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.
Lost & Found
Elevation Amphitheatre, Carson Creek
Tinariwen
Black Mountain
Babes & unicorn pants
Roky Erikson
Country Life
King Khan & BBQ Show
Linda of Golden Animals
Kimia
Sonia
Black Mountain
When I grow up, I’m gonna write rap lyrics (ATL)
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
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
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
Lazy Daisies
The rare orange Azalea
In 3 weeks these will be cherry pies
Sweet Lilac
Dogwood days
One of my favorites, the stunning and strange Coleus
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
Both the probing questions and the ever-increasing interest in my single life, from well-meaning friends, can be annoying, much like newlyweds rudely being asked, over and over, when they are having a baby. The annoyance is that, in coming from so many directions, it becomes compounded, and I am forced to politely grimace and listen to advice on dating and men by women whose love life histories are neither forgotten nor admired by me; and when I’m asked things like, “Are you dating!?” or the startling and repulsively crass (even to a filthy mouth like mine), “Are you fucking anyone yet?”, I maintain that polite façade and refrain from replying with cruel reminders such as,
“Wow, it took [his-name-here] 10 years to finally, and unromantically pull the trigger on you, huh?”
or
“Too bad you really despise your boyfriend but are too afraid of being alone to do anything about it.”
or
“Jeez, remember how bad dating was for you before you found that high school guy on Facebook?”
While in Texas this past weekend, my friend—who, unlike a lot of the other advice-givers, may sadly be right, even if I refuse to accept it—told me that if I wanted any guy at that music festival I could have him, but that I had to do all the work; that, in today’s world, no guy is going to just come up to me and sequester my Amazon loveliness; that men nowadays don’t do any of the work.
Sigh.
What happened to romance and pursuit? Where have all the men gone? Are all the men who wear wife-picked, wife-approved, wife-matching flip-flops, who stay at home raising babies, killing the dreamy male idol of old?
In my opinion, a man, that blessed beast that once was, who could detect the slight scent of lemons and hormones mingling on my soft female skin from a distance on 20 feet, may no longer exist. All the quiet, seductive, joyful female effort I put into my appearance, before I even leave my house, should be subtle enough to intoxicate a man-stranger in close proximity to me; to signal the very natural and deeply carnal desire to want to find out all of my mysteries.
I mean, a firm handshake along with a smile, direct eye contact and a simple, “Can I buy you a drink?” or “Where are you from?” or “What is your name?” should not, at the very very least, be asking too much. But, according to my extremely busy social life and most of my friends, I am. Asking too much.
I do not think that asking of the universe to be presented with a man—one who is so cock-fucking-sure of himself and feels an actual desire to find out things about me that he can’t keep himself from knowing, while not being an asshole—is really asking too much. Having some timid guy watch me for an hour, without making a move, is not attractive. Well, not to me anyway.
Plenty of modern women wear the pants in relationships. I like to wear skirts.
I have known a number of women who emasculate their boyfriends or husbands, even unabashedly doing so in public, unable to see that this makes every witness dreadfully uncomfortable, no matter how common such behavior has become. These fellas, who are as much to blame as their wives, are easy to identify by the fact that they never mention their wives in passing conversation. Ever. It would be simple and easy to think these weak souls want out, but are stuck with their ball and chain because of kids or finances; but, after watching so many seemingly dead marriages continue, I wonder if maybe this is a new world order of castrated and timid men who, ultimately, like being micromanaged, like being told what to do, or more importantly what they can’t do.
I am not the type of woman who decorates a man cave in a basement, or allots the spare bedroom for her beau, all the while hanging a watchful 8 x 10 photo of herself, square and neat, beside his computer screen; you know . . . just in case he gets any ideas about looking at porn (or sexy female bloggers who shamefully post every photo where said blogger looks like hot shit) while she’s out making the bacon; just so she can make sure that he feels totally emasculated by her image, an image that will immediately bring to mind the creepy, watchful 8 x 10s of people like JFK and various popes; just to drive home who is really in charge!
I have been told my entire adult life that I am intimidating to men. This is a lousy excuse for what men have allowed, and possibly liked, themselves to be turned into. I may be a giant in stature and personality, but I am petite inside, all girl. I want to be treated like a woman, a beautiful feminine object of desire, of love and of pleasure. I want to be treated like I am sincerely cared for, something those girls who marry and boss around their “best friend from college” usually don’t end up with. I don’t want to be friends. I have plenty of those. I want a man, and I want to treat him like one. I want a man who, at any distance, sees right through me, to the very best part of me, and can’t stop himself from getting to it.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
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
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.
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
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.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
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.
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.
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.
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
I want to go back.
I always want to be there on the island. I have spent the other half of my life in Bar Harbor, Maine. When I am not there I look up and wonder what the sky looks like without me.
I wonder what I am missing.
The sky on the island is always changing and moving fast. There, the sun wakes me up early each morning with colors I could never find words good enough for.
At night the sky seems so close. All those stars teasing me as if I just tried a little harder I could touch that moon.
I will be back soon enough, the whole summer long this year, each day and night, looking up.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
The worst part about having my email address phished or pharmed or hacked or whatever it is called, is that at one fell swoop I contacted the whole fucking wood shed, also known as my contact list.
Last night, my poor, vulnerable, ancient yahoo email address was phished and it (I assume some dude in West Africa did this, but that could just be me exotifying the crime) sent out 500 plus emails with links to really stupid websites to my whole contact list, a list I have never taken the time to edit or even think about.
I woke up to reply emails from friends cracking spam jokes at my expense and senior citizen friends weirdly and yet very politely, thanking me for the link. I text my brother to warn him not to open the link. He had obviously been on the back-end of this before and in a tone of chipper smugness wrote, “I know and I didn’t open it because I am awesome!! Have a great day!!”
I threw my hands in the air, deciding there was nothing I could do and I climbed in my truck to drive to Brooklyn in the pouring rain on a work errand. Driving north on the turnpike, while listening to QOTSA very loudly, I thought of all the people from my near and distant past I do not want to have contact with and now thanks to some jerk in West Africa, I inadvertently did.
People like my ex-husband’s first ex-wife and her mother, all of his and her lawyers, friends that turned out not to be, and the sister-wife of the last guy I fell really hard for. I was terrified all day that she’d email me, scolding my clear and concise disrespect of forgetting to remove her, I mean his, email address from my contact list.
Luckily, I just over-thought the whole thing. It wasn’t so bad, no unwanted persons from the past crept back into my life. Nobody cared.
Whew!
Now I can go into that junk drawer that is my contact list and clear all those people out of it. So that the next time I get phished, I won’t have to look over my shoulder all day for the ghosts of emails past.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
it aint all ladies in this prison caged heat!
That was a message I received last night from an old friend of mine. His simple line of comradeship worked itself over all of my late night, lonely angst. I surely must not be the only one who wants more out of life than to talk about last night’s Downton Abbey?
All day long we schedule and task, knocking off little check marks each time we get ahead, whether it be cleaning the bathroom or paying off a credit card. Doing what we have to, to live a safe and solid life. But deep inside all of us rest dormant dreams and images of ourselves being somebody else. Somebody who didn’t just let the last 10 years pass, only to be sure we completed most of our routine to-do list.
My to-do list has a spot way at the top for dreams.
I believe in dreaming, no matter how lonely and vulnerable it makes me feel. This can certainly make me seem like a fool. Dreamers are always made to feel a fool. To be honest enough to say, out loud even, that I want things like love, adventure, lust, and sincerity. I want those things, knowing that I may never see half of them.
Getting a message like that last night was comforting, knowing my comrades are out there. I’m not the only one who is itching to pull out of this routine, this prison caged heat.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
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. © Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
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 […]
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 […]
Both the probing questions and the ever-increasing interest in my single life, from well-meaning friends, can be annoying, much like newlyweds rudely being asked, over and over, when they are having a baby. The annoyance is that, in coming from so many directions, it becomes compounded, and I am forced to politely grimace and listen […]
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 […]
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