Why not a tumblr, too?

Is it bad form to keep switching web addresses?

I don’t know, maybe. I feel like I’m that person who changes their phone number or email address every six months. Regardless, my Internet tendencies have changed quite a bit since I started blogging and I’ve started to look at what I put up on the web as ephemeral, temporary, a tiny digital file in a sea of zeroes and ones. Traditional blogging seems a bit stuffy to me these days, and I’ve been feeling like I wanted a change, to see my blog as a casual compendium, a mash-up of text, images, link and quotes from around the Internet or things I come across in my daily life.

Well, Tumblr provides such a service, and I find their interface to be simply, uncomplicated, and fast. Good combo! So, The Sour and the Sweet is moving again. Well, not just moving, but changing altogether. Gone will be the pages, the sidebars, the blog rolls—all the additional accoutrement of this blog. This site will still be up for the foreseeable future, until my stats counter goes to zero.

But if you will do me the favor of updating your links and bookmarks (once again), please go to my new blog, the sapling tumbles, for future updates.

the value of invaluable things

It’s February 8th. Three months and seven days remain until I am officially done with school. Naturally, it is at this point that two things start to happen: I start to wonder what comes next, and many well-meaning but ultimately clueless and misguided people pose the question, “so, what’s next?”

And even though it is not much of an answer at all, the best one I have so far is simply, “I don’t know.”

It’s true that something will happen after graduation. For one, I will need to start paying back my student loans, and in that way school has had a very definite value, to the tune of 100,000-plus dollars—well, 100-grand and a masters degree—that’s the tangible, actual value of these last two years, a culmination of classes and writing, workshops, professors, concentration changes, grades, theses, GREs, permits to register, student i.d.s and writers’ conferences.

See, a writing degree is not like a medical degree or a law degree, which are pathways to a very definitive end—you finish school and become a doctor or a lawyer and you go on to make a gazillion dollars. But graduate with a professional writing degree and do … what exactly? Go back to temping? Join a squatter community? Get another MFA? Who knows? There’s no certainty, and that’s the hardest part about writing, at least creative writing anyway, because so few place any tangible value on it.

Even writers question writing. Find one, any one of them, and ask them—they’ll tell you of the exquisite torture that comes with writing: long hours alone in a room, the constant distraction of the Internet, the nagging feeling that it’s all so futile, that words don’t mean anything, that there are worthier pursuits in the world, that they should have gone to medical school, that it’s so hard why am I trying anyway?

So what is the real value of school? That’s a question I’ve been asking since the day I set foot on USC’s campus and it’s only been within the last week or so that I’ve begun to figure it out. To be honest, I’m surprised it took so long, and if you know me at all you know where this is headed: to relationships.

This past weekend was Lindsey’s birthday party. We dressed in ’60s-inspired clothes and drank ’60s-inspired cocktails; there was much merriment. The next day, Superbowl Sunday, I was tired and a little hungover, and spent the day with many of the same people I’d partied with the night before. Together we suffered from the same malaise as we lazed around, barely speaking to one another half the time. It was comfortable—no pretense, no feeling the need to be “on,” just a roomful of tired writers (and their significant others), all quietly questioning their chosen paths, and watching football, of course.

So it’s community. Ha, I almost laughed out loud when it dawned on me. Isn’t it always community, always relationships that are of utmost import? Yes, indeed. A group of us are headed to the Association of Writers and Poets (AWP) annual conference in Chicago this week. At a recent informational meeting, Brighde encouraged us to be bold in our networking, to not be afraid to walk up to writers we admire and to tell them so, because she also said that the way we meet and interact with writers and publishers and editors now will lay the groundwork for our future careers. I think she’s right and that’s already been happening over the last two years.

Taking it back in time

Our clothes dryer hasn’t been working for a little over a month now. We’ve looked on Craigslist for a new one, have tried to have at least one delivered, yet to no avail. Here we are, on the cusp of February, with still no dryer.

It’s a fact that I’m somewhat conflicted about. On the one hand, I’ve lived with a clothes dryer for almost four years now, and with most modern conveniences (car, mobile phone, microwave) once you get used to having one around, it’s hard to readjust to not having one. On the other hand, when I think about how many people in the word wash and dry their clothes by beating them on rocks by the edge of a river, I know that having one is not absolutely essential to modern living.

But then again, neither is the thought of weekly laundromat visits very inviting.

Leave it up to a woman who spent half of last year living in Africa to come up with a solution.

The clothesline idea was one that had crossed my mind, but I’ve been so busy and stressed out with schoolwork lately that my brain has been acting like a huge seive—leaking and full of holes. Any idea not substantial enough to resist the cracks, slips out. So last Sunday, as I heard Michelle stringing up two lines of yarn in the backyard, I thought “how ingenious.”

A clothesline is so basic—I remember vaguely my mother having one (am I just imagining that, Mom?)—and at the same time quite romantic. It requires a lot more effort than just throwing clothes into a large metal box, pushing a few setting buttons, closing the door and walking away.

Instead, there’s so much more engagement. Each item of clothing must be individually pinned up to the line. The warm sun beats down on your back as you do this, making you somehow accutely aware that you’re outside. The birds chirp, you hear them more distinctly, the cold grass tickles and dampens the bottoms of your feet, the breeze blows and the clothing flutters.

The fabrics of your clothes must be periodically touched, to test for dryness. Cottons take longer than poly blends and become stiffer in the sunshine than their synthetic cousins.

And yet, I found it oddly relaxing to dry my clothes this way. Yes they also took longer than a conventional dryer, but I did homework while I waited, and sat outside doing it. When’s the last time I spent three hours outside reading poetry? I can’t even say.

Ultimately, I don’t know how practical this method if clothes drying will become. Already, a spate of rainy days has prevented any further use of the backyard lines, a boon that I realize most people must be under this time of year. Also, I’m fairly confident that not everyone in the house attaches romantic notions to such things and fail to feel so enthusiastic about this lo-tech laundry method. I suspect that we’ll have to shell out for a new, modern drying machine. But it was fun while it lasted!

Sense Memory

Pardon the anecdotal nature of this post.

I love those moments that make you gasp, that jolt your mind from whatever thought it was on. Those that exhibit the kind of beauty that point to something else, in a universal sense. It’s seeing a smog-oranged moon rising out from behind a line of rolling hills, or hearing the perfect pitch of a three-part vocal harmony sung over the sweet twang of a lap steel (a la Blitzen Trapper).

This kind of jolt can happen in the middle of a conversation, too, like it did tonight while I was in the kitchen with roommate Michelle. She was telling me about a reality show she’d seen called Secret Millionaire. In it, she explained, millionaires dress up as vagrants and interact with people. This is a gross oversimplification of what happens in the show—I’m sure there is a greater point than simply playing dress-up, but I didn’t hear much else of what she said, because the second she said “they dress up like homeless people,” I remembered that my dad had done that once, when I was a kid.

The circumstances were quite different; Lord knows, Dad was not a millionaire in the economic sense. I was in high school, and youth group was having a Halloween party / scavenger hunt. The hunt? Finding our parents, who volunteered to dress up and and hide out in the tiny downtown area of The Dalles. Through feed stores and gas stations and hardware stores and restaurants we tromped, locating parent after parent. But where was Dad? He was the last to be found, due in part because he had smeared dirt all over his face, donned a ratty jacket and beanie, and sat, hunched over, on the curb behind a row of businesses, a large black garbage sack full of cans by his side. So convincing was he as a homeless guy that I, his own daughter, failed recognize him, or more truthfully, failed to take the time to really look at the contours of the man’s face or stride of his gate to realize it was her own father.

I can’t remember who actually identified him, or if any of us did. Eventually he revealed himself by taking off his hat and putting on his eyeglasses. I remember feeling simultaneously proud of him for hiding so well, embarrassed that my dad would smear dirt on his face, and somewhat ashamed at myself for having avoided close contact with the presumed vagrant. Several kids, mostly boys, were dually impressed and talked of nothing else during that evening’s bonfire and marshmallow roast.

Anyway, this is where the anecdote ends—abrupt, I know. I haven’t thought about the time Dad dressed like a homeless man in a really long time. I feel like I want to check out this Secret Millionaire show, and you can too, by clicking here.

So Close!

For those of you keeping track, I have finally updated the last of my Baked in ‘08 entries. I made it to 51 items in one year—I had set out to hopefully complete 52, but somewhere along the way I lost track. No matter—that is still a ton of baking to have done, and frankly I’m proud of myself for having churned out such a high volume of tasty foodstuffs. Along the way it went from a light interest to a serious ministry and I love that I can bless people through food—wonderful!

I will continue to bake in 2009, in fact I already have, this evening. However, I doubt I will catalogue them in such exacting detail this year. But don’t worry, tasty food photography will still appear here regularly.