Thank You

8 Jun

Last night my friend Donal and I drove down to Atlantic City to visit Karen. We brought with us two sofas, a bookcase, and a filing cabinet, all items that had been donated to her from our friends. We have been helping Karen repair her home since November, when her row home was devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

Neither of us had seen the floors that were installed weeks ago, paid for with money donated by our friends and family. The floors looked great! When we placed the sofa where Karen wanted it, she and her son, Cy, sat down in their living room for the first time since before the storm. Eight months. It was very heartwarming to see their smiles, a light at the end of a long tunnel. This is Cy’s senior year of high school. He certainly hasn’t had an easy year to prepare for college and his future.

IMG_8568

We would have never been able to accomplish this goal without the help of the following people, and the priceless support and kind words from all of our friends and family. It means the world to me, and to Donal, to know that if we ask for help, we get it and that friends can come together to make things happen and get the job done!

Thank you to: Brooke, Maria, Matt, Natalie and Dave, Aidan, James, Joel, Kirk, Bethann, Tippy, Jakki and family, Jimmy, Dorothy and family, Barb, Barbara, Chris and Chris, Grace, Erin, Patty, Lisa and Albert, Anjali and Bob, Cecilia, Florinda, Mag, Tara, Kathy, Susie, Brian, Donna, Mundi, Gayle and Joe, Jeff, Dan, Mike and Jules, Jim, Jude, and The Parenti Family

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Last Friday Night

5 Jun IMG_6210

I really never know what to expect when I plan an MQA party; I simply do what needs to be done and just wait-and-see.

Planning Friday’s soirée, in celebration of Walt Whitman’s 194th birthday, required more from me than parties past; stringing 120 feet of lights to eight-foot bamboo stakes, with only a hammer as my assistant, hours before 50 guests arrived, was far from easy. At one point, I became terribly frustrated with a spot of hard ground that would not accept a stake deeper than 4 inches. I knelt to the ground in exhaustion and asked myself the question that is maybe the most human, honest and self-reflecting one of all time: “Why am I doing this?”

Kneeling in the 90 degree heat, my head buried in my hands, the thirsty grass digging a zig-zag pattern on my dehydrated knees, I let myself be a baby for five solid minutes. My thoughts drifted to my friends, 30 of whom agreed to come that evening, the friends who show up when I have sea captains talk in my living room about pollution and when I have parties for dead poets.

I got up, picked the grass off my knees and finished stringing the lights. Later, when my guests complimented my yard, saying sweet things like it was enchanting, I smiled proudly, rubbing the sore part of my right hand that was bruised from the hammer.

Rocky Wilson is a poet. He is well-known in these parts for talking to people via his stuffed puppet, Bongo. He can be seen having tea parties with Bongo and his other stuffed animals in the park across the street from his house, a house he bought in Camden from a vagabond priest for $1 over 30 years ago. Rocky has that attribute that my generation rarely has: he is convincing, authentic in his unconventional ways.

Rocky

Rocky

The first time I met Rocky he had an Emily Dickinson book and three of his puppets with him. Those four, plus Walt Whitman and Camden’s internationally renowned haiku poet, Nick Virgilio, appear to be Rocky’s constant heros. I had never seen him read any of his or Walt’s poetry before, but the many RSVP emails from his fans and friends, filled with gracious enthusiasm, made me eager to see him deliver.

The crowd gathered with their chairs and blankets on the well-lit lawn, drinks and food in hand, all facing Rocky. A chorus of birds sang in the woods behind him. I sat down on a blanket, the heat and frustration melting away from me as he began. Rocky was incredible. He was alive, robust, in his reading. His own poems, with which he began, and Walt’s, with which he ended, were beautiful. His depth and sincerity brought the words to life, leaving us, the listeners, with a feeling of perfect duality, placid and playful.

Life, the seasons, the frustrations and the most human of questions all seemed free from expectation that night. We all drank and ate and talked and laughed until 2 a.m., all the while the birds singing behind us.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags: , , , , ,

Party Animal

4 Jun

MQA Home Movie Six: Party Animal

 

 

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Walt Whitman Party

30 May

Hello friends!

I’ve been getting a great many emails with the question, “What can I bring?” for tomorrow’s party.

Please bring yourself and a friend if you’d like. Beer, wine & snacks are nice, always appreciated. And lastly, please do not forget a blanket or chair for the lawn.

See you at 7:00 pm!

Love,

Ingrid

Spring Eternal

28 May peony

Spring in New Jersey is gorgeous. We are covered in a blanket of green, speckled by the colors of daffodils, tulips, forsythias, camellias, tulip magnolias, dogwoods, cherry trees, lilacs, irises and of course, rhododendrons and azaleas, each surprising me with their punctuality and loveliness. Driving down common suburban streets, past bright fuchsia azaleas—that are almost blindingly neon—I have to grin. I have to wonder how something so grand goes unnoticed all year, disguised as an ordinary shrub. Here the white azaleas grow the largest, reminding me of wedding cakes, huge, decadent.

I savor the gifts that spring sets down in my home state, for when the mosquitos come on with the heat, I leave NJ for Maine. Like most people who enjoy two very distinct locations, I cheat on one for the best of the other, getting enough distance from each place to never feel complacent or bored with my surroundings.

I have been up to my elbows in springtime adventures these past weeks, packing it all in before I exit north. In the past month I have put in no less than 80 hours working on my yard. I even used a chainsaw for the first time. That went ok, but as usual my left-handedness made the tool feel awkward in my hands, much like right-handed scissors. I made do though. In my yard the first peony bloomed last week, giving me the only type of cut flowers I truly enjoy, the ones I grow myself.

peony

Sugar

I met a horse named Sugar this spring. Sugar is beautiful, all white and ethereal; even the way the breeze moved through her mane seemed unearthly. She stared out her window as I watched her; the stoic longing of this horse to use her body and run and be free haunted me for days after. Her wealthy young owner does not ride her often from what I was told. Sugar seemed like a dreamer in a dream, a classic fairytale. This horse’s beauty and the power of her magnificent body wasted, enjoyed by no one. In contrast, watching a painted turtle—with all of its wild freedom—slowly cross my mother’s driveway a week later seemed unfair.

paintedturtle

cow

The cows came a couple of weeks back. One came named Sandy, after the storm in which she was born. The cows live under the windmill next to the pond where I spent most of my early childhood playing alone. Weeks back, I tested out a 100-year-old canoe on that pond, and remembered the freedom and the lessons of solitude it gave me, how it shaped me, a wet shelter for all of the angst, curiosity and sadness I carried as a child, most of which I still haven’t shaken off. Distant thoughts of the eels I was so frightened by, frogs and their lily pads that I imagined as neighborhoods, the hundreds of imperfect figure-eights I practiced in the winter on my sister’s old skates while she was in school…all of those memories came flooding back when my brother pushed me out onto that pond in a leaky ancient canoe, he confidently handing me a hard rake to push myself around.

Spring tells me that I must never grow up. Never avoid and never question rain or tears; each brings growth, sometimes even flowers. Something that stagnant complacency never does.

hardrake

straw

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Sell Out

22 May

My seven-year-old daughter was sent home from her weekly basic skills class with a homework assignment: to read a 95 word story in one minute. I was asked to return it with my signature the following week.

We read it together a few times, over a few days. I then started timing it on my phone, for 60 seconds each time. My daughter became progressively stressed out and, by the sixth time, was speed reading, apologizing and feeling like a failure for only being able to read 83 words in one minute. I told her to stop.

I told her speed reading was stupid, that she would never learn or understand anything by rushing.

Her eyes grew wide and she asked if she could tell her teacher that, that it was stupid. I said to go ahead, as I signed the paper, drew a large arrow indicating to turn the paper over and left the following note on the back.

“Training Lila to read ‘fast’ is not something I am impressed by. Slow readers tend to ingest what they read. This exercise, that you made me sign, makes me feel like my child is a dog that I am forcing to learn a trick, a trick in education that will help her to achieve your ‘teach to the test’ $$$ goals but not make her want to read or have a desire to learn at all. This is a disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself, to be rushing a seven-year-old to read 95 words in a minute.”

I may just be a tiger mom, but in an alternative way.

I do not think drowning my children in drills to pass tests for funding is education. Nor am I going to keep quiet about it. Neither should teachers. Teachers should feel some weight, some responsibility to speak up themselves, stop the madness, look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are actual educators or just test pushers, afraid to lose their jobs, all the while pimping out whole generations to get their funding, their paychecks.

We have a big, complicated, multi-layered problem with education in this country. I worry about the actions of teachers—their hands apparently tied—and lazy parents alike, all of whom sign off on these practices that inhibit actual learning.

Reading is really one of the most magical things we learn to do. It should be treated as such. My daughter has been reading for less than a year of her very precious life. She will not be rushed into factory habits that make her perform tricks for administrators in cheap suits so she can grow up and get an equally lousy, unfulfilling job.

The note went back to school with my daughter yesterday morning. My phone rang one hour later. I picked up, expecting an unpleasant tone. I was shocked to instead hear Lila’s Basic Skills teacher being very friendly and kind; she said she was happy when parents got involved, even if they were upset, that it showed they were engaged. We spoke for 10 minutes, I explaining my displeasure with the assignment and the very idea that my seven-year-old has to meet any expectations. She explained that this practice is for proficiency not “teaching to the test.” I still disagreed, proficiency being a buzzword linked to all that I stand against. However, I chose not to throw any more dirt. In the end, which comes as no surprise, the heart of my message was still ignored.

I see I have a long road ahead of me, as my babies have only just begun their schooling. My proud, unconventional family will have to dance and balance, with one foot settled in our wacky American society and its messy, insecure public schools, and the other foot rooted deeply in a fierce, uncompromising passion to want to actually learn; and never let anyone, especially a teacher, sell us out.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags:

Austin Psych Fest

8 May

These are a collection of photos taken at the Austin Psych Fest I attended two weekends ago. My friend Kimia took most of these photos, all the really good ones. We had a fab time in Texas.

IMG_8298

Lost & Found

Lost & Found

Elevation Amphitheatre, Carson Creek

Elevation Amphitheatre, Carson Creek

allboots

Tinariwen

Tinariwen

Black Mountain

Black Mountain

Babes & unicorn pants

Babes & unicorn pants

Roky Erikson

Roky Erikson

Country Life

Country Life

The King Khan & BBQ Show

King Khan & BBQ Show

Linda of Golden Animals

Linda of Golden Animals

Kimia

Kimia

Sonia

Sonia

Black Mountain

Black Mountain

IMG_8488

I wanna write rap lyrics! (ATL)

When I grow up, I’m gonna write rap lyrics (ATL)

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

So Gay

6 May

I took my little ladies to see my friend, Kimia, DJ on Friday night at Ortlieb’s in Philadelphia. It was early. We stayed for an hour and the girls were in bed by their nightly 8 o’clock bedtime; and while they did dance and party pretty hard at the DJ booth with their comp-ed Shirley Temples and $1 tacos, the scene wasn’t inappropriate. There was nothing young Drew Barrymore-ish about it at all.

Later that night, I posted on FB a really cool but dark photo – because it was taken inside an old Jazz club – of Kimia with my two girls. And then it happened. Some woman I don’t know decided to comment on the photo with this sarcastic ugliness, “Well, that’s not creepy at all.”

The photo was dark, no doubt, but creepy? No. The funny thing about this for me was that this woman had one of those jump-on-the-bandwagon-so-it-looks-like-I-have-an-identity-and-one-opinion stupid, gay rights, equal signs, with Bert and Ernie as her profile photo.

I found it puzzling, the idea of someone openly defending gay rights with cute images of Bert and Ernie (they were puppets, Ok? They never had sex or wanted to get married. Because they aren’t real.) Yet this woman felt ok to call a photo of two children and one really stunning woman creepy. Aren’t children just off-limits when it comes to jokes, especially from such a blatant, and supposedly sensitive, activist?

I replied with a single warning to, “Watch it with the comments, twat.”

I think it is so condescending, this “I love my gays!” nonsense. If I was gay I would be horrified to be treated like a novelty. I personally have no activist interest in gay rights, and guess what: I know about half a dozen more gay men than you do. I find the masses (I mean mindless lambs) who love Siegfried and Roy, and dumb shows like Glee, with their patronizing interest in “Gays!” so offensive.

If I found myself constantly being rewarded or spit on due to my sexuality, while the rest of my character, my being and my personality are ignored in its shadow, I would want to scream. I’d want to bitch slap every idiot who thinks they support me through something as useless as a profile photo and by loving the novelty of the stereotypes I’d have to live up to for them, like a cute little circus monkey in a plaid vest asking for peanuts, or human rights.

I have no idea how hard it must be to have to grin and bare it, to lose dignity by having my sexuality turn into a FB profile picture, one that is trendy among the bandwagon-hopping activists, and one that will be as meaningless as that shallow Kony 2012 FB profile photo that also patronized an oppressed group of people: children.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags:

Dogwood Days

4 May Dogwood days

Every spring I spend hours each week walking through my favorite garden shops. Stopping to admire and sigh at the plants I so wish to buy, but cannot afford. Because one or two is simply not enough. I want to buy 10 or 20 of each plant I love. I can see in my mind how lovely they’d look if only I could buy the whole grand lot.

I console myself with project spots all around my yard, each year building towards the dream garden I want. I am up to 10 peonies, with the two I bought yesterday. Having a beautiful yard takes a great deal of patience, years of planning and very dirty hands.

My bare hands were dirty all day, pulling onion grass, planting this year’s additions and moving my six roses to a new location, one that I hope they like much better.

Spring really is the most wonderful time of the year. It is so hopeful and full of promise with green, green grass to daydream on.

Begonia Baby

Begonia Baby

Lazy Daisies

Lazy Daisies

The rare orange Azalea

The rare orange Azalea

In 3 weeks these will be cherry pies

In 3 weeks these will be cherry pies

Sweet Lilac

Sweet Lilac

Dogwood days

Dogwood days

My favorite, the stunning Coleus

One of my favorites, the stunning and strange Coleus

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Wait

29 Apr

Waiting in lines is not my strong suit. Even back in seventh grade, when eating at stupid places like Planet Hollywood was “the” thing to do for cheesy suburban folk, I would always refuse to join my friends as they waited in lines to get in these places.

Waiting is beneath me. I once cut in front 20, teenage, Mennonite girls at a Panera Bread in Lancaster PA, thinking “Fuck these bonnet-wearing bitches. I know exactly what I want to order. They’ll be lost in this jazzy menu since they are told what to want”, thus justifying my incredibly rude action by dissing their bonnets and beliefs.

Three nights ago I found myself in a long line, on a dirt road, waiting for the transfer bus back to my hotel; I was coming from the Austin Psych Fest, a psychedelic music festival in Austin TX that I attended with two of my friends this past weekend.

The very fun, humid day leading up to this irritating, chilly, late-night waiting game was filled with hours of pretty great live music, nonstop conversations about guys and life in our 30s; it was also filled with the types of hilarity that only ensue when witnessing drunk people at porta-potties.

I left before my friends. Besides simply being tired (I was not keeping my usual mom-hours, the climax of which is climbing into the comfort my heavenly bed by 10pm), I had to pee; and there was no way I was going inside a porta-potty at night, in the dark. I am a real priss when it comes to being in close proximity to other people’s unflushed defecation, especially in the dark.

The transfer line was so long that I didn’t get on the first bus. I decided that, since the taxis weren’t showing because they couldn’t find the location of the festival, it being tucked away in the woods, I’d just wait for the next bus.

One hour passed. With each 10 minutes I told myself I would wait 10 more minutes and then go into the huge parking lot and catch a ride with some nice, sober person. I kept trying to sell this idea to the people around me: “Hey, let’s go troll the parking lot and offer somebody $20 to give us a ride…” Nobody liked this idea. Modern Americans, being afraid of every boogie man known to mankind’s imagination, do not understand that in most countries, catching a ride just gets you to where you want to go, not into a ditch in West Texas, cut to pieces.

I didn’t get on the second bus but was now third in line for the next one. It was 2:00 am at this point. Squirming, I tried to convince myself to hitch hike, but all I could hear was, “You took a ride from a stranger at a psych festival in TEXAS?? Are you crazy? You are a mother of two!”, echoing, for the most part, my over-protective ex-husband but also all the play-it-safers that I know.

I’d had it. I was tired. I had to pee and was going against my nature by waiting in the first place. I pulled my sweater tight to my chest and said to myself, “Fuck this shit.” I walked to the parking lot. I passed car after car, full cars, cars with just one lone fat bald guy, until I finally found my chariot: a car with a really young, very cute guy who looked as safe as he did timid.

“Hey, can you give me a ride back to the Hampton Inn by the airport? I’ve been waiting an hour for the bus and I simply can’t wait any longer.”

He said sure but only if I promised not to kill him, as he moved a glass jar and miscellaneous papers off the passenger seat of his messy car. One of the festival security guys I had been talking to gave him the “I’m watching you” middle & index finger to-and-from-the-eyes gesture and said to him very seriously, “Drive careful… baby on board.”

After that Texas-sized, swoon-worthy comment, we drove away, and, as my driver and I exchanged mini-bios, I started to smell something. It smelled a lot like urine. Was it me? Was it my imagination going loco because I’d been holding it in since 7 pm? Then my fine, young chariot driver, in between telling me about his job working with handicap kids, nervously said, “It really smells like a basement outside.”

Hmmmm. It didn’t smell like a basement; it smelled like piss. That the jar with the amber liquid he moved from the seat I was sitting in, that was rolling around on the floor in the dark next to my feet, was his piss jar!

Mother fucker!

I tried so hard to just let it go, and all its divine irony with it. Once again the Gods above were laughing their asses off at prissy old me leaving the festival early to pee in a clean hotel, waiting in line for an hour, and then sitting in a piss-stanked car with a jar of pee at my feet. I shook my head as we drove, laughing silently with those mischievous Gods, knowing that I really will never win.

Discomforts and problems alike will always replace each other with new ones, or worse, with the exact problem you started with.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags:

Impression

23 Apr

Saturday night I went to see Billy Bragg at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, PA. This is an odd concert venue, as it is in a very out-of-the-way suburb of Philadelphia. The upside of this hard to get to venue is that, for every show I have ever seen there, I always end up with the sweetest seats. This time we sat in seats CC 104 & 105, otherwise known as sixth row, center; I once saw Emmylou Harris there, and had similar seating. Each time, I marveled at my luck.

The show was very good. In-between old and new songs, Mr. Bragg ripped on the ambiguity of hipsters and their beards at SXSW, knocked on Nick Cave’s style, dissed Morrissey twice and, of course, talked about what his day was like when he woke to the news that Margaret Thatcher had passed. On that day he shopped for a wardrobe of pearl snap button western shirts and checked his email on his phone in a coffee shop, all the while sporting the same hipster beard he made fun of. He may be terribly more vain than he could ever recognize, as a great deal of what he spoke of related to what people or ideas “looked” like.

I spent some parts of the show being a silly girl, crying in row six, dead center of the stage. The apparent sincerity of songwriting and a new guitar for each song are exactly the ripest of conditions for me to unload some of my own heartache and angst, and a bit of the sadness I don’t know what to do with. No matter how much I carefully apply heavy black liquid eyeliner, wearing it like a precaution so I won’t cry, a seatbelt of sorts, I still do. Especially in dark concert halls.

He spoke about Woody Guthrie, how Woody never got to play an electric guitar before his death and how he, like me, dreams of alternate universes. In his, Buddy Holly never died and Woody did get to write his supersonic boogie on an electric guitar. That was when I really wished I had just packed a few tissues instead of trying to stop myself from feeling anything through thick eyeliner; because I do feel things. It is not ambiguous.

Throughout the show the smart phones were aglow, filming videos and taking photos of Billy. I certainly can be very guilty of this pandemic keeping-my-monkey-hands-busy-with-a-dumb-phone-nonstop-documentation myself. I even recently setup an Instagram account, doing so regardless of my feeling unsure about participating in yet another way to share, my instinct trying so hard to push her way through the distraction of another shallow sharing app to ask, “Why the need to share and view so much of the mundane, sweetheart?” But my dissing Instagram while owning and operating a blog is as laughable as Billy Bragg dissing hipsters. He is one, whether he realizes it or not.

Towards the end of the show, I watched this guy from the audience sneak up to the stage, in a hunched-over, burglar-style tiptoe, to take a few shots of his idol on his phone. It reminded me of the time I decided that I wasn’t going to take photos in front of monuments anymore. Well, only if I didn’t want to. I was in Italy with my ex-husband. I had been to Italy at least a half a dozen times before but only once to Rome. He and I were traveling with a good friend, visiting the lovely and less traveled Umbria before we spent this single perfect day walking through Rome. While in front of one of the Egyptian obelisks, I decided to end my lifelong façade as a polite, obliging tourist. I declined to have my photo taken. It wasn’t some big declaration; I wasn’t rude; I just didn’t need to have every single moment of this dreamy day documented like I was in a pack of crazed, Japanese tourists. I didn’t need to prove “I was here!” over and over and over again.

I just wanted to sit and look, really look at that obelisk. This object, like Billy Bragg, had been photographed by thousands of novice picture takers, as well as thousands of professional ones. I could just look it up in a book if I wanted to see it again. What I couldn’t do again was to sit on a bench, drenched in early October sunlight, and quietly study it, wondering about the men who carved it, and what their lives were like, what was going through their minds as they worked.

Why do we rush to take a photo of someone we admire, or of a monument we find ourselves in front of? Is it some type of ego-driven ownership, like a dog marking his territory? When we are face to face with greatness, why aren’t the impressions that form in our minds of any more substance than the urge to indulge in crappy photography?

I may never walk through Rome or see a Billy Bragg show again; or sit in the Keswick theatre, crying over all the spilled milk I wasn’t wise or careful enough to not knock over. I didn’t take any photos on my phone to upload that night. But my impression of him and his thoughts, and mostly of who I am in the middle-end of my thirties, is forever stored deep in my collected impressions.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags:

MQA Book Club Dinner & Backyard Soirée

19 Apr

Book four is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnman. Dinner will be served at 7 pm on Saturday, June 1st. The menu is undecided at this point due to the piggybacking of another MQA event that weekend.

MQA is hosting a beautiful backyard soirée with Camden’s poet, Rocky Wilson, in celebration of Walt Whitman’s 194th birthday on Friday, May 31 at 7 pm. For this, I plan to transform my big backyard into a lovely setting for a playful evening of poetry. I picture soft lights strung along the perimeter, a huge makeshift farmhouse table with pies, assorted cheeses and finger foods I love, like pigs in a blanket. I will be borrowing a galvanized water trough to fill with beer and wine. Bring your own blanket or chair and we can enjoy the poems and the spring night together.

Please RSVP to Ingrid@madquestionasking.com if you plan to attend either event. All are welcome.

Here is more on the book, which I just began reading. It is fantastic.

photo-8

You can purchase the book here at Amazon.

“Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected byThe New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.”

“Brilliant . . . It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman’s contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psychologist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of happiness and well-being . . . A magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused with knowledge, laced with wisdom, informed by modesty and deeply humane. If you can read only one book this year, read this one.”— Janice Gross Stein, The Globe and Mail

“A sweeping, compelling tale of just how easily our brains are bamboozled, bringing in both his own research and that of numerous psychologists, economists, and other experts…Kahneman has a remarkable ability to take decades worth of research and distill from it what would be important and interesting for a lay audience…Thinking, Fast and Slow is an immensely important book. Many science books are uneven, with a useful or interesting chapter too often followed by a dull one. Not so here. With rare exceptions, the entire span of this weighty book is fascinating and applicable to day-to-day life. Everyone should readThinking, Fast and Slow.” —Jesse Singal, Boston Globe

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags:

Dream Team

14 Apr

One week has passed since Donal and I visited Karen. And in that week five of our friends offered to come down today and help us paint. We covered the entire first floor with primer, each wall now ready for next weekend’s final days of painting. It is unbelievable what seven people can knock out in a single day.

Friends are what really make the world go ’round.

Thank you Maria, Matt, Natalie, Aidan, and James, for helping me and Donal today. I’ll never forget it.

photo-61JPG

photso-6

pqhoto-6

phodto-6

phaoto-6

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Enough

7 Apr photo-7

It has been about two months since Donal and I have been to Karen’s house in Atlantic City. Both myself and Donal have been dealing with major surgeries in our families since we last saw Karen. We have been on overdrive, helping our families, caring for the children, waiting for phone calls of good news from the hospital, and watching slow painful recoveries of two of our dearest loved ones. This has kept us from what had been an every weekend project to get Karen’s house back together.

We drove to AC this morning to put the project back on track and assess what is left to be completed. What we found was heartbreaking.

photo-6

Karen lost everything on her first floor from the flooding of Hurricane Sandy in October, 2012. Her insurance did not cover content, so the water heater, the appliances in her kitchen and all of the belongings that occupied her first floor—and had made her house her home—were not replaceable with insurance money. She has been receiving assistance by way of volunteers from various churches, from Donal, myself and our friends, and from volunteers of the University of Delaware.

Driving down, I had imagined that Donal and I could walk in her house, assess the work which still needed to be done and apologize for our absence. I even suggested to Donal that we film a short interview and talk about what had happened. I pictured me and Karen standing on her stoop, talking about FEMA and her insurance company, the city of Atlantic City and Chris Christie and all the questions I have; I could then use that short film to ask my friends and family for donations to get her the money for her floors.

We knocked and Karen let us in. I immediately knew I wasn’t going to be making any films today; we could barely bear the weight of Karen’s despair. She broke into tears at the simple question “How have things been going?” She has been living without a first floor for six months now. She told us that her car died last week, that she can’t afford to replace it and now walks to work. Because of her brain injury (a trash can lid flew up on a windy day and knocked her to the ground, from which she now suffers daily) the 30 minute walk to work is adding a great strain to her already shaky equilibrium. To make things worse, she also told us that mold had grown on their mattresses, from wet personal items, crammed in already tiny bedrooms. So, she had to throw them out, and her family have been sleeping on mats donated by her son’s school.

photo-7

Karen is poor. She is the working poor. She sits at the very bottom of the American middle-class, just above the poverty line. She has never gotten a break in her whole life. Then this storm swept through her home and unraveled a life that she was proud enough to try and hold together. Sandy took everything.

Karen is a good person. She works full-time running a program for underprivileged women at the Atlantic City Rescue Mission. She has worked there for over 20 years. She has two sons and is the sole caretaker for her brother, a special needs case. She never complains or acts entitled. Today, I saw a person so low, so beyond despair, her tears rolling down her face as she said she can’t take it anymore. She kept repeating that she just needs a break. This was one of the saddest moments in my life, so sad that none of us could look at each other, look in each other’s eyes for lies, hope or answers. We stood in silence, in a dark room from which Sandy stole the electricity, with humble reverence to Karen’s life, with reverence to what it looks like when everything is really stacked up against you; what it looks like to be poor in the richest country in the world.

photo-5

Karen is, without a doubt, one of hundreds in Atlantic City with a similar story. She told me how neighbors were abandoning their homes, renters gone over night, leaving their soiled belongings to grow mold. I could ask questions about FEMA, The Red Cross, her family and culture, 12.12.12. concerts, and Chris Christie all day long, but that is not going to get Karen floors in her house so she can start living her life again.

Enough. The single word that kept answering all the questions running loose in my mind. None of it matters! Just get her what she needs.

I have a personal commitment to myself to help Karen. I never leave anything unfinished in my own life, and tend to buck up exactly in the 11th hour. I plan to do exactly that for this woman, one I barely know; everybody deserves a break, and I have had plenty of my own. I am going to ask every person I know for money, for a donation in any amount and pull the money together to get her floors so she can move on from this terrible chapter in her life.

The kitchen and most of the walls had been repaired. All Karen needs is floors, an electrician and her walls primed and painted, followed lastly by trim and baseboard. Then we can finally move in the sofas and furniture and all the other generous donations we’ve already secured for her.

If you would like to come to Atlantic City on Sunday April 14, Saturday April 20th, or Sunday April 21 to help paint and prime, please contact me at Ingrid@madquestionasking.com. If you would like to donate money to help reach our goal of $2500 to buy Karen floors, please contact me at Ingrid@madquestionasking.com.

Karen is a good person, she just needs a break, and if you can help, please try.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags: , ,

Inside Joke

27 Mar

I was driving through the main street of a pretty suburban town a few years back. It was one of those sunny days when you could picture blue birds singing to each other, a gentle breeze kissing each tree. I slowed down to stop at a light and this woman walked by the side of my truck; she had this dazed, distant, somewhat vacant look in her eye; her gait was a zombie-like shuffle. I watched her and thought, “Man, what is this world coming to? So many people just look half-alive, they’ve got no life in them at all. This lady looks like she’s never seen a goddamn flower open or a blood orange sunrise.” Disgusted, I started driving and glanced in my side mirror for one last look at today’s example of how lackluster the world was.

She had a cane and a seeing eye dog.

I fell apart with laughter; at myself, at every bit of my high-and-mighty oh-Ingrid-LOVES-to-smell-the-fucking-roses bullshit that I spin in my head.

The universe can make such a fool of us, can’t it? Just when you feel so confident, so sure of yourself, in that split second can the gods slip their giant feet in front of you, and laugh in rolls of thunder, while you trip and fall in your mortal humiliation, somehow made worse by being the only living witness. Maybe life really is one big joke; and like all the best ones, it’s an inside joke, shared only between ourselves and our faulty beliefs.

Some of my fondest memories come from “making my own bed” but finding myself lying in a pile of cow shit. One of my very favorite examples of this is when I was in high school and I was voted female class non-conformist.

I never participated in anything in high school. Well, that’s not entirely true; I did run for student council treasurer one year. I even made a poster of a giant dollar sign with $15 worth of emerald-green glitter I stole from Woolworth’s. I think I won too; but this tiny prick of a teacher who ran the student council said this other kid, all pimples, with a slack jaw whose mouth never closed fully, had won. I knew for sure I’d won, but that teacher had the hots for that other kid and messed with the ballot (I was always really aware of which teachers wanted to sleep with which students. My keen sense of innuendo and stolen glances tipped me off; plus, I watched everyone like a hawk, whether they knew it or not). This tiny, homosexual teacher loved that kid, and hated me for being a female with five inches and 30 pounds on him, and for being such a smart-ass and a nuisance. In any case, I only wanted to be treasurer to steal the money, like I did the weekly homeroom donations made to the Catholic Charities. At 16, I believed that if somebody was dumb enough to give the Vatican money for more 24k gold toilet seats, then they deserved my stealing their money. So, as I strolled down to the main office each week, I pocketed the cash money, but never the coins. Then I would go and smoke a cigarette in the girl’s bathroom or use the pay phone to call my boyfriend or my mom.

At some point during senior year, my class, the class of 94, was asked to create a list of all those goofy awards, like Nicest Legs or Most Likely to Whatever. I’d tell you what all the awards were but I didn’t fill it out so I don’t know. I had a policy—I still do—that I would never fill out anything when asked. For example, there was an incident at a Pearle Vision a few years back; I was asked by a piece of paper if I had AIDS or had ever slept with someone who had. I was already in a mood and couldn’t for the life of me understand why Pearle Vision wanted to know if I had AIDS. I was under the impression there would be no sexual encounter between me and their employees that day, so when the receptionist came in the waiting area and said, “Ingrid? Are you ready to come back and see the doctor?” I looked at her quizzingly and asked, “I don’t know, am I? Do YOU have AIDS? Does Dr. Singer HAVE AIDS?” It really was a scene.

Back to the awards… somehow I ended up winning Female Class Non-Conformist my senior year. I was actually stunned, both that it was a category and that all those people, to whom I never gave the time of day, even knew what a non-conformist was. I don’t think I even knew what a non-conformist was. I wasn’t trying to, on purpose, not conform. Suddenly, this tiny moment of attention started to swell my almost non-existent ego. The fact that I won a category that was so much more exotic than great legs or prom queen was making me feel exactly how I envisioned the popular girls feeling, the ones who won greatest smile, the ones I tortured so ruthlessly, the ones I made cry when acne appeared and I loudly pointed it out by calling them things like pizza face. I watched myself go against my very nature and agreed to be photographed for the yearbook!

Our yearbook photo-op was scheduled after school on a Thursday. The male non-conformist, true to his newly assumed title, never showed up. I, on the other hand, went ahead and let them take my photo, seething inside at the embarrassing pleasure I took in receiving this ego-stroking, faux honor.

Seasons passed and the yearbook finally came out. I scoured through it looking for my picture, quickly passing by our senior portraits and cutesy remarks, stupid words like “I love LBI and golden retrievers and want to be forever young!” I had left mine blank. I wasn’t going to share my dreams with people I despised so deeply and have it published for all of eternity, any more than I’d get a tattoo and live to regret the lifetime reminder of something I liked for five minutes of my life.

I kept leafing through the pages and, without warning, there it was, the greatest inside joke of all: my photo, alone, under the heading “Most Likely To Be Late To Graduation!” What!!? What happened to Female Non-Conformist!? Had sitting for that photo-op ripped me of my true given title? I had no way to defend my non-conformist honor or make any correction without becoming even LESS of a non-conformist!

I knew nobody would ever care or even notice, certainly not all the people who intended to live forever young! Yet, I was forced to see that, despite being SO intent on differentiating myself from my peers and doing the opposite of whatever they did, I had, this one time, let my smug, dark guard down; the gods had tripped me and I fell right into a published pile of cow shit, an eternal, humble reminder that the jokes I make and the games I play, even the ones in earnest, will always turn on me, and that it is I who is the biggest ass of all.

© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved

Tags: ,

← Older Entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 147 other followers

%d bloggers like this: