nonlynnear

Today Mr Mo and I went to the remains of the Children's and Maternity Hospital  complex, founded in 1908, and located not very far from where I used to have my art studio in Weißensee (just two stops farther on the M4 tram line). It was… well, seems like it would be hard to restore much if any of it: there have been numerous fires in most if not all of the several buildings on the campus, some quite serious, and the holes in the roofs and resulting rain damage have led to ceilings caving in and all kinds of rot. I was pretty nervous about scuttling through a couple of corridors, and was glad not to have had any plaster or worse drop down from above. Of course, the buildings have been stripped bare of anything even remotely of value or useful, including copper wire. Only a few window panes in one of the buildings hadn’t been broken, but for the rest — all of the interior windows (for observation, nursing stations, and so on) were thoroughly smashed. What few fixtures had been left b...

Renée’s funeral was this past Saturday: she had died more than a week before due to cancer, advanced age, and likely quite a few other contributing factors (diabetes?) exacerbated by morbid obesity. With respect to her obesity, my aged and aging parents were likely not the only ones who were surprised that she had lasted so long. —And therein lies a great deal of what was so unfair in life where Renée was concerned: being fat defined her for a lot of people, and oh, how it served to define and constrain her view of herself. Renée was the mother of one of my very best friends during high school and university. But I was aware of her far earlier than before my friend and I became such good friends: sometime after I’d been called to be the Junior Primary pianist (Primary being held on Wednesday afternoons before The Divinely-Revealed Sunday Three-Hour Block), I had occasion to go into the chapel (where Senior Primary was held). Renée was at the podium because she was the Primary president...

I started a blogpost some days ago about looking for — and eventually tracking down — someone I knew in Pittsburgh Days of Yore. Moreover, I recently mentioned on the Facebook old missionary page I run that I wish I could find my one truly lost comp, whom I haven't heard anything from or about for more than 30 years now. The odds of my finding Sister H are very small, I think (especially given her relatively common last name), and those odds are helpful for freeing me from any odd attendant feelings of obligation or guilt I might otherwise have. By contrast, as for my Pittsburgh friend, the fact that I know where she is, and where her children are (who were friends with our older children back in the day), has not led me to contact her or them, at least not yet. And perhaps I won’t ever do so.  —And it’s that last possibility that I find a little disquieting (and yet surprisingly not as guilt-inducing as I’d expected). I used to be so good at maintaining relationships. I kept in to...

“Adventure” is a bit strong. This post is about cutting. No, not self-mutilation (although I had to deal with that god-awful phenomenon when I was a school principal), but more like cutting out paper dolls. Only what I’m cutting out (endlessly, endlessly) are the zillions of doodles I’ve drawn over the years (nearly always during interminable meetings of one sort or another). First of all, the doodles: I figured out that doodling is not a distraction: rather, it helps me focus. It is the manual equivalent of something I seem to do subconsciously when driving: humming/singing the same tune over and over again (but in a “theme-and-variations” kind of way). I have not been formally diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I sure have all the classic signs, and yes, the “extra activity” (be it humming or doodling) takes up enough of that part of my brain that is distractible to allow the rest of my brain to focus on the meeting at hand (to listen and actively participate). My ...

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s and into the early 1990s, I used a printer down in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, to produce the tabloid-sized monthly Greenfield Grapevine . I cannot remember if I did this with every issue, but I drove the galleys down to the printer at least a few times during those years.  Brownsville is one of several towns that dot the banks of the Monongahela River; it was founded roughly around the same time as the French & Indian Wars in the 18th century. As with so many places in SW Pennsylvania, Brownsville’s prosperity was largely tied to heavy industry, and when the steel and associated industries left, so did most of the ancillary businesses, and with them, much of the population — dropping from some 8,000 in its heyday (in 1940) to fewer than 2,400 as of the 2010 census. I drove Brownsville’s main drag several times, and each time I marveled at all the boarded-up storefronts and shuttered businesses. I wondered then, as I wonder now, just how precipitous...

I have related in various more-or-less public forums the True Story about marching into the bishop’s office when I turned 12 and demanding that he make me a deacon. Less known is how not too long thereafter, I marched into the same bishop’s office to demand that the name “Beehive” be changed to something less stupid. I was a Beehive, as were all 12- and 13-year-old active Mormon girls up until 2019.† According to LDS Inc. (I mean, lds.org), “the beehive was a symbol of harmony, cooperation, and work for the early pioneers of the Church. Beehive was also the first name by which young women were known. Beehives today learn to work together in cooperation and harmony as they strengthen their faith….” Um, OK, but it [was] still stupid. However, what I want to relate is how much I liked my Beehive teacher Carol, and… how apparently terrified she was of me at the beginning. This was her first real calling in our ward, and possibly her first real calling ever as a relatively new convert, and ...

This past Friday evening marked the end of my third week in an Integrationskurs here in Berlin — a state-subsidized German-language course that is intended to help immigrants become more fully a part of German society. (I have not yet received the certificate required for subsidization, but even without it, the course is amazingly cheap.) I am in class Monday-Friday from 14 to 17h15 (that’s 2-5:15 pm), and this module ends on February 19th. I joined in the middle of the “A1/A2” textbook (the second of six) — this was both a matter of timing (i.e., my finally doing something about learning German) and the fact that I was not a complete novice. I am still scrambling to catch up on the vocabulary and grammar I missed: I've bought the first book and am slowly making the content of both the A1 and A1/A2 books my own. Despite the lacunes, I got 85% on my first sort of official test. (Part of that score has more to do with knowing how to take tests than with knowing German — but I digre...

One of my brothers recently changed his profile photo on facebook. He is in camouflage, proudly holding what I assume is an AK-47, which (in addition to other guns) he has purchased in the apparent belief that he will end up using same to protect his family, and/or his massive stash of food, water, and other survival gear (including a chemical toilet) from the Marauding Hordes that will somehow find their way out to his chic extra-suburban greater LA neighborhood. There are two major things that I find unsettling about this: 1. The expression on his face. He is Prepared. He is Ready. He appears to have utmost confidence that he will be able to defend his family and his stash against all comers. My thoughts in response are not so charitable. Seems to me he felt the same kind of confidence  — at least initially — when catastrophic (and ultimately fatal) illness struck one of his children. And it also seems to me that his AK-47 will be useless against fire in particular, and possibly ...

Yes, hi, it’s January 1st, and this may well end up being one of the few times I blog all year, but who knows. My in-laws are hoarders. They go around their neighborhood on a roughly weekly basis and buy up anything that they think has any kind of value. Their principal home is full-to-bursting with other people’s detritus; their second home is filling up rather more slowly, since they aren’t there very much these days. But again, it’s other people’s stuff taking up space. The prospect of helping my husband and sibs-in-law go through all of this stuff is daunting. I am a packrat. I have accumulated a lot of stuff as well, but nearly all of it is something tied to me or to my nuclear family: my/their papers, my/their souvenirs, and… my rocks, my fossils, my shells, my techno-findings, my “someday these will make extraordinary assemblage sculptures!” wooden bric-a-brac. However, I have been having some Salient Thoughts about this packratitude, to wit: (1) if I'm going to do some asse...

Mom told me that Dad has now trained someone to take his place doing the books at the free clinic. I have very mixed feelings about this. Dad is 85 and has been feeling his age for some time now, but going to the clinic to do the books several times a week has given him a real purpose for getting out of the house on a regular basis and staying active in his area of expertise. Not sure what will take its place now, and I fear this may lead to a real decline soon. Staying on the board and going in every quarter to look things over will be quite a change from his routine of well more than a decade now. This puts me in mind of when Frederick Davis, the founding director of the So. Calif. Mormon Choir, was forcibly retired. He’d resisted taking on an assistant conductor for years, but after one particularly close call — he barely made it on time to a concert — the choir board insisted. So fine, he ended up with the very ambitious Brother RF as the assistant (of course, having a woman lead t...

Yes, another doom-and-gloom post. Given the hand-wringing to follow, it may seem a bit hypocritical for me to fault hyper-righteous religious bigots for their hand-wringing over gay marriage, but I do so mostly because of their conviction that gays and feminists and liberals are the cause of natural disasters, which to their evangelical eyes are punishments from God for sinful permissiveness. Let me share with you, gentle reader, this cartoon as a counter-assertion to this entire idea:  But still, I flatter myself that my hand-wringing has at least some basis in science, and the only judging I do is — OK, fine, I seem to end up comparing the entire human race to locusts quite a bit these days. But at least I’m not singling out vulnerable populations, right? (I do not count wealthy narcissistic over-indulgers as “vulnerable,” by the way.) Anyway, while I try to confine myself to worrying about real problems stemming from real causes, I have been wrong before, and at least once rath...

(Posted on DailyKos, mofembot.com and the European Tribune) There are two basic kinds of war monuments here in France. The most ubiquitous and easy to find are those commemorating the fallen of World War I — “the war to end all wars.” There is at least one in every town and every hamlet, no matter how small, and all bear impossibly long lists of names of those who died “for the glory of France.” There are other monuments, often just plaques, affixed to what seem to be random walls and fences and buildings, scattered here and there in cities and suburbs: these are from World War II, and they commemorate a specific act that occurred on that very spot at a specific moment in time: members of the Resistance executed by the Nazis, for example. What kind of monument will be built in Iraq? In France, it does not matter how remote the place: even the tiniest hamlet on the most hard-to-get-to mountaintop has in its central square a monument to those who fell during World War I. As I have travel...

I have been living in Grenoble since the very tail-end of February 2014. Even when I lived in Grenoble before, and even when I was head of the American school at Europole, I was not quite as surrounded by and immersed in so much French language as I am now — and this is true even though I write technical documents in English at work. There I speak English only with the other technical writer (a completely bilingual Brit, and one of the kindest people I've ever met); all of my other colleagues speak (and generally write) in French to me, and I to them. The (three!) chorales I sing with are all French ( see \"[So no, I don't read music|/post/2014/12/24/So-no%2C-it-turns-out-I-m-not-fluent-in-French]\") . Ping-pong is also French. With one important exception, I speak French with nearly all of the people I interact with outside of work. I am not complaining, not at all. But the longer I live in this Francophone environment, the more I realize just how very far I am from ...

(Originally published on mofembot.com) I’ve been a professional writer and editor since my senior year in college, which was… oh, golly, some 40 years ago now. My first real job came about because one of my English professors was involved in a Mormon church project that required simplifying the missionary discussions, with the goal of reducing them from 18,000 to 12,000 words and taking the reading level down from roughly 12th grade to 6th grade or lower. He and the rest of his team were stuck, and the deadline was hard upon them: each of the discussions was at least 500 words above the maximum and they simply couldn’t get any further. I was initially hired just to count words. After I reported the numbers, this professor essentially threw up his hands and out of sheer frustration or desperation, suggested that I take a crack at it. I did, trimming and combining and simplifying like crazy. When I gave that first discussion back to him, easily under the maximum, he read through it and w...

My friend Odile died this past Saturday afternoon, April 28th, after a long battle with cancer. On Friday, I’d sent a couple of photos of me holding our first grandchild to Odile’s sister C, along with a few thoughts on “the circle of life.” C wrote yesterday that she was able to tell Odile the happy news on Saturday morning during Odile’s last lucid moments, after which Odile lapsed into unconsciousness and died a few hours later. (And yes, C used a close variant of the phrase “ elle nous a quitté ” — “she has left us.”) I am glad Odile is no longer suffering, and that her loved ones are spared further pain in watching her suffer. She lasted far longer than I thought she would, and fought death like a tiger — not because she was afraid to die (at least such was her mindset when she and I talked so frankly about such things many months ago), but because she loved life so much. She had learned to live and rejoice in the moment. She helped me when I needed help, going beyond cultural nor...

(Originally published on mofembot.com) I received a note the end of July from the sister of Odile, my grenobloise friend, telling me that Odile’s health had taken a turn for the worse and that she no longer fully recognizes her surroundings. And two months ago, C wrote to say that “parfois elle est consciente de son état, autres fois, elle espère encore” — “sometimes she is conscious of her state, other times, she still hopes” — a sentence I find so poignant that it still brings tears to my eyes.   I have not heard from C since, although she has said that my weekly emails are appreciated. As is so often the case for those suffering from long-term illness, no direct contact with anyone other than a tiny circle of intimate friends and family for many months means that it is easy to be — not forgotten, exactly, but no longer a focus of attention among one’s larger circle of friends and colleagues. This is normal. I feel I owe Odile so much that I want her — or at least her family...

(Originally published on mofembot.com) A few months ago a Grenobloise friend of mine sent me a link to a long talk by a Québecois psychologist  . I watched the talk — navigating through the ravaged “a” vowels of Québécois French — and came away with a number of helpful insights. The one that has stuck with me is this: “A large part of suffering is due to not accepting that which is” ( “une grande partie de la souffrance est dûe à la non-acceptation de ce qui est” ). It is well more than a year since I dragged my bleeding psyche out of Grenoble and headed home to Berlin, devastated by having lost the friendship and respect of someone I loved, in some ways most particularly because I had not had a clue as to why things had ended so horribly. I mourned this loss in much the same way as I grieved for the death of another important friend, Barbara , much earlier in my life. My Grenobloise friend kindly acted as a liaison and was able to furnish me with some reasons for the rupture with ...

(Originally published on mofembot.com) For any non-astrophysicists out there, all Z Cam(elopardalis)-type stars are wildly erratic and highly unpredictable, as can be seen in the light curve for RX Andromedae:  Note the irregular high- and low-amplitude periods over the course of more than a half-century of observations (light curve courtesy of the AAVSO , for which I used to work). Highlights • Oldest daughter’s marriage: Given that middle daughter Ner’s marriage qualified as the top highlight for 2013, it is only fitting that the Embot’s marriage should top the list for this past year. It was a lovely wedding in a lovely setting. • Music: Not long after starting work in Grenoble, I joined a local choir and discovered how much I’d missed choral singing. I currently belong to three such French choirs, all of which have brought me a lot of joy and satisfaction. • Old friends and new: Since returning to Grenoble, it has been a pleasure to renew several friendships, particularly the o...

(Originally posted on mofembot.com) Since writing (but never posting) the following in early February 2014, I’ve lost 18+ kg (40 lbs) so far. Goal is 23 kg (50 lbs), sooner rather than later, but definitely by my birthday in April. The secret? Well, ever since roughly mid-May of this year, I’ve restricted my intake to half-portions, and have eaten (almost) no cheese, no bread, and no salty greasy snacks (sweet things are thankfully not tempting to me), and I’ve drunk very little alcohol. I’ve experienced a fair bit of unusual stress in Grenoble, but the silver lining to that has been that it has greatly contributed to a lack of appetite. Overall, I feel good, I look much better (even to me — clothes shopping is no longer quite the horrifying activity that it had been for so many years), I am once again wearing certain clothing that I thought I’d never fit into again, and so... onward toward the goal!   I was a skinny kid. Not painfully thin, not emaciated-looking, not a stick-figur...