Tag: quotes

Good point.

From Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert

“And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I–as a beneficiary of that exact formula–will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives–instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”–be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?”

A poem.

Laundry
George Bilgere
from The Good Kiss
The University of Akron Press, 2002.

My mother stands in this black
And white arrangement of shadows
In the sunny backyard of her marriage,
Struggling to pin the white ghosts
Of her family on the line.
I watch from my blanket on the grass
As my mother’s blouses lift and billow,
Bursting with the day.
My father’s white work shirts
Wave their empty sleeves at me,
And my own little shirts and pants
Flap and exult like flags
In the immaculate light.

It is mid-century, and the future lies
Just beyond the white borders
Of this snapshot; soon that wind
Will get the better of her
And her marriage.
Soon the future I live in will break
Through those borders and make
A photograph of her-but

For now the shirts and blouses
Are joyous with her in the yard
As she stands with a wooden clothespin
In her mouth, struggling to keep
The bed sheets from blowing away.

This was the featured poem in The Writer’s Almanac, which is a happy part of my day. It could be a happy part of your day too; if you subscribe, they will send it by email every day. Anyway, one of the reasons I enjoy hanging laundry out to dry is that I feel a connection to the millions upon billions of women who have been hanging laundry to dry both in the past and today. I don’t get that so much with the dryer.

Good advice.

Charles Veley is some rich dot-com guy that travels all the time. He is featured on www.mosttraveledpeople.com. I read an interview with him in the Oregonian and was struck by the genus of the answer to this question.

Q: Do you plan ahead or wing it?

A: Plan as if you need to schedule every waking minute, and then, once you get there, set aside the plan. By doing all the planning as if you had control over all aspects of your trip (which you do not) you’ll have enough knowledge to make good decisions when things start going haywire (which they will.)

I’ve never minutely planned everything, or even very much, for a trip because I didn’t want to turn into the anal, planned-every-minute girl. But because I don’t plan every minute, I often have no idea of what I could be doing while on the trip. This seems a great combination. Go Charles Veley. I guess dot-com millionaires are good for something after all.