Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Shoot for Crazytown. If you fall, you'll land among the stars.

If you've read this blog much at all, you're probably well aware of my disdain for inspirational quotes. You know those posters that hang in middle school hallways...the ones with beautifully-hued sunsets or ocean cliff sides in the background, the ones with stuff like "Be the change you want to see!" (it's the poster, not you Gandhi) plastered in white cursive font in the foreground? I hate those. It's not that the messages are necessarily bad, it's just the whole mix of generic graphic, generic rallying call geared toward unknown audience, generic font that if written out, would be written with one of those giant pencils (if "cussing" doesn't offend you and you consider yourself even remotely funny, please, please check out Lecher's post, "I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.") that bothers me. If you know this, then you likely also know that I don't claim to be super religious. No need for poster explanation here.

With these acknowledged, I have something to admit. ...

I get daily email reminders from The Brave Girls Club. Have you heard of this? I was introduced to the site by fellow FOLK writer and designer/decorator/crafter/stager/artist extraordinaire, Deb Kennedy, and I could just kiss her for it. The Brave Girls Club, a website run by two women and geared toward women, is basically a mash-up of inspirational quotes, messages of motivation, and religious-leaning "things will work out the way they're supposed to" rationales. It is the very thing that would typically make me roll my eyes and quickly go back to Nashville Needs More Metaphors.

Yet, it is not.

I encourage you to check out the site for yourself. After doing so, perhaps you will be able to better explain my affinity. For the time being, though, here's all I got: 1) I love the artistry of the site. The colors, graphics, and fonts "look like me."; 2) I like opening emails in the morning that start "Dear Miraculous Girl," or "Dear Lovely Girl," or "Dear Brave Girl."; 3) Although the gist of the emails is always more positive and fluffy than I'm usually drawn to, there are also always specific lines that make me laugh or that actually do inspire me. Example "Please do not decide that you are forever going to be a resident of crazytown."; 4) Maybe I'm not as cynical as I like to think.; 5) The masterminds behind the site like the "..." as much as me.

Here are excerpts from two of my favorites...

November 9, 2011
"Dear Miraculous Girl,
One of the most important choices we will ever make, and sometimes we have to make this choice over and over again...is that we will not set up camp in a place we don't want to end up...that we will not drop anchor because we are too tired to keep going...that we will not decide to live forever in misery because we have forgotten what it's like outside of it."

November 30, 2011
"Dear Doing-Your-Best Girl,
Because there are only so many hours in the day...and because we are all simply human...and because there is just no possible way that we can do everything we want to do, and especially do everything well...we must make choices. Some of the hardest, most difficult choices we will ever have to make are the choices between two things that both make us happy, things that both bring good and happiness into our lives. Sometimes we only have time for ONE of those things. This is one of the hardest parts of life."
Have a lovely day, beautiful girls.
***
Just wanted to share with you some of my great grandmother's, Etta Brown Turner (Leon Jr.'s [Papa's] mother), pieces that I recently picked out. Thank you Aunts Ruby Jane, Betty Jo, and Carolyn for hanging onto these.


Wednesday, November 23, 2011

"I'm super efficient at wasting time as it is." - Fran Smith

There is definitely a part of me that hates the phrase "in the grand scheme of things." I hate it because it sets up an inevitable comparison between two completely unrelated things, an apparent dichotomy that should never exist, much less be used to "help" someone maintain perspective. Example: I know you stepped in a mud puddle, but there are children without food in "country that you likely know very little about, yet use as an example of underdevelopment." I hate it because all things are not relative. We are entitled to feel hurt or angry or frustrated without guilt, constantly reminded of those who have it so much worse.

Well, no kidding, of course things could always be worse.

With that being said, however, the tiny part of me that doesn't hate the phrase, understands why it is so commonly tossed around. It is the disclaimer that allows us to go ahead and say something utterly insignificant and feel justified in doing so. It is the "bless her heart" that gives legitimacy to - and that magically wipes away guilt from - the insult that will surely follow. SO...

In the grand scheme of things, I realize that Facebook is not that important. It is filled with some stupid, stupid stuff: far too personal postings, the likes of which I would never tell Caroline, much less an entire online community; deep thoughts such as "It's cold this morning!" or "Love this!" (I have used both); an inexplicable hatred of Nickelback; and far too many "bro"s, "tat/tatted up," "lmao"s, and "prayer chains" that spiral into nosy Q&A sessions, for my liking. BUT...

It is also the "place" where I read stuff that makes me laugh out loud while sitting alone in my living room. It is the place where I can see pictures of Terry and Tommy Staley with their grandchildren that make me respect them even more than I already do. It is the place where I can read the Annie Ruby's menu and snippets of my favorite blogs. It is the place where "The Art of Piddling" and "Random Thoughts of Very Little Significance" flourish. It is the place where I can see glimpses of just how funny T.j. Morgan, Jessica Cossel, and Neal Poindexter are. It is a place of shared experience, even if that experience is, by all reasonable understanding, dumb and/or insignificant (...in the grand scheme of things).

And, thus, it is this notion of shared experience that makes me feel okay about devoting a little time to it each day. It's nice to take something that would normally be quite frustrating and, via a quick Facebook post or comment, turn it into something that you can laugh at with others. It's nice when quips from unsuspecting bystanders somehow make you feel as though you're not the only one "XYZ" has happened to. It's nice when you know something you've done has made others smile.

It seems, therefore, that Facebook is just me being super efficient at both time wasting and community development.:)

For two of my favorite Facebook posts of all time (and the related events happened to occur on the same day), see:
The "If anyone has a fence down..." post.
Is it a "u" or "e"?









Sunday, November 20, 2011

Baby, whatever comes Monday can take care of itself.

Well, in lieu of hiding under the covers all afternoon with Keith Urban, I decided to spend some time in the kitchen. ...

Pecan Butter Balls (Recipe courtesy of Heather Hannan, owner of Annie Ruby's Cafe)




Pie Crusts (Will be used for a cushaw, pumpkin, candied pecan pie later in the week; as I learned at the Library's "Knead to Read" cooking class, 1) make sure you chill your flour, sugar, and shortening mix; 2) Use ICE water; 3)A pastry blender is pretty neat.)



Gingerbread, Chocolate Chunk Cookies (Made the dough a few days ago)

Beef Stew (Recipe courtesy of David Gobeli and the FOLK Magazine blog)


*If you would like any of these recipes, just let me know.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

"Good luck, sir."

I realize that "Liza" is not a common name. However, it's no "Apple" or "Banjo" or "Zuma Nesta." I don't have an intelligent way to articulate what I'm thinking, so I'll just leave it at: I don't get weird names, names that seem picked or made up purely for the sake of being different.
***
My great grandfather's name was Thurston. My dad called him Pa Sewell and I remember CLT talking about how much he loved being around him when he was growing up. If I ever have a son, I'd like to see "Thurston" in his name somewhere.

My grandmother, affectionately known by most as "Mama," recently handed down to me two Thurston-related gifts that I absolutely love. The first was a pair of books that belonged to Pa Sewell in the early 1900s: a 1915 edition of Ivanhoe and a 1916 edition of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. On the inside cover of both, he had signed his name and the date. His handwriting reminds me of his daughter's, the woman who, for 31 years, has written the most thoughtful messages in my birthday cards, for-no-particular-reason letters, and on my let-me-tell-you-what-else-you-can-do-with-this-gift post-it notes.

And the other gift, well, I'll just let Mama explain...
Mama took the time to write it out for me, too.
I love this story. I love to think about Mama going just with her father, dressed in that navy suit, to catch a glimpse of JFK. I love that she had no qualms about loaning the gloves to my mom, Jacqueline Ann (who did, in fact, remind me of Jackie Kennedy) for Halloween. I love that she has given them to me.

Monday, November 7, 2011

"You can't fake passion."

I originally saw this article last week linked from a fellow Centre alum's Facebook page, but reread it again this morning. With my Alma mater on my mind, I went searching for two things: my Government capstone paper and a "reflecting-on-the-past-four-years" Cento article (school newspaper) that I had also written during my senior year (2002). In so doing, I came across...

1) Folders filled with notes and essays from classes such as Civil Liberties, Latin American Political Systems, Introduction to Acting, History of Christian Thought, Introduction to Anthropology, The Economics of Poverty, Introduction to Linguistics, Renaissance Women Writers, and Alcohol & Society (the class to which Caroline and I wore belly chains one day...just because it made us laugh).

2) Pictures from class- or organization-related trips to New York, Boston, and Washington D.C.; pictures from a three-week class at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica; pictures from two different West Virginia trips - one, a whitewater rafting trip with the Outdoors Club, the other, a home-building trip with the campus Habitat chapter.

3) A folder dedicated to the Vice-Presidential debate experience of 2000.

4) I finally did find my paper. Part of the title was in Latin, but because it was a phrase the professor had used when discussing the fall of empires, not because I had wikipedia-d something trying to sound impressive.

5) In the article for The Cento, I offered what basically amounts to the philosophy behind this little blog: "Try to focus on those things that make this journey a true education: believe in something greater than yourself and find purpose in whatever it is that you do; be friends with a wide variety of people and take classes from a wide variety of professors, but remember to sincerely appreciate those few who have inspired you, made you laugh, and have just been wonderful friends. You'll look back in the last month of your four years at Centre and realize you are a better person simply because you've known them."
***
"Steve Jobs' Liberal, Hippie Education" by Dave Serchuk
Forbes 10/11/2011

"One of Steve Jobs’ signature achievements was that he was able to somehow impart to his devices something akin to a soul. How ironic that he was able to achieve this at a time when the push in his own country, America, is to make everyone more and more like a machine.

It is amazing to consider what made Steve Jobs special. He wasn’t a top flight computer programmer or engineer. He didn’t go to MIT or even CalTech. Could he have gone there, had he applied himself in high school? Probably. But he didn’t seem to aspire to it.

No, instead he went to Reed College, where he famously dropped out. But that he dropped out of Reed is not what should be taken from this. It is that he went there at all, and that he stayed even after he was no longer officially a student, to audit classes. Why is this important? Because Reed is not just any college. And I can say this having graduated from Wesleyan University, which shares a profile with Reed, in many ways. No, it is very specifically a liberal arts school, with a capital L. Steve Jobs, in essence, is the greatest living argument from the past 50 years for why a liberal arts education is invaluable. More importantly he was a living exemplar of the fact that if America is to continue to lead the world in innovation and creativity it is going to be thanks to the products of places like Reed every bit as much as it’s going to be thanks to the high-tech specialists, and MBAs, that we seem to crank out by the thousands every year.

The irony is that even as everyone everywhere applauds the achievements of Jobs, we as a nation are showing, with our dollars and rhetoric, that we think the arts–which is what a place like Reed is so good at teaching–are either soft, worthless, or kind of sissy. If we follow down this path it will not only drain much of the future color from our collective lives, it will also lead us gradually ever more toward America becoming a second-rate, lackluster nation.

In his commencement speech at Stanford, another school he didn’t go to, Jobs famously remarked that even after he was not longer officially a student at Reed he hung around and studied calligraphy. As he has noted, he didn’t see any practical application for this at the time, he just loved it: its elegance, its historical value, the simple pleasure he garnered from the pursuit of creating something beautiful for its own sake. Of course the upshot is that this love of finely wrought letters eventually became one of the early distinguishing hallmarks of the MacIntosh, its fonts, at a time when most other computers still ran with blocky letters on a black screen. As he himself acknowledged in his speech, he didn’t know this at the time, it only made sense later.

But even if the Mac didn’t benefit from Jobs’ calligraphy–in some other universe–Jobs himself would have. The patience needed to make the letters just so, despite their having no obvious commercial value, was its own reward. The fact that he was happy to not only delve into a fine art, but an archaic one at that, it gave him a set of intellectual tools, and attitudes, that his generational peers cranking out punch-card code didn’t have. It gave him a larger, historical perspective on the world. It gave him an aesthetic. People rave about how Jobs had such an overview of the worlds of technology, and design. This is part of how he got it, by studying things that didn’t have immediate commercial implications. It allowed him to actually think different.

More to the point, the pursuit of beauty for its own sake, then, as now, was probably seen as beside the point, if not offensively silly, in a recession-driven America. God bless Jobs’ tolerant parents, who probably wondered what their son was up to, with his hippie B.S.

Put it another way, do you think MIT had a calligraphy class in 1972? (Also, let’s also give a long-overdue shoutout to Reed itself, which let this dropout not only continue to hang around, but act as a student. This tolerant attitude is part of what leads to true education, but I would not say it’s a common quality.)

Another art that Jobs passionately indulged was his love of music. A true Baby Boomer he seemed to worship it, and not for nothing did Apple share a corporate name with the label the Beatles founded. (Which resulted in a long, long legal dispute.)

Jobs didn’t only passively listen to music, he understood it. It is quite easy to imagine him sparking up a spliff and listening to some Bob Marley, back when it was new. He also dated Joan Baez, so talk about passion.

Need I say where this led? At a time, the early part of the last decade, when the music industry was already spiraling into collapse, due to illegal file sharing, and the shortsighted greed of the major record labels, Jobs not only launched the iPod, but, more key, the iTunes store. As my colleague Zack O’Malley Greenberg so smartly put it, this made him, over time, the most important figure in the music industry, and helped take some of the bite out of free file sharing. This made Jobs more important to music than Clive Davis, Simon Cowell, and Lady Gaga combined, because he, literally, owned the store.

Again, it is easy to imagine his love of music as initially being seen as beside the point, a distraction, possibly a waste of time. I have met many engineers, and many of them love music, but it’s doubtful they studied much of it in the course of their higher educations. I doubt Bill Gates, for example, ever listened to Dark Side of The Moon with the headphones on–though I love the image. But a single minded-focus on programming may have helped them imitate, but not create.

Today educators are being told more and more to push No Child Left Behind, a poorly thought out excuse for a program that pushes “core” academic programs at the expense of the arts. This will in the long run, allegedly, make the U.S. more competitive. As if becoming the new South Korea is something we, as Americans, should aspire to.

It’s not. There is a reason Jobs could only have come from a liberal arts background. There’s a reason schools like Reed, Evergreen, Wesleyan, Centre College, and Brown will continue to punch way above their weight when it comes to minting future generations of leaders and innovators. There’s a reason Bill Gates may be the richest technologist in the world, but Microsoft has become an afterthought when it comes to the cutting edge, and has been for some time. It’s like owning the utilities in Monopoly.

The reason is that while it takes a keen analytical brain to create a new technology it takes a much larger set of skills to make that technology into something the average person will want to use, believe in, defend, and, yes, impart with soul. It takes a liberal education.

But it is hard to imagine that Jobs could have had such a feel for where the music business was headed if he was not, in fact, a fan first. You can’t fake passion.

Again, it is easy to imagine his love of music as initially being seen as beside the point, a distraction, possibly a waste of time. I have met many engineers, and many of them love music, but it’s doubtful they studied much of it in the course of their higher educations. I doubt Bill Gates, for example, ever listened to Dark Side of The Moon with the headphones on–though I love the image. But a single minded-focus on programming may have helped them imitate, but not create.

Today educators are being told more and more to push No Child Left Behind, a poorly thought out excuse for a program that pushes “core” academic programs at the expense of the arts. This will in the long run, allegedly, make the U.S. more competitive. As if becoming the new South Korea is something we, as Americans, should aspire to.

It’s not. There is a reason Jobs could only have come from a liberal arts background. There’s a reason schools like Reed, Evergreen, Wesleyan, Centre College, and Brown will continue to punch way above their weight when it comes to minting future generations of leaders and innovators. There’s a reason Bill Gates may be the richest technologist in the world, but Microsoft has become an afterthought when it comes to the cutting edge, and has been for some time. It’s like owning the utilities in Monopoly.

The reason is that while it takes a keen analytical brain to create a new technology it takes a much larger set of skills to make that technology into something the average person will want to use, believe in, defend, and, yes, impart with soul. It takes a liberal education."

Friday, November 4, 2011

Let the light of late afternoon shine through the chinks in the barn

May Turner Farm be wrapped in comfort and joy tomorrow and every day.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through the chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in the long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to the its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

--Jane Kenyon


The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do no tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-- Wendell Berry

Thursday, November 3, 2011

"In other words..."

One of the most memorable conversations I ever had with my dad occurred one day while we were alone in UK's Markey Center. I always appreciated that he talked frankly with me about cancer, about how he wanted the last few months to go, about the decisions he and I had both made in our lives. On this particular afternoon, we were discussing the idea of "fairness" as it relates to illness. So many times we (the rest of the family) had said or heard, "It just doesn't seem right. He's young. He takes care of himself. He has so much to live for. We need him." Dad's take on it that day: "well, why not me?"

It sounds simple (as most things with any substance often do), but those four words epitomize why I respected, and continue to admire, him so much. Dad (and Mom, too) never allowed some ethereal notion of "should be" cloud what was. They never felt sorry for themselves. They understood that appreciating what they had - a supportive family, a beautiful farm, a new grandchild who shared his name - was more important than fretting about and questioning daily realities and eventual loss. They were grace and kindness and unselfishness personified. They simply "did the best they could."
***
In memory of CLT, November 13, 1948-November 5, 2010.

He was a farmer who loved his horses, cows, dogs, and cats almost as much as the three little pony-tailed girls who likely drove him crazy for 32 years with pleas of pony rides – both actual and the occasional “buckin’ bronc” game in the living room – , fishing trips, and opportunities to hang onto ropes and “ride” the horse walker. He was a good teacher (based on my own experience and on those that others have been kind enough to share with me), one that could make us laugh with some dry, offhand comment and scare us in the same breath with both his knowledge of “a little bit about everything” and with the pointy toes of those classic cowboy boots. He was a news watcher. He was a reader. He loved to sit in his big brown chair in the living room, often with a dog squeezed in right beside him, and pull out his favorite Wendell Berry collection. He enjoyed horse magazines just as much as books of political theory. He appreciated Kentucky authors. He had an affinity for collections about agriculture, sustainability, and simple pleasures in life. He was open to trying poetry, although it wasn’t his favorite and sometimes invoked a little eye-rolling or sarcastic comment. And, this is one of those everyday things that I will miss everyday – walking by and hearing him repeat some line he found particularly interesting or ridiculous, a line he was able to read only because he had not lost his incredibly dirty glasses that given afternoon – but one for which I am incredibly grateful.

He was a husband who made certain the paths around the wild blackberries were mowed in late summer; the son who inherited his father's work ethic and affinity for the story, his mother's sense of simple right and wrong; the dad who makes me better everyday.


He did like his shirts starched and I did/do think he walked on water.


He always liked Alan Jackson and this song has always made me think of him.


"If I live the life I'm given, I won't be scared to die."