bad metaphor

Once upon a time, I saw a compost bin for an incredible steal at a garage sale. Something like $25 or $30 for a large green bin. I noted the price at the time but decided we didn’t have enough room to haul it back, since my roommate and I had a free Christmas tree from another garage sale stuffed in the trunk. While the tree had many awesome qualities, including lighted strands already on the tree, freeness, and ability to rotate (!), I still look back and figuratively kick myself for not trying to cram in that composter also. The cheapest new bin I can find anywhere is at least $50. Since I was getting mightily tired of having to dig a new trench each and every time I take out the compost, I decided to pony up for a new bin from Home Depot.

Until I looked at the bin and thought to myself, hey! that’s just a garbage can with an open bottom! And busted garbage cans can be had for far cheaper than fifty dollars. Turning to the trusty dusty Internets, I found a number of websites outlining DIY compost bins – and quickly became confused by the sheer variety. Worm composters? I must confess I’m a bit bigoted towards legless creatures, and the thought of having to handle hundreds of slimy wrigglies writhing in rotting kitchen slop….eww. There are instructions available for setting up several different wood contraptions, all of which entail things like “sawing” and “precise measurements”…a little too complicated for a compost noob. Then I came across a description for how to build a closed air compost system. “Easy to build.” Aha!

So I gathered my ingredients. I made some minor substitutions; since Krissy happened to have a lot of chicken wire laying around, I borrowed some of this along with all the tools, and decided to make her a composter too.

So far so good!

Ingredients: trash can, utility knife, tin snips, chicken wire, screws, hammer and nail. The hammer and nail was used to make holes in the can for screws; a drill would be ideal but this method works just fine.

Despite my ill-advised attempts to photograph myself stabbing into a rubber bin with a box cutter, I failed to slash my own wrists. Eat it, Darwin!

Step 1: make ye a large hole in the bottom of the trash can. Leave enough room to screw in your chicken wire. (Owing to the awkward shape of this particular trash can, I ended up needing to screw the chicken wire into the sides of the can anyways).

Halfway done, in no time at all!

Now take those tin snips and trim the chicken wire to a size slightly bigger than the hole you have just made. Here’s where the chicken wire makes it a bit tricky – you’ll need to trim the chicken wire so that you can slightly unwind the “ends” to wrap around the screws. Like so:

Set the wire circle aside. Now use your hammer and nail (or drill, if you were smart) to partially install the screws. I only ended up using about 8 – 10 per bin, just enough to keep the chicken wire taut. Use your wire circle as a guide to where to install the screws, if need be!

Note the lack of polish to the rough edges and the blatant crooked placement of the screws. Who cares? This part is going in the dirt and is having kitchen refused tossed into it, so no need to be a perfectionist!

Unwind the wiry ends you have created when you snipped your circle, and wrap these ends around the screws you just installed. Continue working until you’ve got the circle more or less wedded to the can, for better or for worse! If the shabbiness of the product bothers you, or if you don’t particularly feel like being poked in the chest while you carry this thing to its final destination, trim and bend in any chicken wire ends that are sticking out.

Compost view.

Now the fun part – paint your bin! You’re going to the trouble of making your own compost bin, might as well jazz it up a bit.

Appropriate spelling and grammar optional, natch.

Banana peel and leaves equals….

…a flower whose petals kind of resemble the banana peel, turned upside down? I think this would have come across better had I stuck with the yellow paint for the petals.

There you go, a new thing to throw carrot ends and avocado peels into! If I had to do this again I would use slightly larger trash cans, as I went the cheap route and did mere 20 gallons – blatantly defying the website instructions which told me to use 32 gallons or larger. Also, I lined the insides of the trash cans with duct tape markings every six inches, to indicate a point at which it would be a good idea to toss some leaves or lawn trimmings onto the kitchen scraps. I’m not sure if I really need to do that, but it seems like most composters do a mix so I’ll try it out.

I’ve been a bit lazy with both knitting (and obviously blog posting) over the past few months. First my laptop started showing its age, emitting this awful sounding “click click click” noise whenever I started it up, and it took me awhile to ascertain that I just needed to buy a $30 fan on the internets, vs. fork over $200 to the local tech shop. (Ahh, local tech shops. I’m a big advocate of shopping local, but tech shops really test this principle of mine). And THEN I picked up a freak case of tendonitis, when in the midst of getting a line of octopuses out to put on my etsy.

Laptop and wrist fully recovered, I decided to search for a new pattern to make a knitted bear for my adorable niece. Signed on to Ravelry and discovered I had a months-old message from a blog reader (people actually read this thing? Not any more, I wager), tipping me off to this fact: someone is selling one of my free patterns on eBay. Using my photos and everything, unless she just happens to have made the exact same cake, down to my mismatched-weight yarns and felt cutouts and everything. Her description reads: “This is printed instuctions of my moms pattern for carrot cake.”

Her mom’s pattern, eh? Turns out I have a long-lost daughter in England, of all places! How about that?

It annoys me greatly that someone is out there, copying my work (rather lazily, I might add) and profiting off it…but the more annoying thing is that poor knitters are actually buying the pattern, paying over two bucks for my MS paint chicken scratch. Yarn is expensive enough, without poor knitters being fleeced by paying for a pattern that is, you know, free. I don’t feel I am skilled enough to develop patterns for sale just yet, because I do expect a degree of professionalism in the pattern (sizing, gauge and, you know, testing it out as opposed to making it up as I go along). Of course, “professionalism” is a word that one would not use to describe my long-lost eBay daughter.

Still more annoying is the effect this is having on me – I will definitely think twice before I post things to share with other crafters, and I feel bad but I’m not sure how else to protect myself from intellectual theft. I love that the online crafting community provides a great wealth of resources for crafters to share knowledge, in good faith! I hate it when leeches try to take advantage of this good will.

My policy on my patterns: personally I don’t care if people knit octopuses or chocolate cakes from my pattern, and sell the objects themselves. You’ve put the work into it, and congratulations, if you could actually figure out how to successfully make a toy from my incoherent notes, good job! I do care if people STEAL MY PATTERN and sell it as their own, or their “moms.”

Hell, this particular thief might not even know how to knit – looping yarn through needles is not a skill-set required for stealing patterns. All one needs is a lack of shame.

“Thirty two bucks to see a guy I hear every week for free?” was my reaction, when I heard that Ira Glass was coming to town. I’m a big fan of This American Life, and I even donate $5 whenever he implores me to each year. But that seemed such a stiff price for radio, unless there were juggling tricks or a rabbit pulled out of a hat, or anything else uniquely communicable through a live viewing. The problem with the radio show is its greatest asset: it’s just so good that I don’t feel like I need to see what’s going on, which is why I haven’t quite gotten into the TV version of TAL (well, that and we don’t get Showtime). I would fork over thirty bucks to go see Radiohead, fill my head with loud guitars and a dazzling light show – but some old public radio guy? I just didn’t know.

“Did you hear Ira Glass is coming to town?” asked Eli’s mother, over lunch one day. I said that yes, we’d heard, and what an exciting opportunity but the ticket prices seemed a little steep, and then I think the food arrived so the focus of conversation turned to that. Later that day, Eli got a call: his parents had bought us the tickets. Because of my offhand, cheapskate lament! I felt both grateful and slightly guilty, emotions that I often experience when interacting with Eli’s well-to-do parents – I definitely didn’t intend to troll for free tickets, though it certainly must have sounded like such to them. (Though I am not Jewish and was never raised strictly or even lazily Catholic, somehow I still managed to grow up with a strong, all encompassing sense of guilt. Who knows where that comes from. It’s probably a ‘child of immigrants’ sort of thing).

Anyway, here’s the show. On center stage there is an unassuming desk with a microphone and some radio equipment – no unicycles, tap shoes, or juggling balls. After the introduction, lights go out. A shadowy figure dimly shuffles towards the desk, and the lights remain off as he talks. “Thirty two bucks to not see Ira Glass?” I think, bemused and a little irked on behalf of the people who paid for my ticket, but the familiar, disembodied voice fills the darkness in the auditorium, and we acquiesce.

The lights flicker back on, eventually – Ira Glass says he wanted to do the whole show in the dark, in the most “radical bit of theater” ever staged in the Midwest, but the Lied Center folks protested on behalf of paying customers (who no doubt would have lodged complaints echoing my initial reaction), so the lights come up and we get to see the wizard behind the curtain. It is anticlimactic, and I actually kind of want the lights to go back off. Not to knock Ira Glass the person, or make him feel self-conscious about his appearance or anything – but his voice is so much bigger than the visual apparition we see on stage, that it is just kind of…weird. He wants the lights off, too, as he finds the sea of our faces a little overwhelming. He pleads ineffectually with the lighting technician to turn the house lights down just a little (“can you turn the lights down to 20? Maybe try 15? Hey, is anything even changing at all?”).

Eventually both he and the audience settle into our respective grooves, accept the visuals, and move on. The theme to tonight’s show – just like with the radio show, his live show has to have a theme – is storytelling, the fundamental building blocks of a story and how to successfully put a story together in a manner compelling enough to draw millions of listeners to check in with your show for one hour every week.

Spoiler alert – if you want to hear Ira Glass tell this yourself, and you hate spoilers, I’d skip this next couple of paragraphs. Right down to the ****, now, go on.

He plays an example of a really amazing story that did not make the air, a story told by his friend Peter, whose father was enraged at the fact that he is being charged for interring his wife’s remains at a crypt. Both Peter’s father and mother served in the military, and as veterans, one of the perks is that when you die, you get a free burial at any military cemetary of your choosing in the country. Even if you are not killed while in service. So the story is that Peter’s father goes to take the remains to the crypt, and the people who work there say, okay, that will be sixteen dollars.

The old veteran protests, “but it is supposed to be free,” and the secretary says that while yes, it’s true that the burial is free, there is a charge for bringing the remains to the crypt (as Ira Glass puts it, “it’s shipping and handling”). And actually sixteen dollars is pretty cheap, as the handling fee for a normal burial is thirty two dollars (or the cost of an Ira Glass ticket). The old man is just infuriated and feels betrayed by the government for whom he fought and risked his life so many years ago. For people who are part of “the Greatest Generation,” their relationship to government is different than the cynical attitude adopted by future generations. American government is supposed to work, and when something is free, it is totally free – no strings attached.

So the old man is so consumed with fury that he actually takes his wife’s remains and dumps them in the parking lot outside the crypt. ! For years and years afterwards, Peter and his siblings would actually tease their father about this (being remarkably sanguine about the parking lot dumping of their mother, Ira Glass notes), and when the father was planning his own burial, he would mention wanting to be buried next to their mother, and the kids would go “oh, you mean in the parking lot?”

This story has all the elements of an amazing story: it’s got tension, it’s got a fantastic plot sequence, and even a greater idea to be pulled out of it, that idea about how the Greatest Generation sees the world today vs. how we see it. The only problem with the story is that it turned out to be 100% not true.

During fact-checking, it turned out that the mother was indeed safely interred next to the father (who passed recently). Either Peter made up this entire story – and it doesn’t sound like it, judging from the bewildered tone of voice he has in the recording Ira plays for us – or the father just came up with this incredible yet totally fictional story, that became so ingrained into the family history that the kids would tease the father about it until his dying day.

So Ira Glass goes on to say that they pulled that story, and had to scramble to find something else at the last minute to put up, and though the story they ended up going with was good, it was nowhere near as incredible as the parking lot ashes story. Even though that story turned out to be false, I still feel that just like the whole JT Leroy scandal, the unraveling of the hoax leads to even stranger and weirder truths. Why would the dad lie about something like this, an incident that paints himself as the type of guy who would desecrate his wife’s ashes over a measly $16 – and keep it up for so long?

****

Ira Glass then starts to take us through the process of piecing a story together, and how he has figured out a formula for stories that succeed on the radio: action-action-action, a moment of withdrawal and reflective commentary by the storyteller, back to action-action-action, etc. He tells us how proud of himself he is that he has figured out this formula, invented it even – and how crushed he is at realizing that not only is it not a new idea, this formula is so ancient that it comprises the basic format of the Bible. But hey, it’s worked this long, right?

Ira Glass’ charm is that he is so approachable, so normal – he talks about how the journalism that TAL does uses an intentionally approachable tone, unlike regular journalism with its emphasis on detachment and sonorous gravitas. He plays a clip for us of a report he did, on air, when he was twenty six (my age!). And it’s bad. He makes fun of himself, as viciously as only one can be towards their younger self, tells us exactly what’s wrong with it. Afterwards he shares a comment from a friend, after she’d heard the clip: “at no point during this is there any indication that you have any talent whatsoever.” He points out that at this point in his career, he wouldn’t have been able to land an internship on his own show. He would eventually become talented, but as a result of a lot of work and effort.

That’s the most important thing I took home from the show. I hate to say that I am inspired by badness (because what kind of person does that make me?), but hearing Ira Glass at twenty six year old gave me a perverse sense of hope that someday – maybe when I am fifty – I can be where he is now. Maybe not the head of the most popular radio show in America, perhaps, but maybe I could be a successful writer. After all, I am at least as bad at writing now as he was at radio. “Create something at least once a week,” he exhorts the audience, and I make a commitment right then to actually do that something, anything, even if it is just to update this silly blog.

He wraps up the show with a telling of one of my favorite stories of all time, the 1001 Nights. I know this story well, but I listen with my breath held in suspense anyways because he is just that good. I see in my mind the crazed king, unhinged with jealousy transformed into deadly misogyny due to one philandering queen. I’m sad and nervous for the wazir, who is bidden to fetch his own daughter to satiate the king’s lust for violence. I totally see Scheherezade flash in my mind for a moment as a nonchalant, gum-chewing Buffy the vampire slayer type when she finds out that she is to be wed to the insane king: “bring it.”

Then Scheherezade, as told through Ira Glass’ voice, does something amazing – she saves her life and the lives of the remaining girls in the kingdom, simply by telling a story so compelling that it holds the king’s interest long enough to put him off killing her until the next night, and then the next. And I actually release my breath, discover that I have been holding it, when the 1001th night is finished and the king says it’s okay, he’s better now. Scheherezade’s stories are more effective than magic. She has subverted her death sentence, taught a man who has lost all empathy how to be human again, all through storytelling.

And that, right there, is at least worth thirty two dollars.

Once upon a time, I thought I did not like beets. I’d only ever had the canned kind, and I have an instinctive distrust of things that come out of cans that are that color. I think I’d probably lumped them in, unfairly, with that atrocious Thanksgiving cranberry jelly abomination – the kind that slurps out of the can, still retaining all the ridges and botulistic bumps of its container. Blergh.

Then I had real beets: roasted while still wrapped in their native clothes, drizzled with a little olive oil. Beautiful! How could I have gone through my entire life, without having realized such a simple thing. Beets = totally awesome. After this epiphany I ate nothing but beets for three days straight, pausing in alarm when I discovered that, well, that color? Yeah, that lingers post-processing.

Ahem. So my good friend Marie, of Happy Plate, is leaving for El Salvador soon, and she is a long time beet-advocate. She is even planning on getting a beet tattoo when she returns to the states! Naturally, here is my going away present to her:

A glamorous lady beet!

Since I learned that there are such things as gold beets and even candy striped beets, a new rainbow of potential knitted toys has been opened up for me. What lovelies!