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
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
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
Without question, the body part that grabs my attention, that imprints itself on my mind, second only to the eyes, is the hand.
I can picture perfectly the hands of both of my grandmothers, my sisters and brother, my mother and father, even all the dear friends and lovers I’ve had.
These hands belong to the man who repairs my shoes. I took this photo without his permission—believing he’d refuse to let me take photos of his hands—just yesterday afternoon. He is old and thin and frail; but his hands are like another part of him, endlessly working without complaint, or thought of vanity or age.
The first time I saw his hands they were stained from shoe polish, and bled brown and black lines of oily dye in every direction, like a map of wild rivers and streams.
I wish I had a photo of my Gram’s hands. I’d like to see those dark veins pop again against her soft, olive skin, her flat nail beds and wide liver spots. I could look at it and imagine how my own skin will soften and spot many years from now; and how my hands will tell my story one day, maybe more honestly than words will.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
Last summer we were playing a game; it was my brother’s idea. He said,
“If I was a country, what country would I be? For instance, Ingrid would be Cuba.”
(And all this time I thought no one had noticed.) England and France were the most highly desirable nations by my siblings, for reasons unknown to me. Then my mom spoke.
“No. If Ingrid was a country she would be Greece.”
Immediately hot, blinded by insult, I replied,
“What the shit, Mom? What are you trying to say? That I’m bad with money??”
My mom is the picture of an enigma. She can make a comment that makes me half-crazy, and then I realize that maybe it is I who is the fool for taking a riddler so seriously. Once, she accused me half-heartedly of being a gold-digger. Now this blew me away, and I had to remind her that,
“Mom, I have never even had a boyfriend with a car, let alone a bank account. I am the WORST gold-digger of all time, a failure.”
She laughed in a way as to suggest that she knew otherwise. I was left shaking my head and further aging the vertical wrinkle that runs between my eyebrows, the wrinkle of confusion from anti-logic.
She does make up for her mystery by being a really good sport. She may be the only person who would ever laugh at an unfunny joke of mine, in which I roll my eyes and say, “The Treaty of Versailles made me do it.” She thought that one was great. And when I told her I was getting divorced she shook her own head and said, “Heidi Klum? Johnny Depp? And now you? What is going on in the world?!”
Mom
She never makes demands or has any expectations for me to fulfill. This is obviously a two-way street because she never pushed me to “be” something. In fact, there was an incident when I was 18 where, at a dinner-party, a Columbian intellectual friend of my Uncle’s was angrily telling me I HAD to go to college; not being able to defend myself against this South American, my mom glided silently in front of me, with her big hair, and told him very intensely that, “Ingrid… can DO whatever she wants. If she doesn’t WANT to go to college then that is HER choice.” I never saw my mom step up and defend me, or anyone else really, so it threw me off; and also, I mean, when the hell has any white middle-class mother of four encouraged one of her children to “do whatever they wanted?”
The flip-side of such a riddle is that now, at 36, I watch my friends and their careers age and mature, whereas I am still scraping around looking for part-time gigs, ones that will pay all the bills and leave me with enough money to buy expensive cheese I never tried before. I suppose the truth is that I would have liked to, by this point in my life, be able to look at the $20 wines, not still the $10 bottles.
Today I filled out a job application, the first one in 12 years. I have been working part-time from home for a long time now and it has been great, but it doesn’t add up without a second income in my house; so when my friend asked if I was interested in becoming a simulated patient at a nearby medical college, I said yes.
My mom, and even my brother, think this will be great for me; a perfect fit. My brother agreed with me that it was somewhere in-between selling my blood and poor acting, but he believed it was more respectable than being a nude model (that just sounds cold.) But this, this could maybe get me out of the house and back into the world, out of the stay-at-home-work, stay-at-home-mom trap I’ve been in.
Once I’m coasting and feeling a little more secure, once I’m a few months into a new gig and a few more months making it as a single mother, maybe then I’ll hear the riddles differently. Maybe I’ll hear an ancient compliment from my mom when she compares me to Greece; and thank her for expecting absolutely nothing from me, for giving me the grand gift of total freedom of thought.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
That’s me and Rocky and this is our film.
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
Do you ever make a wish? I do.
I make them, usually the same single wish, while looking up at the moon and staring at the stars. I even dare ask the dead for help with this one favor when I visit the cemetery. Well, two nights back I made my wish again on a falling star, while looking up at zillions of blinking stars with zero light pollution to block my celestial view, and it was then that I understood my wish had already come true.
Part two begins.
Wishing is terribly seductive. Isn’t it?
© Mad Question Asking – 2013 All Rights Reserved
I’m not gonna lie, I was bummed I didn’t get the three-volume set of Van Gogh’s letters for Xmas. I knew my chances were slim. I mean, I am 36 years old and it was a little pathetic I sent a text to my brother of a short list of things I wanted. He did get me the nice hose reel I asked for and my sister got me the turtlenecks I needed. I just wanted to read those wild letters for a little while tonight.
The kids went to their dads this afternoon and the truth is this Xmas was better than the last. I knew my marriage was soon ending last year and even though my kids woke up to just me today, it was nice. It was peaceful. I wasn’t full of shit this year, living a life somebody else said was right.
I made the mistake of announcing I’d be seeing The Hobbit by myself tonight and my family didn’t like it, well, except my mom. She said I’d be doing plenty of things alone and I was fine. She was right, but my brother said he’d see it with me this week. So, after dinner I took an open bottle of red wine from my mom, drove home and resolved to start cleaning up my desk, a task I’ve been avoiding for too long.
I just threw out the clutter of decades of things like zip discs, ancient iMac discs, cords I do not know what they are for and I came across a disc of these vintage photos. They are of my family from Norway. They are beautiful. Thick suffragettes (my great-grandmother Borghild, also in the photo with the blessed cow, and her cousin fighting for women’s rights) in the 20s, my grandfather leaning on the tire of a truck while in the Nat’l Gaurd in 1948, my aunt with her piercing blue eyes at 15 in 1965 on her confirmation day, my mom as a baby with a pipe, even one of my great-great grandmother with a scarf on her head and my very favorite, my grandfathers whom I never met, play fighting in the road.
I like looking into the past. I like thinking about the future. It helps smooth out the steady adjustments that are being alive in the present, and all the questions I can’t answer.
© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved
Yesterday I dropped off 30 gallons of water and 30 rolls of toilet paper to the people who live in tent city, the homeless encampment in Camden, NJ. My kids were with me, in part because this errand was taking place just before I dropped them off at their dad’s house and the other part of it was because I wanted them to see how homeless people live.
I pulled up on the curb and gave a big double honk. The girls strained their necks to look in, towards the camp. I told them to stay put and I hopped out of my truck. Two people walked towards me, one with a ski mask on and the other with a scarf covering most of her face. They both looked so cold.
As they lifted the water out, I asked what they needed. The woman with the scarf said they needed chopped wood badly. I would guess so, they live outside. Then I asked what they wanted. She said tobacco. To this I smiled because I do not smoke, but boy do I miss smoking cigarettes, even eight years since my last one.
We pulled away, this errand taking a full 20 minutes and $45 out of my day. The girls asked questions and both shook their heads, exclaiming that they hoped to never be homeless.
My mom told me she wanted to give to a children’s charity in Camden. Having just visited tent city I asked her to buy a cord or two of chopped wood for the homeless there and she kind of hesitated because she wanted to give to children. I reminded her that those homeless adults were kids once. They were somebody’s baby and child once! Well, to that she said she’d do it.
My friend Jude told me last night that I had the heart of a child because I won’t give up on love or hope. I thought that was a really beautiful sentiment. I think we all have the heart of a child. I think we all were a beautiful baby once! All that sweetness gets covered and worn by time, the grime of a dirty highway, bad breaks, heart breaks and mistakes, and hardens us over, some of us more than others. I believe there is a kindness in all of our hearts, a hope for peace.
I can’t change any of the stories that make my heart break, personal or not, but I can help out some fellow human beings that are living outdoors, not five miles from me, each and every one of them somebody’s baby once.
If you live in the Camden area, and have coats or blankets, or mini stoves, tobacco, water… anything you might think you’d want if you ever found yourself living outdoors, just pull up in front and honk. Don’t be afraid of the homeless.
Peace. And Love. And Hope. For everyone.
© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved
My friend Liz sent me this photo today of 1930s teen delinquents. I love it!
I have spent the last few weeks thinking I may take up pipe smoking and this photo only encourages this idea. (I could easily be a lady with a pipe, no?) I have also spent the last few weeks mesmerized by the bold lyrics in Rihanna’s song Cockiness (Love It). I think every one of these vintage little troublemakers would have loved this song, too. Especially the first line, “Suck my cockiness.”
© Mad Question Asking – 2012 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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