I Officially Belong to Iowa

Tonight I stood on Sarah's porch while Amelia braided my hair. She braided my hair and I watched my friends in the kitchen cooking lentil soup. Everywhere was brisk, autumn finally sneaking back into the air. I stood incredibly still as Amelia took her scissors and cut. My hair was so thick that it took a good minute to chop that braid off. And it fell to the ground like an animal stunned, eighteen inches of woven hair--a good pound of hair--gone. And it felt wonderful. Literally a weight off of me. The scissors had sounded horrible crunching through my hair but when I saw the braid on the ground, felt the breeze on the back of my neck, I knew it was exactly what needed to be done. It sounds cheesy but when Amelia asked me how I felt I said, "Like a new woman." Like I could finally move on with my life. Like everything that mattered, everything that happened when those eighteen inches were stuck to my head could be laid to rest. Is this what happens when the weather cools and the heart starts skipping like mad with all the crispness of leaves crackling under foot? When people move across countries, move out of old lives, out of old loves, out of old habits?

I came home to a single piece of mail: my Iowa voter registration confirmation.

Dear Iowa, I'm yours.

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Pancakes: Let's Dish

Usually when you get to a new town you are not greeted by this:

Oh, sure, you could dream about it happening (wistfully, with many stars in the eyes) but the chances of seeing this greeting in real life are slim to none. Slim to none, that is, unless you happen to go to Centerville, Iowa on the day of their annual Pancake Parade. Which is exactly what I, and the great Pancake 7, did last Saturday.

But even before you soak up the sweet sounds of the elderly playing lap guitars, you get to go through the free pancake gauntlet. From afar you just see a vast spread of aproned folks sweating over a whole lot of griddles. Up close it looks like this:

Note, if you will, the huge tubs of margarine, the vat of batter, the styrofoam plates stacked with hot cakes.

Then you eat the stack of delicious cakes at picnic tables and chat with the biker dudes who got the "gourmet pancake feast" (at a whopping $4--almost worth it, judging from the mountain of whipped cream and fruit topping):


After dining on the scrumptious stack of pancakes, you might mosey around the town square, which truly begins to feel like the "world's largest town square" (as the Parade website bragged). It will nearly charm the pants off you, what with the Ben Franklin Five and Dime (selling, among other treasures, David the Gnomes decked out in Hawkeye regalia), the old time-y cafes complete with soda fountains, and the porkchop-on-a-stick stands. Yes. Porkchop. On. A. Stick (that was actually just the bone--basically you were eating a porkchop with your hands, like a caveman).

After seeing that stand you are tempted to say things like, "Well, it just can't get better than that," while shaking your head with a fond smile. But then you see the funnel cake cart, with its zesty flashing lightbulbs and cheery carnival print. And you are reverted to being five-years-old where everything is magical, shiny, and dusted with sugar.

You see the mini Jean-Benets prancing about the stage beneath a banner bellowing: "Pancake Day Parade 2008: Never Ending Story!"

You see children Dressed Up as pancakes and maple syrup.

You think you might die of happiness, or sugar. And you might think, while driving through three hours worth of cornfields to get back home: "I love Iowa. So, so much."

[for the rest of the dazzling photos, see dear Sarah's blog.]

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Proof

That T-Rexes go to hoedowns and square dance and/or sit on bales of hay:

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How my Ozark dance training finally paid off

It is no secret that my love for Kevin Arnold, aged 11-13, is vast and unending. But it all came into hyper focus last night at about midnight when I saw this:
[Fastforward to 5:50]


That’s right, Kevin Arnold SQUARE DANCING! With poor, bless-her-heart Margaret Farquhar on top of it all!

Square dancing… Remember fourth grade? That’s when Willow Elementary School embarked on its square dance physical education. I have no idea how they corralled the bunch of us in the multi-purpose room and taught us how to do-si-doe. There were a lot of cootie shots going around, I can tell you that. In hindsight I suppose the whole exercise was to force boys and girls to—perish the thought—touch hands (a true coeducation) since that was the start of a year long, kid-inflicted sex segregation.

We allowed the boys to pull our hair and chase us around because they were actions that resembled hating rather than loving. And we HATED boys! So I suppose the California education system thought this was the only logical step: gather 100 odd kids in a large room, put them in gym clothes, make them stand in squares and bow dopily at each other, and teach them the fine art of Alabama lefts & right-hand stars. Don’t even pretend that you don’t remember what those are.

So the history of square dancing says that some time long ago the Midwest turned “square dancing” into “play parties.” Something of a Puritan impulse. At those times a common call went like this: “Meet your honey, pat her on the head, if you can't get biscuit, give her corn bread.” “Biscuit” was code for “waist-swing” and “cornbread” was a “two-hand swing.” So really there were two competing mindsets at work in the MPR of Willow Elementary School: 1) integration of the sexes and 2) keep it clean.

The culmination of our training ended in a large fourth grade party that consisted of various cookies, trays of crudités, and a large punch bowl. We were told to come in our best square dance garb, which really translated into cowboy and cowgirl Halloween outfits. Our parents came. They came with cameras. They came with camcorders—those big guys, the ones fathers had to hoist upon their shoulders with much grunting and bulging temple veins. They came in droves.

And we had to dance, dance, dance, like so many little monkeys. The weirdest part of the whole square dance unit was that we had to also learn the Mexican hat dance. I don’t know if it was some sort of concession—a sort of, okay nod to this culture nod to that—or some horrible, off color joke that just went too over our young heads. Either way, half of the classes square danced while the other half hat danced. Every so often we would swap. There is a metaphor of some sort here, I can feel it.

Fast forward 15 years to Lisbon, Iowa where there is a farm so red and so farm-ish it puts other farms to shame. There are horses with names like “Ace.” There are troughs filled with ice, beer, and Coke. There are hay bales a plenty, stacked up to the beams of the farm. There are folks in cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and cowboy belts. There’s me, grinning like a fool and do-si-doe-ing along with the best of them. And man I look good. Thanks, Willow Elementary school, circa 1994!

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Every once in a while...

I become a semi-certified writer, meaning something small and written during the x,y,z hours of night, gets published. And you'd think I'd be braver, put more writing on this silly little blog, but it's scary. So I take heart in the courage of Ashmae and Lia and follow in their footsteps to submit this for your consideration--

A Revisionist History of How

(from, with many thanks, Juice: A Journal of the Ordinary)

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DnD'er? Almost. And it was so right.

Let me try to paint an appropriate picture for you of how I spent two hours of my Sunday evening. Say it was raining and say I was baking pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (because it was and I was). Say some guys called me up to come to a games night. And perhaps when I walked into their house they were playing a wicked game of Halo, complete with a running commentary from all the males in the room. The apartment was of the cinder block assortment, of the two-scruffy-couches-and-card-table-and-massive-shiny-new-TV variety. Somehow it managed to combine every guy's apartment I ever went to in my undergraduate days. It had that college apartment smell too--some highly engineered scent involving old popcorn, pizza, wet socks, and cinnamon (from the scented candles trying to mask the odor). Props for the candles, I have to admit.



It looked like Halo would never end but somehow--miraculously--it did. Rather suddenly. In equally abrupt movements games were rejected, mulled over, then finally decided upon. The games had names that did not match any of the game names in my personal library. There was no Scrabble, no LIFE, no Uncle Wiggly (a most excellent game). No, these were games with sassy, glittery names like "CHAOS!" and "BETRAYAL!" For inexplicable reasons, Betrayal (at the House on the Hill) was deemed highly appropriate for the occasion.



This is what the box looks like:



Awesome, right?



From the minute my friend put this configuration down, I knew I was in for a treat. When he started organizing stacks of cards into neat piles the whole thing started to look suspiciously like the fantasy role playing games kids used to play in the library during lunch when the rest of us played kickball or tore willow branches down to whack people with. "Oh no," I thought. "I have inadvertently signed up to play some crazy DnD game."



But then I met Heather. I tried not to like her, I tried to be aloof. But look at how sporting and sporty she looks! I had to love her chutzpah. Who else could rock the sports bra/Spandex combo while going on monster adventures in a haunted house? What had felt a lot like mortification from a few seconds before suddenly morphed into something like excitement.



The game went on. And on. And on. At one point we looked a lot like these guys, if you squinted: 





And that's when it hit me. I--though not even half as cool--was having a Daniel from Freaks & Geeks moment. And, just like Daniel, I was LOVING it. I mean, at one point we had to create an elaborate scheme to kill all of our evil doppelgängers. I kid you not--we had to KILL our DOPPELGANGERS! It was exactly as awesome as it sounds.



So Sunday night goes to you, Daniel:





Wizards of the Coast, I salute you!

In his own words

This morning we had a small moment of silence for David Foster Wallace in class. It was just a bunch of writers heads bowed over the first page of a rather exquisite fiction piece he wrote in which he delivered Marlon Brando from a somewhat brutish interpretation to that of a poignant, multi-dimensional one and it was breathtaking. We sat in silence and read in silence until our professor finally said something: "Perhaps writing is a dangerous thing." And then: "I do not know why I feel this loss of David so much. I miss him." So all day I just wanted to get home so I could reread his commencement speech at Kenyon College because in it he is wise and honest, and it got me thinking how profound and lovely a gesture any speck of honesty is these days. Here is what he says towards the end:

"Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck."

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This is no good:

David Foster Wallace (linked to Perpetually Peregrine's post, which puts lots of things I think about this into words). 

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this is weird but i kind of like it

"narwhal, narwhal, sing me a sweet song"

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jake ryan = be still my heart

remember this? the car, the cake, the candles? basically everything about this?

sometimes you just need the 80s to remind you about how awesome life can be.

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HOW TWEEN MOVIE BRINK! DESTROYED BLADIN' IN AMERICA

rollerblading was cool in my neighborhood for a few months in 1995. there was a lot of street hockey going on and that naturally meant blades for all. then, inexplicably, rollerblading became the exact opposite of cool. mostly it's because people with blades started doing things like this: 

unacceptable. 

so paris in 2004 took me by complete surprise. never in my life had i seen so many normal, urban, attractive people on six wheels. and yet there they were, constantly: swooshing down the beaux arts bridge, loop-de-looping through arcades, taking casual drags on cigarettes as they glide down the quai d'orsay. none of them wore spandex, kneepads, helmets, or darkly tinted glasses. in fact, most of them seemed to be of the corduroy jacket and literary satchel set (i.e. cool). did blading--excuse me, bladin'--get so uncool that it made the highly coveted hairpin turn to become uber-kitsch cool? and why did this turn fail to happen in america? we can blame baywatch and other similar boardwalks (reality based and otherwise), spandex, and the mid-90s perky workout ethic but that would be too easy an out. i think the sole reason why bladin' never made it back to cool in the good ol' usa is simple: in 1998 disney made a movie called, appropriately, brink!

unfortunately, in america, the art of rollerblading would never recover from this particular disneyfication.

this is nothing against brink!--heavens no! and this is especially nothing against the puppy-eyed boy next door erik von detten who, according to imdb.com, possesses "leading man good looks and undeniable charm" (true!) i'm just saying that brink! basically quarantine the sport to a fluffy disney arena, and that is an arena in which no honest to goodness x-treme sporter wants to be. the good thing about brink! is that it really helped pave the way for other influential tween disney movies such as high school musical, 1 - 3. and it left us with so many gems such as when gabby, the go hard or die hard female blader of the x-bladz crew, says "skating from the heart" and really means that in almost every situation bladin' means living from the heart. 

and that is why this week i chose to go against the prevalent feeling that bladin' = horribly passé. that is why i pulled my $20 k-mart blades out of my trunk, pulled on my knee high striped socks, and strapped myself into the blades. and let me tell you, they looked good on my feet. and i felt good flying down these iowa sidewalks. and even though more than four cars rolled down their windows after honking to shout "WOOOOOOOOT WOOOOOOOT!" i did not take the smallest offense. so today you might want to ask yourself the same question gabby asked andy brinker: "when you woke up today did you say, 'today i'm gonna talk or today i'm gonna skate'?"

[5:28 - 8:00]

i rest my case.

oh i'm sorry...

now i do.

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thank you lia

for this wondrous video, which i watch at least 5 times a day:

amit peled, you who at the age of twenty-one, flew from israel to yale to study with a great cellist, a master cellist (who invited you on full scholarship)--you who told this master cellist one year later that it was time to go somewhere new. and what did you do? you phoned bernard greenhouse at his home in the cape and said, simply, with no frills: "mr. greenhouse you are my hero. can i come play for you?" because that is all you've ever wanted to do. and of course he was pleased with the tenacity of twenty-two and said, "sure!" and even though you shook like crazy through the whole piece you still found the courage to tell him you wanted to leave yale, the scholarship, even dear aldo parisot just to study with him, mr. greenhouse, in the cape. so you did just that. and you studied together, cooked together, walked together, and during every free moment you played, you learned how to breathe properly, how to hold your cello properly, how to love the music and the shape of your cello so completely which shows in every movement of your hands and face. and this is what i want from life--this immersion and immensity of art. 

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if harry potter played the cello

this one's for you, G.O.B!

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bon iver steals hearts everyday

so my friend sarah just emailed me this beautiful, beautiful song that i cannot stop listening to:
"skinny love"


and then there's "flume"


be still my heart.

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those norwegians...still hilarious

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