An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

~ G. K. Chesterton, On Running after One's Hat, 1908



Thursday, December 16, 2010

Snow Day Crows

Bloomington was supposed to get a snowstorm last night. We didn't, but I took a snow day anyway and made Christmas cards in honor of our crowly visitors.

All of the posted are paper cut outs.


Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Gifts for the Sated

I don't need anything. Really. My little house is so crammed full of stuff that not a week goes by we don't happily eject an item or two.  I'm not a minimalist, but I'd like to be.

I'm also not religious. Neither is the new husband, but we were both raised in households that celebrate Christmas. There's no question that we'll continue to do so with our parents and siblings, but what's to be done in our own little house.  Should we exchange gifts?  It's our first married Christmas and we're talking traditions.

We want to live a more sustainable life, a simpler life. A life that where there is a place for everything and everything in its place: A life with less stuff.  A life that is less materialistic.

And, yet...

I like giving gifts and don't want to live in a world where gifts aren't given. I, personally, fight incurable narcissism and gift-giving is a way to break out of myself, to reflect on who others are, their likes and dislikes, their passions, their needs.

But, what if, after some reflection, you realize your loved ones are just as sated as you? What to get for the person who has everything?  In the last few years, I've been trying to shift to consumables and re-suables in gift-giving, to functional art and whimsical utility.

Gifts that are fleeting
Some of my fondest memories are of  traveling and trying new foods with my  long-time friend Julie. I have ideas on what to get her and her husband for Christmans, but when I really think about it, what I want most and what I hope she wants most is focused time and shared experience -- just like when we were teens. This year we plan to go out for a swank meal (sans the children) instead of exchanging presents.

My Dad, who isn't online and won't see this (Mom might -- don't tell!), thinks going to the movies is a luxury. He's getting gift certificates for his local movie theatre. Maybe I can talk him into going Christmas night with us.

The perfect gift is shared experience.  It doesn't always work out. Sometimes you might not want it to. I'm not here to judge. Other options: Coffee, fine wine or even local beer. Everyone has something that they love that is to be experienced or consumed -- leaving no trace.

Courtesy of Bag It Conscious

Gifts that are sustainable
Last year I discovered reusable cloth sandwich bags and life has never been the same. These colorful bags serve as reusable gift wrapping for small gifts or are gifts in themselves when filled with a cookies or nuts. I now have a pattern and will try my hand at to making them one day, but in the meantime, I get my fix on Etsy at Waste Not Saks and Bag It Conscious. Goodbye Ziploc bags.


Thanks to the economic downturn, the vintage, the repurposed and the upcycled are acceptable. One relation is getting a vintage pin from Sublime. Someone  (not saying who) is getting an upcycled handpainted mug from Bloomington artist Sally Harless.   And, while I don't have anyone in mind for these upcycled zombie figurines brought to my attention by my friend Rebecca, I really, really wish that I did.


Courtesy of McSweeney's.

Gifts that keep on giving

 Museum Memberships and season tickets could make someone's year. I heard about a cookie-of-the-month subscription today. The twist? The giver's doing the baking.  If time is short, there are plenty of quirky subscription services to please the quirkiest of friends. I gave a Wholphin subscription to friends getting married this year.  If you have friends even hipper than mine, consider a McSweeney's T-shirt subscription.


Gifts of useful beauty

I think it was my friend Danielle who once said she'd like everything she owned to be a work of art. Hear, hear.  Hand-crafted wooden salad tongs, screen printed tea towels, whimsical kitchen implements. I have a cloth napkin covered in screen-printed ants that makes me smile every time I spill my soup.


Courtesy of Sally Harless

You do have to be careful. I bought my rather serious brother a can-opener shaped like a shark one year. My idea was to brighten up his life with whimsy. I think I just convinced him I'm daft.

My brother, by the way, is very good at gift-giving. He bought me my first New Yorker subscription.  Another year it was a bottle of Absente, the closest thing Americans could get to real absinthe until 2007. It tasted terrible, but I enjoyed imagining life as a degenerate artiste.

Gifts that give
I'm tempted by the Heifer International charity gift catalog of  but  Ms. Manners frowns on donations on behalf of someone.  "It's very nice to give people presents and it's very nice to donate to charities, but let's separate these two things," she says. If you do get a charity gift, Ms Manners has advice on how to word the thank you note.

Gifts that are just too much
Give but give responsibly. Reasonably. IU researchers are finding that the generous of heart are thought to be anything but.

Don't give too much. Don't give too little. Don't give something that will take up space and depress someone's spirits, and cost  money to keep.  Ugh. Gift-giving is fraught. Gift shopping can be a joy, but it can also be disheartening when you realize you don't know someone well enough to know where to start. Maybe it's time to do something about that.

On the other side, the delight in receiving is not in the having, but the unwrapping and being the focus of attention for a moment. Sometimes there are well-intentioned misses. In these cases, gift-receiving allows for the practice of grace under disappointment.

The lessons of grace and delight are the reason that I want very much to maintain Christmas-time gift-giving if/when a kid enters the picture. Matt worries about religious traditions to which neither of us subscribe. It's a discussion for another day. This year Matt and I decided not to exchange, but we've still given a gift to ourselves: a stay at a bed and breakfast on our visit to the family.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Unfounded Fears: Rabies, Crows and Belly Buttons

"Crow Invasion Has Neighbors Squawking"
- Bloomington Herald Times headline, Sunday, December 5, 2010

When I was a kid I was afraid of two things. Okay, I was afraid of lots of things, but two in particular thanks to my mother's evocative warnings.  One fear was that my belly button would pop out. This, my mom told me, would happen if I picked up my none-too-little little brother. I really shouldn't have tried to lift him. Arguably, I also shouldn't have been imagining torrents of blood stream out of a hole in my stomach. Thanks, Mom.

Speaking of stomachs, the other fear was rabies. After we watched Old Yeller, my mom, warning against strange dogs, told me that rabies required a month of painful shots. Every day. In the stomach.  We saw lots of westerns in my household; I think I conflated the imagined pain of this with gut shot.

For the record, even if this dramatic treatment was ever true, it's not true now. Four treatments. In your arm over the course of 14 days. That's it. And rabies, though fatal if not treated, is so rare in the United States that only 55 cases of human rabies have been diagnosed since 1990.

Rabid dogs are scary, but even the best efforts of Stephen King won't make you look twice at the family pet. Some creatures just have a P.R. problem.  Bats can carry rabies, but so can raccoons and nobody runs in fear when they first see one (though perhaps they should). 

Bats from one perspective are tiny teddy bears with wings who make margaritas possible and control the insect population, but the vampire bat's dance with Bela Lugosi has ruined their reputation.   The little brown bat (actual name, not me being precious) that flies through Indiana trees, eats our mosquitoes and provides choice fertilizer isn't after our blood or set on giving us seizures. Enter a P.R person's dream and a ecologist's nightmare: White Nose Syndrome. Nothing creates a more enduring legacy than an attractive corpse. And, bats have never looked cuter.  Pictures of sick little bats huddled together evokes "Got Milk" ads and what's more wholesome than milk?

I'm thinking about bats because Bloomington has been visited by the other B-grade horror fixture: the crow.  A murder of crows. If that appelation doesn't hearken to darker things, I don't know what does.

While some Bloomingtonians are none-to-pleased by the invasion of crows, I like them. One recent foggy morning, I scootered downtown to fetch bagels.  As I drove through the back roads of the Maple Heights neighborhood, mist hid the horizon and leafless black trees reached across the road. Crows as big as cats flapped in front of me and disappeared into the fog.  My life had taken a turn to the delightfully spooky.

I wasn't always delighted by crows. On an early trip to Disney World, a stalled Haunted House ride trapped me next to a squawking mechanical crow. Or, raven. Or crow. The difference was immaterial. It was unhinging -- like being trapped in a real-life cross between The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven.  By the end, I was ready to plead guilty to anything.

Fortunately, I was a child at the happiest place on earth, not a terrorist suspect. My punishment was the It's a Small World ride, which my parents inexplicably loved.

Bats, compared to crows, have it good. While bats are now tragically cute, they also have the Organization for Bat Conservation and attractive TV spokescientist Rob Mies.  Crows have no attractive spokescientist. They have goth teens.  Bat houses can be bought at Lowe's, while cities and farmers invest in sonic bird deterrents. No one respects a scavenger.


Crows do, however, have a sympathetic new documentary. My view of crows changed on seeing this film. Not only do crows clean the streets of road kill, these omnivorous creatures have a complicated social structure, mate for life and have the capacity for tool use -- an ability long ago thought to be held by humans alone.

They can also hold grudges, another human-like trait.  Take that, dolphin, sweet jester of the deep.  In fact, not only can crows take a dislike to someone, they can teach that hate to their children, which is both neat and disturbingly close to home.  

Bloomington has seen the crow's visit as a nuisance. In a recent newspaper article, the great number of crows was compared to a scene from The Birds. I've never read an article so full of excrement. Literally. "Wear a hat," an IU biologist said.

Perhaps I would feel differently if my back deck was besmirched. Instead I look at the crow painting my friend Brett gave Matt and me as a wedding gift and choose to think of the murder, not as menace, but as a mysterious break from the routine. I'm prompted to learn more. I know vaguely of the crow's trickster place in some myth, and as I research I'm surprised to find one very different story: The Rainbow Crow, a hero's journey that colors my view of crows yet again and makes me wonder more about why some creatures are admired and others aren't.