You know what, actually I am not going to wait to write about the pottery class until I have photos for illustration. For one thing, photos basically FORCE you to praise the things I made, and though that would be enjoyable for me, it could be considerably more of a strain for you. For another thing, I now have just enough pottery experience to know that glaze is so pretty it makes every Very Poor pieces look deceptively great, especially in a photo. So I am just going to go ahead and tell you about the class.

To review, first I spontaneously signed up for a wheel-thrown pottery class, and I was surprised at and pleased with myself for having done so. Then I started the class, and after two sessions I didn’t really like it at all and was considering dropping out. Then, after talking to you about it, I changed my strategies and started doing things differently than my teacher wanted me to, and things were going much better, though I was still counting down how many classes were left, and taking Discouragement Breaks in the bathroom. I don’t think I’ve given any updates since.

After one glorious class where the teacher was out of the room and I was doing my own thing and having much happier results, the next session the teacher was back in the room and back to insisting (nicely, gently, quietly, but PERSISTENTLY) that I continue to try to make a straight-sided cylinder. I modified my strategy again: I chose to have some faith in her belief that learning to make a straight-sided cylinder would benefit me in the long run—but, considering the class was half over and there would be no Long Run, I would also work on things I wanted to have as souvenirs when the class was over. I did not want to end the class with nothing more to show for it than a collection of failed straight-sided cylinders. So each day I went in, I worked for awhile on cylinders, and as each one failed I tried to make something else out of it. I continued to feel happy that we were past the halfway point, and continued to think in terms of “Only four classes left!,” “Only three classes left!,” etc. I was unprompt in my arrivals and overprompt in my departures (“Oh, I just reached a breaking point so I cleaned up early”).

On the second-to-last day of class (“This class and then one more and then I’m DONE!”), I learned glazing, which is where you choose what colors to make things. And because I still had things to trim (i.e., partially-dry pieces that needed to be scraped to be thinner and more even), and could only glaze THOSE if they were done BEFORE the last class, I came in the next day for an Open Session: a time when students can come in and work on their projects without the teacher there. I’d never done that before, but I really needed to if I was going to finish everything, so I did.

I can’t quite explain what happened, but on the day I went in for extra work-time, I went home feeling HIGH. My theory is that what did it was learning the last step in the process: now I knew all the basics for taking a 25-pound bag of clay and turning it into glazed finished pieces; and because some of my main anxieties are New Things and Not Knowing How Things Work (like, which cart does this go on when I’m done? and what do I do next? and where are things located when they’ve been fired? and when do I put on the glaze? and then what cart do I put it on?), learning that last step removed a bunch of anxiety. Another part of my theory is that the Must! Finish! adrenaline got mistakenly interpreted by my brain as excitement and enthusiasm. There is also room to question the effects of glaze fumes.

Whatever it was, I started to have a mad, mad, mad idea: Maybe I should sign up for the next session! I recognized this for the crazy near-the-finish-line idea it was. It was relief, that was all: I was having such a surge of relief that the class was almost done, and satisfaction with getting things completed, and sentimental feelings about my nice classmates, and as previously theorized I was mistaking it for excitement and enthusiasm. Also, one of the huge benefits of the class was that it made me appreciate OTHER PEOPLE’S work, so that now perhaps I could take the cost of another session and instead use it to buy some pretty things made by SOMEONE WHO KNEW WHAT SHE WAS DOING. I could support an artist AND end up with a much nicer-looking item than I could make! Win-win!

But then I kept thinking happily all week about getting back to the studio and glazing the things I’d trimmed. I kept thinking of more ideas I wanted to try. I thought about how neat it would be to be thinking about the glaze options AS I WAS SHAPING THE CLAY, rather than standing stupidly in the glazing room with no idea of what I wanted to do. And how nice it would be, now that I knew all the steps, to stagger things: do some wheel-throwing and then do some trimming and then some glazing, and have things at every stage of the process. And maybe I could come in for more open sessions, now that I was not trying to MINIMIZE the number of hours I spent there. And I had seen a marked difference between my first batch of items and my second batch of items, and I wondered if there would be another jump between the second batch and the third. And I went to a pottery store with my mom and didn’t really want to buy anything because I kind of wanted to keep trying to make all those things myself.

In short, brain-error or no, I WAS IN FACT excited and enthusiastic, and counting days until the next class instead of feeling increasing dread. And then on the last day I glazed my last items and I didn’t want to leave early and I was wishing I could have tried painting on the clay before firing, and anyway long story short is that I signed up for the next session.

Christmas mugs, gurl

I should be writing over at my poor neglected baby-name blog, but instead I want to talk about Christmas mugs and country music.

My ideal number of Christmas mugs is four: two smaller ones, two larger ones. The number of Christmas mugs I in fact own has been creeping up somewhat past that ideal, and then I added that happy squirrel mug this year, so I donated two others I don’t like as much, and left two more in the Christmas box, and just brought up these four.

The one with little drawings all over it was a happy find. My mom and I saw it years ago at Marshalls, and we both immediately loved it. I don’t remember how much it cost, but I remember it was more than I could justify at the time—like $12.99 for a single mug (it’s a Dunoon, which meant nothing to me at the time but now I know it’s an expensive brand), so my mom bought it as a gift for my sister-in-law. Then I pined for the mug for years. Then I put a search on eBay for it, and one day a search result came up, and I bought it. So now I have one and I am happy, and also happy to be mug-twins with my sister-in-law. If you feel any stirrings of pining in yourself, the mug is called “Little Bits of Christmas.” (If instead you are pining for any of the others, I got them all at HomeGoods: the Potter’s Studio squirrel is from this year, the larger Christmas tree mug is Fringe from last year, and the smaller Christmas tree mug is from a Myott pattern I’ve seen at HomeGoods and Marshalls year after year but haven’t yet seen this year.)

I have slowly turned from someone who likes a few country-crossover songs and owns one Dixie Chicks album into someone who has put a country station on one of her carefully-hoarded pre-sets. So you still would not call me a super fan at this point, and I still prefer Top 40 and pop-alternative stations, but there has been a definite change. My friend Surely said something long ago about how country music has more love songs for grown-ups—I think at the time I was complaining about how every single pop love song seemed to be about clubs and dancing and bodies rather than, like, LOVE. Anyway, here are a few country songs I like, in case you would be interested in sampling them:

If I Had a Boat, by Lyle Lovett. Country crossover: I first heard it on the alternative rock station.

I Could Use a Love Song, by Maren Morris. With country songs more than with pop songs, sometimes I like a song for the lyrics more than for the tune/artist. This one is me feeling moony while listening to my Peter Cetera Pandora station.

’80s Mercedes, by Maren Morris. This one is the opposite: the lyrics do nothing for me, but I like the rest of the song.

Unforgettable, by Thomas Rhett. Another one where I like the song okay but don’t love it; the real reason I’m including this is that it has shown me the bar pick-up that would work on me: “Then I tried to guess your middle name; for 30 minutes bet we played that game.” Yes. That and a gin-and-tonic gets you your best possible shot.

No Such Thing as a Broken Heart, by Old Dominion. I really like this song and also the video is fun to watch.

Sippin’ on Fire, by Florida Georgia Line. The first song I liked by them was the crossover remix they did with Nelly: Cruise (I like the original version too, but I love how much fun they all look like they’re having making the remix).

Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not, by Thompson Square. I appreciate the way they manage to rhyme “not” with “what”: Are you gonna kiss me or not / Are we gonna do this or wat.

Hurricane, by Luke Combs. Sad and I like it.

Every Little Thing, by Carly Pearce. Sad and I like it.

Games, by Luke Bryan. This is the song where I ran out of things to say about the songs, so now I will just list them.

What Ifs, by Kane Brown.

Small Town Boy, by Dustin Lynch.

In Case You Didn’t Know, by Brett Lynch.

The art center where I took the wheel pottery class did a Student Expo at the end of the term, with work on display from all the classes. The teachers did such a cool job setting all the projects up as if they were pieces in a museum. My pieces, which had previously looked lumpy and tipped to me, now looked like Significant Primitives With Artistic Value. And I will have more to say about the pottery class, now that it’s over, but I want to wait until I have all my pieces back (some things haven’t been fired yet) (or do I mean kilned) (anyway they’re not done) so that I can illustrate the post with a picture—and because the way those final pieces turn out will contribute to my final evaluation of the class.

What I wanted to talk about today is that as I was looking at all the art, a guy came up to me and started telling me about the acrylic paintings I was looking at. I thought he must have been a member of that class, so I nodded and smiled politely. Then I moved on to the next display, with work from another class. He followed me, and started telling me about that display too, standing at Friend Closeness instead of Stranger Distance. I showed even less interest. I started being more deliberate with my body language: closed, turned away, stepping back to Stranger Distance, no eye contact, sounds instead of words, leaving the display as soon as he joined me and going to one across the room rather than to the next natural one along the path. He kept following me and talking, and there was no one else in the room. I had been feeling uncomfortable from the beginning, but now I started to feel increasingly anxious. Why was he telling me all this? Why did he know so much about every single class? Did he work here, or had he taken all the classes, or was he Not Quite Right and he was making it all up?

Then Paul, who had been looking at something in the next room over, came over and joined me. The guy turned into mist and vanished. I was relieved, and also upset. I felt as if I’d had to use Paul’s protection—and that the guy had respected Paul’s mere existence as a man, when he hadn’t respected my clear social signals to leave me alone. The guy had been nearing the point where, if Paul hadn’t been there, I would have had to either leave the building or else start an uncomfortable confrontation. But Paul just appears next to me, and THAT’S what communicates to this guy that I don’t want him near me? If he were actually genuinely thinking I wanted to have him following me and talking to me, he would have stayed and continued “educating” me even with Paul there, and in fact would have included Paul in his informative lectures; his swift departure indicates that he knew perfectly well I didn’t want him around me, and that he was counting on social pressure to keep me from saying anything to stop him.

Thinking about this in the days afterward, I’ve wished a bunch of things. I wished I were Holtzmann in Ghostbusters. She would have glanced in his direction and then licked a gun or something, and he would have backed away, first slowly and then much more rapidly. I wished I were someone who would say the uncomfortable thing and get rid of the guy myself. I wished for, like, a completely different culture, where women don’t have very good reasons to feel nervous about the risks involved in strange men and confronting them.

Rob came home for Thanksgiving and it was great. He started one prolonged fight with Paul about the rules to a game and whether a rule had to be explicitly stated or could be implied, but other than that it was just great. He and William stayed up late talking every night (I got up to pee at 3:30 and they were STILL TALKING), and there were lots of computer/math discussions at the kitchen whiteboard, and I sat nearby feeling contented to have all the babies home. Sure was LOUD, though.

It turns out there is a students-only charter bus that goes from Rob’s college, which is 8 hours away, to a stop 40 minutes from our house, and it is one of the best things to ever happen to my life. There is a woman who coordinates the whole thing, and she has a clipboard and you best believe she checks it eleven times to make sure EVERYONE is on that bus before it leaves the school, and on the return trip she sends an email to all the parents to let us know the bus has arrived safely back at the college. And it costs less than gas and meals would cost me if instead I drove to get him.

Anyway, after I dropped him off at the bus, I went home and sipped brandy (doesn’t that sound classy? actually I mixed it with diet Coke and swigged it down fast to avoid tasting it) and started CHRISTMASSING THE HECK OUT OF EVERYTHING. I got out the Christmas dishes and the Christmas CDs and the Christmas lights and the Countdown to Christmas calendars and the Christmas wreaths and it is just everywhere now. I want pretty Christmas lights and I want them EVERYWHERE I TURN.

I ordered our family pictures to put in the Christmas cards, a task I usually put off until the point of agitation and inconvenience. I scheduled a get-together with my friends, and we’re going to do a Yankee Swap and eat all the Christmas treats. I put a big gold bow on a floor lamp. I got out the pine-scented hand soap. Last year I was too sunk in despair for any of this, but this year GURL IT IS ON.

There is a good sale this morning on one of my favorite Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendars (normally $16-17ish, this morning $11.68 at time of posting):

(image from Amazon.com)

I bought one a number of years ago, and it’s one of my favorite holiday things to bring out. Even Rob, who is now 18, still wants a turn choosing which ornament to put up next. It’s all wooden, nice quality, and nice and flat for storing. I like that there’s a little box for the ornaments that haven’t been put up yet.

I don’t want to wait long for this, because I’m worried the price will go up—but IF THE PRICE STAYS LOW and doesn’t, say, suddenly go to only third-party sellers trying to get $50 for it, I will do a giveaway of one of these mid-day, U.S. addresses only. No comment-content requirement, but if you’re like me and you get shy trying to think of what to say, tell me if you had an Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendar when you were growing up, and/or if you have one now.

[Edited to add: Jessica (Nov 24, 2017 @ 1:49) is the winner!]

In fact, let’s talk about that even if you don’t want to enter the contest (just make a note of that in your comment), and even after I’ve picked someone, because that’s a fun topic and it’s after Thanksgiving now.

When I was growing up, we made a paper chain, alternating red and green links. Each night we could take off one link. Inside each link was written an activity for that evening: sing Christmas carols; watch a family slide show (real slides! we had a screen!); make gingerbread houses; read a Christmas story; draw a nativity scene. (I think my mom must have sorted them to make sure we didn’t have a bigger activity on a busy night.)

When the kids were little, I bought a really cute drawered unit with one drawer for each day until Christmas—but it was too hard to think what to put in the drawers, so I gave up on that. Now we have the Melissa and Doug one.

(image from Amazon.com)

Also, this year I bought the Lego Advent Calendar for the first time, at a price significantly lower than what I see it is today. I’ve been tempted every year, but they’re so expensive, and then last year I thought, “By gum, I’m going to buy one!!”—and then it sold out, and I was disappointed. So this year I bought one, and we will just see. I’ve heard such mixed reviews of delight and disappointment, I think my expectations are nicely managed. It’ll be fun to TRY, even if it is not all that we hoped.

I would like to write a post today, and I will, as soon as I can get Rock Me out of my head.

The lyrics are below dumbness (I think the worst part is when they are spelling out the word “rock”), but it’s so so catchy. I can’t stop. HIT THE PEDAL HEAVY METAL SHOW ME YOU CARE. I can’t comfortably sing along with lyrics like those even when I’m by myself. And is it deliberate that the beat is the same as We Will Rock You? And why do I love it. Why. I am going to have to listen to it over and over until the compulsion is extinguished.

Speaking of embarrassing obsessions, have you played a phone game called Love Nikki Dress-up Queen? I cannot explain its appeal for me. Am I at all interested in fashion? Does the “plot,” in which the heroine encounters people who challenge her to fashion battles and then her cat evaluates the results, make sense in any way? Do I approve of how slender and beautiful and perfect everyone is, or how sexualized some of the levels are, considering how appealing the game is to pre-teens and teens? Are the incorrectly-translated instructions intelligible or helpful? NO TO ALL. And yet here we are. It’s a fun game, once you figure out the one hundred million confusing things about it. I would recommend having a teen or pre-teen play it first and then explain it to you, except that that means feeling mounting horror as you realize that the lingerie challenge you are currently playing was first played by the teen or pre-teen.

Have you ever made cold-brew coffee? There was a booth handing out free bottles of Starbucks Cold Brew, so I tried one, and I really liked it, and then I went to the store to buy some and found it was QUITE A SURPRISING AMOUNT OF MONEY for cold black coffee in a bottle. So I looked up how to make it, and it’s not hard. The worst part is finding a couple of jars, but if you have been enthusiastically participating in the “EVERYTHING is better in a mason jar!” trend you will likely have a couple of them in your orbit. I’m using two well-cleaned 24 oz Ragu pasta sauce jars.

Recipes vary considerably, but this is the one I’ve been using. I put half a cup of ground coffee in the first Ragu jar, and fill it almost all the way to the top with cold water, and put the lid on. I give it a few shakes. I let it sit on the counter for some amount of time over 12 hours, shaking it a little when I see it and think of it. Then I put a funnel in the other Ragu jar, line the funnel with a paper coffee filter, and pour the coffee/water into it. I put a lid on the second Ragu jar and put it in the fridge. When I want some of that coffee, I dilute it 50-50 with water and heat it up in the microwave; if I’m going to drink it cold over ice, I use less water to allow for ice-meltage.

It’s kind of fussy, is my feeling about it, but not as much fuss as it seems like it will be, and it would be a handy thing to know how to do in case of a power outage. Also, Paul keeps drinking it all before I get to it: he says it doesn’t taste much different to him considering how much cream and sugar he adds, but that it DOES significantly reduce the Coffee Mouth afterward. I should get bigger jars, but right now I’m not sure I’m going to bother to do this much more.

I think for a man to more fully enjoy the movie Wonder Woman, he should spend five minutes before the movie picturing this alternate reality:

A nation where presidents and vice presidents are and always have been women, literally never men. Until 101 years ago, only women served in Congress; and even now, not even 20% of congresswomen are male. Fewer than 100 years ago, men didn’t have the right to vote—only women could vote. In the 1960s, there were still states that didn’t allow men to serve on juries. Education for men is a relatively recent idea, and many colleges had to be forced by legal action to let men attend. “Traditional values” includes the idea that men should stay at home and raise children and take care of the house and defer to their wives out of respect; many men do go out to work now, it’s true, and this development is blamed for current rates of divorce and the problems kids have in school and the breakdown of the family unit. Almost all religions worship female goddesses, and have female leaders; many still don’t allow men to be priestesses, elders, deaconesses, board members, or serve in any leadership/governing role. (Men can teach Sunday School, sing in the choir, and help set up the refreshments.) Superheroine movies and costumes and books are popular and there is tons of related merchandise for little girls. Even movies that aren’t about superheroines still tend to feature a woman in the lead role; male characters are mostly present to help her learn lessons about herself, or to further her plot development, or to be eye candy so that women will be willing to see the movie. Sometimes there is a movie where one or more male characters play the lead, but it’s called a Dick Flick, and men go see it with their groups of boyfriends because their girlfriends/wives aren’t interested. Fun Boys’ Night Out!

There. Now. Men! With all of that still in mind, pretending we do not instead live in a world where spellcheck underlines the word “superheroine”: imagine that after many, many superheroine movies (including multiple remakes of the same movie), MANY years of going on dates to see yet another movie about a woman saving the world or leading the mission or finding the killer (and then later watching your girlfriend flex her muscles in front of the mirror as she apparently identifies her ordinary self with that heroinic character), MANY years of seeing the male character endangered or attacked or killed in order to give the female lead an excuse to clench her teeth and repress her grief and start shooting up the place—there is a movie staring a MAN in the heroine role. The first whole movie about one of the only MALE superheroines! And the movie is directed by men, too, so the male superheroine isn’t dressed in just a metal speedo and sexy boots as usual! (He still doesn’t get pants, of course, but we will take our progress in stages if we have to. And maybe Davy Duke short-shorts are better for ease of movement in battle.)

And then when the movie comes out, women dismiss it, and roll their eyes, and say it’s no big deal, and deny that it’s anything special, and don’t want to go see it with you because it’s stupid and just some sort of forced political correctness; or they do go see it but then write think-pieces/tweet-threads about how masculism has gone too far in this post-sexism age, and how there are too many movies these days catering to males, and how actually it’s women who are oppressed by men’s relentless demands to be considered equal members of womankind when in fact they’re now OVER-privileged, and you don’t seriously expect any MORE movies about male superheroines now that we’ve indulged you with this one, and maybe we should remake Batboy and Superboy to be about girls if this is how it’s going to be, and is there a way we could make the seventh Spiderwoman movie so that it has more hot guys in it, like maybe by having flashbacks to when Uncle Jay was young and hot?

“It’s not even that great of a movie,” the women say, shrugging, as if their opinion is the only thing that matters, as if that’s the point, as if movie quality alone is why the men are happy-crying and heartened. You make sure your kids see it (“especially the boys”? “especially the girls”? it’s hard to say which seems more important), and you buy a Wonder Man shirt to wear to bed; and if another movie about a male superheroine comes out, you’ll see it in the theater.