proper admin- may 2016, part two ('bluets')

Bluets is a difficult book to summarize in one neat sentence. I'll try.  It is a type of memoir in which every recollection is filtered through the color blue.

Here is a more official attempt, which I find on a couple of websites-

'A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue.'

I'm not sure why it seems important to try to distill a book into one sentence.  The very concept does seem both explicit and philosophical, though not necessarily lyrical.  I suppose it can lead to great personal suffering, depending on how much effort the writer makes to craft such a sentence.

Luckily, no one is forcing me to narrow a book into one sentence.  No one is forcing me to write about a color, either.  

If I were forced to write about a color, though, I would write about purple.  Purple is my favorite color.

I am not sure why I've come to identify it as my favorite color. All I know is I was asked, once, what my favorite color was.

A week later, I answered. 

'Purple.'

A funny thing it is to take something that lives in your own mind and finally state it aloud. How long was it so, this thing just confirmed as true?  I have no idea if I liked purple for a second, a day, or a week when I finally answered that question.  Maybe I liked it, effective at the end of that sentence.

The sensation of finally stating something aloud works in reverse, though, when the statement forces us to finally confront a truth, to confirm something as false.  It might contradict our actions or our identity.

Luckily, I have no history of dismissing anything for its purple quality, except for maybe Barney the Dinosaur.  So talking about purple did not challenge my identity.

It did force me to start noticing purple a lot more. Sometimes, when you talk about something, you notice it a lot more, and once you start noticing a particular thing, it is hard to stop noticing.

I'm not sure what it means when I notice purple things, like when I noticed that Mother's Day card last month in the shop window, but once you start noticing, you don't stop noticing, so I saw those cards all the time, in every and any color, any and every time my eyes saw reason to stop and notice.

One reason to stop is for a red light.  In Japan, red lights turn to green lights, just like they do everywhere, but the word for green in the context of a stoplight is 'blue'.  

When you see the green light, you say you have the blue light, and you go.  I once asked my mother why this was.

I don't remember the answer, or even if there was one.  There is a lot I forget, mostly answers hard to get.  This is one difference between me and people who write really good books.

Google, though, has a near photographic memory.  I search and find a promising article about Japan's green/blue stoplights.  The article is too long and has a silly headline pun so I don't read it but I do notice that an Australian linguist is referenced as a key figure in unlocking the mystery.

The closest thing I know to an Australian linguist is Courtney Barnett, a witty singer-songwriter who plays guitar left-handed.  The first of her songs I ever heard was 'Avant Gardener'.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I never noticed the phrase 'avant-garde', but now I notice 'avant-garde', all the time, thanks to this song.

I am sure this phrase was not invented at the end of 2015. I am sure it was used, this phrase, all over the place, before I bothered to notice.

But my life is neatly bisected into 'when I noticed 'avant-garde' and 'when I did not', and only until this year did I notice 'avant-garde'.

I'm still not sure exactly what it means, this word, or the song title, although I suppose knowing one or the other would help me understand both.  I suspect Bluets could be described as 'avant-garde'.

I'm still not sure whether this is my favorite Courtney Barnett song.  Or favourite song, which is the spelling my cell phone insists on.  I wonder, is my phone broken or Australian?

It also spells color 'colour', which I never noticed until I started this post a couple of weeks ago. Color and colour mean the same thing but, like sentences, they do end a little differently.  This fact does not need to be spelled out but it does illustrate how we might all see things a little differently.

There is an exhibition at the ICA which spells out exactly how certain movies, Danish I believe, had their endings altered for different audiences.  American audiences got the happy endings, Russian audiences got the blue endings.

Same movies, but they do end a little differently, and maybe this means they aren't the same at all.

At this museum, there was also a wall covered entirely in blue panels. But the blues are all in different shades, the panels are all in different sizes.  To describe these as 'blue panels' might lead to misunderstandings.

My broken (or Australian) phone also sometimes changes the spelling of 'shots' to 'pints' (and vice-versa).  If I am texting about alcohol, this might lead to misunderstandings.

Then again, I suppose 'this might lead to misunderstandings' is the unspoken agreement whenever people come together to share a drink.

I'm not sure if there would be any misunderstandings if I texted to you that purple was 'my favourite colour'.  What I mean is that I'm not even sure if you would notice 'u'.

How strange to start noticing, everywhere, what we have just started paying attention to.  Thanks to my recent forays into bracketology, I notice books that take a word, or fifty, and break them down, over and over, writing until the pieces are as small as they can get.

There is a science to breaking down words, at least according to Eminem, in this video clip with Anderson Cooper.  Get past the surface, and anything is possible.

Lost In Translation is no Consolations but a reader might still place them in the same genre, again at the risk of misunderstandings.  Do so only after reflecting on the word 'genre', at least to the point where you are comfortable with its destined failure to place messy things into neat categories, no matter how promising the early sorting.

Reflect is what Nelson does in The Argonauts, the first of her books that I read.  A genre is like gender, I recall reading.  It is a marketing label.  

If I read The Argonauts again, I'll be sure to recommend it in this space.

I would not recommend it as a last-minute Mother's Day gift, though. This might be the position you are in if you did not notice the many cards available over the past month.

There is nothing wrong with the book.  But it might be worth trying other ideas first.

Flowers are a popular idea, I've heard, and you can probably get them last minute.

I asked my mother once what her favorite (favourite?) flowers were and, expecting nouns, I get adjectives- white, blue, purple flowers.

I asked her this question a week before she died so maybe this is why it took a week for me to answer when asked about my favorite color. Or maybe that is unrelated.

I could have easily said white or blue.  Or black, which is more inclusive.

If you do go with a card, maybe find one with flowers on it, assuming you decide not to buy actual flowers.

The cards have been on sale for a little while now.  If you wait another day, they'll probably go on sale, and you can stock up for next year.  Next year, you can donate the money you save to charity.

I know the Jimmy Fund would love a donation, though not necessarily for Mother's Day.  The donation idea came to me in a letter from the Jimmy Fund, which is like that old joke about how your brain tells you that it is the smartest part of the body.  But I know the Jimmy Fund has pure intentions.

I am not sure when they decide to send letters.  I get them every so often but there is no pattern, no rhyme, no reason to their arrival. But having no obvious rhyme is no reason for no pattern.

I'm told nothing rhymes with purple but nobody told Louis Sachar- I remember reading something about it in one of his Wayside School books.

Although I forgot the words, luckily, Google has a near photographic memory:

The baby won't stop crying

His face is turning purple

Will anything make him feel better?

I bet a burp'll

I assume the baby continues crying in the Russian edition of this book.

And in the American version?  Maybe he grows up to become Eminem, who by the way is still pissed off about that orange thing. Maybe a burp will make him feel better, too.

He was pissed off when he wrote 'Stan', I think, which I do know is my favorite Eminem song, and that song was different because each verse was a letter.  Not like 'u', but like those addressed to you.

There was nothing else avant-garde about the song, but there was a guardrail, which he drives through.  There was no rhyme or reason to how the letters in that song seemed to get sent out, either.

Perhaps the Jimmy Fund sends out a fresh batch of letters whenever they need a break from conquering cancer.  I notice in the letter that 88% of my donation goes directly to 'patient services, research, and community care', the remaining 12% to 'administrative costs'.

Admin!

This ratio puts the Jimmy Fund in the top 1% of all charities, again according to the Jimmy Fund.  They publicly tout their fight against cancer but their ability to defeat admin is receiving considerably less media attention.  Perhaps this is the first blog to cover it.

I'm not sure which eradication would be more impressive, quite frankly- admin or cancer.

Whoever solves cancer should have a statue built in their honor. Whoever solves admin would only get that same statue up today, instead of tomorrow, and maybe save a few dollars thanks to the reduction in paperwork.

But conquering cancer seems likelier to happen, too.  It would not be the first disease conquered by the human race- imagining a world without cancer is not a stretch.  We would have to teach future children what it was, just like I learned about smallpox.

But a world without one more small box to check, one more bill to pay, one more note to reply to, one more pile to sort into two piles?  A world without admin?

I'm skeptical of humankind's capability to eradicate admin, even if 12% of every Jimmy Fund donation is going straight to the front lines.

Then again, the diseases we've conquered seem foreign- they invaded us, they attacked us, they made us do what we were not meant to do.

Cancer means growth and change. Being human means growth and change.

How to conquer a disease that is, in that oversimplified way, defined the way we define being human?

Admin is not like a tumor, not at all, but they do share similarities. Both can grow uncontrollably, or not.  They tend to go unnoticed until quality of life is affected.  They take away our ability to work or simply take us from work.  The really bad kind takes us away from our friends and our families, invading the spaces we once thought safe.

Like any instance where two things share similarities, though, the connections become strained the longer you try to extend them. After all, really bad admin might keep us at work, too.  And sometimes, illness brings people together as much as it takes people away.  The similarities are there but they are fleeting. You miss them if you aren't ready to notice.

That is kind of what this book is about, noticing things, and noticing the fleeing reminders that accompany those moments of notice.  But only blue things, and only the ones that did not get away.

I recommend it.