mush ninja

mush ninja

Originally uploaded by kmartyr

My husband and I loan out Ninja the dog occasionally, and this is one of the reasons why.

Would you buy *The Thumb of All Parts*?

Book description in a nutshell: What if one day you looked down at your thumbs and they spoke to you? What would your opposable digits say about you and the world around you? Journalist and adventurer Ann Beman travels to far-and-weird places in search of the answers.

Would you buy this book?

What does asking yourself a question a day have to do with thumbs?

How often do you appreciate all the things your thumbs can do? How about your elbow, your earlobe, or a can of peaches, for that matter? Appreciating, or simply acknowledging the existence of life’s stuff – its machinations – feeds your curiosity and fuels your sense of wonder. When you delve into the life of the thumb, you can’t help but marvel at all the digit can do, and all the ways thumbs connect us to one another. When you delve into your own beliefs, preferences, and opinions, you have the opportunity to discover qualities and quirks of yourself you never knew existed. I know I do. As Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” so I’ve interpreted that to mean the examined thumb, elbow, or [fill in the blank] is worth more than I imagined. We can leave the topic of peach halves in heavy syrup for another day.

Favorite fictional characters

Today’s question: Off the top of your head, who are five of your favorite fictional characters from books?

Leo Gursky from Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love

Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice

The Narrator in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

Arturo the Aqua Boy from Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Lionel Essrog from Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn

Peacock

That is the answer to today’s question: What is your favorite color?

It’s not quite blue, not exactly green, sometimes flashing glimpses of the entire spectrum. The shade recalls the changes in ocean on a winter day where clouds blow across the sun. I like the depth of color in the bird’s feathers, with their iridescent sheen. In Arcadia, Calif., not far from where I grew up, there was this neighborhood of lovely homes that bordered the Los Angeles Arboretum. The Arboretum was home to an uberflock of peafowl, and the birds overflowed into the upper-middle-class ’hood surrounding it. You didn’t expect such exotic creatures to be lounging in such a mundane suburban setting. Now, across the Kern River from my current home you can sometimes hear the peacocks kept at the local juvenile detention facility, their weird cries sounding like the amplified echoes of manic cats.

you say you want a resolution

How often do you hear the words, “I don’t know myself anymore” — in movies, in novels, on paper plates taped to the back of bus stop benches (OK, maybe that was just me)? One of the reasons I decided to write about thumbs was because the danged digits are universal (I know, Stubbs, you’re a remarkable exception and there are others like you), yet no one pays all that much attention to thumbs until they tweak them. Seen any other books about thumbs out there? I didn’t think so. On the surface, I started Thumbing Through to better know human thumbs and the species that wields them. Beneath the surface, however, I wanted to get to know my own thumbs better, and by extension, to get to know me better. I’m always amazed at what I didn’t know I had to say until I write it down and read it back. The other day, I wrote: I believe that you should ask yourself a new question every day. Really? Since when have I believed that? Wait a sec. That’s a good idea. For instance, where do I stand with organized religion or which teacher/s have had the most influence on me and what would I say to them in a Hallmark thank-you note if I wrote them today? Of course, answering even a single question could take days, weeks, months, a lifetime, so I also must stipulate: I believe that you should ask yourself a question every day. But you shouldn’t take all day to answer it. Treat it like one of those timed essays in high school English class, except you don’t flunk the essay if you don’t finish. It’s perfectly OK to stop in the middle of your sen

Found poetry (found in my own notebook)

 

Palm Party

 

M is a passionate innovator who needs to balance her seeking nature.
H is the passionate influencer in the arts, or the individualistic sheriff artist.
F is a big hearted sweetie pie who needs to become the author of her own “book.”
L is “the butterfly” flitting between mom-ness and career.
B is the “passionate wise woman” working on maintaining her boundaries.
P is a passionate creator with the ability to tap into a spiritual place.
S is a romatic idealist struggling to find a balance between service and over-service.
K is an intense master of creative communications.
D is a SUPERlover able to help people express their feelings but needs to watch out for her overabundance of acorns.
C is the wise, passionate artist who needs to let herself serve herself.
J is at peace as the big-hearted firecracker who will benefit from some form of active meditation.
R is also the butterfly, free-spirited and independent, but she’s gotta watch out for her “gotta gotta” marker — gotta do this, gotta do that.
Though I am difficult to read, I am a creative messenger who, like F, needs to be the author of my own book.

And U?

Holiday piecrust: Dough!

In following these steps laid out in Real Simple magazine, I suggest you let your thumbs absorb the experience:

 

How to make crust for holiday pies

Makes one 8- or 9-inch piecrust

Hands-On Time: 10 min.

Total Time: 55 min.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• pinch salt
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
• 2 tablespoons solid vegetable shortening
• 3-5 tablespoons cold water

Directions

1. Combine the flour, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Using your fingertips, rub the butter and shortening into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Get your thumbs into it. Close your eyes. Soak in the sensation: Flour dust combining with scratchy grains of sugar and salt and the coating grease of butter and shortening. Resist the urge to apply it like a cosmetic to your face, or to your dry elbows and knees.
2. Using a fork, blend in just enough water to make the dough come together. Shape into a disk and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate for 45 minutes before rolling. Feel the moist cool of the dough as you grip it both hands, thumbs gently clamping the disk to the fingers that cradle it. You may want to fling it Frisbee-like, just to see how far it’ll fly. Again, resist.

How to roll the dough

1 Flour your rolling surface and rolling pin

Place a well-chilled piece of dough shaped into a disk onto a floured surface. Dust the rolling pin and your fingers with flour to prevent sticking. As you dust, pinch the flour between thumb and tips of  index and middle fingers. Imagine it’s sand in an hourglass, but don’t be in too much of a hurry.

2 Roll out the dough, rotating the dough as you go

Applying even pressure, press your rolling pin into the dough, rolling away from you and back. Rotate the disk as you go, and flip it over occasionally, to create an even circle. When the dough starts to feel sticky, apply a light dusting of flour. When the dough is a little less than a quarter of an inch thick, place your pie plate in the center of the dough, face up, to check that the dough you’ve rolled out is large enough to fit the dish. As you roll, close your eyes. Be conscious of your grip on the pin, the handle pressing into the V between thumb and forefinger. Use the weight of your body to press the pin into the dough so as not to stress your hands. If you do not have flour somewhere on your face, preferably on your nose and above one eyebrow, you should apply some now.

3  Transfer the dough into the pie plate

Flip the rolled dough in half toward you, creating a half-moon shape, and lift it over the plate. Set it down so that it covers half the plate; then open it so it forms a circle again and covers the entire pie plate. As warm-up, spread out your hands, palm up. Bring your thumbs across the palms toward the little fingers. Now apply this motion to the rolled dough.

4 Press the dough into the pie plate

With your fingertips, gently push the pie dough into the bottom and sides of the plate. Yes, be gentle. But let your thumbs get into the pie plate, where the bottom meets the sides. Revel in the thumbprints that’ll bake right into the pie.

5  Trim the edges

Use a scissor to cut any extra dough along the edge, leaving a 1/2-inch border. Fold the edge of the dough underneath itself so that it creates a thicker, 1/4-inch border that rests on the lip of the plate. Before the blades cut, the scissor holds the dough. That hold extends the human hand’s grip, particularly that of thumb and forefinger.

6  Crimp the edges

Create a patterned edge by pressing the thumb of one hand against the edge of the dough from the outside of the dish while gently pressing with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand from the inside. Rotate the pie plate until you’ve completed the pattern along the entire edge.  This is the coup de grace for the thumb as well as the rest of the hands. By this time, you should have dough somewhere in the hair framing your face.

Tip: Bake the crust right away, or refrigerate or freeze it for later use.

See how it’s done (although this baker doesn’t spend any time in thumb-contemplation): http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1726686707?bclid=1729305751&bctid=1668060958

What makes my thumbs different from yours

When I open my hands palms-down in front of me, I see two little mounds — calluses — in the Vs between thumbs and forefingers. I think of these parts of my hands as oar locks, where the shaft of my kayak paddle — the pole-y part between the flat paddle blades — rotates in my grip. When I travel via canoe, clutching the T-grip of a canoe paddle, the shaft of that paddle builds the calluses, too.

But those hard little bumps at the base of my thumbs, they’ve always been there, and I haven’t always paddled. They may have started with a tennis racket, or a jungle gym bar. In 4th grade at Valentine Elementary School, I wanted to be Nadia Comenici, earning 10, 10, 10 on the unparallel bars. At every 15-minute recess and the hour at lunch, I’d practice over and again my most perfect cherry drop, hanging from the bend in my knees upside-down and swinging, swinging until my chest was parallel with the ground. I’d release the grip with the back of my knees and fly …

…

Or I’d attempt a dead-man’s drop, where I’d sit upright on top of the bar and drop backwards, gripping with the back of my knees and releasing at just the right moment. Fuh-woooop …

…

Minutes, hours, days later, when I landed, I’d raise my arms above my head, signaling to the imaginary Polish, Romanian, and French judges. My routine was complete. And … now Amy Sanderson or Kathy Crimmins or Michelle Amestoy could take their turn on the bar, provided they were wearing shorts under their dresses. Girls weren’t allowed to wear shorts or pants at Valentine Elementary.

The Los Angeles Review and Bat Thumbs

The Los Angeles Review’s website has finally, with newborn wings, flown the nest. Fly with it. The Fall 2009 Issue, No. 6, will be released into the wild Nov. 1. *

Speaking of wings, bats have them. They also have a short curved claw called a “bat thumb.” Along with the bat’s toes, the bat thumb helps the little flying mammal hang upside-down and climb. Bat Thumb  is also the name of a 30-minute parody of Batman created by director Steve Oedekerk. The film’s characters are live-action, costumed thumbs, with the actors’ faces and voices superimposed.

 

*I’ve been the LA Review‘s nonfiction editor since February 2009.