Melodnium

Evidence-Based Hope

2009-05-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

When there is nothing left, no hope, when faith has been bled dry by
lack of evidence, there is suicide. Whether death comes slow through
the destruction of the body by alcohol or drugs, or instant and boldly
intentional, suicide is the illustration of loss of hope.

In Native American communities in the United States, suicide rates are
on the rise as poverty and substance abuse weigh down people with
extremely limited resources. In India, over 160,000 farmers have
taken their own lives in despair over debt incurred by buying seed and
pesticides from Monsanto. There is little left on which to base
faith in god, government or community. We are losing the battle
against a dangerous evolution of the human ability to self-preserve.

It is not an admittance of a lack of faith to require evidence in our
acts of hope. Faith in a god is based on supposed evidence of an existence of a
higher being. Yet, this evidence becomes something of a fairy tale
when the only means of salvation seems to be in death. In this century, we cannot base our faith and live for the hope of attaining perfection only in death—that is a
well-debunked theory for present generations and we must now search
for something that we can sink our teeth into.

Tangible evidence of our purpose here on Earth faces us at every turn.
Every day, we see evidence of our effects on the planet and its
people. Our purpose is to effect. If continue to operate our lives
with immediate self-gratification as the primary objective, then we
are sure to lose. Immediacy is a luxury of the few who hold an
extreme amount of power—and we have direct evidence as to what that
power can accomplish. It creates the means by which the many lose all
rights, resources and energy.

*Written after listening to Frances Moore Lappe on the 5/6/09 broadcast of Alternative Radio: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/LAPF003.shtml

The idea and expression of "evidence-based hope" belong to Ms. Lappe.

Oh dear.

2009-04-27T21:26:00.001-07:00

There is a fine line between duty and conscience. What do we do when we are faced with a job that challenges our beliefs regarding quality of human treatment? If these challenges affect only the way WE are treated, it is easier to plow through and maintain the martyr attitude in hopes of obtaining some sort of spiritual or financial remuneration. However, when it is obvious that, by doing our best work, we are to negatively affect someone else, we must take a different stock of the situation and weigh the pros and cons.

A professor of mine in graduate school spoke of different types of "capital"--spiritual, financial, political, etc. By living our lives and doing our business, we gain and lose amounts of said types of capital which in turn affects our standing in our social environments. By measuring our actions as the means by which we gain and lose these "points," we fail. We fail because we are not doing anything with purely altruistic intentions. We're basically screwed. Thoughts?

Don't Use That Toner with Me, Betty Ford.

2009-04-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

Every printer in my office is named after a famous alcoholic. While it prevents confusion--one doesn't have to remember that the color printer is Canon 5460, it's Sean Penn--it makes me feel a bit sad for the namesakes. Except perhaps in the case of Sean Penn, most severe substance abusers in the Hollywood spotlight will be remembered for being boozers, not for being valuable contributors to the American entertainment culture. Poor bastards.

It's pretty amazing, the things that we remember as humans. We remember the bad shit. We remember the nasty little things that people have done to us, whether purposefully or by proxy. We establish and nurture relationships with people because we love them and enjoy their company, yet the negative things that come out of their mouths are the things that stick with us. What selfish little creatures we are for not allowing our fellow humans to be human.

Smeavan

2009-02-02T16:56:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, heaven was a blue plastic hole filled with water. The bottom of Heaven was slick and slimy with the detritus of a freshly-mowed yard, and the walls of our Kingdom were painted with mushrooms and hedonistic little blue people with white hats.

My sister and I spent the summers of the mid-1980s firmly entrenched in our front yard utopia. The high Japanese sun shone down on our never-ending quest for props and tools with which we created the world's first yogurt-container-and-shampoo-bottle-chemistry set/kitchen/bakery. From the fruits of our labor we created 7-course sushi dinners, potions that would allow us to fly back to New York at a whim to visit our Uncle Dave, and currents that would allow us to escape from the most threatening sea creatures.

Nothing much has changed if you don't count the exchanging of Big Bird swimsuits for slacks and blouses. As my sister so aptly put it, if yogurt containers are jobs, shampoo bottles are relationships and we consider life to be one big science experiment, all we need is a pool. She requests that it be filled with syrah. I agree.

Regarding the Current State of my Digestive System

2009-01-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

Tea empty belly

Peanuts add chunks rising storm

Meeting time--not good

(rumble rumble)

pissed, pro iam

2009-01-13T20:50:00.000-08:00

I am not used to being angry. I do not like the feeling of rot that it imposes on my digestive system. I do not appreciate its grasp on my being, a separate entity that eats away at my jolly mood. When my peace of mind is shattered by anger, I get so mad that another batch of mental piss is created, a sister entity that joins forces with the first. My lower intestine roils out of control.

This time, the antics of a now-former roommate is the cause of all this gas. Bastard. A thorn in my virtual side, this former roommate wants desperately for me to know exactly how much wrong I’ve done him. Oh, Frankie. Email after email after email highlights the various ways in which I’ve failed to live up to this poor man’s expectations. While I know that I have the upper hand of integrity in this situation, the barrage of accusations has done its work. I feel like shit. I feel like shit because I cannot tear my eyes away from the careful arrangement of words specially created to make me feel horrible. The virtual, literary cigarette. Poisonous and stinky and addictive in its ugliness.

Back

2009-01-06T18:07:00.001-08:00

I can walk into that room in the old house on Long Island and know exactly how it’s going to smell. I know that if I look to my right, I’ll see the tip of a white pole belonging to the Greek neighbour’s clothesline. I know that there is a little porcelain statue of a dog on a shelf behind me with a droopy, sad face, and that the little placard below him says, “I miss you.”

I was Anne of Green Gables in this room. I was young Amish wife, waiting to hear the devastating news of her husband’s death while ploughing the fields in the middle of a snowstorm. I was a young ballet dancer, seeking refuge from the chaos and drugs and emotional torture of New York City in the early 90’s. When I walk into this room, I am all these things again, be they real or imagined episodes of my girlhood. The memories mix and separate and come back together at a rate faster than my 32-year old mind can comprehend, a tangible definition of me almost visible in the twilight coming through the slats of the cedar shutters.

The memories of this place are not unique to my life; many people have the luxury of walking into he homes in which they grew up, memories plastered on the walls behind every door, in every corner. I don’t. Perhaps it’s because of this that my memories seem more sacred, more precious, more fleeting in the fact that I only breathe the air of that house every few years. I know that every time I enter and smell that fresh scent, hear that voice, it may be my last. I can still see the ghosts dancing around the corners, just out of reach. One day, they will forget to notice me, and that will be the end.

Guild Economics

2008-10-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

A wise man once explained to me the guiding principles of "Guild Economics," a theory that, while brilliant, could land said wise man (who will remain unnamed for reasons of personal safety) on his* ass in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

Inspiration for the theory came from the painfully readable Chilton Manual, a labor guide for the auto mechanical industry. Guild Economics, like the Chilton Manual, suggests a number of billable hours per job; if the worker is of a higher ability than the average Joe on whom the manual is based, the worker can bill for more hours than it took for her to complete the job, thus expanding income and client base without crossing legal or ethical boundaries.

The first response to this is an obvious wohoo! for anyone who has ever spent ten or more hours surfing Craigslist for used wooden pallets or refrigerator boxes, with which to build that awesome tree fort designed on post-it notes during a staff meeting. We still get our work done—amateur architectural aspirations aside—and no one seems to question our productivity levels. Yet we must continue to play the role of the Occupied Employee, even whilst searching trashy personal ads for people we know, playing online Scrabble or, um, blogging. This game, while useful in the development of “busy” postures and facial expressions, is dishonest by nature and really freaking boring. So why can’t we simply bill by the average number of hours that it takes to complete a project and then hit the road?

On the other hand, if we were to do something useful with our extra time, oh the heights we could achieve! We could write novels, start non-profits, produce screenplays for the Henson Corporation so they wouldn’t have to resort to producing sex-filled murder mysteries in order to garner profits from the rich and tasteless. We could start blogs that laud low-level politicians until a national media frenzy takes hold and makes it possible for them to run for Vice President!

Except that has already been done, and it’s time for lunch, followed by another meeting at which I will complete the design for the garbage chute for my treehouse.

*Thanks to Mike Lane for the use of his theory on Guild Economics.

"Jump in! The Water's Lovely!" or something....

2008-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

I attended a play the other night at the Seattle Public Theater, to which I have season tickets and with whom I've generally been very pleased. This first play of the 2008 season, however, did nothing for me.

War Party, by Vincent Delaney, focused on two striking characters born of the usually overdone and trite renderings of government types. Delany made these ladies sparkle and yell and cry and heave beige office furniture around the room, breeding the ground for heartbreak and personal breakthroughs and political upheaval until I was leaning forward in my seat and then---nothing.

I left the theater with a nasty taste my mouth, akin to what I experience when watching poor television crime drama: I met some really good characters, I was drawn in, began to care about them and then the plotline went *splat* with virtually no return on my emotional investment.

The whole dreamy/swimming FDR character didn't help either. Really Vincent? Leave the coma-induced visions to Tony Kushner and work on those angry women--they have a lot of potential, and the world never seems to tire of their adorable wrath.

“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes."

2008-09-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

A skinny red-headed girl sprawls on a grassy cliff next to an empty lot of brick-colored soil. Legs akimbo, eyes closed, her vaguely dirty gingham dress falls heavily in time with her breath; a carefree appreciation of red fields and crashing waves gives way to despair as adulthood and the blackness of war approach this historically peaceful place.

Having lived in my head most of my life, Anne of Green Gables and her stages of life, love, pain and beauty are as familiar to me as my own memories. It is rare that a literary character takes up such a prevalent and large portion of my imagination, but I gave into it a long time ago and have no regrets. The turmoil that I, up until a few years ago, thought was unique to my own adolescence returned in forceful waves of black—sometimes so black and rotten that Anne’s oft-repeated lamentation, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” was too fitting to be tossed away as cheese. It stuck with me.

Following into adulthood, even the change in profession and geography did not completely chase away the “depths of despair.” Every so often, I am warned by a sudden falling sensation in my stomach, as if something wicked and apocalyptic is coming toward me and my city, and threatening those I love. In a way it is, it’s just not tangible, visible or even real to anyone else. I’m the only one that can see it. And it sucks.

I can no longer ignore the suckage, and it seems that I am not alone, living in fear of this black entity with a fairly frequent penchant for the taste of innards. Last week, one of my favorite authors hung himself in his home in time for his wife to discover his body swinging lifeless from a basement rafter but not quite soon enough to preserve any life that was left, not that there was much there at the end anyway if he saw fit to take this particular action[1].

And now, all these years since Anne entered my mind, I understand that the “perfect graveyard” was so much more than an adolescent’s dramatic spin on disappointment. Today I learned that Lucy Maud Montgomery, the woman who penned Anne of Green Gables, took her own life in 1942 at the age of 67.

When I begin to love a written work, I begin to love the author. I learn to love the parts of them that seep out onto the pages of whatever it is that I am reading, and it is partly for this reason that I am terrified to write myself. I’m pouring my own black and embarrassing issues out into the public sphere, even though I dearly hope that they are at least somewhat hidden in between the lines of content. I suppose, if I had paid attention to the words of the authors I profess to love so dearly, I could have recognized this common darkness. It’s safer, though, to focus on the gingham, the weaving descriptions of roaring ocean waves, and footnotes.

[1] *sigh*

Barrel McRaven Palin

2008-09-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Because what else can we do with this?

http://politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah_13.html

Anne Rice Mills?

2008-08-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

The following was posted at http://slog.thestranger.com/ at 2:25 pm on 8/27/08:

Today in Prank Calls
posted by David Schmader on August 27 at 2:25 PM

This just in from Slog tipper Melody:

I am a UW employee currently sitting at my desk, hard at work in my office in the old Safeco building. Not fifteen minutes ago I was eating my pho and reading the Slog on my lunch break when I received the following call on my UW phone:

Me: This is Melody
Caller (deep, older man’s voice with a heavy southern drawl): Yeah, I’m looking for the shameless hussy who made a fool of herself on national television last night.
Me: Excuse me?
Caller: I’m looking Anne Rice Mills, or whatever, that cried and went on and on about Hillary Clinton last night. I want to talk to her.
Me: What?

Caller then hung up.

As a volunteer for the 43rd District Democrats, my contact information is “out there” but this is just odd. I was wondering if any of your readers have reported similar calls, be they “prank” or from some bona fide angry Democrat…

A Summer Poem for Melvin

2008-08-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

There is a draughty downpour
Upon my summer day;
A misty grey travesty
That reeks of rotting bay;
My garden it is rotting,
(This is no metaphor-
In fact relations are quite good,
On Sunday there were four.)
When tomatoes green in August
Have no hope for seeing red,
They take up talking through the vines
And infiltrate my head.
The mold is ever growing
O’er rocks and trees and houses,
Taking over strolling housewives
Til their offspring look like mouses;
No longer ruddy with delight
At northwest summer’s glory
The city turns to backlit scenes
From some Steven King story:
Pasty hippies hack their way
Through PCC’s tight alleyways-
Metro drivers, vacant-eyed
Plow through bike lanes; those who ride
In search of dry heat, beer aplenty
Turn to rivers that run red
Way down to the moldy bay
Up to my head-
And my tomatoes
Are all dead.

Note:
1) PCC is an expensive co-op where cucumbers cost 3 each but the grocers have killer dreads, dude.
2) Metro is the Seattle bus system; they sometimes share turn lanes with the bike lanes, and if they are mean the experience can be quite harrowing. No offense to the good bus drivers out there; we know you exist and you can wholeheartedly extricate yourselves from the above criticism.
3) Beer is a lovely alcoholic beverage enjoyed by an extremely large number of north westerners; cyclists are especially known for their imbibation (it’s a word) of large amounts of said beverage, preferring brews with socially unacceptable names such as “Deadbaby Brew” or “Ave Rat Malt Liquor.” These beers usually suck, and those of us with pints of good, hoppy IPA and proper rain gear laugh at those who drink it.

A Special Place in Hell

2008-08-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the Café Allegro at the College Inn will be closing its doors as of August 15th.

A place that once rocked eggs and coffee 7 days a week, where no one blinked twice if you ordered a shot of Jim Beam with a bowl of oatmeal back and where everyone knew your name—even if it was punctuated with “high-maintenance prick”—Café Allegro was a neighborhood institution.

It is all but gone now, brought down not by Big Business, The Man, or University development, but by a strutting trust-fund baby wrapped in hipster clothing. I suppose this man cannot be blamed for the devastation he has caused by ripping out the livelihoods of his entire staff from under their feet; we live in a world driven by a free market system and it is his business to play with as he sees fit. What puzzles me is that this man would purchase a potentially incredibly lucrative café, ignore it until it drowns in its own filth and reopen it as the 11th Thai restaurant in a 10-block radius.

This is just one more blow in the slow decapitation of community in my neighborhood. Generations of relationships were built in this café. Families were created and fell apart within these walls; art was produced, shared, lauded and ridiculed. Now the walls are bare and no one talks above a whisper, the kitchen is cold and the door hangs lose and undisturbed in its perpetually crooked posture.

Up the street there is a park across which no one is allowed to walk. High-rises with just-add-water urban hotspots elbow in to the oldest blocks in the city, and fill its open windows with dust, garbage and shitty coffee served straight from the veins of starving farmers. People still come and go but the faces are hard, tired and unfamiliar. At some point, we’ll all stop fighting.

There is a special place in hell for those who destroy a man’s livelihood. There’s a place close by for those who disregard the sanctity of community. In between, though, they serve a mean Tom Kha and the wifi’s always free.

Action Office!

2008-07-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

It is dark and grey on this day, the 40th anniversary of the Cubicle. Originally known as the "Action Office," the cubicle is now a tragic part of modern-day Americana, as firmly planted in pop culture as Turducken or Warhol's Campbell's Soup paintings, the affinity for which remains a mystery to me.

In the cubicle, man ceases to be human, color can no longer be defined and statements such as "Here's a head's up to what's coming down the pike" must be responded to with a straight face and a convincingly sincere tone of voice. It’s a place where Big Brother lurks under every paper shredder, under the cap of every Sharpie and in the tiny air farts of the water coolers. No one is safe.

"...they are going to pounce on us, like a tiger on a helpless baby rabbit, springing suddenly out of the foliage of the bureaucratic jungle..."*

*Quote courtesy of Erin K. Wilson, MA

Tejas

2008-07-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

There is a unique smell to a Texas night, a smell that is not altogether pleasant but welcoming in its familiarity and candour. It is bold, acrid, grassy and ugly, but simple and natural. The same adjectives apply to the land itself, the trees, the food, the people and their gods; all of these things know that they are not perfect, not eternally beautiful and not wholly pure—therein lies their particular charm, their token into the humble kingdom where the rest is built with commitment, resignation and sweat. Lots and lots of sweat.

I don’t hate Texas anymore. I did, with a deep and stabbing passion that drove me out of that place days after graduating from high school, and although I am grateful that my path out of the South took me to where I now head home, I wonder if settling in that state would not have really been so horrid. I still don’t know how I chose to live where I did. It just happened. Many of us don’t ever have the option of choosing where we live, we just are, or we just go, or we are taken or sent. For those people who wander, is there a method to our madness? Or do we do just that: wander?

1st Post - Please Be Kind

2008-06-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

There’s a giant crack in the window of my new cubicle that, from where I now sit, perfectly splits Queen Anne Hill from the rest of downtown Seattle. In almost 13 years in this city, my life has been almost as perfectly geographically divided: hard times southeast of the Denny Regrade (do they even call it that anymore?), good times northeast of Lake Union. Nothing much happened in-between that dead zone Paul Allen now calls home, except for the time I built the light sculpture out of toilet paper rolls at Consolidated Works.

Listening to the soundtrack from “Singles” on my iPod, filing case studies away in the University Tower/Safeco building, I’m hit with the realization that I’ve managed to at least partially fulfill those desires of my late teens to become the Kyra Sedgewick character from that brilliant film.[1] I have a post-graduate degree of the most idealistic and useless nature, my own apartment in a glowing, green neighborhood north of the canal, dear girlfriends with whom I can rock out on the weekends (though now past 30 we seldom rock past 9pm) and am dating a tall, handsome man with a hip job, dreamy blue eyes and a kick-ass record collection. I now can even identify every song on the aforementioned soundtrack by band and vocalist, and maybe a third by record label. Though I still am not sure if that track by the Screaming Trees says, “I was drinking off somewhere,” “I was jerking off somewhere,” or “I was thinking of somewhere.” In my head it changes according to my mood.

Anyhow, future posts to be more serious/political commentary in nature, as no one needs/wants to read my random mental effluvium on a regular basis. This blog aims to tackle the big issues affecting us as Americans. And Swedes. Topic for tomorrow: Did Cindy McCain actually lift her chocolate chip cookie recipe from www.hersheys.com or was it merely a coincidence? Ingredients for chocolate chip cookies can only differ so much, or can they? Discuss.
[1] Before film folk rip me a new one for referring this iconic film as “brilliant” or “iconic,” let me caution you that you speak to a woman who has researched and documented arguments as to why “Armageddon” is the best film ever made. Do you really want to go there? Do you?