etcetera whatever

That girl's just like a Quarter Horse. Treat her special, and she'll really perform.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

On wanting to say the L word

There comes a point in relationships, apparently, when people break the L barrier: one party says it to the other, the other replies, and from then on, it's safe to vocalize. "Phew. We did it. We're on the same page." Every phone call from then on ends with it; you can use the short-hand "L-" as a term of endearment. You float on clouds or something.

Or so I hear.

I've never been in such a relationship, which isn't to say I haven't said it, or thought it. Or even been the recipient of L, although I doubt the genuineness of the only times I've been told it. I'd like to believe L means more than what those declarations amounted to.

But I've spent far more time wondering about what it means to "L" than actually using the term with ease and comfort, at least with men.

With family & friends, L is second nature. I always say it at the end of phone calls. I don't think about what it feels like to L; I think about how I can actually L. What's _so_ different with a man? Obviously, we think there's something, or crossing the L barrier wouldn't have the significance it does in popular culture.

Is there a significance in real life?

I think there is. I would like to hear it, and be free to say it. I think there's a deeper sense of safety and commitment implied.

I don't care too much about the heightened feelings it implies, at least in popular culture; I'm not one to throw around a good solid word like L to describe emotion, and I'm skeptical of most emotion-based declarations of L (see above). Show me the L, I say. What does your L do?

When wondering about whether I L or not, my internal buzzer tends to go off when I find myself biting back the words that seem more natural to end conversations, the words I use so easily with family or dear friends. Why the change? I don't know. Emotions and commitments don't come with thermometers. Do I feel differently? Do I want more for them, or of them? Am I willing to give more than I was before? No, not really. But even so, something in me becomes newly ready to acknowledge what is probably a preexisting state.

Despite being a good feminist, something in me wants to say it only with the addition of "too" at the end. And so, the words are bitten back, and instead, a question fills the space. Is this also a reality for the other -- a preexisting state they simply are not yet ready to acknowledge? Or does the other require something more, some progress or change, to warrant the L?

If so, does that say anything about me?

Assuming you're not an emotion-driven person who throws it out like candy -

What does it take to break the L barrier?

[scienceisbeauty]

X-Ray images of women wearing corsets from the second volume of the French doctor Ludovic O’Followell’s Le Corset (1908) via The Public Domain Review.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

N took me on a surprise side trip en route back from DC, to the Mutter Museum, "America's finest museum of medical history." There was a corset exhibit, showing the skeleton of a woman with a history of corset-wearing, and the natural skeleton, explaining what happens to the body as a result. The ribs are actually reformed, pushed inward. The bottom rows of ribs are particularly affected, with a distinct inward curve, which pushes internal organs upward, making a lady constipated (among other problems).

Say what you will about a small waist: constipation is not sexy. Thankfully, N seems pretty content with my natural waist, and my additional charming qualities.

[allcreatures]

A sparrow lands on a blossom atop the nearly 3-foot-tall stem of a flowering onion plant Tuesday, June 25, 2013 off Bowles Road east of Kennewick. The field, filled with thousands of the blossoms, attracted birds, ladybugs and bees.

Bob Brawdy | AP (via Day in Pictures - The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento, California)

[etceterawhatever-blog]

I can only presume this is _my_ Kennewick. Eastern Washington, FTW.

In other news, THAT is what onions look like? My past attempts to grow them were even more off base than I thought.

[revawilliams-blog]

Hey, dears. For those of you who haven’t gotten to see it, Will’s movie Broke* is finally available today through distribution from SnagFilms. Me and my bandmates from Gretel, Phil and Melissa, are in it a lot, as is our music and a lot of great artists.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Broke* is a documentary film made by my good friend and longtime collaborator, Will Gray, as he tells and follows his story across an 18-month period of effort with reflections from over a dozen other indie artists attempting to create sustainable music careers, as well as commentary from music industry experts and major label artists like John Legend, Kelly Clarkson and Isaac Slade.

There’s a lot of good music in it, Will’s and other people’s. You can watch the film through any of these outlets: Comcast, Verizon FIOS, and DirecTV systems, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and Xbox.

Please, do so :)

xoxoxo,

Reva

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Would like to see this. I like Gretel's music so much, I went to their NYC live show the same day I broke my arm. (Vicodin, anyone?). I missed the showing at IAM about a year ago but I'm glad to know it's available more broadly now. Should be interesting, especially for someone who is (like me) not a musician but a top tier fan.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

That blissful feeling isn't new.

That blissful feeling itself isn't new. The brain plays all kinds of tricks: That man, nothing but bad news, offering to buy you a third drink, can make your stomach turn pleasant knots of hope and anticipation. That man, wrong for you in every major way, can, by a well timed kiss, clever compliment, thoughtful surprise, make you think you're meant to be.

How many times have you met someone and felt "This is it! This is important! This will last!" Each time you think this time's premonition, this well of emotion, is grounded in reality present and future; each time the feelings fade and you're left to laugh at the mountain you made from molehill. But does that, in itself, mean the feeling of "This is it! This is important! This will last!" is always wrong? Does past ill-begotten pseudo-bliss mean the bliss derived from something genuine is as meaningless, as fleeting?

What if this time, it really is different? What if this time, you have in fact grown wiser, your censors more alert, your sense of fit accurate and your hope, at last, well placed?

***

For all that, I don't actually feel any stress or angst about this. It's been easy; the things that are hard aren't about the "us."

Tomorrow, our first road trip as "us." (First road trip was as friends. Will it feel different now?) Off to DC to see a friend & their new baby. I am nothing but blissful about it, as I am about the whole.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Happy dad is halfway through first round of radiation day!

[putthison]

Q & Answer: When Shouldn’t You Go Bespoke?

Philip asks: I’m considering how I should spend $400 to buy a suit. I can either purchase one from a shop in Washington, DC, have one custom made for me in Florence or Rome when I visit this fall, or have one made in Bangkok or Hong Kong when I visit SE Asia in April. What would you recommend for receiving the best suit with the limited funds I have?

We get this question a lot at Put This On. Folks say they’re headed to Bangkok or Mumbai for a week, and should they buy their first suit there? Alternately, they ask if they should buy their first suit from a low-cost online custom maker.

The answer, generally, is no. Unless off-the-rack clothes don’t fit you, just buy off the rack.

Why shouldn’t you go bespoke?

Unless you have a very unusual body, an off-the-rack suit will fit you well, particularly with alterations. You can and should try on a variety of models to get a sense of which brands and styles fit you best, but for men who aren’t 6’6” or 300 pounds, off-the-rack will fit.

Bespoke tailoring, and custom tailoring generally, is never right the first time. Getting a perfect fit requires a long-term relationship and typically at least two or three garments, even for a great tailor.

Inexpensive tailors in second and third-world countries are rarely great tailors. There simply isn’t demand for great tailoring at their price point, and so good enough tailoring suffices. There are certainly exceptions, but you should ask yourself if you have the time and cultural skills to figure out who those exceptions are.

Fashion in the first world is very different than it is in the third world. One generally can’t rely on a tailor for fashion tips, but this is particularly true in, say, Thailand. If you don’t want an awkwardly designed (as opposed to tailored) suit, you’ll have to have a very, very specific idea of what you want, and communicate it effectively.

Buying bespoke involves a lot of choices, and those choices are best left to a professional clothing designer, rather than a guy buying his first suit.

High-quality fabrics are tough to get in the third world. You’ll find a lot of Chinese polyester blends in the fabric market in Bangkok, and not a lot of English woolens.

Of course, there are situations in which you can and should buy custom garments. If your body is unusual and you can’t get a good fit off the rack, go for it. If you live in a tailor-rich country, and can effectively judge who’s good and who’s not, and have the money to experiment and import fabric, go for it.

Generally, though, you’ll be better off at Suit Supply or Brooks Brothers or even H&M than with a tailor you don’t know whom you will see only once.

(One side note: shirts are a different story. If you can find decent fabric, there are tailors who can make affordable custom shirts in tons of places.)

(Photo via)

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Bespoke suits in Thailand have been a mixed bag for me, particularly with pant suits (not made for my female body!). What putthison doesn't cover is their genius for replicating existing items in your wardrobe. It's easy, and cheap, to (1) bring items that fit you well (perhaps in so-so fabric); (2) buy nice / other fabrics and (3) have an exact copy of the item made for you. The copies I've made are dead on in terms of fit, with a quality that exceeds my existing off-the-rack pieces.

Also, come on, it's just fun to pick and choose your own clothes from the ground up!

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Google declares GPAS worthless

Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock explains why GPA and most interviews are useless for hiring.

When God, in the form of sage advisers or ancient spiritual wisdom, tells you your value is not based on your GPA, you are skeptical. It's only when Google says so that you believe it.

What traits would you consider most useful in a new employee & how would you interview for them? In managing dozens of interns and volunteers over the past 18 months, I've come to prize plain old reliability and steadfastness; not so sexy, but you can count on it, and that's gold

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Meta question:

Can you no longer reply to comments on posts (as new posts)? How do you do so, if you can?

[scienceisbeauty]

The march of the penguin diagrams (Symmetry Magazine)

Two physicists walk into a bar and start playing a game of darts. One turns to the other and says, “Let’s make a bet. If you lose this game, you have to use the word ‘penguin’ in your next paper.”

This may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but it is actually the reason that, in 1977, a certain type of drawing in particle physics became known as the “penguin diagram.” Theorists and physicists from the LHCb experiment at CERN told the tale last week at a Google+ Hangout.

CERN theorist John Ellis (pictured above) was the scientist who took the penguin bet. He did not play his best game of darts that day.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Wonderful.

But what would he have done had the word been "octopus?"

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Only a child could make a card like this. Adults dance around the words, using things like "the situation" and "what you're going through." But I mean, it's true; may as well come out and say it. And somehow, in saying it, this sweet child made me laugh and laugh and roll over laughing some more. I tried to make a sad face, but as you can see, I failed.

(PS This card is one of several that a sweet friend arranged for me to receive, by telling her friends, who don't even know me, about "the situation" and asking for me to get mail. It's been a complete delight to discover unexpected gifts in my mailbox. What kindness!)

[etceterawhatever-blog]

At Central Park with N, enjoying the way small children feel no anxiety about playing within inches of strangers' (our) space. A woman joked that we should take some home with us. "Pick me, pick me!" one child yelped, then tap-danced to show us what he had to offer. N=He who gifted me with Annie Dillard. (See previous post.)

[etceterawhatever-blog]

Last summer, I said something along the lines of “I pretty much think Annie Dillard is the closest we mere mortals can come to divine and will eat from her hand nearly anything she says.”

Around that time, I met my then-new-beau. The first time we met, as friends, I was reading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and couldn’t stop raving about it, couldn’t stop asking questions like, “What do the existence of slugs say about God?”

When that man and I progressed beyond friendship, I proposed that we begin a “two person book club.” I then learned, to my delight, he’d already checked out “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” from the Brooklyn library, expressly to engage me in conversation.

He kept it on his dresser for the duration of our relationship. To my knowledge, he never progressed beyond the first few pages, and we never talked about it, or slugs, or what they say about God.

I am with someone new now. (A separate story, but in brief: he feels to me like a silver parachute from The Hunger Games, falling in my lap as an expression of lavish generosity. Don’t overstretch the metaphor.) While discussing Annie Dillard, who he’s also enjoyed, I admitted to him that, despite my previous claim (“I’ll eat from her hand nearly anything she says”), I hadn’t read anything else of hers.

So he bought me this. For no occasion, just: he cares for me, we like books, it was a kind thing to do.

I’m not sure he realizes, though I thanked him sincerely and profusely, how touched I am by a gesture like this.

That very evening we’d discussed the difficulty of giving a good gift: knowing a person, then making the creative leap from the things a person can know they want to the things they will, but haven’t yet discovered. A good gift involves listening and responding, thinking about a person when you don’t have to. A good gift is about what the person will enjoy, not the way you’ll feel presenting it.

This book, all these things, says to me: I see you, I understand you, I care for you, and, (perhaps best of all,) we’re on the same page.

Also, it’s an Annie Dillard book, and now I get to read it! N, you’re speaking my love language. Thank you. Looking forward to comparing margin notes.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered what’s now known as the “spacing effect.” Ebbinghaus studied gibberish words and showed that his ability to learn and recall those words improved dramatically when he spaced his study session out over time. It’s intuitive to any student who has crammed for an exam and then immediately forgot everything. It’s the phenomenon that your ability to learn a concept improves when you study it multiple times, spaced over a long time span rather than within a short time frame. On the other hand, the spacing effect seems counterintuitive because it feels like and is misinterpreted by outsiders as laziness. It feels more logical to push forward with hard work, even as we see diminishing, plateauing returns, because the alternative is inaction. The spacing effect demonstrates the role patience plays, in tandem with pushing, in the way our minds learn and improve.

3 Tips on Overcoming Learning Plateaus from David Foster Wallace, by Walter Chen.

I am currently collecting thoughts on space between, and now that I'm on the lookout for it, I see it everywhere. What began as a mere observation on the sacred space between two hands in the image below (Rodin's, The Cathedral, one of my favorite works of art) blossomed into a conversation topic and subject of curiosity. Now I'm feeling a minor compulsion to create a unified theory of pauses.

I'd been thinking about it in terms of physical space and conversational space, the space between two dancers or two notes of music; I hadn't yet considered the value of learning space. What else?

[12hourrn]

Means of giving pleasure to the sick: A sick person also intensely enjoys hearing of any material good, any positive or practical success of the right. He has so much of books and fiction, of principles, and precepts, and theories; do, instead of advising him with advice he has heard at least fifty times before, tell him of one benevolent act which has really succeeded practically,—it is like a day’s health to him.

Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale. (via 12hourrn)

I like the idea of a sick person flooded with notes not screaming at him to get well, something which he cannot make himself do (and don't you think he would if he could, without your nosing?), but of wonder, delight, and good. If the body must be frail, at least the heart may be warm and strong.

[citystories-blog]

Lilies

Should you be having a down sort of day, I prescribe buying an armful of lilies and carrying your bouquet about the town. 

Sometime last summer I became obsessed with lilies- their majestic, giant blooms, their glorious fragrance, capable of perfuming a room—or a crowded subway car.  I’d buy bouquets every Friday at the Union Square farmers’ market and carry them with me as I did my errands.  When you’re carrying lilies, people smile at you.  It feels like leading a charmed life.  Try it, look out for the dimpled grins. People seem intuitively happy to see zest for life in the form of an armful of blooming flowers.

There’s a brownstone I often walk by on Prospect Place in Brooklyn with a yard full of lilies-taller than toddlers, strong and straight, bedecked with dozens of big white blooms. You’d know the yard blindfolded; the scent wafts up from the garden out to the sidewalk, heralding one’s approach to the lily-yard a half block in advance.  I had lily envy.

I started buying lily plants, planning to plant the bulbs in my own yard when they died and prepare for festivities in the year to come.  I don’t know what wintering bulbs look like, but mine don’t look like much of anything. I’m not confident they’ll grow me any flowers, not if my summer crops are any indication.

To make matters worse, the beautiful two-stalk stargazer I bought at last week’s farmers’ market, bearing a good six buds on each stalk, has only a single flower to show for it.  Most of the buds simply, inexplicably, dropped to the floor.  It remains to be seen whether the two still clamped shut will fall, stay wound tight as they are now, or become the lilies they were meant to be.

The other day I saw yet another premature lily-bud death, and as I reached to sweep the damage I thought, “You should have been a lily.”  I immediately knew I wanted to write a poem to which that would be the first line. I thought at first it would be in free verse, chaffing at the formality of structure for such a flowery thought, but then I read something in the introduction to a book of Rilke sonnets that changed my mind:

“By concentrating on the technical demands of meter and rhyme, the poet who composes a sonnet is liable to think of possible formulations that would not have occurred to him or her otherwise.  For Rilke, the process of composition involves more receptivity than deliberate control, and its fruits are experienced as a gift that could not have been anticipated.  Lacking the freedom to write down the first things that come to mind, he is forced to go beyond what he was already prepared to say.”

So instead I wrote a sonnet. I can’t agree more that the process of composition is about letting go and receiving rather than control. And sure enough, the fruits were unanticipated.  When I got to the end I found myself saying something very different from what I’d planned to say—but perhaps what I’d wanted to say all along. Here it is—first draft, anyway:

You should have been a lily. There you lie- a bud, full, thick and fat, and meant to bloom- discarded on the floor, food for a broom, never to explode in shocks of white. You’re green now, for a day or two at most, but severed from your mother this can’t last. The water you have stored is fading fast. You’ll shrivel brown and small, a lily ghost. Do you regret your fall, mourn for the life you could have had:  stargazing, dappled, sweet? Do you know what you could have grown to be? Did you think a cramped bud was all you’d find? While seeking freedom you found death instead, but tethered, you, a lily, should have been.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

I’ve written before about the benefit of carrying a bouquet of flowers.

When you’re carrying lilies, people smile at you.  It feels like leading a charmed life.  Try it, look out for the dimpled grins. People seem intuitively happy to see zest for life in the form of an armful of blooming flowers.

(Read the rest below.)

New twist: carrying a bouquet on an airplane. All of the above, amplified. Security lines with a smile. Flight attendants thrilled to have you. Fellow passengers breaking their travel game face to notice, enjoy, comment.

I should make this a standard travel practice.

[etceterawhatever-blog]

The language of falling in love

As two people fall for each other, they become increasingly bold in saying so, and saying lovely things about each other. First it's, "This feels like Something." Then, a veiled allusion to the other's beauty. Then, clever but unmistakable avowals of admiration. Tentative declarations of interest-testing the waters-gain speed, growing into affection, and soon, adoration, gaining fluency and confidence with the language (and permissibility) of desire. They introduce terms of endearment-perhaps in second languages, making affection feel more like play, less frightening if not reciprocated in scale. "I'm excited to see you," becomes "I miss you," becomes "The city feels quiet and empty without you," becomes "I don't want to be apart from you." Another paragraph could be written, but won't right now, on the escalating meaning and comprehension of silence, smiles, adoring gazes and knowing looks.