Monday, May 1, 2017

Adventures in dressing oneself for the mid-century mark.

Naramata, British Columbia, August 2010.
Remember when we road-tripped all the way to British Columbia to do an Ironman? Twice? Yeah, I barely do, but I've got the medal to prove it, right here in my desk drawer. I've also got the heartbreakingly beautiful blog post to prove it (Naramata Linen Pants), and,  I also have the floral linen pants that I bought at Shades of Linen, in Naramata.  Every year when I drag out my *summer wardrobe bins* my beloved linen pants get their due attention. This year it got hot so fast (gee, I wonder why), I found myself wearing the floral print in late March. Go figure.  And so, now that I'm practically fifty years old, I'm ready to revamp some of my looks, and, what better way to dress my fifty-year old self than with long flowy pants that aren't too hot, or made of stretchy synthetic stuff.  
 Most of you know I'm a yarn goddess, almost to the exclusion of other wearable crafts.  But...I can sew a mean outfit when and if necessary, and certainly if inspired.  Sewing can make me a little crazy (machinery and extensive planning and non-portability beware), but sewing is also unparalleled in the realm of speed. While months can be involved in yarn-art endeavors, once the measuring, architecting, and planning phase is behind us, one only has to confront good old fashioned procrastination, and, of course, the mistakes of sewing (usually corrected by tearing seams out, cutting new sections of cloth, or trashing the whole project if it's gone horribly wrong (there are many reasons a piece can go horribly wrong--think back to junior high sewing class.)).
 Frustrations aside, when the bug bites, I'm all in.  I browsed the web (don't get me started on the demise of the Local Fabric Store) and I found myself on the website of an old San Francisco (now closed) favorite, Britex.  With a broad selection of high quality linen I knew I was in  business. One thing about being practically over fifty, when a woman finds a pattern she loves, she's ready to wear the same thing every day.  I vowed to start with one pair of pants, but promise that if these bad boys work, I'll have every color and print available in no time.  I landed on this chartreuse (honeydew) fabric and estimated how much fabric I would need. Backtrack: before I ordered fabric, I cut  a pattern based upon the floral Naramata pants.  It's something I can do, given the pattern is simple enough. Throw me a tailored design and I need a load of professional (published pattern) advice and support.
 Britex shipped the fabric so quickly I wondered if they'd moved their operation to Chicago. After all, friends in the Bay Area told me, with great sadness, that Britex's great storefront had closed in the past year or so.
 I usually sew in the basement, where I've got two machines, all my supplies, a big card table, ironing board, and a big TV queud up with Netflix, etc... But with the TV on the fritz and an amazing spring day outside, I dragged the necessary accoutrements upstairs to sew and assemble on the fully extended Heywood Wakefield Dining room table (thanks, Mom--and I got plastic to cover the whole thing).  Yeah, I know, I roll like that.
Singer: 197_? Elna 1992.  Tried and true: domestic machinery. Lost arts.
 So, I can't say that there were too many frustrating barriers here. They're the easiest elastic waist pants to assemble, and a great reminder why I like sewing for myself more than for other people, because the most challenging part is fit, and i can make sure the fit is going to work, because, ummm...I can try them on as I go (this is a hint to why sewing always frustrated me--I think of sewing as architecture and crochet as sculpture--and as far as I can tell, with architecture you have to know exactly what you're doing before you start, which doesn't really match my process).  Yeah, I know, you could pick on me for bad process, but I'm practically fifty so what are you gonna do about it?
Don't blame me (said the cat, every day).
 Here's a finished view, ready for wear.  For those who need to know, it was a crotch seam, an inseam,  side seam, hem to encase elastic waistband, and a nice fat hem at the bottom.  Everything is easier with the industrial Serger, which now is over twenty five years old (wow--how did that happen!) and my junior high Singer single seam machine.  That I've got two operable sewing machines is pretty cool, as far as I'm concerned, and I can't even start on how sad it is that no one else in my family makes this stuff.
That's a decent day's work.
 Finished and ready to wear. That my pants match my office fabric is telling. I LOVE chartreuse, and have for many years.  For enquiring minds, I used the self timing on the Canon Power Shot for these images. No one else was around for this modeling session, so take the photos as they are.  Just to be clear, this is a *nearly fifty-year old* out dancing around in mid April modeling for herself while, supposedly, no one else is looking (yeah, I roll that way, too).
When they say, *pull on your big girl pants* what do they mean?
Is this what they mean when they say...
Don't just sit there, do something!
Oak Park, 2017.







Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Adventures in local democracy, 2017.

An oldie but a goodie.
Oak Park has entered another referendum season (our k-8 district is running two referenda), and so there are many lively conversations in town about the merit, value, and downsides of the referenda.  Meantime, there are multiple candidate races (two separate school boards, library board, and village trustees).

Now is the time when people begin sifting through information in order to vote, especially when their decision could immediately effect taxes or life in the village.  After my work on the high school facilities referendum last fall (we lost), I feel like I've been down this path before, and a lot of this feels familiar.  One part that is particularly flashback-inducing is when folks in the community start to wonder: "Well, they spent money on (fill in technology, facility upgrade, program, classroom accoutrement, etc.), and now they want more money, so maybe they shouldn't have purchased those things!"  Or, "Can't they just...(not purchase said program, cut the funds from another part of the program, one that I'm less attached to, change the salary schedule), or, "I never really liked (program, enrichment, curriculum) etc... Basically, once voters realize that they've got an opportunity to reject something, they dig in and start to examine the rationale for the expenditure, find the things that stick out to their eye as "unnecessary" and begin to dismiss the whole endeavor. This is perfectly natural, but it's rough for the team that assembles the package in the first place. Yes, we want input, but every voter can't go through each scenario and evaluate or make changes. By the time it reaches a voter, it's a yes or no.

Red and Black!
In these cases, prior to citizen perusing the informational materials and considering whether they vote yes or no on the referenda, someone has asked, in all likelihood, all of those questions, every imaginable question, scenario and outcome.  In the case of facilities, all corners have been cut and the agency is looking for the optimal time to move forward with necessary and enhancing construction.  In terms of operations, many meetings have usually been held, educators, community members, lawyers have been consulted to find the most judicious stretch of current funds and in the event  of failure, plans for most reasonable cuts to programs have been measured.

By the time the referenda meets the voter, unless that voter serves on a board, committee, or attended multiple vetting meetings and asked questions all along, the voter is actually voting on a few things.  First, does the voter believe in the mission of local funding for schools, libraries, and parks? I canvassed a woman last fall who stopped me at the porch of her lovely small house. She told me, "In all the years I've lived in Oak Park, I've never voted yes on a referendum."  Okay, this is clear.  There's not much any one can do to argue with this perspective. Her dismissal of such referenda is probably matched on the other side by folks like me and my spouse, who truly believe in taxation for the individuals to pay for the betterment of the whole (yeah, too bad we're American).

A second consideration, noodling in my mind on this snowy day, is this.  We elect school board members, who hire superintendents, who hire and manage the bureaucracy of our school district and it's employees.  Few of us have time to filter through the complexities of a school budget and ask all of the right questions when the time comes to vote on a referenda. This is why it's so important that we look at our leaders with concern and trust.  Chances are, any one voter didn't vote for the whole board, but we can certainly argue that for whatever reason, a sizable portion of our community put those officers in positions to make decisions.
What a beautiful day to flyer!

 I've taken a few days this week to do some volunteer work for a Library Candidate.   Fortified with a readout of everyone who voted in the last election (the last election of this sort--not our November race), I hang flyers on selected porches.  Oak Park voter turnout (especially in key years) is relatively high, and we can count on this coming election to produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000-9000 votes.  This is out of something like 38,000 registered voters. You can see where this is going, by now. I've seen these numbers in the past, and basically shrugged my shoulders. In fact, when hand-wringing about democracy, I'm more likely to fret about vote suppression than folks not showing up at the polls.

But, as I walked my own precinct,  I hung five to ten flyers per block (there are at lest twenty homes on all these blocks). Walking the neighborhood and hanging so few flyers was downright dispiriting, particularly, you know, because of 2016.  With all of the angst and heaviness of facing down the republican onslaught on democracy, I felt the tears well up--what have we done? How much have we lost?  And so, from the very local, seemingly unimportant races, to the highest in the land, let's get back on board.  I'm no stranger to tuning things out, we've all done this. We're busy, someone else will take care of it, we forgot, we're patching a crisis elsewhere, I don't really like/know the candidates, whatever.  Yet, moving forward,  I'm trying harder, and I see others, too. I'm encouraged to see such  a remarkable outpouring of activism and involvement in this moment.  And so, whatever the turnout of our upcoming referenda, we can hope that community members will do what they can to stay involved, and if you're like me, you'll trust the neighbors we elected and have kept our community the attractive place that it is.
Mary Anne Mohanraj for Library Board.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Wherever you go, there you are.

Where do I begin?  It's been nearly a year since my last post.  I'd like to say that I'm lying on a floor in a house in Wisconsin, passed out after falling and bashing my head against a hard counter.  My family's about to wake me up, and yell at me for drinking that extra sangria, and then I'll rest it off for the remainder of the morning.  I'll drive home in the afternoon, and get to the heavy work on the High School Yes Vote, and eagerly wait for Hillary's election.   While the months swirl by, I'll lay off the drinking, and I'll recommit to exercise, rest, and reading.  I'll take care of the cats, watch the season change, and wait for another step toward greater equality in this country, and finally putting to rest a vital issue here in my own back yard.  I'll support my eldest as she approaches the daunting task of applying for college.


But that's probably not going to happen.  As I realize, each and every day, I'm not still passed out on that hard kitchen floor, I'm awake.  I've survived a rattling concussion, we lost our local referendum, and we lost the national race and our footing towards increased security and equality in such a major way that we're all living in constant fear, anxiety and dread.

Friends are exhausted, neighbors are sick, and thinking about living our lives as we would have is a lost cause.  Nothing is the same, and nothing will ever be the same. And still, each day we make decisions. And so, I rededicate this blog to this concept of what it means to be unencumbered.  For someone completely consumed with thought, worry, outrage, swirling thoughts, distractions and time sucks, how can I continue to carry this flag? The unencumbered woman is not an end, it's a process. How do I, how do you, live your life? How can I live, with a sense of purpose, vitality and health?









After months of ruminating on the risk of sliding into the most corrupt period of american democracy, ceding power to the most autocratic and foolhardy regime, one promising a xenophobic, hateful, factually flawed governance, we can only ask ourselves with what freedoms and powers are we still endowed? As I mentioned to my teen a few weeks ago, it's a line from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: "Wherever you go, there you are."

Buckaroo Banzai: "Wherever you go, there you are."










And so, we take to our means of communication. We huddle and drink tea with friends. We call legislators, we write postcards, we share on social media, we march, we support others who march, we give money whenever and wherever possible. We hunker down for a coming storm. And in that, we rediscover our community,  our friends, our family, our values, our beliefs.