Are blueberries and the jasmine on the slope behind them are locked in eternal conflict. The jasmine is the aggressor, continually trying to climb the blueberries, and the blueberries just want to be left alone. ๏ฟผToday was the day to intervene. ๏ฟผ
I’m currently reading Alan Rusbridger’s Play It Again : An Amateur Against the Impossible. It’s about his attempt as an amateur pianist to tackle Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor — one of the most impressively challenging pieces in the canon.
I’ve been quasi-obsessed with Chopin’s Ballades for a long time, and while I’ll grudgingly admit that No. 4 is the superior of the four, No. 1 will always be my favorite. And I love it for the reason all who play it love at and fear it: the terrifying coda, marked Presto con fuoco. For non-Italian speakers or people who never to music lessons to learn all those Italian terms:
To say it’s impressive is an understatement.
Those leaps the left hand has to make; those whatever-the-hell-they-are right hand furies starting at bar 216 (Garrick Ohlsson calls them “wiggles” — if only); that double scale separated not by an octave but by a tenth at bar 255. How can anyone do that?
I took enough piano that I can follow the score and point to where the music is (in other words, I could turn the pages for someone playing this), and that means I know just enough about piano to realize how impossible this piece is. And yet people learn it all the time. “I played it when I was 17 and…” one person explained in a video. “It’s devilishly tricky,” a professional might say. No — it’s impossible. How anyone does it is beyond me.
Alan Rusbridger accomplished it (or least I’m assuming he did — he wrote the book about the attempt) while serving as the editor of the Guardian, which, according to Rusbridger, was publishing around 200,000 words a day when he was working on the Ballade. He was working 60-80 hours a week, coordinating the WikiLeaks articles, getting 60-80 emails an hour by his own estimation, staying up until the wee-hours several nights a week — and somehow he found the time to tackle this ridiculously challenging piece.
In short, Rusbridger’s accomplishment leads us to wonder what we do with our own little spare bits of time here and there. To be able even to stumble through the Ballade would require the average amateur hours upon hours of practice. Where do we get those hours?
I spent some of my free time tonight reading Rusbridger’s book, for example; I’m spending time now writing this. K has started tinkering on the piano, using L’s old books. The Boy — we have to pull him off Fortnight. The Girl — reading, phone, movies, chatting/texting with friends. But the amount of time most of us in the West waste is astonishing. The only thing we can’t get back, and we waste so much of it.
Today was the day everything went back to normal. The Christmas lights came down (though the tree is still up — whatever K wants to do is fine with me in that regard). The Boy’s 5v5 soccer season resumed: E’s team won 4:3, with the Boy scoring the winning goal.
But some things were still holiday-esque: I made farsz for pierogi again. And this time, I remembered how much grease the sautรฉed mushrooms spit out as they go through the grinder.
“Do we a fartuszek of any kind I can use?” I asked K.
“But of course…”
Everyone has returned home; K returns to work tomorrow — the 2024 holiday season is over. The timeless magical period of Wigilia and Christmas and all the time preparing for it disappears, and the worries that for a few days we put out of our minds come crowding back in.
I woke up this morning thinking of school. The students are great — the best group I’ve had in years. The amount of micro-managing and mindless paperwork has increase so much over the last two years that it has me dreading a return. I’m left in a stressful quandary:
It’s a difficult decision that I’ll have to make very soon, and it entails a conversation with my school’s administration that I don’t really anticipate gleefully.
L is still recovering from surgery. It will take a couple of weeks. It’s still stressful to us all, though. It’s “Worry 2” instead of “Worry 1” because we know it’s temporary. She’ll recover; she’ll be able to breath better; her sinuses won’t be giving her constant headaches. So it’s a short-term worry — hence, “Worry 2.” But it’s our daughter we’re worried about: even when it’s a seemingly unfounded worry, we can’t just shake it off.
We have a leak in our roof. It might be under warranty from the company that replaced our roof a few years ago; it might not be. We won’t know until the company comes out and looks at it. But we’ve been on the list for over a week now. It took them forever to start the work in the first place. I’m not confident we’ll see anyone here for a long time.
And it’s supposed to start raining tomorrow afternoon and rain through the weekend.
I’ve got it tarped, but not sufficiently for a heavy rain. The location of the leak and the shape of our roof make it difficult to tarp. And we have no idea how long this will last.
Do we just call another company and take the hit?
Do we call insurance (they suggested calling the company that replaced it in the first place — a company the insurance adjuster had recommended, for the wrote our current roof)?
We have elected as president a narcissist who’s a convicted felon who tried to retain power by overthrowing the democratic process, a man who is, in every possible sense of the idea, completely unfit for the office. And some very worrying people will likely have an influence on him. People like Curtis Yarvin:
Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trumpโs election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvinโs public proposals for taking autocratic power in America. (The Guardian)
When Trump takes office in a few weeks, it could conceivably lead to the end of America as we know it. Sure, the Republicans said the same things about Biden, but those fears were based on baseless conspiracy theories and good-old-fashioned hate-mongering. The people surrounding Trump aren’t being conspiratorial about anything: they’re saying it all aloud. They’re not holding their cards close: they’ve laid them all out with the Project 2025 manifesto and rhetoric people like Yarvin are saying.
Given the post-election period and Trumpโs preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvinโs program seems less fanciful then it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.
In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.
Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, โYouโre essentially advocating for someone to โ age-old move โ gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfullyโ, adding: โWhat do you think the actual chances of that happening are?โ
Yarvin responded: โIt wouldnโt be unlawful,โ adding: โYouโd simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.โ
Yarvin continued: โYouโd actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, โHey, this is what weโre going to do.โโ
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves, and effectively ran on these promises. Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to Americaโs immigration crisis.
Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff, and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with โthe enemy withinโ.
Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January, โyou canโt continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of Aprilโ. Later expanding on the idea with โthe idea that youโre going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with someone elseโs Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.โ
โMachiavelli could tell you right away that thatโs a stupid idea,โ Yarvin added. (The Guardian)
This is, of course, a worry that leaves me thinking, “This is all out of my hands — I can do nothing about it,” and yet. And yet…
So when the holidays are over, it’s not just a return to “normal” life. It’s that with a few additional stressors (not even all mentioned here) thrown in. We’ll get through it all, but it doesn’t diminish the stress levels.
Exactly one year earlier, it was a smoking day as well.
Will we ever be done with pierogi? Saturday, Sunday, and Monday — three days of pierogi and uszki work. The upshot — we have an entire freezer of Polish dumplings.
Our last batch was a distinctly non-Polish varietal: we had left-over turkey (not from Thanksgiving!) that we ground and mixed with mushrooms. They’re good, just not very Polish. When we have them, I like to fry them just long enough to get a crispy finish and then make the lovely sauce you get with Chinese dumplings (soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil) and pretend we ordered out Chinese.
We closed the evening with a little math help. K does the math work with him; I do the English work.
It always amused me how much stuff the average Polish woman (and it’s always the woman) irons. “Do you all iron even the underwear?” I once quipped.
There is a certain sense behind it, I guess, if you worry about wrinkles in everything. When I first lived there, I didn’t. And I didn’t even have an iron if I wanted to smooth out my clothes. “We always laughed about how obvious it was you were a bachelor” one of my former students once confessed.
Ironing sheets, though? Yep.
I’ve written often enough, I suppose, about how my Saturday rhythm has changed over the last forty years or so. Saturday once meant church, seclusion, no work, no socializing with non-church folks, no sports, no school-related activities. Nothing that could pollute our minds or get our focus away from our sect’s teachings.
Saturday afternoon at 2:30 we met at the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) union hall. We usually arrived at least an hour earlier, and stayed at least an hour past the 4:30 end time. Every Saturday afternoon, a two-hour meeting during which men of dubious theological education pontificated about the conspiracy theories that comprised the bulk of the organization’s theology. The only saving grace was the playing (and later, as a teenager, socializing) that took place before and after the meeting.
These days, my Saturdays are so much more fluid. Sometimes, there’s a clear outline to the day, with chores in the yard occupying much of my time. Once school starts, I send a fair amount of the morning grading students’ work. Today, for example, I went through 43 kids’ single-paragraph analysis of “The Cask of Amontillado.” They wrote things like this:
The narratorโs story can be trusted because Montressor is confessing his actions to the priest on his deathbed. For example, Montressor talks to the preist because he knows the โnature of [his] soul.โ and would not believe that he โgave utterance to a threatโ. This proves that the priest knows Montressor very well, probably because the same priest would come to his house often. The priest also would not suppose Montressor killed someone. He would most likely want to admit his wrong doings before he died. Another example is, In โhalf of a centuryโ no one has disturbed the catacombs or found Fourtunadoโs body. It shows that no one has found out what happened to Fortunato 50 years later. This also explains the reasoning why Montressor would tell his priest, because he would be very old by this time; old enough to be on his deathbed. To sum it up, because Montressor is confessing to the priest that he killed Fortunado, this narrative can be reliable.
I worked through the papers in between trimming shrubs, cleaning my bike chain, and cleaning out the basement.
The shrubs — didn’t L just trim those? Her chores on Saturday usually include getting crickets for her frog, shopping (she usually gets the week’s groceries on Fridays, but there’s always something more we need), and cleaning her room.
The bike chain — didn’t I just clean it? Bike maintenance is something I’ve never really enjoyed. It’s so tedious cleaning a chain, replacing cables, adjusting brakes, replacing tires. But the worst of it all is definitely chain cleaning. No matter how carefully I clean it, there’s always a bit of grime left behind. But nothing makes a bike look better than a spotless chain.
Today, I used a new degreaser, and I was fairly pleased with the results. Ultimately, what I’d like is an ultrasonic cleaner that I could just drop the chain into for a few minutes and then let dry. But in the meantime, I’ll use a degreasing solution and toothbrush.
Cleaning out the basement — there’s been a crate of old books that K will eventually take to Goodwill, and among the books are several of my college lit anthologies. I’ve kept them for so long because — well, I really don’t know why. I haven’t cracked one open in so long. I had them at school for a long time, but I’ve run out of shelf space and brought them hope.
That is a story in and of itself. Last year, the state of South Carolina provided each English teacher with $3,500 worth of independent reading books so we could have a classroom library of contemporary, high-interest books. But this year, things changed:
Effective August 1st, 2024, SC Regulation 43-170 requires teachers to produce a complete list of the Instructional Materials (including classroom library books) that are used in or available to a student in any given class, course, or program that is offered, supported, or sponsored by a school, or that are otherwise made available by any District employee to a student on school premises. That list shall be provided upon reasonable request by any parent/guardian of a student in the District.
Greenville County Schools Press Release
In short, we’re not to have any books that even hint at sex. It’s another last-gasp effort of the far right to maintain its stranglehold on young people’s minds, I say to myself. For me, it’s simply a headache, which is why I’ve closed my library: I haven’t made the list yet, and I have no idea when I’ll be able to. In the meantime, I posted a sign explaining the situation, and I look forward to Meet the Teacher night when all parents can see the signs because I’m going to make my presentation standing right beside one.
So I guess in a way, my Saturdays have come full circle.
I took today was of one minor accomplishment:
I reinstalled the pressure-reduction valve that I put in last week but was leaking.
Yes, that’s red and blue pex. No, I don’t care.
We dedicated today to our elderberries. I clipped the clusters from the bush in the late morning, and K spent a lot of time pulling the small black pearls from their clusters as I worked and after I finished when I joined her.
And when I say we dedicated today to the elderberries, I mean the whole day. As I type (and work on my safety videos for school), K is finishing up, filling jars with fresh elderberry preserves.
We ended up with something like who-knows-how-many kilos of berries (was it four? five? I can’t recall) which will make who-knows-how-many pints of preserves.
The other task for the evening was helping the Boy get his room straightened up, a Sisyphean task if ever there be one. We ended up throwing out quite a bit of stuff, an act that initially stressed and frustrated the Boy a great deal.
Surrendering even the smallest trinket is difficult for someone as sentimental as E. I can understand that, though I hope eventually to grow out of it myself.
A beautiful morning
Gives way to a lovely afternoon with blueberry pierogi
Summer eating at its Polish best.
One item on my summer to-do list is to repaint the ceiling in one of the showers. Why? There’s some stain that we have no idea what it is or how it got there, can’t get rid of it, and are tired of. So our simplified solution is fairly straightforward: paint over it with multiple coats.
Taping up the edges and protecting the rest with plastic, though, took longer than all the painting (for all coats) combined will likely take. And the best part: all the plastic, at this point, was unnecessary because I didn’t have a single drop.
Of course, if I took out the plastic…
This is the time of year we feel like weโre drowning in blueberries. We head out each day and pick berries, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a not-so-few minutes. Today, for example, I picked for about an hour; K joined me for about half an hour, and she was not even picking in a new spot of the bushes: she was going back over where Iโd been, grabbing the berries Iโd overlooked because they were hiding.
And the rest of the time? K was making the first batch of jam for the year.
