Slugs May Be Tasty But Beware & The Suckiest Job EVER (for real)!

(That is a photo taken on my trek up Mount Everest last year.) After a crazy busy week of work as I am now working at two schools, I finally got to have some fun! Friday night I stayed up into the wee morning hours writing-which is rare for me as I usually konk out by eleven or twelve. Then yesterday I woke up, saw TWO Imax films, Hurricane on the Bayou and Mount Everest, at Portland's amazing OMSI Center. Because I am a diligent auntie I also picked up some tasty edible banana slugs for my six year old nephew, Sammy, there. Btw, did you know that banana slugs are immune to our stomach acids and will go on living in there if you eat them live? Be careful out there! I know its tempting but its not worth it. Incidentally, I also learned that they reproduce by biting themselves in half (ouch!), can be trained to tie themselves in a knot, can survive in outer space, pick up radio signals with their tentacles, communicate using telepathy, AND their slime really does taste like bananas! Now that you are thinking sluggishly, I will also mention that slugs are hermaphrodites! They have male and female parts: thus, they can mate with themselves and save a lot of money on dating.

Hurricane on the Bayou was pretty startling. My mom was born and raised in New Orleans, part of a huge family with enough relatives left that we have a big family reunion there every other year. I hadn't really understood the whole wetlands thing and just how important they are. Did you know that every three miles of wetlands reduces a storm surge by one entire foot? And Louisiana has already lost more wetlands than equal the size of the entire state of Delaware-and thats just in the last fifty years! I have to admit, I have essentially done zero when it comes to being more environmentally active. Mount Everest was also amazing. It chronicles the expedition to the summit by the son of the first man to ever climb Mount Everest, the first woman from Spain to accomplish this feat, and one American man from Utah. What the human being can achieve when we set our minds to it is simply awesome, isn't it? (That makes it sound like I think I could do this too if I wanted, and I just want to state for the record that I would only walk about one inch up the mountain before I would totally cave and suggest we go find a hammock somewhere instead and play Parcheesi)... but! I am in genuine awe and honored that such people and I are of the same species at all! (And if you are still reading then you know by now that I was just kidding when I said that is me in that Everest photo! That wasn't and never will be me! If I really want to impress someone, I might consider when I go to Nepal visiting Everest and walking about six steps in an upwards direction so I can casually mention in conversation, "When I climbed Mount Everest..."...If they don't ask for more details, then technically I haven't lied!)

And last, but certainly not least, I went to the Portland Art Museum afterwards, somewhere I had never been though I have been here for two years. This was a very busy day considering I prefer when not working to travel no further than the distance from my hand to a laptop, book, or writing notebook. But while driving I had heard on the radio that there was an actual boat on exhibit that had been buried with an Egyptian pharoah to help him navigate his way through the underworld, and that I had to see! This was the first time I had seen my field trip companion,Laini, since January of 1962 when we trekked up the slopes of Mount Donut in Cupcakistan! The exhibit was called The Quest for Immortality: The Treasures of Ancient Egypt, and apparently was the largest exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts to ever tour North America. It was pretty fascinating, all the stuff they would bury in the tombs with their loved ones. I'm talking not only sweet momentos like letters and a little bit of food, but rather BIG things like furniture, mummy beds, detailed maps and instructions, symbolic animal figurines, beautiful canopic jars holding all your internal organs, the works! The entombment process alone lasted seventy days. (Note to Family: Please bury my beloved chair with me if I should perish suddenly along with twelve dozen cupcakes, twelve hundred blank notebooks, my bookshelves, butternut squash fries, my cranberry flannel sheets, a cell phone, and my Body Shop shimmery cranberry body lotion. Oh, & sushi from Yuki's on NW 23rd.)

And if you are still with me after all this nonsense, I shall now reveal The Suckiest Job EVER award, It goes to all the "ushebtis" out there- or really, under there. Whats an "ushebti?" I didn't know either before yesterday! Apparently, it is a small figurine buried beside the deceased in ancient Egyptian tombs believed to magically awaken and required to perform any and all labor that the tomb owner might require in the afterlife, basically a ghostly underworld slave! "Ushebti" translates to "one who answers." They were so serious about it that they actually buried beside the ushebti tiny versions of agricultural tools that he or she would be expected to use. I never ever ever want to be an ushebti. Thats another reason kids to stay in school, study hard, and get your education!

What do you want in your burial tomb?

Sunday Scribblings: Fantasy

I hopefully am not rascist but I am bookcist, which means someone who holds prejudice towards those who don't choose to read, or even worse, those who find reading boring. Ok, I did just make that word up but its very real to me. I don't like non-readers, or maybe I should just say they make me queasy. I don't care what one reads but to not read when the world is so full of stories and books and magazines and newspapers feels like choosing to live in a world with just one color. Why would you do that when you have choices of mulberry and fuschia, maroons and lavenders, golds and a thousand and one shades of blue? As far as we know, we are the only species with the ability to read as well as to imagine. Thats incredible to me, that we can dream up things that never were or throw a bunch of characters in the blenders in our heads and pop out stories on paper or screen, create whole worlds and oceans, love triangles and sagas that stretch a millenium, put wings on leopards just because we feel like it, fly an owl gondolier across the night sky, even be a king or a queen...in the world of our imaginations, there is literally nowhere that we can't travel. What a contrast to our real lives that are stuffed with stop signs, detours, relationships that end (or begin!) against our wills, irreversible consequences, and sometimes, all too often, sad endings.

I've spent the afternoon in Snoosy Lickylice's writing room reading picture books to get back in the rhythm of one I am working on myself. I've written three different drafts over the last half year and it amazes me that they are three totally different stories. Each unfurls in a totally different direction. I love that! I love that when our minds get loose enough they start stretching themselves every which way, performing acrobatic feats our actual limbs wouldn't dare. I've spent the last few hours with poet dogs that travel to Paris to pursue their dreams, North Winds that carry the lovelorn across the earth, Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden floating about in a hobgoblin hat across the skies of Moominland (a place I have wanted to live for many years!)... I couldn't do this in my real life which is what makes fantasy so, so great! It enlargens and multiplies our worlds in a million directions all at once, and through that process, transforms and inspires us to find ways to sprinkle magic across our waking, tangible days like stardust. I'm inspired by the grand gestures of kindness, generosity, and integrity that the characters in my favorite books choose for themselves. I think the stories we love most make us greater than we would otherwise be too. They ask us to be more than what we are inclined to be, challenging us too to be better, braver, nicer, wiser, crazier, and sometimes even more mischevious and devilish! (Afterall, its very important to have a teensy bit of devil alive and swirling wildy inside oneself, right?!?) Maybe we can't just hop on a magic carpet just because we want to, but by opening ourselves up to fantasy, to written words whereever they might appear, our lives become so indescribably richer, not to mention a whole lot more FUN!!

I still read picture books often before bed. I consider them as vital as vitamins and brushing my teeth, and I never cease to be surprised at just how many wonderful stories continue to be churned out! My favorite of the last couple of weeks is Ms. Rubinstein's Beauty by Pep Montserrat. Its about a bearded circus lady and a man with a long striped proboscis, also in a traveling circus, who happen to meet one afternoon in the park while their circuses are both in town. I won't tell you anymore but it is a story that left me with such a feeling of joyous delight. A world without books and fantasy isn't a world I'd want to live in. I'm off to go read and hopefully write some more now!

SnoW DaY AND My OnE YeAr BloGGeRVeRsArY DaY !

That was my street this morning when I awoke! (more photos below) And those are my parents in the picture below while traveling in Estonia! ( I know you are thinking too that I should be in this photo but I wasn't invited!) Aren't they cute? They celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary this upcoming November. They are both cancer survivors, big eaters, book lovers, and ever since my dad was recovering from cancer five years ago-he was diagnosed on September 11, 2001- they go to sleep almost every night together listening to music. They met on a double date in New Orleans, only they weren't each other's dates! My mom's date and my dad's date were friends but as soon as my dad saw my mom, he liked her much better than his own date and asked her out soon afterwards. (Fortunately, she said yes!)

I am home today from work because it started snowing early this morning and it didn't stop until nearly noon! I'm sure all the kids at the high school and elementary school where I work are psyched. This is rare for Portland so its very exciting. Can you see the snow show out my windows? Growing up in southern California it only snowed once the whole time I was growing up, and that wasn't really even a snow. It was really only enough to cover the fingernail tip on my pinky and it was gone by morning.

So its been a wonderful, unexpected day off spent reading, studying, exercising, and writing in my living room. I love being home, hanging out with my plants, a bowl of red pepper and tomato basil soup, pumpkin chocolate scented candles, rereading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of my very favorite books. Unfortunately, I can barely remember it anymore which is why I am rereading it again! Its hard to describe what its about so I will just copy a couple sentences from the back sleeve. "One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The vistors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites, and that would be the Master and his Margarita." Last I heard it was going to be made into a film with Johnny Depp but I haven't heard anything recently.

I did don my new ice-cream cone gloves, a Christmas gift from my best friend, Snoosy Lickylice, and go for a walk in my snowy neighborhood. I inherited a digital camera recently so these are all photos I took today as I walked. I love snow! I saw that the kids had made homemade signs on an adjacent street closing it off so that they could go skiing and sledding. Of course I promptly made civil arrests as that is illegal and drove them to the Portland sheriff myself and now they are all sitting in jail cells, even little seven year old, Christopher Pendlebottom, seen below. Fortunately I had a lot of emergency licorice in my trunk as there was only so much room inside my Toyota and I had to tie a couple of them up with the spare licorice ropes and place them on my car's rooftop. Incidentally, Christopher will spend the next five years behind bars for his actions this morning. Children must learn consequences, even on carefree snow days when school is closed.

YaY BulGaRiA!

Bulgaria (along with Romania) became part of the European Union effective today, New Years Day! I know that you have been waiting for this with baited breath, counting down the days and crossing them off on your calendar, and at last the day is here! Really, I never ever thought that I would care but then thats what happens when you travel to places you have never been, and dots on maps become freckles on faces and before you know it, you find yourself in a relationship with a country other than your own, and forever after when you hear its name in passing on the television or on a news headline, you stop in your tracks and listen because somewhere across the tens of thousands of miles people you now love may be affected. I can't imagine what it must be like for say, Pakistanis in England or the US who have to learn through television that their hometown has suffered a catastrophic earthquake, and the gruel of the wait to learn whether or not your loved ones are alive and okay. Fortunately, today it was good news, great news really for the people of Bulgaria because this means that the economy actually may begin to improve. When I lived there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I knew of babushkas who were so strapped that they had to ration out their daily beans to ensure they would have enough to eat every day.

Last night I called the family who lived in the apartment upstairs from where I lived when I was there. Deshka, the mother, used to call me her third daughter, and both of us cried when we wished each other a happy new year. I wondered if she cried because she thought I would forget about her, but that would be impossible. One can never forget someone who took you in like a longlost famiy member though they had no obligation, benefit, or ulterior motive. Whenever I think of traveling somewhere new, its the natural thing to marvel at all the differences and to worry about all that might go wrong, but when I lived in Bulgaria, over and over again I was forced to realize how very much I ultimately had in common with Bulgarians. I imagine it would be the same nearly anywhere I would go despite the blaring distractions suggesting otherwise.

I have a really good feeling about 2007. Despite the horror of all horror moments of last night when my ex-husband took my "before" photos of me in a red bikini from Target so that I can gleefully compare them to my future "after" photos (and he was extremely sweet about it, insisting I only gained "a maximum of 3-4 pounds," which unfortunately couldn't be farther from the truth!) , still, I feel positive! We are entering the last two years of the Bush presidency with a new Democratic Senate and Congress (yippee!), Darlene's son is continuing to survive and heal each day, and I have a head filled with new dreams, old dreams that refuse to give up, and a world stuffed with people and their stories to be inspired by. Happy New Year!