Many kinds of failure.

I failed.  Or I succeeded for a very short time.  You choose.  My facebook break lasted 24 hours.  My brief reprieve illuminated the degree of duty I've accepted through the silly functions of the site.  There were messages I had to answer, wall posts that required a comment, tagged photos of me that I needed to review to be sure I'm not a hamster again.  I didn't like being a hamster that time.  I don't think I look like a hamster at all.  I'm barely hairy, except in the winter, and even then, it's light.  I swear.

Anyhoo, I'm accepting facebook but imposing strict rules of play on myself.  The discipline this will require is way more soul-enriching, or something, than total abstinence.

How's this for an uncomfortable non sequitur?  It's about failure, so it's on topic, even if it doesn't feel like it to you.

Over the weekend, I tried my fifth hot chocolate from a super cool, exceptionally stylish, specialty chocolate shop in Wellington called Ciocco.  The guy behind the bar is always kind, and if there are two of them, they are equally welcoming, pleasant and enthusiastic in their pitch for chocolate.  They smile and explain the rules of the joint regardless of your interest or prior knowledge.

The deal is: the shop doesn't sell a plain cup of cocoa.  The customer has to choose a flavour (that's right, with a 'u') from a list scrawled on a mirror behind the counter.  How about cardamom white chocolate?  Chili dark?  Tangerine milk?  Earl grey dark?  If you stay in the store, they lob a lump of chocolate into your cup, pour in some milk and give you a metal spoon/straw contraption that allows you to stir and suck, all at the same time.  The spraw, or stroon if you prefer, is a fun tool for a half minute but quickly inspired my scorn when I realized I'd sucked most of my chocolate blob out of my milk and had nothing but froth to entertain me while my parking time awaited expiration.   

As was the case with the first four, on Sunday, I got a nasty cup of ill prepared milk poured gently over a dab of chocolate that barely offered its color to the drink.  I took a sip, frowned to feel the burn of the milk's heat over the bite of chili and muttered when I couldn't discern the chocolate over the chili.  Everything about the taste was moderate while the heat of the milk burned my tongue.  I stirred and stirred, hoping to liberate any chocolate remnants from the deep and to cool the drink down.  Nothing helped.  I put my cup down to wait for a minute.  Maybe it had to brew.  I tasted again and it sucked, just like before.  If I'd had a stroon, I would have considered using it to fire a spitball at the window of Ciocco.  I was mad.  I wouldn't really do that, unless maybe the drink had tapioca at the bottom of the cup, and then I might, but not at a window.  Only at a friend.  Or maybe at a Humvee. 

I'd given it another shot and Ciocco failed me.  I tossed my cup and found a real hot chocolate, with marshmallows and the actual taste of bittersweet chocolate, down the street.  I commiserated with the barista, another coffee-free kinda guy who knew what it meant to have good, thick, rich, steaming liquid chocolate.  I also told him about my experience at Ciocco, so he would know what I know.

And now, my direct appeal.

To Ciocco: get it together.  I've wasted 25 bucks on you, hoping that the idea of your chocolate would match up with its flavor.  I wanted to support you, Ciocco.  I wanted you to have it all.  But, I'm done with you, Ciocco.  I've tasted your drinks and sampled your bars.  Your chocolate doesn't taste good, and I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but you need to get the taste right instead of relying on your estimable status as the only superfly specialty chocolate store in town.  Try one of your drinks.  I'm pretty sure you won't like it. 

Fish out of water.

When I open my bleary eyes to the glaring beam of sunlight assailing my room every morning, I don't greet the day with an intention to wile away the finite minutes of my precious life reading status updates.  I don't roll over sleepily self-absorbed with my future plans and mutter, "yes, please, facebook."  I don't.  I wouldn't.  I refuse.

Candidly, I don't care about most of the status messages I read.  They either don't apply to anything in which I'm marginally interested or they're written by someone with whom I have only a tangential relationship.  Maybe you interned for me years ago?  Maybe you and I sat through Con Law together?  We've probably never shared an afternoon in the sun, our beers warming in the sun.

And yet.

These days, I awake to the light with the fanciful ambition to write 3000 good words by nightfall.  Okay, I may bargain, I'll take 2500, a blog post and a few emails.  And I'll make chocolates.  I roll toward the empty but still warm space to my left and gaze out the window for a moment of gratitude that I no longer have to hop into uncomfortable pants and scurry into an office to hear voicemails of scared, worried, disgruntled, abused, or anxious clients.  I fold back the covers, stuff my feet into de rigueur sheepskin boots and launch myself down the stairs for tea.  Mornings: they are so ripe with prospect.  When I open the door to the ocean air, I'm certain I could knock out my entire word count by noon.  I could.

But then, I don't.  When my machine lights up, I don't jump into my business the way I used to jump into the business of others in efficient six minute intervals; instead, I cannonball into the shallow pool of banal updates on facebook and I wade around like an attention deficit child playing Marco Polo.  Inevitably, I forget if I'm looking for friends or avoiding them and I settle on some stupid update in surrender.  Megan is "a fish out of water." As I scroll up and down, refreshing for the most recent bit of posted prattle, I wonder, "is this the best we can do?" and "what the fuck am I doing with my life?"  And then I decide to like something, because that's a nice thing to do, I guess.

In general, with few exceptions, facebook doesn't offer me a smite of inspiration or a hint of pivotal information.  I've learned that co-workers would rather be elsewhere, that old acquaintances have children I will never meet and that Pee Wee Herman is far too prolific a poster.  There are those few redemptive qualities that merit mention: it's easy to remember birthdays and to sneak around in lives I wouldn't dare to enter.  I also like to peruse the photo albums of strangers; so much hammy fun seems to brew when people aren't sitting in front of facebook.  But I don't always feel right in celebrating these perks.  I'd rather see people on their birthdays, hug them, offer them a chocolate.  I'd rather not trespass on alien lands without an express invitation.  Really.

So, why do I keep going back?  Facebook offers persistent distraction, aggravating repetition, vapid nonsensical banter of unknowns and a sad realization that my online friends all seem to access the same media sources for their posts-- the same damn sources I'll eventually wander toward after confirming that none of my friends is winning a Nobel Prize or about to show up at my door.  I don't really want to do it anymore.  And I'm pretty sure it wouldn't matter if I didn't, at least not to the facebook "community."  They wouldn't notice and I would free up some time.  I want to get to 3000 words by noon and spend the afternoon doing all the things that truly warrant photo albums and postcard-length messages.  

Resolved: I'm taking a break.  You know where to find me.  I wonder how long I can last.

The wind shifts.

The largest storm on the planet didn't quite fit into the airspace over Wellington.  Despite an admirable attempt to squeeze itself into a more manageable girth, the best it could do was wring out some rain and shoot ornery bolts of lightening at us in a convincing display of its greater power.  It huffed away more quickly than it arrived, scorned, I think, by spring's gently wagging finger.

Spring is watching and waiting.

When the great ceiling cleared of the manic churn of cloud and wind, I caught a glimpse of summer.  At sunrise, the surfers launched themselves over the waves to claim their spots on the line.  Only an hour later, joggers and walkers with their companion kids and dogs arrived to wander the golden shore.  They were barely noticeable beside the fiery dispersion of light on the clear peaks of waves held up by a northerly breeze.  By midday, the sun had warmed us enough that the infrequent, toothless gusts of wind were more like polite coughs than screaming tantrums.

That was yesterday.

The sun rose behind clouds racing on a steady southerly wind this morning.  The bay is roiled by anxious white-capped chop charging the shore.  The beach is empty but for the kelp and wood abandoned by the water.  The waves ride each other, collapsing, reforming and falling again.

I think spring has tucked her hands in her pockets, bracing herself as she watches to see who wins the skirmish between the sun and the wind.

I love you, Mary.

To Mary of Radio NZ:

I listened to you this evening while sitting in my first NZ traffic jam.  After zigging right and zagging left on the stacked hairpin turns around Evans Bay, I was accosted by such an eruption of red light that I instinctively pulled down my sun visor.  I replaced it after quick self-counseling that this day, like other squally days but somehow more special for the largest storm on the planet churning nearby, was a dark day and those red lights required that I stop.

So I stopped.  No longer able nor willing to abide the sludgy techno fest on the cool station that had to be recorded on cassette through a microphone plugged into a Radio Shack tape recorder, I sought out Radio NZ.  I found you, Mary.

I've heard you before; I swear.  But I confess: I've never really listened to you, hearing your guests struggle to craft their messages on whatever political nightmare or social quandary they've stumbled into over the high octave trill of your voice.  For this, you also deserve tribute because your job as the host of your program is to get the spokespeople to speak, to provide time for their mangled fabrications or messy half-truths.  Yay, Mary, you make the guests talk.  Job well done.

Tonight, however, I honor you for something more.  Because tonight, you outdid yourself.  When I turned on the radio, you informed me that you would be interviewing Mr. Hide, the leader of the ACT party here in NZ (which, for my benefit and others who haven't yet managed to give a rat's ass about NZ politics, is kind of a Tea Party equivalent, but more entrenched and possibly better educated.)

A couple years back, Mr. Hide had been told by an ACT party parliamentary hopeful, David Garrett, that Mr. Garrett had criminally obtained an NZ passport in the name of a dead child.  Not his child, but the child of a family who had buried their son in a cemetery where Mr. Garrett happened to meander one day while deciding to see if he could get a forged passport.  Mr. Garrett commit the crime in 1982 but wasn't caught until 2005 when he was indicted by not convicted of passport fraud on the basis of a false affidavit in which Mr. Garrett assured the court that he'd led a blameless life.

Mr. Garrett told Mr. Hide this stuff, leaving out the bit about the false affidavit, and Mr. Hide promptly encouraged him to stand for parliament.  You see, integrity could be restored in politics if they all acknowledged their baser, criminal instincts.  Anyhoo, Mr. Garrett rose to some prominence as ACT's law and order patsy, demanding stricter sentencing, decrying second chances, and grooming his killer facial hair.

Now that the country has discovered that the man who doesn't believe in second chances for criminals is, in fact, a criminal, Mr. Garrett has found his own second and third chances, as well as his caterpillar moustache, rescinded.

Back to you, Mary.  I write to you tonight because you invited Mr. Hide to your program, he appeared and you tore him a new one.  You see, my ability to anticipate reason and challenge in the national discourse has been tortured by my long exposure to American media.   They aren't allowed to do what you did because money is on the line, and even if it isn't, it really is.  A Senator could opt to never appear on a show again if a radio host on NPR used his or her intelligence to grill the Senator on the basis for his or her votes.  Really, that would be no great loss to the Senator, who can always find friendlier shelter on a better controlled outlet.  Oh well.

Mary, you deserve a totem pole.

Tonight, Mary, as Mr. Hide tried to justify his impossibly hypocritical logic in encouraging his colleague to stand for parliament, even while permitting the facts to remain undisclosed to the people, you whipped your switch at him and he jumped.  You quoted ACT party literature, you found old quotes about zero tolerance uttered by Mr. Garrett himself, and you nailed Mr. Hide.  When Mr. Hide tried to return to his chosen points, you said, "No, I'm not interested in that."  And, at the end of it all, you wished him a pleasant evening.

For that, Mary, I love you.  Thank you for being one reason that NZ is better, even if it is really small.

Flash Mob

I started a jewelry-making class last Monday.  Since long-ago nights passed heavily in my mom's lap when I twirled a yellow gold ring over the loose skin of her pinky, I've wanted to learn to shape metal.  In college, I enrolled in Welding, but our efforts were focused on tractor-repair and cow-bells; the intricate web of gold I would have woven as a reciprocal gift for the ring my mom eventually gave me would have been melted in a flash by the arc welder.  I did love the crackle of the light as it ate and shat a line of metal into the join.

Due to time constraints and the effect of jilted investors left with nothing but grandma's necklaces to melt into their portfolios, I'll confine myself to brass, copper and silver for now.  In the meantime, I'll ponder quietly the inflated reputation that attends the inflated price of the prettier metal.  Gold doesn't really do much but it sure looks nice on our appendages.  So be it.

On our first day, we were handed two small scraps of copper and brass.  I eyed the copper in wonder, remembering the articles about cable theft I'd read recently.  Young men had broken into a wind farm risking electrocution at 220,000 volts for a clumsy tramp through a magnetic field on the other end of which was some copper wire.  And copper is worth less than gold?

I started with the brass so I could finally have the triumph of grabbing my own brass ring.  I will put it in the corner, I fantasized, just above my writing machine and I will lunge at it every minute or two, tugging at the leather belt wound around my belly to restrain me in my chair.  If I only had a horse...

I cut the brass, filed it, annealed it, shaped it and soldered it.  I was slow and methodical because no one told me that I could shape it more completely after I joined the straight edges with the solder.  My brass ring fit over the knots and knobs of my first finger perfectly.  I dropped the wide, fat, smooth, perfectly round evidence of my control issues into the slow cooker of acid pickle that will eat my skin and clean my metal or both if I'm so inclined.  As class finished, I returned to claim my prize.  The only object remaining in the hazy lavender liquid of the ersatz pickle barrel was a mangled turd of metal, vaguely reminiscent of an ellipse but hammered out of its round audacity ensuring it could grace only those fingers held patiently under the wheels of two-ton trucks while they practice parallel parking.

I didn't make this piece of shit.

"Um, hmm,"  I said.

The instructor said class was ending and ordered that I clean or replace all supplies I'd used over the evening.  Seven students marched past me to leave.  I glimpsed the rings they'd made and my mind manufactured accusations against each one of my fellow novice artisans.

"Yeah, um, my ring?" I asked.  I thought, one of you fucking assholes left me with a shitpile and it stinks.  Give me my ring.

And they were all gone.

I've spent the last week preparing for the moment this evening when I ask for my ring back.  I've imagined the passive speech in which I innocently request that everyone consider checking their rings against their fingers.  I've thought I could ask to inspect all rings and declaim thievery as counter-productive to adult education.  Finally, I dreamed of a flash mob descending on class tonight at 6:06 PM to slowdance to a modified version of this all-time great.  Yeah, the doggone ring is mine.  I'll love it endlessly.

I know, I know, it was either an honest mistake (likely made by one of the blind students in class who also has no sense of touch) or my ring is long gone.  I'll make more and get over it.  But I hate missing the brass ring.



PS- Anyone else think it's pretty tragic that the woman being held in Iran for her funwalk with friends across the border from Iraq is going to be released to the US because of her breast lumps and precancerous cells.  Um, duh, I hope she is a spy because with that kind of publicized pre-existing condition, she's shit out of luck for health insurance.  Maybe she's from Massachusetts.

Why so dumb?

Alright, I know I've got shit to figure out.  I get that.  I'm all, "oh, poor me, because I have so much time and I get to do exactly what I want with it."  Yeah, you can hate me.  I don't mind.  Sometimes, I hate myself, too.

But if you're on the prowl for a more substantive wrong to abhor-- perhaps a richer, juicier meatloaf of iniquity rather than the inconsequential small plate I serve up-- consider the following: dumb Americans.

I love my people.  I do.  But now, I'm away.  So, I'm going to dish it out straight.  Americans, you're really dumb.  Really, just painfully ignorant.  Unfortunately, with the limited appeal of education to people who don't care to actually read, it probably isn't going to get any better anytime soon.

Here's a shortlist of examples:

1. A northern Florida pastor wants to burn Qurans because its content differs from the Bible.  Couldn't he just burn last week's T.V. Guide?  Last I looked (probably in the early 80s), T.V. Guide provided information that may conflict with the New AND Old Testaments.  If the pastor would read the Quran and the Bible, he might find that their conflicts are fewer than either would have with his favorite entertainment weekly.  Unfortunately, the pastor won't read it.  He probably will, however, find pleasure in his own press.  (Kind of makes me wonder if the scared gun-toters who don't like the idea of Muslims building places of worship recognize the extremism in their midst?  Yeah, probably not.)

2. Republicans continue to trash Obama because he wants to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.  The Republicans say this will result in fewer jobs because small business owners will be more highly taxed.  If the Republicans subscribed to the lessons of history, they would know that top marginal tax rates for the wealthiest have been highest during times of substantial growth in the country.  We need that money.  How hard is that to understand?

Check it out:  You can look at old tax rates and read a Marketplace report that cites a labor economist at Georgetown who clarifies the difference between the rich and the super-rich and prompts the question, why aren't we getting more money out of the super-rich?  Huh?  I'm sure we're more numerous.  We can totally invite them to dinner and make them really uncomfortable.

Even sheep know to run from potential danger.

Finally, what the hell is up with all the reports on joblessness and the limited reporting on the growth of companies who are downsizing their workforces?  This report on the PBS Newshour on Labor Day made me so sad, I had to stop my quiet contemplation of the circling seagulls to listen attentively.  Although Dr. Pepper Snapple, the parent company of a Mott's factory in New York, is profitable, workers were offered a contract that cut their benefits and kept their wages flat.  When the workers rejected the contract, the company sought wage reductions of $1.50 per hour.  Nevermind the stability of the $6.5 million salary earned by Dr. Pepper's CEO.  If there's an abundance of workers, then the market turns them into a commodity.  Doesn't that offend anyone?  I mean, aside from the striking workers who have seen themselves replaced by a temporary labor force working at half their wage and without benefits.

So, dumb Americans, please, for your own good: get some damn traction.  Sink your soft, fat feet into the mud sliding beneath you and pay attention to the reality around you, rather than the big dream of wealth you'll never acquire.

Morning Tea.

So, I'm writing a book.  To my ears, or eyes, that sentence tickles the feet of the absurd.  It isn't that books shouldn't be written, or that anyone else deigns to do it.  It's that I would.  Shouldn't I be making better use of my time?

I was reminded of the various other occupations that could or should distract me from my ridiculous pursuit today, at morning tea.

First, I'm still not entirely sure what morning tea is intended to be.  I don't think it's breakfast.  It seems to be an opportunity to supplement the morning meal with a pastry, scone or cake.  Since I'm always perplexed about the proper amount of food to eat at tea, and I'm genetically predisposed to be thin yet convinced that I'm otherwise, I didn't eat at this morning's morning tea.  Unfortunately, I'd also skipped breakfast because it was the only way I could get out of the house before 10.  My report, therefore, may be colored by my poor, neglected hunger.  She growled for attention, but I put her in the corner.

I arrived late, despite the malnourishment.  I joined the ladies who tea instead of lunch and as I scanned the room, I realized that a dozen of the fifteen of us had babies or would be joined imminently by a wee one.  A place was kindly made for me at the table and I approached, tripping first on a plastic fire truck and second on a small, red shovel.  I sat, wisely inspecting my seat and removing a tiny airplane from the chair before letting my ass descend.  I congratulated myself for my foresight.  A child drove a blue car over my foot several times before I could introduce myself to his mother.

The kids played and the mothers talked.  Babies were fed and changed, passed and put down.  The mothers were remarkable for their calm comfort and their contented exchange of maternal secrets.  These woman are important, I thought.  They're raising the inhabitants of the world.  Good for them.  I wiped my face after a child sneezed at me and watched another cram a fist-sized wad of napkin into her mouth.

Here's the part where I started to question my personal commitments.  I was asked, as I always am, about my own kids.  "At kindy?"  Nope.  I keep them in the boot of the car, I could have said.  But that would be crude.  "No kids," I confessed.  "Working, then?"  Nope.  I'm writing a book.

Dragon sale.

Okay, see how that should have been a joke?  The funny punchline is that I am.  Writing a book.  

I was quick to point out that my mission was only to finish it, give it a read, stuff it into a drawer and check the job openings at the library, but that's not really what I want.  I do want to finish the book.  I don't want to work.  (I wouldn't mind, however, seeing my book in a library someday.)  What I'd prefer to do is just live and feel occasionally important for random contributions that don't require so much responsibility.  That makes me happy now.  I'm pretty sure it could sustain me.

So, why does that feel so absurd?