Rant Or Too Much Information From Me, As Usual

I read Simcha Fisher's Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning. It was thoughtful and insightful and helpful. But I think that I was hoping that it would include more whining and complaining and sarcasm.

The fact is, sometimes I just want to vent. And I don't see that as immoral.

Some people (not Fisher) just focus on the good part of NFP, which I'm sure must exist. (I think for Fisher, the best it gets is being a cross of suffering through which God can work, which is about the best it gets for me, too.) However, can we please also talk about how difficult and inconvenient it is? Or are we just scared to death that that will scare away the five whole people who were contemplating using NFP in the first place?

For the sake of allowing me to vent (this is overstated to increase the humor):

A) The time of the month that you're abstaining is the part of the month that women tend to most want sex. In fact, my husband is skeptical of sex drive from me: he thinks it must mean that I'm fertile.

B) It is tremendously difficult and inconvenient and, at times, impossible to wake up at the same time each morning. While the time I take my temperature is at 7 a.m. each morning, sometimes, for reasons I can't control, I have to wake up before 7. Or what if all week I have to wake up at 8, but one day a week I have to wake up at 7? That means that my morning wake up is an hour earlier than it needs to be 6 mornings a week just to NFP. That means that my sleep is interrupted while I shove a thermometer in my mouth and wait for it to beep. That means that while my husband stays up till all hours and sleeps in late, I have to wake up.

C) Some NFPing in day-to-day life is ok, but it gets darn (edited, because my mother reads this blog) hard when you're traveling--when you're stopped at an ill-lit, dirty gas station bathroom trying to ascertain whether or not there is cervical mucus. When you're hopping back and forth between time zones, trying to figure out what time in Central Time is East Coast 7 a.m. (And how does that correspond to when I need to wake up in order to present my paper?)

D) About a week out of the month, you can't have sex till after 6 pm, if at all. What about lovely Saturday mornings? Turns out, my husband is an evening person and I, by virtue of my schedule, am exhausted in the evenings. He can't wake up in the mornings to save his life. So our best time to cuddle and kiss is the afternoon. Well, one week a month, that doesn't work.

E) Not being sure. The way they write it up, it will be crystal clear to you whether or not you're fertile. But the truth is, even if you start carefully studying your bodily functions carefully 6 months before you get married (as I did), you might not have a clue sometimes. And since you can't just carry your cervical mucus around, showing it to people, you end up feeling scared and alone a lot. Plus, who do I have to get advice from? Not too many people: I know a couple of people who have been NFPing for a year or so; many more who are recently married and pregnant; some others who NFPed until they stopped needing to decades ago.

F) The people who teach you NFP emphasize that while the pill puts family planning all on the woman, NFP is a method used by the husband and wife together, communally, as one happy family. In one sense that's true: I don't get sex, my husband doesn't get sex. In another sense it's not true at all: the woman who taught us the Creighton Model admitted that the man's primary contribution to charting is putting the appropriately colored baby sticker on the chart each day. (By the way, we don't use that model, and I find baby stickers as part of charting to be really infantalizing and odd.) The fact is, the woman does all the work and makes all the guesses about whether or not she's fertile or not. I can imagine ways to include the husband more fully in this process, but let's just say, it's not all that natural.

G) After you've ovulated and waited enough days to be certain you won't get pregnant, when there's finally a green light, well, it's just about the time that one starts PMSing. And the truth is, when one is PMSing, you can end up accidentally picking fights that, let's just say, aren't the biggest aphrodisiac.

H) One of the really nice times for NFP to work is right around the wedding. It tends also to be the case that the wedding is the time of most stress of your whole life. During times of extreme stress your reproductive system tends to not work in any way that approximates normal. While my body is generally to be relied upon like atomic clock, the months around the wedding smashed that clock and made my body do things that are barely even mentioned as possibilities in the NFP instruction guide.

I) Now that it's winter, we're trying to save money on heat. That means that our room gets quite cold as we sleep. Now I'm not getting even remotely accurately temperature readings from my cold thermometer. 

That's my review of The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning: more whining, please. Can't we both accept NFP and be honest about its difficulties?


P.S. I want to whine and fuss about NFP. But the truth is, not only do we use it because that's what the Catholic Church teaches and we're open to learning from the Church, but I'm also not even sure what kind of birth control I'd use if I were open to using it--I have moral and health concerns about most of those, anyway.

P.P.S. I'm pretty sure that most of the things that I've complained about are just the plain old things that everyone who uses NFP experiences. Francisco and I have a great situation, actually--neither of us has to travel extensively for work, and when we do, we can often travel together. Neither of us has serious health conditions that make having children life-threatening, etc. Which is to say, my complaints are much less significant than some of the complaints that other people have. 

A Random Assortment

~ The problem with doing what you love (via Francisco).

~ Oh my goodness--I want to go here.

~ Scallops, St. James, and Botticelli: I love the idea of serving scallops in their shells.

~ This is awesome:

Viktor F. Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, went on sick leave on Thursday, stalling negotiated efforts to resolve the country’s political crisis.

I have "respiratory illness and fever" and I'm not even cancelling class.

Oh my goodness--how did I miss this when I was in St. Louis? Must go back there.

Guest post: Ilana on Grandma Leopard

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
- from “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden

When I walk up the half flight of stairs into my grandmother’s house, I open the door and see her standing across the room, framed by the window behind her. The rest of the house was for her family, but the window and the windowsill was and is hers. The bird feeder outside is at the height of the window. Her sink is in front of the window, and her coffee cup is always right next to the sink. My grandmother rarely leaves her house. She cared for my two great-grandmothers so my grandfather did the grocery shopping. Since my grandfather died, my mother has done her grocery shopping. My grandmother’s window looks out to the driveway, to the bird feeder, and to her neighbor’s house where her brother and sister-in-law live.

Standing in her kitchen, near her window, my grandmother knows the room, the view, and the sounds so well that she can supernaturally detect one of her children’s cars slowing down on Race Street and turning left into the driveway. The cars pull in at odd times: my mother’s nearly daily; my uncle’s when a bill needs to be paid or a pot of soup needs to be shared; and the others’ when they're in the area, to say hello.

I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away.
-from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

When I was home most recently, my mother and I stopped by (after a long day of errands) to drop off groceries and listen to my grandmother’s news and worries. On our way home and halfway down the one-way Race Street, my mother stopped and said, “we should have Grandma over for dinner.” She turned right three times around the block and turned left into the driveway.

I imagine how my grandmother felt when we left and then returned. She is used to cars and children coming and going, but she probably relished the minute or two of silence to reflect when her daughter and I left. But this time, we left and came back, taking her with us, away from her window and out of her driveway.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
-from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

My grandmother’s window is one of those with a central pane that doesn’t open and two side panes that open a bit. So she cannot lean out of her window, but I imagine, when I pull my car into the driveway, that she is nearly leaning out of her window. She is waiting and guessing to see who it is who has come to visit her, and why. She leans out of her window because she loves the person who will walk through her door. And we all come to her.

Every Christmas Eve, we file in. The staircase is narrow, and there are too many of us to pile our coats on the banister, so one of the grandchildren deposits them on a bed upstairs. My grandmother’s house is full of us, and several times during the evening she returns to her window. It seems like she’s making coffee, or mixing pineapple juice and ginger ale, or placing a used styrofoam cup in the sink, but I see her pause there. I wonder what she thinks when she looks out the window for a second or two into the dark (and snowy, if we’re lucky) night before turning back to her overfull house.

Quote

"When faith is weakened, the foundations of life also risk being weakened, as the poet T.S. Eliot warned: "Do you need to be told that even those modest attainments / As you can boast in the way of polite society / Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?"[48] If we remove faith in God from our cities, mutual trust would be weakened, we would remain united only by fear and our stability would be threatened."

--Lumen Fidei

Rant

Guys: The heat in my office works by blowing heat until the room is heated up to a bit warmer than the temperature that I select; then it blows air-conditioning. This is even worse than it sounds--I mean, it's great that I can control the temperature in my office; it is not great that that involves adjusting it every 20 minutes. I could have designed a better thermostat than this.

La Dolce Vita

The sweet life is not that sweet. From the beginning scene in which a statue of Jesus dangles from a helicopter on its way to the Vatican to the end in which a dead enormous stingray is pulled up by nets and observed by party goers on their way home, La Dolce Vita is a spectacle of the pursuit of a pleasure that never really seems to get found. Marcello, the journalist/publicity agent who realizes that he's not living up to his creative potential, has a new girl every night (although, as Ebert points out, it's never even clear that he has sex with them).

(Previously 8 1/2 here.)

A Random Assortment

~ Nun-chic.

~ Yuengling's ice cream is coming back! On our brewery tour we saw the old building where it was made during the Prohibition to keep Yuengling afloat.

~ Good thing Francisco built himself a standing desk: "Sitting at Work for Hours Can Be As Unhealthy As Smoking."

~ On the recently reguilded Diana statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She used to stand on top of Madison Square Garden where O. Henry imagined her in dialogue with the Statue of Liberty:

"Ye have the best job for a statue in the whole town, Miss Diana,” Mrs. Liberty said, in an unexpected Irish brogue.Launch media viewer

 

Answering in a clear soprano voice, Miss Diana took pity. “It must be awfully lonesome down there with so much water around you,” she told Mrs. Liberty. “I don’t see how you ever keep your hair in curl. And that Mother Hubbard you are wearing went out 10 years ago.”

The Wolf of Wall Street

From The New Republic review:

"At three hours, The Wolf is open to charges of self-indulgence. The narrative line drifts and wallows and clutches at voice-over to stay afloat. Still, if you love the film, you will wish it were longer, for there is a riffing ease here, a swell air of deserved chaos, and a brazen awareness that the American system is corrupt not because bad people seek to exploit it, or because there is some evil in the hearts of men, but because American opportunism requires corruption and nerve. The inevitable 
conclusion is that there is no such thing as corruption. There is just the exhilaration of screwing everyone—and so, for the first time, the gang in a Scorsese film is delivered with more jubilation than dread. GoodFellas knew it was subversive, and took coy pleasure in that. This is unflawed delight, a work of exultant nihilism. At last Scorsese has abandoned the priesthood."

Open to charges of self-indulgence?! It isn't boring--it just goes on and on--drugs and women and more drugs and more women. When everything is a big party, it's hard to pick out the actual narrative.

"The inevitable conclusion is that there is no such thing as corruption." Wow--really? The film just doesn't come down with a moralistic judgment; however, there's no backing away from relying on the viewer's natural nausea and recoiling from such actions. Nothing in the entire film was remotely enticing to me. Nothing was desirable or enviable in any way. Now, if you wanted to see Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, have a moment in which he realizes his own depravity, then you're going to be disappointed. But just because a smarmy character is only obsessed with money and influence and control, doesn't really signal to me that the film is without judgment: Belfort loses his wife (actually 2) and children--he endangers his daughter's life by trying to drive away with her while high. He's too far gone to see these as bad things, but it isn't hard for the viewer to.

I can't believe that the film came out on Christmas. I don't really know what else to say about that, except that I don't like this review:

"Seeing the film on Christmas day was a tonic, not just dispelling bogus holiday atmospherics, but as a lesson in blithe amorality."

The reviewer argues that corruption is not corruption; it's just the American way. I disagree: the America I know is more modest, more puritanical, more hard-working than the Wall Street that the film presents. The America I know is the postmen that Jordan Belfort was scamming, not the scammers (granted--the postmen fell for the scams in a desire to make easy money, but there's still a big difference).

Disability actually comes up quite a bit in a film about Wall Street scammers. The film begins with a frat-party-like atmosphere at Belfort's office where people in the office are competing by throwing dwarfs head-first at a target. Later, Belfort asks his partner about marrying his cousin and what he would do if his children were born disabled (his partner jokes that he would drive them into a rural area and "set them free" by pushing them out of the car; he then amends himself--he'd send them to an institution). After a particularly potent drug experience, Belfort describes himself as feeling like he has cerebral palsy. He is unable to communicate and rolls himself down the steps to his car. Finally, and most strikingly, The Wolf of Wall Street quotes from Ted Browning's 1932 film, Freaks. Belfort and his colleagues chant the "One of us! One of us!" mantra that, in Freaks, is chanted by the carnival "freaks."

One reviewer, who paid better attention than I did, writes:

In addition to the happy hookers that Belfort and his brokers buy and use for part of the entertainment at his weekly parties -- the dwarves who rent themselves out for throwing at huge velcro dart boards, human bowling, and the like -- are referred to as "it" and compared to animals. In the boardroom over negotiations over the dwarf rental, it's declared that you "never look one in the eyes," and that "we need a tranquilizer gun ready" in case the dwarves charge like wild animals on the Serengeti. And then there comes the completely unexpected "one of us, one of us, gooba gabba, gooba gabba, one of us" chant from Todd Brown's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks, complete with pounding and chanting on the boardroom table. Amazing.

I don't even remotely know what to do with these references to disability. It seems like the disabled are, like women and anyone they can possibly scam, just instruments that they can use.

The Brandywine River Museum

I love this little museum (which I last visited with Stearns)--it's full of Andrew Wyeth's paintings (and his father's and his son's), as well as paintings by other local artists and of the area. On this visit, I noticed and loved the paintings of Horace Pippin (what a great signature!), who got into art as a form of rehabilitation after his arm was injured in World War 1.

I love the space, too--the curved views of the river are just lovely.

Photo credit: Francisco

A Random Assortment

~ A great series by MSI paralleling ancient political thought and country music.

~ I'm scared to death of lightning and super happy to hear that it isn't killing as many people these days.

~ On Gasland: Aside from the terrible aesthetics of the low-fi documentary, which are dizzying, boy, I buy it--all these ideological documentaries I swallow, hook, line and sinker.

~ Yes: "You may have been raised charismatic if..." (via TB)

~ The Panda Cam at which you can watch the National Zoo's baby panda sleep (oh so cute).

~ On Dallas Buyers Club: When I lived in Texas, two of my best girlfriends there had a real thing for Matthew McConaughey. I never got it--I didn't find him remotely attractive, but did find him always oozing self-confidence in a very unattractive way. Dallas Buyers Club, however, had just the role for him--you could barely tell it was him, so thin and dark-haired and with such 80s hair and mustache. The typical McConaughey bravado is even less well-founded than usual, and so is endearing and inspiring.

Herman's Hermits - I'm Henry Vlll I Am

#1tomatolover came to visit for a bit yesterday and showed us this great music video--this is a song that Papa Leopard used to sing us all the time when we were little. 

A Random Assortment

~ A very cool rediscovered old church ceiling.

~ I've been waiting for this Chagall mosaic to get moved to the sculpture garden in DC.

~ So glad Francisco and my days of sync-watching tv are over (stream-cheating is totally a thing).

~ TSE's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock turned into a comic book? Yes please!

~ PAL on gender roles and social construction:

One piece of evidence in favor of the theory that gender roles are socially constructed is that women, as they ascend to economic and relational dominance, become more confidently aggressive. One piece of evidence against that theory, of course, is that men, when they come to be ruled by women, don’t take on the “gender roles” traditionally assigned to women: Being the “domestic goddesses” who run the home and take most of the responsibility for nurturing children. That means, of course, that our country is plagued by numerous “caregiving” issues that really can’t be resolved by government policies. It’s not so easy, after all, for most single moms to do it all. 

Downieville, CA

This is from an old train station in Roseville, near Sacramento.

The rest are from Downieville--a little gold rush town that we passed through on the way back from Portola. Word is, it used to be in the running for state capitol of California.

There were plaques all through town with crazy stories of the lawless gold rush days.

Obviously they aren't short on Christmas trees: they were decorating most of the posts.

Hymies

Oh my goodness: the deli down the street from my house has a pickle bar. I can't believe I've lived here for a cumulative year and a half and I've only just now discovered this. I love pickles.

And, if you buy a bowl of soup (and a bowl of soup is approximately the size of three ordinary bowls of soup) the pickle bar comes with it for free. Unbelievable.

Portola

Sadly, Portola's railway museum was closed, since, as we all know, Francisco loves passenger rail.

Twitter

Oh em gee: Laurie Colwin's daughter followed me on (my actual) twitter. Life made!

Truckee

In Truckee there's an odd civic building.

Beside it is a gazebo on top of a rock. The rock was purportedly put there by American Indians ages ago--it balanced so that if you touched it a little it rocked (since then it's been stabilized and cemented down).

The view of the town from the top is lovely.

The mansion that used to inhabit the spot was amazing--I wish it were still around.

This tower, of which the gazebo is reminiscent, used to be on top of the rocking stone.

The Inn at the Edge of the World

If The 27th Kingdom had some elements of magical realism, The Inn at the Edge of the World moves even closer to a full-fledged ghost story. The story builds slowly--5 people gather at an inn at the edge of the world for Christmas, where they hope to skip Christmas. There's an island myth about Selkies, seal people--when the seals come ashore to dance, they sometimes lose their skins and can't return to the water.

But the book also communicates Ellis's typical incisive insights into human beings and life and love. For instance:

'Am I a person from Porlock? asked Jessica who was no different from anybody else in that she rather enjoyed disturbing people who were attempting to work. There was not any malice in the urge: it was a primitive, tribal response to the individual intent on private concerns--'Kindly rejoin the community and let us play.' The man engrossed in solitary pursuits is always a little threatening.

Which is to say, not my favorite of Ellis's novels, but intriguing enough--in part because it wasn't clear what the genre of the book is until the very end: if you stick a bunch of strangers together on an island, then I assume it's going to be a detective story.

(See also: Ellis's The Summer House and The 27th Kingdom.)

Grass Valley

I always forget when I'm not here that Francisco's hometown is really charming--the architecture is incredible. And for a small town, it has all the right kinds of stores--tons of book stores and thrift stores and antique stores and coffee shops. Plus, when it's not raining (and it isn't), the weather sure beats the East Coast.

Dulles

I've flown out of Dulles many times, but I've never paid much attention to the architecture. Traveling with Francisco, however, means paying attention to the building.

Photo credit Francisco

And it's quite a remarkable one.

(Eero Saarinen, the architect, also designed St. Louis' Arch.)

The Art Museum

The other day I went with TB and her mother to the Philadelphia Museum of Art--that place is so big that I saw tons of things I'd never seen before (in addition to a Vermeer that's on exhibit that I'd been wanting to see). The oddest thing, by far, were these paintings of eyes or eye miniatures worn as jewelry, a Georgian fad. They're pretty creepy displayed in a bunch, huh?