not to be confused with the Swiss rhinoceros.

When we got J back, I asked him what he did with his week away from us, and said there had been a very long and annoying "knot-tying lesson." This turned out to be a failed attempt to teach the boy to tie his shoes, which not only left him unable to tie his shoes (his fine motor control makes it a high-effort, low-return investment, easily bypassed with cord-locks on his laces) but anxious about his inability. We were discussing when Anna had gotten around to shoe-tying.

"Yeah, I dunno, there was some story that's supposed to make it easier to remember--"
"The rabbit goes down the hole, and around the tree, or the other way around."
"--right. It's very confusing."

The child continued to perseverate.

"There's also the second part about the rhinoceros coming back up the hole to drink tea and eat flowers."
"What? It doesn't say that!"
"Sure it does. The whole story goes back to Germany in 1542. The Middle Ages. "
"No it doesn't!"
"1452, I guess it's the Renaissance, actually."
"That's not true!"
"The Reformation was a really confusing time for Europe."
"You know, if you wrote a book of all the fake history you make up, it'd be really funny."

My hope is that education will leave him sending me indignant text messages about a childhood filled with semi-plausible half-truths.

Or, as Anna put it after he'd read a few Calvin & Hobbes books: "Okay, Calvin's Dad."

summer plant update

"Summer" is a funky term around here, since we've had highly variable temperatures, reaching summery heights over a month ago. As always in California, the constants are a lack of rain, and a blinding sunlight that washes out the colors of the world and seems to find you even in the shade.

Our trees seem only variously happy, presumably from the drought. Some of them, like Loki the loquat, "cherry" plum, pomegranate, and Driveway Peach have taken the year off from fruiting. The Sidewalk Peach is taking it easy with the fruit, and may be adjusting to the heavy pruning we did--although that was only clearing out all the dead branches. Driveway Peach, to be fair, may still be recovering from the loss of its major branch two seasons ago, when the weight of the fruit snapped it off.

I put "cherry" in quotes because its companion, the pluot tree, is putting out fruit twice the size of previous years, so I imagine if the water table were higher, we'd be getting full-size pluots (we're already close). We fertilized it once and we've been watering it daily for a long time, so it seems possible that the "cherry" plum is just a plum that was discouraged and low on resources.

Figgy, of course, is going gangbusters like there's no drought. She was heavily pruned and seems to have responded with an explosion of leaves and nascent figs. The Figpocalypse will come for you. There is no escape.

I've had daydreams about making a dehydrator (wood frame + window screening + fan), but in reality I should probably just buy one. The figs in particular I hate to see go to waste, but there are so many of them it's not even practical to capture them all as fig puree (which is nice for baking, but takes up too much space and doesn't get used quickly enough).

Surprisingly, the apple tree is surging this year, despite being crammed in between Figgy and the pomegranate. Once we understood when the apples are ripe (November-ish), they were pretty good last year.

You may or may not remember that there were 8 rose...things, in front of the house when we moved in. "Bush" is sort of a strong term, but they were old rose plants, typical for rental properties around here. We don't care for roses and certainly didn't want them in the yard, so we invited people to come dig them up. They dug a foot or two down in the ground, pulled up the plants, and boom, we were done.

Eighteen months later, we have 9 rose plants.

The first Zombie Rose has been blooming regularly, first one flower, then two, and is currently at four. These are not the flowers of a plant in difficulty; they are bright, large, beautiful red roses. It's hard enough for me to think of roses as high-maintenance when they're one of the default half-assed-landscaping plants for low/mid-range rentals, but it's another thing entirely when people dig up the plants and then they simply grow back, in a record drought, without any watering.

Zombie Roses.

east coast

I was just in New England! We went to Connecticut for my high school reunion. Despite predictions, it didn't rain: New England is having what they call a drought, which is the adorable thing where it doesn't rain there for a few months. (When California is not in a drought, we call that situation "April through December.")

There's so much water in the air there, all going to waste. What a shame. We spent a lot of time being wistful for a place with such greenery that just happens, without a lot of effort. (Sure, if you slack off you might get the wrong greenery, but something's gonna grow.) I mostly don't need my sunglasses out there, which is something I'd forgotten or never noticed. Is it the latitude (41 vs. 38)? The humidity? I don't know.

We went back for my nth high school reunion, and front-loaded it with a couple of days with my parents, which was lovely. Anna's goal for the trip was to gather fascinating and tantalizing stories of Young Chris, and I suppose spend time with me in the process. She got at least a few good ones, including the time when one of my best friends decided to hang-drop off a 1.5-story roof just to prove he'd be okay: he remembered the ER, but his memory left out the part where I hauled him over to the infirmary, made up a story for what happened, and held his hand while they cut off his shoe to look at his ankle.

(I'll make no claims for having good judgment as a teenager, but I did have strong impulse control. When I fucked something up, I tend[ed] to plan it in advance.)

I identified four different kinds of people I see at reunions, which map almost exactly to our relationships while in school:

1. Actual friends. You're both genuinely happy to see each other.
2. Friendly acquaintances. You're happy to see each other and content with the limited but positive role you played in each other's younger lives.
3. People who were indifferent or hostile during school, who now feel able and compelled to greet you as though you have a shared history you can celebrate together.
4. People who honor the fact that you were indifferent or hostile to each other during school, and that our relationship probably didn't blossom into something more positive over a couple decades of not speaking to each other.

I have a lot of respect for #4, and quite a number of classmates did me the favor of not even acknowledging my attendance. (There were just over 100 of us, so we all knew everyone's name and face at one point.)

 #3 I find a little confusing, and what Anna calls the "assumption of intimacy" is not at all unique to reunions. I wonder if they just have an idea about how classmates should feel about each other, much like parents can have an idea about how a family should interact, and that idea fails to give way to the reality of the people and relationships actually involved.

It was good to see some of the old gang, see the campus in its majestic summer beauty, and see what few teachers haven't retired yet.

We went to a panel interview with the last three heads of the school, including the one who left shortly after I graduated. He's a dynamic, wickedly intelligent and learned man--when I met him as a 13-year old, something in our conversation left me at a loss for words, and immediately my mother correctly decided he was amazing. The moderator asked some question about events during his tenure, and he rambled quite a bit about the guy who had preceded him and the changes in New England private schools around that time. But in the rambling...

And then Northfield-Mount Hermon, which is, strangely enough, now in the Mount Hermon campus, having sold the beautiful Northfield campus to the C.S. Lewis Center for the Preservation of the Most Naive and Backward Interpretations of Christianity..."

It's good to see he's still got it, in his mid-80s.

on meat.

If you haven't heard, the project to grow meat in a lab had a proof-of-concept a couple of years ago. (Actual cow cells, not some protein replacement.) The taste was a little funky, and it cost more than $300,000, so there was room for improvement. The scientist has managed to cut the cost by more than 80%, which is remarkably fast progress for any product's path to commercialization. Barring calamity, someone will be trying to sell it within 10 years, probably much sooner. Hopefully it's edible, because the upside is huge: while we should continue to complain about how much water almond trees use (and must use every year to keep them alive), livestock in California uses a lot more. Plus the way we produce meat is quite literally horrifying.

I eat it anyway, because I have to.

The selfish part of me isn't sad that I have to eat meat, because meat is delicious, and banh mi is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I have had a couple stretches of not eating meat, and they were complete disasters.

The first time was accidental: I stayed 3 weeks at San Francisco Zen Center, which doesn't serve meat at all. The food was good at the time--it varies depending on which student has been placed in charge of the kitchen, a position so important that Dogen wrote his most famous essay about it--so I didn't really miss meat. After maybe a week and a half, though, I was chatting with a resident, and I commented that I felt like my energy level had been ticking steadily downward.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "You need a hamburger. I need to duck out periodically to go eat meat somewhere."

Off I went to Rosamunde Sausage Grill, and I felt better after the first bite.

The second time, I was farther in to Zen practice, and felt very keenly that I should stop eating standard urbanly-available meat, because it's really just a catastrophe for the planet, and unspeakably cruel to the animals. I figured I'd try it for a month and see how it went. I ate what seemed like pounds and pounds of lentils and beans, though I also wasn't really eating cheese or butter at the time.

I was running every other day, and after a couple weeks I suddenly realized that running had been getting harder and harder. My legs felt like they were made of lead, my muscles had no bounce-back; things I would expect every so often, but not every time. After 3 weeks, I ate some kind of meat thing, and again felt better immediately.

Now my body's all horked up and weird--or rather, it's mostly normal for the first time ever, but only with the aid of medication--and experiments in vegetarianism are out of the question, especially because the kind of energy issues I've dealt with for the past couple years feel suspiciously like those times I wasn't eating meat. It's sort of sad, though.

Maybe "cultured meat" will save the day.

books books books

A while ago I started keeping a list of books I read, because otherwise I'll just forget. If I have the titles, I'll usually remember a lot about it.

Obviously I would want to count them, but until this year, it never occurred to me to just put them in an HTML numbered list. That makes counting much easier, though since I'm lazy and I condense series into one entry, I still have to do math. I add books in the year that I finish them, which is the only sensible way to do it.

Last year I finished 42 books. I discovered some really excellent series that jacked up the numbers, but even so, that's 0.8 books per week. I also worked full-time, but you can tell who's doing most of the parenting chores, and it's not me.

This year I've finished 21 books, and the list is a bit less fluffy than 2014. This is also the 21st week of the year. I'm pretty split now between e-books and paper books; the e-books particularly feed my lifelong habit of reading a dozen books at once, because I borrow them through the Kindle app in my iPhone and iPad, and if I don't finish them but borrow them again later, the Kindle app remembers my place and any notes I made and everything. I have some long-running project books:

• Cubed - Nikil Saval.
• Consider the Fork - Bee Wilson.
• Plato at the Googleplex - Rebecca Goldstein.
• Notes of A Native Son - James Baldwin.
• A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn.
• Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck.
• Moby-Dick - Herman Melville.

It's not a coincidence that most of these are information-dense non-fiction. I sometimes have a hard time focusing these days.

Grapes of Wrath I read in high school, but after being blown away by East of Eden in Chile, I re-read Of Mice and Men last year, and clearly Younger Chris did not properly appreciate Steinbeck.

Moby-Dick (1852) is fascinating. I use it for bedtime reading, because nothing happens and it calms my mind. It's exquisitely crafted, but...what is it, exactly? Is it a novel? I can only appreciate it if I set aside my preconceived notions of a novel as a Story about Events involving Characters who might change somehow by the end of the book. There is a plot, but it doesn't appear until about 20% through the book. Melville just wasn't in any hurry.

"Come, dear reader, and let your Ishmael tell you, not about a ship or its captain or some stupid whale or whatever. Sit with me as I wax rapturous about the glories of shipboard living, the importance of the harpooneer, the fine hand-crafted details of the pulpit in the fishermen's church."

The pulpit took at least 2 pages. No joke. This author is deeply, passionately committed to describing things.

I like it, though! Now that we're actually on the ship and we've met the psychotic captain, there's a lot of Shakespearean vibes going on. Melville coins words like Shakespeare did: overscorning is the one that sticks with me, but several times I've typed a word into Google when the Kindle dictionary didn't know it, and the only reference is to quote Melville's passage. The guy loved English.

Now that I think of it, there's a woeful amount of Shakespeare I've never read. Maybe that can be the next thing to put me to sleep.

housing up a storm over here

We got a bird feeder and filled it with birdseed, which was thoroughly ignored until we replaced it with sunflower seeds. Now we have a bunch of tiny birds bickering over the feeder: there are 4 perches and usually 2 birds fighting, so it's a lot like me and my brothers when we were kids. There is one bird who ignores the bickering and just sits there and chows down; maybe that would have been my sister, if I'd had one.

This seems to be a genuinely squirrel-proof feeder, where the bird perches are mounted on a spring-loaded sleeve, and too much weight causes the sleeve to come down and close off the feeding holes. I had it hung on a string, which the squirrels didn't want to climb down; now it's on a swivel chain, and they don't like the rotation. We'll count that as a solid victory.

If you're going to buy sunflower seeds for birds, really the only sensible thing is to buy a 40-pound bag and have Amazon ship it to you. The downside is that now you have to put it somewhere, and the squirrels had no trouble figuring out that they were in a plastic bin on the patio. We put it in the garage, but our terrible garage has enough problems and I want squirrels to have no reasons to colonize it. Home Depot still carries metal trashcans, I think for the sole purpose of keeping animals out. The one model they carry is certainly a piece of shit compared to the ones we had when I was a kid, and I doubt it would stand up to being an actual trashcan. Said piece of shit is, however, proudly marked as American-made.

The rejected birdseed went into our compost bin. We have a compost bin! Along with "not having to move in the coming decade" and "I have a pool table," the compost bin must be my favorite thing about owning a house. (A close fourth is probably "paying for all the plumbing repairs myself.")

With the compost bin and the recycling--ignoring the non-trivial question of how much of that actually gets recycled--the waste produced by our household of 3 is about half of a paper shopping bag every week. And the level of the compost bin never seems to change much. Is it this magical if you grew up on a farm? I most surely didn't, and it's magical. Leaves, food waste, grass, eggshells, coffee grounds. Countless whole oranges from our tree, swiftly given completely over to mold in the compost heap, dissolved within weeks by the truly vast ecosystem it feeds. Mostly it's

• ants, who seem so content to have infinite food that they stay outside the house,
• fruit flies,
• tiny slugs (do they become bigger slugs? I never see bigger slugs),
• earthworms, a relatively recent phenomenon who for some reason are often crawling down the outside of the bin toward the ground,
• a specific kind of black beetle I've seen around here for years and years, here numbering in the hundreds, and
• a couple times I saw millipedes!

I haven't noticed the earthworms crawling down the outside recently; we've seen the occasional bird finding a snack on the compost bin, so nature may be selecting for earthworms that only want to dig down through the contents instead of going adventuring.

The single most amazing thing about the compost bin is that it never, ever smells like rotting food. It smells like the most delicious, flavorful dirt you can imagine. Anna extracts it occasionally--there is surprisingly little of it, see the constant-size comment above--and the plants are all big fans.

What kind of wonderful world do we live in where there's a way to make rotting food not smell like rotting food?

aikido!

I did the aikido weapons class on Sunday, with no ill effects! It didn't involve any falling, which is the big test of my energy, but I also have an affinity for weapons, so it was a very comfortable way to get back on the mat.

I miss it. The fluidity that aikido drills into me is diminished right now; at various times I feel myself spoiling for a fight, or wanting to argue, rather than step back and take a deep breath and de-escalate. Sitting Zen is important (though I'm not doing that either), but aikido is more so.

The truth is that by and large I don't fight, and I do de-escalate, in ways that people find really striking, if they notice. Last week I was listening in on a meeting and I took over to defuse it before it became a really harmful and misdirected ragefest, antics that got everyone's attention, up and down the chain. I'm less patient, but I think maybe only Anna sees it. (Lucky her!)

So my perceived lack of fluidity is really about my own internal experience: how long it takes me to bring myself to that creative, constructive space of conflict resolution, how hard it is to let go of my idea of how things should go and find the idea that includes everything and better resolves the issue. It's not that it doesn't happen, it's just that I notice how much longer it takes and how much harder it is.

But! Aikido!