Flabby Brain

I’ve been thinking more about the Joshua Bell story and why it’s so uncomfortable to be the one person standing and listening to a street performer.

During the summer there was an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where young country music star Miranda Lambert sang her #1 hit “The House That Built Me” to the people who had just received their dream house, mortgage-free. It’s a sentimental song, but she sings it with genuine emotion, and it’s a song that, if it catches you in the right mood, will leave you weeping.* These people sat on a couch watching her play the guitar and sing. They looked absolutely miserable. They had wept when they saw the house, wept again as they walked around it, but now they sat dry-eyed and looking like they couldn’t wait for the moment to end.

It was sooo uncomfortable. And I think I know why.

Art conveys emotion to its audience. When that art is something static, like a painting, we can absorb the feeling without self-consciousness. We know that it moves us, and we enjoy the experience because we have no expectations that the painting is watching us watching it or that the artist is nearby waiting for our reaction.

Performance art is different. When it’s you one-on-one with the performer, it feels like all of the emotion is directed at you alone. It feels personal, and that’s an intimacy that’s too intense to handle most of the time. You become self-conscious that the performer has expectations about a reaction from you, and you start to worry that you’re not conveying the correct one. That self-consciousness takes you out of the moment. I think we need a co-audience to deflect some of the emotion so that we can actually appreciate performance art.

I think if you re-did the Joshua Bell experiment and planted a small crowd in front of him you’d see a completely different reaction from passersby. I’m curious what y’all think.

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*This song always catches me in the right mood. It’s embarrassing, actually.

Mom sent a corrected copy of my Texas map drawn from memory in the Story Time post. Classic!

It’s raining and the kids are watching The Sound of Music, so I’m going to amuse myself by telling you a story about my plane trip from Seattle to Austin.

I found a journal that I was intending to use for story writing. Instead I will illustrate this story with the journal.

*ahem*

“Why I Hate Flying” by Lynn

The Big M and I told the kids during our 3,245-mile drive on the family vacation that we were driving in part so that they would appreciate the convenience of flying.

On our trip to Seattle, The Big M and I reminisce about the easy times we had driving cross-country with children compared to the misery of being stuck in the airport and then stuck on an airplane.

I take the middle seat. The Big M heroically crosses his arms so as not to intrude on my space, but airplane seats are not made wide enough for his shoulders no matter how much he scrunches them. Meanwhile, a 50-something-year-old man takes the aisle seat.

Stranger makes no such heroic efforts to stay out of my personal space, instead hogging the armrest and pushing his leg against mine.

I elect not to talk to him about this because a) there’s not really much he can do about it because he is big and b) whenever I talk to strangers on planes it usually ends badly.

For one thing, once I get talking to someone, they start to think they are now friendly enough with me to invade my personal space even more than the cramped quarters of an airplane require. And I don’t appreciate when a stranger uses me as a body pillow.

My strategy of ignoring the stranger prevents this scenario. When he falls asleep I am not the pillow.

Meanwhile, I am becoming aware of the small child seated directly behind me.

Her mother’s tone of voice immediately makes it clear that the child will be an ongoing problem on this flight. This is one of those mothers who mollifies, who gives in to the child’s demands, thereby ensuring that the demands will continue.

I think of my own mother, who had little tolerance for noise when I was small and who has even less tolerance now. Her response would be to get up, turn around, and give that mother a talking to about keeping her child quiet.

And she has a point.

But I think about it a little bit and realize that this woman’s voice shows a complete lack of confidence in her parenting. No 30-second lecture is going to fix that. If anything, she’ll likely be less confident going forward seeing as how complete strangers yell at her about her lousy parenting skills.

And, really, who am I to lecture anyway?

My kids are good on planes, but maybe that’s a personality thing that resides outside of my active participation.

Anyway, that’s my elaborate rationalization for not turning around and causing a bigger fuss (I say bigger because the fuss is already there), but I feel better.

Aside from the considerable discomfort, flying is all right. You get a different perspective than you do on the ground.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve gradually changed from an oblivious flier to an interested flier to an irritable flier to, finally, an irritably nervous flier.

What if that cute little bird gets sucked into an engine? We all know Sully retired. He’s not flying this thing. Besides, we’re not over the East River — he’d have to put it down on I-35 or in a field or something.

What would happen to my kids if this thing crashes?

Sometimes an active imagination is a problem.

I’m doing my best not to hyperventilate, and to ignore the fact that the intermittent screams of the child behind me are now being punctuated by the steady rhythm of her kicking feet. Her mother gets up to take the screaming sibling to the bathroom and a little fantasy plays through my mind…

I don’t act on it because it would be cruel to scar this kid for life just for annoying me for three hours straight.

But I do think about it.

Meanwhile, Stranger continues to hog armrest and legroom as he sleeps.

And these combinations are why I end up spending $12 the moment the drink cart rolls by.

Alcohol dulls both my sense of hearing and my sense of giving a crap.

I really do want to charge it to the mother behind me.

After 3 1/2 hours we begin our approach into Austin. Stranger leans over to me.

It’s not all that green because it’s summer. And the water is a pathetic little detention pond. The Big M jumps in with a response.

The Big M is a native of Iowa, so he doesn’t realize that Stranger isn’t noting our increased rainfall over last year. I’m a central Texas native, and since my childhood I’ve encountered people like Stranger all over the place, people who’ve only seen Hollywood’s version of Texas (filmed in Arizona). I had a lively conversation a few years ago with some New Yorkers who wouldn’t believe I don’t ride a horse down the streets of my city.

I suspect that Stranger had envisioned this:

And the next words out of his mouth prove my suspicions right.

I answer patiently.

I was thinking of El Paso. When I pick up my children from her house, my mother will inform me that El Paso is actually 600 miles west of Austin.

I drew this map from memory. I think all Texas schoolchildren should be required to be able to draw from memory a passable map of Texas and its major cities before graduating.

I’m probably off on the precise location of a few of these cities, and this map is of questionable quality. The irony that I would probably fail my own test is not lost on me.

Nonetheless, the desert is a good deal west of Austin.

Stranger seems suspicious of my answer.

He is not the first out-of-stater to ask me that.

And it’s true. I say y’all, but I don’t drawl.

Clearly, he’s struggling to understand.

To which he responds:

*sigh*

He seems to understand.

I don’t mind playing ambassador now that we’re on the ground.

To which my brilliant interlocutor responds:

And that’s pretty much how it goes until we get off the plane.

THE END

The Big M and I had a lovely anniversary trip to Seattle. He may be the gambler on a hot streak lately, but most of the time I feel like the lucky one.

Feel free to roll your eyes.

Sunday, what was supposed to have been U2 day, we drove down to Mount St. Helens. This May marked the 30th anniversary of the explosion. I was in kindergarten when it happened, and I remember knowing that it was a big deal. They rolled a TV on a cart from the A/V room and set it up in the hallway outside my classroom so we could watch news coverage on the eruption. I remember it looked like a lunar landscape, although I probably wouldn’t have thought of it that way at the time. Everything was gray and dead-looking.

Later my Aunt Carolyn, the world traveler, would bring me a little vial marked “Mount St. Helens” filled with gray volcanic ash, and I kept it in my room for years.

Today you can see the ash along either side of Coldwater Creek. We got this shot from the deck of one of the visitor centers:

Coldwater Creek dumps into Coldwater Lake, a new lake created after the eruption:

I took their word that the lake was comprised of cold water. It was June 20th, and 49 degrees out. And raining. I wasn’t about to touch that water.

Sometimes as we walked we could see the debris of trees that were swept downhill in the explosion. On the hillside you can still see hundreds of standing stumps.

Here are my attempts at arty shots of the lake:

Any of you who are good at PhotoShop, please feel free to do whatever it is one does to make shots like these look awesome. ‘Cause I don’t know how to do it.

As we drove toward the final visitor center, the one that gets you five miles from Mount St. Helens, we seemed to ascend into the cloud canopy.

By the time we pulled into the parking lot, it was looking a bit ominous:

Not ominous in the “we’re about to be struck by lightning” sense, but more in the “are we going to get to see this mountain, or what?” sense.

We approached the Visitor Center:

We went inside and listened to Ranger Nik (seriously) tell us about the crater and how the mountain is regenerating itself. It could look whole again in 200 years. Maybe less.

By the way, it’s actually a volcano. We were going to see a volcano!

Then we went into the massive movie theater (massive for a visitors’ center, anyway) and watched a movie on the 1980 eruption and the activity since then. At the end, the giant screen rose to reveal the wall of windows beyond and the much-anticipated view of Mount St. Helens. Which was this:

Everybody laughed.

We went out and took pictures of the whiteness. I decided to believe the volcano was out there. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through, building all this stuff, just to prank some visitors. So yeah, it’s there.

But I still have never seen an actual volcano.

When we got home and our boy asked what the volcano looked like, his father told him to close his eyes. Then The Big M walked him over until his little nose was about six inches from a white wall and told him to open his eyes.

“That’s what it looked like.”

We still had a good time at the national park. On our way back down, we went into a visitor center put together by Weyerhauser, the lumber company that reclaimed most of the fallen trees and planted thousands of new ones. One of the exhibits was a room where you could touch various wood, rock, and animal specimens from around Mount St. Helens.

That’s when I spotted the animal pelt file:

It is a literal file of animal pelts. I found this extremely funny. I like that it’s even alphabetized. I don’t think I’ll ever see something like it again.

It was a good trip.

I apologize for being so erratic in posting this month. I haven’t felt like I have much to say. Mostly because I haven’t been doing my brain exercises.

I’m reading a lot of novels.

School is wrapping up, and I’ve been finalizing summer plans. I like to have plans. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t.

Take for example, our anniversary plan. The Big M knows I love U2, so he said I could pick a city in the U.S. that they were playing and we would go there for a trip. I picked Seattle. We’ve never been there, and summer seems like a good time to hit the Pacific Northwest.

Listening to U2 makes me feel like I’m 17 again. But I’m not 17 anymore, and Bono is not 31 anymore. And the trouble with buying nonrefundable plane tickets to a city across the country to see aging rock stars is that sometimes age catches up with them. Bono’s emergency back surgery in Germany this week caused U2 to cancel their entire U.S. tour this year.

So that’s a bummer for me and for him, and for the 400+ staff who are now out of work for the summer. But I had been a little sad about not being able to visit Mt. Ranier National Park, and now it turns out we’ll have time to do that. The door closed and a window opened, it seems.

Not that I’m not mourning the loss of my chance to finally see U2 after 18 years of trying. But still. Gotta keep perspective.

Speaking of which, I got to see baby David today, and he looks wonderful. He will have scars, but his beautiful little face is unscathed. He toddles around and babbles like the little 12-month-old dude he is, and I’m just so grateful to see him looking healthy and smiling.

So I guess I’m pretty happy this afternoon. Have a good weekend.

I checked out some books on tape from the library to try out the concept of listening to family-friendly stories in the car while on road trips. Garrison Keillor told a story of an elderly couple in Lake Wobegon whose arguments over spending money to travel followed a specific form. The argument would leave them satisfied at the end, like playing a Chopin etude.

“Why is that funny?” my son asked.

“It’s a grown-up thing.”

“It doesn’t even make any sense.” His voice was rising in pitch the way it does when he’s getting annoyed.

“This is what my parents used to play on road trips when I was a kid.”

“Well I hope you’ll put in a DVD for us while you’re playing that!”

The kid makes me laugh more than Garrison Keillor. But now I need to figure out something else to check out.

Here’s the ad copy:

JANE: I simply can’t stay late tonight to retype those letters, Boss! I’ve got to hurry right over to the Blood Bank to donate blood!

BOSS: I know, I know. But look at these carbon copies! Fuzzier than an English sheep dog’s eyebrows!

JANE: Well, don’t pin that on me! If you’d buy the right kind of carbon paper, that wouldn’t happen! Like this Roytype Park Avenue Carbon Paper I just borrowed. I’ll type with it now — just to show you the difference…

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It goes on from there, but I won’t torture you. Suffice to say, Boss orders some Roytype Park Avenue Carbon Paper and — as a bonus — some Roytype Ribbons, while Jane goes to the Blood Bank. Good times.

1) What is the boss asking her to do?

and

2) What is this scene advertising?