatever you damn well please -- to hell with the environment, or those who are less advantaged, through no fault of their own -- is not the fairest way for society to be run. And yes, I know, I sound biased, and of course I am.

Interestingly, right now Americans of both persuasions, Republican and Democrat, are feeling very angry indeed because of the unfairness of so many rich corporations paying no federal income tax at all, while we lowly common folk struggle to pay our taxes. On top of the fact that a number of the large corporations that contributed to the economic downturn, that has cost so many people their jobs and their savings, have been making huge profits over the past year, and their people are getting the same kind of big bonuses as before. Uh, uh, we're all thinking; this is not fair.

Where did we get this idea?