Author Archives: Rima

I Should Not Have Written This Post

by Rima Posted on May 14, 2013

As I age I’m noticing there are fewer and fewer things that beg to be spoken aloud.*

Sure, I still have thoughts on a regular basis, and plenty of them at that. But more often than not, when I pass one through the old, “Is this thought meat or filler?” filter, it turns out to be just filler. Either that, or it’s something I’ve said many times before, and probably to the same person.

Why is this happening? I have a few theories. First, I am lazy. It’s difficult to form sentences that do justice to the sentiment behind them, so what’s the point in trying? Plus, I’ve already said a lot of things in my life. It’s come to the point where I’m mostly just repeating myself. When a person asks me a polite question, I can’t help but wonder, “Do they really care about my boring as hell answer?” If not, what a colossal waste of breath.

The world is already full of word pollution, simply put. With the explosion of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are dropping indiscriminate word turds with wild abandon. I myself am guilty of this type of littering. After all, I’ve had a blog for going on six years.

One thing for which I no longer have patience is the telephone. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it’s nice to talk to your mama or an old friend. But more often than not lately, its jarring ringtone feels like a personal affront. There are a lot of things I still want to accomplish in my lifetime, and I simply cannot afford to spend upwards of an hour making a carpool arrangement, like I did last week.

A fellow school mom called me to ask for a favor and, failing to think of a single valid reason why I couldn’t grant it, I agreed. We exchanged a few niceties and it my mind the conversation was over, fini, kaput.

Only it went on. On and on and on. Unable to withstand it any longer, I had to cut the speaker off mid-sentence and fabricate a story about needing to be someplace. We said goodbye and I went back to what I had been doing before being interrupted, which was staring off into space.

A few hours later, this person called me back. She felt badly for “being short with me” on the phone earlier, and wanted to pick up where we’d left off. Was it some form of passive/aggressive punishment? Was it truly possible that she believe she’d been the one who cut me off? The monologue continued for another hour before I set off my smoke alarm in a desperate attempt to hang up.

It was an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

Think of how much more productive we Americans could be if we stopped running our mouths so much. Look at the Japanese, for example. Or the Trappist monks.

I love language. But I feel like we’re using it too much.

 

 *Does not apply to conversations with husbands.

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Posted in My Two Cents, rant-o-rama, social media | 3 Comments

The Future Is Disappointing

by Rima Posted on May 10, 2013

I think this mid-life crisis business might be real. One doesn’t want to drape one’s destiny  around a looming, arbitrary number (forty, coming up in July), but as the date that wasn’t supposed to mean anything draws nearer, the funnel of possibility that was once so wide it was impossible to avoid it is getting narrower by the minute.

I keep reminding myself that the way I live my life, my way of being, means much more than the sum of my accomplishments, but I still have this nagging feeling that there are certain things I must do (write, draw, make music). At the same time I know in my very bones that I’ll never do them – not the way I want to – and that makes me profoundly sad.

I think often about the way our lives affect those of others in ways we’ll never know and could not have imagined, and sometimes that thought is enough to half-convince me it will be okay if I never publish a book or sell another piece of artwork, or live abroad, or learn to sing alto, or read Ulysses, or appear on the Daily Show as a special guest.

There’s another part to my mid-life crisis I like to keep close to my vest. I’m not sure when it started happening, but I fear I’m becoming somewhat of a recluse. It’s not that I don’t like people or want to have friends; more that I prefer solitude and the quiet introspection of daily, repetitive tasks to the trauma of picking up a telephone, making plans, sustaining conversation, putting on a pair of socks.

I don’t think it’s good for me, but the warm cocoon of my domestic dominion has some kind of built-in force field that makes it very difficult to step out.

As I write this, my husband is in the next room over, building a robot. He has decided that fishing is too emotionally draining and taken up robotics as a hobby instead.

“The future, as I see it, has been very disappointing,” he said. “By now we should be commuting to work in hovercrafts and having robots complete our daily tasks.”

“I think I’m having a mid-life crisis” I told him.

“Why do you think I’m building this robot?” he said.

Here is something I’ve discovered: life gets smaller the longer you live it, not the other way around.

I’m not depressed, in case you were wondering. And I know that if could just find a good cause to throw myself into, all of these imaginary problems would be roundly solved. Because isn’t that the ticket? Doing things for others instead of the solipsistic navel gazing I’ve been engaging in, instead?

 

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Posted in secrets, self-indulgence, thirtysomethings, totally unabashed mushfest | 2 Comments

One, Two, Three, Four, I Declare an Egg War

by Rima Posted on March 28, 2013

Hello and welcome to another fun edition of “Wild and Wacky Lithuanian Holiday Traditions.” Today’s topic is Easter, or “Velykos.”

In Lithuania there was no Easter bunny, but rather an Easter Hag (“Bobutė). The Velykų Bobutė was a little old lady who rode around in a carriage pulled by a rabbit. She would deliver each child ONE OR TWO EGGS.

“And you better believe those kids were grateful. Nobody ever heard of jelly beans or Peeps back then. They were just happy to get a couple of warm eggs on their windowsill, straight from the chicken.”

Another thing the Lithuanians did was to race each other home from church in their horse drawn carriages. It was said that the winner would finish his work faster than others throughout the coming year, all of his animals would be healthy, and his bees would make more honey. I imagine this caused more than a few buggy accidents, which is probably why the ancient Lithuanians also used to say special ritual prayers on Easter morning to protect themselves from roadside snakes, wolves, demons, and accidents.

“But guess what, kids! The Lithuanian children were happy to ride home seatbelt-less in a horse drawn carriage because it beat walking.”

Once home, the Lithuanians partook in a breakfast feast of pretty much every kind of meat available to them, bacon, cake, beets, mushrooms, and colored Easter eggs, or “margučiai.” But before beginning the meal, they would count their blessings and divvy up one egg between them as a symbol of family unity.

After everyone had eaten his egg sliver, the Egg Wars would begin. Each person would select an egg and hit it, end-to-end, against another person’s egg. If your egg remained intact, you would go on to the next round and hit your egg against the egg of another winner, and on down the line until one person with an unbroken egg emerged victorious.

That person would live the longest.

After breakfast, kids would roll eggs down a wooden plank on an incline, kind of like in a game of marbles. If anyone tried to cheat by using a fake egg, he would be pelted with raw ones.

“And believe you me, they thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. That’s because they didn’t have TVs, computers, or iPods.”

Growing up, my family retained some modernized forms of these traditions. For example, my dad would always make a beeline out of church right after the Mass of the Resurrection to get a head start on the parking lot traffic. And though we never tried to divide a single egg between us, we always decorated margučiai and proceeded to destroy them in the Egg Wars. (The trick, if you choose to try this, is to always hold your egg still and let the other person hit it. Also, use the blunt end.)

DSCN202
The Twin Brothers and I, circa 1981, Cleveland.

Happy Easter! And may your egg remain intact on both ends.

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Posted in family, good times, Lithuania, Lithuania, Lithuanian traditions, superstitious | 6 Comments

I Should Have Been a Monk

by Rima Posted on March 26, 2013

There is something so gratifying about making useful things by hand. I’ve decided that if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse and we all have to start over from scratch with green living, I want to be the village bookbinder.

I also wouldn’t mind being the village weaver and greeting card maker, although I don’t know how to weave just yet.

I needed some small sketchbooks to keep handy whenever inspiration hits, but I didn’t feel like buying any, so I perused the almighty Internet for some simple bookbinding techniques I could use with materials I already had on hand. In the end, I combined several different methods and made it up as I went along.

As you know, I’m not much of a seamstress, but I really enjoyed stitching my little notebooks together with twine. Each notebook has about thirty pages and only took about twenty minutes to make from start to finish (although I already had the stamps I used to decorate the covers handy).

notebooks
Two Little Notebooks

 

graph paper inside
Graph Paper Inside

 

I used card stock for the covers and graph paper for the filler pages because it helps in sketching repeating patterns.

I even made one out of a recycled paper grocery bag.

grocery bag book

 

I was a small, thin, recycled notebook binding machine.

The method I used is basically a variation of this tutorial, but instead of folding all of the filler pages together in one big sheaf and stitching it down the middle, I folded each one separately and stacked it on top of another before stitching the binding. I also experimented with the number of binding holes.

Now I’m totally hooked on organic books. And I decided that for my next big project, I’m going to print and hand-bind a hard copy of my mem-wah. It’s going to be a big, fat hardback with photos in the middle and a beautiful linocut cover. And I’m going to keep it on my coffee table as the ultimate party conversation piece.

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Posted in books, crafting | 4 Comments

Easter Egg Shenanigans

by Rima Posted on March 21, 2013

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen decorating my margučiai (traditional Lithuanian Easter eggs) this year. Many a morning I could be seen hunched over the Professor Bunson Honeydew style wax melting contraption on my kitchen island, dipping a pin head into hot beeswax and mumbling curses like, “Po šimts pypkių!” (One hundred tobacco pipes!) every time I messed up.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t make my eggs look perfect, and perfection is what I strive for in everything I do. (Trust me, several of my eggs didn’t even make the bowl shot cut this year, and you better believe I arranged them in such a way as to display only the good sides.)

marguciai 2013

pink and green margutisgray margutis

First, there were some issues with the wax not getting hot enough on my homemade wax melting apparatus.

potato contraption
Home Made Wax Melting Apparatus

 

The flame was a bit too far away from the spoon with the wax in it, which I fixed easily enough by sawing off the end of the spoon handle.

Just kidding! I raised the candle up to the wax.

Secondly, I didn’t have any pins with heads sized to my liking, so at first I used a nail as my decorating implement and it just didn’t produce nice markings. In the end, I went with a pin with a gigantic plastic head and this actually worked quite well, though it made thicker lines.

pencil tip

Here are a few more tips:

  • Work with warm, or at least room temperature eggs, if possible.
  • Keep your pin dipped in the wax for several seconds before transferring the wax to the egg, and use careful measured strokes. Waiting too long causes the hot wax to cool down, but going too fast makes it look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
  • Limit your pre-decorating coffee intake to one cup in order to reduce hand tremors.

One commenter on my original egg decorating tutorial said that instead of beeswax, she simply uses the wax from a lit candle to decorate her eggs.

In all my years of making Lithuanian Easter eggs, this thought has never occurred to me.

 

(Click here for my full post on Lithuanian style wax Easter egg making.)

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Posted in crafting, Lithuania, Lithuania, Lithuanian traditions | 2 Comments