Things We Should Do Better

I have recently returned from the most PSYCHOTIC family vacation ever.

First the four of us (father, wife, baby, me) board a plane to Arizona to visit my little sister Chloe at her boarding school for wayward girls, although her therapist warns us she has regressed tremendously and it will not be fun or even a good idea. Before picking her up, we check into a five-star resort in Sedona, a beautiful Arizona town surrounded by red-rock mountains. We visit a camping store and try to fit my baby sister into a baby backpack. She gets scared and starts crying when the saleswoman picks her up and puts her into the backpack unexpectedly. My father, incensed by her crying, yells at her to be quiet and decides to bend her to his will by squashing her head under a strap that isn’t fitted correctly. The excessive force causes more screaming and crying. Her mother’s and my attempts to rescue her prompt furious looks from my father and the pronouncement: “You’re treating her like a fucking baby. You’re going to turn her into a girl.” (Indeed.) It is quite a scene. After leaving the camping store, he drops us off in the desert, and the ensuing hike with his wife turns out to be more of an escape from tyranny than the peaceful idyll we had anticipated. I would very much like to go home, but I have eleven more days of this.

When we pick her up, Chloe proves worse than we had imagined and no better than she was a year ago when she went off to this expensive therapeutic boarding school. She claims to have mastered all the life skills her therapists have taught her but has decided not to use them. Her new career aspiration is whore/prostitute. “If it meant I could stay in Texas and see my friends, I would suck every dick in town.” She professes an extreme aversion to dish-washing. “I don’t wash dishes. Never have, never will.” Why sucking every dick in town is less disgusting than washing your family’s dishes is not made clear. She is a bitch to everyone. I leave the restaurant to cry in the rain after she pushes my button about not having accomplished all that I would have liked thus far in life. She has an uncanny ability to know exactly which buttons to push. I want to tell her that even prostitutes need to learn a few social skills, such as politeness and personal hygiene and how not to be a bitch for at least five minutes at a time.

Matters come to a head on Saturday evening when she is caught doing black magic with candles in the middle of the night. I am asleep in the next room. I hear some yelling but I don’t wake up completely. Later I learn there has been some sort of physical altercation. Chloe says that my dad hit her in the face, and he says he only pushed her. I am very upset by this news and wish that I could go home at once. Chloe is returned to school without further incident the following day, but everyone is in an incredibly horrible mood.

However, the day after that my father seems jovial, even when Chloe’s therapist calls to say he has informed child protective services in both states. My father happily expresses the hope that they will never let him see Chloe again. We arrive in Santa Fe to continue the holiday. My father wonders aloud why I seemed to be in a bad mood in the morning. (!!!) At a loss for words, I ask: how do you define “bad mood”? His wife explains that I have been rather quiet, not myself. (!!!) I am eager to escape from this hellish alternative universe.

We visit a jewelry shop where my father buys a beautiful gold necklace for his wife. The shop owner suggests some gold and purple sapphire earrings for me, which I strenuously repudiate to the point of rudeness, preferring to buy that sort of thing in the unlikely future when I can do it with my own money. They are bought anyway as a Christmas present. This makes me feel dirty and horrible. Now everyone seems “happy”. I feel extremely disturbed. Meanwhile I am trying to decide my future with regard to boyfriend/ job/ money/ place of abode, etc. I visited the vortexes of Sedona and meditated and had clarity, but now I have lost my clarity.

Tags: black magic, family insanity, luxury hotels, prostitution

        For our trip to Sweden, I came fully prepared with the latest in anti-pest technology.  I had visited the camping store and discovered a wealth of insect control devices.  Not only did I buy the standard highly concentrated Deet that will do God-knows-what to my unborn children, I also bought a bandana-sized cloth permeated with some chemical that mosquitoes do not love and – my favorites – wrist and ankle bands permeated with Deet that created a “halo” of protection, releasing the dry poison automatically as a result of my movements.  A less powerful weapon in my arsenal was a herbal roll-on with Eucalyptus oil and other gentle substances, but I didn’t use this as much as the poisonous stuff.  I spent a lot of time spraying myself, and as a result I did not get any ticks and did not get many mosquito bites until the end of the trip, when I began to grow lax in my defensive regimen.  My boyfriend eschewed poison, and his only means of protection was the fly swatter, so he got a lot of bites.

        Every night we argued over my most powerful weapon, a wall plug-in that released poison vapors to kill mosquitoes.  It really worked.  The mosquitoes dropped out of the air.  But my boyfriend said he did not wish to breathe poison vapors all night.  We had to compromise: I filled the room with poison for two hours before bed, and then we unplugged it.

        All my devices had no effect on the large black ants which had chewed their way into the house.  They were big and mean looking.  One day I was down by the lake, and I flicked one into the water and watched it swim for a long time until it finally washed back onto the rocks, righted itself, and went on its way as if nothing had happened.  No stopping to catch its breath, no post traumatic stress for that ant.  I also saw several snakes.  One day I was lying on the rocks by the lake, and I rolled over and frightened away a long black snake (not an adder, I hope) that had been emerging from the water to join me in sunning itself.  It slid back into the lake and dove down out of sight.  Our favorite animals (which we did not consider pests) were the frogs that came out in the rain.  When we went walking at night, we had to watch our step because they were all over the place, big and fat, hopping across the roads.  The forest really did not belong to us, and it was futile to think I could create a vacuum around me where I could go about my business as if I was not stepping into everybody else’s habitat.

Tags: vermin, wilderness

        One of many stupid arguments my boyfriend and I have had is about pancakes.  On our recent holiday, I offered to make pancakes one morning.  First he said that would be good.  Then he said, “But the only food I consider a pancake is the size of a plate and the thinness of a beer coaster.”  (That is a good description of a pancake in unenlightened England.)

        “That is what I consider a crepe, not a pancake,” I said, “and that’s not what I am going to make.  I don’t care for crepes.”

        “What’s wrong with crepes?” he said.

        “They’re not very filling, and people put too much sugar on them, and they don’t have any taste.  American pancakes are much heartier and you can put all kinds of things in them.”

        “I don’t see why you have to say bad things about my kind of pancakes,” he said.

        “You’re being ungracious,” I said. 

        “You attacked my pancakes.”

        “I offered to make you pancakes,” I said, “and you then stipulated what kind of pancakes were acceptable to you.  My making American pancakes does not threaten the existence of your kind of pancakes or prevent you from making them in the future.”

        In the end we had to laugh, but I did not make pancakes that morning because I discovered we had no milk.  We made them for dinner a few days later, and his pancakes turned out much better than mine because he had a better pan and he got to the milk first, and then we ran out of milk and I didn’t have enough, so my pancakes had a big emphasis on the cake aspect (they were way too thick). 

        I’m sure I’ll win him over one of these days, and I’ll hear him having this argument with another English person, laying down the law about what real pancakes are.

Tags: cultural differences, pancakes

Tags: Sweden

The week before last I spent three nights camping alone, which is not something I have done very often. I told myself that if I got scared, I should just think about an acquaintance who recently served in the Israeli army. If he could survive eighteen months in the Golan Heights with Hezbollah shooting at him, I could probably last a few days in a campground in the New Forest.

On the train platform, as I was waiting for the train to Brockenhurst, a businessman walked past me, glanced at my bicycle, my backpack, and my camping clothes, and dismissed me with a disdainful look. Observing his petulant expression and excess belly fat, I probably did the same to him. He was most likely a lot richer than I will ever be, but I was glad to be the one heading for the forest. I doubt if you could have paid either one of us a million dollars to trade places with the other.

Oddly enough, I saw his double the next day. When I visited Palace House in Beaulieu, I saw a portrait of Charles II that showed exactly the same petulant lips, the same ugly expression, the look of too much indulgence that has not brought happiness. Some things don’t change.

On my first evening of camping I went for a walk, got lost, wandered through a field with sharp things that stuck in my socks, and didn’t see another living soul, which was rather eerie. I returned to the campground to reorient myself and went to bed while it was still light so I wouldn’t be scared. All was quiet until a herd of ponies came through at 3 a.m., brushed past my tent, and spent an eternity grazing on a holly tree beside me. It got light around 4 a.m., and I slept better after that.

The next day I walked on a heath, got lost more times than I care to admit, and saw no more than three people, whom I regarded with suspicion. (What were they doing out in the middle of nowhere? Riding a horse, running, and walking a dog – or so they pretended.) I found it very hard to orient myself in the wide-open moor, in the absence of any landmarks. It was strange how empty the place was.

When I got back to my bike, I found that someone had stolen my bungee cords for the second time in a week. I use them to hold bags on the rack at the back. This double theft was very odd, as they have never been stolen in the years that I have been cycling around with them. Somebody must have finished work and come to the parking lot to have a few beers. They said to themselves, “What I really need right now are some bungee cords. Oh look, there are some brand new ones.” Perhaps they thought of dragging ponies behind the car; there does not seem to be much else for delinquents to do in the forest. I was glad they had left the bike, or it would have been a long walk back to the campground.

That night was not quite so peaceful, as I woke at 2 a.m. feeling sick and had to run out of my tent to throw up. The next morning I was awakened by a similar urgent bodily crisis of an opposite nature. As soon as I had recovered, I moved my tent to the other end of the campground, away from that place of pollution and death. I hoped the next residents of that campsite would not look behind the holly tree. I felt very weak, but I was determined to go for a hike anyway. I tried to buy Gatorade for its all-American magical properties, but the shop sold only an inferior sugary English equivalent called Lucozade which did not restore my strength.

I ended up walking at least fifteen miles because I got lost a few more times on the moor, in spite of (or perhaps because of) asking people the way. I may have misdirected a few lost children myself. “Over the hill, turn right, take your next left, can’t miss it.” Oh, but you can. The map makes it look so easy, showing one fork in the trail when in fact there may be five forks, or the trail may vanish altogether.

I did make it to Anderwood, my favorite place in the New Forest, a grove of ancient pollarded beaches that reminds me of a temple. Then I hurried back to my bicycle in the fading light, getting lost only a few times along the way. After searching for a footbridge, I took off my shoes and waded across a stream, only to look up on the other side and see the footbridge thirty feet away. The ponies looked bemused.

On the last night I finally slept well. Maybe I was getting used to being so exposed and vulnerable, or maybe I was just exhausted. I was proud of myself for surviving the three days alone, in spite of being fairly nervous and jumpy and getting lost all the time. When I got home, I wasn’t nervous anymore about sleeping with the window open. That is real progress!

Tags: forest, getting lost, ponies, wilderness

I spent all of yesterday editing a student thesis.  Most of the people who ask for my editing services turn out to be foreign students, usually from China or Korea.  I am grateful for the business, but I get annoyed at myself because I always undercharge them, and then I end up spending many unpaid hours trying to unravel their grammar, which is often stubbornly knotted.

For instance, what was I to make of this?  “The two ways correlations enable to enhance higher level of learning.”  Or this?  “Additionally, address persistence communication and discourse among teachers and students are initially to foster reflection.”  Arrgh!  What are the admissions standards for British universities these days?

While I was working in the library, a bird was chirping outside the window in a maddeningly repetitive way.  It has been there all week; it must be doing something important in that tree.  I wished for a beebee gun.  However, inertia prevented me from moving to another library.

Every time I spend a whole day on a job that I only charged £35 for, I swear I’ll give a more realistic quote next time.  The problem is that they are students, and they send me emails saying, “I am self-funded and I can’t afford very much.  Please don’t make it too expensive….”  Then I lose my courage.

Not long ago a lad named Yousef sent me his thesis and emailed additional instructions an hour later:

“ I have just found out that my findings of the Moroccan tax system might be insufficient, and my analysis of the findings and conclusions are weak and that have lead to poor conclusions. It has been suggested that the Moroccan tax system barely meets the preconditions of R. Grover’s Model. Rather Morocco is a country that likes to show its systems are transparent and operating well but rather at the grass roots application level this is not the case.  I’m not sure if you can edit taking this information in board or whether it is better for me to rewrite it and send it to you once rewriten? Please advise.  P.s. would you have any idea what grade my research is at?”

After I informed Yousef that, unusually enough, the Moroccan tax system does not happen to be my field of expertise, and perhaps he should make the changes first, I did not hear from him again.

Whenever native English speakers send me their theses, I love them, even if their grammar is comparatively bad.  I give them an even bigger discount because at least they know to put “the” or “a” in front of the nouns.  When I get an email from someone with a name like Brad Johnson, I hardly dare hope.  “I presume you are a native English speaker?” I ask.  This question confuses and offends people named Brad Johnson and makes them suspicious of me.  However, after I have praised the high quality of their writing (compared to what I have been seeing from Tao or Ji), they are soothed, and we enter into a happy partnership.

Tags: grammar, poverty

The ponies in the New Forest, where I went camping last week, are very clever indeed. They have established their own fiefdom with unprecedented pony freedom and special rules for humans. About 3000 ponies roam freely throughout the forest. Their grazing maintains the heath and grasslands, and they also contribute to the local economy and the special character of the place, so they have a lot to be proud of.

The New Forest is not new, and it is not what we commonly think of as a forest. It is an administrative area founded in 1079 by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting ground. It is mostly heathland but also includes woodland, bogs, rivers, and villages, and it stretches down to the south coast of England. People who live on certain smallholdings still retain their ancient rights to graze ponies, cattle, and pigs.

The ponies are well aware of their special status. They require motor vehicles to observe a speed limit of 40 mph so that they can stroll along the roads at their leisure. It is not uncommon to see a line of traffic backed up behind an easy-going pair of ponies. In the villages, people have to put up turnstile gates to prevent the ponies from coming in and eating their gardens. There are signs everywhere advising people not to leave food in tents or to feed the ponies: “They may look cute, but they can bite and kick.” This is a PR campaign by the ponies to toughen up their image; they are tired of being the favorite model for little girls’ toys.

The ponies are very sure of themselves. Whenever I sat down to have a picnic, a herd of ponies appeared as if from nowhere. They pretended to graze nonchalantly as they crept nearer and nearer. When they were almost upon me, I had to flee to preserve my lunch. In the campgrounds they are particularly bold, requiring every resident to pay a food tax on pain of tent damage.

While well-bred ponies can fetch thousands of pounds at the market (the New Forest pony is a pure breed), and many are sold to private families for riding, there is a darker side to the ponies’ story. Because of overbreeding, many of the ponies have been sold cheaply for meat (pet food or human food on the Continent). They are herded by men on motorbikes from the open grazing lands into crowded, muddy markets and sold to the highest bidder, sometimes for as little as £1. Then they are packed into trucks and driven to slaughterhouses.

The ponies’ mistreatment at these markets has attracted the attention of animal welfare groups. The public is also disturbed by the idea of the ponies being sold for meat. For the past few years, the pony association has tried to tackle the problem by limiting the number of stallions available for breeding. They hope to drive up the price so that the meat men will not come calling.

These wild, free-roaming creatures have things their way in the forest, but that may not be enough to save them out in the world.

Tags: forest, ponies

I wonder why it is that I feel such a tremendous sense of wellbeing around trees. Last weekend we took trips to two wooded areas, Burnham Beeches and Cliveden, both in Buckinghamshire. Burnham Beeches is a 540-acre wood that was bought by the City of London in the nineteenth century to stop it from being developed into houses. After four hundred years, the ancient beech pollards still look vigorous and alive, even though their smooth grey bark is tough and wrinkled like elephant skin, and many of them are hollow.

Pollarding is a technique of increasing the timber supply by chopping off limbs about ten feet above the ground before they get too heavy and damage the trunk; new limbs then grow out sideways, too high for animals to chew, and after a few years they can be harvested. The method of pollarding old trees that have been left alone for such a long time is a lost art, and the managers of Burnham Beeches are trying to rediscover how to do it without killing the trees.

As soon as we walked into the wood, I felt calm and happy. This was not only because I had just wolfed down a Stag burger at the nearby Stag pub. When I looked up at the sunlight shining through the high canopy of beech leaves, it seemed to envelop me in a green and gold bliss. Though surrounded by suburbia, the wood felt pristine and ancient. We wandered past ponds dense with white-blossoming water lilies. We saw an oak tree and a beech tree that had grown together in a Gothic arch, so that their trunks joined, then crossed and moved apart, and then came back and joined together again much higher up. It was very romantic. I suppose trees must be aware of each other somehow since they spend hundreds of years in one another’s company.

We saw an 800-year old oak tree known as the Druid’s Oak. I commented on how tiny our lives are compared to those of the trees. My boyfriend said, “But they don’t do very much.” On further reflection, we realized that actually they do a tremendous amount – they make the air we breathe, which is quite a task; they provide a habitat for countless organisms; and they grow much taller than I could dream of being. We found one young beech tree beside a commemorative plaque stating that it had been planted in 1957. In those fifty-one years it had grown at least thirty feet high. If I grew at such a rate, I would have to spend most of my time shopping for new clothes, but the trees have more important things to do.

When we read some of the signs, I saw how the wood has healed itself since the Second World War, when it was used as a military base, a place to hide tanks, and a prisoner of war camp. It was bombed by the Germans, and the bomb craters are still visible, although we argued over what was actually a bomb crater and what was a valley or a natural depression. Few signs of this violent past remain; I could have believed we were walking in a wood in the Middle Ages, except that I was not worried about highwaymen.

Cliveden, the National Trust property where we went the next day, was also put to military use; it was a hospital in both wars, and soldiers who died were buried in what used to be the tennis court. There is an Italianate mansion, last lived in by the Waldorf Astors of hotel fame, but now turned into a five-star hotel. The house was at the center of a British political sex scandal in the 1960s known as the Profumo affair.

Mr. Profumo should have saved his reputation and his career by leaving the party and the pretty girl and going down the hill, past the formal gardens to the lovely stretch of woodland along the River Thames. The wood grows on a very steep hill and is therefore known as the Hanging Wood. This is an apt name, as the great yew trees look as if they are barely hanging onto the slope, with their roots exposed and the ground around them eroded. We saw a small, stocky muntjac stag feeding in the undergrowth; he looked shy, but he stared at us for a long time.

A few weeks ago (as described in #35 Never Give Up) we set off on a fruitless hunt for a box wood without finding a single box tree. This quest was finally fulfilled at Cliveden when we found ourselves in the midst of a great many old box trees growing on the hill. They were just as gnarled and ancient as I would have hoped. If we had not spend a whole day in May looking for such trees, I might have passed right by them without distinguishing them from the rest of the wood, but because of our failed quest, I was grateful for every box tree we encountered. I thought it possible that, in their own way, they too rejoiced in the completion of our journey.

Tags: trees, wilderness

When I call my boyfriend in the evenings, we often have a great conversation, and then he ruins the whole thing by hustling me off the phone without warning because he wants to brush his teeth or go to bed or something exciting like that. I know he has to get up early and he doesn’t have much free time, but it still feels like a slap in the face. Even if all has been well up to that point, I hang up the phone feeling as if we have started a fight, and the feeling can linger through the night and the next day. With phone arguments, there is no way to hug each other and get over it. There’s just the insomnia, the urge to send nasty text messages, and the promises to myself never to call him again.

Tonight I was talking and he said suddenly, “I’m going to go now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I said, “You need to work on your transitions.”

He said, “But I have to iron my shirt.”

Grrr.

At least he called back later and apologized.

On the other hand, why am I so offended? Why am I expecting him to be nice? I am reading an amazing novel, The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. (This book is what I was talking about tonight when my boyfriend cut me off.) It tells the story of a harelipped, supposedly simple-minded gardener who makes a journey through war-ravaged apartheid South Africa. He is repeatedly imprisoned in camps and harassed by the police for being a vagrant and not having the right travel permit and identification papers, but he never seems offended by other people’s behaviour towards him. He doesn’t expect people to treat him well. All he wants is to find a place in the world where he can live freely, even if it means living alone in the wilderness. He doesn’t ask for a nice house, a lot of stuff, or even other human companionship. It is a beautiful book. Today I was comparing my life and my expectations to Michael K’s and thinking how, compared to him, I live like a billionaire. The level of security and companionship and hope that I enjoy is something that he cannot even dream of. Then I thought how strange it is that I am constantly finding things to be annoyed about, even though I live in this comparative paradise. Why do I expect people to treat me with “respect” or be “nice” to me or live up to all these standards in my head? No one is nice to Michael K, but that isn’t really the point. He just wants to be free of confinement and to be allowed to live with dignity – that is his unattainable paradise.

Tags: freedom, paradise, wilderness

My recent trip to Scotland was the best thing I have done all year.  After months of anxiety, I thought I had tried every kind of stress relief: exercise, healthy diet, yoga, meditation, self-help books.  Nothing was working.  I felt overwhelmed by the impossibilities of the future, and at some point every week I felt as if I was about to have a breakdown.

Then my mother came to visit, and we went to Scotland for a week.  I didn’t let myself take any work with me.  We went hiking every day, through landscapes that varied from moors, forests, and mountains to clifftop coastal paths and beaches.  We walked through rain and sunshine.  We stalked wild seals basking on the rocks and called to dolphins playing in the waves.  All I had to worry about each day was, first, deciding where we would hike, then doing the hike, and finally mustering my last reserves of energy to eat some delicious local fish for dinner.  Every night I slept well.  The only stress was driving on the wrong side of the road, but that was fairly easy to adjust to.

On the second morning of our holiday, I awoke feeling happy for the first time in months.  I finally felt like myself again.  I could see that all my burdens were imaginary and self-imposed, and no one else was judging me as harshly as I was constantly judging myself.

I discovered that when I confine my concerns to my daily activities, I can really enjoy each day.  It is only when my mind leaps ahead to next month and next year, and I start trying to control the future, that I get into trouble.  When I say to myself, “If I can get this project done by this date, I will be an OK person, but if I don’t get it done, I am worthless and my life will fall apart,” I am obviously setting myself up for misery.  I believe I have to say those things to myself to keep motivated, but for that week in Scotland I did not give myself a hard time, and I did not try to control the future – and lo and behold, the sky did not fall!  Maybe tomorrow really can take care of itself.

I think the key is to concentrate on the work of the day and jettison the general angst about anything that doesn’t have to do with this particular day or even this hour.  If I focus on the task at hand, I’ll be happy.  When we were hiking, I was putting one foot after another, mile after mile, and not worrying about next year or my career, just thinking about getting up the next hill, enjoying the view, finding our spot on the map, and enjoying all the ideas pouring into my head.  That was the wonderful thing: when I left my work behind, I was more inspired than I had been in months.  I spent our walks reveling in the creative visions that seemed to shine from the sky with the endless daylight.  Something about the rhythm of walking releases a flood of ideas in my mind.  I had so many useful thoughts without even trying, and I didn’t end up feeling that I had taken time away from my work; I had just approached it in a different, more stimulating way – like sneaking up on the seals across a seaweed-covered peninsula instead of going to see them in a zoo.

If I could hold onto that live-for-today mentality in my everyday life, I would be just as productive, and I would have none of the useless anxiety that is so exhausting.  Life would be heavenly.

Tags: dolphins, inspiration, Scotland