Eccentric Flower:199810/basics and sudden insights

twentyseven october ninetyeight elevenam

basics and sudden insights

After my rude rant about mail yesterday, I got a nice flow of correspondence. And - get this - most of it was from the people whom I read regularly but whose pages didn't get specific comments from me: "You didn't mention my page!"

Most of them were at least half-kidding, but it occurs to me that maybe all online journallers are secretly or not-so-secretly craving the attention.

Hey, looka me! I'm writin' stuff over here!

Hmm. Online journaller. Is that what I am? I have resisted the idea of being classified as such. I'm not in any lists of journals and very few people know I exist - I'm not in diary-l or journal-l or anyother-l that you can think of. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Anyway, I got mail, and several people pointed out that I don't always reply to mail when they try to send me some. Well, true. But if you're telling me about your day, or what's good/bad in your life - although I love to get it, I'm not sure it calls for a reply. And if I'm talking about my daily mundania, that doesn't seem to call for a reply either - fair's fair.

But if I state (for example) that more women have learned boy skills than men have learned girl skills, I'm stating a clear position and trying to drag you into debating it. A couple of people picked up their cues properly - but we'll get to that last.

- - -

Some of you will say I should have reached the conclusion long ago that online diarists want attention - that it's pretty obvious. Well, maybe. I wouldn't have said that I was writing this for attention, and I bet a few other friends with journals would deny the charges too - which may just mean we're kidding ourselves.

At any rate, I am sometimes slow to get that flash of insight, yes. Unrelated example:

I read a comic strip called For Better Or Worse. Maybe you do too. I don't usually go for the heartwarming strips, but these are in a class by themselves. Anyway - there's a character in these strips, a college kid named Weed, who hangs out with one of the principal characters, Mike. Weed has some odd turns of phrase. One of them is that, when he likes a suggestion, he is likely to say "Bone idea!" I just wrote this off as a non sequitur.

Now, the cartoonist is Canadian, and the strip is set in Canada, but even knowing those things, I didn't catch on - until Weed (a photographer) said "Dites fromage!" today ("Say cheese!") Then it hit me: "Bone idea" is what you get when you deliberately mangle "Bonne idee."

Duh. I'm sure everyone else in the world but me had already figured this out, right?

- - -

I'm in a better mood about email today in general, not just because of the flow of teasing last night, but also because one of the major pieces of Unresolved Business has been fixed - Ginkgo has written back and added me to the guests for the Hallowe'en Ball! For a while, I wasn't sure if she was going to get to me in time for the thirty-first.

You should go have a look. So it's frivolous. What's your point?

Oddly enough, and in response to one correspondent's question, I am doing nothing for Hallowe'en in the flesh. It's my favorite holiday, but I don't know any parties or anything to go to - don't forget that I really don't know all that many people here.

Even in Baton Rouge, my preferred way to celebrate Hallowe'en was to either wear 1. something extremely elaborate 2. absolutely nothing and go take a walk alone in the open fields in the dead of night and meditate. Of course, I could get to open fields where no one would see me in Louisiana - easily. In a city it's a little harder.

- - -

Now, about those vital skills. I got two interesting messages, one from Dan and one from Anita, and as I noted to Dan, I'm afraid I misled you by dragging gender into it. Gender may be a red herring here.

The problem is not one of women knowing how to cook and men not knowing; the problem, increasingly, is that neither men nor women know how to cook. I'm not talking cordon bleu here. I'm talking about people who would literally starve to death without a microwave.

Anita sent me this link, which lists some skills the author thinks everyone should have, but these are all social and mental skills - "white-collar" skills if you will - and the ones I'm worried about are the "blue-collar" ones.

I have a book on my shelf - a very good book called Back To Basics. It's about how to make a garden that really produces, how to raise, breed, slaughter your own livestock; how to weave baskets and make drystone walls; how to make jams and jellies, mend clothing, fix things, et cetera. It is from Reader's Digest, but don't hold that against it. Along with their amazing home repair book (you can practically build a house from the foundation up with the Red Book), this book is astonishing. Like the home book, it has breadth but not depth. If you seriously wanted to get into animal husbandry, you wouldn't find much to help you here. But if I were stranded on a farm without access to civilization and I had to become self-supporting in a big hurry, these two books are the ones I'd want first. They give you enough to get started and then some.

And, looking through this book, it's amazing how much I don't know.

Now, you may argue, "But I don't need to know how to milk a cow!" No, you don't. But do you know how to turn off the power to your house? Do you know that (once you figure out how to turn the power off) small home electrical repair (i.e. replacing a light switch, rewiring that busted lamp) is usually a cinch? Do you know that the plumber will charge you an arm and a leg to come replace that sink trap, but it costs a pittance at your hardware store and you only need one tool?

I'm no saint here. As I noted a while back in another postcard, I have all but stopped changing my own oil. It is worth it to me to pay someone else to do it. And, having been on my back in the crawl space under a house for three hours in freezing mud, trying to unstick a pipe joint with a wrench and blowtorch while not burning off my face ... I'll get the plumber to do that next time. But the point is, I know how. I could do it if I needed to. And that's more important than you think.

There's also the economic argument. If you don't think you can repair a thirty-dollar lamp, you're likely to just get a new one, right? But if you repaired it, not only would it boost your confidence, it would save you money.

Finally, there's the following sentiment (which Nonelvis uses as the signature under her email):

Humanity has an amazing inability to plan. Not too many generations ago, when our relatives lived by hunting and gathering, the inability to plan for the next season meant death. Planners survived. The clueless died. But today, Homo Sapiens eats at McDonalds - for the moment, planning and survival are not strongly linked.
--David Isenberg

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