"Talkin' 'Bout My Degeneration"

Today's Lake Superior Name: Light Blaster.
I'm catching the bus home in three hours, so this is my last morning having coffee at the Duluth co-op. On the way here, I filmed my third little (38 seconds) video.

Marz surprised me by being enthusiastic about my idea of making videos about getting older: "You should make a channel on YouTube". Though it makes some sense--that's the only social media she loves.

Maybe--probably--other people have used "Talkin' 'Bout My Degeneration". I'm not going to dig deep into what other people are posting about aging, though. I know myself: it will frighten me off to see other people doing the same thing--or even not doing the same thing.
If I go ahead with this, I'm going to close my eyes and jump.

I get the sense there's a lot of polarization:
Defy aging! vs. Celebrate aging!
If I had to choose, I'd choose the 'celebrate aging' folks--but, they look so chic. Like Jamie Lee Curtis or the new breed of models with long silver hair.
They don't look like me.
Or they're going sky diving. Looks like marketing.
"Sixty is the new forty."
No, it's not.

Aging is not just a state of mind. I mean, that's part of it and hooray for that. Stay Sproingy!
It's also a biological process, and I'm interested in that. What are my cells doing? Not what they were doing at forty.
Call me Aging Curious.

I'll post my little videos here for a while, where I'm comfortable, readership is low, and hardly anyone I know here in town visits (so I feel less immediately vulnerable). (Hi, bink! You're the exception.)

Me, Being Old(ish), 2

My second unvarnished video (42 seconds) of Being Old. 

Jeez, video is so much more exposing than photos. I don’t enjoy being visible that way, but I want to explore for myself and share what aging is like (for this woman), so I’m going to try this form.

(Unvarnished, unedited, and also entirely made-up on the spot. My hair does need washing today! But my point stands.)

Big Gulps

Drinking coffee at the Duluth co-op again this morning. Going back home tomorrow.
Lake report: It hurts my eyes to look at the bright horizon--the water is playing light ping-pong with the clouds.

Today Marz and I are making chicken potato soup for her upcoming week––with black potatoes from the farmer's market (below). The potatoes are purple inside.

____________

I complimented a woman at the farmer's market on her T-shirt--a cute elf--she showed it to me on her phone case too:

Her father invented this folding saw (to take camping), the Sven-Saw, in 1961. This is her mother using it:

How cool is that?
So cool it's in the running for Coolest Thing Made in Minnesota. It's up against Faribault Mill and their famous blankets, so I doubt it'll win, but I voted for it.

It's like that here, the Outdoors People, the Acoustic Music scene, classes on making syrup from birch trees...

There are also the Big Gulpers.

Marz pointed out that many of the people signing for money or nodding out in vacant lots near her apartment are carrying Big Gulps. You know those? They're 32-ounce plastic cups of pop or slurpees or whatever-sugar liquid. You buy them at quick-mart gas stations.

The Big Gulp is a famous cultural turning point from 1976 (the Bicentennial Year):gulpmportant

"Until 1955, a bottle of Coca-Cola was a mere 6.5 ounces. The Big Gulp represents a point where something changed in a radical way—how much soda we were serving. American drink sizes have been so huge for so long that nearly nobody can recall a time when restraint was the rule."
--Adweek

A song came across my Instagram feed recently--a slim, young, white man singing, "It's your own fault you're fat." (Thank you, Instagram?)

Though it seems he intended it as an insult (I didn't listen to much of it), that could be encouraging: YOU HAVE AGENCY! It's your body!
But either way, it's pure ignorance to proclaim that what and how we eat is purely a private matter.

I doubt this young man is subject to the cravings or hardships of, for instance, people living on the street with addictions.

"There is an underlying connection between addictive behaviors and sugar intake. Sugar can affect the brain in similar ways as alcohol or drugs, giving the user temporary and superficial relief and can be chemically addictive itself."
--"Why Do Addicts Crave Sugar?"

 I first learned about this from where I learn so much: the movies.
Taxi Driver, for instance (1976, another thing from the Bicentennial Year.) Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes the young street hooker Iris (Jody Foster) to a diner, and she pours sugar on her toast and jelly.

I'm pretty sure there's a similar scene in Mona Lisa (1986), with another teenage hooker-junkie girl and a would-be rescuer.
I haven't seen that since it comes out. I see now it's a Criterion movie. I should rewatch it. It's research! "Where did I learn about the connection between drugs and sugar?"

Also research--I'm going to stop in the Speedway gas station between here and Marz's and check on Big Gulps. How much do they cost? (Not much, I think.)

Then, time to make chicken soup.
Have a lovely Sunday, all!

The Lift Scene ("Name that Movie")

No one here has yet correctly guessed the movie scene recreated by Low & Pearl in Chester Creek, Duluth.

 

Above, left is the original.

Know it?

*
*
*
*
Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey practice lifts in the lake, Dirty Dancing (1987).

Me being older, unadorned

Hm. I’ve never posted a video of myself here. But I was so inspired by  Barbara Scully, an older Irish journalist, posting herself talking without make-up or flattering lighting that, wanting to see more older women talking, I thought I could try it myself. (Oh, and Carol Kane performing a coming-of-age ritual at 73 in Between the Temples inspired me too.) Be the change you want to see, right? So, here’s a 49-second video of me sitting in Marz’s apartment this evening, giving it a try. Absolutely off the cuff…

 

Name That Movie

 Recognize this scene? (Added note: In the movie they are in a lake.)

"What if I want to stay...?"

I. Gray Lady is a siren.

Last night Marz said, "I'm worried I'll want to stay here forever, and then what will I do for work? Maybe I should go into wildlife management..."

BELOW: this morning in Duluth, 7:15 a.m. I'm sitting at the nearby food co-op with my laptop, looking over the lake, drinking coffee. Marz is home asleep.
(Behind the tree tops is water, the top is sky.)

When I first came here years ago, I thought this co-op seating area would always be full because––what a view! But Duluth is built between the lakeshore and the hill rising above it--everywhere you go, this is the view.

For whole hours at a time, the lake looks the same, but often it's a shimmering light show. Or you can't see it at all, covered in fog.
Marz's coworker told her the lake is called the Gray Lady.

Fog City! Last time I visited, the liquor store's broken OPEN sign framed blue sky.

Marz moved here three weeks ago.
In a classic––but not guaranteed–– trajectory, she went from "I'm not going" to I'm never leaving.
(Granted, it's been three weeks of perfect weather; Marz says she'll see how she feels in the winter.)

I get it. I looked into moving here a few years ago, but couldn't leave home.

There's the pull of the lake, but not only the lake--the architecture changes on every block, from crummy shack to Victorian vaudeville theater. Much of it rundown. Much of the city is run down (or worse), but ripe for redevelopment--for climate refugees and people who want to stay.

II. Strike the rock, and water will come forth.

I went yesterday to the downtown alt-movie theater, the Zinema in the Zeitgeist Arts building (above) to see Between the Temples (2024, dir. Nathan Silver).

Between the Temples is a story about how refreshment may come to diminished lives from unexpected sources.
A middle-aged Jewish cantor, Ben (Jason Schwarzman) can not sing since his wife died a year ago.
Enter his grade school music teacher, Carla (Carol Kane), widowed and retired. After an unexpected meeting, she asks him to prepare her for the bat mitzvah she, a red diaper baby, never got.

It's somewhat like Harold and Maude, a movie that was important to me when I was young. As I get older though, I think far less of Maude's story arc. It seems thought up by someone with an immature psychological understanding--someone like Harold, bless him. 

Between the Temple's resolution for Carla (with or without Ben) is a mature insight:
you can come of age at any age.
_____________________

I think of Auntie Vi telling me that her life really started in her seventies: "All my life I took care of other people. Finally I was living my own life."

When I talk about realizing I may have only twenty-some years to live, I'm NOT complaining. It's more an experssion of ripeness.

The "complaint" part is that I need to take better care of my body. This is work. (And I'm not chuffed about pain.) I've skated by on my good genetics, but age wears on every body.
So, I've got work to do, but it's good work, after all.

As for paid work... No word from the art store or the library... But I haven't pushed either.
I had the summer off, but because I'd thought I was going back in the fall, I felt employed. Now I feel newly unemployed and, as such, that I should get a vacation. Heh.

We'll see what comes along.
What's coming along now is breakfast at Uncle Loui's [sic] cafe where I ate yesterday. I'm meeting Marz and a pal of hers who also recently moved up here [independently of Marz, but nice for her to know someone from the past].

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

Pegasus jumps the Lift Bridge

I spent the day working on a lino print of Pegasus jumping the Duluth Lift Bridge. It’s not there yet…. The lino (below) looks far better than the print. Will try again (maybe).

I got the idea from a photo I took last night of the Mobiloil neon Pegasus on Canal Park, by the bridge whose roadway goes up to let ships into the harbor.  The Pegasus is at Gramma’s Saloon, which hosts the Duluth marathon. 

In Duluth …

 … you can read a house copy of the newspaper (paper) while you eat your pancakes with scrambled eggs.

After I set the paper aside, the gent at the counter (below) came up and asked me if I was done with it.

“Take it”, I said. “It’s all good news.”

He laughed.

Haven’t had an exchange like that in many years.

Life Vacation

I. Madeline: The 'Fight Club' Edition

Jenny Baker, Penny Cooper's cousin, went to live with Emily and her little boy. Theoretically, more than enough girlettes remain, but an absence made itself felt.
I looked online.

There are always lots of "Madeline" dolls, but most are not for us. And then, THIS ONE:
obviously a member of the scrappy Duquette family, looks like she's been running her own Fight Club.

Of course she is coming here.

Life Vacation

And I am taking the bus to Duluth today, for the weekend. It's a mini Art Retreat--I'm taking my printmaking kit.
I have ideas ("The Escape"), but I'm open to inspiration from the place itself. I don't see myself making prints of nature, but it might show up... Who knows?

I took this photo, below, last time I was in Duluth (ten days ago). It's soon to go again, but the weather is perfect and I am unemployed...
= I'm on Life Vacation!

It's different being older, isn't it?
I keep feeling aware that I only have about twenty more years to live, more or less. Twenty-three, if I live to eighty-six like my father.

If I were to live as long as my mother, I'd have only five more years.
Though she didn't die of natural causes, dying at sixty-eight isn't really unnaturally young. "The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five". [--New Yorker, "How to Die in Good Health"] She had three--though not mentally healthy ones.

The awareness of being a relative short-timer doesn't scare or depress me, it's . . . maybe an impetus? A prioritizer? It's not very much time to create a Body of Work of printed ephemera.
I must get on it!

This woman, Barbara Scully, turned up on my Instagram feed. Scullly is a journalist in Dublin, Ireland, born in 1962, a year after me, and author of Wise Up: Power, Wisdom, and the Older Woman (2022).

She's unkown to me, but I instantly loved seeing her face and gray hair on IG, which is full of people with real bodies, but almost all young.
She talks about stuff like, what kind of funeral do you want?

Speaking of getting on it, I must pack. Printmaking supplies!

I miss you, Auntie Vi

Speaking of do-ers, Auntie Vi, a champion of doing, died three years ago, today, shortly after her 96th birthday. I think of her often. bink took this photo of Vi and me a few years before.

"Nothing for it . . . but to do it."

It was sweet to have new friends over for their birthdays last night. ("New" = from the past coupla years.)
Becky'd been here before (she helped me move two Julys ago), but Em hadn't, and the thing she seemed to like the best was this gouache on my fridge. It's one of my favorites too, so I'll post it again:
"Spike in New Mexico: Nothing for it . . . but to do it."

Good advice in job hunting season.
This morning I checked to see if that job I'd wanted at the History Center was still open--part-time in their book & gift store.
Of course it wasn't, but I'm going to apply to places I WANT to work, not just wait for openings.

I think I'll take the bus up to Duluth again later this week. The weather forecast is perfect: mid-70s, partly sunny every day. (Duluth is usually colder than the Twin Cities. Here, we'll be in the 80s.)

Marz will be busy with classes and work, but I have my own work: online job hunting, and printmaking: so portable. All I need is some lino, cutters, a brayer, black ink, and paper. I can finish "The Escape" [from the basement].
And I can go hiking right in the city.

Not today though: in half an hour, I'm going to volunteer at the thrift store.

Let's see... what else?
Oh, I watched Carnival of Souls!
(On Criterion--scroll down for essays on the film.)

It's low-budget art that works, and I liked it for that very fact alone. It was shot in three weeks for $30,000: you don't need a lot of money to make something good. (Or even a lot of skill, though the director, Herk Harvey, was an industrial & educational filmmaker, so he did have skills--only the main character was a professional actor--Candace Hilligoss, below, plays Mary).

Part of my experience of the movie was the message:
YOU CAN DO THIS TOO.
But you do have to do it. Enter the carnival!

The backstory of the film's existence is fun--the director wanted to make a film around a place-- the then-abandoned carnival-like Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah. [Wikipedia has a good article on the movie--with a link to watch the whole film free online.]

It's an odd movie--more atmosphere, organ music and lighting, than plot, but because it's all rather vague, it invites you to decide:
What is happening to this woman, Mary, after she mysteriously survives a car wreck?
The film offers a tidy solution at the end, but really--is that it?

For me, a different solution is the question a bogus doctor asks Mary: does she feel guilty?
The whole movie could be about survival guilt. Filmed in 1961 (the year I was born)--sixteen years after the end of World War II--was survival guilt a hidden stream in the national psyche? Even as it danced with a frenzy in an empty shell of a culture?

My cover letter was not written by ChatGPT.

OMG!!! Job applications are so onerous! You have to write everything ten times--in a resume, in the online form, in supplemental questions, and in a cover letter.

By the time I got to the cover letter for my application for the public library, I was punchy. Fuck it, I thought, I'm writing as a representative of the HUMANS.
________
Here's what I sent:

Dear Lovely People at XX Library,


Someone told me that I should get ChatGPT to write a cover letter for this job as a Library Customer Service Specialist, a job I very much want and am well-qualified for.  So, I just now asked the AI if it could write a cover letter for me, and (I’m sure you know this), it perkily replied that if I would gather all the necessary information, it would turn the info into sentences, like spinning gold out of straw. (It did not say that, of course.)



Thanks, I told it, but I think I will write it myself. Maybe if I make errors, it will prove that I am human.



It replied, “I get where you’re coming from! Writing a cover letter yourself can indeed add a personal touch and reflect your unique voice.”



So, let me just say, I know books, and I know people. I come from six years running the books section at XYZ Thrift Store, one mile from where the police killed George Floyd. Living through that, I became more strongly committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity.
I also believe in efficiency and attending to tasks that make everyone’s life a little easier, like keeping the copier machine full of paper.



I worked at [art college] Library for several years as well. I always said being a librarian is like being a bartender: the heart of the job is listening to patrons.


Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you for a chance to talk in person soon.

Sincerely, Fresca, Human

_____

I tell ya blog friends, I would totally hire me based on this, but every time I’ve done this sort of thing (written a quirky note), I never get an interview. 

On the other hand, I’ve applied to the public library and other county jobs the “right” way before, and I never got an interview that way either.

So what the hell. At least I enjoyed myself. 

Rearrange!

I. Bears for Friends

Volunteer Abby had said she wanted the first color-test strip of bears ( below, top strip)––to put up where she works with special ed students––but that print is so messy, I wouldn't let her have it.
I said I'd make another, and now I have.
I'm still adding eyes & trim (bottom strip):

I planned, took care, and managed to print cleanly (the carving lines are supposed to show)––and using only one jigsaw-cut block, it took half the time.
Not sure I like it better though...
That's okay: 

this was an exercise, not a passion project like The Escape will be (where they're trapped in the basement). Finishing that is next up.

I made the bear strip this weekend because Abby and Emily--both from the thrift store--are coming over tonight to celebrate their Virgo birthdays.

Em's aesthetic is more about death and dismemberment, but she has a five-year old, so maybe she'd like one of the strips too. (I printed three strips of each colorway.)
These friends are very different in style; I love that we all get along.

Enough with color, for now.
I'm not interested in decorative prints per se––I want to push myself to carve little stories. Black and white is perfect for that.
We'll see.

I've signed up for a couple one-night "sampler" classes (cheaper) at the expensive professional print studio, and bink & I signed up for a 5-Thursdays community ed class, Printing at Home. Looks like that's more about screen prints, but I could learn lots from that, I hope. It doesn't start till October 24.

II. Forward!

I chose "Forward"––the slogan of Wisconsin where I mostly grew up––as my word of the year, and promptly forgot about it. But many good changes have gone forward since then.

Almost immediately after quitting the thrift store in February, I saw I'd needed to leave more than I'd even thought. The constant cruelty, mostly the fallout of deprivation (- of everything), had badly ground me down.

After I left, my spirit popped back up, like it'd been...hm, trapped in the basement?
I love volunteering there though--it's my ground to touch. About once a week is manageable. Despite the terrible management and the desperate surroundings, there's a lot of joy in the place. People laugh a lot there.

BELOW: Roses hang from a fence in the parking lot, mourning the death of a young man shot there a few weeks ago

Some board member brought in a grief counselor for a staff presentation last week, after the murder in the parking lot. (Turns out it was, as we guessed, a drug-business execution. The shooter was caught.)

I rolled my eyes, "What about the last five years?"
Most of my coworkers told me they felt numb about this latest violence--the tipping point for most of them is long past. Even for me, a relative newbie to this.
My own crisis point had forced me to realize, I AM NOT THE SAVIOR, and that was what I needed to know, to carry on.

I hate the uppity-ups in the organization--they are that useless thing, "well-meaning". (I am being unfair—that’s just how I feel, it’s not a fact that being well-meaning = uselessness.)

The special-ed assistant job was perfect to get me up and out of that spirit grinder, and I'm proud of what I did in a short time at the school. I feel a pang when I think about some of the students (the boy who I took walks with, who taught me to identify cars by their logos on front), but mostly I feel relief to be gone. There was no joy in my coworkers. They never laughed.
And I am not the savior--I cannot save the kids from the institution.

I'm applying for a job at the public library today--I'd love that.
(No word from the art store yet.)
Mostly though, I'm learning about printmaking.

III. School Report

Learning is the best thing! However you do it.
I miss Marz less than I thought I would--because she's doing so well after two weeks of college! Of course I'd a billion times rather she be thriving elsewhere than hanging out in the city I live in.

BELOW: Sign in gutter by Marz's apartment, just up the hill from Lake Superior:  "No Dumping, Leads to Lake".
But, is that a shark?

I did not trust that Marz would take to college anymore than a shark to a great lake (too cold for sharks). She certainly didn't think she would.

She's said she's almost kinda angry to be proven wrong, that her ego pride is annoyed that clichés about university are proving true:
that it opens your mind, challenges your unknown biases;
that you are pushed to find out who you are and how you relate to others;
and, . . .  that it is hard. Ha!

She'd done some community college after high school, and it was soft. She's mostly home-schooled, and a she's terrific self-educator, but it's a truth that you cannot push yourself the same as an outside force can.
...And you can sometimes lose momentum and drift into a comfortable boredom. (I am prone to that, anyway.)

Maybe finding college a welcome slap awake is partly a matter of being an older returning student?  I went back to college around Marz's age myself, and it was a whole 'nother galaxy from my first time. (I got my BA  in Classics at 35, from the U here.) Rolling right on from high school might not have the same effect.

But also, teachers matter. Personality rules.
Marz disliked most of her classes the first day, so she switched her schedule, and she found a teacher who inspires her in a topic she's interested in:
Russian History.
(One of my favorite things Marz ever said was that The Brothers Karamazov "really picks up around page 700".)

LESSON: Don't like it? Rearrange!

And now I must rearrange my apartment—put away laundry and printmaking supplies before the birthday party tonight.

Show your works

Lino-cutting is not improv.
I am slow to accept this.
It could be imrovisational, but mostly it pays to get the drawing right before you carve it into the lino.

I'm pleased with this Get Well card now:
I re-carved the S, rightway-round, and hand-painted a white square on the Band-aid to make it recognizeable. It had looked more like. . . a rainstick, Marz said.

(I loved her interpretation––
"Great depiction of a historically significant event when dolls gave music to bearkind"––but it didn't match the words I'd carved.)

I printed ten cards. Please feel unwell--but just slightly!--or suffer a small nick (minor!) so I can send you one.

I made this one because my sister has Covid (for the third time) and requested a girlette card. On the same day, an old friend fell and hurt her head.
I don't usually send get-well cards, do you? By the time I would think to go buy one, the person is better.

What I could really use is a good sympathy card. You can send them anytime because people stay dead. Alas.

In the interview with musician Labri Siffre (posted yesterday), he worded how he felt after his husbands died with wonderful honesty. (He'd lived with two for years, in Wales, and they died within a couple years of each other.)
He was searching how to say what he still felt after the losses, and the interviewer suggested he was "processing".

No, Siffre said, "suffering".

Thank you.
___________________________
Show Sympathy...

I wouldn't use a girlette for a sympathy card. They don't die, and they aren't very sympathetic to human emotions--mine aren't, anyway.

"You just turn back to juice," they say about death, looking up from hand-polishing their rocks (their school project).
Refreshing, but maybe not what everyone wants to hear in their sadness.

The sympathy card I'd liked best after my mother's suicide--the only one whose image I remember, in fact--was a woodblock print of the full moon. It was calming, comforting in its remote, cool beauty.
Funny, that card was from the sister of an old friend, someone I barely knew, who lived far away. I love that she sent it.

Don't second-guess yourself when it comes to doing love, I'd say. ______________

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2010), by Matthew B. Crawford.

I got this book for $1.99 at the Goodwill in Two Harbors, MN, when I was visiting Marz last weekend––and Penny Cooper and Low were visiting Marz's girlette, Carrie Miller Morton, samurai. They're in the chair Marz bought at a garage sale:

I read the book's first page in the store, and I bought it because Crawford starts out by talking about how you can buy all sorts of used tools online---from the dismantling of high school shop classes (this was fourteen+ years ago).

"The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit. And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to 'hide the works'...."

I'd been shocked that there was no shop at the high school where I worked---the only students who learn to use tools are those who build theater sets or those on the robotics team. Awfully specialized. (No sewing classes either.--aside from theater costuming--and no cooking or metal- or leather work at all.)

I've said before--one thing I like about printmaking is, your work shows. Maybe not if you're incredibly accomplished and it's your aim to hide your hand, but that is never going to be me.
I do want to get better, but I'm in no danger of getting that good.

How are you, anyway?

Naturally, no doll or a bear would ever wish injury or illness on anyone – – but just in case anybody maybe isn’t feeling well or needs a Band-Aid… They are eager to be of assistance, at least in the mail. Also, they are eager for me to point out that it is I, Fresca, who spelled the S backwards.

The Trammeled

Last night I watched The Holdovers (2023). There'd been a hundred holds on the library DVD for a long time, but finally it was available everywhere.

It is so good, but I only watched it because Michael highly recommended it (twice, in his 4-sentence movie reviews). I wouldn't have otherwise because I'd hated Sideways (2004), by the same director (Alexander Payne) and actor (Paul Giamatti).  In that movie, Giamatti's character, an alcoholic, fucked up, failed writer, ends up on the porch of a warm-hearted woman, who takes him in. I related to the woman, and I wanted to yell, "DON'T TAKE HIM IN:
that line about 'love will save you' is bullshit!"

That's not the story in The Holdovers. Here, the alcoholic, fucked up, failed writer shows up for someone else.
You can almost imagine it's the same character, twenty years later––that of course the thing with the nice woman didn't work, and the man is bitter and dead inside. All the worst has come to pass and he, now a teacher at a New England boarding school, is making others pay for it.
But here, he gets a chance to be the caring one, assigned to watch a troubled student (Dominic Sessa) over Christmas break, along with the school cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), who has recently lost her only child in Vietnam. [These actors are outstanding.]
In stepping up for this kid--slowly, reluctantly--the man finally shows up for himself too.

I've seen The Holdovers advertised as a warm, Christmas comedy. Really, it's muted and melancholy. The heat has been turned off in the emptied-out boarding school, and while it's not scary, the kid in the empty hallways and dark kitchen brought to my mind the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (also about an alcoholic, fucked up, failed writer).

There is a rah-rah scene, but this is not a tearjerker like Dead Poet's Society with its warm colors and attractive people. This is a movie about the trammeled and the funny-looking people. When they say, "You can do this", you believe them.

I'm going to buy the DVD so I can be sure to have it to watch at Christmas.

This is the song played in full over the credits of The Holdovers:
"Crying Laughing Loving Lying", by English singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, 1972.

. 

Interview with Siffre in The Guardian, 2022:
"‘I had the perfect life – then both my husbands died’: singer Labi Siffre on love, loss – and happiness".

Floating, Steering

 I'd been so disgusted when I'd returned for the new school year on Thursday, I'd taken Friday off and gone to Duluth to visit Marz over the Labor Day weekend.
I came home, 

and the next morning I quit my job.

Lake Superior
Me

_______________

Marz & Friends at the Duluth Farmer's Market

I'd helped Marz arrange her apartment, below. She'd moved in the night before classes started, and she was still living out of boxes.

We went to a garage sale, and she got the comfy chair ^ and the flag of India in the window. The circle on the flag is the Ashoka Chakra, as you may know--the wheel of dharma.
"The chakra shows that there is life in movement and death in stagnation."

 

So, there ya go.
Did that--life in movement--inspire me to quit my job?
Maybe? Mostly though, I just could not bring myself to get on my bike and go to the first day of school yesterday. I tried to positive-talk myself into it, by my self was not buying it. I tried to lure myself––by waving money––but I would not take the bait.

The idea that one's soul has signed up for The Earth Challenge doesn't mean we have to stay where we land.
On the contrary.
Our soul got legs; we can move!

(Tracy wrote me: "Life seems to be a tricky balance of floating and steering, and we're doing our best to figure out which to do when.")

One example sums up my dislike of the school:
They lock the doors from the inside.

"For safety," it is said.
Uh-huh.
It is a prison.

Krista commented that K-12 schooling aims to produces docile bodies. I hadn't heard the term, but it's perfect for what I saw.
It's from Foucault.

"Docile bodies refer to individuals who have been subjected to various techniques of discipline and control, resulting in their submission to authority.
Ultimately, Foucault invites us to critically examine power dynamics in society and to actively engage in the pursuit of freedom and self-determination."
--from Easy Sociology.

 

 Easy Translation: Get a different job.

I emailed Admin and a dozen of my coworkers:

"Sorry to be so very last minute about it, but I am not returning to be an SEA-ASD [special ed assistant–autism spectrum disorder].
I love the kids, but high school? Not so much.

Best of luck to you all, and thank you for any kindnesses you have shown me--they meant a lot."

Admin wrote back a sour note, "If you don't give two weeks notice, you can't work for the school district."

I do not want to work for the school district.
"Thanks, understood. Go ahead and process my separation papers."

One coworker wrote back. 
"We will miss you. You had a great impact on our kids and the team. Good luck in your next adventure."

Otherwise, crickets. It was the most disengaged workplace I've ever been in. Pod bodies?
It's not like I dropped them in it by leaving so abruptly. Three assistants (and a teacher) remain . . . for six ASD students. (The ratio has to do with federal mandates, I think. Meanwhile the city is reducing the music program because of budget cuts.)
Another reason I didn't like the job--I didn't feel needed, usually. Because I wasn't. Not that I didn't give and receive Good with the students.

Will I miss the students?
Honestly, not really. They were lovely, I'm grateful I got to know them, but 3.5 months in that setting with them was enough. If I had to work in the schools, I would want to be a teacher--they can set the tone in the classroom. But teaching was never my vocation.

What now?
I have no plan--except the plan I already had to make lino-prints, watch Criterion movies, and read The Economist.
Luckily I have savings (thank you, dead ancestors), so it's not an emergency.

This morning I'm applying for a part-time job at an art store--that'd be great. And then I'm returning keys and ID badge to the school.

All done.