1 February 1998: Time Flies

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treeChinese New Year's, Houses, the Two-Sister Theory

Yesterday I worked on the computer the greater part of the day, so happy to have a good, stable, fast machine to use. CGK called to invite us to go out with everyone for Jeff's birthday, but last night was Adelia (from Dot Org)'s Chinese New Year's party. RDC still isn't all better yet, so he didn't go, but I did.

Adelia & Jim's house is the typical Denver bungalow. Sometimes a house is divided into nesting Ls running the length of the house and sometimes not, but just now writing about it I realize why it strikes me as alien: most houses I grew up with were aligned widthwise, not lengthwise. Cape Cods, Georgians, Colonials, and even ranches, simple, split, or raised, all are arranged front to back rather than side to side. Maybe that's because houses tend to be built to divide a lot into front lawn and back yard and thus aligned horizontally across the property, but in Denver no one has any yard and lots of houses are packed tight to front to a street, and so are aligned vertically in their lots. Maybe it's all where the entrance is. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

At Adelia's, I talked mostly to June, an Dot Org intern whom I don't know well, and her sister Irene. Of course I had to ask if they, a pair of sisters, were the only children in their family. They are, so I then had to tell them CLH's theory. It didn't work completely for them (both agreed that the younger is more successful) but as far as the older expecting service from the younger, the theory held true. In CLH and my case, a service I remember performing was the french fry ritual. The elementary school was released an hour after the high school, so by the time I got home, CLH would be sprawled on the couch watching "General Hospital" and wanting me to make her french fries (with plenty of salt). Of course, the service goes both ways: perhaps the older sister only expects favors from the younger because she's sick of having to defend and protect the younger from bullies and parents and whatnot.

I told June and Irene about how the Bad Family at the top of our road treated us. There were four older brothers and a younger sister who was a couple of years older than CLH, which made me so much younger as to be an easy punching bag. Apparently they threw me into the draining ditch when I was in first grade and two of them--twins, or one held back--in sixth. Or something. Anyway, one time one of the brothers gave me or us the finger. I had never seen that gesture before and, repeating it to CLH, asked what it meant. "Don't do that-it's a swear!" she immediately instructed me. No it wasn't. A swear was a bad word you said, it couldn't be a finger. So that night at the dinner table, I flipped my parents the bird and said, "CLH says this is a swear." And, being the fair and even-minded folks they were, they assumed she had taught it to me. The french fries made up for that awkward explanation.

The service June expected Irene to perform for her was to warm her bed. The younger, Irene, had to go to bed earlier, but June would make Irene go to sleep in June's bed, and then when June had to go to bed, she'd wake Irene up and make her go back to her own room, so that June could have a nice warm bed. Telling the story, they mentioned that, confounding the older sister's logic, the younger one's room was always hot and the older's always cold. So I asked, "Why did you switch rooms?" and June immediately responded, "Mine's bigger." I love that. Perfect older sibling dynamic.

I have wondered if any truth to CLH's theory affected SEBB's and my friendship. Not that there weren't other problems. And I'm currently friends with the older sisters of two pairs of sisters, so maybe the theory doesn't affect friendships. Plus if it's true, I should have been friends with AFK. One of the few times we chatted, it seemed she idolized her sister as I do mine.

Also I got into a discussion about astrology because, in honor of the New Year, Adelia and Jim had posted on their walls web pages they'd found about Chinese astrology and Chinese New Year. First someone wanted to guess what animal I am. He guessed first the animal for 1965, then 1963, and I told him that the further back he guessed, the angrier I was going to get. Chinese astrology-wise, I'm a monkey; Greek astrology wise, I'm a Gemini, which is an air sign. So I'm an air monkey.

I will say that that particular rendering (the horoscope is seldom translated the same way twice) described me as well as any general, one-sentence definition can. Intelligent, loquacious, able to influence people, easily confused and discouraged. C'est moi. But how can an entire year's worth of people share just a few personality traits? And considering the Chinese calendar (which I think is lunar) doesn't jibe with the Western (mostly solar), how can you be certain what animal spirit guides you?

And despite having an air sign, I'm a swimmer. My element is water. The split nature of Gemini fits; I often feel I have at least two different personalities depending on whether my daily dimorphism is aesthetically appealing or not.

Whatever. So the astrologist wanted to do my chart and asked where I was born. He guessed Missouri. This was after he guessed I was five years older than I actually am. How much more could he insult me in one evening?

It was a good party. It's been a long time since I've had homemade Chinese food.

treeSunday

This morning RDC and I went to Penrose (the DU library) before fetching HAO away to see a Spiegelman exhibit. While he hunted down books, I sat and read The Unconsoled. If I would only devote a few more chunks of time to it, I could finish it. I really love Ishiguro.

We dumped RDC and the books at home and scampered to the Jewish Community Center whose gallery had the Spiegelman. On the wall in an atrium is a memorial to the holocaust. I've always known that six million Jews died, but I've never known what proportion that was to the whole: about a third.

In the second volume of Maus, Vladek tells of the fate of the Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz near the end of the war. "It started in May and went on all summer. They brought Jews from Hungary--too many for their ovens, so they dug those big cremation pits." In the rough draft, Spiegelman implies the vast number: "tens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews." Also the second volume expresses a lot of the personal struggles Art Spiegelman worked through in representing his father, their relationship, and his father's experience in the Holocaust, in only a couple hundred pages of black and white cartoons. Seeing his rough drafts made a greater impression even than the books: transcripts of eight years of oral history, blocking out the pages, and most compelling of all, the CD-ROM of Maus, which includes both Art and Vladek Spiegelman's voices and some video of both. And family trees--with, as Vladek says in Maus--not the least scrap of snapshot of any of his family, none of whom but one brother survived. Some photographs of Art's mother Anya's family survive; only two siblings, I think, and a nephew of Anya (Zylberberg) Spiegelman survived.

The exhibit didn't include much beyond Maus, but Maus itself comprises a vast quantity of journals, sketches, transcription, and more; and is, as far as I know, the most Jewish-oriented of his work, so it's the most pertinent for that gallery. The process of discovery and creation fascinates me: I love to know what inspires an author to this or that, so seeing the drafts, the blocking, the transcripts, the gradual darkening of the drawings as he used yellow, orange, red, and blue pencils, and finally black ink as the books gestated in his mind and on the page, was fascinating.

On the way home HAO and I stopped at Wild Oats. A slice of pizza, a brownie, and a bottle of cranberry-grape juice: a perfect lunch. She told me that after the restaurant, everyone returned to Jeff's for a game of Balderdash. One of the word to be defined was corody. "I don't remember what its actual definition is, but I wrote down that that was the name of the evil twin of Corduroy Bear."

I was parking at Wild Oats when she told me that. I almost peed. Besides herself, only CGK, who was reading the definitions, and Christy, got the joke. Everyone should know who Corduroy is, especially since the little girl who brought him home and sewed a new button on his corduroy overalls was named Lisa.

Merriam-Webster's definition: "an allowance of provisions for maintenance dispensed as a charity." So it's like the agricultural surpluses of butter and milk and peanut butter and canned corn that people receive.

The most frightening element of tonight's "60 Minutes" story about a Faith Tabernacle family whose parents have so far allowed two of their children to die--a young son from an ear infection and an older daughter from diabetes--because they don't believe in mortal medical intervention is that they have eleven children remaining to propagate their religion. These people apparently draw their belief in prayer and anointing with oil from one particular Old Testament passage, and they reject immunizations, insulin, and (obviously) contraception. Yet they wear artificial fibers, drive cars, use cameras (all of which was evident in the story): all accoutrements of the twentieth (and nineteenth) century that the Bible doesn't mention, predict, or condone. I don't know what their justification for using those things is.

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