Shutdown

I don't know about you but the recent government shutdown really got me riled up.  The first three days I was completely obsessed, glued to the TV.  I wanted to know the play-by-play as each occurred and not wait for the evening news.  I only did chores and tasks that allowed for watching the news at the same time: ironing, cooking, paying bills, pretending to clean.  If I couldn't simultaneously watch our national monuments and parks being cordoned off or listen to the pundits speculate on how long the strong-arming would last, that chore had to wait until my own personal shutdown was over.

Of course, after a couple of days it was necessary to go out into the world again to buy provisions but those first three days were solid shutdown.  Then it stretched on and on. And on. The fun parts were soon over, like when Michelle Bachman, who had just voted for the shutdown, thrust herself into the war memorial demonstration and declared, "You can't close America!" Or when Michelle Bachman stretched the skin wide around her eyes and declared, "We're not blinking." Or when Michelle Bachman...hey, wait a minute; I sense a pattern.

Now the shutdown is over and our budget is passed for the super long, super secure and reassuring period of roughly three months.  What then?  In the post-Christmas credit-maxed period for middle income and low income Americans, Tea Party Republicans may again decide to hold the government hostage and cause billions of dollars of loss, putting people out of work and causing ripples of lost income and commerce to large swaths of the economy yet again.  Maybe they got enough of a whooping in the polls to prevent another shutdown but we'll see. Ted Cruz's numbers went up in his bid for president, so he came out ahead. 

I don't think I'll ever understand the concept of the antigovernment government rep. It's like a frog complaining about the size of the pond just before he leaps in and starts swimming.  It's like a carpet salesman decrying the loss of hardwood floors.  It's like a queen complaining about the cost of supporting the royal family.  I can't tell if the antigovernment folks are disingenuous or if they really don't understand what government does.  A lot of them seemed genuinely shocked that the federal government runs national parks.  Sort of like those Obamacare protesters with the "Government keep your hands off my Medicare" signs.

I'm glad the president hung tough.   At the beginning of the shutdown, I heard Chris Matthews say on The Colbert Report that no one fears Obama and not being intimidating is a problem for any president.  I think Matthews was right at the time...there were several points in his first term when he seemed to be the caver in chief.  But Obama's refusal to deal with extremists holding the government hostage put a healthy fear in those who want to do him and his agenda harm.  He's not perfect but he sure played it right this time.

I Feel Bad About My Neck

I feel bad about my neck…and my jaw and my temple and my shoulder. So bad that I have a physical therapist who periodically tries to ease my upper right quadrant into peaceful submission.  I’ve had several appointments with her and recently she started pressing the idea that maybe, just maybe, there were things I could do that would prevent my body parts from freezing up in pain. 

According to Miss Smarty Pants, plopping my MacBook Air on my desktop and hunching over it for four to five hours a day is not good for my aforementioned neck, jaw, shoulder, etc. A big word was bandied about: ergonomics. Somehow I (aren’t I the victim here?) was partially responsible for my pain.  Well, I never!

Did you know that your head is ten percent of your body weight? Every time you bend your head forward it’s like you’re dangling a sack of potatoes out front and using the rest of your body as a counterweight.  Since I often have the brain function of a ten-pound sack of potatoes this seems like an apt analogy to what I’m doing to myself.

The physical therapist gave me homework: get myself a platform to raise my computer screen up to eye level and a wireless keyboard to replace the one on the computer. With this new set-up I will become an ergonomic poster child! Using my laptop and my bad-for-me posture, I looked at platforms and keyboards online.  Then I called the Apple store and discovered that their prices were actually cheaper.  My sore jaw almost dropped to the ground. 

I drove over to the Apple store and it was, as usual, packed with energetic customers trying to buy the latest technology, little old lady customers getting lessons in using the latest technology, and much less excited customers trying to get their broken technology to work again. And there were nearly as many sales staff, all dressed in Godawful blue tee shirts, engaged in conversation with the myriad customers.  It was hard to blaze a path though all the people. If the economy is in the toilet, you would never know it from the interior of an Apple store. 

One hundred and thirty dollars later I had my assembly-required computer stand, a wireless keyboard, and instructions on setting up Blue Tooth.  It was just after I set them up and I tried to click on an onscreen option that I realized I had to reach up to use the mouse pad in the center of the computer keyboard.  My head was no longer doing its sack-of-potatoes imitation but my hand was now doing its two-year-old-trying-to-get-a-cookie-off-the-table imitation.   Seems I also need a new mouse. 

The Poetry Feedback Loop

Besides being a blogger, I happen to be a poet. 

In January, I graduated from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in writing.  After two intensive years of reading and writing poetry, I suddenly found myself able to read whatever I wanted, from the trashy to the sublime.  I immediately embarked on four months of reading novels and nonfiction.  I read a lot of great books like Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and a lot of above-average-quite-good-not-at-all-sorry-I-read-'em books like Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.  

But I didn't pick up one single volume of poetry in my four-month post-graduation extravaganza of reading. And guess what? I didn't write much poetry either, or at least not much decent poetry.  I even took the April poem-a-day challenge but my poems were decidedly uninspired.  

And of course my pea brain wanted to write good or even great poetry and said pea brain knew it was missing something but it couldn't quite settle on what that something might be. Chocolate? Sunshine? Puppies? Oh, (palm hitting forehead) poetry!!

Now I'm easing my way back in--I just finished reading my contributor's copy (see how I slipped that in?) of The Cancer Poetry Project 2, an anthology that features poems by cancer patients and the people who love them.  Next up is Reverse Rapture by Dara Weir, a book with more parentheses than are found in entire libraries. Then I'll turn to my shelves of unread poetry books and choose whatever calls to me, whether its David Trinidad or Tess Gallagher, Thomas Lux or Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert or Eduardo C. Corral.

I can't help but wonder if there's a metaphor embedded here; that what we take in is also what we put out; that we, as an American people, are taking in way too much of the wrong stuff—crap TV, fear, anger, corruption. The paradox is that we need to put more goodness out into the world—more friendship, considered thought, hard work for justice—in  order to then get it back, but that does seem to be the state of things, doesn't it?  Slap me before I start singing Kumbaya.  

And now, to Dara Weir.