The Clareverse

Dear everyone who is calling me twice a day,

The reason I haven’t called or emailed to tell you about the baby being born is not because I am overwhelmed with new motherhood, laying on the floor incapacitated by contractions unable to reach a phone, or using your new grandchild/niece as a pawn in a strange mindgame.

It is because the baby has not been born. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be any day now. Yes, I am getting pretty tired of being pregnant. That’s why I’m ignoring you and everything else that reminds me of said pregnancy. When the baby is born, I will let you know.

love, Clare

My gardening year ended with the first frost last week. The tomato plants have been disassembled, and it’s time to reflect on the best addition to my yard this year: the rain barrel.

The rain barrel greatly surpassed my expectations in the amount of water it provided. I set it up in May thinking it would take a few weeks to fill completely, and it was full after the first rainfall. From May until mid-October there was only one week when the barrel was empty and I had to fall back on municipal water to keep my garden happy.

Most of my flowers are drought-tolerant native species, but I have annuals in containers and 5 tomato plants that need to be pampered with daily watering. In hot weather I use maybe 10 gallons of water a day.

A rain barrel collects water a lot faster than you’d think it would. My 55-gallon barrel draws from approximately 300 square feet of roof area, and a medium-strength rainfall (more than a sprinkle, less than a storm) fills it in under four hours. As long as it rained once a week I had as much water as I could use.

If I were to make one improvement to my current setup it would be to raise the barrel a few feet on blocks or a frame so there’d be more water pressure in the attached hose. Right now the barrel sits at ground level, and there’s so little pressure that the water only trickles out of the hose, and that’s only if there’s no point in the hose raised more than six inches above the ground. Spraying water from the hose is completely out of the question. If I’m out in the garden working I lay the hose out and let it dribble for five minutes at a time on each plant, but if I’m in a hurry it’s much faster to just scoop water out of the barrel with a big watering can and dump it where I want it.

In some ways hauling a two-gallon watering can around is less of a hassle than wrestling and re-coiling a fully pressurized hose. Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. In any case, 55 gallons of free water a week is definitely worth the extra effort it takes to get it to the plants.

Next year I’d like to install another rain barrel to catch the runoff from the other 500 square feet of roof. Maybe work it into a nice little water feature or a tub with some pond plants. Yeah.

This Thursday, October 18, is apparently Love Your Body day.

We all know about the unrealistic and degrading presentation of women’s bodies in the media, blah blah blah. They hand out those notes on the first day of Feminism 101. I’m not saying that’s not a problem.

I’m irritated by the Love Your Body site because it implies that external physical appearance is the only reason to love your body. Most of their example ads in both the “Offensive to Women” (They can’t really think those are only offensive to women, can they? Nice reverse sexism.) and “Positive Ads” section focus on the idea of beauty.

They seem to be concentrating their attention on convincing all women that they are beautiful, and assuming that will solve problems with body image and self-esteem. But to my thinking, all that does is validate a point of view that in an ideal world would be completely irrelevant. You can redefine the notion of beauty all you want, but it’s still a focus on external appearance, and that’s what irritates me. I don’t get why you need to convince women that they’re beautiful in order to convince them they should love their bodies.

The primary function of my body is not to be a decorative object, no matter how loosely “decorative” is defined. The purpose of my body is to be my vehicle for experiencing the world. I couldn’t care less how frizzy my hair looks or how wrinkly my skin gets, as long as I get to run fast and go places and taste food and look at pretty things. Why would I not love the tool that carries my brain around so I can have all that fun?

So, Love Your Body, everyone. Feed it some pizza and beer, and thank it for the delicious taste sensation and nifty digesting functionality with optional belching feature. Bodies rule.

If you are licking clean a bowl of tiramisu as your spouse gets up from the couch, and you hand him the bowl and say “Honey, if you’re going in the kitchen could you get me some tiramisu or a piece of cake or a donut?”, you might be nine months pregnant.

This will sound pretty weird, and you’ll want to skip this if uterine parasites gross you out, but when Wiggly the Enormous Nine-month-old Fetus stretches her legs and pushes against my abdominal wall with her butt, it feels good.

But when she does the same thing with one foot wedged against an ovary? Not so good at all.

Carry on.

Sidekick: [annoying comment about animated commercial on TV].
Me: [insightful witty comment about art in general totally refuting his lame point].
Sidekick: Art shmart
Me: I don’t know why I bother talking to you.
Sidekick: Because I am the father of your child!
Me: Dammit.
Sidekick, in Nelson Muntz voice: Ha-ha!

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire is full of neato ideas about the effects of various plants on the evolution of human culture and the origins of western ideas of beauty, major religions, and other important memes. The chapter about psychoactive plants is particularly interesting. This just made me chuckle:

The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.

- The Botany of Desire, p. 130.

It reminded me of the time I came home to find my roommate prostrate on the couch, almost weeping in frustration. She had the flu and a high fever, and had been trying to read Count Zero. Early William Gibson isn’t the best prose for calming the fevered mind.

I think the most mindbending thing I’ve attempted was bourbon + Thomas Pynchon, which was done more to preserve my sanity than to experiment with it. There was no way I was going to make it through Gravity’s Rainbow without a few stiff drinks.

Warning: Spoilers, lots of spoilers. All spoilers, all the time.

Hi, I’m Amir, protagonist of The Kite Runner. I’m a lying coward and something of an idiot. It’s kind of weird that the book I’m in is at all enjoyable, since I’m such an unbelievable bastard.

For example, I spend the first several chapters of the book being a complete ass to my best friend, servant, and sidekick Hassan. Hassan has some kind of martyr complex, so it’s understandable that I would want to smash his face in, but you’d think that if his selfless devotion bothers me so much I’d just get some other friends.

Soon I’m watching as the neighborhood bully beats and rapes my buddy Hassan. This part is awesome because I do nothing to prevent it or to help him afterwards, and I never show him any concern. In fact, I frame Hassan for theft and drive him and his father from their home and livelihood. It’s pretty odd that I should be cowardly enough to treat Hassan like this, and yet also sensitive enough to be haunted by guilt about it for the rest of my life. I’m the most sensitive coward ever - totally in touch with my own moral failings and unwilling to do anything at all about them. I bet you’ll enjoy reading about my self-hatred.

The middle of the book is about my life in San Francisco after my charismatic heroic father and I escape from Russian-occupied Afghanistan. We live in an interesting and sympathetic community of Afghan immigrants and refugees. They’re all fun to read about. In this part I’m sort of likable because there are no challenges to my morals or physical safety; you kind of forget what a contemptible person I am.

The last part of the book is when you’d expect me to grow some balls and start redeeming myself. Things look promising for a while: I go undercover in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to find the lost son of my old buddy Hassan. Who, in an astonishing coincidence, is being kept as a sex toy and molested by the very same psychopath who raped his father. I rescue him by getting the crap beat out of me. Wait, no, I get the crap beat out of me and then the kid rescues me. And then, because although I have grown about half a ball I’m still a thoughtless idiot, I break the only promise I’ve made to this orphaned abused child. So he attempts suicide.

By the end of the book things are looking up and I’ve forgiven myself (and I’ve even apologized to the kid!), but by now you probably don’t even care and you wish that all the other characters in the book would just walk away from me and go be in some other story that’s not narrated by a self-indulgent moral coward who might be some kind of anthropomorphic metaphor for modern Afghanistan.

Does it look like I’ve had the baby? Do you see a baby anywhere around here?

(Catchy post title, I know, but if I want people to be directed to this guy’s site, I need to make this post findable for a search engine.)

Marcus de la Fleur is a landscape architect in my area, and he has a great website detailing his solutions for dealing with stormwater runoff at his (rented) house: 168 Elm Ave - One Drop at a Time.

Water conservation is one of my personal soapbox issues. Briefly, I know people whose houses have been ruined by a new “big box” store’s parking lot altering the water table for up to a mile around, water we use is taken from ecologies that would be prettier and healthier if we didn’t use so much, and in a few decades water is going to be as expensive and conflict-causing as oil is now, even for those of us here in the rich countries, so the sooner we figure out better ways to deal with it, the better. And as they say, act locally.

I’m all proud of myself for my single rain barrel and my passive-irrigation compost/tomato setup, and this guy has a whole water system with a fantastic looking grass gravel parking spot. If you own property and have trouble with flooding, or you just want to save some water to use on your own garden, check out what he’s done.

Aside from the impressive content, his website is well-organized. There’s PDFs with detailed directions for each of his projects and photos of the projects under way. I love the brick permeable pavement - I’m gonna make some next summer when we rip up our crappy old concrete.