Check out my new article in the Pacific Sun on Coast Miwok death ceremonies:

When a person died in a Coast Miwok village, everything went quiet. People spoke in whispers and moved gently, hushing their children and cringing at every dog bark. The village was flushed with silence, but the people were quiet out of more than just respect for the grieving family.

“They were afraid that if they made a noise, someone would come to poison them,” Maria Copa, a Coast Miwok, explained in a 1931 interview.

The Miwoks feared that if you laughed or shouted while another family was mourning, they might be so offended, they would get a sorcerer to poison you.

“In the 18th century, it wasn’t clearly understood what caused illness,” says Betty Goerke, author of Chief Marin: Leader, Rebel, and Legend, published by Heyday Books earlier this year. “They believed there were sorcerers in the village that were paid to cause people to die, and they were fearful of bringing illness upon themselves. So they were cautious.”

Miwoks had other kinds of silences surrounding death as well. After someone died, his possessions were destroyed and his name was never spoken again. His memory remained in the confines of people’s heads, passing away completely with each generation.

Read more here.

I don’t know when it was that I lost interest in movies. I used to watch nearly every film that came out in the theater. Literally. I spent thousands of dollars on movies. But nowadays, I don’t seem to have any interest in them. I don’t even know what is coming out, which is crazy for someone who used to watch movie previews online just for fun. When I do watch a movie, I can barely sit through it and tend to turn it off half way through.

I think it may be because every movie I can remember looking forward to this year has disappointed me. Most recent example: Into the Wild. I love that book, but the movie was a let down. For one thing, I don’t think Sean Penn, who directed it, understood Christopher McCandless–the character was a lot stupider and darker than McCandless seemed to be. And all the philosophy behind what McCandless did got completely lost in the movie, or worse, boiled down to cliches like kid hates his father/American consumerism makes people numb. Boring! McCandless was anything but boring.

For another thing, the pacing of that movie is awful. There are oodles of voice-overs and loooooooooong montages. And that’s made even worse by the fact that large chunks of action from the book were cut out of the movie, like when McCandless almost died in Mexico. Why? Action is interesting! Montages are not.

The thing is, I love movies, movie theaters, going to the movies, eating popcorn, etc. But they so rarely suck me up and carry me along in them anymore. So I would rather watch an episode of The Office or read a book than watch most movies. And that makes me a little sad. Is it the overall quality of movies these days, or is it just me?

I am an artsy-fartsy type person. Sometimes I try to paint pictures. I make jewelry and take photographs and other crafty/arsty things. So explain to me, then, why I hate picking paint samples so much. On the list of things I don’t like to do, it’s up there with running for no reason and doing math problems. I hate those little paint sample cards. I get unreasonably upset when I get a paint sample home and it doesn’t look good on the walls. It makes me feel betrayed by the paint chip. And also, choosing a color seems like such a big decision, such a commitment. I know it’s supposed to be fun. For some reason, I don’t find it fun at all.

Anyway, at this point I have picked out the trim color (wainscot white) and the office color (anjou pear, or green). I still have to do the bedroom (light brown?), living room (off-white), and guest room (a buttery yellow). So I’m not even half done.

Oh I hear people want to see a picture of the house. Here is a before picture:

Changes that will be made: The cypress trees and the basketball net on the garage will be taken down. The house will be painted off-white with forest green trim. The yard will eventually have a fence around it.

For landscaping, I will be putting several fruit trees in, including (maybe?) two cherry trees, a fuji apple, a pomegranate, a honey tangerine, and a peach. I am also putting in some flowers along the front of the house, a veggie garden to the left of the garage, and a decent lawn. I am putting in an irrigation system so I can keep up with all the planting I plan to do, too. I should have a big water bill when I’m done, but the food bill will be next to nothing!

We’re deep into the remodeling portion of the house. My parents, bless their hearts, are here for the better part of next week to help us sheetrock the front room (my dad used to work in construction). It’s going pretty well, although I am feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. Here’s where I stand:

Finished:

Tenting of the house and all drywood termites killed.
Bought a mattress for the guest room off of Craigslist. Brand new (still in the bag) and half price and darn comfortable.
Bought a new wall oven, which I’m thrilled about. It was half price, a total steal, and is awesome looking.
Bricks in the fireplace, which were covered with smoke and ash, are cleaned.
Chimney has been swept.
Ugly 70s wood paneling in the front room is GONE and insulation put in. Sheetrock should be up by tomorrow.
Ugly 80s bunny wallpaper in the guest room is GONE.
All room colors are picked, except for the dining room and kitchen, which is still a mystery to me.
The 75 fire detectors that the previous owner had up are down.

Things that still have to be done before we move in on November 17:

Subterranean termites have to be killed.
Ugly cypress trees have to come down.
Hole under the eaves as to be patched.
Living room has to be completely sheetrocked, textured, and painted. (Thank you Dad!)
All the rest of the house has to be prepared for painting.
Guest room and my office have to be painted. Maybe the master bedroom.
I have to pick paint colors.
Kyle has to wire the house with Cat 5.
Hardwood Brazilian cherry floors have to be put in the house. (Going to be gorgeous.)

Maybe what’s getting to me is that there are a zillion details to attend to. Maybe I had to come home (to my rental) and have a break today because I spent hours pulling staples, push pins, screws, nails, hooks, fire detectors, and molly bolts out of the walls. I am a macro thinker ! All ideas and story telling and philosophy about life in this brain, not the microscopic details of tenants in a rental who screwed a hook in the wall or decided to hang a poster with staples. Exhausting, I tell you.

One thing I find surprising about Lady Chatterly’s Lover is how relevant Lawrence’s criticism of modern life feels. A lot of the book is about how the quest for power, money, and possessions kills off an authentic sense of self and chances for real happiness, which is certainly an issue in today’s world as well.

Although I don’t agree with Lawrence’s assertion that the cure for modern malaise is to have an affair with a game keeper in a shack in the woods, I like some of the passages in the book, like this one spoken by the game keeper, Mellors (even though it is written in a ghastly vernacular that I think the book would have been better off without):

Let’s live for sommat else. Let’s not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else. Now we’re forced to. We’re forced to make a bit for us-selves, an a fair lot for the bosses. Let’s stop it. … The least bit of money will really do. Just make up your mind and you’ve got out of the mess.

…

Look at yourselves! That’s working for money! — Hark at yourselves! That’s working for money. … Look at your girls! They don’t care about you, and you don’t care about them. It’s because you’ve spent your time working and caring for money. You can’t talk nor move nor live, you can’t properly be with a woman. You’re not alive. Look at yourselves.

Does that seem scarily relevant to you too? Written almost 100 years ago.

I am updating my Etsy shop again. For the next few days I’ll be adding jewelry and photographs on there. Keep checking back if you’re interested.

Maybe it’s the fall weather or something, but I really want to move to a cabin somewhere on the East Coast and hide. I want to eat apples and watch leaves change and write in my hand-shewn desk without Internet or TV distracting me. I don’t want to engage in the daily tread of gossip and phone calls and minor irritations and betrayals. I definitely don’t want to do the dishes. Or scrape tile glue off the bathroom wall of the new house.

I am tired of being professional. See, sometimes I try to be professional for awhile and return e-mails quickly and make phone calls and thank people for things. However, it quickly starts to feel like I’m on a hamster’s wheel where the quicker I respond and the more professional I seem, the more there is for me to be professional about and more things there are to respond to. Isn’t the point to finish work, not create more work?

I guess instead of moving to the East Coast, I will carve pumpkins and eat a lot of roasted vegetables. And I will get rid of TV–I’m tired of it and we can use the extra $50 a month. And I will read books. Currently: Lady Chatterly’s Lover by DH Lawrence and Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis. I am enjoying both, especially Davis’s book. I knew short stories could be like this, but it’s nice to be reminded.

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Doris Lessing’s reaction to learning she won the Nobel Prize for Golden Notebook? “Oh Christ …”

This made me laugh out loud. Later in the interview, she says, rather sarcastically, “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, and I’m delighted to with them all. It’s a whole lot, okay? It’s a royal flush.”

I love it. I love when people don’t care about these major (and political) honors that everyone else drools over. And I love salty old ladies who say what they think.

UPDATE: An interesting follow-up article in the Guardian.

“There were lots of people who have wanted me to have it for a long time, so it is very nice that I have. I’m exhausted. To celebrate I’d have to go and buy champagne. I’m going to bed.”

So did we close on the house on time? Nope. That would mean financial people would:

a. get to their offices before 10:30 in the morning.
b. stop blaming everyone else for their being inefficient and actually do their jobs.
c. care about whether we close on time.

With the exception of our real estate agent, who is one of the top sellers in the area for a reason, these people are leaving me a tad … let’s say, unimpressed. You have to babysit them and hold their hands while they sit behind a shield of polite distance and cooly explain to you that it isn’t their fault something didn’t get done, it’s someone else’s fault–even though you know perfectly well that this person went on a four-day weekend or doesn’t get into the office until practically lunchtime. But because you want to have a “good working relationship,” you can’t say, “Well, maybe this would have gotten done on time if you had done your job like you’re supposed to.” No, that would insure that they would be even less likely to do their job. So you have to smile and pretend to believe them and ask sweetly do they think they could maybe, possibly, pretty-please-with-sugar make it so that you could get the keys to the house only one day after you’re supposed to instead of two days like they are now saying? And they will look at you with their frigid financial-person eyes, or smile at you in a slick salesman-like way, and explain that it’s not up to them. It depends on this person over here.

And can we talk about fees? Lately it feels like I spend my whole life telling companies not to charge me extra money for nothing. It’s not just the house–which floored me with all the ways we were getting nickled-and-dimed and hundred-dollared-and-thousand-dollared–but every bill that I’m getting lately. I have to call the credit card all the time to get some fee or incorrect charge removed (Chase–don’t go with them). I have to call my retirement account and tell them not to charge me $15 a month to give me the $100 interest a month my money earned. And so on and so forth. Every week there’s some call I have to make along these lines, and it’s not easy, either. They act like the arbitrary amounts they are charging you are your fault in order to intimidate you and get you to accept the fee, so it takes a lot of energy and stubbornness to get them to remove it. And they do remove the fees 98% of the time, but sometimes you have to resort to threats to get them to do it. It’s exhausting. And it’s made even more annoying because I have good credit! I pay my bills every month! I don’t deserve any of this crap.

But the house. My word. The house. After battling fiercely to get $5,000 in closing fees removed, zillions of other ones still cropped up. We’re talking $100 “documentation fees,” $1,300 “title insurance,” $500 “processing fees.” It’s insulting to my intelligence for them to pretend that these fees are anything other than ways to rip us off.

Because I live in a writing bubble and have built a life based on honesty, I forget that the world is like this. Everyone is playing a game where you pretend something is one thing when it’s really another, where you plead helplessness when you mean you won’t do something, where you smile in someone’s face just to get something out of them (I believe that’s called “networking”). On Tuesday, I went out with a friend to an after-hours place where business people hang out. There they were in their business casual clothes, leaning back in their chairs and talking about deals and using PR speak and laughing very loudly over their overpriced vodka drinks in a we-are-networking-right-now kind of way. I was disgusted by their bravado and falseness.

Of course, not everyone in the business world is like the above and of course, you can live an honorable, moral life and deal with money. Sill, I don’t have one iota of sympathy that the banks are losing their shirts right now from all the foreclosures. They gave loans to people who couldn’t afford a house and therefore had no business getting a loan for one. The banks did this knowingly and what’s more, they told people lies about how they would be able to afford the loans in the future, or at the very least, refinance if things get tough. (Yikes. I can only shudder at all the “fees” and “insurance” they must have tacked on these poor SOB’s mortgages–after all, the person can’t afford the loan, so why not act like you’re doing them a favor for giving them a mortgage and get an extra $20,000 for your trouble?)

So now that this has all come to its natural end, and people have ruined their credit by declaring bankruptcy and losing their homes, the banks are complaining that they are losing money. Well you know what? You bet on a horse with a broken leg, banks, so don’t whine. Maybe if you weren’t so greedy and slimy, you wouldn’t forget basic tenets of finance, like that people have to make enough money to afford the product they are buying–otherwise, they will not be able to pay for it. You should be held accountable for your actions, not given money to bail you out, but because you are so big and powerful and affect everyone else, you’ll get your way in the end. So cheer up, there are new people to cheat all the time. Why, here comes Kyle and me right now! Maybe you can charge us a $300 printing fee. Go ahead. See if we’ll go for it.

I’ll feel better when I get the keys to my house.

My book review on I Heart My In-Laws by Dina Koutas Poch is up on PopMatters.

When I read I Heart My In-Laws by Dina Koutas Poch, I was a little worried that my mother-in-law would see the book lying around and think I had some unspoken issues with her. I’ve heard stories about other people’s in-laws that range from horrible to downright nightmarish, so I didn’t want to do anything to suggest there are any lurking problems. Even in a healthy relationship, it’s not good to rock the boat.

But I needn’t have worried. Poch’s book has as much for those who like their in-laws as those who don’t. After all, any time two families mesh, there’s bound to be some friction, even if it’s just when getting to know each other.

More here