Score one for the hippies

**Disclaimer: It hardly ought to need saying, but I will: you can only choose the right treatment for you. Consult many sources before deciding how you want to go about being your own doctor.

Since freshman year of college, I have suffered from what my family delicately phrases as "gross feet." After several dermatological consultations, and attempts at adjusting my diet to determine a food allergy, I have come to the conclusion that those attempts were a waste of my time. The first dermatologist, Dr. Turner, took a couple of skin samples and diagnosed eczema. He came into the room to deliver the results, looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then left. He never came back, so eventually I just left. I called back the next day to be told there was nothing to do about it, except to keep it clean. Feet. Clean. I had a gp once tell me that it was a whole new type of disorder, and quizzed me on my overseas traveling (I hadn't done any). What he thought was an algae-bloom (no lie) was really the residue of red toenail polish that did not come off entirely. That ought to be adequate explanation of Why Modern Medicine Doesn't Work For This Problem.

What to do? When I started seeing Will, I thought nothing could embarass me more than having him see my naked feet. CS Lewis once described a character in my favorite book by saying "It would have shamed me no more to go naked." Exposed feet caused me more moments of soul-crushing torture than I like to admit. I finally took the challenge thrown down by our earth-hugging social clime, and researched some herbal alternatives. Score one for the hippies.

Every other night, I soak my feet for 20 minutes in a tea made of:
2 c. epsom salts
several drops pure tea tree oil
1/4 oz. dried calendula
1/4 oz. dried comfrey leaf

Bring a large stock pot of water to boil (mine is 6 qt.). When boiling happily, drop in the salts and stir till (absolved? resolved?) dissolved (that's the word I was looking for). Drop in the calendula and the comfrey leaf, and sprinkle drops of tea tree oil over all. Stir just enough to get everything under the water. Leave the lid on the pot for 10 minutes or so whilst steeping. Let the tea cool to a bearable temperature, and soak, soak, soak!

I've done this procedure for 2 weeks now, and it has almost literally performed a miracle--even the nails look healthier. Last night, I used a callus shaver about 10 minutes into the soak, and then popped the feet back to finish another 10 minutes of soaking. Follow up with a heavy duty foot cream and you just might be on your way to what my boyfriend now calls "less scaly feet"!

Quick thought...and then to work

Last night, I picked up a new CD--something I haven't done in a loooong time. Okay, okay. You caught me: I have friends who engage in a little illicit burning. I will never give up their names. Do your worst.

The White Stripes self-titled album. Amazing. The album itself is no White Blood Cells, and definitely no De Stijl (my personal fave of their catalogue). An illustration, Reader. My friends Dave and Leslie liked to strap their toddler into her car seat for long rides, and then show her nothing but Tom and Jerry cartoons on the portable DVD. By the time they turned her loose, she was a whirling dervish of frenzied action and speech. She would turn in circles, generating her own electricity in a flurry of flying barrettes, sliding glasses, and impossibly slurred speech. Jack White, metaphorically, is that toddler locked up and fed Tom & Jerry for hours. The fury with which he attacks each track stuns the listener into a rapture that is akin to addiction. No wonder these people got a record deal.

My current favorite track:

New Thoughts Thursday

Once upon a time I had kept a notebook of facts that I learned each day. No complicated descriptions or anything especially philosophical--just something that I knew by bedtime that I didn't know at waking. For example, one day I learned that the Jonathan Edwards (notable historical contribution: "Sinners in the Hands of Angry God") was the grandfather of Aaron Burr (notable historical contribution: dying by the "unintended" shot of Alexander Hamilton's gun). Makes sense. Another time it was that my car's backseat folded down so that I could expand the storage room of the trunk. Yes, I had owned the car almost 3 years before I knew this. Judge me.

Grand visions of a Samuel Johnson-esque diary aside, I thought the notebook could be useful as a tool to review the facts of life (no, not those facts) or at least provide a little humor one day in the nebulous distant future when I thought I knew all there was to know.

Today's new thought went a little something like this: Disagreements and misunderstanding suck the joy from living. Starting over is happiness.

Nostalgia

For a museum curator, I don't get into nostalgia in a big way. I rarely use my camera to capture events like birthday parties or Christmases. My photos are either still in their original paper sleeves, or thrown around in a box somewhere (maybe). I prefer to live my life and archive someone else's. But today, walking across campus during my break, I got a strong, powerful reminder of one of my favorite childhood moments. You must now read about it. Yay for you.

If you live in the Mid-South/Southeast, you know it has rained for 10 out of the last 11 days. Today, the sun peeked out for a few moments, as if to say, "Hello! I didn't forget you. We'll meet again." The temperature, which has been hovering at a cool-but-comfortable 70 spiked upwards like all mid-south Mays are wont to do. 11 minutes of humid, sunny wonderfulness reigned. As the day sat upon its brief throne, I caught the strong scent of water, grass, and a whiff of chlorine. Instantly transported to being 7 in my red plastic kiddie pool, still small enough to get all the way under the water. It is the first time I remember being brave enough to open my eyes underwater. Things went fine until I snorted in water, trying not to laugh at how my sister's toes looked like hotdogs.

Hee hee! Thanks for that, Mother Nature.

I was eating lunch and thinking about poems. Here is a poem from Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems about 1960s New York. O'Hara was a curator at MOMA during its formative years. Curators, poetry, sugar-free peach pie--sounds like a lunch break well spent.

Ave Maria
by Frank O'Hara

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeing movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young

Immigrant blues

Will introduced me to Li-Young Lee not long after we started dating. The immigrant experience in America fascinates me, and this poem does a lovely job of encapsulating one man's experience.

Immigrant Blues
by Li-Young Lee

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It's the same old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It's called "Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation."

It's called "Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,"

called "The Child Who'd Rather Play than Study."

Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You're always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body's finitude,
at peace with the soul's disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don't believe you're inside me, you're not,
she answered, at peace with the body's greed,
at peace with the heart's bewilderment.

It's an ancient story from yesterday evening

called "Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,"

called "Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,"

called "I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs."

Another long poem. sorry. Tried steering away from them, but this is a good one. A colleague and I are instituting a new walking plan today. Since my thyroid has been overactive, I have felt terrible, both mentally and physically. I have stopped walking places entirely, because it caused my heart to beat a little too hard for comfort. But after a week of medications, I feel better enough to tackle the 2-mile round trip to work and back. I miss the feeling of striding along at a comfortable pace, the slight stretch up the back of my hamstring, the swing of my arms. I'm ready to have that back. It's also amazing how much your thyroid controls feelings like irritation which can be bottled in, and produced by the most unlikely of sources. Cracks in the sidewalk? Really?! I've almost been brought to tears because of it.

Pablo Neruda is best known for his sensual poems of "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" and the open sexuality of "The Body of a Woman." Freud would probably have plenty to say about our eagerness to identify Neruda as a purely sexual poet. But readers often miss what Neruda's hallmark as a poet really is: his mastery of describing all sensory experiences. Enjoy this one about a walk through his neighborhood.

Walking Around
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

Translated by Robert Bly