Voiceless

Since I so rarely get sick, I'm not very good at it. I usually get two colds a year. My fall cold didn't seem too bad at first. My usual symptoms (sore throat, plugged-up ears, low fever, constantly hacking my brains out) were blessedly absent. I had a husky voice for a couple of days. It was kind of fun in a way sounding like I'd been out partying all night.

Last Saturday evening, Paul & I went to an Oberlin Alumni Potluck in Cleveland Heights. This was the second one I've been to, and I always enjoy the conversations with articulate, like-minded people. We had met a few of the people last time, including our hosts, who happened to live in the house next door to the house I had shared with 3 roommates over 20 years ago.

We met one 50-something woman in a beautiful bohemian-looking blouse who used to work at Delphic Books in Coventry. She introduced us to her companion, a man of about the same age. He was very pleasant, so when we got plates of food, we sat near him.

Well, he just started venting about illegal immigrants, lazy welfare moochers, etc. Now keep in mind that by now I had only about half my voice left, and the room was very loud. I really had to think about whatever I said, since I had to save my voice and I couldn't project. I could see his point of view, but it was really off-putting how sneering and contemptuous he was of other human beings. I made non-committal comments, but he wasn't interested in hearing my point of view.

It was weird that by his age, he hadn't yet learned that it's not the best idea to vent about politics with people you don't know--what made him think I agreed with him? Couldn't he see by my body language that I was trying to disengage from the conversation? He was absolutely clueless. Then he started dissing Ohio as a place to live. I said, "Well, I'm happy here and I chose to live here." You'd think he would get a hint.

When I mentioned an article I had read in the New York Times to support my thesis that if we got rid of illegal immigrants, Americans don't want to/don't have the physical stamina to work those migrant farm worker jobs he started dissing my NYT. That was it. I said, " I don't agree with you, and I'm ending this conversation," got up, and went to the other room.

I don't like to think of myself as someone who refuses to talk about politics with someone I don't agree with. I think it was his tone that got me. And his assumption that I would be on his side. Really, dude? At an Oberlin function in Cleveland Heights? I really wonder what Ms. Delphic Books sees in him.

I proceeded to talk for three more hours (with other people), which was a blast, but by the end of the evening, my voice was gone and I've been totally mute ever since. It gets me thinking about people who really don't have a voice. Maybe next time, I will take the risk to speak up when someone is speaking contemptuously of others. And I should be more mindful before opening my mouth, because sometimes I do the same thing.

May

Last night, Paul & I were invited to the Student Appreciation Party at our teacher's new (and much farther away) ballroom. One of our fellow students, May, is in her mid-90's. She has a private lesson once a week, and can move more easily than a lot of 60-year-olds we know. She has a whole wardrobe of ballroom dresses she made and designed herself. She has a nice little business making outfits for other ballroom dancers for their competitions.

We got to talking last night, and she said that lately she's been branching out. Apparently, her fame is spreading to other demographics. She's started designing outfits for pole dancers. We think this is kind of awesome.

Here's a snippet of conversation from last night.

Paul: So what are the pole-dancing costumes like?

May: Skimpy! And stretchy!

Paul: I guess the skirts have to be kind of short--otherwise, they'd just fly up in their faces when they're upside-down.

May: Yeah, they're about seven inches long.

If I live to be 96, I hope I turn out to be half as cool as she is.

What IS Reality?

Paul and I love this topic, and have a variation of this conversation at least once in any given week.

Unless I stop to think about it, I tend to assume that everybody else experiences reality exactly the same way I do. That plate I'm eating from sure seems to be a solid object, even though on the atomic level it's mostly empty space between atoms. If a friend and I each took out a pencil and paper to draw the plate, I think we would each come up with a similar picture. This leads me to believe (and assume) that s/he and I perceive the plate the same way. When we have a conversation "on the same wavelength," and we don't have to work hard to make each other understood, it feels like we must experience the world in a very similar way.

It's really hard to imagine the world from any frame of reference outside the filters of my bodily senses and life experiences. Without the brain's ability to organize raw sensory data into patterns, the world out there would just be a chaotic mess of random-seeming atoms. We wouldn't be able to make sense out of any of it.

Even if someone else shared my exact sensory perceptions (doubtful), s/he would still have a totally different history of life experiences. We would perceive the same sensory experience very differently.

This reminds me of a spirited debate in my Twentieth Century (music) Analysis class in my CIM days. Our prof asked the class the following question: If you encountered an isolated group of people who had never heard Western music before and played them a Beethoven symphony, would it sound like dissonant chaos to them? A minority of the class, including me, said it would. The other side argued with conviction that Beethoven was so universally accessible that of course they would understand it, and probably love it, upon hearing it for the first time, just like we would. We must have debated it for at least half an hour.

I still stand by my conviction. When I first heard Indian music, it sounded strange and out of tune to me because the intervals in their scale are much closer together than ours. I'm sure it doesn't sound that way to them!

Since every human is unique, it follows that there are approximately 7 billion different human realities out there. It's amazing that we get along as well as we do!

A Cautionary Tale for Those Who Keep a Messy Office (Like Me!)

I finally spent about an hour and a half going through the 16 months' worth of old mail, catalogs, rejects from the printer, schoolwork, check stubs, and various other detritus. For the first time in ages, I can see both the carpet and my desktop. It sure is nice! That's the good news.

I had weeks during the winter break from work and school that I could have done this. But of course I didn't. Why now? Well, it's funny you should ask. Earlier in the week, I extracted a few pieces of music from my vast pile of sheet music to play for this Sunday's church service, and, as usual, brought them upstairs to my office so I could copy the titles and composers into an e-mail so they could be listed in the Order of Service. At least, I thought I brought them upstairs.

The week got busy. My online class, Business Strategies, started. I added blizzards of syllabus and PowerPoint printouts to the ankle-deep mess on the floor. I accepted a job as rehearsal pianist for the Bedford High musical, Guys and Dolls. Must print out the rehearsal schedule, contact info, Google Map to the school, etc. There are tons of papers all over the place related to my Treasurer duties at the church--financial statements, board meeting paperwork, etc--in several separate piles. I suppose I ought to get to that and stop procrastinating, I thought.

It's funny how well I can adapt, to a point, to navigating in a mess. I rarely spend more than a couple of minutes looking for a particular piece of paper before finding it. But then there comes that one time that the thing you're looking for, in this case, my music for Sunday, seems to have disappeared into a parallel universe. Couldn't find it before work this morning. Oh, well, I thought, I'll find it this afternoon.

But I couldn't. Really, I went through everything, even the paper recycling box. The horrible thought occurred to me: what if I had mistakenly dumped it into the recycling that I already took out and got rid of? I looked at the playlist I had e-mailed to the church office. Had I unintentionally memorized any of it from the last time I played it? How well could I fake it, if necessary? Most of it was fairly obscure ragtimes and fiddle tunes. How noticeable would it be if I had to make up large sections of it? Or would it be better to just pick something else and make an announcement? Not that anyone would notice the difference--or would they?

I didn't have any memory of putting it back in the tattered plastic library bag where I keep all of my xeroxed copied music, but I looked there, since I had now exhausted every other alternative. It wasn't in the top of the pile. But seven or eight pieces down, there it was. I heaved a great sigh of relief.

I guess the moral of the story is: Don't let the layer of papers become such a permanent part of your office floor that the cat walks on it and even naps on it because he thinks it's part of the floor.

A Shiver Up My Spine (Not the Good Kind)

Winter is making its second grand entrance in less than a week here along the Lake Erie shore. It's been snowing for at least 24 hours straight, with a nasty wind averaging at least 35 mph. The wind has a good side: it blows the snow off our driveway as fast as it can fall, so I haven't had to do any shoveling. However, the downside is that the wind chill factor is about -11 F. Though our house is fairly new and holds heat well, that wind just seemed to penetrate its icy fingers right through our walls earlier today.

Throughout the morning, as I was reviewing my notes for my Financial Management final, the room seemed to be getting colder and colder. I was already wearing my L. L. Bean fleece pj's, which are usually toasty enough to be more than adequate when I bump the heat up to 66, as I often do when I'm home during the day. But my hands were icy and I couldn't feel my toes even with socks on.

So I put on my heavy robe over the pj's and a second layer of socks before I took the exam. Gotta love those online classes on a day like this! After acing the exam (yes!) and farting around on my favorite websites for a while, I thought, hey, I'll do a cardio workout--that ought to warm me up. I opened the bedroom door to get my workout wear and was practically bowled over by the crypt-like draft blasting out of there. The thermometer said 52 degrees! It's always freezing in there during the winter, especially on windy days, but this was lower than I'd ever seen it.

I went downstairs to check the thermostat: 60 degrees. That's funny, I thought. It seems like the furnace isn't even on. I went down to the utility room, and sure enough, it was eerily quiet. My mind flashed back to a time in the summer when the air conditioning seemed to be malfunctioning, and wouldn't respond no matter what we did. It turned out that Mouchie the cat had bumped the master switch to the "off" position hours before. (I really wonder who thought it was a good idea to install it 2 feet above the floor level.)

Today, the switch was in its usual "up" position, but I thought, maybe turning it off and on will "reboot" the furnace. I did that, and, dramatically, the furnace roared to life, followed by the fan. I had fixed it! That's a little weird, but whatever. And then, exactly 15 minutes later, it stopped. All afternoon, I kept running down there to reboot it, which brought the house to an anemic 61 degrees. I had the gas fireplace on for about 7 hours, which at least kept the family room warm, but I knew something was seriously wrong. The bedroom was now down to a bone-chilling 45 degrees! How on earth were we going to sleep tonight?

When Paul got home, we looked up furnace troubleshooting tips online. We looked up the phone number of the heating and cooling company that does our maintenance in case we had to call them tomorrow. He went outside into the arctic blast with a flashlight to see if the outside vent was coated in ice or something--nope. It just kept getting colder and colder. We started retreating into ourselves like turtles. Well, I did, anyway.

Paul finally started checking the tubes that vented water from the humidifier, after jostling one around, water just started gushing from it, as if it had been pent up in a reservoir. It had been pinched near the bottom, leaving the water nowhere to go. After one false cycle, the furnace has been functioning normally for an hour and a half now. I think (hope) he solved the problem.

Here's what we think happened. Although Mouchie hadn't flipped the master switch this time, the chain of events that led up to this is still his fault. About 3 weeks ago, when I was eating my lunch at home, I heard a huge crashing noise, followed by the pinging of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny pebble-like objects. Something was clearly amiss down in the utility room.

As I came down the stairs, the overpowering smell of dry catfood overwhelmed me. Mouchie, hiding behind the couch in full freak-out mode, shot up the stairs as soon as he saw me. I had a few choice words upon entering the room. He had knocked over a newly-opened 15-pound bag of dry cat food from the top shelf. It weighed more than he did--don't ask me how he had the strength--and absolutely exploded upon impact dumping little pellets of cat food everywhere. And I mean everywhere. All over the top of the washing machine and dryer. behind them. Inside them, even though their doors weren't open. On top of (and in) the litter box. (Guess I should be thankful it had a cover over it.) In every dust-bunny- and cobweb-infested nook and cranny in the entire room. Including, of course, all of the nooks and crannies of the furnace and its myriad pipes and tubes.

I was on my hands and knees for at least a half and hour with the hand broom and dustpan getting it all. We had had ants before (who love dry cat food), so I made an effort to get every last kibble. It was like hunting for cockroaches; you see one, you know there are 10,000 more just out of plain sight. Honestly, that's what I was thinking when I pulled the flimsy little white pipes aside only to see at least 200+ kibbles way under there. I had to get them all! As you can imagine, I was kind of pissed at this point, and I took it out on those poor pipes, shoving their ends back in their little hole none too carefully.

Fast forward to today, the first day it was cold enough for the furnace to be on continuously for hours and hours at a time. The water from the humidifier just couldn't drain fast enough, and when its reservoir stayed full, it automatically shut off the furnace. Now that it can drain, problem solved. It sure is a relief that we (and our pipes!) won't freeze overnight, and that we are spared the ordeal of an emergency service call on a day that I'm sure plenty of others would be ahead of us in line.