Watching

Rex has been enjoying two television series on DVD lately, which are both acclaimed in their own way: "Mad Men," which is critically praised, and "Arrested Development," which was a cult hit. I find them both intolerable. Both are extremely well crafted, and Mad Men is also visually beautiful. But both demand that you take pleasure in watching people treat each other cruelly, and entrap each other in intolerable situations because of their unwillingness to tell the truth.

On the other hand, last night I rented two animated films, "Kung Fu Panda" and "Up." I watched them in that order but should have reversed it. Poor Rex, who was playing around on the computer while I watched, enjoyed "Kung Fu Panda," but found "Up" depressing for the way its story centers around loss. The central character is an elderly man, voiced by Ed Asner, who strikes out on an adventure that was once a dream he and his late wife shared; he does so at that particular moment because his house is threatened by development and he is threatened with being put in a nursing home. For me, and for many watchers of "Up," this poignancy is part of the sweetness of the story; but for Rex it was just depressing.

So I suppose I have to concede that I might be missing something in "Mad Men" as well. I'm reserving judgement on "Arrested Development."

Jiffy Lube

I got the oil changed in the car today, which always makes me think about my relationship to my vehicle. We don't drive much - less than 3,000 miles a year - since we commute by bicycle and live on an island that is 35 miles long. (This leads to unintentional humor when the AAA tries to sell us the gold membership by telling us that we can get a tow as much as 100 miles from home. If my car were 100 miles from my house, a tow truck wouldn't be much help.) And we're pretty frugal, so we didn't want to pay for any more car than we were going to use (for running errands and going to shul). So we drive a 1998 Corolla with 78,000 miles on it. This is low mileage for a nearly twelve-year-old car, and it's a Toyota after all, so it's been pretty reliable. Things wear out periodically - the radiator went a few months ago, but then it was the original radiator, and had reached the end of its usable life. It has some cosmetic issues (some small rips in the fabric of the ceiling, for example) but because we don't care, we got it for $1000 under blue book when we bought it three years ago. Generally speaking, it's a good car: reasonable if not stellar gas mileage (and we only fill it up once a month anyway), easy to park, and it's worth relatively little so the insurance payments are low.

The challenge is that it is the first car my husband and I have owned (the first we have owned together, and the first he has owned ever - I shared custody of a Honda Civic with my girlfriend N for about two years back in the early nineties, and my folks lent me their old Mazda for a year when I was in grad school and teaching all over Chicago). The point is that neither of us has very much experience owning an automobile. The result is that it can be very hard to tell, of the many strange noises a twelve-year-old Toyota can make, which are the ones we actually have to worry about. On top of this, there's the American culture of automotive competence. We are supposed to know something about our cars in a way that nobody necessarily expects us to know something about our computers. As it happens, himself and I both know more about our computers than about our car. But it makes interaction with auto mechanics - even the guys at Jiffy Lube - a little bit touchy sometimes. "Do you want a flush of your automatic transmission fluid today?" I don't know, do I? What counts as due diligence for a reliable but ancient old car you don't drive much? Usually I answer "No," and then I ask Mr. Noga (my mechanic) about it the next time I go in. He and his second-in-command, Scott, are extremely patient with me but I do end up feeling like they must roll their eyes at me as I am leaving.

Fortunately, after a few years of ownership, we are starting to get the hang of what needs to be taken seriously and what can be safely ignored. For instance, we know that the fact that the air conditioning doesn't really work is mitigated by the fact that you can always roll the windows down. And the windshield washer fluid system has never worked right (though the wipers are fine) and more recently has given up entirely. We suspect it would be expensive to fix, possibly involving replacement of the whole system. However, a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex in the back seat are extremely economical.

In the watches of the night

I keep thinking about segmented sleep, which is what I seem to be getting lately. I can't decide whether it's work stress that's causing it, or whether the fact that I'm finally teaching medieval art next semester has caused me to revert to historically attested patterns. Clearly I should have my balance of humors checked.

A few things worth looking at

Advanced Style. "Proof from the wizened and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age."

Bio-Diversity. Surprising interpretations of autumn leaves.

Bent Objects. Delightfully insane visual gags constructed out of everyday objects. Recent entries are mostly about the release of the Bent Objects book, so go into the archives for a taste of the actual work.

Dogblog. Leashed dogs of San Francisco, with commentary that is at once dry, and also revealing of the author's deep love of dogs. My favorite entry: Dog in a Sidecar.

Sense of snow

Last night I picked up the alumni magazine from my high school - an elite preppie boarding school in New England which drew many international students - and saw a picture of a woman I'd known way back when. She came in the same year as me but came in as a sophomore when I was a freshman, so she was a year older. She was from Curacao, in the Netherlands Antilles, a place which at that time I'd never heard of. In the magazine, she was shown with another alumna from the same class, pushing their children on swings in a snowy backyard in Massachusetts, where she now lives. And I remembered that the earliest memory I have of her is of walking across campus in the dark of an early winter evening, coming back from the dining hall, with the first snow of the season falling. It was her first snow ever, and she looked up at it in wonder as it fell on her face in big fluffy clusters of flakes. "I thought it would be like little ice cubes," she said, amazed, as I, a lifelong veteran of many more severe winters than we ever had at school, looked on.

Now I want to write her and tell her that the tables are turned; I live on a tropical island and have learned as an adult about things she no doubt knew well as a child: about shade-promoting architecture and louvered windows, tile floors and cross-ventilation, about geckos in the house and mold in the closets and automotive roach abatement. I want to let her know that I finally know what cotton sweaters are for.

Neti pot: a verdict

It is a deeply strange thing to do. But boy, does my nose feel better. Allergies begone!

Follow-up on the comose fig story

Finally, some movement! Now there is an online petition to save the comose fig on campus: it's located here and anybody can sign it. The Powers that Be have been notified and perhaps there will be some movement now. We're waiting to see.

The campus paper Ka Leo has also published an article on the threat to the tree.