The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself – But That’ll Do

I can identify with Sara Palin’s low-tech crib notes. For a high school French final, I copied conjugated verbs on my upper thigh all the way to the panty line. The guy next to me failed, but I passed.

Unfortunately, this technique doesn't help most of us when forced to speak in public. At such times, the problem isn’t remembering the point, it’s voicing it. Pushing the point up the throat, convincing it to take that leap of faith off the tongue.

Public figures, teachers, preachers, and other blow hards can do it, just because they’re always doing it. Face the same fear often enough, it goes from frightening to downright boring.

But for those who speak to a large audience only on rare occasions, the body tends to betray the spirit. An invisible hand grabs and strangles the throat, and another invisible hand shakes the brain up and down like a snow globe.

I thought about this recently, while comfortably in the audience during a public hearing, watching one or two speakers make rather a hash of things. I felt a patronizing sympathy. As one who has done her fair share of public speaking , I chose to identify with the times I amused and charmed -- when I had been saying essentially the same thing to a similar group of people day after day, week after week.

But buried deep among my many, many humiliations, were the times I made a speech when woefully out of practice. When the words I had to say were perfectly fine, but I couldn’t find the breath to say them. And then my body would whisper, “I’ll save you!” sending a series of adrenaline torpedos. And then we'd bomb.

You’d think the body and mind would prop each other up in time of need, because really, when it comes down to it, all they’ve got is each other. But usually they’re at cross purposes; each with an opposing agenda. That’s the major reason I’m not my own best friend. We have so little in common.

Down came the rain

Devil's Gate Dam, post-flash flood, mid-afternoon.


(Bonus Photo: Petrea at Pasadena Daily Photo was nice enough to forward the following "before" shot. The orange floats are there to keep the big bits -- three trunks and so forth -- away from the dam. You can also see the growing sinkhole in the middle.)

The Pleasure of the Sierra Madre

You go to New York for the show, Paris for the food, Pasadena for the Rose Parade, and Sierra Madre for the blow dry.

I’m not sure if I trust a city that has 12 times more hair salons than gas stations, but maybe I’m a tad jealous. You might call Sierra Madre our sister city – we live right next door. Of the two of us, Sierra Madre’s the college prom queen, and just a little too full of herself. We, on the other hand, have to repeat our last semester at Debbie Dootson Truck Driving school.

I’m only talking a comparison of downtowns here. The center of one is a cobblestone town square with a watchtower, and the center of the other is the Arco station. The major restaurant for one offers California Cuisine and high-end wine tasting; for the other, it’s the Bucket of Cluck, and that was closed by the Health Department.

But at least we in Altadena are not pathologically concerned about our bangs. To keep all the hair salons and spas of Sierra Madre afloat, the population of 11,000 needs a cut and a color every two weeks, and the babies better be getting electrolysis. If your embryo needs a facial, this is the place.

No, we in Altadena are a simple people. We have one salon for 45,000 people. Sometimes it takes years to get a bleach job and permanent wave.

Let

When I’m not busy socially activisting, I like to peer in the backyards of the rich and unfamous.

Would it were everything that goes to seed looks as beautiful as an old forgotten tennis court. See the Gatsby whites, hear the martini shaker?

“Love?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s love,” he answered.

I give a counterintuitive (Update)

Results of City Council Meeting

I’m not going to say the staff and consultants behind the Haha plan are a shifty lot. But their presentation to city council was one long rebuttal before any arguments had been made. Defensive, rambling, non-professional. I can’t help but think by stretching their presentation out to OVER AN HOUR, they hoped people would leave or they’d befuddle the council.

And is there really anyone in the world who can’t work powerpoint? If you’re going to use that old chestnut, at least know how to turn the darned pages.

But council asked cogent questions, and obviously already knew about the public concerns. And while the overall design plan was accepted, very important additional work will be done and language added. I can’t say all the trees will be saved, but they will be the subject of a new environmental impact review, taking into account habitat displacement from fire, etc. – something the staff had not wanted at all.

Democracy makes for some tedious meetings, but seems to work at this level. At least in Pasadena.

(For a much more complete look at environmental and open space issues around our way, visit Greenward Civitas. A smart and thoughtful site.)

Original Post
“Counterintuitive.” It’s the polite way of saying fuck!

You’d think with most of Angeles Forest burned and destroyed, the last thing on the City of Pasadena agenda would be to cut down trees in Hahamonga Park. Healthy trees that apparently have the original sin of not being original to the area, or more importantly, stand in the way of two bikes riding abreast. Live trees that are home to hawks and sparrows and all that draw us back to the charred hills. It just counterintuitiveling blows my mind.

These trees are the good guys. The peppers and palms have been a refuge for hikers and riders. They don’t encroach. They don’t throw wild parties and sow seeds throughout the Arroyo. At their worst, these trees give us shade and beauty in the dead heat of summer, and wet their whistle only when the rain falls. No one has the right to counterintuitive with them.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope I misread the city’s plan for Hahamonga – that it doesn’t plan to destroy wildlife habitats in service of native plants. Sacrifice nature to make a nature center.

I hope others who love this little patch of green and wild land will watch what happens at the planning meeting tomorrow. I’m speaking just for myself here, and my interpretation may be way, way off.

Nothing could make me happier than to return from the meeting tomorrow and admit I misread the whole thing; that I got it all counterintuitiveling wrong.

NOTE:
The Pasadena City Council will be considering the Hahamongna Annex Plan on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 7:30 pm in the City Council Chambers in City Hall, 100 N. Garfield St.

Pasadena Daily Photo (who writes on the subject today), Bellis, and I will be there, and surely many many more. Will let you know how it goes.

Learning Curve

When I was in grammar school, a non-curvaceous, non-brunette, non-British version of Emma Peel, my dad made a rare stab at playing Atticus Finch.

Dad loved his children, provided for his family, would have laid down his life to protect the lot of us, but he didn’t really know any particulars, like exact age or grade or eye color. In fact, other than summer vacations, the kids, and that would be me mainly, only held center stage when Mom snitched. And then there would follow a bit of a bellow and slap.

Anyway, at 11 years old, I cut my spy teeth investigating suspicious neighbors. I and my recruits spent some afternoons on a grassy knoll with binoculars, taking copious notes on one particular house that was a source of grown-up gossip. I guess I must have gotten caught or something. Perhaps when I snuck into the house for evidence – the details escape me.

Instead of the usual “Oh, for God’s sake!” this time Dad decided to sit me down for a chat. There are many fine professions in this world, he told me, and I should consider my choice carefully. It might lie at the altar my mother worshipped – orthodontia -- or it might involve international espionage. But before I chose, there were some things I should consider. He gave me his copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. “Let this be a lesson to you,” he said.

Lord knows, my friends and I had already seen everything from Thunderball to Valley of the Dolls, so anatomy and its creepy purpose held no surprises for me. But where Dad hoped I’d see the tough underbelly of the CIA, I only saw long paragraphs. What I didn’t see were pictures of beautiful people or beautiful places, so the book became a TV tray, a resting place for sandwiches while I watched The Avengers.

By the time I gave the book back to Dad, he had both forgotten I had it and that he was Atticus Finch. All he knew was that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had peanut butter and jelly stains. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, as he returned to his reality, and I to mine.

I don’t think I’ve ever returned anyone’s book without some sign of life on it. Let that be a lesson to you.

Olympian Thoughts

My parents didn’t watch sports, but they did watch the Olympics, only because Norway generally gave a good account of itself in winter. As a child I found this rather embarrassing, not because Norway won a lot of gold, but because it only won gold in the sports no one ever heard of -- events involving snowshoes, moose hide, and fish. While glamorous ski jumpers aspired to a Telemark landing, it wasn’t the guys from Telemark who tried to land it.

I’m of course old enough to remember the Olympics during the cold war era, which was the primary reason I did watch it. We in the West were the good guys; the communists took steroids. And for awhile, that had an element of truth. You could instantly identify the woman swimmer from East Germany; she looked like Schwarzenegger in a one-piece. At the other end of the spectrum, the female gymnasts from the Soviet all had the body of a child and the face of a grandmother, and when they talked it was at a pitch only the family dog could hear. Not sure which drug was responsible, but I’m guessing it’s banned now.

Back then, we had a dog in the fight – it was called the West and Fair Play; honest amateurs suiting up against the cheating professionals. We didn’t stop to consider that all our athletes seemed to work for the post office. We just knew the rivalry was so riveting, any contest seemed worth watching – grass growing, water boiling.

But then the Berlin Wall fell; everyone moved everywhere. Now the Austrian skater was born in Belarus. Denmark picks up a gold thanks to its citizen from Croatia. There’s only an us when there’s a them, and there’s no them there. And while this may be good for world peace, it wreaks havoc with the popularity of Curling. It also eliminates any reason to watch skaters dressed in cast-offs from a high school performance of Cabaret.

About the only thing left is to get involved in the inevitable stories involving the individual athletes. The guy who lost his mother, father, and both legs in a plane crash and came back to learn to snowboard on his nose.

Or, come the summer Olympics, we can spend the time speculating why the seedy male gymnastic coach from Romania is always hugging and kissing and holding those little, little girls. But really, we should have been wondering about that one for a couple of decades now.