Tag: bloganuary

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February

I’m a New York City boy, and I kvetch a bit. Need to familiarize yourself with that term? It’s a Yiddish word for complaining, whining, and generally bitching about things. If you are from New York City, It’s no big deal. Half of the New York dialect comprises words borrowed from other languages. If it sounds good and descriptive, we snatch it. The availability of good juicy terms is almost endless as almost all the world resides in the city.
Back to kvetching. While annoying, it’s a safety valve on my temper. I grumble, growl, and complain about stuff rather than having temper tantrums (usually).
I am now growling about the calendar and how we need to fix February. It needs to be shorter. “But aren’t you worried about the total alienation of millions of people who would no longer have a birthday due to your shortening February by a week?” No. We’ll give them Valentine’s birthdays or shove them off into March. Don’t bother me with the details.
That’s the nice thing about my grumbling, growling, and kvetching. People roll their eyes, but nobody expects I’ll come up with anything constructive to fix the problem.
Now, about my plan to shorten February…

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Off The Beaten Track

Not all family traditions involve cooking or holidays! Let me explain.
Some of the tools racked around the shop are my father’s, and one or two probably date back to his father. Tools, access to, and use thereof are a family trait. Become an adult in our family, and you will likely receive a tool kit. The contents will vary depending upon the specific interest: for general work, jewelry making, model making, or design. We procure the goodies from various tool catalogs, internet sites, and tool sellers at shows.
It’s more than tools alone that are intergenerational. My bookshelves contain titles that were in my father’s library. Bookstores and booksellers get ransacked while we look for titles in areas that interest us. We always look for independent dealers who stock more than the local big box store. Titles on creative arts, crafts, and skills are in high demand.

When people talk about favorite family traditions, it’s often about food and holiday celebrations. And those are important, but much more gets passed on – food and holiday traditions are just the easy ones that come to mind without any prompting. What about gardening traditions, musical interests, or occupational specialties? Some of these traditions are off the beaten track. More than one family I know of has vocabulary items passed from generation to generation. Not understanding the little phrases and sayings leaves you out of the conversation.
In a way, it’s atrocious that when we discuss family tradition, our minds immediately skip to the most obvious rather than the truly unique bits of culture that are distinctive to our family.

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Winter

Over coffee this morning, I allowed myself to page through the seed catalogs. They’ve been piling up since December. I wait until January to browse and dream of the new year’s garden. It’s part of my strategy to get through the winter – seed catalogs now and order by the end of the month. In early February, I start planting indoor plants that need lots of time to develop before planting out. By mid-February, I get my taps and buckets ready for maple syrup. In March, I’m busy making syrup, planting seeds, and cleaning up outside ( weather permitting). Throughout, I continue writing my blog posts for intellectual stimulation.
These things form a strategy for stopping my seasonal affect disorder from taking over my life. Full spectrum grow lights, music, exercise, blogging, and family time with my wife, children, and pets all form a plan. I’ve learned that the SAD experience is contingent on my actions to counteract it. Accept the conditions of life offered by the SAD and live a miserable and depressed life through the winter. Or take active steps to counter it, and get through the winter a bit fatigued from the activity but feeling fulfilled.
From talking to others with similar conditions, I’ve learned that you need to develop a plan that works for you. I know one woman who compulsively knits, cooks, writes music and corresponds with others via snail mail letters. Her plan would fail for me – just on the knitting. And while she’d love the maple syrup, hiking out in the snow to fetch in buckets of sap would make her unhappy.
You have to come up with things you like, tolerate, keep your mind active, and keep the body moving.
As in other things, Buddha was correct: it doesn’t matter how slow you go as long as you keep moving.

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Past,Present, Future Perfect

The physical sciences are discussing the nature of time: does it exist? Does it flow in one direction? At the practical level, I have not recently found myself at particularly embarrassing moments in 1967 (Baltimore, Maryland) – no need to discuss the delicate nature of the event. And I am pleased to tell you that time is working fine without inconvenient little rambling episodes to prior times.

For those of us still bedazzled by the prospects of the future, this is encouraging. I’ve read so much Sci-Fi that the prospect of messing with my past scares the hell out of me.

I’d love to go back and change any number of things, beat the hell out of bullies, and stop myself from saying dumb stuff. But then I’d be a pickpocket of my own future because my present would change…or would it bifurcate? And would the new me then try to go back and fix things again? Would they run into me? Would there be an entire convention of me clamoring that their fixes should take precedence? 

I don’t think it would go well knowing that I like the ultimate, not penultimate, word on things. No. It’s better like it is. Being unable to alter the past, live with it as it is, and mine it for inspiration and learn from it.

Taking too deep a dive into the past is dangerous. We forget history is not an unalterable landscape. We can look back and view it time and time again from different perspectives. Using this ability for insight is one thing, but using it as a dwelling is foolish.

I ask you to consider this quote from the historian Shelby Foote: “People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.”

Be careful. Being able to reinterpret the past is as dangerous as going back and actually changing it.