How to be a dog walker

What you’ll need: a leash, a multitude of plastic bags

Songlist: Who Let the Dogs Out? by Baha Men, Salty Dog Rag by Red Foley

Further reading: The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Marley and Me by John Grogan

Dogs: the best thing ever created (not that I'm biased)

Last year, my doorbell rang. A thin man with oiled hair stood outside with a clipboard in his hand. Upon seeing me, he launched into a narrative of redemption. He was trying to sell me something—a magazine subscription or ecstasy or Jesus, I couldn’t tell which—but first he had to draw me in.

“Ma’am,” he said, “What’s your profession?”

“I’m a teacher,” I said. Minnesota Reading Corps-Americorps Literacy Tutor at Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary—my official title—was more information than he needed.

“And what was your first job?”

“Um, walking a dog.”

“So, think about it. You’ve gone from picking up shit to educating our young people, arguably the most important profession in the world.”

In fact, I had gone from making ten dollars for each half hour walk to a position where I calculated my earnings to be about four to five dollars an hour. And I went from picking up a small pile of literal shit to dealing with the metaphorical shit of ineffective bureaucracy, difficult coworkers, and the special needs of homeless, neglected, and mentally disabled children. Metaphor trumps literal.

Iberian ham in a handy ham-holder. Yum!

Since I graduated college in 2008, I have somehow managed to make successively less money every year. My first job was as a Language and Cultural Assistant at an elementary school in southern Spain. Compared to my fellow Dartmouth graduates’ starting salaries of 70Gs at consulting firms and financial institutions, my 700€ a month stipend didn’t seem like much. However, I was placed in a tiny town where the only items in the grocery store more expensive than about three euro were the cured pigs’ legs. Plus, I was only required to work twelve hours a week (thank you, siesta culture), and, after all, these were euros we were talking about.

Then came the AmeriCorps job. Service to our country cannot be underestimated, but it sure can be underpaid. Daily, I came home exhausted, unable to do much more than read my horoscope for the day already past and fall asleep. I was in awe of two of my co-tutors who held other part-time jobs in addition to our forty-five-hour weeks at the school. They soon quit their other jobs.

AmeriCorps ended last July, and I decided not to renew my contract for one more year. I now work as a receptionist at an oriental medicine health clinic. Besides the bonus of free acupuncture whenever I want—who needs health insurance when you’ve got needles!—I make ten dollars an hour. However, the clinic is small and my help is needed only four to eight hours a week. I now have plentiful time and energy to write.  So far, though, I haven’t found anyone to pay me for that, and my funds are running low for the trussed up coffee drinks I buy during my café writing sessions.

Maybe I should just go back to dog walking.

The garden as paradise

Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

As I was walking my dog today, I admired the state of gardens in my neighborhood. I had just come back from the Linder’s Garden Center, which has everything a Minnesotan gardener might need: Zone 4 hardy perennials, bright annuals, evergreen trees, even Koi fish for ponds. In my walk, I saw combinations of the these same elements: blooming petunias, fading tulips, lush hostas and ornamental grasses. All beautiful, but somewhat repetitive. Living in Minnesota, I sometimes forget that a garden can mean so much more than a fragrant interlude between house and garage.

The English word ‘paradise’ comes from the Old Persian pairidaeza, which means ‘walled garden.’ Of course, one of the primary creation stories of humankind takes place in the earthly paradise known as the Garden of Eden. This garden was a place of safety and innocence and order; when Adam and Eve were expelled they were confronted with danger and chaos and longed to return to the garden.

Gardens attained the highest of statuses in ancient civilizations, such as Nebuchadnezzar II’s Hanging Gardens of Babylonia, labelled one of the seven wonders of the world. Islamic culture gave rise to fabulous gardens that provided a metaphorical and literal escape from the wildness of nature. These gardens were walled off and cultivated as verdant spaces with shade and water elements to contrast the surrounding arid environment. Their geometrical design harkened back to the Garden of Eden’s location at the intersection of four rivers.

In fact, I should not use the past tense when describing these gardens. I visited many such gardens in southern Spain, which was in the hands of Islamic rulers longer than it has since been under Catholic control. The most extraordinary gardens I visited were the Alcázar in Sevilla and the Alhambra in Granada.

The Alhambra at twilight

I visited the Alhambra for the second time this past July. A friend of mine and I chose an evening entrance time when the Spanish summer heat was at a low. We walked through the Palacio de Nazaries in twilight with bats swinging over our heads and water trickling through grooves in the stone steps. After the palace we strolled to the Generalife gardens (from the Arabic Jennat al Arif, or Garden of the Architect). It was dark by this time, and thus we could not see the vast Moorish garden, but the warm, damp air was full of the scent of jasmine and lavender. This truly was paradise.

Art in bloom

In early spring the Minneapolis Institute of Arts puts on a three-day show called Art in Bloom, which is consistently my favorite event at the museum. Floral artists from around the Twin Cities create interpretations of paintings and sculptures in the MIA’s permanent collection, which are then displayed for one weekend next to the work of art that inspired them.

The weekend of Art in Bloom 2011 was a busy one for me, but my mom and I were able to squeeze in a thirty minute trip through the galleries. The floral creations are scattered throughout the entire museum so we raced from room to room to see as many as possible. I felt like we were on an Easter egg hunt, in that the bouquets are bright and barely camouflaged and ubiquitous.

My mom and I agreed that the best arrangements were not overly literal and beautiful independent of any association of the painting. Here are a few of our favorites:

Allegory of the Four Elements by Cornelis Jacobsz. Delff

Calypso by Karl-Ernest-Rodolphe-Heinrich-Salem Lehmann

St. Severin, Paris by Emmanuel Rudnitsky

Small Buddha statue

Chinese scroll

Monet’s garden

Monet's garden would make anyone an impressionist painter

The summer after I graduated from high school, a friend and I travelled to Europe to spend a week each in London and Paris. On our last day in Paris we took a train out to Giverny to see Claude Monet’s garden which he created with as much artistry and devotion as any of his paintings. Monet was a master gardener who once said, “Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing; my greatest masterpiece is my garden.”

Knowing Monet’s oeuvre moderately well, I had the uncanny sense while walking through his extensive grounds of being in a new yet completely familiar environment. Here was the aisle of irises leading up to his house, there the pond filled with water lilies, and arching over it, of course, the famous green Japanese bridges. I could imagine that if I spent enough time in those lush, beautiful gardens, I’d emerge an impressionist painter, too.

Some of Monet's paintings from Giverny

How to be a master gardener

What you’ll need: sun/rain/soil/seeds, correct pronunciation of calibrachoa/weigela/crocosmia/lisianthus

Songlist: Roses by Outkast, Octopus’s Garden by The Beatles

Further reading: The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I do not have a green thumb. When I lived in Spain I bought a hibiscus plant which died within two weeks. My knowledge of flowers is only average. Yet, when I interviewed at Linder’s flower mart this past bleak midwinter I got the job. Now I work part time selling flowers.

Inside a Linder's greenhouse

I was terrified my first day, expecting to feel like a total dunce. But when customers asked me questions, memories of working alongside my grandmothers in their gardens would surface or tidbits I gleaned from my garden-enthusiast parents would enable me to answer correctly. Yes, impatiens are great for the shade. Yes, deadhead those petunias and they’ll keep blooming. Obvious stuff for a master gardener, but enough to suffice for the beginning gardeners who make up the majority of Linder’s customer base.

In fact, at the Linder’s training, they told us not to bother the master gardeners: they know more than we do. They come in knowing what they want and if they see our plants are in proper condition they’ll buy them. End of story.

Some of my coworkers are master gardeners themselves, and I love overhearing them talk to the Horticultural Society members; I also envy them their knowledge. As I make my rounds through the aisles of perennials, herbs, vegetables, and annuals I hope that some day I will understand plants the way master gardeners do. And as I rearrange the marigolds and group the begonias I plan out a vast garden of blooms perfectly balanced, weeded, colorful. Then someone comes along and asks me for insider tips about how to avoid blight on a specific tomato plant and I remember that I have a long way to go.

It’s my birthday and I’ll scry if I want to

I was born on May 20th, 1986, making me a Taurus by astrological standards and a Tiger in the Chinese zodiac (I’m therefore a Bull-Tiger, a creature as awesome as it is fearsome). This also means that today is my 25th birthday.

My lovely fortune-telling cards

On Monday I said that I had given up reading my Tarot cards, but today I pulled them out again to check how being 25 will treat me. When I dealt out the 36 cards for a “full” reading and began to interpret their meanings, I remembered how seductive these cards are. For one thing, they are quite beautiful: unlike actual Tarot cards, my deck doesn’t include the arcana or suits and therefore the images are more stylized than pictures on the original Tarot. Also, an overwhelming majority of my cards are distinctly positive and therefore it is quite easy to interpret every reading as very uplifting.

Here are my highlights from the year ahead, just as vague and optimistic as you might expect from fortune telling cards:

• An important man will bring good news that will lead to a significant change–don’t worry, this change will lead to great things!
• Good omens surround your relationship, and love will continue to blossom!
• Your career will become very important and give you great security.
• Trust that your wisdom will allow you to handle any awkward circumstances.
• Your road is in the hands of the gods. Everything you do this year will be blessed.

Sounds like a pretty good year, no?

The end is near, as usual

Homer Simpson, doomsayer

A favorite activity of humans since the dawn of consciousness has been predicting the End Times. Everyone wants to believe that their lives are more significant, their iteration of the world relatively more important than the other several millions of years and billions of lives that have passed by before. If your life happens to coincide with the end of the world, you are then part of the remarkable final generation of humans.

This morning while I was reading my horoscope at my local Caribou coffee shop, I overheard the employees talking about the end of the world. It’s either coming this Saturday if you’re to believe Harold Camping’s extremely obfuscated set mathematics* based on the Bible or perhaps December 21 of 2012 if you want to believe Hollywood (the Mayans have since spoken out to contradict the idea that their calendar predicts a doomsday in 2012).

I was talking with a friend last summer about the end of the world. We agreed that it would be a bummer if everyone knew that the world was about to end, because then everyone would quit their jobs and take off on world-tours (but then not be able to eat at any restaurants, sleep in any hostels, or fill up on gas in any stations). Basically, it would be anarchy. So we stipulated that we would be the only ones to know the world was about to end (and could maybe tell a few friends and family members). He thought he would buy a motorcycle and bike around the world, and I decided I would spend the rest of my time lying on a beach drinking margaritas, so long as all the most important people in my life came along.

If you knew that you had exactly two years left, how would you spend them?

*Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle:

By Camping’s understanding, the Bible was dictated by God and every word and number carries a spiritual significance. He noticed that particular numbers appeared in the Bible at the same time particular themes are discussed.

The number 5, Camping concluded, equals “atonement.” Ten is “completeness.” Seventeen means “heaven.” Camping patiently explained how he reached his conclusion for May 21, 2011. “Christ hung on the cross April 1, 33 A.D.,” he began. “Now go to April 1 of 2011 A.D., and that’s 1,978 years.”

Camping then multiplied 1,978 by 365.2422 days – the number of days in each solar year, not to be confused with a calendar year. Next, Camping noted that April 1 to May 21 encompasses 51 days. Add 51 to the sum of previous multiplication total, and it equals 722,500.

Camping realized that (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500. Or put into words: (Atonement x Completeness x Heaven), squared.

“Five times 10 times 17 is telling you a story,” Camping said. “It’s the story from the time Christ made payment for your sins until you’re completely saved.

“I tell ya, I just about fell off my chair when I realized that,” Camping said.

Lament of the fortune teller

Cassandra laments her fate

Oh, mistery, misery! Again comes on me
The terrible labor of true prophecy, dizzying prelude.

They call me crazy, like a fortune-teller,
A poor starved beggar-woman – and I bore it!
And now the prophet undoing his prophetess
Has brought me to this final darkness.

Thus says Cassandra in Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon. The god Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of seeing the future with complete clarity, but because she did not return his love he then cursed her so that no one would believe her visions. The only thing worse than predicting the total ruin of your city and your own death is being unable to convince others to help avert these tragedies.

Of course, that is the paradox of a true fortune teller: if you were able to see the future in a fixed state, there would be no hope of avoiding the misfortune you would inevitably foretell. You could not, for instance, foresee an accident in your loved one’s future and be able to save that person from danger.

A Russian scientist, Igor Novikov, described a similar notion in the 1980s called the self-consistency principle that deals with time travel. He asserted that any event that would change the past has a probability of 0 to eliminate the potential for time paradoxes. For example, if someone were to travel back in time and kill his younger self, that act would prevent him from the time travel itself; Novikov’s principle rules this act to be impossible.

J.K. Rowling played with these temporal paradoxes in her third installation of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Hermione, an over-achieving student, uses a “time turner” so that she can attend more classes than time permits. At the end of the book, she, Harry, and Ron rewind time to save the life of a creature that’s already been killed and then must rescue their slightly former selves from danger. Thus this sequence of events exists in a permanent loop: the former selves must be saved before they can travel back in time, but only after the later selves travel in time are they able to be saved (this is known as a bootstrap paradox).

Coming full circle, poor Professor Trelawney of Hogwarts is another fortune teller who is rarely believed (but perhaps for good reason in her case):

How to be a fortune teller

What you’ll need: a bunch of slightly mysterious accessories, a slightly mysterious demeanor

Songlist: Wheel of Fortune Theme Song, The Future Freaks Me Out by Motion City Soundtrack

Further Reading: Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

For spring break of my senior year of high school I went to New Orleans with some friends. We saw alligators in the swamps, ate beignets at Cafe du Monde, and went on a ghosts-of-New Orleans walking tour. Being a senior in high school, though, I had one thing on my mind: college acceptance. At that point I had only heard back from one of the eight schools I applied to, and was very anxious to find out answers from the rest. Thus, I got my fortune read.

Fortune tellers' row in New Orleans: there are an inordinate number of Lolas

My friends and I went to fortune teller row on Jackson Square in front of St. Louis cathedral. Dozens of women wearing bangles and scarves and thick eye makeup sat with their hands motioning dramatically over crystal balls. In their midst sat a clean-shaven man dressed in khakis and a white button-up shirt.

“You want your fortune read,” he said to us, calmly. I couldn’t tell if it was a question or a command (or perhaps he had read our minds! It’d be quite a feat to predict that someone wants their fortune read when wandering among fortune tellers). We sat down and he read my palm and my friend’s palm. He told me a lot about my life–all generally good, so good that I kind of tuned him out. But then I asked about colleges. He took out his Tarot cards for this one. He set out three cards for each of the eight colleges I applied to and looked over them.

“You would be very successful here,” he said, pointing at the cards for Swarthmore College, “and here you would be very creative,” pointing at Amherst. “This one would be stifling,” he said about Yale. Then he pointed at the cards for Dartmouth. “This is the college you’ll go to.” My heart leapt at those words. I badly wanted to get in to Dartmouth, and his prediction that I would attend it made me optimistic. I knew it was ridiculous to assume that I would get in because a fortune teller in New Orleans told me so, but still I hoped.

When April 1st came around that year, I found out that I had indeed gotten in to Dartmouth. I also got into a few other schools, ones that I had loved on my initial tours, but I ended up picking Dartmouth. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve always wondered if the fortune teller played a role in that choice.

Okay, I got the sun again today: that's definitely good, right?

Earlier this year I started reading Tarot cards that my brother gave me for a long-ago birthday. I’d never been too interested in them before, but the first few months of 2011 were filled with uncertainty for me. I was searching for jobs and holding out hope for good news. Every morning for about two months I’d read a spread of seven cards. The prevalence of “good cards” those two months would made me think Today’s the day I’ll hear back from that interview or If I send my resume in now I’m bound to have good luck. But the good news predicted by my cards did not, in that time, come to fruition. And so I gave up Tarot. Just a month later I finally had a successful interview, and am now working at a fabulous job–all without the cards letting me know ahead of time (I say this in ridicule of my slightly former self: the future will happen whether we have sufficiently planned for it or not).

From these two anecdotes I understand that I turn to fortune telling when my future is at its haziest. This is logical, I suppose (if there’s any logic to be found in fortune telling). Fortune telling is a desire for the universe to reveal its plan, a wish for order in the compounding chaos of the future. And, in truth, there is great balm in knowing that good fortune will soon replace an unsettled present state. But life lived in constant expectation and desire of the future dims the present. And thus I’ve put my cards away–at least until I apply to graduate school.

Battle Hymn of the Soccer Mother

Tigers make good mothers

Amy Chua created much uproar earlier this year with the publication of her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In this memoir she describes her “demanding Eastern” parenting model as opposed to the “permissive Western” model exhibited by her fellow American mothers. Parents and experts were shocked by some of her bordering-on-abuse anecdotes and strict rules. Her two daughters were not allowed to: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, or not play the piano or violin.

In American culture, much more pervasive than the Tiger Mom is the Soccer Mom, complete with her own set of rules.

Tenets of a soccer mom:

• My child is the brightest, funniest, cutest, most wonderful child ever born, and I will make sure he or she knows I feel that way.
• I will sign my child up for many sports teams, visual arts classes, music lessons, and summer academic camps so that he/she will find his/her own passion at a young age.
• Any attempt at any of these passions will be met with extreme enthusiasm: my child’s artwork will cover my refrigerator, I will send out copies of my child’s first grade poem to friends, and I will casually let it slide at the office that my child placed high in a state math examination.
• If called upon to coach my child’s sports team, I will allow all children equal playing time, and not favor my child over any other.
• My child’s team doesn’t need to win the game to be successful. The goal is to learn to be good teammates.
• If my child does lose a game or make a mistake at a piano recital, I will tell him/her that he/she did his/her best and I’m proud of him/her no matter what.
• I will bring healthy snacks for all the kids after a game, including nutritious granola bars and 100% organic juice boxes.
• For my child’s birthday, I will send along treats to school and make sure my child hands them out to all his/her classmates, excluding no one. In this way, my child will learn to be both humble and generous.

Any other Soccer Mom rules?