Hope: True or False

Everyone in America, it seems, is rushing out to participate in the big Mega Millions lottery. The drawing is this evening, and the jackpot is a staggering $640 million.

Here's a secret: I have managed to reach this advanced age without ever playing the lottery -- until today.

Why not? Even if my chances are only about 1 in 160 million, I might as well give it a try for just a couple of bucks. Somebody has to win eventually, and it may as well be me (echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans tonight, I imagine).

What's the Draw?
Not being a gambler, I don't really understand the attraction of games of chance. It always seems sort of pathetic to me when I see a discarded lotto ticket on the ground, pathetic that someone wasted a couple of their precious hard-earned dollars on false hope.

I feel no pull to casinos. In fact, they feel ugly to me, dreary smoke-filled places with people grimly feeding coins into vending machines that give out no merchandise. Whether they're on Native land in California, or rising out of the desert in Nevada, casinos look to me like resources extraction devices, draped in a very thin glamor.

It Was My Idea
Nevertheless, it was at my request tonight that my working-class boyfriend and I trundled down to the liquor store in his rusty old Toyota to buy lottery tickets.

I didn't even know how to go about buying a lottery ticket.. He had to show me every little step. I had to read the isntructions on the back of the card. I had no idea it was so complex,

All the people were gathered round the lottery kiosk waiting their turn to use the single pen, to pick some numbers and take their chance. I picked at random, without thought or system, and my boyfriend let the computer pick for him. We spent $4 total. The drawing is in two hours

All this is leading up to what I really found interesting about the whole experience, as a person working two jobs, living in a small apartment with few amenities, and driving a borrowed car. A person like so many others, who works hard and just can't seem to get ahead. A person with one-in-150-million chance of getting a lucky break, a chance to stop the vicious cycle of struggling until your youth fades and your health fails and you die.

What's interesting to me is our conversation about what we would do with our money.

We agreed, by the way, that if either of us won, we'd share equally with one another.And our dreams were rather similar.

I want a house, a Victorian maybe, on a very large piece of land, free from neighbors. A flower garden, a nice big kitchen. I would get myself a reliable, fuel-efficient vehicle.

I'd pay off my student loans and get the government off my back. I'd still work part time because I like to work, but I would also have some of the free time I crave. Maybe I would get my PhD through Texas Tech's distance learning PhD program, because I want to be near my children.

I'd get everyone in my family set up comfortably, with a helpful person coming by my parents' house every day to give them a hand with their chores and drive them wherever they need to go. I'd set my kids up with a monthly allowance that they could have as long as they were enrolled in college full time or working at least 20 hours a week.

My boyfriend's dreams looked a lot like this too. He'd build a big wall around his big comfy house and garden. He'd surround himself with people who didn't hassle him. He'd buy his mom a house but stipulate that there could be no animals in it. He'd still work too, building and refinishing things, maintaining a small vegetable farm.. He'd buy a truck just like the one he has but new and in pristine condition.

What strikes me about these dreams of ours is that they are so modest. No Ferraris, no Tahitian vacations, no plastic surgery, no exploitation of other human beings at all. Wow, what would the world be like if people got rich and didn't exploit anyone?

The whole thing, the lottery, the millions of Americans participating, the tiny rays of sunshine as they hope "Maybe it could be me!" All these things seem like a statement on modern American life. We're so fat, so surrounded by plastic crap and conveniences, so seemingly robust, but it's false, false, false. Under it all, we're unhealthy, tired, in debt and our dreams are fading fast.

But somebody's going to win the lottery, maybe tonight. Someone is about to get another chance. What are your thoughts?

Generalizing about Genres

Oh a day off, and it's glorious. Of course, I spent it polishing up my curriculum vitae so it hardly counts as a psychological break from work.And never really a break from thinking about writing.

Resume vs. CV
My resume is pretty well rounded, but my CV is disappointingly thin. I wish I'd gone to more conferences while in grad school, published more of my papers.

I was a single mom through grad school, and as a result life narrowed right down to only what was absolutely necessary: the kids and the requirements of school. Conferences, traveling, would have been extravagances I couldn't afford.

Still, I have managed to assemble a rudimentary CV that I will refine over the next few days. My deadline is the end of the month, but now during Spring Break, I have time to think about it.

Professional Wordsmithing  
I'm also struggling with how to translate a year in the marketing field into relevant academic experience. It absolutely was, but how to articulate that?

It's going to translate into the ability to teach how to write in the real world, write for money, to turn your wordsmithing into cash to support yourself. I'd like to find a way to offer that as a course in the English department.

Writing Across the Disciplines
While I was thinking about it, I went through all the course offerings in all the departments and discovered that so many disciplines offer courses in writing. Journalism, Communications, Special Programs, Business, even Engineering. I wonder why these departments don't recruit faculty from the writing department.

A New Genre: Historiography
Along the way, I also discovered a new genre, from the History Department: the historiography.. It's a "focused study on a particular theme, problem or issue from a specific era and field of history" and an assessment of the secondary literature on this topic. Basically, it is how historians assessing how other historians have written about history.

Blogging
Even blogging can be lucrative, though I am not particularly interested in changing the (self-indulgent) nature of the Bitten Apple. I looked today at the analytics of this blog and discovered that 53,000 sets of eyes have read it.That seems like a lot, though hundreds of those page views were probably my own to see how it looked.

While pondering that, I discovered the intriguing detail that readers of The Bitten Apple arrive here while searching for the following topics: Goth, sock monkeys, social exchange theory, Swedish Easter witches and pink Smith & Wessons. I wonder what they think when they arrive?

I can see getting here on the wings of social exchange theory, something I tend to belabor, but it's the strangest thing is that the Goth keyword would get readers here (rather than somewhere else). I've written about Goth exactly once, in "Goth RV Rodeos" (describing a strange dream I had about my neighbors).

And as for pink Smith & Wessons, that was in "Things I Wish I Had." You just never know what you'll write that many people will read.

Becoming Fluent in the Rhetoric of Empowerment

I read an article by Elizabeth Flynn called  “Composing as a Woman” wherein she assigns gender to different rhetorical styles and notes that these differences (linearity and nonlinearity) are related to unequal places in the social order. The article focuses on American English and American comp studies.

In response, I am troubled that Flynn advises women to cling to and celebrate their non-linear approaches. Instead, I think that oppressed people (whoever they are) might consider becoming adept in the linear rhetorical approach as a way of finding a stronger place in the social order. 

Obviously, there are problems with that approach as well. For example, what might be lost or overlooked without the nonlinear perspective? 

Rhetorical Fluency
Maybe it's similar to teaching speakers of nonstandard dialects to be fluent in standard dialects, so that they are able to shift back and forth as the situation demands. Maybe women should be as "fluent" in a linear rhetorical approach to writing as they are in a nonlinear approach. 

After all, isn't part of rhetoric choosing which approach is right for the occasion? Furthermore, isn't advising women to continue to write in a way that is indicative of a lower place in the social order a way of fossilizing women into that lower position?

"Feminized" Comp Studies
Flynn points out that, thanks to process pedagogy, wherein the teacher nurtures rather than directs, composition studies have been "feminized." Feminist scholars, who are usually in the same department as comp programs, note that the marginality of comp departments may be linked to the marginality of women.

I am intrigued by these observations and their implications. But instead of exploring them, Flynn delves into the question of how the findings of feminist researcher apply to student writing.

The Social Differences
Feminists argue that men and women differ as a result of an imbalance in the social order. What are these differences?

• We identify rather than stress difference: First, research suggests women have different self-conceptions and modes of interaction as a result of our early relationships with our mothers. Girls never give up our primary identification with our mothers, whereas masculine identification stresses difference from others, including the mother.
• Morality equals responsibility rather than rights: Women tend to define morality in terms of conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights, illustrated by metaphors of a web and a ladder, respectively. 
• Interpersonal is considered feminine, while abstraction is considered masculine: In regards to intellect, our culture labels abstraction and the impersonal as “thinking,” in contrast to the interpersonal which it labels as “emotions;” two modes of thinking our culture attributes to men and women respectively, although they are present in both genders.   
• Intuition plays as strong a role in intellectual development as authority does: Women’s stages of intellectual development are linked to the development of an authoritative, public voice as well as the ability to integrate intuitive knowledge with externally acquired knowledge.

How does this play out in writing?
Flynn wanted to know if these relational, moral and intellectual differences find their way into women’s writing in first-year composition. It's an interesting question, but to answer it Flynn did not use a scientific approach. Instead she chose student writing samples that already met her criteria, i.e., she chose female students’ writing that focused on relationships and males students’ writing that focused on achievements. 

Flynn advises writing teachers to provide a critical perspective by making gender differences in behavior and language the class subject of investigation. This alerts students to “the possibility that gender affects the way readers, writers and speakers use language” (433).

This seems like an interesting and productive approach to critical cultural studies. 

To Write Like a Man, or Not
But next Flynn's bias takes over, when she advises teacher to alert female students of the limitations of attempting to “think like a man” in order to take part fully in our culture. She explains that to compose as a woman is not to avoid composing as a man, since identity through differentiation is a masculine concept. Instead, she writes, composing as a woman is active rather than reactive; it is to make connections “between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected” (435). 

So Flynn is pointing out that abandoning a nonlinear rhetorical approach would be to lose possible connections and insight. 

I have to agree when it comes to thinking, but in regards to writing, there is more to consider. Flynn also notes that the differences between men’s and women’s thinking and writing are less related to their gender than to their placement in the social order.

Social Inequality and Nonlinearity
These differences, Flynn writes are “the result of an imbalance in the social order, of the dominance of men over women” (425). Therefore, the linearity is the rhetorical style of dominance, and the nonlinear the style of the oppressed.

If that is true, then it is all the more important for women and others who may lack social status to be able to present their insights in a way that has resonance and power in the culture.

In other words, I argue that for optimum rhetorical effect on the dominant culture, those who occupy a lower place in the social order (women or whoever they might be) should, after arriving at their ideas and insights via nonlinear avenues, present them in the fashion that has greatest impact on the dominant culture.

The Trouble with Nonlinear Approaches

Reading this article brought to mind also a young woman I know, who is attempting to define for herself what it means to be a woman. This is an example of conflicting responsibilities defining morality.

At 18, “Amanda" instantly acquired three step-children. Now at 23, she works full time and goes to school half-time. When she comes home after work, she cooks and cleans and does everyone’s laundry, then does her homework after everyone goes to bed. Last night on the phone, she laughingly told me she is near a nervous breakdown. 

But her definition of what a good woman/wife are do not seem to permit her to rearrange this situation. Personally, I would already have had the nervous breakdown, run away from home or, at the very least, delegated aggressively. Only Amanda’s youth and inner strength have allowed her to tolerate it thus far. 

These conflicting responsibilities define Amanda's morality. To suggest that she change this situation, in the interests of fairness and sanity, is to suggest she become less of a woman. Meanwhile, her husband is busily defining his morality by his rights, to have a “good” woman to take care of these matters for him, the right to a meal waiting on the table, the right to have his expectations met.

I am interested in how Flynn's observations apply to first-year composition, but her article, just as it seems to promise to answer my question, ends. So I still don’t know. 

Yet, I feel that I have observed this conflict in the writing of two different students. One is a freshman, female and 18 years old, who has difficulty crystallizing her profound ideas into her essays. She thinks she has done it, when the ideas are still scattered and hidden within her lack of structure. The other is a graduate student trying to draw elements of Native American epistemology into her academic writing. In both cases there is a struggle between linearity and nonlinear thinking, between abstraction and interconnectedness. 

The grad student solved her rhetorical problem with a river metaphor, where one idea flows into the next and there is no pretension to abstraction, no pretending that anything can exist independently of its context, a notion strongly echoed in the writings of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

All Flynn offers is the caveat that women should not “immasculate” their writing, not attempt to make their writing masculine. Is that what we do when we pretend anything can be abstracted? Is that what we do when we structure our essays, develop our ideas in paragraphs?

I don’t think so. But perhaps I write like a man.

I tell students that the structure is a way of being considerate of the reader’s time. Opening paragraphs hint at what is to come. Topic sentences do too. The reader needs these to decide whether to read at all! 

Writing for Empowerment
After considering Flynn's article, I am left to continue pondering the questions:  

If we teach students in the American university writing classroom to master a linear structure for their thoughts and writing, will that raise their standing in the social order?

Could teaching linearly structured writing be a way to challenge oppression?

The Girl Who Loved a Warmer Story

Image courtesy of Ann's Needlework

As Hollywood's film version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tops the local marquees over the holidays, I have to wonder why the Americans felt the need to remake a three-year-old movie that the Swedes had already done a perfectly fine job with. It's a mystery, but then so is the popularity of the Millennium Trilogy at all, in my opinion.


I wrote this post a few months ago, when the final novel of the Stieg Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, was failing to capture my imagination and provide a reliable escape from reality.

Having read the first two (with diminishing interest), I felt obligated to finish the project, but I don't think I'm going to be able to do it.


I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a couple of years back, during my great obsession with all things Swedish. Although it was disappointing, it was not a complete bust because it helped me to crystallize my understanding of my own Swedish obsession, which I must conclude contain no interest whatsoever in the slick, grim (and rather cold) modern Sweden.


Instead, my obsession is very finely pointed into the past. I could live and breathe retro-Sweden, the Sweden of my grandparents: homey little housewares, lullabies, embroidery, earthbound cuisine, the lyrical spoken language, and the history from Vikings to the Swedish diaspora to America.

I only read the second book (Girl Who Played with Fire) out of camaraderie with my co-worker. After reading it, we watched the movie and ate Swedish food. 

Now, we plan to do the same thing for this third one, but even my craving for meatballs and lingonberries cannot make me read this excruciatingly boring book.

I'm just going to skip right to the movie.

Fake Trees and Real

This is not my family nor my tree. (Image courtesy of Judiology.com)

We used the same artificial Christmas tree year after year throughout my entire childhood, dragging its musty box out of the cellar or garage every year and shaping the limbs into verisimilitude before decorating it.

At least we weren't the people with the silver foil Christmas tree.

I swore that when I grew up, I'd have a  real tree. And I did for many years.

The Hat Tree (1981)

At the young-adult flop house where I did most of my young-adult partying, we had a real Christmas tree that we left up for months and months after Christmas came and went.

We did eventually take off the ornaments, then covered it with hats and called it a hat tree.

Happily, though there was plenty of smoking going on around it, this little fire hazard never burned the flop house down.

Top-Heavy Tree (1984)

A couple of years later, I moved west to California and lived in the legendary Casa de Montgomery in Santa Cruz.

It was a boarding house of sorts, with a colorful history. It had originally been an old country estate, later turned monastery, turned mental hospital, turned low-rent boarding house.

By the time I met the Casa, it was a decrepit Spanish-style estate with a long industrial-utilitarian hospital wing extending from it. It had fallen into disrepair and was occupied by university students, aimless young people like myself, divorcees and people or various ages who were on the dole.

When Christmas rolled around, we residents put up a tree and decorated it. But sometime in the night, the tree fell over with a crash, ornamens rolling and pine needles scattering across the floor.

I was very troubled by this at the time, making vague analogies of this event to my lifestyle: top heavy, pretty to look at but lacking in a solid foundation.

That was the same year I went to the beach on Christmas day and made a sandman. California living...

Trees of Life (1990-1996)

When my kids were little, we always had a live tree, which we tried to plant again afterwards, but I don't know if any of them survived the ordeal of being brought into the warm indoors like a pet, then thrust back out into the harsh elements.

Under one of those trees, my partner planted the placenta that had nourished my elder son throughout his gestation. A no-longer-needed organ, full of nutrients that could now nourish that little tree instead.

One of those live trees I kept in its pot on the front porch after Christmas was done and it stayed there all year long like front-porch topiary. When Christmas rolled around again, I pulled the whole tree, pot and all, back inside for decorating.

Snow Tree (2002)

Years later, I remarried, and my new husband, plus his two kids and my two kids, journeyed up Trinity Mountain Road to hunt for our tree, all bundled up for snow.

This was a wonderful, beautiful day which stands out in my memory. So much laughing, snow up to our knees, crisp, bright winter wonderland.

The kids found the right tree, my husband cut it down, and the kids dragged it back to the truck, where hot chocolate in a thermos awaited us.

Sadly, that marriage didn't work out. No one ever really got along. His kids moved out almost immediately, and after that mine went to live with their own dad awhile. And eventually the marriage itself was casualty.

But that day in the snow, we were all together like a real, hopeful and happy family of six.

Simplifying (2007)

One summer, at a yard sale, I found an artificial tree, still in the box, tall and slender, with built-in lights. It was like a miracle: just pop it up like an umbrella, plug it in and voila! The best 20 bucks I ever spent.

We use this tree every year now and cover it in homey Swedish-style decorations. I understand now where my parents were coming from with their fuss-free fake tree.

My elder son, who has his own family now, has a real tree at Christmastime, I noticed. The circle continues...

Vanilla Tales

Image courtesy of UCLA Biomedical Library, Spice Collection

Once upon a time, vanilla was my term for anything ordinary, mainstream or unembellished. I used the word disparagingly, with contempt for all things that swam downstream or failed to stand out.

But that was before I understood vanilla. Vanilla, my friends, is anything but ordinary. In fact, vanilla is exotic, legendary and downright sexy.

Did you know, for example, that a vanilla bean is the fruit of a gorgeous, curvaceous orchid that only grows naturally in the tropics of Mexico, where it has a delicate, symbiotic relationship with a certain vine and a certain bee?

Image courtesy andesamazon,org

Anywhere else it manages to grow nowadays, it is being pollinated by hand. This high-maintenance substance is the second most expensive spice next to saffron. A single vanilla bean costs about $3 in Safeway, but aficionados can find more affordable options online.

 Image courtesy of the National Museum of Mexican Art

Local legend in Mexico says that the first vanilla orchid sprang up from the shed blood of a heartsick princess. Old medical texts call it an aphrodisiac, and modern science tells us it is possibly even addictive.

Hernan Cortes, image courtesy Wikipedia

Vanilla came to Europe at the hands of a conquistador. It was an adolescent slave-boy who first thought to try hand-pollinating it, thus making it possible for us here in the US to be cavalierly adding it to our cookies and ice cream today.

Last year at Christmas, my sister put a single vanilla bean in my stocking, encased in a small, glass spice jar.
 It took me an entire year to get around to making my own vanilla extract, which I did last night.

Last night was my first tactile, sensual experience with a raw vanilla bean. When I opened the spice jar, the powerful creamy aroma burst into the room and settled in my hands and hair. I can still smell it in my apartment this morning.

I had a wide-mouth jar of brandy, sweetened with agave nectar, ready and waiting when I took the long brown vanilla pod from the jar, marveling at its pliable texture. I split it lengthwise to reveal the dark mass of pulpy black seeds inside.

I dropped the opened bean into the sweet brandy and sealed the jar tight. It's now languishing in the dark cupboard for the next few weeks until it's ready to use.

What I really want to make now is vanillinsocker (vanilla sugar), an amazing substance I discovered in Sweden while making whipped cream for pankakor.

Vanillin socker is strongly aromatic powdered sugar used in baking the way Americans use vanilla extract and the way Germans use vanillezucker, which is vanilla scented granulated sugar.

I recently used the last of the canister of vanillinsocker I brought back from Sweden in 2009 and I'd like to replace it with a natural handmade substitute. So that's going to be my next endeavor.

I'll let you know how that goes.

In the meantime, please read the ingredients carefully on the package of vanilla you are using, whether it is extract, socker or zucker. Avoid artificial flavorings of any kind, which seduce and inure our tastebuds with falsity and aliencate us to the delicate flavors nature has to offer.

Check out the nanofoods section of PBS' "Need to Know" page to see how widespread chemically engineered flavor enhancers are going to be in the coming years.

Someone Else's Dream

(Image "Masquerade" by Thomas Barbey)

Last night I had the strangest dream. I woke up from it sobbing in grief, but it wasn't my dream.

Of course, it was a bubble from my own subconscious, but it's just flotsam, or empathy, for an old acquaintance I spoke with last night on the phone.

Should I tell you my dream, or should I tell you the horrible Job-like story of my acquaintance's life? Let's start with the dream.

The Dream
I was in a hardware store talking with a friendly old man wearing little, round, thick-lensed glasses. He and I traded glasses and I realized I could see through his. We were laughing about that, but I was thinking, "Wow, my eyesight is as bad as an 85-year-old man's!"


Then his wife came up to me then, peered at me closely and said, "What are you, about 50?" All I could say was "No!" but instead of volunteering my true age, I walked away, into the back room and burst into tears.

That's when I woke up crying.

I have always looked younger than my true age. The paradigm I am used to in such encounters is that I volunteer my age and people don't believe me, they think I am much younger.

My mother was the same way, so young-looking she could  get away with lying about her age by 10 years or more. Which she did until the time came when she was prouder of her good health than of her beauty.

Whose Dream It Really Was
This acquaintance of mine is someone I knew in junior high and young adulthood. I lost touch with her or a decade or two and then found her again about three years ago.

I know it's not possible for someone to be cursed, but this woman's life is a string of such terrible stories that it seems almost supernatural.

I do know that we bring many things upon ourselves through the choices we make. And that our attitude dictates how these experiences will be processed into our identity.

Many of the things that have happened to her over the years were her own fault, but the consequences now are so tremendous it seems like overkill, like the Biblical story of the boils and griefs that God and the devil afflicted Job with to test his faith.

Now she lives a quiet life and isn't harming anyone, but her health problems are overwhelming. The latest chapter in her saga is, all at the same time, congestive heart failure, an unsightly skin condition, an antibiotic-resistant staff infection and now, allopecia. Her hair is falling out.

A Wake of Tragedies
Her life history consists of a trail of sudden deaths and suicides in her wake. I could tell 10 tragic stories here, but this post would be too long.

She visits someone, she begins talking to them, she gets involved in their lives and starts giving them her twisted point of view, overriding their own opinions, giving them books to read, generalizing about men, society, politics, religion.

Her views are encased in wry humor, she seems simply edgy, but she is twisting the knife, digging out insecurities, finding evidence to support her view.

If the person she is talking to is vulnerable or wounded (they always are), their hope begins to dwindle.

If they don't get away from her as fast as possible, they soon die, either in an accident or by their own hand. In one case, someone murdered someone else before they committed suicide.

I'm not making this up and I am not exaggerating.I have seen it with my own eyes, over and over. She leaves a trail of death in her wake.

Beauty as a Weapon
Once she was rather pretty, not overly so, but.attractive enough that she made extra money as a prostitute for a few years.

Maybe that is how she managed to do so much damage. Maybe it was hard for people to believe that evil could reside in a pleasant-looking young woman.

Maybe she used her beauty as a weapon so much that destiny saw fit to divest her of it. Life has not been kind to her. What beauty she may have possessed has been stripped away. She looks 20 years older than she really is, her health is failing and her hope is fading.

Left Alone
She has been left all alone with no family, no friends, no lover.She lives alone in a house in the mountains, with no companions, only 3 dogs and a TV.

She has swindled her way into a life without work, but that has left her also without purpose, and her false disability has now become a true disability; now she is not healthy or strong enough to work.

Does evil know it's evil? Because she truly doesn't know. Is she a sociopath? Maybe so. She thinks all these things have happened to her, through no fault of her own.

She is in despair, asking Why? But not listening to the answer.

Seeds of Discontent, Web of Sympathy
Part of me fears connecting with her. My instincts tell me she is dangerous. Last time I went to visit her, my son's terrible accident happened while I was away. Every time I talk to her, seeds of discontent are planted in me.

Yet I can't bring myself to stop talking to her. I feel like I am the last thread that tethers her to humanity. I try to offer gentle advice about doing things differently, changing her attitude, but I see that is not possible.

My suggestions-- move into town to be around people, get involved in activities to make friends, stop smoking, change your diet, take up yoga, get a counselor-- only make her angry.

If I stop taking her calls or if I break our connection, what if she does herself in? Then there would be a suicide in my own wake.