Let’s build a new train service

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After wonderful experiences taking trains all over Japan, I thought about all the benefits we would derive from a good rail system and wondered why no one was talking about it. Each time I mentioned it the responses were something about being in love with our automobiles, or how awful Amtrak was. I took the train, once, from Pittsburgh to New York. The trip was so nasty I returned by bus–cleaner and faster. A high-speed rail system, like they have in Japan, would get me to New York in two and a half hours; Chicago in three hours. One of my recent flights from New York took seven hours. I could have driven in that time.

David Bear, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, had an article, last Sunday, about the situation; first time I’ve seen anything about it. He goes into all the statistics and concludes with some hope for improvement, but not much. I followed the link in the article and found there is some interest in US rail travel. With some Googling I found articles that had been broadcast on NPR and also found that the Japanese rail system is both private and publicly owned and makes a PROFIT. So, now I have this fantasy that Bill Gates will look at the situation, decide he could make money this way, and build high-speed rail service throughout the country, or at least from Pittsburgh to New York and Chicago.

Complaints

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Usually I wake up before my radio turns on at seven every morning. This morning it woke me; the announcer said it was 9F out; I went back to sleep and did not get out of bed until after Morning Edition ended at nine. I don’t remember much of what they said either. I think I slept through it all. I don’t know why the outside weather affects me so much. I keep my apartment at 68F during the day and let it drop to 58F at night. I like sleeping in the cold. But when it gets this cold out my body knows it and sends all kinds of nasty messages. I obviously have arthritis in my left hip. Mostly, it only bothers me when I’ve been walking all day. In this weather, it bothers me at night, and I wake up in great pain. How do my bones know it’s 9F outside?

I don’t like to make it warmer in the apartment because I suffer from the lack of humidity, even with three humidifiers going. Sometimes I feel like I spend all winter schlepping water. In fact, I have to stop now: I’m feeling the need for moisturizer on my hands and face.

Name Change

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I finally decided I have to change the name of the blog; not because I have become younger or thinner. I want people to find the blog, other than the ones who are Googling fat and old. If I am correctly interpreting the Typepad help files, all of my links should remain intact. You don’t have to change your bookmarks, favorites or blogrolls, I hope.

Messages from the universe

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Amazing how things come together sometimes. Last week, answering that meme, I wrote about how depressed I was when I was supposedly living the American dream. Over the weekend a friend sent me these rules for being a good wife, dated 2 months after I got married.

Good

Googling it before I wrote this post, I found a controversy about its authenticity.  I don’t know whether this exact article is authentic, but I am certain those ideas about being a good wife were widely promulgated at the time. If you have any doubts, look at The Ladies Home Journal from the fifties. It was my mother’s bible, as she tried to make me into a good little housewife. Her most repeated instruction was: "marriage is a compromise and the wife compromises 90% of the time." Obviously, she didn’t think much of my ability to compromise.

What I find most appalling about the controversy is that young people don’t really understand that the sentiments were real; and that it could happen again. Many women worked and were independent in the thirties and forties. After World War 2 ended, men wanted to take away our independence; they wanted us out of those good jobs. They also wanted to sell us all those consumer items that were being produced. Housewives were encouraged to think they couldn’t live without the newest refrigerator or vacuum cleaner; these items became a substitute for self esteem.

Finally, last night, PBS aired an amazing documentary about lobotomies, a popular "solution" applied, until about 1959, to people (mostly women) who were depressed or psychotic. As I watched I realized I could easily have been one of those unlucky victims. Thanks again, Betty Friedan.

Good Intentions

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It’s 19 degrees here, at noon. About 11 o’clock I collected some reading material, put on my hat, coat, and scarf and went to the health club. I didn’t want to walk so I figured I would get my exercise indoors. Today being cold and a holiday, everyone else had the same idea. There were no parking spaces less than a block away. After circling the lot twice, I found one about a block away and decided to bite the bullet and walk in the cold. As I turned off the engine I realized I had left my readings at home. I gave up, drove back, put my car back in the garage and sat down to read. After all, those are readings for tomorrow’s class; what’s more important!

Multitasking

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Back in school; more Japanese art. I think I wrote this before: the more I study, the more I realize I haven’t begun to scratch the surface. This time I am taking an intro to J. art. All of my other classes have dealt with specific subjects. I’m hoping this intro will give me a glimpse into some of the stuff I know nothing about. Of course, we begin at the beginning: Japanese artifacts go back to at least 11,000 BCE, and I’ve looked at most of this stuff in other classes. I am anxious to get to recent history, like 1100 CE. I think I’m missing the part between 1100 and 1600 CE.

I’m still working on the book binding and I’m very frustrated. I want to make a quilt-type design for the cover, but the pieces are tiny and my fingers are not cooperating. My hand-eye coordination has not improved with age. I am using a pattern from the Japanese quilting book I bought in New York, and the bits of fabric I got in Japan.Dsc06678_2
I needed brighter colors so I added some bits of fabric from my stash and finally got to color combinations I liked. Using the pattern is kind of a joke. It is designed for a finished size of 26" x 16". I want a finished size of 6" x 8". Although I reduced the pattern on the computer, most of the pieces are still too large, requiring further reductions and generally rearranging everything. I doubt it will look anything like the picture I started with.

I’m still thinking about that name change. Haven’t found anything that thrills me. Beginning with "Snapshots and…" I’ve considered Stitches, Solecisms, Scrawls. Any thoughts out there?

An elder meme

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It’s not easy to find something to write about every day. One of the solutions seems to be memes (me me). Most of them are trivial and easily dismissed, but the latest one going the rounds of elder blogs asks you to list five things in your life now you never dreamt would be in your life when you were 25. I first read about it in Blogging in Paris; Ronni Bennett took up the challenge today.

I’ve been thinking about it all morning, beginning with determining what year I was 25 (1959), where I was (returning to Chicago from California), how I felt. Briefly, I wallowed in those memories and realized I don’t really want to write about them in any detail. Suffice it to say, I bought into the American dream: a house in a posh suburb, a husband who brought home a good paycheck, a beautiful daughter, no ambition other than being a good wife, mother and homemaker; Betty Furness incarnated. That was the only ambition women were supposed to have. I was also severely depressed and might have been institutionalized if it hadn’t been for another Betty (Friedan), who published The Feminine Mystique, attacking the then hugely popular notion that women could find fulfillment only through childbearing and homemaking.

So, everything I am today is different:

1. I am happy, not because I have achieved some goal or passed some milestone, but because the sun is shining; birds are singing; trees are beautiful.

2. I have learned to live in the present. I didn’t know what that meant at 25. I am not without goals, or things I want to achieve, but I have a clear picture about what is really important, family and relationships, and what is secondary.

3. I am divorced and live alone. I went from my mother’s house to my husband’s house, all the time wanting to run away. Now I know I love living alone. I no longer want to run away. I wouldn’t mind more companionship, but I hope to always eat breakfast alone.

4. Like Claude, I also became a teacher and loved it. It seemed impossible to me back when I was in college and when I was 25. Most of the time I taught adults. Once I had a pre-teen class and decided I would never do it again. I taught in a college in Chicago and found I preferred the older students in evening classes, in spite of being tired, to the younger, just out of high school kids. I was able to support myself and earn enough money to live comfortably now that I am retired. At 25, I was sure I would have a husband to support me. How things have changed.

5. I live in Pittsburgh. When I returned to Chicago, at 25, I never thought I would leave. I loved Chicago, knew everything about it, photographed most of it. When I left 10 years ago, to be near my daughter and her family, it was with the added inducement of being near New York, my second favorite place to live.

Maybe ten years from now I’ll do another one of these, telling you what I never dreamt would happen to me after I was 73.

Contemplating life and death

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Karen at Verbatim posted this link on her website, and while I don’t usually care about these things, this one looked like fun. Thanks to her, I now know: "When you will die: Sunday October 31, 2032, at age of 98," with a high probability it will be from heart disease in a nursing home. When I was a kid I was sure I would live to 100, to 2034. Now, as I approach that number I would consider it a blessing not to get there.

My father lived to 94; in fact, today was his day of birth. He wasn’t in terrible physical shape for 94, but his hearing was all but gone and his sight was going fast from macular degeneration. I think he died because he couldn’t figure out what he would do when he became completely deaf and blind. You don’t learn braille in your nineties.

I don’t think my father enjoyed his old age. Although he remained physically strong, he was angry, and paranoid, and probably very bored. I am determined to keep things interesting, to find new things to learn, to look at, to think about, and not to  worry about the length of my life.

Wonder of the Internet

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Back in December I wrote a post about a church whose deterioration I’ve been watching from my fitness club parking lot, and asked if anyone had any information about it. Alice, from Wintersong, who currently lives in Salt Lake City, but once lived in Pittsburgh, replied that she would ask a Pittsburgh friend about the church.

Shortly thereafter I received a comment from M L Greene with some information about the church. Two days ago, Mage from San Diego, who posts at Day Tripper, sent me a link to some beautiful photos about the church. Although never identified in these photos, and I never before noticed the large red chimney/incinerator next to it, I couldn’t believe there were two different places with the same damage to their spires.

I drove over to it yesterday. It is the same church. The red chimney (or whatever) is behind it. The windows are boarded up, the damage to the spires continues, but the chain link fence is gone and there is a sign inviting people to come for "The Word" on Sundays at noon. So the church has become useful again, and hopefully will be repaired. Some Sunday at noon I’ll go over and see it.

Amazing, isn’t it, that people from all over the country can join together to give information.

This is exercise?

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Today’s substitute for exercise was walking around The Waterfront, a large shopping mall built on the site of the Homestead steel mill. I don’t really like shopping, except for food and then only sometimes, but I’ve been accumulating a wish list for the last month or so. What finally pushed me over the edge was the need for paper to print out the picture pages of the book.

I wasn’t happy with the photographs I was printing on my "special" paper the other night, so I printed only the black and white pages. Yesterday, after a stint at the health club, I stopped nearby at Staples. Their stock needs restocking. My first stop today was Office Depot, where I bought some Epson Premium Presentation Paper. I hope that will work. I did not want photo paper; it’s too heavy and you can’t use both sides. I found some online that says you can use both sides, but it costs more than a dollar a sheet. This book is not so precious. The Epson paper says it is "Matte Double-Sided" and has "vibrant images and crisp, sharp text." I intend to find out in a few minutes.

Back to shopping: I went to Michael’s, just for fun; Bed, Bath and Beyond, and Target, where I did not buy the one-person size, indoor grill, because they didn’t have it; Dick’s Sporting Goods, where I did not buy the sports bra I’m still looking for; and finally Giant Eagle for $50 worth of fruit, veggies and assorted cleaning supplies. Now I’ll get back to work on the book with the grill and the sports bra still on my mental list.