Pippi

My daughter has taken to Pippi Longstockings. Astrid Lindgren's creation. As soon as I bring her home in the afternoon, she seeks out a CD with a theatrical production of the book, pops it into the CD player, and plays it. I am still OK with it, but a few hundred more performances might change that.

I used to know a Pippi. That wasn't her name, but she was an unadulterated Pippi all the same. The unapologetic joie de vivre. The fearless disposition. The freckles. The green eyes. Red pigtails. The patchy dress and long, striped socks. She even had this funny, unusual name. Everything except the super-strength. And the monkey.

She lived in a quaint old house on the edge of a botannical garden, sandwitched between a football field and a small farm. I lived on a street at the edge of a near-by suburbia. Consequently, she was magical to me. And her world. You would look out her window, and see cows grazing. If you lay down in the thick grass outside her house, you could hear hens clucking, dogs barking, sheeps bleating. Somehow, her parents did not seem to be there that much. All in all, a true Pippi Longstockings.

We were eight years old, and she just moved there one day. We were in the same class, but it wasn't there that we got to know each other. I think I just kind of ran into her while playing on the edge of the botannical garden. She would lead me on bold adventures, through the jungle, and over the oceans. In winter, her house would be completely sealed off by snow. For some reason, the city's snow ploughs never seemed to make it out there. Her house did not have a TV. It was made out of wood. They cooked over gas. All different from what I knew.

She hardly ever came to my house. Looking back, I think she found the place uninteresting. She did come to my birthday party, though. But she was out of her element. Instead of her bold, smiling self, she sat quietly in the living room while I led a hoard of howling, sugar-crazed kids through the house, blasting away with screeching ray-guns and other new-fangled toys I had just gotten for my birthday. It wasn't until years later that I realized how she must have felt.

And then she was gone. I vaguely remember a good-bye, or maybe that's just something that my memory has made up by itself over the years. I do know that I missed her. And a bit of Paradise was lost.

But then life moved on. I grew up. Some. Around age fourteen, it was me and the girls in my year that were a head taller than the rest of the boys. My voice was also the first to drop. I was also a geek. Shy and gangly. With thick glasses. And pimples. Predictably, the other boys turned on me. My old school was an odd mix of spoilt, whiny, privileged, yuppie kids, me included, and troublemakers from the cheaper houses on the other side of the hill. Only a handful of them ever made it to college. I had to get out of there, so at age sixteen I talked a couple of my best friends into applying to a high school across town. A school thought of as a good preparation for college.

It was not that common, back then at least, for kids to do something like this. They generally just went to the high school in their own neighborhood. So I hardly knew anyone when I started there. Adding to my shyness, and the armor I had built myself when being picked on at my old school. And then two of the three friends that went with me flunked out.

This has all been an elaborate way of excusing what happened next. Excusing the inexcusable. You see, one day in my second year, when I was finally becoming one of the group, a group that I actually respected, and respected me, I saw her again.

I think at first I just saw her in the school hallway. She looked oddly familiar. There was this air of fantasy about her. She had obviously just transferred to this school. But I couldn't place her. I would see her every now and then, but we did not talk. It wasn't until after this student ball, which was held at a disco waaay out in the suburbs, that I heard her speak. I was with a group of people that were gathering outside to decide what to do next. You never just went home after one of these balls. There had to be a party somewhere. So as we were standing there, laughing and drinking, preparing to catch a taxi, this girl shows up. She smiled bravely, despite her short skirt, the snow, her long, thin stockings, and the wind taking a pass at trying to knock us over. She was the only one who hadn't been drinking. She asked one of the girls in the group if we would like to share a taxi into town. If she could come with us to a party.

It was one of those defining moments. Do you Fit In, or do you become An Outcast. I don't think she ever had a chance. She was just too genuine. Too natural. Besides, she didn't drink. And nobody knew her. Except me. I suddenly realized who she was. This was the girl I used to know, half my life ago. Here she was again. Just as true, just as sparkling. The girl she had turned to answered her in some snippy way, and a few others added their own venom. I didn't say a word. Did not come to her aid. Did not try to intervene. I just stood there. Like an idiot. She was silent for a moment. Her smile faded, just a bit. Then she thanked us and turned away into the squall. I felt my stomach turn. And it wasn't from the drinking. Nobody else seemed to give her another thought. But I felt like shit. It hurt.

But somehow, it was done. It was irreversible. I was a part of the gang now. I had a place, a role. There were things I could do, and should do, and things that were unthinkable. Like reaching out to someone that was considered weird. Or just different. It was Conform or Die. And I desperately wanted to conform. It really wasn't until college that I finally broke free of that. I became me again. And never looked back. But by then it was to late. Pippi was gone. And I never saw her again.

I wonder where she is today?

Better

It's all a little lighter. A little brighter. Calmer. And just less jagged, somehow. There are some smiles, too.

Kind of like when the sun makes a surprise appearance. You might be sitting on a stone wall. Watching your feet dangling off it. Annoyingly petitioning you to jump back down and continue walking. But just before you oblige them, the sun comes out. She strokes your cheek. Ever so gently. You had forgotten how nice that felt. And you close your eyes. But it's bright now. So you see all this light through your eyelids. And you can't help smiling. Smiling in the sun with your eyes closed is one of this life's real treats. No question.

You know you are still in the middle of it when you look back without being able to discern a beginning, a cause, an end. I know I had not gotten over this people validating the attack on Iraq, when the next tragedy struck. All those lost lives. All this misery. This darkness.

The pitfall is in trying your all, when you should know that you are in over your head. You reach out as far as you can. You put yourself on the line, even. You shout off the top of your lungs. All in the naïve belief that you can make a difference. That it has to matter. And when you run out of breath, when your voice has become hoarse, when you look around, and a few people smile politely, some shrug their shoulders, and most all of them just continue their lemming-like plodding along their route through life, that's when the horror of it dawns on you.

Life goes on. No, not as in "Oh, thankfully life does not end, but goes on", but as in "life just goes on more or less as if nothing, ever, happened." That kind of "Life goes on".

So I went numb. I became profoundly sad. Deeply, utterly, helplessly, sad.

Self-preservation reflexes kicked in. I worked a lot. Tended to my women. Read. Slept. Alot. Became sick for days at a time. Twice.

So you see, feeling like the sun just made a modest appearance to warm my cheek is really, really welcome. I do not know what prompted it. Maybe it's something basic. I finally went back to the gym today. Excercised. Stretched for the longest time. Floated around in a hot tub. Sweated in the sauna. Treating my body well has always had its way of paying me back. Or maybe it was Amelié, which I finally saw. Or perhaps it was how gentle and tender my little girl was tonight. Patting me on the head. Calling me "papa". Kissing me on the cheek. Cuddling under my arm. Or maybe this is just the amount of time that my mind needs to wind me back down. To level me before I get all bent out of shape over The Next Impossible Thing that I take on. Who knows?

Tonight, at least, I am better. Look, I'm even blogging again!

It's official: Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I hate being right when the difference between 'I told you so' and 'They made the right decision' is a hundred thousand dead people.

Snow and aid, snowaid?

Finally, finally, finally. We have snow!

Went out with my daughter and played in the snow today. We dug out my wife's car, showeled the walkpath to our neighbor's front door (my daughter did not like the idea of us shoveling to our front door), made snow angels and ate some snow.

In a word: Fun.

Last week I experimented with giving money online to some charities. Some of them try very firmly to steer you towards signing up for giving them something monthly, instead of just one time. Baaad decision. In my book, anyway. It does nothing but turn me off and make me want to look for a charity that is less controlling. I am willing to go along with a fair amount of such 'manipulation' when I am doing online shopping, especially for things that I can't get anywhere else. But when donating, I want to be more in control. For some reason. So, for all you charity web masters out there among my thousands of readers...

Some points that I try to make on this blog kinda really don't make much sense, when taken into account that hardly anyone reads it.

Ah well.

Mommy dearest

"Mama".

"Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama."

My daughter has decided on an actual, first word. Close to a year after she started uttering her first, random words, she finally decided on one that she actually puts meaning into. And it's "mama". Probably not surprisingly. This happened just before Christmas.

A few days later she added another word. "Ama". For granny, you see. Not surprising, I guess, given it's practically the same word. And her grandmother did stay over Christmas.

Then she started calling her grandmother by her first name. And then her mother. And now there is a constant stream of seemingly random words streaming out of her, day and night. But with apparent thought attached to them. This morning, she pointed at her beach ball and called it a balloon.

Now I know that this is all hard enough for her. And its all great. Really. But when will she start calling for her dad?

Soon, right?

The calming effect of carpentry

OK, 11 days. Sloowly working my way back to a weeklog, and then maybe back to a blog. Oh, and I added the stupid post title field to quiet those that thought my feed was cryptic. No promises of relevance of the titles, but enjoy.

My mother-in-law stayed with us over the holidays, and consequently got the stomach flu with the rest of us, save my daughter, luckily. We also threw a fairly large dinner for our friends. So not to stressful, all in all. Actually, probably the most relaxed Christmas I've had in recent memory.

That was also helped by the fact that a few days before Christmas, I started building my daughter a new room. Before noon on day one, I thought I would also finish it before Christmas. I quickly abandoned that plan, though, and the wood became a source of contemplation. Of calm thinking. Reflection. There is something so peaceful about handling wood. Wielding it. Molding it. Perhaps not so quiet, especially when waving my new power tools around, trying to find use for them all, but serene. Albeit in a sometimes very loud way.

And I needed that. As I said, not so much because of holiday stress, but from the deep sense of loss and tragedy that my thoughts have been stuck in, ever since the news started coming in about the more than 150,000 people that perished on the shores of the Indian Ocean. I have been trying and trying to come to grips with all this loss of life. And the horrors that await the survivors. But it has left my exasperated. And numb. And sad.

So cobbling away at this room – hanging doors, putting in windows, connecting electricity, putting up sheet rock – has really helped to keep me grounded. Level and plumb, so to speak.

In addition to giving money, I have come to the conclusion that there is but one thing to do in the face of such loss, and that is to be resolute in living your own life well. Be generous, of spirit and in material sense, be a good person, as in towards others and to yourself, and live. Live, dammit, live! There is no one to be angry at here. There was no way to avert these floods. Yes, the loss of life could probably have been dramatically reduced with a warning system in place, but there was no malice, no agression, no ill will, no calculated decision. And that seperates it from the other, ongoing catastrophe. Which was wrong, was done in cold blood, and could have been averted. But has now been blessed by the majority of the people of this fattest, in every sense of the word, nation on Earth.

That is something much harder to come to terms with: The designed disaster.

12 days. Wow. If I am trying to kill this blog, then it looks like I am succedding.

To be fair, I have had a rather full plate this last week-and-a-half:

• I finished my discrete math exam, and I think I did pretty well. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high though, mainly because I am one of those that has never been able to go home after a test and look up answers to the questions that were on it. When I'm done, I'm done. Nothing to be done about it anyway, right?
• Secondly, I have been adding a room to our house. Well, sort of. I intend to post some pictures of it here soon.
• And thirdly, I managed to finish a sizeable, two-part work project I had pending before Christmas. Yippee...

And the little blog-related energy I have had extra, I have been using in comment boxes all over the Net. As an example, I was reading a looong and depressing comment-thread about the chimperor sporting an iPod in his recent Time profile, and just had to respond. Not only did I want the people in the comment-thread, who were writing that muck, to hear me. More to the point, I think I am finally on a way out of this depressing rut I have been stuck in since America voted this clown into office last November. So I wrote this:

I started to read this apparently endless thread and, almost as a reflex, stopped again as soon as I saw what was really festering in it.

But then I realized that by averting my eyes from this pestulance, I am condoning it. So I made myself read the whole thing.

This is that time of year when I normally am able to get a little mid-winter break, and enjoy the festival of lights that this nation excels at producing in late December. Some religions have a name for it, others do not. But this has still been that time of year when people smile a little more genuinely to each other, and actually look other people in the eye. We are reminded that we co-exist in this country, this world, and therefore have a need to respect each other. There is no place else to go to. And it simply does not bring you anything but misery, if you spend your relatively short time on this Earth, fretting about the fact that we are not all of the same opinion.

So you can now see how reading this drivel made me sad. Truly sad. I feel like I am witnessing the beginning of the breakdown of this society. The disrespective, hate-filled, spiteful projectiles that almost all of you hurl at each other are so pointless, so far removed from any sense of intelligent discussion, that it borders on depressive. And it dampens ones hopes for the future of this country. You can see that it does not matter who would have won this presidential election, the situation would be the same: Two ever-growing factions of people that have less and less understanding of, and respect for, the human beings that belong to the "other" faction. This leaves the rest of America either disgusted with both of these hateful sects, or disinterested in the apparently failed political system, as a whole. Why do you think that fewer and fewer of our children are participating in the democratic process, even taking into the account the spike in turn-out for this last presidential election? "It's the hate, stupid", to paraphrase a common quote. You can not tell me, earnestly, that this is still a meaningful debate. It has long since lost any relevance. Or meaning. It is nothing but a pityful shouting contest, designed to denigrade, embarrass, and belittle other people, and their beliefs.

I am not going to fall into the trap of telling you to stop, to "see the light", or whatever one should be urging you to do. Because I do not belief you would listen. Nor am I going to let myself be pushed to a cynical disposition by this, declaring myself better than you, and passing judgement on you as being some sort of bad people.

But I refuse to read this vile and just turn quietly to another page. This needed to be said. At least I needed to.

I felt better as soon as I had written it. It did not matter that I could not publish it, due to an apparent 100 post maximum per news item.

I just genuinely feel a little better.

Which is good.