Friday, February 25, 2005

What I've Been Doing for the Past Few Weeks

Here's the reason I haven't posted much in this Blog over the past month or so. After Chris moved back, we decided we each needed our own space if we're gonna live in the same house. This upstairs bedroom used to be a very boring, and very unused, guest bedroom. White walls, old fogey bedroom furniture, the whole boring deal. I've claimed it as my own. It's hard to get me out of here.


You've Heard Enough of Me. Here's My Shadow

Here's my little guy at about five months old. We entered him in a water retreiving race, and he was awesome. Never did it before, but he jumped right in, swam out to get the little rubber bone thingy, and brought it right back to us on the dock. We were amazed!


Best Puppy Ever!


And here he is last year, at about two and a half. Still just as awesome and my best buddy. He LOVES going for rides in the Jeep in the summer!


Best Dog Ever!

That Thing I Bought Last Year

Bought this last year, to replace my '92 Celica GTS which, of course, still runs like a top. Agonizing over selling the Celica. Can't make a decision. But I love driving this around in the summer with Shadow in the back.

Day Off

I'm sprawled here on my couch with my laptop, Shadow (a.k.a. Best Dog Ever), and a diet Coke. I took the day off. Chris is gone for the weekend, and I'm considering driving down to Queens to visit a friend tomorrow. I wanted at least one full day in this big, solitary house. Just to do this. Sprawl on the couch and do nothing.

I haven't really done nothing. I did vacuum, in preparation for my weekend alone. I like a neat house. And I've already returned from an appointment with an English professor at SUNY, where I'm very seriously considering starting a Master's program in English this summer. I have another appointment with the director of the Master's programs in English, next Thursday. Don't know if it'll come to anything, but I'm taking each step at a time and will just see where things lead me.

I've also been perusing other blogs, and I'm noticing a disturbing trend. And perhaps I've particpated in this trend, and for that I am ashamed. But the general tone of most blogs I've read is pretty cynical. I don't begrudge anyone the right to an occasional vent or rant, but I'm seeing this emerging as its own form of humorous entertainment. This is why I stopped listening to George Carlin. Someone who used to completely crack me up, and who I considered the funniest guy on the planet, presented one of the most miserable, cynical, negative shows I've ever attended here in Albany a few years ago. Maybe I'm getting older, but I just don't seem to have the stomach for it anymore. Life is short. Mine needs to be happy.

So, I'll stay away from other blogs for awhile and just write my thoughts. If people wanna read 'em, great. I'd love the feedback. If not, that's okay, too.

Here's something interesting that happened to me this week. But it needs some background. I came across a letter, while going through boxes of my mom's belongings (She died four years ago.), to my mom from one of her childhood friends. It had been written while my mom was in the hospital, so there was a good chance this person (Her name is Charlotte.) was still at the same address. I wrote to her.

I didn't know if I'd get a response or if she'd even want to be bothered. I knew she'd know who I was, because we'd met once or twice over the years, mostly when I was very small. After about two weeks, I had pretty much given up, when I came home and found a large envelope with 9 typewritten pages inside, and pictures! I read the whole thing before taking off my coat.

Not only was this great stuff about my mom from the time she was born until she was about sixteen (when my own creation began), but it's also fascinating from a social perspective. She really goes into detail about life growing up in the fifties, and what people did and didn't do. No TV until they were six, so their parents played cards and listened to the radio at night. Neighbor families would get together outside in the evenings and actually talk to each other. Your parents knew your friends' parents. Apparently, my great-grandparents, who I remember vividly, were the first on their block (I know, it's a cliche, but it's true.) to get a color TV, and neighbors would pile into their tiny living room every Sunday night to watch Bonanza. I remember watching it in reruns and my mom telling me she'd had a crush on Little Joe. She didn't know I did, too.

So, the letter made me cry, as I more fully began to realize how much my mother has actually lost by dying so soon (52). She had a lonely and somewhat unhappy childhood, as far as her relationship with her own mother is concerned, and she spent her adult life living for other people, never really finding the happiness she kept trying so hard to create. She raised me and, when I was seventeen, she had my brother. She raised him until he was18 ,and then she died. She married a wife-beater and then an alcoholic, always trying to turn them into something she could be happy with. It never happened. She never learned.

She had just started enjoying herself and told me, a month before getting cancer, that she was looking forward to my brother going out on his own so she could really begin to live her own life for the first time. She died five months later. When I think about it, I just cry. It just seems like such a waste to me. What was the point? Why did she live?

Granted, I wouldn't be here if she hadn't, but there must have been more to it than that. If we all have a purpose in being here, what was my mother's? And if it was only to raise two children, shouldn't I be doing something more important with my life?

So, there's a very good chance I'll be starting this English program in the fall. And if I happen to write some stuff and people happen to read it, and it makes a difference in their lives, I will have honored Linda Ruo's existence. And that's enough.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Nothing To Do

There's nothing to do at work today. No, really. Nothing.

This is how it works. There's a bucket. Not a physical bucket. A figurative bucket. We logon to this web page, click some stuff and there's the bucket. It's full of tickets. Figurative tickets. You see, people from all over the State call into this Help Desk (a.k.a Level 1) and open "tickets." They can't logon or their server's down or they forgot how to turn on their monitor or whatever. Level 1 takes all the information and sends the ticket to us, at Level 2.

Side note: Level 1's real job is to troubleshoot the issue and send the ticket to Level 2 ONLY when they can't resolve the issue. But Level 1 does not troubleshoot. Level 1 answers phones and types inaccurate information into the tickets, creating the need for Level 2 to call the person back, get all the correct information and begin troubleshooting. This completely invalidates Level 1's existence.

So, the bucket... Typically, there are 50-60 tickets in the bucket at any one time. Some are easy to solve and you can get rid of them in an hour. Some are sent directly from hell and stay in your own bucket (Yes, we have our own personal buckets, too.) for several months. For quite a while, there were at least 130 tickets in the bucket, on an on-going basis. This sucks. It means you're busy all the time. You can't stop. You just keep working and working and working and you feel like you're accomplishing nothing, because they just keep calling in more tickets. You feel guilty going to the bathroom.

Then we have days like today. I have three tickets in my own bucket, and am waiting for those people to get back to me. And there are no tickets in the Level 2 bucket, so there are no more tickets to take, so I can wait for more people to get back to me.

So, there's nothing to do. I'm planning on a long blog posting for the post-sushi afternoon.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Pottery, continued

So, it's been a while, but I didn't want to leave you in the lurch. (Where is this "lurch?")

I was describing the intricacies of pottery, with its bats and wheels and facial accidents, etc. I believe I'd just gotten to the point of creating a lump on my second night. Discouraging, but I learned a lot. I learned how to make a lump and, more importantly, how NOT to make a lump. Valuable information.

Second night, we ventured into bowls. But let me take a moment here to ponder the existence of the "bylinder." Initially, I thought this was an official pottery category, such as the platter, the bowl, the cylinder. (Those more astute readers are already onto something, I know.) For instance, Doug came over to Chris and commented on his nice bylinder. Chris smiled, all proud and puffed up. It only took a few seconds for him to make the connection. "Wait, what's a bylinder?" A bylinder, as you might imagine, is a combination bowl/cylinder. But it was a damned nice one.

Apparently, cylinders have a propensity for working their way into being bowls. It's like they secretly want to be bowls, but their parents are pressuring them to go to cylinder school, like their grandfather. You see, because of something called "physics," which a very nice woman in Bellport, NY tried, in vain, to teach me about in 1984, clay naturally wants to fling itself toward the outer-most regions of your wheel. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to keep the freakin' stuff from doing that, by pushing on it with your left palm as it spins. A lot. Hard. Harder.

So, enough of bylinders. You get the idea.

That second night, I made four bowls. I was unaware of how proficient I was becoming at making bowls until the fourth night, when we had to pull out all the stuff we'd made and I had all these bowls. I like bowls. My goal was to make a bowl. So I was happy.

Third night, we made plates and platters. Difference? Apprarently, one is a platter. Two are plates. This begged the question, on the way to our third night of pottery, "Is plate just the plural of platter?" Can you say, "Please hand me that platter?" and if there are five of them, can you say, "Please hand me that stack of plate?" Like gander or mice? Is there no such word as "platters?" Alas, these questions were not answered.

But I made a damned good platter (I made only one, you see). Platters are more difficult than they sound. You figure, how hard can it be to make a flat disk? Just smush some clay onto the wheel, right? But no! Everything starts with a cylinder. If you can imagine turning your coffee mug into your dinner plate (platter?), you're beginning to understand how hard this is.

First you make your cylinder, but you make it with a wide bottom. Then you have to sort of coax the sides down by pushing with the flat part of your finger, from the inside, against (and over) another finger located on the outside. You keep doing this until the point JUST BEFORE the whole thing collapses onto the wheel. Of course, someone asked the question, during the demonstration, "How do you know when that is?" The answer? "You don't. I do."

Well, I was nervous and yes, I did push the limits a bit. But I had the edge of that platter almost horizontal, and it didn't collapse. I was impressed with myself. I made a platter. I even put little lines (decorations... adornments... flourishes...) in my platter.

So, the fourth class we learned how to trim our pottery. They are dried out, not kiln dried, just kind of leathery. And we grab one and have to center it on the wheel. I hate this part. I heard other people say they hate this part which, of course, instilled in me a sense of challenge in that I would vow not to hate this part and would make this the thing I became expert at. But no, I hate this part. It's all trial and error, heavy on the error.

You stick your thing (whatever... cylinder, bowl, platter) on the assumed center of the wheel. And then you spin the thing ever so slowly while holding your finger as still as possible to see where the pot hits your finger. Then you stop and nudge the pot just a little bit. And you do it again. And again. And again. And again. Until you're convinced you're just pushing the thing back and forth across the wheel and accomplishing nothing. This results in the "It's close enough" philosophy, which I readily adopted.

You also have to decide where to put the foot. Didn't know mugs had feet, did you? Me neither. There's a formula based on some pythagorean geometrical theorum, no doubt involving derivatives and hypotenuses and probably even amortized interest over several years, that I won't get into, but you eventually find a location for the foot. And you start trimming away everything that isn't feet. You're trimming off the bottom of your pot. It's upside-down on the wheel. Almost made the mistake of marking the location of my foot and then trimming it right off. But you have to trim inside the foot and then outside the foot and then lots of trimming from the foot along the side of your pot, toward the top which is really the bottom right now 'cause it's upside-down, remember.

At some point, and I might hate this part even more than the centering part, you take the thing off the wheel by unsticking some of the wet clay you used to stick it on. You look at it. You turn it over, back and forth very quickly, to compare the inside shape with the outside shape, to decide whether you need to trim more. And if you're new at this, you need to trim more. I would say, if you've never done this before, don't even take it off the wheel. Just keep trimming until you're convinced you're about to bore holes in the thing.

Then you try to stick it back on in the EXACT SAME PLACE it was before. Ha! I believe this is physically impossible. (I think I remember that nice woman in 1984 telling me this is impossible. I'm pretty sure we did a pottery lab.) But I got close. More trimming, blah, blah, blah (see first post).

Voila! It's an ugly cup!

I chose to trim the thing I liked least. Figured it was good to practice on. But it meant my first trimming experience was very unfulfilling.

We ran out of time, and I didn't get to trim anything else that night. And the night of the fifth class, we got some pretty nasty weather so we had to skip it. There's only one class left, in which we're supposed to glaze our pieces, assuming they've all been trimmed. So, we'll need to trim while others are glazing. Kind of a bummer. But we'll make up a class and, eventually, bring home all these mugs and bowls and plate.

Oh, and one bylinder.