« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
April 30, 2008
It holds things together
Seeing all the stuff my mom's able to eat is making me feel better about the possibility that I'll also have to give up gluten one day.
Gluten's the stuff that holds bread together, it's a key component of wheat and pasta and most soy sauces and a huge number of foods in my diet. Eating it makes my mom very, very, very sick. Sometimes this intolerance runs in families, and often it does not manifest until later in life.
I love bread and Cheerios and beer and spaghetti so much that the thought of life without them kind of scares me. But my mom has stir fried veggies with rice, corn tortilla-based enchiladas, eggs, rice-based breakfast cereals, potatoes, and all kinds of other yummy food.
There's no gluten in butter. There isn't any gluten in most cheeses. Vegetables and beans and fruits are all gluten free. Popcorn, too, I think. So I'll probably be OK in the long run, whatever happens. Until then, I'll eat my fancy breads and drink my fancy beers and revel in the pleasure that they bring to me.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008
Patterns in lives and literature
I'm most of the way through the book "She's Come Undone." Early on, the protagonist makes a number of self-destructive decisions as a child and an adolescent, and as I read I cheered her on for being such a bad ass. But now she's an adult and I can see her on the path to self destruction yet again, and tonight I had to put the book down and walk away. We defeat ourselves when we're young because we don't know any better. When it keeps on happening into adulthood, it becomes tragic. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens next.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:06 PM | Comments (1)
April 28, 2008
Wow. Family. Wow.
What does it mean when you can sit in a circle with your mother, your husband, your brother and his wife, and listen to the matriarch tell silly stories about sex? Isn't this supposed to trigger some culturally instilled gag mechanism? Maybe the reason it doesn't is that the story involves actual vomit. And the words "spagghetus interruptus."
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2008
Time to go!
I'm heading to the airport to meet my mom. Yay for parental visits!
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2008
August 30, 2008: Camping
I still want to do this. August 30, 2008. New moon, Labor Day weekend. Every year the light pollution blotting out the stars and constellations spreads, but the Milky Way is still visible less than two hours from Portland on the blackest night. I want to reserve some campsites. I want to invite everyone I know. I want to pitch tents, cook and eat and sing, and then late at night I want to lie back on picnic blankets and revel in the stars above. I mean it! Save the date! I WILL reserve camp sites. I WILL invite local people who I think like camping. I DO want you to come, even if I don't realize that you like camping and even if you don't live in the area and thus I don't think to invite you. Stay tuned.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 06:06 PM | Comments (4)
April 25, 2008
A wicked woman
I finished reading "Wicked" around 12:30 a.m. last night/early this morning, after falling under the book's spell for the better part of a week. I wrote up a little review over here. Rian sent it to me as a birthday present, and it was an awesome and perfectly-timed gift. I needed a fast, smart, entertaining and thought-provoking dash of fiction.
I have read a lot of books, but not enough with smart, interesting women who have better things to do with their lives than moon over men and children. The Wicked Witch of the West, star of "Wicked" has deep moral questions to explore, people to protect, a resistance to join. She's not immune to romance, but it's not the center of her life. Drop the "s" from the "she," and I don't these traits would be so atypical. It's a bit sad that most of the female protagonists I've gotten to know have been so limited as human beings. Maybe I need to do something about that.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:35 PM | Comments (1)
April 24, 2008
What have you been up to at work lately, Courtney?
Oh, I've been analyzing tech firms, digging up data on tax evaders, writing the first American article about a Canadian manufacturer's struggles, exploring the local implications of global energy trends, contemplating where we've been and how far we've come, and trying to create something coherent out of a jumble of numbers.
How about you? What have you been up to a work lately?
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:42 PM | Comments (7)
April 23, 2008
Too tired
I'm a little bit disappointed in myself. I was looking forward to going to the Sullivan's Gulch Neighborhood Association meeting tonight. The leading candidates for mayor are taking questions. I'm still undecided on who to vote for, and have some pretty big questions I'd like to ask. I've wanted to go to a neighborhood association meeting for months. I even had a plan to bring the digital camera and post about what I learned here. But.
But I got home from work at 6:55 p.m. dead tired with a deadly hunger, and the meeting is an eight minute walk away and starts at 7 p.m. I'm scarfing down some grocery store sushi right now and I could still show up 20 minutes late, but I know I'm not going to. I'm too beat.
Instead I'm going to stay in and eat cinnamon bread and drink red wine and knock another hundred pages off my book. I'm going to kick back and stay warm and take it easy and do as little productive as possible. If I'm lucky, I'll listen to a little bit of saxophone in a little while.
To make it up to myself, I'm doing research on upcoming Sam Adams-Sho Dozono appearances. I will see them, even if it means I have to crash some other neighborhood association's meeting. Maybe it's a good think I'm not going to the one in Sullivan's Gulch. I'd probably find myself an accidental seat on the association's board.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2008
Prezzies!
Lindsey came back from Japan with presents! I can't believe I've traveled the world and never before realized how cool it is to bring back a suitcase load of neat foreign stuff to share with the people you know back home. Right now I'm wearing silly Japanese socks, purple with a bluish bird, and the socks split like mittens to hold my big toe separate. I look like I have cloven hooves instead of feet. How cool!
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:58 PM | Comments (1)
April 21, 2008
Misanthropy
Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to get a hundred stickers printed that say "the crosswalk is for pedestrians," so that whenever I have to walk in traffic to get around a car that pulled too far forward I can slap a sticker or two onto its hood as I pass.
Sometimes I think I should chew extra gum when I go to the gym, so that when I open the last seemingly unclaimed tall locker and find that it contains a sweatshirt and dozens of cubic feet of unused space I can stick my gum all over the sweatshirt. That's what I'll do, in my imagination, before I try to squeeze my carefully folded full-length coat, my carefully folded fancy dry cleaned suit, my mostly-empty gym bag (because I've taken the gym clothes out), my after-workout casual clothes and my purse into a space measuring two feet by two feet by three feet.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
SNDC pics
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2008
Weekend highlights
* Dreamed about work.
* Spent money wisely: carbon monoxide detector, fire extinguisher.
* Had really good coffee.
* Made miso vegetable soup, which once frightened me but now I really enjoy.
* Finished a book.
* Baked oatmeal cookies.
* Watched a lot of basketball, by association.
* SNDCed.
* Spent $38 on 10 gallons of gas. I never foresaw that.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2008
High culture and fine dining
When Ben's eight hours of basketball viewing finally came to an end, the TV somehow landed on a show called "War Birds" tonight. It's about the end of World War II, a bunch of Americans and a handful of Japanese crash their planes onto a remote Pacific island where they are attacked by flying dinosaurs.
The flying dinosaurs are just about the most believable aspect of the movie. The Japanese characters all look very American and speak with fake-Japanese accents. They wimpily don't want to die and hope to be treated well by their captors. Most of the American fighter pilots are women. Women who swear a lot and swagger. They wear semi-realistic clothes, but to hide the fact that waistlines were higher than is fashionable now they also all wear low-slung hip-hugging gun belts. The handful of American men on the dinosaur island treat the women as warrior equals, men, practically. Nobody blushes at rather explicit sexual innuendo. And the women seem to have a large supply of lipstick and curlers, considering how groomed they remain. Like I said, the dinosaurs are just about the most believable part of the show.
After 20 minutes or so we flipped the channel to something more realistic. Vampire in Brooklyn, starring Eddie Murphy.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2008
Dancing chicken
Courtney: Look, Ben! It's a naked bird! It lost all it's hair.
Ben: Birds don't have hair, they have feathers.
Courtney: Oh, yeah.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2008
Tight
That it was April 16 when we finally got to see Portland's preeminent jazz musician did not seem significant as I took my seat. I had forgotten that Mel Brown is not only a drummer. He's also a tax man. He had a few things to work out through his music, frustration at 10 p.m. clients begging for help before midnight and that sort of thing. Wow. I wish I could release my stress by captivating a room full of people with genius rhythms and clever musical stylings for an hour and a half. At one point he stopped drumming and looked out at us, and everybody knew not to clap, just to hold our breaths, until the music resumed at a frantic yet controlled gallop. At another point the drumsticks strayed from the drums and cymbals to the music stand, the microphone. It wasn't noisy or weird, it was wild and fun.
I think April 16 Mel Brown shows should become an annual event.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:03 PM | Comments (2)
April 15, 2008
Inflation revisited
Economist Seth Gitter tackles some of my recent questions about inflation on his blog today. Thanks, Seth! He and commenters Gregorus and Rachel have got me thinking deeper on this topic, and my editor just gave me the go-ahead to do a big-picture inflation story sometime in the next month or so.
I'm not sure which direction my eventual article will head, but in my early information-gathering stage these are the questions on my mind:
* How is inflation being experienced now? (In this community, across the U.S., around the globe.)
* What is causing it?
* What should we do in the face of rising inflation, as individual consumers?
Feel free to e-mail me at work (courtney.sherwood AT columbian (dot) com) or to comment here if you have more insight that might help me.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:53 AM | Comments (4)
April 14, 2008
How can I pay attention when I've got nothing to pay it with?
I head out the door to buy a new cable for my computer, make it halfway to the store, and realize I've forgotten my wallet. Turn around, home, turn around, store. Turns out they don't carry it there. Decide to head to Best Buy, which is east on I-84. Start heading for I-5 instead. Turn around, I-84, store. Buy the cable. Head east on I-84. Hit Troutdale before I realize I'm going the wrong way. (That's far.) Turn around, home.
Now I can upload the video of Ben's jazz concert. Plug it in, push play, watch the show. Ben's head, big crowd, no clear shot. Sue: "Are you going to film the whole thing?" Courtney: "I was going to, but I can't get a clear shot." Screen goes blank, music keeps playing. Light, dark, Ben, shadow, Ben, dark, music plays throughout. So that's why the battery ran out. I guess the lens cap is not the on-off switch.
This is my life.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:28 PM | Comments (2)
April 13, 2008
Inflation
So inflation's happening. I'm a business reporter, I watch the economic indicators, I've seen it coming for a while. I've seen it not just in the climb in the consumer and producer price indexes, but in the rise in the cost of a box of Cheerios, a slice of pizza and a gallon of gas. I buy a lot of Cheerios, pizza and gas.
I have read a lot of articles about the causes of our current inflation - it seems to be fueled by a wheat shortage, the alternative fuel boom's affect on corn prices, global economic growth's push on commodity prices, the decline of the U.S. dollar, the rise of the price of gas, and the Federal Reserve's anti-recession policies. It all makes a lot of sense.
I have also read a lot about how inflation is affecting people and countries and the world. The county jail is dispensing ketchup from a tub instead of individual packets and serving more turkey, less beef, to make budget. Airlines are going bankrupt. There's a deepening global food crisis. I get it, I get it.
I don't, however, get what I'm supposed to do about it. In fact, I think I remember reading in my economics textbook that inflation creates a conundrum for consumers. Is there any value in saving money, when its purchase power declines with each passing day? What should I spend on now, with the knowledge that it will cost more tomorrow? What is the best way to plan for my future when I don't know what the future holds? I've never been through this before.
The Washington Post just ran an article that really spoke to me. Economic theory is leaping out of the textbook and into real life for people in their teens, 20s and 30s, who are experiencing inflation for the first time, reporter Kristin Downey writes. She has it exactly right.
The thing that amuses me about how her article has been received: all these old know-it-all commenters are complaining about young folks for being bewildered by something they've never seen before, and also complaining about a story that describes this small, inconsequential side-effect of inflation, instead of writing about the broader causes and consequences. I disagree with the know-it-alls. I'm glad to finally read something that I haven't read before about inflation: that it is bewildering, that we don't know what to do, that I'm not all alone.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:19 PM | Comments (5)
April 12, 2008
One of those days
I took the Max downtown today, the first really warm and sunny weekend day since about October, and everyone in Portland seemed to have the same idea. It was standing room only. People were smiling, making eye contact, talking to strangers, wearing shorts and short sleeves and skirts.
On a street corner outside the library, a group of well dressed men started singing a hymn. As others recognized the tune, several stopped and joined in song. The group grew, men singing and smiling in a circle on the corner. All around people who didn't know the words were clapping and grinning and falling in love with the city after a long, cold, damp, isolated winter. This is why we live here.
The farmer's market was swarming with foodies, which it always is. It's early in the year, and we haven't started to hate the bustle of the crowd just yet. Instead, we jostled one another with joy in our short sleeves and sunshine. Who cares about a few bruises when it's warm and the rain isn't falling? Who cares if it's too early for tomatoes? Who cares if everything's sold out but kale and cauliflower? It's a glorious day!
Later, at home with the windows open and a mild breeze ruffling the pages of my book, I laid back on the couch and tried to read. Instead I napped.
At dusk we made a social call. Morgan was juggling and standing on his hands. Robin was spinning enormous poles. Playing circus, they called it, as they put away their toys and we all sat down together to share a moment of our lives.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2008
Eating out
"I had the foresight to loosen my belt one notch," Ben said just now, post pork belly.
I'm a bad vegetarian. I don't eat meat. I avoid jello and marshmallows and uninspected soup, for fear that I'll consume something tainted. But when we go out I always encourage Ben to eat the decadent and awful things I've read about in various foodie publications. In the past he's consumed wild boar and buffalo at my instigation.
Tonight it was pork belly, and from what I've heard it was amazing. My butter-mushroom-grain-asparagus was also incredible. Mind blowingly so, but not belt looseningly. We hadn't had a decadent meal out in more than a year. That changed tonight. I'd say it was worth it.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2008
Ben is 33 years old today
There's something about the way Ben plays "Bye, Bye Blackbird" that makes it the most soulful song I've ever heard. So when I heard him start the tune last night as I watched TV in another room, I muted the television. After the first few bars the saxophone stopped and suddenly I heard the song pick up on the piano instead. I came upstairs, and Ben was sitting at his new keyboard playing the piano while wearing his saxophone and occasionally playing it too. He was playing the saxophone and the piano at the same time!
I was astounded. Ben saw the look on my face, and smiled.
"What?" he said. "I'm trying to figure out harmony."
I have to confess that I don't exactly understand what this means. But I know that his understanding of music and of music theory is so developed that Ben can discern deep musical concepts while playing two instruments at once.
Or at least he could yesterday, when he was a mere 32 years old. I'm not sure how his newly advanced age has affected his faculties.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:51 PM | Comments (6)
April 09, 2008
I take notes when I watch TV
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
Dinner with friends
Photo by Dan, left to right: Mike, Tommy, Ben, Me.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2008
Spotted in Vancouver, Wash.
Man on skateboard, kicking off the ground to propel himself forward: not so unusual. Man with feet planted on skateboard, leash in hand, being pulled around the block my his running dog: a frequent sight in downtown Vancouver near my office. The city has a strict new helmet rule. Seen recently: running dog, pulling man on skateboard by a leash while the man wears a massive face-obscuring motorcycle helmet. It's hard not to look twice.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2008
My day
Sun rises, so do I. Crazy man tries to run me off the road, I call 911. Work, work, work, work, work. Lunch, call Mom. Work, work, work, work, work. Run 3 miles in 26:43. Find books on the doorstep (thanks, Rian!). Eat bread sticks and cheese and crackers. Watch basketball. Watch Ben play Wii. Fall asleep.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:53 PM | Comments (1)
April 06, 2008
Thinking about history and MLK
I was listening to NPR the other day, a report on Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech before his death, "I've Been to the Mountain Top."
"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
The next day he was shot and killed. As they played the speech and interviewed people who were there when he gave it, people who were there the next day when he was killed, I pulled up to a gas station to fuel my tank.
I was crying. In Oregon you can't pump your own gas. So I wiped tears from my face and sniffled as I handed over my plastic and said "fill me with regular." The gas pumping guy must have felt bad for me, because he washed my windshield while I sat there, riveted to the radio by the words of a great man.
Here's the thing I've been thinking about in the three or four days since I listened to that speech and pondered a 40-decade-old assassination: The day before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, there were a lot of Americans who did not think he was a great man. A lot of people agreed with his cause but disagreed with his approach. Still others disagreed with everything he stood for, thought his civil rights fight would destabilize the country and grant rights to those who did not deserve him. And then there were those still more impatient than MLK himself, those unwilling to push peacefully for change when what they wanted was a revolution then and there.
On the day that he was killed, how did those people - those critics of a man who now has a national holiday - how did they feel upon hearing the news? Did they shake their heads at the shame of it, even if they disagreed with his mission and his passion and his life and his accomplishments? Did they rejoice? Did they feel a hole ripped in their hearts? Did they feel more American or less, closer to their neighbors or more distant, vindicated or isolated or simply lost?
I'm having a hard time putting my mind and my imagination into that moment in the past. Like most good public school children of my generation I've learned that Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement that transformed America. But there's so much more to an event, to an assassination, than the narrative we choose to teach our children.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2008
More reading
"We are born thinking that we'll live forever. Then death becomes an intermittent reality, as grandparents and parents die, and tragedy of some kind removes one or two from our own age cohort. And then, at some point, death becomes a normal part of life -- a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder."
Michael Kinsley, 57, former L.A. Times editorial page chief, now facing Parkinsons, writes about longevity in the New Yorker this week. Death is a barely intermittent reality to me so far. I've known more cats and dogs who've died than people, though that equation is slowly shifting.
"If a hundred Americans start the voyage of a life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen," Kinsley writes. "At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain."
Kinsley's essay is a bit meandering. He's baby boomer naval gazer, which is a rather boring category. He eventually touches on Parkinsons, but there's no foreshadowing or thesis or hint of where you're going until you get there. Still, mortality is an interesting subject.
In the past few months, I've turned 30, my dad's turned 60, my grandmother's turned 90.
"If you're feeling older, note that Grandpa and I are three times as old, and still enjoying life," Grandma Sherwood wrote in a note I received on my birthday.
Isn't that what matters more than any of it? More than longevity and statistics and disease and generation warfare? Finding joy in life? I hope so.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2008
Conformity
When I was in fifth grade, I did a science fair project that probably doesn't meet ethical standards for experiments on human subjects. I took a bunch of unscented water, dyed it various colors, and put it into sealed clear cups. Then I told my class that I was testing how scents traveled, and had people stand up or raise their hands when they smelled each liquid, and I uncovered the colored scentless waters one by one. Of the 25 or so kids in my class, all but one stood up each time - first the kids in front, then slowly the kids in back, though some kids with really strong noses in the back of the class stood up faster than you might expect. Only one kid, Sarah Barakis or something like that, insisted that she didn't smell anything. Everyone else picked on her and told her she was nuts, even though she was the only one who was actually right.
I wonder how many of my attitudes about conformity were born on that day?
It's probably cruel and insufficiently empathetic of me, but I think of that experiment every time I read an article like this.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:30 PM | Comments (3)
April 02, 2008
Recommended reading
"Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success," Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang write in the New York Times. "Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term."
This is a really interesting article about success, ambition, willpower, goals, self-control, the limit's of the mind and its ability to grow.
I'm getting better at willpower and self control with every passing day, practically. I think maybe I overdo it on the goals.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2008
The Prime of Miss(us) Courtney Sherwood
"A delightful, insightful and short novel about a group of private school girls in Edinburg, Scotland, and their intense relationship with teacher Jean Brodie." So I summarized "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" in my book journal when I finished the novel on Sept. 22, 2007. But what sticks with me half a year later is Miss Brodie's spirit. She's a flawed character - a pretty bad teacher, when it comes to the subject matter, an unfaithful lover, and a closet fascist. But she's also full of spirit and well aware that she's in the prime of her life and living every day to it's fullest.
There's so much about Miss Brodie that I don't want to be: politically unsound, romantically unreliable, professionally off-kilter. But I, too, feel overwhelmed by spirit and emotion and effulgence, like maybe I'm in the prime of Ms Courtney Sherwood.
And if that's true, then I may have the same fate as Miss Brodie, as well - a fall, or at least a decline. Once you've peaked it's hard to keep going up. But if this is the top, if I'm living at the height of my life, then it's a pretty good height. I can see a lot from here, and it's exhilarating. When my prime is over, I hope I'm ready to carefully climb back down. Until then, I'm going to enjoy it.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:59 PM | Comments (2)