Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 34

The iceberg model of culture, or: taking a metaphor to extremes

No posts for nigh on two weeks and then two of them come in one day. NOT GOOD BLOG MANAGEMENT.

I'm training to do tutoring with an organization that helps immigrants and refugees, and part of the training was watching this one-minute video on the iceberg model of culture . Spoiler: Culture is like an iceberg, with only a small portion visible.

I was telling the ninja girl about this, and the conversation unfolded like this:

Me: Culture is like an iceberg: only a small portion is visible.

Her (sagel...

Halloween 2021

Our neighborhood is a magnet at Halloween, and the residents go all in to make it fun. It was great to be back to doing it this year--I really loved seeing all the kids, parents, and teens, and some of the costumes were just fabulous. My favorite was a chicken: a homemade comb-and-wattle of red felt, attached to a white felt cap, and the kid was wearing a white hoodie. I didn't get a picture, but one of the neighbors caught it in a slideshow they posted on FB--apologies for the graininess:



I carv...

popping maze corn (aka, popping maze maize!)

Last week mallorys_camera and I visited Mike's Maze , and I purloined an ear of corn from the walls of the maze. This corn is obviously not sweet corn for eating boiled or grilled--it's long in the tooth and deep yellow and gives the impression of being the sort of corn you might grow for milling into cornflour, or some other use like that. I don't have a picture of it still on the cob, but here it is as kernels in a bowl:



I was wondering what it would be like to try to pop it. I know that nowaday...

forms and starlings

I went for an annual physical the other day. The place I go, they make you fill out this form where you rate how you're feeling mentally/emotionally ("I think the world would be better off without me (a) never (b) sometimes (c) often (d) always"--that type of thing). I tend toward the melancholic, and these haven't been the most cheerful few years--I mean, it's been a Five Year Plan's worth at least of not-greatness--but basically I'm good. I checked "never" for all of them except one, "Have you...

Hartford Marathon

Today Wakanomori ran the Hartford Marathon. With this marathon, he's run a marathon in every New England state (not to mention several in New York). But two people running in today's marathon were using it as a capstone for running a marathon in every state, so there are always new goals to achieve.

I kept myself entertained by limping around Bushnell Park, which is not named after a corporation, as I darkly suspected (there is a Bushnell Corporation, but it's headquartered in Kansas), but after ...

an angel ghost, an unexpected guest

I did a chalk drawing of an angel offering an apple to a fox (... if foxes can crave grapes in Aesop, then they can be offered apples)--I had the angel leaning out of a sky window because I love that conceit. The fox came out VERY wonky in the body, but I like his face.

The feet belong to the next-door neighbor girls






I finished right before a good, drenching rain, so now the angel is a ghost:



In other remarkable news, a plant grew in the pot I had planted calendulas in. It looked vaguely familiar--...

Follow-up Piranesi entry (warning: contains spoilers)

People commented at the time that Piranesi came out that you could read in it Susanna Clarke's experiences with chronic illness, and, primed for that, I can see it, but talking to the ninja girl this morning, I was thinking about it more in terms of death and rebirth (or death and afterlife), and I was thinking: it's a really a daring choice to center your story on a person after death, so to speak, a person who's in eternity.

I really viscerally disliked 17,776, another story that deals with bei...

Piranesi

I adored the time I spent in the presence of the narrator of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, a man who communes with the infinite House that is his world, who takes care of so many things: recording the tides (because the House encompasses an ocean), cataloguing the statues (the House is full of statues), leaving offerings for the bones of the dead, and paying attention to the birds who share the House with him.

I knew from the beginning that we would have to learn the truth about the narrator, who r...

no surgery!

While the doctor's first choice would be to do surgery, he felt going a nonsurgical route can work, and if it doesn't, the consequences for me aren't dire, and he's willing to keep working with me throughout the healing process, including fixing things if the nonsurgical route doesn't work out as well as it might. So I'm happy! And for anyone who sees this entry and not the last one, all we're talking about is a broken toe. It's uncomfortable and interfering with my life, but it's not, y'know, a...

On the less marvelous side of the scales

I broke my toe! Falling down in my own house! How dumb is that? And when the doctor looked at the X-ray, he said he wanted to talk to a foot surgeon because of the nature of the break... and now they want to do surgery. I am NOT EAGER for that, not one bit. I thought they could just put it in a boot and it would get better. So I will talk to the surgeon tomorrow and try to get a better sense of things.

This was not in my game plan, but I guess breaking random bones, big or small, rarely is in an...