Category: Musings

With apologies to Joan Didion for borrowing at least a part of the title of her fabulous book of essays (unrelated to today's post).

I was reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan today while I was outside waiting for the grill to warm up and watching our lunch cook, and it struck me how much time and energy we humans spend, as a species, telling ourselves stories, simplifying data to make it intelligible, and interpreting what we see in the world in a way that makes some sort of sense that we can see ourselves through.    I don't believe that this is unique to me.  Perhaps not everyone has a running commentary going on in their head, but everyone interprets what they see and forms it into some kind of narrative by which they live their lives.  And I increasingly believe most of us are not even conscious of doing so.

This is why it is so difficult to perform any kind of truly unbiased judgment or interpretation of facts.

An example of this can be seen in  can be seen in Nick Paumgarten's new article in the New Yorker, "The Death of Kings".  Paumgarten scatters many anecdotes throughout his tale of the crises in the financial market including a comment by a private-equity executive who said he knew the gig was up when his cleaning woman took out a sub-prime loan to buy a house in Virginia.  And yet he kept his money in the market. 

Paumgartner also talks about how someone was advised to take a job, even though they were offering him too much money, because either they were "stupid or have so much money it doesn't matter", and the rational thing to do would be take the money while the taking was good.

Even we see danger we tell ourselves stories that it is okay. That we are doing the right thing.  If your pay is based on how much revenue you generate it makes sense to do whatever possible to make more money, regardless of the long term effects, regardless of any small interior voice that is telling you it is all folly.  You see that people who shouldn't be getting loans are getting loans, and you know that the end is near, but you also see everyone you know making money so you rationalize your actions, thinking you can just make a little more and you have plenty of time to get out.

We all believe these stories in some form or another.  The fact is the stories we tell ourselves are far to simple to accommodate an increasingly complicated world, a world of our own making.  We tell ourselves if we work hard and save money everything will be alright and when things fall apart we tell ourselves we were too lazy or too greedy.  Or we tell ourselves that good things happen to good people, and we search our souls to see where we went wrong when things go wrong.

We tell ourselves that everyone deserves to own a home and we forget that home-ownership opens one up to all kinds of unexpected expenses and risks.   We tell ourselves that if we eat right and exercise we will live to a ripe, healthy old age.  We tell ourselves that the markets will rebound because they always have in the past.  We tell ourselves things will always get better.  We tell ourselves that lightening won't strike twice in the same spot.  We tell ourselves that if we live in gated communities and send our children to good schools nothing bad can ever happen.

I tell myself that if I can just have everything organized I can meet every challenge in life.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

This morning I wanted to take a picture of a shirt I wear pretty frequently.  The fit is ok, although it could be better, and I wear it a great deal with sweaters.  I wanted to add it to the touch closet app, and thought a photo on Matilda would be better than a flat shot.

Here she is, in process (she kindly asked for there to be no embarrassing "before" photos).  The white shirt is another version of  the purple blouse that did not fit this morning.  I included two shots because I was shocked at the first photo, as I see myself more like photo 3.  Photo 4 was taken in a pose comparable to the first photo.

While I was working on this it occurred to me that I needed to take a photo for reference next time I get my hair cut because I really love the way the cut turned out this time.  This morning I really made no effort, no blow-drying, just occasional tousling with my hands as it dried, and I really like the look.  Since I had new photos it seemed like time to update my blog photos as well.  This photo is not clickable.  No one needs to see my wrinkles in all their glorious detail.

Going to London to see  Cy Twombly at the Gagosian Gallery.  I would dearly love to see these new works, would love to have a day just to sit and absorb.  The advantage of planning a trip around seeing art is that I would have time to actually SEE the art.  

Or going up the Road to Albany to hear Willie and the Wheel play on Sunday.  I haven't seen or heard a new Asleep at the Wheel album since my college days, although listening to my old albums always brings a smile to face and a definite tap to my feet.  A little smiling and tapping, perhaps with a little whooping and hollering sounds good. I am not sure if any of my friends would be interested in hearing Willie Nelson and most of them would say "Asleep at the Wha..?"  G most definitely would not enjoy himself, but he isn't comfortable at most popular music type of venues, so that is not surprising.  

So it is also probably too much to wish that I could be in NYC for David Byrne's concert at Madison Square Garden.

So I won't be there either, although I would like to be.  I'll just have to put in my earbuds and tune out the world for a while in the safety of my own little piece of the world.

How does one rationalize the contradictions in one's life?  Not the contradictions that are externally imposed, as in the neat-freak married to the packrat.  How does one deal with one's own contradictory loves and habits?  Is this the human condition?  Or is it an affliction that affects only a small portion of us.

This last day of 2008 found me sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks and stacks of patterns making some shaky attempts at resorting and re-filing things that have been sitting here waiting patiently for far too long.

I did finish 2008 with a sewing promise fulfilled, small promise though it was.

I have actually finished altering the skirt.  It took less than an hour, as anticipated, although that hour was spread out over several days.  As I result I did not update you about progress and accomplishments either simply because the available time came down to doing something, no matter how minute, or writing about it. Doing won.

I've been suffering from Restless Mind Syndrome of late and so the sewing got put on hold for a bit.  Everything  is still on the queue but the schedule has been shifted around. The external bits of my life have been a bit chaotic of late, and although I don't think of myself as being particularly regulated in my interior life, I cannot really settle down into a more creative mindset with too much is out of order.

I realize of course that any kind of creative activity needs to be practiced regularly, and I think that has been my goal. I don't want to run into the sewing room, lock the door, and finish a bunch of stuff in a rush then have to walk away for an extended period of time.  I want to make regular sewing time.  And I have come to accept that I am the kind of person who cannot really shut the door on the external part of my life and ignore it completely.  There has to a certain orderliness to the structure of life so that I can feel free to explore the inner creative instinct.  I am constantly trying to regulate that outer need for structure, with that inner more intuitive bit that my sewing taps into. 

So I am trying to expand the time devoted to creative pursuits.   I am knitting regularly, every day, and have been petty productive, even though some projects have been ripped.  But it wasn't really until the latter half of last week that I began finding daily time in the sewing room and it frankly has not been enough.  Still, the fact that I am there is good, and eventually this slow trickle will expand into a bigger stream.

What I have been doing has not been particularly blog-worthy, however.  I need clothes to wear now.  And so I have been involved in some of the more boring chores that sometimes fall on those of us who can wield a needle and thread, namely mending and alterations.  I have taken in several things that were too large to wear. If I were reconfiguring or refashioning something interesting, like a Chanel Jacket or a beautiful garment, I would share the process. But taking in tees so they don't hang, taking up baggy summer pants and other uninspiring tasks do not make for thrilling reading. And I suppose none of this is creative, but it is practical experience, and it is a joy just to make something work.

Of course there was the day I spent my daily hour cursing under my breath at a stack of J Crew tees that had all come undone where the neck band joins the body of the shirt.  They had not been worn that heavily, it was purely sloppy workmanship, and it really annoyed me.  Each top took less than a minute to serge back together.  But it took substantially longer than that to re-thread the serger with different colors of thread between shirts.  I should have known better.  I have complained about this company's merchandise before so I should have known better.  But I fell in love with certain colors in a flattering style that is long enough that my tummy doesn't show above the tops of my Jeans.

It might be easy to buy tees, but not so easy, apparently, to by perfect tees.  All the more reason to spend more time in that sewing room.

I have reopened my knitting blog, PurlsandMurmurs.  This combination of knitting and sewing just isn't working for me.  Somehow I feel like I can't babble on as much as I would like with everything in one place. 

Despite the fact that I have just been reading in the new Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet has shortened our attention span so that no one will read more than a couple of paragraphs, I still feel the need to go on an on.  I read a lot.  I love reading long thoughtful blog posts when other people, who actually write well, post them.  I still enjoy throwing out bucket loads full of mindless twaddle.  And so I shall.  Like my library and my books are an extension of my memory, and external hard drive of sorts, so too are these blogs. And I need them to make some sense of the jumble of my thoughts; they accomplish that best when they are separate.

Tonight my local PBS station was rebroadcasting The American Masters Program on Pete Seeger.  It is fund raising week once again and the dreaded fund raising chat is interspersed with programs geared at attracting the broadest audience.  Actually, fund-raising weeks are usually when I watch the least public television, as they don't tend to show my favorite shows.  But I support them anyway, and I know it is necessary.

Tonight however I loved seeing the program.  I had missed it the first time, but even if I had seen it I would have watched it again.  It reminds me so much of my youth, of that eagerness and optimism of youth, of the person I once was, and yes, still am, although too often perhaps I am distracted by the various ephemera of daily life.

And so I sang along, and once again thought about the issues and movements that shaped my childhood, and the ideals that shaped my young adulthood.   Much of all this was beyond me — I was too young.  But I used to volunteer on the Clearwater and for the Clearwater organization.  I spent time out in the river doing my small bit to help clean it up.  I attended the annual Clearwater Revivals, which have gotten to be really big events, much bigger than they were then..  We no longer go.  I do think it would be much to confusing and overwhelming for DH at this point.  But it is nice to remember, and remind myself who this person is, this person who was once myself, and is still myself.   These memories are only a part of who I am, are memories are only a part of who we all are, and usually the whole is so much more complicated than can be defined by one time, or thread.  That doesn't mean we don't need to look into those forgotten corners occasionally though.

I also thought about how unusual it really is to be a person who stands true to one's principles and beliefs steadfastly, whatever the rest of the world may think.  And on that thought I need to go to bed, before my thoughts get even more muddled. 

One of my mentors, who was also a friend of Pete Seeger's, always believed that most problems could be solved by going to bed, or perhaps it was by gong to lunch.  I think he actually said both, whichever the circumstances warranted.