The tile factory

Our house looks the same as always on the outside, but over the past couple of weeks the inside has been transformed into a modest tile factory. I have no idea what I'm doing--if you know, please contact me right away.


This all began when I decided that a recent kitchen remodel wasn't really complete until I had some fancy-dancey bit of decorative tile as a final (if expensive) touch. We're both modern shoppers, so we turned to the web and, after a lot of surfing and squinting,  we finally found something that we think will work. We bought  it and it's coming, but apparently by slow boat from a workshop in Beirut.


But all that shopping--not a normal activity for either of us--triggered a sudden, overwhelming desire in your correspondent to make tiles of my very own. For the past two weeks, once my day job is over, I have started rolling, stamping, painting, glazing, and fooling around with polymer clay while I watch the news. This stuff does not require a kiln--you stick it in the oven of 15 minutes and tiles come out almost exactly as planned.


Now I've reached a stage where the tiles have veered a long way away from the square, straightforward norm and pretty much anything goes--I've been adding little bits of costume jewelry, glass beads, and any number of small household items whose usefulness is no longer obvious. 


In case you're wondering, July 16, 2005 is the day Vince and I got married in our back yard by Barney Bloom, a local justice of the peace; Barney is an old friend with a very large beard. Our wedding cost $57, but it seems to have stuck. And maybe by July I'll be able to figure out how to use these tiles productively to celebrate a worthy anniversary.

The Ziggy experiment

Haflingers are a breed of horse named for a village, Halfling, that's now in northern Italy, although it used to be in Austria and most of the people who live there speak German. Things like this happen in Europe--I read once that the Dutch national anthem, "Het Wilhelmus," declares allegiance to the king of Spain.

Anyway. I bring this up because, for the past three weeks, I've been doing groundwork with a rugged, clever Halflinger named Ziggy, full name Sigmund Freud. Ziggy is a school horse, and like a lot of school horses he has some issues with the way he is ridden and handled--he is  nibbly, pushy, a pain to lead, and unfortunately knows his own strength, which he uses to snatch at hay bales and get in some unsponsored, stubborn grazing. Even for fairly skilled people, he's a major pain in the neck to handle, and a few years ago he dragged an inexperienced handler out the barn door and broke her collarbone.

His endless, anxious chewing means his reins are a slimy, toothmarked mess, and he's probably munched any number of cross ties down to a frayed nubbin. Plus sometimes when he's asked to pick up the right-lead canter he runs away, very fast, and scares the bejeezus out of his rider. 


But I can't help it. I like him. He is obviously intelligent and has figured out how to make his life easier with his rapid-fire resistance and his heavyhanded leaning and shoving. It's hard for me not to admire his resilience and his commitment to results, since one of the main outcomes is that no one really wants to ride him. He gets to loaf, which from his perspective is a pretty good arrangement.

But there's also more to Ziggy than I knew: Groundwork has let me feel and see his ferocious anxiety about whips and his defensive posture toward people in general, but at the same time I can also see he wants to trust, wants to be a contributing partner in a horse-to-human relationship. I think maybe he trusted once and still remembers--when I use ground exercises the right way and can get his attention and admiration, he becomes soft and yielding and instantly beautiful. We trot together, halt together, pivot, back up, set our safe boundaries, fool around with poles on the ground, and generally talk about what to do with pressure and how to make pressure go away. He's in the game and interested; I am convinced that Ziggy sees the point of the experiment and the value of what I'm trying to explain.

Today, about halfway through my session, my groundwork coach, Betsy, suggested that I could try gently manipulating Ziggy's tail while he was resting between exercises. I've never really monkeyed much with any horse's tail except to braid, so I carefully felt under his dock and noticed right away how tucked and stiff his whole tailbone was. With help from Becky, I slowly loosened the muscles around the bones so his tail actually arced slightly away from his haunches. As soon as this happened, he dropped his head, mumbled, and then made that little flutter noise that horses make when they have let go of something that worries them. 

Good boy.

losing my grip

About six years ago I started losing my grip in a perfectly literal way--I began dropping things and wrestling with can openers and fasteners, and using my teeth on what seemed to me excess and impenetrable wrapping. Like these creepy, individually wrapped bananas (courtesy of treehugger)it seems like the packaging is meant to define its contents in what is sometimes an unhealthy way.

I found out later that the underlying issue with my grip was neurological, but that's not the point. Isn't there something a little weird about a culture that seems to value packaging above what's inside? And no, this isn't just another consumer tirade about bubble packs, although they are horrid. Because what I realized, as soon as a package morphed into a serious barrier to use, is that we actually use consumer wrappings to accelerate desire and simultaneously inspire dislike for a new purchase.

It's a strange dynamic--you buy something, presumably because you want it or need it, but by the time you've penetrated the protective shell, the new thing is sadly diminished. Partly it's the extra work, but it's also the resentment that the work is necessary--I mean, you paid for the thing, so why should it be inaccessible? Frustration poisons the reason for the purchase, and you (by this I mean me) begin to have doubts about individual judgment. And it's chiefly this false sense of weakness that triggers another purchase.