It's fantasy, not a dating manual

There has been much discussion in the past few years over the portrayal of young women and their romantic entanglements in young adult fiction. Two of the most hotly contested series are the Twilight series and the Hunger Games series. Many women feel that Bella is a weak girl interested only in obtaining her happily ever after with Edward. She has no desire to go to college, have a career or become a person in her own right. She simply wants to be with Edward.
Katniss Everdeen on the other hand has fought in several ferocious battles and is very much a strong young woman. Yet she too has romantic entanglements and is torn between the classic best friend versus the kind boy who has always loved her. Many people think the author copped out by having Katniss indeed decide between the two and settle down with one of these two young men.
I am more sympathetic to the point in the Twilight series that this is perhaps an unrealistic portrayal for young women to have, that one person can fulfill all your needs and desires and that you don’t need to be a person complete in and of yourself. However I’d argue that this is an unrealistic expectation for any person, including young men. Edward sets the bar fairly high attentiveness wise.
I do think that people are overreacting a bit to the Twilight series though. There are a couple of things that bother me, the first being that all women must fit a certain mold and that if she doesn’t fit in that mold there is something wrong with her. If she isn’t strong and kickass then she is flawed in some way.
Secondly as much as we would all like a book to be life changing they very rarely are. Peer pressure will have far more to do with how young girls form their first romantic relationships. Most of the young women I know get that this is fantasy. They know perfectly well that very few men are going to attentively inquire after their thoughts and feelings and live in an angst like state in denying their feelings for the object of their desire. It is somewhat insulting that the inference is that these girls are so weak minded (Bella like?) that they cannot make up their own minds and form their own opinions as to whether this is the type of romance they would like to have.
Somewhat more puzzling for me is the vehement wish that Katniss had not “settled” for a man. I do not understand why, after all that Katniss had endured, anyone would deny her the love and company of another human being. To my way of thinking Katniss did not settle for Peeta. She instead chose to be with the one other person who as fellow survivor could understand all that she had gone through. Would the reader have preferred that Katniss live alone, becoming more and more like Haymitch as the years went by? Why can’t we have our happy endings in our fantasies or realities for that matter? Who would not want that ending?

summer vacation

Driven by the fear that one of my in-laws (or worse one of my friends) will nominate me for one of those hoarding programs I cleaned my house for my summer vacation. I did a fairly good job of ridding the closet and chest of drawers of old clothes as I never have really had attachments to clothing. After calculating that I will probably only read another 1,350 books I even winnowed the bookcases of books I will never read. I was slightly less successful at paring down my fabric stash but I still managed a respectable 2 ½ bags worth. What has me flummoxed though are a couple of old address books.
One of these belonged to my mother. I already know all the addresses of the people I need to so I am not sure why I can’t simply throw this one into recycle. Maybe it is because if I do it is one less link I have with her. My mother always had beautiful handwriting and it is the last thing of hers that still has her handwriting in it. Maybe it is because I watched one too many of those find your ancestors shows where they talk about finding a diary etc. that prevents me from throwing it away. Regardless of the reason why though I have left it on its shelf for now.
The second address book is one I had in high school and I look at some of the names and have absolutely no idea who some of these people were. It is kind of fun for me to see the name of my old freshman crush or to remember that my good friend in high school had the same birthday as my dad or to try and remember just who Debbie Williams was or why I would have known anyone in Iowa back in the 80s. I’ll keep this one for the puzzle value for awhile but it will be easier to dispose of it once the novelty has worn off. It is rather frightening though to know that old age has crept in to an extent that I no longer remember old friends. It makes me wonder what else I’ll eventually forget. Maybe this is why we keep so much stuff, they work as mnemonic aids. We’ll see if, in another twenty years, I remember any of the names at all.

Plus sized; Stilettos

So Ms. Crabby pants is back. I’m in one of those moods where I just want to walk up to someone and scream “what if wrong with you people”.
Why am I in this mood? I was in the gym slogging away on the stair stepper and perusing a gossip magazine I came across an article about a plus size model whose photos were digitally altered to make her look very thin. The photographer’s response, “Well I’m paid to make her beautiful’. Evidently anyone over a size two is not beautiful. Now the irony was that this 5’ 9” model weighs 150 lbs and looks pretty darned good in a bikini. 150 lbs on someone that height is considered mildly overweight if one has a small frame and just fine if one’s frame is larger. So this annoyed me but I figured that this was a fluff piece designed to take up space. After all most of us tend to be this woman’s weight if not height and believe it or not don’t consider ourselves to be plus sized.
Then I moved down to the free weight area which, for some reason, has a television set. I should have just done my reps and ignored it but no…. The program that was on was some “so you want to be a model type thing.” Naomi Campbell was holding up an obscenely high pair of heels and saying something about athletes. I foolishly thought she was going to say something along the lines of “athletes don’t wear these things because it destroys their feet’…Nope she was saying that athletes play through their pain and so should these aspiring models. These poor things literally could not hobble across the floor in these shoes and looked absolutely crushed as the panel critiqued their runway skills. I kept waiting for one of them to take the shoes off and scream “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”. Alas evidently no one had ever seen Network much less thought that perhaps they should inhabit the real world instead of having their self esteem and souls destroyed by a bunch of collagen injected has beens.
Here’s hoping that one day we will all (me included) learn to obsess less over weight and appearance and learn to just live healthy. In the meanwhile I must lift a few more weights to burn off my annoyance.

Welcome to quiltland

My father and his wife came for a visit last week and while they were here I was showing off some of my quilts.
As I continued to show them what i had done I realized that, for them, I was speaking a foreign language. Since I have been in quilter world for so long I had forgotten how alien it must be for people who don't quilt.
First we had to discuss why I had sooo much fabric. Explaining that my stash was kinda small in comparison to some had no effect. Neither did the “its sort of like paints for an artist, you wouldn’t expect an artist to just have two colors of paint” explanation work. I didn’t even attempt to describe the fabulous high garnered from stroking my fabric stash. No sense in them having to feel they needed to stage an intervention.
While everyone recognizes that quilts can indeed be beautiful I could tell that the cutting up of perfectly good fabric into small pieces and then reassembling them was something they would truly never really get. A trip to one of my favorite quilt shops was a little constrained as I knew a large purchase would also be met with confusion; remember I already have all this fabric in the closet. So alas I came away with a one yard cut of fabric for a fall project. While I certainly enjoyed their visit I’ve learned my lesson. Next time I shop and share only with other people living in quiltland.

Best author you are not reading

A few weeks ago I went into my local public library to the section where the short stories had been housed only to discover that the section had disappeared. When I queried the librarian I was told that no one reads short fiction and that the materials had been moved into the main fiction section.
I thought to myself , if no one reads short fiction then why do magazines like the New Yorker continue to publish it?
So, with this fact in mind the best author you are not reading is a gentleman by the name of Paolo Bacigalupi. Yes, I know, perhaps it’s his name that is the problem. If you can’t pronounce it much less spell it, it is pretty hard to ask for him in a bookstore or library.
He has the most fabulous collection of short stories. Most of the time after I’ve read something I tend to forget what I’ve read a few days later. I read this particular collection of short stories about six months ago and at least two of the stories remain vivid in my mind. They are science fiction but please don’t let this stop you. Go ahead try something different. Dive into these works and experience these meticulously crafted stories. Some of them will disturb you but I can guarantee that you won’t be bored.

Luddite quilter

I am a long time quilter, I started quilting in 1984. Back in the day we used plastic templates and a lot, though not all of us hand pieced our quilts. I was and am a happy hand piecer. I love making quilts and while none of them will ever win a prize most of my quilts look pretty good. I find the quilting process to be soothing and almost zen like. However a friend persuaded me to take a quilting class by machine. I needed to spring forth into the 21sr century, she said. I had too much fabric and would never use even a tenth of it unless I learned to machine piece, she said. It’s easy to learn, she said.
So I signed up for and recently completed a ten week course beginning machine piecing quilt class billed as a “fun” class. All I can say is that I did not have fun. I had nightmares, I broke down into crying jags, my cats hid and my spouse almost divorced me. My only consolation was that another student in the class also had the same symptoms and that we both survived.
Some evenings striving for the elusive perfect ¼ inch seam so that my quilt block would “square up” seemed to me to be akin to being on the front lines in a war zone with no knowledge on how to shoot a gun or, in my case, operate my sewing machine. I lived in a constant state of terror and stress. On a rare occasion I’d get a block right and it was if I’d just come in first in the New York marathon. Most nights were not like this. Most nights were spent sobbing, pleading and bargaining with my machine. Being heartless it ignored me.
The experience has led me to the following conclusions
1. If I use two ply thread I may attempt a machine pieced wall hanging. The fabric I use will be quite ugly so I will not have to sorrow after my beautiful fabrics lost in a bizarre and senseless death under the rotary cutter’s blade.
2. Most of my quilts will continue to be made via hand and anyone worried about my excessive fabric may remain mum on the subject.
3. Zen like states cannot be achieved at the machine though a dangerous rise in blood pressure can. Somehow I think this info could be used in a good murder mystery plot …
So I’m about to begin a queen sized churn dash and a little part of me is thinking…churn dash is pretty straight forward. I could piece this on the machine but then I look at the trusting face of the one cat who finally ventured out from under the couch and think nah…. Somebody has to be the last hand piecer in the world and I’m okay with that.

Book club snob

I have belonged to book clubs off and on for several years and finally found one that fits me. I’ll have to admit it is all women which is quite the change from some of the testosterone book clubs I’ve been in. Book clubs are much like any other group meeting and I’ll be sexist and say it men tend to dominate more than women.
Even in our nice “little ladies who sew “book club though there will always be one or two opinionated individuals who speak more than others, and, I admit, sometimes that person is me. (Okay it is frequently me and I know I annoy others….)There is going to be the person who just wants everyone to get along and who only wants to hear nice things about the book and, a bit more socializing than perhaps would be tolerated in other book clubs also occurs.
Our books tend to fall into "Oprah" inspirational, you should be getting a message from this book"; women's fiction; or theme books of some sort. World War II seems to be a recurring theme. I don’t know if this is because there are just a lot of WWII books out there or if we tend to gravitate more to that type of historical fiction. Rarely though are the books going to be ones that will survive the test of time, that will continue to be read and discussed into the next century and I’m afraid this is where my snobbishness shows. You may legitimately shake a finger at the self professed genre reader ( I know zombie books, how can I be a snob?) but I always feel a little like I’m slumming with the Jody Picoult and the Jennifer Chiaverini type books.
However, I have a confession to make, sometimes even though we aren’t reading Dostoyevsky or James Joyce I still find one or two of the books that really move me. I forget to be a snobby little snot and simply become engrossed in a story. One of those was the Book Thief and another was last month’s selection The Help. I know this book will be forgotten in 20 years but the author made the characters seem so alive I didn’t want the book to end, I wanted to continue to peer into their lives until I knew everything about them, what they’d be like in 10 years, if they would survive the changes they were undergoing. The story is basically about three women, two black and one white in a small Southern town in the early 1960s. The two women are maids and the white woman persuades these women to tell stories about their working life and by doing so exposing the cruelties done to other human beings based solely on the color of their skin. Some of the things done are so difficult to believe that you think “well this is fiction” and yet the author forces you to understand that these horrible things did happen just through the use of simple narrative on the part of the characters.
I guess what I’m trying to say is read this book, don’t be like me and be a little snot and think that just because a book is a best seller does not mean that it is merit-less. You may very well find a diamond in amongst the rhinestones. Even if you don't maybe you'll still just have a good read and sometimes that's enough.

Anticipation

The past week has been a rainy blustery sort of week which, for this time of year, is not all that unusual.
There was something about this past week though that reminded me of my childhood Marchs spent in Colorado. Perhaps it was the high wind or the sly promises of sun.
When I was little I looked forward to spring the way many small children looked forward to Christmas. I hated being cold. I also hated the lack of any discernable color. Winters in Colorado are ugly. Don't let anyone sell you a picture postcard full of gentle white mounds of snow and lacy snowflakes floating down. The reality is that we have thin dry snow, so no pretty lacy snowflakes, which melts quickly once the sun does come out. It also means slushy dirty streets, bare patches of dried dun colored grasses and bare spindly trees. Everywhere there is that ugly, nasty dun color, not a spot of color to be seen.
Every year though I knew that at the end of March, the beginning of April there would be a warm spell. I'd watch for it, my whole body quivering with the promise of warmth. When that warm spell hit (a warm spell being anything over 45 degrees) I'd run outside, sit on my front stoop and watch our Ash tree in the front yard start to bud with that wonderful chartreuse green that all young growth seems to have. I’d scour the ground in my mother’s flower bed to get the first glimpse of grape hyacinth. I'd sit there until my mother hollered at me to come in and put on a jacket before I caught my death of a cold but still I'd sit until the stoop began to cool as the sun moved on its way.
As an adult, living in Northern California, I don't get to have that heightened sense of anticipation, that sense that something is going to change , that there is going to be a little magic in the air. There is always color here even on the greyest day. Like the child who knows Santa isn't real, the exquisiteness of the anticipation is gone. Don't get me wrong, I still tear into my present of sunshine as I watch the daffodils and freesia come up but with just a hint of jadedness as I sit on my front stoop and that's too bad.