What’s New for 2003 (tax-wise)?

- the label wouldn’t peel off, and when I stuck it onto the 1040, the paper curled around it in a most unattractive fashion;

- I do not think I could purchase a new TV on the money GWB saved me;

- It took me 16 minutes less to do the forms for 2003, quite likely because I copied all those zeros off of last year’s form without giving them much thought, to save time;

- Because the week-end is so far in advance of April 15th, I completed the forms a full 4 days ahead of schedule, a life-time record of sorts, I’m sure.

Wisconsin forms will have to wait. My mind is spinning after this excessive conscientiousness.

Greetings

To family and friends in Warsaw and Krakow, none of whom got a card from me as I never remember that Easter calls for greetings of this nature, thank you so much for your messages and let me just say:

Wesołych świąt wielkanocnych, smacznego jajka i mokrego dyngusa

Out of kindness to those who think I am making it all up and it is all gibberish, let me inform you that the above is a traditional Polish Easter greeting, translated to mean: (May you have) merry Easter holidays, a delicious egg and a wet Dyngus.*

*On the meaning of Smigus Dyngus, see post of April 1.

Separation of church and gym

An annoying moment happens when you look outside, see that it is close to 32 degrees cold, with an occasional snowflake for emphasis, decide that a walk would be less than inspiring, and so you slip on your gym shorts, pick up a book that you just have to finish by Thursday, and go to the gym. Yes, THAT gym the one for which you have paid great sums of money, only to consistently under-use now that the weather is good, the same gym that promises round-the-clock 24-hour protection against the encroachment of superfluous blubber. So you drive up and you see that the lot is empty, but you drive up anyway in the hope that the patrons are all there, they just WALKED over, hence the empty lot. But no, lo and behold, there is a sign, and the sign says “closed for Easter.”

Now I don’t want to deprive folks of their rightful share of Easter merriment. But for many of us the day allows for plenty of hours for which the gym is a very real and attractive possibility. To say nothing of those for whom the day just doesn’t have the same degree of zesty commitment to the home as, say, Thanksgiving. And so I am filing a protest: places of public gathering should think about keeping to regular business hours today. Besides, NOTHING IN MY CONTRACT SAID ANYTHING ABOUT EASTER! I want my annual membership refunded for 1/366 of its value!

I did take a walk in the end, but it was with hands deeply buried in the winter jacket pockets. And the shorts had to be replaced. So how fun is that on an April morning??

Sociology News (Okay, I start the day on a more serious note. It'll be 'down the light path' henceforth.)

It’s hard for me to pass up any article featuring a prominent sociologist and so, not surprisingly, a VERY LONG interview with Ann Swidler in the WashPost (here) caught my attention this morning. Swidler, a professor at Berkeley, writes on families. Her latest book, written three years ago (“Talk of Love”), takes on the topics of love, marriage and commitment. Is there an overarching theme? The author of the interview says that Swidler’s stance on marriage or family life isn’t easy to pigeon-hole, though you could certainly conclude that Swidler takes the position that “the family in America is in a flux—both imperiled and deeply resilient.”

Having once been a grad student in sociology with an emphasis on comparative families, and now finding myself teaching family law, all this would, of course, be good reading for me. But there are also other memorable little tidbits in the article, having less to do with family studies and more with the art of academic discourse. For instance, the author recognizes an interesting and bifurcated world out there. About Swidler’s research on marriage and the family he writes:

Swidler works quietly, methodically and out of the popular limelight, which makes her an interesting voice -- refreshingly nuanced and unpredictable -- when asked about the wrenching cultural issues of the day. She is a chin-stroker, when it comes to thinking about American family life, rather than an ideologue with a fast-on-the-draw sound bite for every occasion -- which only underscores the huge gulf between sociologists who simply study American life, and sociologists who throw themselves into the partisan fracas.

Of course, it’s easier to abandon sound bites when you are having multiple pages of a prominent paper devoted to your “nuanced voice.” Nonetheless, it is true that these days lecturing or writing about families forces you to make decisions on how you are going to position yourself before an audience (a non-positioning is of course a positioning of sorts) in the current debates that are taking place. Swidler does not use her academic arena to advocate. Is this good? It’s one way to gain respect as a scholar. It’s not the only way, but it is one way.

And they said it was going to snow

Never underestimate the potential for good weather in April. Today, though not brilliant and certainly not warm, had enough of a spring feel that I decided that a camouflaged Spring Update may be in order. How can I not acknowledge willow catkins that are ready to flower? Or the budding birches? Or the presence of bluebirds? Just a brief post, no great words needed. Taking a walk brings out all the very best of this crackerjack month.

The politics of salmon

In a post below I wrote of my determination to step away for the moment from political blogging. I am staying with this decision (and indeed, the response seems to have been one of relief, since several readers indicated that this is a good thing).

However, may I just retreat into a fishery politic for a second to say that everywhere I turn, I am now reading about the horrors of farming salmon and it MAKES ME SO MAD because here we are again, making our foods “cheaper” (translates: more profitable and produced on a larger scale) in the short run and quite deadly in the long run. I truly think that it’s gotten to the point where one just should not buy farmed fish unless the grocery store can tell you exactly what the farming practices have been at the place where the fish was raised (Seafood Watch tracks the safety issues, but most grocers don’t give you this information even if you ask, forcing one to shop in places like Whole Foods because there at least you don’t have to battle the store at every turn if you want to know about these things, and indeed, they can provide assurance that minimal standards of sustainable fish farming have been adhered to).


A good synopsis of the debate over “wild” versus “farmed” can be found in this month’s Wine Enthusiast (of all things). The recommendation couldn’t be clearer – unless a restaurant or a store can tell you about how the fish was raised and whether sustainable farming practices were followed, if it's farmed rather than wild, don't order it. Farmed salmon, raised in the “modern way” (SO MAD!) has up to 40 times more PCBs than wild salmon, to say nothing of having hormone levels that probably sprout facial hair on the poor fish and an antibiotic overdose, just to counter the filth in farm holding pens (analogy of chicken coops comes to mind). The FDA (which regulates farmed fish; the EPA sets only wild fish standards) refuses ('is lax') to update its standards for fish safety in spite of the surfacing reports about the dangers posed by eating conventionally farmed fish. REALLY MADDENING!

[cartoon credit: wildsalmon.org]

Update on calves and cottonwoods

My reader from Montana clarified things a bit for me. Two days ago I posted a picture of calves, thinking this would be a good depiction of what life in Montana would be like now (she had written about caring for young calves and planting cottonwoods this week).

Not accurate, writes my pal. In her words:

"I like your pictures - only you need to change the calf picture. This morning it's snowing [we've had several inches in the last hour] and the calf that was just born is wet [from both the snow and life in the uterus] and slimey. I left it so its mother would lick it off but soon will check to see if it needs a warmer place to be."

Okay, maybe I should focus on spring updates closer to home. I seem to know nothing about young calves and weather conditions in April in Montana.

As for cottonwoods – my reader explains:

"Cottonwoods are large, deciduous trees that are native to this area - they are related to poplars. They are also the tree you see in Utah's canyon country along dry riverbeds."

I am all for accuracy in the blog! I’m not sure what you see here is a Montana cottonwood, but at least it’ll strike the image of a futon store* from our minds.

[*Cottonwood is, I believe, the name of the local futon merchant]

What my mother told me

Today’s Cap Times (Madison’s local paper) invites readers (here) to submit sayings and wisdoms that their mothers have passed on to them. The idea is that on Mother’s Day we will have a paper filled with important words implanted by mothers to their daughters. Yes, to daughters. For some odd reason the paper invites only daughters to participate in this enterprise.

The newspaper offers clues as to the type of sayings that might be appropriate:

"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

"Don't imagine you can change a man, unless he is in diapers."

Or, what has to be a first for the Cap Times:

"Keep your dress down and your panties up."

I thought about this project some and deliberated whether my mother (who now lives in Berkeley) would enjoy seeing this public display of her infamous words of wisdom. I decided not. But forget the Cap Times, what is the blog for if not to relive those years where virtually all conversations ended with the following pronouncement on her part:

“Life is not a bowl of cherries.”

Deep? Well, yes, if you think about it. There are anti-Pollyanna overtones to the message, to be sure, but a friend with whom I shared this recently said that it also speaks profoundly to certain cultural differences between Poles and Americans. He speculated that perhaps cherries had inherent value to a Pole (after all, in the past I’d described cherry vodka, the popularity of sour cherries, even my sister’s week-end-long-nothing-but-cherries fast). Surely depriving a Pole of cherries would be a harsh punishment. Life, then, according to the saying, could never measure up to that dish of all dishes: plain old unadulterated cherries.

He has a point. But perhaps there is a silver lining? I have contemplated upon occasion how good it is that life is not a bowl of cherries. I don’t think that is what my mother intended, but certainly the words have had this other effect. Sometimes I even hope that it’s all about blueberries or raspberries. Others may wish for cherries, but for me, there are those other fruits to consider. And in the end, as I have been know to say so often lately, you take what you can get, right?

P.S. My mother’s other important missive was that “you have to sacrifice for the children.” That doesn’t quite have the punch of the first, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. Though perhaps it isn’t so much a directive as a statement about where she sees herself on the sacrifice continuum?

To days gone by...

The New Yorker this week reports on the phone company’s sudden and unexplained cancellation of New York’s longtime informational numbers –including the longstanding weather information source at 976-1212. I remember that number as well as I remember the birth date of Jacquie Graupner’s mother (Jacquie was my grade school girl-friend – see post somewhere below). But as of March 24th, the weather person behind that number is gone. Gone, too, is “at the tone, the time will be one twenty five, and thirty seconds, beeeeep!” which had lasted for many many decades at 976-1616.

There appears to have been no citizen’s revolt, no great protest or outcry. The author of the article speculates that people are inundated these days with informational sources. Weather forecasts appear everywhere from newspapers to elevators and computers. All true, but in fact, when you wake up in the morning and you wonder how many sweaters you’ll need to survive the April-in-Wisconsin kind of morning, it shouldn’t be that you have to turn on your computer to find out. Turning on the computer leads immediately to ten other computer-related activities (I should check my email; I should check the headlines; I should check a few blog updates…) and then you’re just lost. Calling an anonymous voice to get the weather was like a gift to yourself – you could avoid the world encroaching on your space that much longer. You could not pick up the paper, turn on a radio or TV or computer, you could just BE.

As a side note, the reporter for the New Yorker attempted to find out why Verizon had decided to scrap the info numbers. The article states: “A call to Verizon didn’t reveal much, either. The company spokesman seemed to be preoccupied with a recent catastrophe involving a technician who had mistakenly routed two hours of 911 calls to a bank in Brooklyn.” Next time I am down on myself for some inept act that I will have committed (so many come to mind, even as I write…--you, email recipient of the wrong message as of fifteen minutes ago, know exactly what I am talking about!), I will remind myself that at least I did not do that: at least I did not cause people to reach a bank when they desperately needed a doctor or a police officer.

Where have all the politics gone?

I have noticed recently that I have absolutely no inclination to blog about things of a political nature. Stories that caused me to contemplate a post today ranged from an article about cat remains found in an ancient burial site (NYT here) to a piece about a woman who decided to use her down-time at the airport to give free advice (IHT here). (Both are great stories, btw!) I had no interest in blogging about anything more serious than that. [I know, I know, my devoted-to-cats reader will immediately respond that an article on the origins of cat-as-pet scores a ten on the seriousness scale, but for the rest, I would regard it as a curiosity rather than a shattering event; and it certainly lacks any political overtones.]

It could be that I am bucking the trend. Every day I come across a new weblog with posts about politics. Some of these commentaries are interesting, thoughtful, original, but most, to me, are not. Many appear arrogant (no cites, I don’t want blogger-enemies), anything but reasoned, in fact –quite off-putting.

On the other hand, abandoning politics here seems entirely wrong too, since the very title of this blog suggests a contemplation of matters that are of concern to those living here and in more distant places (eg Poland – and I have a handful of loyalists who continue to check the blog there!). If ‘politics’ stands for the art of government, then surely an internationally-inclined blog should at least make references to things of a political nature.

Call it a crisis of blog identity. I am giving more ‘serious’ thought to the ‘lightness’ factor that has seeped into virtually every post. Perhaps it is a sign of the times: I look for frivolity because the daily news stories that I wake up to have almost none of it, or at least it is overshadowed by the doom and gloom of a never-ending political drama that is both threatening and unnerving.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. If none are forthcoming, then I will organize a focus group very soon and I will gauge public sentiment from this select audience. The scientific method for selecting members of the focus group? I’ll use the legal standard of ‘arbitrary and capricious.’

A week-end of 1040 fun

It’s not holiday time. It’s tax time! Last year I asked one of the professors who teaches Tax here, which computer program he uses to file his returns. He said “the simple one called ‘pencil and eraser.’” Me too.

But I’m still a week away and the temptation each day is to push this odious chore to another moment.
Today, for instance, I could not possibly work on taxes. I am distracted by the following email received from a reader:

Greetings from Montana.
Although my head is full of keeping calves alive and planting cottonwoods right now, I will be back in Madison next week.

What is more interesting than gathering the requisite papers for tax work? The above. I wish I were keeping calves alive and planting cottonwoods this week-end (btw, what are cottonwoods*? Futons?).

*name of store in High Point Plaza

It’s Easter week-end, isn’t it?

My family never did anything about Easter as I was growing up. There was no reason to make a holiday of it: in Poland, Easter was a supremely religious celebration (my family was not Catholic). I don’t remember there being bunnies or chicks or Easter bonnets – just crowds pouring out of church, and then, in the late post-dinner afternoon, crowds in parks, as families went for the weekly ‘promenade.’

But the painting of Easter eggs for Easter transcended the holiday itself. We learned early on how to get the egg out of the shell and preserve the shell itself. And we learned to love the designs that we repeatedly saw reproduced on eggs sold in craft shops.

I'm including a few photos here, perhaps to remind myself of their loveliness.

It’s final: a pyramid over a crate

I didn’t read this week’s NYT science article (here) until today. I once fancied myself as being mathematically-inclined (it seems, in retrospect, that I have fancied myself inclined in very many ways over the years…hmmmm..) and so I read the article with greater care than I normally would read a piece from under the “science” rubric.

It appears that one of the oldest problems of math has been conclusively solved (as demonstrated by the acceptance of the proof by a leading mathematics journal). No, don’t stop reading! You may want to know, even if you have no interest in math. The problem is all about the most efficient ways to pack oranges (originally stated as a problem of stacking cannonballs): the pyramid holds more than the crate. Why? The Times gives this simple layperson’s explanation: “(the pyramid) allows each layer of oranges to sit lower, in the hollows of the layer below, and take up less space than if the oranges sat directly on top of each other.”

The article explains how the computer-assisted proof initially raised eyebrows (checking issues arose). It is a fascinating story of how mathematics can no longer rely on the human brain to solve its remaining puzzles (but neither can it simply feed the problems to the computer, for understandable reasons). But I am still stuck on this very basic truth: pyramid over crate. So easy, so logical, but I would have never guessed.

Confession of a weary gardener

It’s not all fun and games out there in the mud. Nor is it all smiles in the blogger community in reaction to my Spring Updates. Two comments from yesterday are especially telling:

Reader number one wrote the following:

“I'm glad to see that you are not blogging about Spring and gardening today. Though I enjoy the pictures of the flowers, you were making me feel guilty because I have no interest whatsoever in doing yard work or getting my hands dirty.”

Conclusion number one: Spring Updates inspire guilt rather than pleasure.

Reader number two commented:

”Call me old fashioned, but I like to see grass as the dominant plant-life of a lawn. It seems that if you sprinkle turkey droppings and only turkey droppings to sustain it, you’re likely to have weeds, weeds and more weeds. In fact I distinctly remember seeing weeds last year in your front yard.”

I remember an exchange that I had with someone about lawns a few years back. When I recounted to this person that I had just spent a morning picking out the particularly noxious spreading weeds, she had said “in my yard, if it’s green it stays.”

Conclusion number two: people feel strongly about lawn care (or lack thereof).

I am all for balance, so I promise, Spring Updates will appear at intervals so great that you wont even remember when you last saw one. As for weeds – I will continue to dig by hand. For those used to greener pastures – I’m sorry, but I can’t even stand to take walks through the neighborhood when the Chemlawn truck has passed through and left its dirty trail. The stench takes all the pleasure out of walking. In my mind, this is one of the most avoidable chemical addictions that suburbanites continue to support. I can understand smoking better than I can understand spraying your yard repeatedly so that it will look like Astroturf.

To buy or not to buy?

Suppose your income was $200 a month and you had a family to support (including aging grandparents and parents who had no where else to go). Suppose life was tough, entertainment options were few, winter nights were long. Suppose you were used to buying things “under the counter” as it were, and you lived in a country where the word “copyright law” has not been in existence for the past 70 years.

Alright, supposing all the above, would a legitimately produced CD, priced at $10, or DVD priced at $20 cause you to turn away from the market of pirated copies, selling at $4 each? Showing titles that are more recent than what you can legitimately have access to? And appearing with ready translations into the language of your choice? You would do that? ARE YOU SURE??

The Times reports (here) that the American Film Industry is now trying to fight piracy in Russia by lowering prices of DVDs (cutting them back to $10 -$15). Still, it seems futile. I cannot imagine a person who earns that little spending so much just to feed the American Film Industry its rightful share of profit. I’m not saying that this is right, I am simply dubious that the Film Industry will make even an infinitesimal dent in piracy with this move.

Perennial quest to understand life around me

Early on in the blogger game, I puzzled over an intriguing bumper sticker (on Bukowski). That speculation proved to be the single most provocative thing I ever wrote here – it inspired pronouncements of anger, admiration, boredom, impatience, and confusion from all corners of the world. It was riveting to be in the midst of such controversy.

This time my walk through a parking lot made me spot yet another bumper sticker that I found puzzling. I do NOT anticipate a slew of emails over this one, though I must say, I am at wit’s end as to the meaning or purpose of the following sign:

“Visualize whirled peas”

I have two hints:
1. the person is not announcing anything of a politically conservative tenor since all other bumper stickers on this car were rather left-leaning.
2. a search on the Net produced the picture I've included here. But does this really help us any? I'm confused.

UPDATE: A reader unscrambled this one within seconds: World peace. Whirled Peas. Ah. It had nothing to do with sustainable agriculture after all.

Trying to make the best of "life in the suburbs," part 2

In a February post, I rhapsodized about the household across the street and their creative genius in bringing out (on a drab winter day) a stockpile of pink flamingos, to be arranged haphazardly in the snow by the children who live there.

Yesterday the entire family was hanging out in the front yard (I love this about them; only two households on the entire long block of some 30 houses, actually use their front yard for hanging out purposes) and so I finally quit being the voyeur and went over to introduce myself (they are fairly new arrivals to our neighborhood).

After this first encounter, I am convinced that they are indeed great people, creative, fun, terrific in all respects. But the flamingos? Alack, alas, these are not their birds. They do not have a single pink flamingo. Some service brought them around for a week, to celebrate the birthday of the woman living there.

Still, I was cheered to see buckets of colorful chalk by the garage. Maybe now that we’ve officially met, I can help paint dragons and monsters and butterflies on the street with them. At the very least, I can again watch the color unforld.

Accounted for

Today, Agence France-Presse announced that a plane wreck has been discovered off the coast of France. The plane has been identified as belonging to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This is certainly not a recent crash: Saint-Exupéry disappeared 60 years ago and although it was speculated that the plane he flew went down, the accident was never confirmed.

‘The Little Prince,’ written by Saint-Exupéry, was first published in 1943. The Times reports that it has since been translated into more than 100 languages and is third on the all-time-anywhere best seller list, after the Bible and Marx’s Das Kapital.

Das Kapital is second on the list of best sellers? Can you list ten people you know who have read Das Kapital? (I can be included on your list as it was required reading for me at the U of Warsaw; but then, I was an econometrics major and this was Poland in the 60-70s!) I would think that if you were going to be Marx obsessed you’d pick up the Communist Manifesto, not Das Kapital.

As for ‘The Little Prince’ – well, for me, too, it was a truly magical little book, but I don’t know why it uniformly inspires such feelings of rapture. It is quite a simple story. One might say that it is sort of the opposite of Das Kapital in that way. Are the same people reading both??? After the eyestrain of paging through Marx, ‘The Little Prince’ may well offer the perfect antidote.

‘The Little Prince’ is one of those books that makes you think that surely there is a subtext, a Great Meaning of some sort. It’s not hard to imagine a Great Meaning hidden in simple statements about our planet –as seen from the eyes of an interstellar traveler. Now that I’m remembering it, I can see how easy it is to get lost in the imagination of that storyteller. And the illustrations – well, after reading the Bible and Das Kapital, one would be so GRATEFUL for a book with illustrations. Gentle words, soothing pictures, nice text, possibly with Great Meaning, but probably not. Yeah, a nice relaxing moment, lyrical, calming to your senses, allowing you to forget about the deeply troubled world described in the “top two” best selling texts.

Wake up! It doesn’t get much loftier than this!

If this wasn’t a day that topped all spring days, I don’t know what could possibly qualify: partly (mostly) sunny, temperatures in the upper sixties, no chilly undertow, truly great walking weather!

It was also a perfect day to revisit the UW Arboretum. When I am there, I think I should devote my life to collecting seed samples and to the creation of this place of great natural beauty. It evokes a feeling of community and partnership. True, in some places you can hear the Beltline traffic and the noises of nearby construction. But in some spots it's just the echo of your walking shoes among the pines and birches. And, on the hill of orchard trees, you could just run and run and test your endurance and no one will care or even notice. Next time.

News doesn’t just hit you in the face

..you have to go out and look for it. This week’s Newsweek tells of a writer who went right out into NY’s alleys in the interest of searching out stories about rats.

Robert Sullivan observed rats for a year and then wrote a book about it (see comment on it here). Not bad material, I should think. There are enough rat stories out there to keep us intrigued for a while. I do side with the Newsweek interviewer who asks “why do people hate rats and not squirrels?” Why indeed? Each is a rodent, yet we teach our children how to feed the latter and fear the former.

The author of the rat book was also asked to comment on how rats and people may be similar. Sullivan replies:

"I observe these rats, and they come out of their hole, they go to the same place each day to feed and then they go back to their hole for bed. Then I turn around and look at Wall Street, and I see all of these people coming out of holes in the ground, going to breakfast, going into their buildings and then going home. Same thing."

No kidding.

[sketch: from On-line Pravda]