Really good reading (Karl Ove Knausgaard), kitchen update

Since I can remember, which to be fair is only since about the age of 6, I have so enjoyed having older friends. High on the list of both options and favorites included my parents' friends, and even my Nanny's. I attribute this to never quite feeling like I fit it with peers my age, finding comfort in those who'd lived a bit longer, made it through various gantlets (who else wonders about gantlet versus gauntlet? See below for a deeper-in-brief understanding.), and shrugged aside what no longer mattered or should.

Being that I am nearly 42, I cannot for the life of me recall why I started this post this way. I mean, it's all true, but where was I going with my older-friend (discussion)? And why, after nothing more than a question from Jack regarding (a fifth) dinner, have I forgotten my direction?

I attribute this both to being nearly 42 and to having been home with a sick'ish child for two days while also being in the midst of our renovation and having a 3rd grade class play to attend to. Plus trump. He's generalized anxiety at its worst. Robert Reich, who I heard speak last night, feels we have much work to do but also should feel lots of optimism. We must get back to the common good, the unwritten moral obligations we each feel for others, for those are the threads that bind. Here's hoping.

In any case, good reading. 

There is always too much good reading to ever actually complete, but, if you love being swept away in deceptively simply observation of places and people, I beseech you to make time for Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian writer who lives in a tiny town in Sweden. 

I suspect that being friends with KOK would be difficult. He seems quite the artistic dervish really. Naturally, he is ruggedly handsome, perennially windswept and tan. And he smokes. But I am besotted by his writing, by his ability to see where he is and make you feel that you, too, are there. Smelling what he smells, meeting who he meets, smoking as he smokes. 

He first came on my radar three years ago, when he published in the New York Times a masterful travelogue/essay/memoir-lite about travel through North America. He managed to traverse some epically barren places, but my god did I shortly want to go where he had gone. To see the combination tub-shower-wall that seemed it couldn't have fit through the door but also couldn't have been crafted in that room. To experience the silence and space and immense rurality of some of the places he visited. In the country that is my home, and in the one that is my immediate northern neighbor. 

That piece stuck with me, not least because I consider myself nearly hampered by my observations but here was a writer making beautiful of it. And then I read about his enormous, multi-volume autobiography, and picked up "Autumn." The Guardian loathed it, considered it twee and horrid, but honestly, I loved it. I love the way he describes a wall or a spill of blood or a church or authenticity and the way we all search for and are drawn to it. Is KOK self-indulgent and dramatic? Maybe. But is his eye impeccable and is his hand deft? Without a doubt.

And then, last Sunday, this roguish Scandinavian took us to Russia via not enough pages in the New York Times Magazine. Not having read Turgenev's “A Sportsman’s Sketches," (1852) I can, nonetheless, feel I understand that which Knausgaard remains drawn to: "modest, aimless" stories that manage to portray so much, perhaps even the whole of the story.

There is something utterly magnetic in Knausgaard's rendering of place. Something completely authentic and crucial. Something essential. The everyday. Life.

I can imagine that for some such writing is mundane. But to me it is magical. And while I in no way want this to seem aggrandizing, I wonder if the magical in the mundane is maybe what can get us back to a truer sense of the common good. 

What if we first met each other as teammates? For example, my kitchen renovation. I need a team and I have one. My team is young (30s) and old (70s). They speak English and Spanish in varying degrees of fluency, and no, that doesn't wholly map with age. They are from this country and beyond. They live in cities and they live so much farther out. They are single and they are married. Some are grandparents, some are gay. I do not know where their political affiliations rest, but I do know that all of us respect the others' talents and that each of us can and do work toward a common end. We share a bathroom and a microwave, a lunch break and many hours. I watch videos of their children's musical concerts, I see photographs of their grandbabies, and I hear the woes that teenagers and college freshman bring. I think that were something horrible to befall us here, we would keep each other safe, even if that meant risk.

That is the pattern that has been revered, never completely was, is not, but could be. It is what writers like Knausgaard are drawn to and record, it is what Reich implored us to bring back, and while I still don't totally know why I started writing about older friends, I wonder if that thread is related. What we keep and what we shed as we age and our values come together and focus.

~~~
Oh, and even though I did just find termites in our deck (FFS), our kitchen is coming along swimmingly, thank gawd. The two far left cabinets in the second picture will have glass fronts too- coming...

Integrity

Well, folks, we've hit the proverbial renovation speed bump, and it.is.a.doozy. Prior owners of and contractor for our lovely home, if you're reading this, you should be ashamed.

But I bet you aren't. Which leads me to today's theme which is...INTEGRITY.

In this day and age of a toxic, lying, cheating, abusive, devoid-of-moral-fiber "presidential" administration, one of the MOST conspicuously absent traits is integrity.

To pull a completely overused and somewhat contrived stunt on y'all, but also to ensure that you learn if you don't already know, Merriam-Webster, the dictionary, defines integrity as:

• firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values; incorruptibility.

For further review, incorruptibility is defined as: 

• not subject to decay or dissolution, and/or
• incapable of being bribed or morally corrupted

 Adherence to a moral code, incapable of being morally corrupted via influence or bribe, anti decay...Interesting.

Trump, our "president," fails every one of those standards as does every one of his current advisors, cabinet members, and employees -past and present- that I can name or easily recall. Although it's fun to stab at the ignorant, destructive, hair-challenged Yam, he's merely a symbol of the decay in the general public. Us. The voters.

It's probably exceedingly obvious that I did NOT vote for the noxious turd. But I did mostly trust and place good faith in the folks from whom we bought our home. They'd dealt with the termites, they'd renovated beautifully, they'd had an inspection and shared the results. Their agent and ours were absolutely lovely. We knew we'd ultimately redo the kitchen which was both growing old and not to our liking in either style or function, and at some point, even the best roof and HVAC units need replacing.

This was their "forever home" -before the dream job they moved for- and so we trusted that things had been done correctly. As per integrity. And, might I add, being financially comfortable enough to not cut corners unless stingy.

Alas. Integrity, and generosity in its spirit, are in such short order these days. Let's consider the FEMA director who promised 3 million meals to Puerto Rico but delivered just 50,000. To American citizens. Who were and remain without electricity and water and sustenance. Thank you, instead, José Andrés. 

Let's consider just how many employees Trump has stiffed over the years. Just how many thousands upon thousands of unpaid bills he's ignored. How many students he's stiffed. How many potential tenants he and his father discriminated against based on the color of their skin. Let's think about how he assaults women and continues to keep known abusers employed. Let's think about his desecration of truth and the media. 

But I'm trying to go micro here, so let's talk about my house. And how my plumbing permit was unexpectedly denied yesterday because the previous owners chose to install more plumbed fixtures than are allotted on the current pipe coming off the main into our house and did not bother to disclose that tidbit. 

Keep in mind that our kitchen looks like this:

And that my house currently looks like swiss cheese because of the myriad exploratory holes bored to figure out the plumbing discrepancies and also to bring everything up to code. And that now everything is delayed because...

Our only options are to:

• cut and remove all evidence of ALL hoses and additional fixtures (a sink, say) on our property (great expense; what would I do if I couldn't work in my yard and had to watch it all die?; also, removing all evidence essentially means removing most walls)

OR

• pay the exorbitant fees required to upgrade the line from the main to our house; install a new meter IN our home which means demolishing a wall of our basement and building some bizarre "home" for the meter which is too large to fit behind a wall; apply and wait for all the permits needed to do this; pay the overages for extra fixtures we did not install but bought on good faith; AND pay for all the additional plumbing needed to fix all of the above. 

Could you, in good faith, sell your home to someone knowing they could never renovate or change even one plumbed item without forking out roughly a car's worth of money and not tell them? Could you, in good faith, agree to let your renovation go through knowing you were lying? Would you?

If you have integrity, the answer to all is a resounding NO. If you sold your house without a word and, by the way, left it dirty with, for example, pee residue on the main floor toilet, to a young family, you suck. You are greedy and stingy and you lack integrity.

So, please, people. Do better. Be better. Especially if you have means. We screw the poor in this country left and right. Sometimes corners have to be cut to survive (and if you're rolling your eyes, you're A) probably not actually poor and buy into that welfare queen nonsense and/or B) need to go do some reading. Read Evicted, for example. It is excruciatingly hard and expensive to be poor in this country).

We're going to fix everything correctly. At great expense. At sacrifice of other things we'd budgeted for this year. Because it's the right thing to do, and because there is zero chance my mental health can handle a dead yard. 

If you don't need to cut corners, don't. Have integrity and "be a man." Seriously. This greedy, selfish bullshit is for the birds. Worse, it's a toxic virus that spreads like wildfire. It's ugly and it deforms. We need to do better. Be better. It starts with each of us.

My newest venture

I am so, so excited to share that I have opened an editing business, Elucido: Make Your Written Work Shine. As you know, I love to write. Perhaps even more, I love to edit, and for years and years now, I have joyfully helped students and professionals polish application essays and cover letters, strengthen resumes, and tighten literary essays. Last year, I had the remarkable experience of helping edit the soon-to-be published memoir of a Civil Rights journalist.

As I look ahead, to the near future of sons who are going to sleepaway camp this summer for six weeks (gasp!) and to the longer-term future of boys continuing to grow up and out, I want more for me as Emily. I think it's wise, and I think it's time. This blog sustains me deeply, but Elucido is a thrilling venture beyond that, and there is something about a paycheck that feels awfully rewarding.

I had my first Elucido client over winter break, and friends, I was a new woman. I adore college-age students. Remembering what a crucial time my undergraduate years for me, in SO many ways, I love experiencing some of that excitement again. The electric jolt of opportunity that a good undergraduate or graduate fit can give young people. 

Likewise, the thrill of seeing people of all ages get to reinvent themselves professionally is such a gift. If I can help them make that leap with even an iota of greater confidence, well, wow. 

It would be impossible to adequately articulate the ways in which writing has changed and improved my life. I believe deeply that any sort of writing, especially if creative and/or personal, is a portal into parts of ourselves that might otherwise remain unknown. Whether telling a college more about who you are as a young adult or a potential boss about why you are the perfect candidate for the job or your readers about why you're worried or gleeful, you're coming to better understand and know yourself, and that is never a bad thing. To partner with others as they travel these roads is an honor.

So, thank you to everyone who has already expressed such generous support for me and my writing and Elucido. Please feel free to spread the word.